Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [118]
Mabel wanted this case in writing, ‘to use as a shield’ against any future ‘attack’ on their love. As always, she presents herself as the innocent victim of his family’s campaigns. Her allegations are persuasive enough for her words to have reached beyond Austin to biographers and critics of the future. This reach across the footlights of her own time testifies to Mabel’s skills as an actress who is the first to believe her words as they issue from her mouth. How rare it is ‘to be a lady to the core!’ Her class act upstaged Susan’s ‘wrath’. In her politely temperate tones, Mabel regretted Sue’s tantrums as too vulgar for a gentleman of Austin’s refinement. They justified his defection. Mabel capitalised on every outburst, commiserating with Austin on what he had to bear from the virago at home. Mabel’s drama of manners seeks to obliterate the darker drama of betrayal.
Inconveniently for Mabel, Susan’s protests did not continue. Successive blows of death and betrayal had shaken her, but she found something to live for in the love of her two remaining children. These ties strengthened. Then there was the balm of Emily’s support, with more notes crossing the grass in 1885 than in any previous year. That year, following the wallpaper incident, Ned’s nerves were ‘perfectly worn out’ by unavoidable proximity to a ‘storm-centre’ (his father) moving their way. Ned’s rheumatic condition worsened and his frame ‘stiffened up’, he noticed, in new places. Alarmed, Susan found the strength to prop up the outer ramparts of relations with Austin.
For all these reasons, as well as family rectitude, Austin replied to Mabel’s request with caution: ‘. . . Is it not better and nobler that I say nothing which . . . reflects upon any other!’ He did not want to ‘offend or wound’. They had ‘so much to be grateful for’, even if obliged ‘to defer some of our hopes - everything will come in good time’.
Mabel didn’t let go. She pressed him once more for a ‘wee’ case against his wife. ‘Dear, forgive me, but have you put that little wee note in my box yet?’ she pleaded from London on 18 July 1885. ‘You will, will you not?’
Austin hesitated. In August, he offered Mabel emotional security when he called her ‘my sweet wife’. It was a private gesture when what Mabel wanted was to move from the secret space occupied by a mistress into a public space where her tie with the Dickinsons could be manifest.
Austin’s reply was delayed until 13 September 1885, the day Mabel returned from Europe. Again he backed away. His past had been a ‘wicked’ failure, he said, and he wanted to put it behind him rather than ‘involve any other unpleasantly’ or risk ‘the slightest injustice. Believe me,’ he appealed. ‘Believe me.’
Mabel was not to be deterred. Austin’s family were ‘encumbrances’ and ‘annoyances’, while she, Mabel, who ‘Oh!’ loves him ‘so tenderly’, may die if ‘deprivations grow insupportable’. In this campaign to cut family ties, Mabel called in a powerful supporter, none other than the Almighty.
Just ‘one turn of God’s hand’ could secure what she wants. ‘I wonder if He does hear prayers!’
Like fighters and armies from time immemorial, Mabel co-opts the deity as she prays for the enemy’s death. It was indeed to be a fight to the death, led by the campaign of slander. This was in the air when Ned asked Aunt Emily to look after Mother while he was away. Emily fortified Sue with scripture: ‘The World hath not known her,