Man and Wife by Wilkie Collins (e book reader pc .txt) 📕
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Man and Wife is the ninth novel by Wilkie Collins, and was published in serial form in 1870. Like many of his other novels it has a complex plot and tackles social issues, in this case the then-lax state of the marriage laws, particularly in Scotland and Ireland. As always, Collins deals carefully but frankly with human personal behavior. To avoid offending Victorian morals too greatly, much is implied rather than stated outright. Nevertheless, even dealing with such matters at all led to his novels being derided as “sensation fiction” by his critics. By today’s standards, of course, they wouldn’t even raise an eyebrow.
In Man and Wife, the main character Anne Silvester has fallen pregnant to a muscular and handsome, but boorish man, Geoffrey Delamayn, to whom she is not married. She is working as a governess at a house in Scotland. Anne arranges to meet Delamayn secretly at a garden party and angrily demands that he fulfill his promise to marry her, that very day. He very reluctantly agrees to a secret, private marriage, knowing that a public marriage would badly affect his inheritance prospects. How is the marriage to be arranged quickly but kept quiet? Anne has a plan based on her understanding of the looseness of the marriage laws in Scotland. Naturally, of course, things go badly wrong with this plan and many complexities arise.
Collins is deeply critical of the state of contemporary marriage laws, both in how loosely they were framed, and in how little power over their own lives they gave to women once they were married, even if married to a brutal man. He also uses this novel to denounce the worship of sporting heroes and the obsession with physical prowess rather than mental superiority as a primary indication of male virtue.
Though not as popular as his novels The Woman in White and The Moonstone, Man and Wife received a good critical reception when it was released and was a commercial success.
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- Author: Wilkie Collins
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He bent over her, and roused her, impatiently, almost angrily. The steady resolution in her face was terrible to him, when he thought of the man in the next room.
“Take time to consider,” he pleaded. “Don’t be led away by your own impulse. Don’t act under a false excitement. Nothing binds you to this dreadful sacrifice of yourself.”
“Excitement! Sacrifice!” She smiled sadly as she repeated the words. “Do you know, Sir Patrick, what I was thinking of a moment since? Only of old times, when I was a little girl. I saw the sad side of life sooner than most children see it. My mother was cruelly deserted. The hard marriage laws of this country were harder on her than on me. She died brokenhearted. But one friend comforted her at the last moment, and promised to be a mother to her child. I can’t remember one unhappy day in all the after-time when I lived with that faithful woman and her little daughter—till the day that parted us. She went away with her husband; and I and the little daughter were left behind. She said her last words to me. Her heart was sinking under the dread of coming death. ‘I promised your mother that you should be like my own child to me, and it quieted her mind. Quiet my mind, Anne, before I go. Whatever happens in years to come—promise me to be always what you are now, a sister to Blanche.’ Where is the false excitement, Sir Patrick, in old remembrances like these? And how can there be a sacrifice in anything that I do for Blanche?”
She rose, and offered him her hand. Sir Patrick lifted it to his lips in silence.
“Come!” she said. “For both our sakes, let us not prolong this.”
He turned aside his head. It was no moment to let her see that she had completely unmanned him. She waited for him, with her hand on the lock. He rallied his courage—he forced himself to face the horror of the situation calmly. She opened the door, and led the way back into the other room.
Not a word was spoken by any of the persons present, as the two returned to their places. The noise of a carriage passing in the street was painfully audible. The chance banging of a door in the lower regions of the house made everyone start.
Anne’s sweet voice broke the dreary silence.
“Must I speak for myself, Sir Patrick? Or will you (I ask it as a last and greatest favor) speak for me?”
“You insist on appealing to the letter in your hand?”
“I am resolved to appeal to it.”
“Will nothing induce you to defer the close of this inquiry—so far as you are concerned—for four-and-twenty hours?”
“Either you or I, Sir Patrick, must say what is to be said, and do what is to be done, before we leave this room.”
“Give me the letter.”
She gave it to him. Mr. Moy whispered to his client, “Do you know what that is?” Geoffrey shook his head. “Do you really remember nothing about it?” Geoffrey answered in one surly word, “Nothing!”
Sir Patrick addressed himself to the assembled company.
“I have to ask your pardon,” he said, “for abruptly leaving the room, and for obliging Miss Silvester to leave it with me. Everybody present, except that man” (he pointed to Geoffrey), “will, I believe, understand and forgive me, now that I am forced to make my conduct the subject of the plainest and the fullest explanation. I shall address that explanation, for reasons which will presently appear, to my niece.”
Blanche started. “To me!” she exclaimed.
“To you,” Sir Patrick answered.
Blanche turned toward Arnold, daunted by a vague sense of something serious to come. The letter that she had received from her husband on her departure from Ham Farm had necessarily alluded to relations between Geoffrey and Anne, of which Blanche had been previously ignorant. Was any reference coming to those relations? Was there something yet to be disclosed which Arnold’s letter had not prepared her to hear?
Sir Patrick resumed.
“A short time since,” he said to Blanche, “I proposed to you to return to your husband’s protection—and to leave the termination of this matter in my hands. You have refused to go back to him until you are first certainly assured that you are his wife. Thanks to a sacrifice to your interests and your happiness, on Miss Silvester’s part—which I tell you frankly I have done my utmost to prevent—I am in a position to prove positively that Arnold Brinkworth was a single man when he married you from my house in Kent.”
Mr. Moy’s experience forewarned him of what was coming. He pointed to the letter in Sir Patrick’s hand.
“Do you claim on a promise of marriage?” he asked.
Sir Patrick rejoined by putting a question on his side.
“Do you remember the famous decision at Doctors’ Commons, which established the marriage of Captain Dalrymple and Miss Gordon?”
Mr. Moy was answered. “I understand you, Sir Patrick,” he said. After a moment’s pause, he addressed his next words to Anne. “And from the bottom of my heart, madam, I respect you.”
It was said with a fervent sincerity of tone which wrought the interest of the other persons, who were still waiting for enlightenment, to the highest pitch. Lady Lundie and Captain Newenden whispered to each other anxiously. Arnold turned pale. Blanche burst into tears.
Sir Patrick turned once more to his niece.
“Some little time since,” he said, “I had occasion to speak to you of the scandalous uncertainty of the marriage laws of Scotland. But for that uncertainty (entirely without parallel in any other civilized country in Europe), Arnold Brinkworth would never have occupied the position in which he stands here today—and these proceedings would never have taken place. Bear that fact in mind. It is not only answerable for the mischief that has been already done, but for the far more serious evil which is still to come.”
Mr. Moy took a note. Sir Patrick went on.
“Loose and reckless as the Scotch law
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