The Green Bough

The life of Mary Throgmorton, viewed as one would scan the chronicles of history, impersonally, without regard to the conventions, is the life of a woman no more than fulfilled in the elements of her being.

All women would be as Mary Throgmorton if they dared. All women would love as Mary Throgmorton loved--suffer as she suffered. Perhaps not all might yield, as she yielded towards the end; not all might make her sacrifices. But, in the latitudinous perspective of Time where everything vanishes to the point of due proportion, she must range with that vast army of women who have hungered, loved, been fed and paid the reckoning with the tears out of their eyes and the very blood out of their hearts.

It is only when she comes to be observed in the immediate and narrow surroundings of her circumstance that her life stands out tragically apart. She becomes then as a monument, set up on a high and lonely hill amongst the many of those hills in drowsy Devon, a monument, silently claiming the birthright of all women which the laws men make by force have so ungenerously circumscribed.

There is no woman who could look at that monument without secret emotions of a deep respect, while there were many in her lifetime who spurned Mary Throgmorton with tongue and with a glance of eye, and still would spurn her to-day in the narrow streets where it is their wont to walk.

The respect of one's neighbors is a comforting thing to live with, but it is mostly the little people who earn it and find the pleasure of its warmth. The respect of the world is won often by suffering and in the wild and open spaces of the earth. It was on Gethsemane and not in Bethlehem that Christianity revealed its light.

In Bridnorth, the name of Mary Throgmorton was a byword for many a day. They would have erased her from their memory if they could. It was in the hush of voices they spoke of her--that hush with which women muffle and conceal the envy beneath their spite.

No one woman in Bridnorth, unless it was Fanny Throgmorton, the third of her three sisters, could have had honesty enough in her heart to confess, even in silence, her real regard for Mary.

Who should blame them for this? The laws had made them and what is made in a shapen mold can bend neither to the left nor to the right. They were too close to her to see her beauty; all too personally involved to look dispassionately at the greatness of her soul.

Yet there in spirit, as it were some graven monument upon those hills of Devon, she stands, a figure of tragic nobility. Had indeed they carved her in stone and set her there upon the hills that overlooked the sea, they would have recognized then in her broad brow, in the straight direction of her eyes, the big, if not beautiful then generous line of her lips, the full firm curve of her breasts, how fine a mate she must have made, how strong a mother even in the weakest hour of her travail.

Stone truly would have been the medium for her. It was not in color that she claimed the eye. The fair hair, neither quite golden nor quite brown, that clear, healthy skin, neither warmed with her blood nor interestingly pale, these would have franked her passage in a crowd and none might have noticed her go by.

There on the rising of that cliff in imagination is the place to see her with the full sweep of Bridnorth bay and that wide open sea below and all the heathered stretches of the moors behind her. There, had they carved a statue for her in rough stone, you must have seen at once the beauty that she had.

But because it was in stone her beauty lay and not in pink white flesh that makes a fool of many a man, they had the less of mercy for her. Because it was in stone, man found her cold of touch and stood away. And yet again because it was in stone, once molten with the heat of life, there was no hand in little Bridnorth that could have stayed her fate.

Once stirred, the little pettiness of Bridnorth folk charred all like shavings from the plane at touch of her. Once stirred, she had in her passion to defy them every one. Once stirred, herself could raise that monument to the birthright of women which, in fancy, as her tale is read, will be seen there over Bridnorth on the high cliff's edge.