The next forenoon Captain Ranger rode up alongside the carriage of Mrs. McAlpin and her mother, in which Jean was posing as driver and guest, and said: “I hope I gave you no offence in speaking as I did to Mr. Burns last night.”
“No offence at all, Captain. Don’t mention it; you were simply discharging your duty. But”—and Mrs. McAlpin hesitated a little—“would you mind exchanging your mount with Jean for a little while? I am quite sure she will enjoy a canter on the back of Sukie, and I wish to counsel with you a little. I am sorry to impose upon your good nature.”
Mrs. Benson took little notice of the Captain or of her daughter, but leaned back on the cushions, apparently absorbed in a book.
“I want your candid opinion,” said Mrs. McAlpin. “Do you consider the marriage ceremony infallible? Is it an unpardonable sin to break it, except for a nameless reason? I have an object in asking this question that is not born of mere curiosity.”
“Nothing of human origin is infallible, madam; and, for aught I can see to the contrary, nothing is infallible anywhere.”
“Do you believe it is better to break a bad bargain than to keep it?”
“That depends upon circumstances.”
“Why do you evade my question?”
“Because I can’t see what you’re driving at.”
“Then I’ll come at once to the point. Suppose you had been born a woman?”
“That isn’t a supposable case.”
“But we’ll let it rest for the present as if it were. Suppose you were born to be a woman,—we’ll put it that way for the sake of illustration,—and suppose, while you were yet a child, you had been married to a man many years your senior—married just to please somebody else—in defiance of your own judgment or desires?”
“Millions of women are married in that way every year, madam. Look at India, at China, at Turkey, and at many modern homes, even in England and America! It would seem to be the exception and not the rule where women get the husbands of their choice. I know it is the fashion to pretend they do; for a woman has to become desperately weary of her bargain before she’ll own up honestly to a matrimonial mistake.”
“But suppose one of those women had been yourself; don’t you think if you had been so married in childhood, that you would have rebelled openly as soon as you reached the years of discretion?”
“Nonsense, Daphne!” interrupted Mrs. Benson. “You harp forever on a single string. Suppose you discuss the weather, for a change.”
“There are points on which my estimable mother and myself do not agree,” said the daughter, with a sad smile. “Don’t mind her, please. I have learned that you are a wise and just man, and I am in need of advice. What would you do if, although you had obeyed the letter of the human law, you knew in your own soul that your marriage was a sin?”
“Don’t talk like that in my presence, Daphne! I cannot bear it!” exclaimed her mother, petulantly.
“When I left the States I hoped to get away from everybody’s domestic troubles,” said the Captain, earnestly. “Please don’t tell me about yours—if you have any—unless it is in my power to assist you.”
They had reached a narrow and rocky grade, where careful driving was necessary to avoid disaster.
“We must turn aside here, ladies,” the Captain exclaimed suddenly, as he dexterously alighted and guided the horses by the bits to the only point of advantage in sight. “Cattle and horses ought never to be compelled to travel together. You can’t hurry a steer except in a stampede, and then Old Nick himself couldn’t stop him.”
“They remind me of more than one pair of mismated bipeds I have met,” said Mrs. McAlpin.
The Captain stood at the horses’ heads till the last of the jolting and complaining wagons had safely passed the perilous bit of roadway. Then, guiding the team back to the road, he resumed his seat in the carriage, his lips compressed like a trap.
“Don’t you think Mr. Burns is a wonderful man?” asked Mrs. McAlpin, in a desperate effort to rekindle a conversation.
“He’s a fellow of considerable genius in some ways, but a mighty poor ox-driver.”
“He reminds me of many a woman I have seen,” continued Mrs. McAlpin, “who has failed to get fitted into her proper niche. His mind isn’t fitted to his work. I have seen women chained by circumstances to the kitchen sink, the wash-tub, the churn-dash, and the ironing-board, who never could make a success of any one of these lines of effort, though they might have made excellent astronomers, first-class architects, capable lawyers, good preachers, capital teachers, or splendid financiers. It is a pity to spoil a natural statesman or stateswoman to make a poor ox-driver or an indifferent housekeeper.”
“You seem to take great interest in Scotty,” remarked the Captain.
“I do. We have travelled extensively through the same lands, though we had never met until our orbits chanced to coincide on this journey. He has a retentive memory, a wide experience, and a keen appreciation of the beautiful, both in nature and art, and so have I. He is as much out of place as an ox-driver as I should be in a cotton-field. He’s a perfect mine of information, though, about a lot of things.”
“Then why not take counsel of him, instead o’ me?”
“He would hardly be a disinterested adviser.”
“Ah, I see!”
Mrs. McAlpin blushed. “He has not spoken to me one word of love, Captain,—if that is what you mean. I am not an eligible party,” and the lady used her handkerchief to wipe away a tear. “I want your opinion about getting a divorce from a union that I detested long before I ever met Mr. Burns. It is unbearable now.”
“Hush, Daphne! Not another word,” interposed her mother. “Strangers have no right to an insight into our family affairs.”
“But I must speak to somebody. Stay, Captain!” laying her hand upon his arm as he was about to leave the carriage.
“Are you running away from your husband, madam?” he asked, resuming his seat.
“You guess correctly, sir.”
“I suspected it all along; but it was none of my business in the beginning, nor is it now. But I confess that it looks as if I were making it my business to conduct a caravan of grass widows to Oregon, judging from the present aspect of affairs.”
“To make a long story short,—for I see you are growing restless,—I was married in my callow childhood, married in obedience to my mother’s wish. She was a widow and poor; my suitor was accomplished and rich. If he’d been a sensible man he would have courted and married my mother, who adores him. But old men are such idiots! They’re always hunting young women, or children, for wives.”
“You’re complimentary.”
“Beg your pardon; present company is always excepted. They imagine that young and silly girls will make happy and contented wives,—when any person not overcome by vanity knows that no young man or young woman can be truly enamored of anybody that’s in the sere and yellow leaf. What would you think of a woman of mamma’s age, for instance, making love to a boy? And if such a boy should consent to marry her, who believes that he would be content with his bargain after his beard was grown?”
“Ask me something easy,” said the Captain.
“My father was a physician; and it was my childhood’s delight to study his books, attend his clinics, and make myself generally useful among his patients. I never dreamed of surrendering my person, my liberty, my will, and the absolute control of my individuality to the commands of any human being on earth except myself, till after the deed was done for me by another. No wonder I rebelled when I reached the years of maturity and discretion.”
“Mr. McAlpin was a good man and a gentleman, Captain Ranger,” interrupted Mrs. Benson.
“Yes, mamma; he was always ‘good.’ He never whipped his wife; he gave her everything that money could buy. There is no reason that the law can recognize for me to be dissatisfied. But I don’t belong primarily to myself, and I don’t like it. Mamma here, with her ideas of woman’s place in life, would have made him an excellent and happy wife.”
“He was always a gentleman, Daphne,” repeated her mother. “Don’t do him an injustice.”
“Yes; and I was his personal and private property. I was a beautiful animal, as he thought, to bedeck with his trinkets and show off his wealth; but I was nobody on my own account. I was simply his echo,—or supposed to be,—and nothing else.”
“Daphne, you forget that this carriage, these horses, our wagons and oxen, and the supplies for this journey are all the product of his bounty.”
“They are the product of my jewels, Captain. This outfit is mine; it was bought with my own heart’s blood! I owe nothing to Donald McAlpin.”
“Do you think you have dealt justly by your husband?” asked the Captain. There was reproof and impatience in his tone.
“I owe him nothing, sir. I am in the same line with Dugs,—a runaway chattel. That is all.”
“But Dugs, whose name now is Susannah, did not enter into her bargain voluntarily.”
“Neither did I. My mother made the bargain.”
“How did you escape, Mrs. McAlpin? And why did you undertake this journey?”
“Mr. McAlpin was called away to England last year, to inherit an additional estate. Mamma was too ill to go, so I stayed to nurse her. I had been his body vassal for four years, and was at last a woman grown. One taste of liberty was enough. I will never be his vassal again. I decided to make this very unusual journey to elude pursuit. He’d not think of searching for me outside of the United States or Canada; least of all in the Great American Desert, whither we are bound. I mean to lose myself for good and all in Oregon.”
“And so now you are seeking a divorce?”
“Yes, sir; that is, when I reach Oregon.”
“Thousands of other women have borne far worse conjugal conditions all their lives, and died, making no outward sign, Mrs. McAlpin. Men also have their full share of these afflictions, which they bear in silence to the bitter end.”
“That is their own affair, sir. If other people choose to wear a ball and chain through life, that is their privilege. I would not do their choosing for them if I could.”
“What course would you pursue if you had children?”
“Then I suppose I should be compelled to die with my feet in the stocks. Children might have diverted my mind and helped to save my sanity, though. I’ve prayed for them without ceasing, but in vain. I’m going to a remote country, a new country, where new environments make newer and more plastic conditions. The laws of men, one-sided as they are, will divorce me after seven years.”
“And what is Scotty going to do during all this time?”
“If he loves me as he thinks he does, he’ll wait. If it’s only a passing fancy, he’ll get over it in time. I will not permit his attentions now, nor until Donald McAlpin divorces me and gets another wife.”
Captain Ranger’s union with the gentle bride of his choice had been so natural, and their lives together had been so harmonious, despite their many cares and sorrows, that neither of them had ever harbored a thought of living apart from the other. Differences of opinion they had sometimes, and now and then a brief, angry dispute, but the end was always peace; and he remembered now, with a pang of self-reproach, that in all such encounters he, whether right or wrong, had invariably gained his point.
“You are my guiding star, my faithful wife,” he whispered, as he gently assisted her from the wagon after they had halted for the night. “Come with me, dear, and get some exercise, while Sally and Susannah help the other girls to get supper.”
“I don’t see why we mightn’t end our journey here, John,” said his wife, as they gazed abroad over the vast expanse of table-land that stretched away on every side, intersected here and there with streams, their courses marked by stately rows of cottonwood just bursting into leaf, their bases hedged with pussy-willows. “Here are land and wood and water as good as any we passed yesterday. This surely will be a rich and thickly settled country some day.”
“But it is all Indian country, my dear. I wish you would talk about something else.”
They returned to the camp in silence.
“I wish the girls were as tractable as you are, Annie,” he said an hour later, after having had a heated dispute with his daughters over some trifling disagreement. “They are as headstrong as mules.”
“Being girls, they take after you, John,” replied his wife, with a smile. “I’m afraid their husbands won’t find them as tractable as I have been.”
“Bring on more of your flapjacks and bacon, Miss Mary,” cried Scotty, as Mary poised a big pile of the steaming cakes over the heads of the hungry men who knelt at the mess-boxes.
“You seem to be regaining your lost appetite,” exclaimed Sawed-off. “Have you and the widder cried quits?”
“That’s our business,” was the curt reply.
It was late when Mary sought her mother’s couch for a brief visit that night. She was weeping silently, and her mother caressed her tenderly. “I know your heart is troubled, darling,” said Mrs. Ranger, “but do not be discouraged. Be of good cheer. Every cloud has a silver lining.” And Mary’s heart was comforted, though her reason could not tell her why.