THE BRONCKHORST DIVORCE-CASE.
In the daytime, when she moved about me,
In the night, when she was sleeping at my side,--
I was wearied, I was wearied of her presence.
Day by day and night by night I grew to hate her--
Would to God that she or I had died!
Confessions.
There was a man called Bronckhorst--a three-cornered, middle-aged
man in the Army--gray as a badger, and, some people said, with a
touch of country-blood in him. That, however, cannot be proved.
Mrs. Bronckhorst was not exactly young, though fifteen years younger
than her husband. She was a large, pale, quiet woman, with heavy
eyelids, over weak eyes, and hair that turned red or yellow as the
lights fell on it.
Bronckhorst was not nice in any way. He had no respect for the
pretty public and private lies that make life a little less nasty
than it is. His manner towards his wife was coarse. There are many
things--including actual assault with the clenched fist--that a wife
will endure; but seldom a wife can bear--as Mrs. Bronckhorst bore--
with a long course of brutal, hard chaff, making light of her
weaknesses, her headaches, her small fits of gayety, her dresses,
her queer little attempts to make herself attractive to her husband
when she knows that she is not what she has been, and--worst of all--
the love that she spends on her children. That particular sort of
heavy-handed jest was specially dear to Bronckhorst. I suppose that
he had first slipped into it, meaning no harm, in the honeymoon,
when folk find their ordinary stock of endearments run short, and so
go to the other extreme to express their feelings. A similar
impulse make's a man say:--"Hutt, you old beast!" when a favorite
horse nuzzles his coat-front. Unluckily, when the reaction of
marriage sets in, the form of speech remains, and, the tenderness
having died out, hurts the wife more than she cares to say. But
Mrs. Bronckhorst was devoted to her "teddy," as she called him.
Perhaps that was why he objected to her. Perhaps--this is only a
theory to account for his infamous behavior later on--he gave way to
the queer savage feeling that sometimes takes by the throat a
husband twenty years' married, when he sees, across the table, the
same face of his wedded wife, and knows that, as he has sat facing
it, so must he continue to sit until day of its death or his own.
Most men and all women know the spasm. It only lasts for three
breaths as a rule, must be a "throw-back" to times when men and
women were rather worse than they are now, and is too unpleasant to
be discussed.
Dinner at the Bronckhorst's was an infliction few men cared to
undergo. Bronckhorst took a pleasure in saying things that made his
wife wince. When their little boy came in at dessert, Bronckhorst
used to give him half a glass of wine, and naturally enough, the
poor little mite got first riotous, next miserable, and was removed
screaming. Bronckhorst asked if that was the way Teddy usually
behaved, and whether Mrs. Bronckhorst could not spare some of her
time to teach the "little beggar decency." Mrs. Bronckhorst, who
loved the boy more than her own life, tried not to cry--her spirit
seemed to have been broken by her marriage. Lastly, Bronckhorst
used to say:--"There! That'll do, that'll do. For God's sake try
to behave like a rational woman. Go into the drawing-room." Mrs.
Bronckhorst would go, trying to carry it all off with a smile; and
the guest of the evening would feel angry and uncomfortable.
After three years of this cheerful life--for Mrs. Bronckhorst had no
woman-friends to talk to--the Station was startled by the news that
Bronckhorst had instituted proceedings ON THE CRIMINAL COUNT,
against a man called Biel, who certainly had been rather attentive
to Mrs. Bronckhorst whenever she had appeared in public. The utter
want of reserve with which Bronckhorst treated his own dishonor
helped us to know that the evidence against Biel would be entirely
circumstantial and native. There were no letters; but Bronckhorst
said openly that he would rack Heaven and Earth until he saw Biel
superintending the manufacture of carpets in the Central Jail. Mrs.
Bronckhorst kept entirely to her house, and let charitable folks say
what they pleased. Opinions were divided. Some two-thirds of the
Station jumped at once to the conclusion that Biel was guilty; but a
dozen men who knew and liked him held by him. Biel was furious and
surprised. He denied the whole thing, and vowed that he would
thrash Bronckhorst within an inch of his life. No jury, we knew,
could convict a man on the criminal count on native evidence in a
land where you can buy a murder-charge, including the corpse, all
complete for fifty-four rupees; but Biel did not care to scrape
through by the benefit of a doubt. He wanted the whole thing
cleared: but as he said one night:--"He can prove anything with
servants' evidence, and I've only my bare word." This was about a
month before the case came on; and beyond agreeing with Biel, we
could do little. All that we could be sure of was that the native
evidence would be bad enough to blast Biel's character for the rest
of his service; for when a native begins perjury he perjures himself
thoroughly. He does not boggle over details.
Some genius at the end of the table whereat the affair was being
talked over, said:--"Look here! I don't believe lawyers are any
good. Get a man to wire to Strickland, and beg him to come down and
pull us through."
Strickland was about a hundred and eighty miles up the line. He had
not long been married to Miss Youghal, but he scented in the
telegram a chance of return to the old detective work that his soul
lusted after, and next night he came in and heard our story. He
finished his pipe and said oracularly:--we must get at the evidence.
Oorya bearer, Mussalman khit and methraniayah, I suppose, are the
pillars of the charge. I am on in this piece; but I'm afraid I'm
getting rusty in my talk."
He rose and went into Biel's bedroom where his trunk had been put,
and shut the door. An hour later, we heard him say:--"I hadn't the
heart to part with my old makeups when I married. Will this do?"
There was a lothely faquir salaaming in the doorway.
"Now lend me fifty rupees," said Strickland, "and give me your Words
of Honor that you won't tell my Wife."
He got all that he asked for, and left the house while the table
drank his health. What he did only he himself knows. A faquir hung
about Bronckhorst's compound for twelve days. Then a mehter
appeared, and when Biel heard of HIM, he said that Strickland was an
angel full-fledged. Whether the mehter made love to Janki, Mrs.
Bronckhorst's ayah, is a question which concerns Strickland
exclusively.
He came back at the end of three weeks, and said quietly:--"You
spoke the truth, Biel. The whole business is put up from beginning
to end. Jove! It almost astonishes ME! That Bronckhorst-beast
isn't fit to live."
There was uproar and shouting, and Biel said:--"How are you going to
prove it? You can't say that you've been trespassing on
Bronckhorst's compound in disguise!"
"No," said Strickland. "Tell your lawyer-fool, whoever he is, to
get up something strong about 'inherent improbabilities' and
'discrepancies of evidence.' He won't have to speak, but it will
make him happy. I'M going to run this business."
Biel held his tongue, and the other men waited to see what would
happen. They trusted Strickland as men trust quiet men. When the
case came off the Court was crowded. Strickland hung about in the
verandah of the Court, till he met the Mohammedan khitmatgar. Then
he murmured a faquir's blessing in his ear, and asked him how his
second wife did. The man spun round, and, as he looked into the
eyes of "Estreeken Sahib," his jaw dropped. You must remember that
before Strickland was married, he was, as I have told you already, a
power among natives. Strickland whispered a rather coarse
vernacular proverb to the effect that he was abreast of all that was
going on, and went into the Court armed with a gut trainer's-whip.
The Mohammedan was the first witness and Strickland beamed upon him
from the back of the Court. The man moistened his lips with his
tongue and, in his abject fear of "Estreeken Sahib" the faquir, went
back on every detail of his evidence--said he was a poor man and God
was his witness that he had forgotten every thing that Bronckhorst
Sahib had told him to say. Between his terror of Strickland, the
Judge, and Bronckhorst he collapsed, weeping.
Then began the panic among the witnesses. Janki, the ayah, leering
chastely behind her veil, turned gray, and the bearer left the
Court. He said that his Mamma was dying and that it was not
wholesome for any man to lie unthriftily in the presence of
"Estreeken Sahib."
Biel said politely to Bronckhorst:--"Your witnesses don't seem to
work. Haven't you any forged letters to produce?" But Bronckhorst
was swaying to and fro in his chair, and there was a dead pause
after Biel had been called to order.
Bronckhorst's Counsel saw the look on his client's face, and without
more ado, pitched his papers on the little green baize table, and
mumbled something about having been misinformed. The whole Court
applauded wildly, like soldiers at a theatre, and the Judge began to
say what he thought.
. . . . . . . . .
Biel came out of the place, and Strickland dropped a gut trainer's-
whip in the verandah. Ten minutes later, Biel was cutting
Bronckhorst into ribbons behind the old Court cells, quietly and
without scandal. What was left of Bronckhorst was sent home in a
carriage; and his wife wept over it and nursed it into a man again.
Later on, after Biel had managed to hush up the counter-charge
against Bronckhorst of fabricating false evidence, Mrs. Bronckhorst,
with her faint watery smile, said that there had been a mistake, but
it wasn't her Teddy's fault altogether. She would wait till her
Teddy came back to her. Perhaps he had grown tired of her, or she
had tried his patience, and perhaps we wouldn't cut her any more,
and perhaps the mothers would let their children play with "little
Teddy" again. He was so lonely. Then the Station invited Mrs.
Bronckhorst everywhere, until Bronckhorst was fit to appear in
public, when he went Home and took his wife with him. According to
the latest advices, her Teddy did "come back to her," and they are
moderately happy. Though, of course, he can never forgive her the
thrashing that she was the indirect means of getting for him.
. . . . . . . . .
What Biel wants to know is:--"Why didn't I press home the charge
against the Bronckhorst-brute, and have him run in?"
What Mrs. Strickland wants to know is:--"How DID my husband bring
such a lovely, lovely Waler from your Station? I know ALL his
money-affairs; and I'm CERTAIN he didn't BUY it."
What I want to know is:--How do women like Mrs. Bronckhorst come to
marry men like Bronckhorst?"
And my conundrum is the most unanswerable of the three.
