Oh, fathers! provoke not your children to wrath. It was that hard, cruel letter that changed Nea"s repentance to unrelenting bitterness.
Instinctively she felt the iron of her father"s will enter into her soul. In a moment she understood, as she had never done before, the hardness and coldness of his nature, the inflexibility of his purpose; as well might she dash herself against a rock as expect forgiveness.
Well, she was his own child, her will was strong too, and in the anguish of her despair she called upon her pride to support her, she leaned her fainting woman"s heart upon that most rotten of reeds.
He had disinherited her, his only child; he had flung her away from him. Well, she would defy him; and then she remembered his ill-health, their projected trip to Pau, their happy schemes for the future, till her heart felt almost broken, but for all that she stood like a statue, crushing down the pain in the very stubbornness of her pride.
Ah, Nea, unhappy Nea! poor motherless, willful girl; well may she look round her with that scared, hunted look.
Was this her future home, these poor rooms, this shabby furniture?
Belgrave House closed to her forever. But as she looked round with that fixed miserable glance, why did the tears suddenly dim her eyes?
Her glance had fallen on Maurice, still sitting motionless with his hands before his eyes--Maurice her husband; yes, there he sat, the man whom her own willfulness had dragged to the brink of ruin, whose faith and honor she had tempted, whose honest purpose she had shaken and destroyed, who was so crushed with remorse for his own weakness that he dared not look her in the face; and as she gazed at him, Nea"s whole heart yearned with generous pity over the man who had brought her to poverty, but whom she loved and would love to her life"s end.
And Maurice, sitting crushed with that awful remorse, felt his hands drawn down from his face, and saw Nea"s beautiful face smiling at him through her tears, felt the smooth brown head nestle to his breast, and heard the low sobbing words--
"For better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, till death us do part, have I not promised, Maurice? Take me to your heart and comfort me with your love, for in all the world I have no one but you--no one but you!"
CHAPTER X.
IN DEEP WATERS.
Let our unceasing, earnest prayer Be, too, for light, for strength to bear Our portion of the weight of care That crushes into dumb despair One half the human race.
O suffering, sad humanity!
O ye afflicted ones, who lie Steep"d to the lips in misery, Longing, and yet afraid to die, Patient though sorely tried!
I pledge you in this cup of grief, Where floats the fennel"s bitter leaf!
The battle of our life is brief, The alarm, the struggle, the relief; Then sleep we side by side.
LONGFELLOW.
Nea had to learn by bitter experience that the fruits of disobedience and deceit are like the apples of Sodom, fair to the sight, but mere ashes to the taste, and in her better mood she owned that her punishment was just.
Slowly and laboriously, with infinite care and pains, she set herself to unlearn the lessons of her life. For wealth she had poverty; for ease and luxury, privation and toil; but in all her troubles her strong will and pride sustained her; and though she suffered, and Heaven only knew how she suffered! she never complained or murmured until the end came.
For her pride sustained her; and when that failed, her love came to her aid.
How she loved him, how she clung to him in those days, no one but Maurice knew; in her bitterest hours his words had power to comfort her and take the sting from her pain. When it was possible, she hid her troubles from him, and never added to his by vain repinings and regrets.
But in spite of Nea"s courage and Maurice"s patience, they had a terribly hard life of it.
At first Maurice"s efforts to find another clerkship were in vain, and they were compelled to live on the proceeds of the check; then Nea sold her jewels, that they might have something to fall back upon. But presently Mr. Dobson came to their aid.
He had a large family, and could not do much, as he told them, sorrowfully; but he found Maurice, with some trouble, a small clerkship at eighty pounds a year, advising him at the same time to eke out their scanty income by taking in copying work of an evening.
Indeed, as Maurice discovered many a time in his need, he did not want a friend as long as the good manager lived.
And so those two young creatures took up the heavy burden of their life, and carried it with tolerable patience and courage; and as in the case of our first parents, exiled by a woman"s weakness from the fair gardens of Paradise, so, though they reaped thorns and thistles, and earned their bread by the sweat of their brow, yet the bitter-sweet memories of their lost Eden abode with them, and in their poverty they tasted many an hour of pure unsullied love.
For they were young, and youth"s courage is high, and the burden of those days was not yet too hard to be borne.
Nea longed to help Maurice, but her pride, always her chief fault, came as a stumbling-block in her way; she could not bear to go into the world and face strangers. And Maurice on his side could not endure the thought that his beautiful young wife should be exposed to slights and humiliations; so Nea"s fine talent wasted by misuse.
Still, even these scruples would have faded under the pressure of severer needs, had no children come to weaken Nea"s strength and keep her drudging at home.
Nea had never seen her father nor heard anything from him all this time. Maurice, it was true, had humbled himself again and again, but his letters had all been returned unopened.
But when her boy was born, Nea"s heart, softened by the joys of maternity, yearned pa.s.sionately for a reconciliation, and by her husband"s advice, she stifled all feelings of resentment, and wrote as she had never written before, as she never could write again, but all in vain; the letter was returned, and in her weakened state Nea would have fretted herself to death over that unopened letter if it had not been for her husband"s tenderness and her baby"s innocent face.
How the young mother doated on her child! To her he was a miracle, a revelation. Nature had opened a fount of consolation in her troubles.
She would lie patiently for hours on her couch, watching her baby in his sleep. Maurice, coming in jaded and weary from his work, would pause on the threshold to admire the picture. He thought his wife never looked so beautiful as when she had their boy in her arms.
And so the years pa.s.sed on. Maurice worked, and struggled, and pinched, till his face grew old and careworn, and the hard racking cough began to make itself heard, and Nea"s fine color faded, for the children were coming fast now, and the days were growing darker and darker.
By and by there was a baby girl, with her father"s eyes, and beautiful as a little angel; then twin boys whom Nea kissed and fondled for a few weeks, and then laid in their little coffins; then another boy who only lived two years; and lastly, after a long lapse of time, another girl.
But when this one was born the end was fast approaching. Mr.
Huntingdon had been abroad for a year or two, and had just returned to Belgrave House--so Mr. Dobson informed Nea when he dropped in one evening on one of his brief visits--and he had brought with him a young widowed niece and her boy.
Nea remembered her cousin Erle Huntingdon and the dark-eyed girl whom he had married and taken with him to Naples; but she had never heard of his death.
Doubtless her father meant to put Beatrice in her place, and make the younger Erle his heir; and Nea sighed bitterly as she looked at her boy playing about the room. Mr. Dobson interpreted the sight aright.
"Try again, Mrs. Trafford," he said, holding out his hand as he rose; "humble yourself in the dust, for the sake of your children." And Nea took his advice, but she never had any answer to her letter, and soon after that their kind old friend, Mr. Dobson, died, and then everything went wrong.
Maurice"s employer gave up business, and his successor, a hard grasping man, found fault with Maurice"s failing health, and dismissed him as an incompetent clerk; and this time Maurice found himself without friends.
For a little time longer he struggled on, though broken in heart and health.
They left their comfortable lodgings and took cheaper ones, and sold every article of furniture that was not absolutely necessary; and the day before her baby was born, Nea, weeping bitterly, took her last relic, her mother"s portrait, from the locket set with pearls from her neck, and asked Maurice to sell the little ornament.
All through that long illness, though Heaven only knows how, Maurice struggled on.
Ill himself, he nursed his sick wife with patient care and tenderness.
Nea and her little ones had always plenty of nourishing food, though he himself often went without the comforts he needed; he kept the children quiet, he did all and more than all a woman would have done, before, worn out at last in body and mind, he laid himself down, never to rise again.
And Nea, going to him with her sickly baby in her arms, saw a look on his face that terrified her, and knelt down by his side, while he told her between his paroxysms of coughing what little there was to tell.
She knew it all now; she knew the poor, brave heart had been slowly breaking for years, and had given way at last; she knew what he had suffered to see the woman he loved dragged down to the level of his poverty, and made to endure such bitterness of humiliation; she knew, when it was too late, that the man was crushed under the consequences of his weakness, that his remorse was killing him; and that he would seal his repentance with his life. And then came from his pale lips a whispered entreaty that Nea shuddered to hear.
"Dearest," he had said, when she had implored him to say what she could do to comfort him, "there is one thing; go to your father. Yes, my darling," as she shivered at his words, "go to him yourself; let him see your dear face that has grown so thin and pale; perhaps he will see for himself, and have pity. Tell him I am dying, and that I can not die in peace until he has promised to forgive you, and take care of you and the children. You will do this for me, Nea, will you not? You know how I have suffered, and will not refuse me."
Had she ever refused him anything? Nea kissed the drawn pallid face without a word, tied on her shabby bonnet, and took her baby in her arms--it was a puny, sickly creature, and wailed incessantly, and she could not leave it--then with tears blinding her poor eyes, she walked rapidly through the dark streets, hardly feeling the cutting wind, and quite unconscious of the driving sleet that pelted her face with icy particles.
For her heart felt like a stone; Maurice was dying; but no! he should not die: with her own hands she would hold back her beloved from the entrance to the dark valley; she would minister to his fainting soul the cordial of a tardy forgiveness, though she should be forced to grovel for it at her father"s feet. And then all at once she suddenly stopped, and found she was clinging, panting for breath, to some area railings, that the baby was crying miserably on her bosom, and that she was looking through the open door into her father"s hall.