IT was necessary that either he or I should tell my father of what had passed between us. On reflection, I thought it best that I should make the disclosure. The day after the picnic, I repeated to my father Roland's melancholy narrative, as a necessary preface to the announcement that I had promised to be Roland's wife.
My father saw the obvious objections to the marriage. He warned me of the imprudence which I had contemplated committing in the strongest terms. Our prospect of happiness, if we married, would depend entirely on our capacity to legally supersede the proceedings of the Lunacy Commission. Success in this arduous undertaking was, to say the least of it, uncertain. The commonest prudence pointed to the propriety of delaying our marriage until the doubtful experiment had been put to the proof.
This reasoning was unanswerable. It was, nevertheless, completely thrown away upon me.
When did a woman in love ever listen to reason? I believe there is no instance of it on record. My father's wise words of caution had no chance against Roland's fervent entreaties. The days of his residence at Eastbourne were drawing to a close. If I let him return to the asylum an unmarried man, months, years perhaps, might pass before our union could take place. Could I expect him, could I expect any man, to endure that cruel separation, that unrelieved suspense? I His mind had been sorely tried already; his mind might give way under it. These were the arguments that carried weight with them, in my judgment! I was of age, and free to act as I pleased. You are welcome, if you like, to consider me the most foolish and the most obstinate of women. In sixteen days from the date of the picnic Roland and I were privately married at Eastbourne.
My father--more grieved than angry, poor man--declined to be present at the ceremony; in justice to himself. My brother gave me away at the altar.
Roland and I spent the afternoon of the wedding-day and the earlier part of the evening together. At nine o'clock he returned to the doctor's house, exactly as usual; having previously explained to me that he was in the power of the Court of Chancery, and that until we succeeded in setting aside the proceedings of the Lunacy Commission there was a serious necessity for keeping the marriage strictly secret. My husband and I kissed, and said good-by till tomorrow, as the clock struck the hour. I little thought, while I looked after him from the street-door, that months on months were to pass before I saw Roland again.
A hurried note from my husband reached me the next morning. Our marriage had been discovered (we never could tell by whom), and we had been betrayed to the doctor. Roland was then on his way back to the asylum. He had been warned that force would be used if he resisted. Knowing that resistance would be interpreted, in his case, as a new outbreak of madness, he had wisely submitted. "I have made the sacrifice," the letter concluded; "it is now for you to help me. Attack the Commission in Lunacy, and be quick about it!"
We lost no time in preparing for the attack. On the day when I received the news of our misfortune we left Eastbourne for London, and at once took measures to obtain the best legal advice.
My dear father--though I was far from deserving his kindness--entered into the matter heart and soul. In due course of time, we presented a petition to the Lord Chancellor, praying that the decision of the Lunacy Commission might be set aside.
We supported our petition by quoting the evidence of Roland's friends and neighbors, during his three years' residence in the Lake country, as a free man. These worthy people (being summoned before the Lunacy Commission) had one and all agreed that he was, as to their judgment and experience, perfectly quiet, harmless, and sane. Many of them had gone out shooting with him. Others had often accompanied him in sailing excursions on the lake. Do people trust a madman with a gun, and with the management of a boat? As to the "act of violence," which the heirs at law and the next of kin had made the means of imprisoning Roland in the mad-house, it amounted to this: he had lost his temper, and had knocked a man down who had offended him. Very wrong, no doubt; but if that is a proof of madness, what thousands of lunatics are still at large! Another instance produced to prove his insanity was still more absurd. It was solemnly declared that he put an image of the Virgin Mary in his boat, when he went out on his sailing excursions! I have seen the image--it was a very beautiful work of art. Was Roland mad to admire it, and take it with him? His religious convictions leaned toward Catholicism. If he betrayed insanity in adorning his boat with an image of the Virgin Mary, what is the mental condition of most of the ladies in Christendom who wear the cross as an ornament round their necks? We advanced these arguments in our petition, after quoting the evidence of the witnesses. And more than this, we even went the length of admitting, as an act of respect toward the Court, that my poor husband might be eccentric in some of his opinions and habits. But we put it to the authorities, whether better results might not be expected from placing him under the care of a wife who loved him, and whom he loved, than from shutting him up in an asylum, among incurable madmen as his companions for life.
Such was our petition, so far as I am able to describe it.
The decision rested with the Lords Justices. They decided against us.
Turning a deaf ear to our witnesses and our arguments, these merciless lawyers declared that the doctor's individual assertion of my husband's insanity was enough for them. They considered Roland's comfort to be sufficiently provided for in the asylum, with an allowance of seven hundred pounds a year--and to the asylum they consigned him for the rest of his days.
So far as I was concerned, the result of this infamous judgment was to deprive me of the position of Roland's wife; no lunatic being capable of contracting marriage by law. So far as my husband was concerned, the result may be best stated in the language of a popular newspaper, which published an article on the case. "It is possible" (said the article--I wish I could personally thank the man who wrote it!) "for the Court of Chancery to take a man who has a large fortune, and is in the prime of life, but is a little touched in the head, and make a monk of him, and then report to itself that the comfort and happiness of the lunatic have been effectually provided for at the expenditure of seven hundred pounds a year."
Roland was determined however, that they should not make a monk of him--and, you may rely upon it, so was I!
But one alternative was left to us. The authority of the Court of Chancery (within its jurisdiction) is the most despotic authority on the face of the earth. Our one hope was in taking to flight. The price of our liberty, as citizens of England, was exile from our native country, and the entire abandonment of Roland's fortune. We accepted those hard conditions. Hospitable America offered us a refuge, beyond the reach of mad-doctors and Lords Justices. To hospitable America our hearts turned, as to our second country. The serious question was, How were we to get there?
We had attempted to correspond, and had failed. Our letters had been discovered and seized by the proprietor of the asylum. Fortunately we had taken the precaution of writing in a "cipher" of Roland's invention, which he had taught me before our marriage. Though our letters were illegible, our purpose was suspected, as a matter of course; and a watch was kept on my husband night and day.
Foiled in our first effort at making arrangements secretly for our flight, we continued our correspondence (still in cipher) by means of advertisement in the newspapers. This second attempt was discovered in its turn. Roland was refused permission to subscribe to the newspapers, and was forbidden to enter the reading-room at the asylum. These tyrannical prohibitions came too late. Our plans had already been communicated; we understood each other, and we had now only to bide our time. We had arranged that my brother and a friend of his, on whose discretion we could thoroughly rely, should take it in turns to watch every evening, for a given time, at an appointed meeting-place, three miles distant from the asylum. The spot had been carefully chosen. It was on the bank of a lonely stream, and close to the outskirts of a thick wood. A water-proof knapsack, containing a change of clothes, a false beard and wig, and some biscuits and preserved meat, was hidden in a hollow tree. My brother and his friend always took their fishing-rods with them, and presented themselves, as engaged in the innocent occupation of angling, to any chance strangers who might pass within sight of them. On one occasion the proprietor of the asylum himself rode by my brother, on the opposite bank of the stream, and asked politely if he had had good sport!
For a fortnight these stanch allies of ours relieved each other regularly on their watch--and no signs of the fugitive appeared. On the fifteenth evening, just as the twilight was changing into night, and just as my brother (whose turn it was) had decided on leaving the place, Roland suddenly joined him on the bank of the stream.
Without wasting a moment in words, the two at once entered the wood, and took the knapsack from its place of shelter in the hollow tree. In ten minutes more my husband was dressed in a suit of workman's clothes, and was further disguised in the wig and beard. The two then set forth down the course of the stream, keeping in the shadow of the wood until the night had fallen and the darkness hid them. The night was cloudy; there was no moon. After walking two miles or a little more, they altered their course, and made for the high-road to Manchester, entering on it at a point some thirty miles distant from the city.
On their way from the wood, Roland described the manner in which he had effected his escape.
The story was simple enough. He had assumed to be suffering from nervous illness, and had requested to have his meals in his own room. For the first fortnight, the two men appointed to wait upon him in succession, week by week, were both more than his match in strength. The third man employed, at the beginning of the third week, was physically a less formidable person than his predecessors. Seeing this, Roland decided, when evening came, on committing another "act of violence." In plain words, he sprang upon the keeper waiting on him in his room, and gagged and bound the man.
This done, he laid the unlucky keeper, face to the wall, on his own bed, covered with his own cloak, so that any one entering the room might suppose he was lying down to rest. He had previously taken the precaution to remove the sheets from the bed, and he had now only to tie them together to escape by the window of his room, situated on the upper floor of the house. The sun was setting, and the inmates of the asylum were then at tea. After narrowly missing discovery by one of the laborers employed in the grounds, he had climbed the garden inclosure, and had dropped on the other side--a free man!
Arrived on the high-road to Manchester, my husband and my brother parted.
Roland, who was an excellent walker, set forth on his way to Manchester on foot. He had food in his knapsack, and he proposed to walk some twelve or fifteen miles on the road to the city before he stopped at any town or village to rest. My brother, who was physically unable to accompany him, returned to the place in which I was then residing, to tell me the good news.
By the first train the next morning I traveled to Manchester, and took a lodging in a suburb of the city known to my husband as well as to me. A prim, smoky little square was situated in the immediate neighborhood; and we had arranged that whichever of us first arrived in Manchester should walk round that square, between twelve and one in the afternoon, and between six and seven in the evening. In the evening I kept my appointment. A dusty, foot-sore man, in shabby clothes, with a hideous beard, and a knapsack on his back, met me at my first walk round. He smiled as I looked at him. Ah! I knew that smile through all disguises. In spite of the Court of Chancery and the Lords Justices, I was in my husband's arms once more.
We lived quietly in our retreat for a month. During that time, (as I heard by letters from my brother) nothing that money and cunning could do toward discovering Roland was left untried by the proprietor of the asylum, and by the persons acting with him. But where is the cunning which can trace a man who, escaping at night in disguise, has not trusted himself to a railway or a carriage, and who takes refuge in a great city in which he has no friends? At the end of our month in Manchester we traveled northward, crossed the Channel to Ireland, and passed a pleasant fortnight in Dublin. Leaving this again, we made our way to Cork and Queenstown, and embarked from that latter place (among a crowd of steerage passengers) in a steamship for America.
My story is told. I am writing these lines from a farm in the west of the United States. Our neighbors may be homely enough; but the roughest of them is kinder to us than a mad doctor or a Lord Justice. Roland is happy in those agricultural pursuits which have always been favorite pursuits with him; and I am happy with Roland. Our sole resources consist of my humble little fortune, inherited from my dear mother. After deducting our traveling expenses, the sum total amounts to between seven and eight hundred pounds; and this, as we find, is amply sufficient to start us well in the new life that we have chosen. We expect my father and my brother to pay us a visit next summer; and I think it is just possible that they may find our family circle increased by the presence of a new member in long clothes. Are there no compensations here for exile from England and the loss of a fortune? We think there are! But then, my dear Miss Anstell, "Mary Brading's husband is mad, and Mary Brading herself is not much better."
If you feel inclined to alter this opinion, and if you remember our old days at school as tenderly as I remember them, write and tell me so. Your letter will be forwarded, if you send it to the inclosed address at New York.
In the meantime, the moral of our story seems to be worth serious consideration. A certain Englishman legally inherits a large fortune. At the time of his inheritance, he has been living as a free man for three years--without once abusing his freedom, and with the express sanction of the medical superintendent who has had experience and charge of him. His next of kin and his heirs at law (who are left out of the fortune) look with covetous eyes at the money, and determine to get the management and the ultimate possession of it. Assisted by a doctor, whose honesty and capacity must be taken on trust, these interested persons, in this nineteenth century of progress, can lawfully imprison their relative for life, in a country which calls itself free, and which declares that its justice is equally administered to all alike.
NOTE.--The reader is informed that this story is founded, in all essential particulars, on a case which actually occurred in England, eight years since. W. C.