THE PALSIED HEART.
_THE_ shock to Mr. Delancy was a fearful one, coming as it did on a
troubled, foreboding state of mind; and reason lost for a little
while her firm grasp on the rein of government. If the old man could
have seen a ray of hope in the case it would have been different.
But from the manner and language of his daughter it was plain that
the dreaded evil had found them; and the certainty of this falling
suddenly, struck him as with a heavy blow.
For several days he was like one who had been stunned. All that
afternoon on which his daughter returned to Ivy Cliff he moved about
in a bewildered way, and by his questions and remarks showed an
incoherence of thought that filled the heart of Irene with alarm.
On the next morning, when she met him at the breakfast-table, he
smiled on her in his old affectionate way. As she kissed him, she
said,
"I hope you slept well last night, father?"
A slight change was visible in his face.
"I slept soundly enough," he replied, "but my dreams were not
agreeable."
Then he looked at her with a slight closing of the brows and a
questioning look in his eyes.
They sat down, Irene taking her old place at the table. As she
poured out her father's coffee, he said, smiling,
"It is pleasant to have you sitting there, daughter."
"Is it?"
Irene was troubled by this old manner of her father. Could he have
forgotten why she was there?
"Yes, it is pleasant," he replied, and then his eye dropped in a
thoughtful way.
"I think, sometimes, that your attractive New York friends have made
you neglectful of your lonely old father. You don't come to see him
as often as you did a year ago."
Mr. Delancy said this with simple earnestness.
"They shall not keep me from you any more, dear father," replied
Irene, meeting his humor, yet heart-appalled at the same time with
this evidence that his mind was wandering from the truth.
"I don't think them safe friends," added Mr. Delancy, with
seriousness.
"Perhaps not," replied Irene.
"Ah! I'm glad to hear you say so. Now, you have one true, safe
friend. I wish you loved her better than you do."
"What is her name?"
"Rose Carman," said Mr. Delancy, with a slight hesitation of manner,
as if he feared repulsion on the part of his daughter.
"I love Rose, dearly; she is the best of girls; and I know her to be
a true friend," replied Irene.
"Spoken like my own daughter!" said the old man with a brightening
countenance. "You must not neglect her any more. Why, she told me
you hadn't written to her in six months. Now, that isn't right.
Never go past old, true friends for the sake of new, and maybe false
ones. No--no. Rose is hurt; you must write to her often--every
week."
Irene could not answer. Her heart was beating wildly. What could
this mean? Had reason fled? But she struggled hard to preserve a
calm exterior.
"Will Hartley be up to-day?"
Irene tried to say "No," but could not find utterance.
Mr. Delancy looked at her curiously, and now in a slightly troubled
way. Then he let his eyes fall, and sat holding his cup like one who
was turning perplexed thoughts in his mind.
"You are not well this morning, father," said Irene, speaking only
because silence was too oppressive for endurance.
"I don't know; perhaps I'm not very well;" and Mr. Delancy looked
across the table at his daughter very earnestly. "I had bad dreams
all last night, and they seem to have got mixed up in my thoughts
with real things. How is it? When did you come up from New York?
Don't smile at me. But really I can't think."
"I came yesterday," said Irene, as calmly as she could speak.
"Yesterday!" He looked at her with a quickly changing face.
"Yes, father, I came up yesterday."
"And Rose was here?"
"Yes."
Mr. Delancy's eyes fell again, and he sat very still.
"Hartley will not be here to-day?"
Mr. Delancy did not look up as he asked this question.
"No, father."
"Nor to-morrow?"
"I think not."
A sigh quivered on the old man's lips.
"Nor the day after that?"
"He did not say when he was coming," replied Irene, evasively.
"Did not say when? Did not say when?" Mr. Delancy repeated the
sentence two or three times, evidently trying all the while to
recall something which had faded from his memory.
"Don't worry yourself about Hartley," said Irene, forcing herself to
pronounce a name that seemed like fire on her lips. "Isn't it enough
that I am here?"
"No, it is not enough." And her father put his hand to his forehead
and looked upward in an earnest, searching manner.
What could Irene say? What could she do? The mind of her father was
groping about in the dark, and she was every moment in dread lest he
should discover the truth and get farther astray from the shock.
No food was taken by either Mr. Delancy or his daughter. The former
grew more entangled in his thoughts, and finally arose from the
table, saying, in a half-apologetic way,
"I don't know what ails me this morning."
"Where are you going?" asked Irene, rising at the same time.
"Nowhere in particular. The air is close here--I'll sit a while in
the portico," he answered, and throwing open one of the windows he
stepped outside. Irene followed him.
"How beautiful!" said Mr. Delancy, as he sat down and turned his
eyes upon the attractive landscape. Irene did not trust her voice in
reply.
"Now go in and finish your breakfast, child. I feel better; I don't
know what came over me." He added the last sentence in an undertone.
Irene returned into the house, but not to resume her place at the
table. Her mind was in an agony of dread. She had reached the
dining-room, and was about to ring for a servant, when she heard her
name called by her father. Running back quickly to the portico, she
found him standing in the attitude of one who had been suddenly
startled; his face all alive with question and suspense.
"Oh, yes! yes! I thought you were here this moment! And so it's all
true?" he said, in a quick, troubled way.
"True? What is true, father?" asked Irene, as she paused before him.
"True, what you told me yesterday."
She did not answer.
"You have left your husband?" He looked soberly into her face.
"I have, father." She thought it best to use no evasion.
He groaned, sat down in the chair from which he had arisen, and let
his head fall upon his bosom.
"Father!" Irene kneeled before him and clasped his hands. "Father!
dear father!"
He laid a hand on her head, and smoothed her hair in a caressing
manner.
"Poor child! poor daughter!" he said, in a fond, pitying voice,
"don't take it so to heart. Your old father loves you still."
She could not stay the wild rush of feeling that was overmastering
her. Passionate sobs heaved her breast, and tears came raining from
her eyes.
"Now, don't, Irene! Don't take on so, daughter! I love you still,
and we will be happy here, as in other days."
"Yes, father," said Irene, holding down her head and calming her
voice, "we will be happy here, as in the dear old time. Oh we will
be very happy together. I won't leave you any more."
"I wish you had never left me," he answered, mournfully; "I was
always afraid of this--always afraid. But don't let it break your
heart; I'm all the same; nothing will ever turn me against you. I
hope he hasn't been very unkind to you?" His voice grew a little
severe.
"We wont say anything against him," replied Irene, trying to
understand exactly her father's state of mind and accommodate
herself thereto. "Forgive and forget is the wisest rule always."
"Yes, dear, that's it. Forgive and forget--forgive and forget.
There's nothing like it in this world. I'm glad to hear you talk
so."
The mind of Mr. Delancy did not again wander from the truth. But the
shock received when it first came upon him with stunning force had
taken away his keen perception of the calamity. He was sad, troubled
and restless, and talked a great deal about the unhappy position of
his daughter--sometimes in a way that indicated much incoherence of
thought. To this state succeeded one of almost total silence, and he
would sit for hours, if not aroused from reverie and inaction by his
daughter, in apparent dreamy listlessness. His conversation, when he
did talk on any subject, showed, however, that his mind had regained
its old clearness.
On the third day after Irene's arrival at Ivy Cliff, her trunks came
up from New York. She had packed them on the night before leaving
her husband's house, and marked them with her name and that of her
father's residence. No letter or message accompanied them. She did
not expect nor desire any communication, and was not therefore
disappointed, but rather relieved from what would have only proved a
cause of disturbance. All angry feelings toward her husband had
subsided; but no tender impulses moved in her heart, nor did the
feeblest thought of reconciliation breathe over the surface of her
mind. She had been in bonds; now the fetters were cast off, and she
loved freedom too well to bend her neck again to the yoke.
No tender impulses moved, we have said, in her heart, for it lay
like a palsied thing, dead in her bosom--dead, we mean, so far as
the wife was concerned. It was not so palsied on that fatal evening
when the last strife with her husband closed. But in the agony that
followed there came, in mercy, a cold paralysis; and now toward
Hartley Emerson her feelings were as calm as the surface of a frozen
lake.
And how was it with the deserted husband? Stern and unyielding also.
The past year had been marked by so little of mutual tenderness,
there had been so few passages of love between them--green spots in
the desert of their lives--that memory brought hardly a relic from
the past over which the heart could brood. For the sake of worldly
appearances, Emerson most regretted the unhappy event. Next, his
trouble was for Irene and her father, but most for Irene.
"Willful, wayward one!" he said many, many times. "You, of all, will
suffer most. No woman can take a step like this without drinking of
pain to the bitterest dregs. If you can hide the anguish, well. But
I fear the trial will be too hard for you--the burden too heavy.
Poor, mistaken one!"
For a month the household arrangements of Mr. Emerson continued as
when Irene left him. He did not intermit for a day or an hour his
business duties, and came home regularly at his usual times--always,
it must be said, with a feeble expectation of meeting his wife in
her old places; we do not say desire, but simply expectation. If she
had returned, well. He would not have repulsed, nor would he have
received her with strong indications of pleasure. But a month went
by, and she did not return nor send him any word. Beyond the brief
"I have gone," there had come from her no sign.
Two months elapsed, and then Mr. Emerson dismissed the servants and
shut up the house, but he neither removed nor sold the furniture;
that remained as it was for nearly a year, when he ordered a sale by
auction and closed the establishment.
Hartley Emerson, under the influence of business and domestic
trouble, matured rapidly, and became grave, silent and reflective
beyond men of his years. Companionable he was by nature, and during
the last year that Irene was with him, failing to receive social
sympathy at home, he had joined a club of young men, whose
association was based on a declared ambition for literary
excellence. From this club he withdrew himself; it did not meet the
wants of his higher nature, but offered much that stimulated the
grosser appetites and passions. Now he gave himself up to earnest
self-improvement, and found in the higher and wider range of thought
which came as the result a partial compensation for what he had
lost. But he was not happy; far, very far from it. And there were
seasons when the past came back upon him in such a flood that all
the barriers of indifference which he had raised for self-protection
were swept away, and he had to build them up again in sadness of
spirit. So the time wore on with him, and troubled life-experiences
were doing their work upon his character.