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 passionately 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 passed 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.
There was a carriage standing there, and a footman was shivering as he
walked up and down the pavement. No one took notice of the
beggar-woman as they thought her, and Nea, moved by a strange impulse
and desire for warmth and comfort, crept a few steps nearer and looked
in.
There was a boy in a velvet tunic sliding up and down the gilded
balustrades; and a tall woman with dark hair, and a diamond cross on
her white neck, swept through the hall in her velvet dress and rebuked
him. The boy laughed merrily and went a few steps higher.
"Beatrice and the young Erle Huntingdon," said Nea to herself. And
then a tall thin shadow fell across the door-way, and, uttering a
half-stifled cry, Nea saw her father, saw his changed face, his gray
hair and bowed figure, before she threw herself in his way.
And so, under the gas-light, with servants watching them curiously,
Mr. Huntingdon and his daughter met again. One who stood near him says
an awful pallor, like the pallor of death, came over his face for an
instant when he saw her standing before him with her baby in her arms,
but in the next he would have moved on had she not caught him by the
arm.
"Father," she sobbed; "father, come with me. Maurice is dying. My
husband is dying; but he says he can not die until he has your
forgiveness. Come home with me; come home with your own Nea, father;"
but he shook off her grasp, and began to descend the steps.
"Here, Stephen," he said, taking some gold from his pocket; "give this
to the woman and send her away. Come, Beatrice, I am ready."
Merciful Heaven! had this man a human heart, that he should disown his
own flesh and blood? Would it have been wonderful if she had spoken
bitter scathing words to the unnatural parent who was driving her from
his door? But Nea never spoke, she only turned away with a shudder
from the sight of the proffered gold, and then drawing her thin cloak
still closer round her child, turned wearily away.
True, she had sinned; but her punishment was a hundred times greater
than her sin, she said to herself, and that was all. What a strange
stunned quietness was over her; the pain and the fever seemed all
burned out. She did not suffer now. If something that felt like an
iron claw would leave off gripping her heart, she could almost have
felt comfortable. Maurice must die, she knew that, but something else
had died before him. She wondered if it were this same heart of hers;
and then she noticed her baby's hood was crooked, and stopped at the
next lamp-post to put it straight, and felt a vague sort of pity for
it, when she saw its face was pinched and blue with cold, and pressed
it closer to her, though she rather hoped to find it dead when she
reached home.
"One less to suffer and to starve," thought Nea.
Maurice's wistful eyes greeted her when she opened the door, but she
only shook her head and said nothing; what had she to say? She gave
her half-frozen infant into a neighbor's care, and then sat down and
drew Maurice's face to her bosom, still speechless in that awful
apathy.
And there she sat hour after hour, till he died peacefully in her
arms, and his last words were, "I believe in the forgiveness of sins."
* * * * *
When she had ceased to wish for them, friends came around her in her
trouble, and ministered to her wants.
Kind faces followed Maurice to his last resting-place, and saved him
from a pauper's grave.
The widow and her children were clothed in decent mourning, and placed
in comfortable lodgings.
Nea never roused from her silent apathy, never looked at them or
thanked them.
Their kindness had come too late for her, she said to herself, and it
was not until long afterward that she knew that she owed all this
consideration to the family of their kind old friend Mr. Dobson,
secretly aided by the purse of her cousin Beatrice Huntingdon, who
dare not come in person to see her. But by and by they spoke very
firmly and kindly to her. They pointed to her children--they had
placed her boy at an excellent school--and told her that for their
sakes she must live and work. If she brooded longer in that sullen
despair she would die or go mad; and they brought her baby to her, and
watched its feeble arms trying to clasp her neck; saw the widow's
passionate tears rain on its innocent face--the tears that saved the
poor hot brain--and knew she was saved; and by and by, when they
thought she had regained her strength, they asked her gently what she
could do. Alas! she had suffered her fine talents to rust. They had
nothing but impoverished material to use; but at last they found her a
situation with two maiden ladies just setting up a school in the
neighborhood, and here she gave daily lessons.
And so, as the years went on, things became a little brighter.
Nea found her work interesting, her little daughter Fern accompanied
her to the school, and she taught her with her other pupils.
Presently the day's labor became light to her, and she could look
forward to the evening when her son, fetching her on his way from
school, would escort her home--a humble home it was true; but when she
looked at her boy's handsome face, and Fern's innocent beauty, and
felt her little one's caresses, as she climbed up into her lap, the
widow owned that her lot had its compensations.
But the crowning trial was yet to come; the last drop of concentrated
bitterness.
Not long after Maurice's death, Mr. Huntingdon made his first overture
of reconciliation through his lawyer.
His niece, Beatrice, had died suddenly, and her boy was fretting sadly
for his mother.
Some one had pointed out to Mr. Huntingdon one day a dark-eyed
handsome boy in deep mourning, looking at the riders in Rotten Row,
and had told him that it was his grandson, Percy Trafford.
Mr. Huntingdon had said nothing at the time, but the boy's face and
noble bearing haunted him, he was so like his mother, when as a child
she had played about the rooms at Belgrave House. Perhaps, stifle it
as he might, the sobbing voice of his daughter rang in his ears, "Come
home with your own Nea, father;" and in spite of his pride his
conscience was beginning to torment him.
Nea smiled scornfully when she listened to the lawyer's overtures. Mr.
Huntingdon was willing to condone the past with regard to her son
Percy. He would take the boy, educate him, and provide for him most
liberally, though she must understand that his nephew, Erle, would be
his heir; still on every other point the boys should have equal
advantages.
"And Belgrave House, the home where my boy is to live, will be closed
to his mother?" asked Nea, still with that delicate scorn on her face.
The lawyer looked uncomfortable.
"I have no instructions on that point, Mrs. Trafford; I was simply to
guarantee that he should be allowed to see you from time to time, as
you and he might wish it."
"I can not entertain the proposal for a moment," she returned,
decidedly; but at his strong remonstrance she at last consented that
when her boy was a little older, the matter should be laid before him;
but no doubt as to his choice crossed her mind. Percy had always been
an affectionate child; nothing would induce him to give up his mother.
But she became less confident as the days went on; Percy grew a little
selfish and headstrong, he wanted a man's will to dominate him; his
narrow, confined life and the restraints that their poverty enforced
on them made him discontented. One day he encountered the lawyer who
had spoken to his mother--he was going to her again, with a letter
that Mr. Huntingdon had written to his daughter--and as he looked at
Percy, who was standing idly on the door-step, he put his hand on his
shoulder, and bade him show him the way.
Nea turned very pale as she read the letter. It was very curt and
business-like; it repeated the offer he had before made with regard to
her son Percy, only adding that for the boy's future prospects it
would be well not to refuse his terms. This was the letter that, after
a moment's hesitation, Nea placed in her boy's hands.
"Well, mother," he exclaimed, and his eyes sparkled with eagerness and
excitement, "I call that splendid; I shall be a rich man one of these
days, and then you will see what I shall do for you, and Fern, and
Fluff."
"Do you mean that you wish to leave us, Percy, and to live in your
grandfather's house?" she returned, trying to speak calmly. "You know
what I have told you--you were old enough to understand what your
father suffered? and--and," with a curious faintness creeping over her
"you see for yourself there is no mention of me in that letter.
Belgrave House is closed to your mother."
"Yes, I know, and it is an awful shame, but never mind, mother, I
shall come and see you very often;" and then when the lawyer had left
them to talk it over, he dilated with boyish eagerness on the
advantage to them all if he accepted his grandfather's offer. His
mother would be saved the expense of his education, she would not have
to work so hard; he would be rich himself, and would be able to help
them. But at this point she stopped him.
"Understand once for all, Percy," she said with a sternness that he
had never seen in her, "that the advantage will be solely for
yourself; neither I nor your sisters will ever accept help that comes
from Belgrave House; your riches will be nothing to me, my son. Think
again, before you give up your mother."
He would never give her up, he said, with a rough boyish caress; he
should see her often--often, and it was wicked, wrong to talk about
refusing his help; he would talk to his grandfather and make him
ashamed of himself--indeed there was no end to the glowing plans he
made. Nea's heart sickened as she heard him, she knew his boyish
selfishness and restlessness were leading him astray, and some of the
bitterest tears she ever shed were shed that night.
But from that day she ceased to plead with him, and before many weeks
were over Percy had left his mother's humble home, and after a short
stay at Belgrave House, was on his way to Eton with his cousin Erle
Huntingdon.
Percy never owned in his secret heart that he had done a mean thing in
giving up his mother for the splendors of Belgrave House, that the
thought that her son was living in the home that was closed to her was
adding gall and bitterness to the widow's life; he thought he was
proving himself a dutiful son when he came to see her so often, though
the visits were scarcely all he wished them to be.
True, his mother never reproached him, and always welcomed him kindly,
but her lips were closed on all that related to his home life. She
could speak of his school-fellows and studies, but of his grandfather,
and of his new pony and fine gun she would not speak, or even care to
hear about them. When he took her his boyish gifts they were quietly
but firmly returned to him. Even poor little Florence, or Fluff as
they called her, was obliged to give back the blue-eyed doll that he
had bought for her. Fluff had fretted so about the loss of the doll
that her mother had bought her another.
Percy carried away his gifts, and did not come for a long time. His
mother's white wistful face seemed to put him in the wrong. "Any other
fellow would have done the same under the circumstances," thought
Percy, sullenly; "I think my mother is too hard on me;" but even his
conscience misgave him, when he would see her turn away sometimes with
the tears in her eyes, after one of his boasting speeches. He was too
young to be hardened. He knew, yes, surely he must have known? that he
was grieving the tenderest heart in the world, and one day he would
own that not all his grandfather's wealth could compensate him for
being a traitor to his mother.