MY WIFE.
Fannie May Harvey was the daughter of Dr. W. C. Harvey, of Roanoke,
Howard county, Mo., a physician who, in addition to the social
prominence which his profession conferred, had accumulated a competence
and enjoyed a lucrative income from his practice. Tenderly nurtured in
the surroundings of a home of wealth and luxury, of which she was the
pride and pet, gifted with rare graces of mind and person, and endowed
with education and accomplishments unusual even for one of her age and
station, through the anxious care of parents ambitious for her future,
brilliant in wealth and station, May Harvey had reached the bloom of
womanhood singularly unspoiled by her advantages and surroundings, and
possessed a sweet amiability of disposition and a gentle and loving way
that endeared her to all who were brought into contact with her. As one
has said, “none knew her but to love her, nor named her but to praise.”
My father’s farm was but four miles distant from the home of Dr. Harvey,
and being thus almost neighbors, we were thrown into contact at that
stage of life when the heart of each was most susceptible to the
tenderest and truest impulses of affection. That I should have
surrendered to the influence of such a nature all the ardor of a
youthful and undisciplined enthusiasm of love was not to be wondered at.
That my affection, earnest and sincere, and unbroken as it remains to
this day to her memory, should be returned might be wondered at, when it
is remembered, as the reader will have before learned, that my name had
already been associated with crime. The standing of my family had,
however, shielded me to some extent from the consequences of the
reckless tendencies of my life, and what might have been characterized
by a harsher verdict was to some extent condoned as youthful wildness.
This was sufficient to excuse our earlier association, and when the
parents of May Harvey had awakened to the serious nature of our
intimacy, our hearts had become knit with an affection stronger than
parental remonstrance or interference was able to move. Once aroused,
Dr. and Mrs. Harvey took active measures to separate their daughter from
the danger which they foresaw from such a union. But, as it very often
happens, opposition served but to fan the flame of devotion between us,
and to strengthen our mutual resolve to unite our love and fortunes in
an indissoluble tie. Finding her parents unrelenting, it became evident
that the only course was to accomplish our happiness by means of an
elopement, and this was carried into effect on the night of August 24,
1870. May’s natural aversion to this extreme and undesirable step, and
her knowledge of the anger which it would awaken in the hearts of her
parents were undoubtedly overcome not alone by the promptings of her
love for me, but by the belief growing out of the tenderness of her
heart, that her parents loved her too dearly to be long unreconciled and
that regard for her happiness would overcome a temporary displeasure.
Well do I remember that night on which she left the home of her
childhood, the surroundings of luxury and the love of parents; a
sacrifice to a greater love. Before leaving the house she played on the
piano and sang “Good-Bye, Old Home,” with an intensity of feeling that
none but herself realized. She bade good-bye to several friends with a
seriousness which was mistaken for badinage, and I with a horse from the
barn being waiting in the vicinity, she was soon speeding on the way to
the opening of life’s tragedy. We rode eighteen miles to Renick, where
we were married by ’Squire Butler, a justice of that place.
As may be imagined, when Dr. and Mrs. Harvey learned of the event, their
wrath knew no bounds. The brilliant hopes which they had entertained of
a career of social distinction for which they had aimed to fit their
favorite daughter, and to which they had looked forward to a marriage of
wealth as the key, were not only dashed to the ground, but they had the
added bitterness of knowing that it was not poverty alone to which their
daughter had been wedded, but a poverty tainted by social disgrace, for
the object upon whom she had bestowed the wealth of her affection was
comparatively an outcast, a gambler by profession, and even at that time
resting under suspicion. Looking back now, without prejudice and in the
light of a fuller experience, I can hardly feel justified in condemning
them for the bitter feeling which they displayed toward me. Yet, at the
time, the animosity with which they pursued me awakened a deep, and, as
I thought, justifiable resentment, for I had acted with honest motive,
and, as I then thought, with pure and unselfish regard for the happiness
of one who was dearer to me than life, for even to this day I can say
with truth and sincerity that one of the sweetest faces in all the world
to me is one that comes to me as a hallowed memory; and the sweetest
thoughts are those which cluster around the life which, through good and
ill report, we led together. And I can add now without resentment that
it was not politic toward me nor christian duty toward her whose life
was irrevocably linked to mine, that they should cast her off and bid
her never again to darken their doors, and thus add to such unhappiness
as her life encountered by long years of cold and unfeeling denial of
the boon of forgiveness, for which the heart hungered from the parental
love by which her childhood had been blessed and brightened. It is right
to say that her father would probably have relented after our marriage
but for the influence of her mother, a cold, haughty and determined
woman, who said in a voice of steel, “she is dead to us all,” and who
kept her relentless renunciation a cruel and living fact for nearly
eight years.
Her father said: “As for my daughter—the worst punishment that could be
inflicted upon her is to leave her alone with her villain of a husband.”
It is sad to think that parental love could so soon become cold, and
that a social disappointment should transform a mother’s tenderness into
obdurate and unforgiving rancor to last, as it transpired, through so
many years. In later years I had a boy whom I loved with all my heart,
and had I under any circumstances forsaken him I would have expected God
to desert me.
This separation and its cruel circumstances, and the disappointment of
her expectation of a reconciliation after reasonable time were very hard
upon the tender and affectionate heart of my wife. At times she would
weep as if her heart would break, and yet I am confident that at no
time, nor in any of the vicissitudes of her married life, did she ever
falter in her faith in the love that had led her to make the sacrifice.
We struggled along through the varying changes of fortune which make up
the gambler’s career; at one time abounding in comforts, at another
pinched for the necessaries of life. It is an old saying that love and
poverty cannot dwell together in the same cottage longer than between
two meals. Out of my experience I can dispute that proverb in at least
one exception, and testify that while love and poverty during the ten
years we were together struggled through many a close place, love,
though sometimes saddened with suffering and misfortunes, survived to
the end in all its sweetness and sincerity, trust and hope.
On one or two occasions my wife wrote home, but always received the same
reply—“I will never see you again.” After several years’ residence about
Roanoke, we removed to Moberly, Mo., and there my wife was seriously ill
and was anxious to have her father attend her. He came, and the fact of
his visit did her more good than his prescriptions. We were told that
her mother came with him on the occasion, but remained at the hotel,
saying that if her daughter died she would then come and see her. What a
grim and terrible illustration of the implacable and unhallowed spirit
which now filled the bosom that once had swelled with pride and
affection under the love of this unforgiven daughter’s childhood.
Soon after May’s recovery we removed to St. Louis, and here life began
to wear a brighter outlook and the future to be gilded with a rosier
hue. Dr. Harvey purchased for us a suite of furniture—the only thing he
ever gave us after our marriage—and comfort and happiness seemed to give
assurance of a permanent stay. But, alas! for a time, only! Soon the old
vice of gambling reasserted its alluring sway, with the result which
inevitably follows its capricious favors. Straightened circumstances
again pinched us with their implacable necessities, and one day my wife
sat down and penned the following letter to her mother:
“MY DEAR MA:—Since you sent me from you in such deep, and from your
point of view, just anger, because of my marriage, I have often longed
to be reconciled to you and dear Pa. Is my offense so heinous that you
cannot forgive me? The worst that can be said of John is that he is a
gambler; God knows that is bad enough, but as a husband he has always
been good and kind to me. At present he is doing nothing. Could you
see the poverty to which we are reduced, I think you would have some
pity upon your daughter. I do not like to ask any favor of you but if
you will help us a little now I will pay you back. Will you never
soften your heart?
Your loving daughter,
MAY.”
Sealing this letter, which had melted her heart to tears, she handed it
to me to mail. I went out, and after remaining a short time, returned
but with the letter still in my pocket. A few days passed in which the
clouds of adversity had seemed to gather thicker around us, and we were
as a last resort, compelled to mortgage our furniture. “Well, John,” she
sadly remarked, “it seems as if ma and all the world have forsaken us.”
Seeing her so deeply affected, I took the letter from my pocket and
placed it in her hand. “Oh!” she exclaimed, “it makes me feel so much
better to know that my mother did not refuse my letter.”
Eight years had elapsed since she had looked upon the home of her happy
childhood, when at length came an invitation from her mother to pay her
a visit. For a long time the pride of the wife and a sensitive spirit
wounded by long repulse, battled against the yearning love for father,
mother, sisters, and home. At length she decided to go, but when only a
few days there, her mother endeavored to persuade her to renounce me. At
once her constant and faithful heart revolted, and she went out and
ordered a man to call for her trunk. At the family’s entreaties she
finally consented to remain, but it was with the understanding that she
had made her choice and would abide by it; that if she deplored our
misfortunes she did not regret her love. This second separation from
home and from the luxury and magnificence which she saw around her,
tempting her the more by their inviting contrast to the hard conditions
by which experience had tried her married life, have always seemed to me
to be the noblest sacrifice and adds a hallowed lustre to the brightness
with which memory enshrines the recollection of her unfaltering love and
devotion.
Two years more we struggled on through varying fortunes. Her father on
one or two occasions visited her, but having failed to separate us, her
mother gave no more sign of reconciliation. One Saturday evening my wife
and self and our colored boy, Charley, went to market, and while out I
purchased for her a satin dress, jokingly remarking that it would “help
her to catch a new beau.” She replied, “I might be buried in it.” After
purchasing our Sunday supplies, I put her and the colored boy on the car
to return home, while I left all that was best and dearest to me to
follow the irresistible and fatal fascination of the green cloth table.
I gambled till a late hour and then started for home. On the street
everything seemed to be “turned around” to me, so that I was compelled
to ask a policeman for direction home. Arriving, I retired to bed, but a
strange and somber feeling had taken possession of me. An unaccountable
sadness seized my soul; a vague and irrepressible sense of impending
calamity, without any palpable or definable reason, weighed upon me, and
I burst into a passion of tears. My wife asked me what the trouble was,
but that I did not know myself.
On Monday her mother called during my absence, and induced her to go
down town. They remained together at the Laclede Hotel during Monday and
Tuesday nights. This absence seemed to intensify the gloomy forebodings
which I could neither explain nor comprehend, nor shake off. It almost
seemed as if I were going to lose the one joy of my life. The pall of
gloom upon my mind was such that sleep or rest was impossible. For hours
I would get up and walk the floor, wrestling with the shadowy terror
which seemed so close and incomprehensible. Was it the warning from
another world of a direful grief so soon to befall? The dread rustling
of the wings hovering even now over the happiness of my hearthstone?
Wednesday morning she returned home. I remember that we had a box of
sardines, and ate them out of the same saucer. She said we would go down
in the same car together and might possibly meet her mother at one of
the stores. She requested me to speak to her mother if we met, which I
at first declined, but on seeing that it grieved her, consented to. She
also requested me to buy some little presents for her little invalid
sister, Zollie, whom she tenderly loved, and on leaving her I went to
the St. Bernard’s dollar store and made some purchases for this purpose
and proceeded with them to the hotel. Enquiring for Mrs. Harvey, I was
told that she and her daughter had left for home. “My God!” I exclaimed
to myself, “has May forsaken me?” I immediately took a car home, and
there, to my inexpressible relief and delight, was May, herself, looking
a thousand times fairer than ever before. Doubtless, she had employed
this last interview with her mother in endeavoring to promote the
reconciliation which her tender heart, filled with affection for both
husband and parent, so fully desired. She told a friend of ours that
when her mother left her that morning she had said: “Daughter, I would
rather see you in your grave than continue to live with that man.”
Little she recked that before the sun should go down upon the bitterness
of her heart the fell wish would become a tragic reality.
I was at this time interested in a foot race and was in training at
Court Brilliant race track. I kissed her good-bye about 10 o’clock of
the day her mother left St. Louis, saying that I would be back for
dinner between 3 and 4 o’clock in the afternoon. Little did I dream that
this embrace had parted us forever on earth! When I arrived home the
colored boy, Charley, met me at the door, saying, “Miss’ May fell down
stairs and was hurt bad.” Alarmed, I hastened into the house. It was
full of strangers. I rushed to the bedside, and there, white and still,
lay my wife, the dear one who had so often told me she would lay down
her life for my sake. I put my lips to hers; they were not yet cold.
With a cry of agony I knelt by her side and my heart seemed to cease to
beat. It could not be possible that my May, so full of life when but a
few hours before I had left her, was now lying dead before me! That
those eyes would never again open to look upon me with an affection that
never wearied or grew faint! That those lips were never more to open to
speak to me one word of hope or love! Words fail to depict the anguish
and the utterness of the loss which it seemed so hard to realize. Death
is hard and cruel even when it comes to those whom age or disease has
long marked for its own; but how unutterably sad when it comes without
warning and sweeps away in one moment the brightness and sweetness of
life alike from the victim and from those who are left to mourn!
I was informed subsequently that in descending the stairs she had caught
her foot in her dress and fallen headlong, striking the door sill with
her head. She was carried up to her room, insensible, and lay for about
three hours in a comatose condition. At length she rose up in bed,
exclaiming, “Where is John? Oh, ma! ma! you break my heart! You won’t
forgive me! Take down my hair, I am dying!” This was the last effort of
consciousness. She lay back in bed and passed quietly into the silent
sleep from which there is no waking. She expired at half past three on
April 29, 1880.
Her father, who had that morning arrived at the Union Stock Yards, was
notified and came immediately, and I have often wondered what were his
thoughts as he stood by the bedside of his dead child, to whose life his
unforgiving spirit had brought so much sadness. In this trial there was
one circumstance that has always afforded me a melancholy satisfaction.
Although we had been poor almost the entire portion of our married life,
at the time of her death I was in a position to give her honorable and
reverent sepulture, and to respect her wishes oft expressed in life with
regard to burial. She had always desired to be laid to rest in a corner
of the lawn at her parental home, at Roanoke, and there it was agreed
her remains should be taken. This time, as she crossed the threshold of
the old home, there was no unkind look or word of reproach, for upon her
pallid and peaceful brow there was enthroned the majesty of the
sovereign fate of all, before which the paltry passions of pride and
anger shrink away in shame. As she lay there surrounded by father,
mother, sisters and friends, the look of trouble and care which had
rested there of late had all disappeared, and only the sweetness and
peace of eternal rest remained. Listening to the expressions of love,
sympathy and admiration which came from those who surrounded her bier, I
could not but think that it might have been better if a few of the
tokens of affections now extended around her lifeless form had been
bestowed while her warm and loving heart had hungered and yearned in
vain during the struggle of our married life. But pride and anger had
been allowed to stand in the way of natural affection, and both hearts
had suffered. It was now too late for vain regrets to make atonement or
to undo the wrong from which only death gave relief to her gentle
spirit.
I certainly think if her parents could have seen us on several occasions
struggling through the hard places, they would have come to our relief.
Her father showed at times that he felt kindly for his child and was
willing to take her back into his heart as he had taken her in his arms
when a little child, but her mother, who exercised a great deal of
influence over him, would not forgive nor allow him to forgive. I
suppose she thought she was doing a mother’s duty and that morality
compelled her to treat her child as a stranger and an outcast. I have
sinned often in allowing the tears to gather in the eyes of my dear
wife, but I know this: she was troubled more by the way her parents
treated her than by any sorrow that came through my life. True, I was a
gambler, and as she said, “God knows, that’s bad enough!” but I was
always good to her, and so far as it was in my power, strove to make her
happy.
I have sometimes thought that I did her a wrong in our marriage. From
the time I was sixteen years of age I had been familiar with the
vicissitudes of a gambler’s life, and had always in good luck or bad
fortune remained light hearted. If fortune smiled upon me I was the
gayest of the gay; if fortune frowned I whistled and waited for a better
day. With my wife it was otherwise. She had been brought up so tenderly
that she knew not what it was to have a wish ungratified or a want
unsupplied. She was not in any way prepared to meet the fickle and
uncertain experiences to which a gambler necessarily subjects his
family. As a flower bends before the wind which blows too rudely upon
it, so she bowed when ill luck brought us to want and privation. The
only excuse I have to offer is that I sincerely loved her and thought I
could make her life happy. If I failed may God forgive me, but I did the
best I could.
As I look back after the experience of years, I come to this
conclusion—she was too good for me. In the hours of gloom there was
never a look or word of reproach. Had there been more of the force of a
sterner character about her I might have yielded to her influence and
stopped gambling, settled down and become a steady, industrious, God-
fearing man. I say God fearing because I always had a deep sense of
religious truth. My companions used to say, “John, you were never cut
out for a gambler; you would make a good minister.” This element of
sternness she did not possess. Her nature was all love and gentleness,
and so, like two heedless children, we played with life; ate of its good
things when fortune brought us plenty; drank of its bitter water when we
had lost our all.
I thought then that it was terrible for her to be cut off almost in the
springtime of her life; that my affliction was unendurable, and that
life without her would be intolerable. But I feel now that all things
are in the hands of One whose wisdom is beyond our thought. Better for
her to rest in the dreamless sleep of eternity than to bear the shame
and trouble that a gambler brings upon his family. Her power over me for
good has been greater in death than in life, although at first I did not
listen to the voice of love which came to me; yet there was a constant
power drawing me to the better life. If angels are allowed to pray for
and visit their holy influence upon those they love upon earth I know
now that my dead wife followed me through all the years of my subsequent
career until the light of God’s truth broke in upon my heart in the
prison at Jeffersonville.
“Oh, friends, I pray to night,
Keep not your kisses for my dead, cold brow,
The way is lonely, let me feel them now.
Think gently of me; I am travel worn;
My faltering feet are pierced with many a thorn.
Forgive, oh, hearts estranged, forgive I plead!
When dreamless rest is mine, I shall not need
The tenderness for which I long to night.”
[Illustration: MRS. MAY HARVEY QUINN.]