THE IRREVOCABLE DECREE.
_IT_ is two years since the day of separation between Irene and her
husband. Just two years. And she is sitting in the portico at Ivy
Cliff with her father, looking down upon the river that lies
gleaming in sunshine--not thinking of the river, however, nor of
anything in nature.
They are silent and still--very still, as if sleep had locked their
senses. He is thin and wasted as from long sickness, and she looks
older by ten years. There is no fine bloom on her cheeks, from which
the fullness of youth has departed.
It is a warm June day, the softest, balmiest, brightest day the year
has given. The air comes laden with delicate odors and thrilling
with bird melodies, and, turn the eye as it will, there is a feast
of beauty.
Yet, the odors are not perceived, nor the music heard, nor the
beauty seen by that musing old man and his silent daughter. Their
thoughts are not in the present, but far back in the unhappy past,
the memories of which, awakened by the scene and season, have come
flowing in a strong tide upon them.
Two years! They have left the prints of their heavy feet upon the
life of Irene, and the deep marks will never be wholly obliterated.
She were less than human if this were not so. Two years! Yet, not
once in that long, heart-aching time had she for a single moment
looked backward in weakness. Sternly holding to her act as right,
she strengthened herself in suffering, and bore her pain as if it
were a decree of fate. There was no anger in her heart, nor anything
of hardness toward her husband. But there was no love, nor tender
yearning for conjunction--at least, nothing recognized as such in
her own consciousness.
Not since the days Irene left the house of her husband had she heard
from him directly; and only two or three times indirectly. She had
never visited the city since her flight therefrom, and all her
pleasant and strongly influencing associations there were, in
consequence, at an end. Once her very dear friend Mrs. Talbot came
up to sympathize with and strengthen her in the fiery trial through
which she was passing. She found Irene's truer friend, Rosa Carman,
with her; and Rose did not leave them alone for a moment at a time.
All sentiments that she regarded as hurtful to Irene in her present
state of mind she met with her calm, conclusive mode of reasoning,
that took away the specious force of the sophist's dogmas. But her
influence was chiefly used in the repression of unprofitable themes,
and the introduction of such as tended to tranquilize the feelings,
and turn the thoughts of her friend away from the trouble that was
lying upon her soul like a suffocating nightmare. Mrs. Talbot was
not pleased with her visit, and did not come again. But she wrote
several times. The tone of her letters was not, however, pleasant to
Irene, who was disturbed by it, and more bewildered than enlightened
by the sentiments that were announced with oracular vagueness. These
letters were read to Miss Carman, on whom Irene was beginning to
lean with increasing confidence. Rose did not fail to expose their
weakness or fallacy in such clear light that Irene, though she tried
to shut her eyes against the truth presented by Rose, could not help
seeing it. Her replies were not, under these circumstances, very
satisfactory, for she was unable to speak in a free, assenting,
confiding spirit. The consequence was natural. Mrs. Talbot ceased to
write, and Irene did not regret the broken correspondence. Once Mrs.
Lloyd wrote. When Irene broke the seal and let her eyes rest upon
the signature, a shudder of repulsion ran through her frame, and the
letter dropped from her hands to the floor. As if possessed by a
spirit whose influence over her she could not control, she caught up
the unread sheet and threw it into the fire. As the flames seized
upon and consumed it, she drew a long breath and murmured,
"So perish the memory of our acquaintance!"
Almost a dead letter of suffering had been those two years. There
are no events to record, and but little progress to state. Yes,
there had been a dead level of suffering--a palsied condition of
heart and mind; a period of almost sluggish endurance, in which
pride and an indomitable will gave strength to bear.
Mr. Delancy and his daughter were sitting, as we have seen, on that
sweet June day, in silent abstraction of thought, when the
serving-man, who had been to the village, stepped into the portico
and handed Irene a letter. The sight of it caused her heart to leap
and the blood to crimson suddenly her face. It was not an ordinary
letter--one in such a shape had never come to her hand before.
"What is that?" asked her father, coming back as it were to life.
"I don't know," she answered, with an effort to appear indifferent.
Mr. Delancy looked at his daughter with a perplexed manner, and then
let his eyes fall upon the legal envelope in her hand, on which a
large red seal was impressed.
Rising in a quiet way, Irene left the portico with slow steps; but
no sooner was she beyond her father's observation than she moved
toward her chamber with winged feet.
"Bless me, Miss Irene!" exclaimed Margaret, who met her on the
stairs, "what has happened?"
But Irene swept by her without a response, and, entering her room,
shut the door and locked it. Margaret stood a moment irresolute, and
then, going back to her young lady's chamber, knocked for admission.
There was no answer to her summons, and she knocked again.
"Who is it?"
She hardly knew the voice.
"It is Margaret. Can't I come in?"
"Not now," was answered.
"What's the matter, Miss Irene?"
"Nothing, Margaret. I wish to be alone now."
"Something has happened, though, or you'd never look just like
that," said Margaret to herself, as she went slowly down stairs. "Oh
dear, dear! Poor child! there's nothing but trouble for her in this
world."
It was some minutes before Irene found courage to break the imposing
seal and look at the communication within. She guessed at the
contents, and was not wrong. They informed her, in legal phrase,
that her husband had filed an application for a divorce on the
ground of desertion, and gave notice that any resistance to this
application must be on file on or before a certain date.
The only visible sign of feeling that responded to this announcement
was a deadly paleness and a slight, nervous crushing of the paper in
her hands. Moveless as a thing inanimate, she sat with fixed, dreamy
eyes for a long, long time.
A divorce! She had looked for this daily for more than a year, and
often wondered at her husband's tardiness. Had she desired it? Ah,
that is the probing question. Had she desired an act of law to push
them fully asunder--to make the separation plenary in all respects?
No. She did not really wish for the irrevocable sundering decree.
Since her return to her father's house, the whole life of Irene had
been marked by great circumspection. The trial through which she had
passed was enough to sober her mind and turn her thoughts in some
new directions; and this result had followed. Pride, self-will and
impatience of control found no longer any spur to reactive life, and
so her interest in woman's rights, social reforms and all their
concomitants died away, for lack of a personal bearing. At first
there had been warm arguments with Miss Carman on these subjects,
but these grew gradually less earnest, and were finally avoided by
both, as not only unprofitable, but distasteful. Gradually this wise
and true friend had quickened in the mind of Irene an interest in
things out of herself. There are in every neighborhood objects to
awaken our sympathies, if we will only look at and think of them.
"The poor ye have always with you." Not the physically poor only,
but, in larger numbers, the mentally and spiritually poor. The hands
of no one need lie idle a moment for lack of work, for it is no
vague form of speech to say that the harvest is great and the
laborers few.
There were ripe harvest-fields around Ivy Cliff, though Irene had
not observed the golden grain bending its head for the sickle until
Rose led her feet in the right direction. Not many of the naturally
poor were around them, yet some required even bodily
ministrations--children, the sick and the aged. The destitution that
most prevailed was of the mind; and this is the saddest form of
poverty. Mental hunger! how it exhausts the soul and debases its
heaven-born faculties, sinking it into a gross corporeal sphere,
that is only a little removed from the animal! To feed the hungry
and clothe the naked mean a great deal more than the bestowal of
food and raiment; yes, a great deal more; and we have done but a
small part of Christian duty--have obeyed only in the letter--when
we supply merely the bread that perishes.
Rose Carman had been wisely instructed, and she was an apt scholar.
Now, from a learner she became a teacher, and in the suffering Irene
found one ready to accept the higher truths that governed her life,
and to act with her in giving them a real ultimatum. So, in the two
years which had woven their web of new experiences for the heart of
Irene, she had been drawn almost imperceptibly by Rose into fields
of labor where the work that left her hands was, she saw, good work,
and must endure for ever. What peace it often brought to her
striving spirit, when, but for the sustaining and protecting power
of good deeds, she would have been swept out upon the waves of
turbulent passion--tossed and beaten there until her exhausted heart
sunk down amid the waters, and lay dead for a while at the bottom of
her great sea of trouble!
It was better--oh, how much better!--when she laid her head at night
on her lonely pillow, to have in memory the face of a poor sick
woman, which had changed from suffering to peace as she talked to
her of higher things than the body's needs, and bore her mind up
into a region of tranquil thought, than to be left with no image to
dwell upon but an image of her own shattered hopes. Yes, this was
far better; and by the power of such memories the unhappy one had
many peaceful seasons and nights of sweet repose.
All around Ivy Cliff, Irene and Rose were known as ministrant
spirits to the poor and humble. The father of Rose was a man of
wealth, and she had his entire sympathy and encouragement. Irene had
no regular duties at home, Margaret being housekeeper and directress
in all departments. So there was nothing to hinder the free course
of her will as to the employment of time. With all her pride of
independence, the ease with which Mrs. Talbot drew Irene in one
direction, and now Miss Carman in another, showed how easily she
might be influenced when off her guard. This is true in most cases
of your very self-willed people, and the reason why so many of them
get astray. Only conceal the hand that leads them, and you may often
take them where you will. Ah, if Hartley Emerson had been wise
enough, prudent enough and loving enough to have influenced aright
the fine young spirit he was seeking to make one with his own, how
different would the result have been!
In the region round about, our two young friends came in time to be
known as the "Sisters of Charity." It was not said of them
mockingly, nor in gay depreciation, nor in mean ill-nature, but in
expression of a common sentiment, that recognized their high,
self-imposed mission.
Thus it had been with Irene since her return to the old home at Ivy
Cliff.