Chapter IV A Brilliant Match
“Love is a pastime for one’s youth; marriage, a provision for one’s old age.”
—Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler.
“For life is not the thing we thought and not the thing we plan,
And woman, in a bitter world, must do the best she can.”
—Robert Service.
In order that the reader may more fully understand the foregoing chapters and the predicament in which certain of the characters find themselves, it is necessary to ask him to return with us to a period some thirty years before, when a certain young lady, known as Clara Brooks, had just made a most sensible match.
Now, as this was the first sensible thing that Miss Brooks had ever been known to do, it naturally attracted some attention and created some discussion. For she was one of those impossible beings who want to be happy and who, instead of viewing happiness in the light of a series of discreetly conducted flirtations, ending in marriage with the most eligible of the flirtees, had persisted in prolonging these flirtations to a really indiscreet period of time and had even carried her folly so far as to refuse two or three really desirable offers. She had a vague yet fairly positive idea that marriage, in order to be at all happy or satisfactory, must be based on mutual love and esteem, and, because of this antiquated and most unfortunate notion, she had remained unmarried until the age of twenty-five.
This attitude of Clara’s laid her open to much well-deserved censure. There were two opinions about it; the first being that she had no common sense, whatever; the second being that she was unfortunately romantic and fanciful, yet somewhat to be commended in that her ideals were of a slightly higher order than those of the average girl. There was not much truth in either of these views. Clara Brooks, like most of the rest of the world, was supremely selfish, though not unpleasantly so. She loved love; she also loved money; she wanted to be happy, whatever the price she paid for happiness; and she did not care to do anything that she thought likely to militate against her happiness. That was all.
It seemed very hard to Clara, who possessed beauty of quite an unusual order, a wheedling tongue, and a pretty taste in dress, that she could not marry both for love and money. She would have preferred to marry for love, however, if she had been obliged to make a choice. This was partly because she had never known poverty and could not compute its discomforts with any degree of accuracy; but, also, because she was one of those women who are capable of an overpowering infatuation and who are, therefore, instinctively on the watch for a possible object which may awaken it. The object had not appeared; Clara was twenty-five, and twenty-five, at the period of which I write, was not the twenty-five of to-day. Only people of unusual fascination and prettiness, such as Miss Brooks, dared to be unmarried at twenty-five. Already her enemies were beginning to brand her with the awful stigma of “old maid,” already her friends were beginning to murmur plaintively, “What can she be thinking about?”
Clara’s thoughts ended in a very usual fashion. As Prince Charming had not arrived; as the time was fast approaching when she would be relegated to the dreadful social lumber room where all such derelicts of love were stowed by grieving relatives in the “good old days”; as enemies were, as has before been said, beginning to murmur “old maid” behind her back, and friends, “silly girl” to her face; for all these reasons and for fifty others, Clara Brooks suddenly made up her mind to accept a well-to-do and silent man, by name Lowden Thayer, who for some time past had been obviously attracted by her undoubted charms. Now the sky brightened for Clara. She, as a bride-to-be, received many handsome wedding presents, a number of compliments on her most unexpected good sense, and a vast amount of eminently imbecile advice from well-meaning ignoramuses of both sexes.
The wedding was a fine one; all Clara’s relatives were pleased to know that she was settled and would be provided for until the day of her death no matter how ugly or unpleasant or incapable she became with age; and all Lowden Thayer’s relatives were pleased to think that he had married at all, though the majority of them felt that he had made a most unsuitable choice. Wherein they were undoubtedly right.
After the honeymoon, the Thayers took up their abode in a handsome house in a fashionable quarter of Montreal; the gentleman went to business every day and the lady began to receive and return calls from the elite of what is known as “society.”
She had many calls of all kinds to return, for she had fulfilled the whole duty of civilized woman; she had married, and married well. Within a year she further absolved herself of blame by bringing into the world a little, helpless infant, bald and thin and red-faced, who howled most objectionably and seemed as indignant at having existence thus forced upon it as though it knew what existence really was. Probably it was no prophetic instinct but some more prosaic ailment that led Clara’s infant daughter to make night hideous with her cries. Be that as it may, its mother conceived something that almost amounted to dislike for the ugly little voyager upon the sea of life for whose existence she was responsible. She loved men and boys; why then should she give birth to a daughter? She loved beauty; why should her first-born be devoid even of hair? Besides... the baby resembled its father; the “good match” which Fate had compelled her to make, much against her wishes; the detested crumple in her bed of roses; the hated benefactor to whose unwise fancy she was indebted for board and clothing, place in society and honourable title of “married woman”; the loathed necessity which spoilt everything—even her child—for her.
This much, however, must be said for Clara Thayer; though the child meant less than nothing to her, she did not neglect it on that account. She may have been an unnatural mother, but she was not a soulless brute, and she therefore attended carefully to its wants and saw that it lacked for nothing that she could give it. What she could not give it, it necessarily went without; but she did her duty so far as she was able and was unexpectedly and munificently rewarded. For when her little girl was three years of age its father died, leaving her a wealthy and beautiful widow.
Now when Fortune is too kind to us Fate sometimes plays a grim joke, in order to level us with the vast mass of toiling, yearning, disappointed, suffering fellow-humans. This is what Fate did with Clara Thayer.
She was young, rich, beautiful, able to marry whom she pleased and live as she liked without let or hindrance. Fate had given her good coin with which to purchase anything her vagrant fancy might light upon. She might have chosen whom she would. Therefore she chose an extremely good-looking scoundrel whose Irish mother and Italian father had bequeathed to him, together with the light-hearted fascinations of their kindred natures, the sum total of every vice of which both lands are capable. The sweet kindness of heart and warm devotion to cause and kindred which characterize the Italian and Irish races lay in the softness of his dark eyes, the velvet smoothness of his voice, but were quite absent from his nature. This Clara Thayer did not know; and, had she known, it is more than probable that she would not have cared. For the first time in her life she was in the grip of a perfectly irrational fascination, an infatuation which drove her as a whirlwind might drive wheat. The infatuation ended, moreover, only when her life did.
This was, perhaps, a natural ending to Clara Thayer’s career. It was natural, too, that people should refer to her as that poor girl who made “such a sensible first match” and “such an idiotic second one.” As a matter of fact it would be difficult to determine which of Clara’s two marriages was the more idiotic. Her first was for money, her second, for love. Her first supplied her with good food, pretty clothes and unlimited boredom. Her second gave her sharp rapture and equally poignant pain. Possibly, if she had remained unmarried she might have encountered worse things than any of these. Of the three wishes which the bad fairy, Life, gives the average woman it is difficult to say which is the least fraught with unhappiness.
“Woman in a bitter world must do the best she can.” Clara Brooks did the best she could and bad was the best.
However she died at forty-five, and many women live to be old.