The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems | Page 2

accounting for the former.
I had several times heard it mentioned that Mrs. Greyfield had been twice married; and as her son Benton was also called Greyfield, I presumed that he was the son of the second marriage. How I found out differently I am about to relate.
One rainy winter evening, on the occasion of my second visit to this friend, we were sitting alone before a bright wood fire in an open fireplace, when we chanced to refer to the subject of her son's personal qualities; he then being gone on a visit to San Francisco, and of course very constantly in his mother's thoughts, as only sons are sure to be.
"Benton is just like his father," she said. "He is self-possessed and full of expedients, but he says very little. I have often wished he conversed more readily, for I admire a good talker."
"And yet did not marry one:--the common lot!"
Mrs. Greyfield smiled, and gazed into the fire, whose pleasant radiance filled the room, bringing out the soft warm colors in the carpet, and making fantastic shadows of our easy-chairs and ourselves upon the wall.
"Mr. Greyfield was your second husband?" I said, in an inquiring tone, but without expecting to be contradicted.
"Mr. Greyfield was my first, last, and only husband," she replied, with a touch of asperity, yet not as if she meant it for me.
"I beg your pardon," I hastened to explain: "but I had been told--"
"Yes, I can guess what you have been told. Very few people know the truth: but I never had a second husband, though I was twice married;" and my hostess regarded me with a smile half assumed and half embarrassed.
For my own part, I was very much embarrassed, because I had certainly been informed that she had lived for a number of years with a second husband who had not used her well, and from whom she was finally divorced. Doubt her word I could not; neither could I reconcile her statement with facts apparently well known. She saw my dilemma, and, after a brief silence, mentally decided to help me out of it. I could see that, in the gradual relaxing of certain muscles of her face, which had contracted at the first reference to this--as I could not doubt--painful subject. Straightening her fine form as if ease of position was not compatible with what was in her mind, she grasped the arms of her chair with either hand, and looking with a retrospective gaze into the fire, began:
"You see it was this way: the man I married the second time had another wife."
While she drew a deep breath, and made a momentary pause, I seemed to take it all in, for I had heard so many stories of deserted Eastern homes, and subsequent illegal marriages in California, that I was prepared not to be at all surprised at what I should learn from her. Directly she went on:
"I found out about it the very day of the marriage. We were married in the morning, and in the afternoon a man came over from Vancouver who told me that Mr. Seabrook had a wife, and family of children, in a certain town in Ohio." Another pause followed, while she seemed to be recalling the very emotions of that time.
"Vancouver?" I said: "that is on the Columbia River."
"Yes; I was living in Portland at that time."
In reply to my glance of surprise, she changed the scene of her story to an earlier date.
"Mr. Greyfield had always wanted to come to California, after the gold discoveries; but when he married me he agreed not to think of it any more. I was very young and timid, and very much attached to my childhood's home, and my parents; and I could not bear the thought of going so long a distance away from them. It was not then, as it is now, an easy journey of one week; but a long six months' pilgrimage through a wilderness country infested by Indians. To reach what? another wilderness infested by white barbarians!"
"But I have always heard," I said, "that women were idealized and idolized in those days."
"That is a very pretty fiction. If you had seen what I have seen on this coast, you would not think we had been much idealized. Women have a certain value among men, when they can be useful to them. In the old States, where every man has a home, women have a fixed position and value in society, because they are necessary to make homes. But on this coast, in early times, and more or less even now, men found they could dispense with homes; they had been converted into nomads, to whom earth and sky, a blanket and a frying-pan, were sufficient for their needs. Unless we came