Bella Baxter—General Sir Aubrey de la Pole Blessington

Bella Baxter—General Sir Aubrey de la Pole Blessington is a relationship shaped by disputed identity, marital authority, and the struggle over who may choose Bella’s life. The General recognizes Bella as his former wife, Victoria Blessington, but she has no settled memory of him; when he tries to reclaim her, his language of duty and medical diagnosis collides with her insistence on freedom. Their final confrontation reverses the old marriage’s power dynamic, though its violence ends not in reconciliation but in the General’s death.

Identity and the Former Marriage

The General’s claim arrives as a revelation in a gathering where Bella has been addressed as Bella Baxter. He identifies her as his lawfully wedded wife, Victoria Blessington, born Victoria Hattersley, and presents Blaydon Hattersley as her father. Bella looks with interest at both men but cannot remember having seen either. Archibald McCandless understands the strange collision beneath the scene: she is encountering the father of her brain in the first husband of her body, and the grandfather of her brain in the father of her body. The General’s certainty about her identity therefore confronts Bella’s absence of personal recognition, while the narrative makes the divided histories of her body and mind part of the relationship itself.

The General’s medical adviser, Dr. Prickett, supports the identification by saying that Bella’s voice and appearance are so like Lady Blessington’s that he believes them identical. That assertion gives the General’s claim apparent physical evidence, but it does not restore Bella’s memories or settle what authority he can exercise over the woman before him. The scene distinguishes resemblance and recognition from consent: the men may identify her as the former wife, but Bella cannot confirm that identity from her own experience.

Marriage, Diagnosis, and Control

The General and Dr. Prickett explain the former marriage through a diagnosis of erotomania. Prickett says Victoria wanted to share the General’s bed every night, including during her eighth month of pregnancy, and wept when he refused. He also recounts advising the General that sexual intercourse should be limited during the honeymoon and afterward, and cease once pregnancy was detected. In this account, a desire for constant closeness becomes a symptom to be managed according to a doctor’s schedule. Bella’s response is to interpret the woman’s need as a need for cuddling, not proof that she was mad.

The General describes physical intimacy in terms of male lust and calls cuddling unmanly and degrading. His explanation casts restraint as a danger posed by women’s bodies, while Prickett’s testimony turns marital intimacy into a matter of prescribed frequency and hygiene. The dispute is not simply over how much affection a wife may ask for: it concerns whether her wish can be treated as a legitimate need or must be classified as illness. By the time the General demands that Bella return, that medical framing has become a means of asserting control. He says that if she refuses, she must still be mad, and that his duty as husband is to place her in an institution.

Refusal and the Dispute over Freedom

Bella does not remember the General, though his voice and appearance seem faintly familiar to her. She asks to hold his hand in the hope that touch might bring something back; instead, contact makes her gasp and pull away as though stung or burned. The gesture offers no recovered intimacy. The General answers by recalling that she once called him horrible, then characterizes her as unstable and says Dr. Prickett should have operated on her after their honeymoon. His appeal to past marriage thus depends on a history Bella cannot access, while his proposed remedy would make her body another object of intervention.

The legal argument exposes the stakes behind the claim. Godwin Baxter says that the marriage ended when Victoria drowned herself, since a marriage contract lasts until death. He invokes the Humane Society official who witnessed the suicide and retrieved the body, and argues that, if he gave the woman a new life, he is entitled to protect her and let her choose a husband. The General’s lawyer counters that Baxter abducted and drugged her, casting Bella’s new life as the product of deception. These conflicting accounts make her identity a legal and familial contest, but Bella’s own decision is plain: she says she will stay, and that life without freedom to choose is not worth having.

Her farewell to the men who shaped the competing stories of her life is pointed rather than conciliatory. She thanks the General for driving her away from his house, while also recognizing Dolly Perkins as part of the chain of events that helped free her from him. She thanks Dr. Prickett for trying to make the former woman’s life bearable, but refuses the assumption that she remains that dependent figure. To McCandless, she describes her home with Baxter as a place that is not a prison and values a companion who cuddles her yet leaves her free to work. The contrast defines what the former marriage failed to provide: affection without ownership and care without confinement.

Armed Confrontation and Ending

The General’s departure is not peaceful. He orders George Grimes to keep McCandless in place, draws a revolver, and threatens to shoot him in the groin if he moves. With Dr. Prickett readying chloroform, the General asks Bella to squeeze the trigger, presenting the request as his final wish. When she does not comply, he turns the request into a command and orders her to shoot. McCandless interprets this outburst as evidence that the General truly wants to be killed, connecting his repeated wounds in battle to a lifelong desire for death.

Bella partly obeys, but redirects the violence: she fires the remaining five shots into the back of the fireplace rather than at the General. The gun discharges stun those present; a bullet passes through her hand without breaking a bone, and she faints. Her action neither grants the General the death he demands nor accepts his authority over her. The scene ends their relationship through refusal made physical: she controls where the shots go, even as she is injured by the weapon.

Two days later, the newspapers report that the General has been found dead on the gun-room floor of his country house at Loamshire Downs. The revolver in his hand and the bullet’s path through his brain rule out an accident. The coroner records that he died while his mind was disturbed, allowing a Church of England burial but not a state funeral; The Times of London speculates that political disappointment may have led him to choose a Roman end. His death follows the scene in which Bella refuses to shoot him, but the account does not state that she killed him. The relationship closes instead with her continued life apart from him and his private, self-inflicted death.