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By Root 635 0

interrupted another tryst at the other house (as the Homestead was often called) on 27 February, when she sent for Austin to escort her to a college event. ‘After which, a night of it’, Austin noted in his diary. Upholding Susan was the sanctity of the marriage vows and Austin, who shared her faith, would have found it hard, in principle, to disagree. Trained to introspection, they were accustomed to question secret sin. Susan was versed in the classics of moral debate and Austin was temperamentally a moral being like his father. This was the challenge Mabel had to confront in her smuggled letters.

After the first chill, on 15 December 1882 her voice took on a strange timbre, as though she were reporting an impersonal fact: ‘It is months ago now that you heard some one say she had come to stay.’

‘I have come to stay’, Mabel repeated after the freeze, on 17 January 1883, and a third time on 28 January: ‘As I told you long ago - I have come to stay.’

It was as simple as that: she was immovable, like a rock in restless waters.

‘I came to stay,’ she reminded him yet again in April.

There was no going back to his wife. If Austin did soften to Susan’s protests or acts of kindness, he could find himself in Mabel’s power. He would go all his days in the shadow of their secret: their deep looks into the other’s eyes, the shady drives along back roads, the kisses and pressures of the hand they had exchanged. There was no overt threat. Mabel’s commitment shone with promise. All the same, there was a claim. Austin Dickinson was too astute a lawyer not to recognise his danger.

Bad as this was for Susan, she had one effective weapon: she cut Mabel socially. In a small community this could not go unnoticed, and Mabel was quick to feel the hurt. Not only personally, for Mabel was wary of damage to a lady’s reputation: once disfigured it would be hard, if not impossible, to retrieve. To prevent public notice of Susan’s snub Mabel was forced to leave town. In mid-March 1883 she retreated to Washington.

From there she sent Susan a box of arbutus in mid-April. No thanks came. Instead, Susan rebuffed her by sending money to pay for Mattie’s past piano lessons.

Mabel did not allow her chagrin to show. ‘I am sorry that you have given money for what was only a pleasure to me,’ she replied. ‘You have done for me that which no number of lessons could repay, & I hoped you would allow me the satisfaction of this slight return.’

To Austin alone Mabel showed her mettle: ‘This week will not last forever, not this month, nor this year. I came to stay; and sometimes you will look back upon all these days of pain with exultant, triumphant happiness in their entire banishment from your life.’ In the meantime, he must compel his family to keep up a façade of outward courtesies. ‘I should like to have [the members of your family] call, at least with an appearance of cordiality. I think they will do this. But I am very anxious to have nothing occur to cause an open ceasing of all civility. That I could not bear.’

Susan must have refused, since Mabel stayed away from Amherst for six months. Not for a second did Mabel waver; her letters urged Austin to defy his family for the sake of happiness to come. What he had to endure in the way of ‘nervous tension’ as he tore his family apart was, she promised, a ‘portal’ to bliss. In June she passed through Boston en route for Hampton Beach in New Hampshire and there - after a separation of three months, with another three months to go - Austin met her.

The lovers’ pretence of nothing between them came to an end with this assignation in the summer of 1883. Abruptly Austin exchanged the tactics of secrecy for confrontation. On the morning of 29 June he walked with Mabel for several hours on Boston Common. Afterwards he was ready to have it out with his wife, as he confided in a letter to Mabel. On his return to Amherst that evening the presence of a visitor silenced the couple, but at breakfast next morning Susan faced him squarely.

‘Did you see Mrs Todd?’

‘Certainly,’ said Austin who had expected the question.