FICTION.
MRS. BALFAME.*
Is one of the "Bab Ballads" the late Sir W. S. Gilbert described the career of a man who indemnified himself in middle age for long years of impeccable integrity by plunging into pecu- lation on a gigantic scale, arguing that the more virtuous he had been in the past the better was he qualified peccare fortiter. We are reminded of this Gilbertian topsy-turvydom by the strange case of Mrs. Balfame. Up to the age of forty-two she had been a model of domestic virtue and respectability, and then suddenly resolved to murder her husband in the most cold-blooded fashion. The attentions of Mr. Rush, a brilliant lawyer eight years her junior, who boldly suggested that she should clear the way for their union by divorcing Mr. Balfame, were quite a minor consideration. She was not in love with him, though flattered by his admiration, and hated the pub- licity of divorce. What she really wanted was a clean short-cut to freedom from a husband who had grown repulsive to her. The fact was that, while they had both come of homely stock, David Balfame, a failure in business, had found himself as a bibulous politician, while his wife, endowed with supreme beauty, had risen to be a social leader, and the most prominent and admired clubwoman in Elsinore, Brabant County. Now it chanced that Mrs. Balfame had for her most devoted friend a German-American lady doctor, an expert in toxicology, who, in a. moment of indiscreet expansion, had shown her friend a phial containing a most deadly poison, the operation of which defied the most careful post-mortem analysis. Mrs. Balfame promptly stole the phial, and was preparing to administer the contents to her husband in some lemonade, when he was incon= siderately shot dead by a burglar outside his own door. At least Mrs. Balfame thought it was a burglar and loosed off her revolver at him. This shot of hers led to all the trouble, for the burglar could not be traced ; suspicions, vigorously fostered by the Press, thickened around Mrs. Balfame ; and in due course she was arrested on the charge of murdering her hus- band. Of course, the chivalrous Rush undertook her defence, offering to marry her when she was acquitted, as he honestly believed she would be. Later on, when things were going badly for his client, he went still further, and declared that if all other means failed he would swear that he committed the crime himself. (Some people, we may add, had already suspected his guilt.) And he still persisted in both intentions after Mrs. Balfame had confessed that she was a potential, if not an actual, murderess. In reality Rush, already disillusioned, was horribly shocked by this disclosure, but as a man of honour felt that he could not go back on his word, although he was not only innocent but in love with another woman. This young person, however, had no intention of surrendering him to Mrs. Balfame, and in a soul-shaking interview she extorted from him
a confession of his love, but failed to move him from his resolve. Thereon she promptly played her trump card, concerning which we shall say no more than that it led to the immediate acquittal of Mrs. Balfame and the release of Rush from his promise to marry Mrs. Balfame. How two people should have been ready
to die for so fishlike an egotist as Mrs. Balfame passes the wit of the present writer. It is only fair to say that it passed the • Mrs. Balfame. By Gertrude Atherton. London: John Murray. (6e.) wit of Mrs. Balfame herself. But Mrs. Atherton evidently thought she could make out a plausible case, or otherwise the novel would never have been written. The moral of the story, if it has a moral, seems to be practically the same as the old saying that a pretty woman, if she is pretty enough, can make fools of the wisest men. Mrs. Balfame had exceptional beauty, so we are repeatedly assured, and is credited with a certain hypnotic power over her own sex, which accounts for the strange conduct of her club-mates in believing in her guilt while openly professing their sympathy, and constituting a sort of bodyguard of " sob-sisters" in Court. Apart from some interesting studies of the activities of American journalists, male and female,'who, when sensation is concerned, are rendered inhuman by the exigencies of their calling, and a vivid picture of the strange procedure of a cause cilare in America, the story, which is a mixture of the detective melodrama and the problem play, is written with the energy and rhetorical vehemence which we always find in Mrs. Atherton ; but, taken all round, it gives us a curiously unflattering impression of the soul of the American woman.
Previous page
