The Heavenly Twins by Madame Sarah Grand

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"Of course I deprecate my father's anger, but I must again repeat I do not
consider that I deserve it.

"The lunatic asylum is a nonsensical threat, and the law I am inclined to
invoke myself for the purpose of ventilating the question. Do I understand
that Major Colquhoun presumes to send _me_ messages of forgiveness?
What has _he_ to forgive, may I ask? Surely _I_ am the person
who has been imposed upon. Do not, I beg, allow him to repeat such an
impertinence.

"But, mother, why do you persistently ignore my reason for refusing to
live with Major Colquhoun? Summed up it comes to this really, and I give
it now vulgarly, baldly, boldly, and once for all. _Major Colquhoun is
not good enough, and I won't have him_. That is plain, I am sure, and I
must beg you to accept it as my final decision. The tone of our
correspondence is becoming undignified on both sides, and the
correspondence itself must end here. I shall not write another word on the
subject, and I only wish you had not compelled me to write so much.
Forgive me, mother, do, for being myself--I don't know how else to put it;
but I know that none of the others could do as I have done, and yet I
cannot help it. I cannot act otherwise and preserve my honesty and
self-respect. It is conscience, and not caprice, that I am obeying; I wish
I could make you realize that. But, at all events, don't write me any more
hard words, mother. They burn into my memory and obliterate the loving
thoughts I have of you. It is terrible to be met with bitterness and
reproach, where hitherto one has known nothing but kindness and
indulgence, so, I do entreat you, mother, once more to forgive me for
being myself, and above everything, to say nothing which will destroy my
affection for you.

"Believe me, I always have been, and hope always to be,

"Your most loving child,

"EVADNE."

The last lines were crowded into the smallest possible space, and there
had hardly been room enough for her name at the end. She glanced at the
clock as she folded the letter, and finding that there was only just time
to catch the post she rang for a servant and told her to take it at once.
Then she took her old stand in the window, and watched the girl hurrying
up the Close, holding the white letter carelessly, and waving it to and
fro on a level with her shoulder as she went.

"I wish I had had time to re-write it," Evadne thought; "shall I call her
back? No. Anything will be better for mother than another day's suspense.
But I think I might have expressed myself better. I don't know, though."
She turned from the window, and met her aunt's kind eyes fixed upon her.

"You are flushed, Evadne," the latter said. "Were you writing home?"

"Yes, auntie," Evadne answered wearily.

"You are looking more worried than I have seen you yet."

"I _am_ worried, auntie, and I lost my temper. I could not help it,
and I am dissatisfied. I know I have said too much, and I have said the
same thing over and over again, and gone round and round the subject, too,
and altogether I am disheartened."

"I cannot imagine you saying too much about anything, Evadne," Mrs. Orton
Beg commented, smiling.

"When I am speaking, you mean. But that is different. I am always afraid
to speak, but I dare write anything. The subject is closed now, however. I
shall write no more." She advanced listlessly, and leaned against the
mantelpiece close beside the couch on which her aunt was lying.

"Have you ever felt compelled to say something which all the time you hate
to say, and afterward hate yourself for having said? That is what I always
seem to be doing now." She looked up at the cathedral as she spoke. "How I
envy you your power to say exactly what you mean," she added.

"Who told you I always say exactly what I mean?" her aunt asked, smiling.

"Well, exactly what you ought to say, then," Evadne answered, responding
to the smile.

Mrs. Orton Beg sighed and resumed her knitting. She was making some sort
of wrap out of soft white wool, and Evadne noticed the glint of her rings
as she worked, and also the delicacy of her slender white hands as she
held them up in the somewhat tiring attitude which her position on the
couch necessitated.

"How patient you are, auntie," Evadne said, and then she bent down and
kissed her forehead and cheeks.

"It is easy to be patient when one's greatest trial is only the waiting
for a happy certainty," Mrs. Orton Beg answered. "But you will be patient
too, Evadne, sooner or later. You are at the passionate age now, but the
patient one will come all in good time."

"You have always a word of comfort," Evadne said.

"There is one word more I would say, although I do not wish to influence
you," Mrs. Orton Beg began hesitatingly.

"You mean _submit_" Evadne answered, and shook her head. "No, that
word is of no use to me. Mine is _rebel_. It seems to me that those
who dare to rebel in every age are they who make life possible for those
whom temperament compels to submit. It is the rebels who extend the
boundary of right little by little, narrowing the confines of wrong, and
crowding it out of existence."

She stood for a moment looking down on the ground with bent brows,
thinking deeply, and then she slowly sauntered from the room, and
presently passed the south window with her hat in her hand, took one turn
round the garden, and then subsided into the high-backed chair, on which
she had sat and fed her fancy with dreams of love a few weeks before her
marriage. The day was one of those balmy mild ones which come occasionally
in mid-October. The sheltered garden had suffered little in the recent
gale. From where Mrs. Orton Beg reclined there was no visible change in
the background of single dahlias, sunflowers, and the old brick wall
curtained with creepers, nor was there any great difference apparent in
the girl herself. The delicate shell-pink of passion had faded to milky
white, her eyes were heavy, and her attitude somewhat fatigued, but that
was all; a dance the night before, would have left her so exactly, and
Mrs. Orton Beg, watching her, wondered at the small effect of "blighted
affection" as she saw it in Evadne, compared with the terrible
consequences which popular superstition attributes to "a disappointment."
Evadne had certainly suffered, but more because her parents, in whom she
had always had perfect confidence, and whom she had known and loved as
long as she could remember anything, had failed her, than because she had
been obliged to cast a man out of her life who had merely lighted it for a
few months with a flame which she recognized now as lurid at the best, and
uncertain, and which she would never have desired to keep burning
continually with that feverish glare to the extinguishing of every other
interesting object. She would have been happiest when passion ended and
love began, as it does in happy marriages.

And she was herself comparing the two states of mind as she sat there. She
was conscious of a blank now, dull and dispiriting enough, but no more
likely to endure than the absorbing passion it succeeded. She knew it for
an interregnum, and was thinking of the books she would send for when she
had mastered herself sufficiently to be interested in books again. It was
as if her mind had been out of health, but was convalescent now and
recovering its strength; and she was as well aware of the fact as if she
had been suffering from some physical ailment which had interrupted her
ordinary pursuits, and was making plans for the time when she should be
able to resume them.

While so engaged, however, she fell asleep, as convalescents do, and Mrs.
Orton Beg smiled at the consummation. It was not romantic, but it was
eminently healthy.

At the same time, she heard the hall door opened from without as by one
who had a right to enter familiarly, and a man's step in the hall.

"Come in," she said, in answer to a firm tap at the door, and smiled,
looking over her shoulder as it opened.

It was Dr. Galbraith on his way back through Morningquest to his own
place, Fountain Towers.

"I am so glad to see you," said Mrs. Orton Beg as he took her hand.

"I am on my way back from the Castle," he rejoined, sitting down beside
her; "and I have just come in for a moment to see how the ankle
progresses."

"Quicker now, I am thankful to say," she answered. "I can get about the
house comfortably if I rest in between times. But is there anything wrong
at the Castle?"

"The same old thing," said Dr. Galbraith, with a twinkle in his bright
gray eyes. "The Duke has been seeing visions--determination of blood to
the head; and Lady Fulda has been dreaming dreams--fatigue and fasting.
Food and rest for her--she will be undisturbed by dreams to-night; and a
severe course of dieting for him."

Mrs. Orton Beg smiled. "Really life is becoming too prosaic," she said,
"since you dreadfully clever people began to discover a reason for
everything. Lady Fulda's beauty and goodness would have been enough to
convince any man at one time that she is a saint indeed, and privileged to
heal the sick and converse with angels; but you are untouched by either."

"On the contrary," he answered, "I never see her or think of her without
acknowledging to myself that she is one of the loveliest and most angelic
women in the world. And she has the true magnetic touch of a nurse too.
There is healing in it. I have seen it again and again. But that is a
natural process. Many quite wicked doctors are endowed in the same way,
and even more strongly than she is. There can be no doubt about that--" He
broke off with a little gesture and smiled genially.

"But anything _beyond_!" Mrs. Orton Beg supplemented; "anything
supernatural, in fact, you ridicule."

"One cannot ridicule _anything_ with which Lady Fulda's name is
associated," he answered. "But tell me," he exclaimed, catching sight of
Evadne placidly sleeping in the high-backed chair, with her hat in her
hand held up so as to conceal the lower part of her face; "Are visions
about? _Is_ that one that I see there before me? If I were Faust, I
should love such a Marguerite. I wish she would let her hat drop. I want
to see the lower part of her face. The upper part satisfies me. It is
fine. The balance of brow and frontal development are perfect."

Mrs. Orton Beg coloured with a momentary annoyance. She had forgotten that
Evadne was there, but Dr. Galbraith had entered so abruptly that there
would have been no time to warn her away in any case.

"No vision," she began--"or if a vision, one of the nineteenth century
sort, tangible, and of satisfying continuance. She is a niece of mine, and
I warn you in case you have a momentary desire to forsake your books and
become young in mind again for her sake that she is a very long way after
Marguerite, whom I think she would consider to have been a very weak and
foolish person. I can imagine her saying about Faust: 'Fancy sacrificing
one's self for the transient pleasure of a moonlight meeting or two with a
man, and a few jewels however unique, when one can _live_!' in
italics and with a note of admiration. 'Why, I can put my elbow here on
the arm of my chair and my head on my hand, and in a moment I perceive
delights past, present, and to come, of equal intensity, more certain
quality, and longer continuance than passion. I perceive the gradual
growth of knowledge through all the ages, the clouds of ignorance and
superstition slowly parting, breaking up, and rolling away, to let the
light of science shine--science being truth. And there is all art, and all
natural beauty from the beginning--everything that lasts and _is_
life. Why, even to think on such subjects warms my whole being with a glow
of enthusiasm which is in itself a more exquisite pleasure than passion,
and not alloyed like the latter with uncertainty, that terrible ache. I
might take my walk in the garden with my own particular Faust like any
other girl, and as I take my glass of champagne at dinner, for its
pleasurably stimulating quality, but I hope I should do both in
moderation. And as to making Faust my all, or even giving him so large a
share of my attention as to limit my capacity for other forms of
enjoyment, absurd! We are long past the time when there was only one
incident of interest in a woman's life, and that was its love affair!
There was no sense of proportion in those days!'"

"Is that how you interpret her?" he said. "One who holds herself well in
hand, bent upon enjoying every moment of her life and all the variety of
it, perceiving that it is stupid to narrow it down to the indulgence of
one particular set of emotions, and determined not to swamp every faculty
by constant cultivation of the animal instincts to which all ages have
created altars! Best for herself, I suppose, but hardly possible at
present. The capacity, you know, is only coming. Women have been cramped
into a small space so long that they cannot expand all at once when they
_are_ let out; there must be a great deal of stretching and growing,
and when they are not on their guard, they will often find themselves
falling into the old attitude, as newborn babes are apt to resume the
ante-natal position. She will have the perception, the inclination; but
the power--unless she is exceptional, the power will only be for her
daughter's daughter."

"Then she must suffer and do no good?"

"She must suffer, yes; but I don't know about the rest. She may be a
seventh wave, you know!"

"What is a seventh wave?"

"It is a superstition of the fisher-folks. They say that when the tide is
coming in it pauses always, and remains stationary between every seventh
wave, waiting for the next, and unable to rise any higher till it comes to
carry it on; and it has always seemed to me that the tide of human
progress is raised at intervals to higher levels at a bound in some such
way. The seventh waves of humanity are men and women who, by the impulse
of some one action which comes naturally to them but is new to the race,
gather strength to come up to the last halting place of the tide, and to
carry it on with them ever so far beyond." He stopped abruptly, and
brushed his hand over his forehead. "Now that I have said that," he added,
"it seems as old as the cathedral there, and as familiar, yet the moment
before I spoke it appeared to have only just occurred to me. If it is an
ill-digested reminiscence and you come across the original in some book, I
am afraid you will lose your faith in me forever; but I pray you of your
charity make due allowance. I must go."

"Oh, no, not yet a moment!" Mrs. Orton Beg exclaimed. "I want to ask you:
How are Lady Adeline and the twins?"

"I haven't seen Lady Adeline for a month," he answered, rising to go as he
spoke. "But Dawne tells me that the twins are as awful as ever. It is a
question of education now, and it seems that the twins have their own
ideas on the subject, and are teaching their parents. But take care of
your girlie out there," he added, his strong face softening as he took a
last look at her. "Her body is not so robust as her brain, I should say,
and it is late in the year to be sitting out of doors."

"Tell me, Dr. Galbraith," Mrs. Orton Beg began, detaining him, "you are a
Scotchman, you should have the second sight; tell me the fate of my girlie
out there. I am anxious about her."

"She will marry," he answered in his deliberate way, humouring her, "but
not have many children, and her husband's name should be George."

"Oh, most oracular! a very oracle! a Delphic oracle, only to be
interpreted by the event!"

"Just so!" he answered from the door, and then he was gone.

"Evadne, come in!" Mrs. Orton Beg called. "It is getting damp." Evadne
roused herself and entered at once by the window.

"I have been hearing voices through my dim dreaming consciousness," she
said. "Have you had a visitor?"

"Only the doctor," her aunt replied. "By the way, Evadne," she added,
"what is Major Colquhoun's Christian name?"

"George," Evadne answered, surprised. "Why, auntie?"

"Nothing; I wanted to know."

CHAPTER XVI.

When breakfast was over at Fraylingay next morning, and the young people
had left the table, Mrs. Frayling helped herself to another cup of coffee,
and solemnly opened Evadne's last letter. The coffee was cold, for the
poor lady had been waiting, not daring to take the last cup herself,
because she knew that the moment she did so her husband would want more.
The emptying of the urn was the signal which usually called up his
appetite for another cup. He might refuse several times, and even leave
the table amiably, so long as there was any left; but the knowledge or
suspicion that there was none, set up a sense of injury, unmistakably
expressed in his countenance, and not to be satisfied by having more made
immediately, although he invariably ordered it just to mark his
displeasure. He would get up and ring for it emphatically, and would even
sit with it before him for some time after it came, but would finally go
out without touching it, and be, as poor Mrs. Frayling mentally expressed
it: "Oh, dear! quite upset for the rest of the day."

On this occasion, however, the pleasure of a wholly new grievance left no
space in his fickle mind for the old-worn item of irritation, and he never
even noticed that the coffee was done. "Dear George" sat beside Mrs.
Frayling. She kept him there in order to be able to bestow a stray pat on
his hand, or make him some other sign of that maternal tenderness of which
she considered the poor dear fellow stood so much in need.

Mr. Frayling sat at the end of the table reading a local paper with one
eye, as it were, and watching his wife for her news with the other. A
severely critical expression sat singularly ill upon his broad face, which
was like a baked apple, puffy, and wrinkled, and red, and there was about
him a queerly pursed-up air of settled opposition to everything which did
duty for both the real and spurious object of his attention.

Mrs. Frayling read the letter through to herself, and then she put it down
on the table and raised her handkerchief to her eyes with a heavy sigh.

"Well, what does she say now," Mr. Frayling exclaimed, throwing down the
local paper and giving way to his impatience openly.

"Dear George" was perfectly cool.

"She says," Mrs. Frayling enjoined between two sniffs, "that Major
Colquhoun isn't good enough, and she won't have him."

"Well, I understand that, at all events, better than anything else she has
said," Major Colquhoun observed, almost as if a weight had been removed
from his mind. "And I am quite inclined to come to terms with her, for I
don't care much myself for a young lady who gets into hysterics about
things that other women think nothing of."

"Oh, _don't_ say think _nothing_ of, George," Mrs. Frayling
deprecated. "We lament and deplore, but we forgive and endure."

"It comes to the same thing," said Major Colquhoun.

A big dog which sat beside him, with its head on his knee, thumped his
tail upon the ground here and whined sympathetically; and he laid one hand
caressingly upon his head, while he twirled his big blond moustache with
the other. He was fond of children and animals, and all creatures that
fawned upon him and were not able to argue if they disagreed with him, or
resent it if he kicked them, actually or metaphorically speaking; not that
he was much given to that kind of thing. He was agreeable naturally as all
pleasure-loving people are; only when he did lose his temper that was the
way he showed it. He would cut a woman to the quick with a word, and knock
a man down; but both ebullitions were momentary as a rule. It was really
too much trouble to cherish anger.

And just then he was thinking quite as much about his moustache as about
his wife. It had once been the pride of his life, but had come to be the
cause of some misgivings; for "heavy moustaches" had gone out of fashion
in polite society.

Mr. Frayling followed up the last remark. "This is very hard on you,
Colquhoun, very hard," he declared, pushing his plate away from him; "and
I may say that it is very hard on me too. But it just shows you what would
come of the Higher Education of Women! Why, they'd raise some absurd
standard of excellence, and want to import angels from Eden if we didn't
come up to it."

Major Colquhoun looked depressed.

"Yes," Mrs, Frayling protested, shaking her head. "She says her husband
must be a Christlike man. She says men have agreed to accept Christ as an
example of what a man should be, and asserts that therefore they must feel
in themselves that they _could_ live up to his standard if they
chose."

"There now!" Mr, Frayling exclaimed triumphantly. "That is just what I
said. A Christlike man, indeed! What absurdity will women want next? I
don't know what to advise, Colquhoun. I really don't."

"Can't you _order_ her?" Mrs. Frayling suggested.

"Order her! How can _I_ order her? She belongs to Major Colquhoun
now," he retorted irritably, but with a fine conservative regard for the
rights of property.

"And this is the way she keeps her vow of obedience," Major Colquhoun
muttered.

"Oh, but you see--the poor misguided child considers that she made the vow
under a misapprehension," Mrs. Frayling explained, her maternal instinct
acting on the defensive when her offspring's integrity was attacked, and
making the position clear to her. "Don't you think, dear,"--to her
husband--"that if you asked the bishop, he would talk to her."

"The bishop!" Mr. Frayling ejaculated with infinite scorn. "_I_ know
what women are when they go off like this. Once they set up opinions of
their own, there's _no_ talking to them. Why, haven't they gone to
the stake for their opinions? She wouldn't obey the whole bench of bishops
in her present frame of mind; and, if they condescended to talk to her,
they would only confirm her belief in her own powers. She would glory to
find herself opposing what she calls her opinions to theirs."

"Oh, the child is mad!" Mrs. Frayling wailed. "I've said it all along.
She's quite mad."

"Is there any insanity in the family?" Major Colquhoun asked, looking up
suspiciously.

"None, none whatever," Mr. Frayling hastened to assure him. "There has
never been a case. In fact, the women on both sides have always been
celebrated for good sense and exceptional abilities--_for_ women, of
course; and several of the men have distinguished themselves, as you
know."

"That does not alter _my_ opinion in the least!" Mrs Frayling put in.
"Evadne must be mad."

"She's worse, I think," Major Colquhoun exclaimed in a tone of deep
disgust. "She's worse than mad. She's clever. You can do something with a
mad woman; you can lock her up; but a clever woman's the devil. And I'd
never have thought it of her," he added regretfully. "Such a nice quiet
little thing as she seemed, with hardly a word to say for herself. You
wouldn't have imagined that she knew what 'views' are, let alone having
any of her own. But that is just the way with women. There's no being up
to them."

"That is true," said Mr. Frayling.

"Well, I don't know where she got them," Mrs. Frayling protested, "for
I am sure _I_ haven't any. But she seems to know so much about--
_everything_!" she declared, glancing at, the letter. "At _her_ age I
knew _nothing_!"

"I can vouch for that!" her husband exclaimed. He was one of those men who
oppose the education of women might and main, and then jeer at them for
knowing nothing. He was very particular about the human race when it was
likely to suffer by an injurious indulgence on the part of women, but when
it was a question of extra port wine for himself, he never considered the
tortures of gout he might be entailing upon his own hapless descendants.
However, there was an excuse for him on this occasion, for it is not every
day that an irritated man has an opportunity of railing at his wife's
incapacity and the inconvenient intelligence of his daughter both in one
breath. "But how has Evadne obtained all this mischievous information? I
cannot think how she could have obtained it!" he ejaculated, knitting his
brows at his wife in a suspicious way, as he always did when this
importunate thought recurred to him. In such ordinary everyday matters as
the management of his estate, and his other duties as a county gentleman,
and also in solid comprehension of the political situation of the period,
he was by no means wanting; but his mind simply circled round and round
this business of Evadne's like a helpless swimmer in a whirlpool, able to
keep afloat, but with nothing to take hold of. The risk of sending the
mind of an elderly gentleman of settled prejudices spinning "down the
ringing grooves of change" at such a rate is considerable.

During the day he wandered up to the rooms which had been Evadne's. They
were kept very much as she was accustomed to have them, but there was that
something of bareness about them, and a kind of spick-and-spanness
conveying a sense of emptiness and desertion which strikes cold to the
heart when it comes of the absence of someone dear. And Mr. Frayling felt
the discomfort of it. The afternoon sunlight slanted across the little
sitting room, falling on the backs of a row of well-worn books, and
showing the scars of use and abuse on them. Without deliberate intention,
Mr. Frayling followed the ray, and read the bald titles by its
uncompromising clearness--histology, pathology, anatomy, physiology,
prophylactics, therapeutics, botany, natural history, ancient and
outspoken history, not to mention the modern writers and the various
philosophies. Mr. Frayling took out a work on sociology, opened it, read a
few passages which Evadne had marked, and solemnly ejaculated, "Good
Heavens!" several times. He could not have been more horrified had the
books been "Mademoiselle de Maupin," "Nana," "La Terre," "Madame Bovary,"
and "Sapho"; yet, had women been taught to read the former and reflect
upon them, our sacred humanity might have been saved sooner from the depth
of degradation depicted in the latter.