The _cause_ of grief very seriously affects its character. If
it is based on a sense of wrong, as in the case of a husband’s
unfaithfulness, then indignation, anger, malice make a part of it, and
a pregnant wife, distracted by these emotions, conveys to her child, as
we have shown, the violent emotions she herself experienced.
If the bad, the unprincipled conduct of a son from whom we had expected
reverence and manliness bows us down, a sense of wrong and shame, a
feeling that it _might have been avoided_, mixes with our grief and
embitters it.
But if death, from natural causes, which no woman’s eye could foresee
and provide against, strikes down one near and dear to us, we simply
mourn, and this grief may open the inner chambers of the soul hitherto
closed.
Thus Mrs. W., an external, worldly-minded woman, not wanting in common
benevolence or sense of duty, simply without dignity or elevation
of character, was married to an energetic, sensible, practical man,
the manager and owner of a large foundry. Their circumstances were,
therefore, quite easy. An inferior kind of social life occupied much of
Mrs. W.’s time, and amid these conditions their first child, a girl,
was born. This child, on the principle that inferior fruit ripens
early, was as mature as she would ever be at sixteen. At twenty she was
shallow, pretentious, illiterate, which last her mother was not.
When five months pregnant with her second child, the news was suddenly
brought to Mrs. W. that her husband, whom business had called several
hundred miles from his home, had been stricken down with yellow fever,
and, among total strangers, had passed away, in his delirium calling
wildly on his wife for help. The loss made a more profound impression
on Mrs. W. than it would have done had she not been pregnant. She had
accepted Mr. W. from sentiments of gratitude, and now she was moved
to make a strict self-examination as to her imperfect appreciation of
his love and kindness. Worldly motives and thoughts were silenced.
Conscience and finer judgment were active.
The second child, modified by these four grave, earnest months, was
made up of sincerity, earnest thought, and unfailing benevolence. Her
early disregard for appearances, as compared to realities, made a wide
gulf that could never be bridged between the two sisters. There was
absolutely no relationship between them. Marian’s plain, honest, eager,
affectionate face was grand beside the empty, pretty one of her elder
sister. The younger was slow in developing her whole nature, which was
transcendent in its interior moral characteristics. The blow came too
late to seriously injure the physical. There was just the unavoidably
less degree of robustness between herself and sister, which, with the
absence of hope and common gayety, favored gravity in the former.