“Pain! pain! art thou wrestling here with man,
For the broken gold of his wasted span?
Art thou straining thy rock on his tortured nerve,
Till his firmest hopes from their anchor swerve,
Till the burning tears from his eyeballs flow,
And his manhood yields in a cry of woe?
“Death! death! do I see thee with weapon dread—
Art thou laying thy hand on his noble head?
Lo! the wife is here, with her sleepless eye,
To dispute each step of thy victory.
She doth fold that form in her soul’s embrace,
And her prayer swells high from its resting-place.”
In a quiet village of New York, Myra Whitney made her home with the man
who had won her against so much opposition and amid so many trials. She
had cast off the splendor of her old life, and, sharing the fortunes of
her husband, began a new and still more noble existence; but directly
came one to the little Eden with news that would henceforth and forever
more drive quiet away from her home.
A man who was well acquainted with the frauds that had been practiced on
the infant heiress, sought out the young bride and told her of the vast
wealth illegally withheld from her by the executors of Daniel Clark’s
estate—told her of that which stirred the proud blood in her veins more
warmly than any idea of wealth could have done—the doubt that had been
craftily thrown on her own legitimacy, and thus on the fair fame of her
mother.
From that day all hope of repose fled from her happy home. A stern duty
was before her—that of retrieving the wrongs heaped on her mother, and
of wresting the honorable name of a father, whom she worshiped even in
his memory, from the odium that had been fastened upon his actions.
Joined to all this, was the natural ambition of a high-spirited and
proud young woman to claim her true position in the world, and to endow
the man of her choice with wealth justly her own, but of which he had
been all unconscious at the time of their marriage; and now commenced
that stern strife between justice and fraud which has for more than
twenty years made the romance of our courts. With her young husband Myra
went to New Orleans, and there gathered up those threads of evidence
which laid the iniquity, which had darkened her whole life, bare before
the world. There she found Madame De Gordette, her mother, the Zulima of
our true story, and there, for the first time, she learned all the
domestic romance of her own history. The anguish that had followed her
mother, the remorse and solemn restitution that had marked the closing
hours of her father’s life.
To a being ambitious and imaginative as Myra, this interview with her
mother was calculated to make a painful and solemn impression. The one
great idea of her life became a firm resolve; to that she was ready to
sacrifice domestic peace and all those feminine aims which spring from
highly cultivated tastes. Still womanly in all her acts, she took upon
herself the research and duties of a man, not alone, but hand in hand
with the husband whose happiness and aggrandizement would be secured by
these exertions.
But the vast property of Daniel Clark had been scattered far and wide by
the men who had taken it in trust. The personal property had melted away
first, then tract after tract of land, block upon block of real estate
had followed, till the claimants, most of them innocent purchasers,
might be counted by hundreds. But the greater the obstacles that
presented themselves, the more resolute became this young creature in
the advocacy of her own just cause. All necessary evidence of the
existence of a last will and of its destruction was secured; witnesses
of Zulima’s marriage with Daniel Clark in Philadelphia still existed.
The mother herself, though shrinking from the cruel publicity of her
wrongs, gave such aid as her naturally shrinking nature, now rendered
almost timid by suffering, would permit. Men of influence, struck by the
sublime spectacle of a fair young creature, with scarcely the physical
strength of a child, entering courageously on a battle where such
fearful odds prevailed against her, came generously to her support. The
great fight of her life opened hopefully; victory might be distant, but
she would not doubt that it would come at last.
But in the midst of her first struggle she had forgotten to be prudent,
indeed precaution was scarcely natural to that early period of her life.
By adoption she had become a child of the North, but the warm genial
glow of her blood still sympathized with the sunny climate to which she
had moved, fearlessly, with her little children at the most dangerous
season of the year.
But her husband was a northern man by birth, and he did not assimilate
readily to the hot, moist climate of New Orleans. The excitement into
which he was thrown doubtless added to the causes which oppressed him;
in the midst of his struggles, in the full bloom and force of his manly
youth, Whitney was stricken down among the first victims that the yellow
fever seized upon that year.
They were living at an hotel in the heart of the city, with no home
comforts around them, and surrounded by a crowd of enemies—such as
spring from hotly-contested law-suits where many persons are interested
in the defence. To all those persons who had in any way attained a claim
on the property of Daniel Clark, his daughter was, of course, held as an
aggressive enemy,—a woman who had come with her ambition and her
doubtful claims to disturb the tranquillity of a great city. Many of
these persons, having bought the property they possessed in good faith,
really felt her action to be a great wrong—they had no means of knowing
the facts of a case over which so many legal minds have struggled, and
naturally sided with their own visible interests against the fair
claimant. Thus the yellow fever that struck her husband down in a single
hour, found Myra in the midst of enemies such as few women have ever
encountered.
All day Myra had been lonely and sad, her children felt the heavy
effects of the climate, and her own bright energies seemed yielding
themselves to the enervating influences that surrounded them. Sometimes
in the great struggle that she had commenced so bravely, Myra felt the
painful reaction which springs from a long strain upon the energies.
That day she had been thinking of her pretty home in the North, of its
quietude, its cool thickets, and the great forest-trees that
overshadowed it. Near the house was a spring of water—one of those
natural outgushes of crystal waves which children love to play near, and
whose flow is remembered as the sweetest music in the world afterward.
In the heat and closeness of her room, Myra’s thoughts had been
constantly going back to this spring. The children also had prattled
about it between themselves, and once had joined in a pretty petition to
the languid mother that they might go back again and play out-of-doors.
Myra felt the tears come to her eyes as she answered them; there was no
real cause for this depression, but it had fallen heavily upon her all
day; she felt like snatching up her little ones and fleeing with them to
the northward, where they might all breathe and laugh freely.
While the young wife was in this strange mood, the door opened and her
husband came in. She glanced up in his face smiling a welcome, but his
eyes were heavy, and a hot crimson burning on either cheek startled her.
She put the children aside, and seizing his hand gave another terrified
look in his face. He tried to smile, but instantly lifted a hand to his
forehead and groaned aloud.
“What is this, my husband—are you ill, or have you been walking in the
hot sun?”
He withdrew his hot hand from her clasp, and sharply ordered the
children back as they came laughing toward him. The little ones began to
cry, but Myra would not be repulsed, she was no child to shrink away
from a sharp word, though it was the first she had ever known him give
her darlings.
“Ah! now I am sure you must be ill,” she said, hushing the children;
“who ever saw you cross before, my Whitney, above all things, to them?”
“They must not come near me—send them away, and go yourself,” he said,
huskily.
“What! I—I go away?” cried the young wife, with a groan of indignation
breaking up through her terror; “what can you think of me, Whitney?”
“For their sake—for your own, Myra,” he said, pushing her away;
“child—child, it is the fever that is upon me.”
She looked at him eagerly, almost wildly; her pale lips fell apart and
her cheek grew cold as snow.
“Take the children away,” she said, motioning backward with her hand to
a mulatto girl who stood looking on. “Take them quite away into your own
room, Agnes, and be still.”
The little ones went reluctantly and with tears standing in their wild
eyes. It was so strange for them to be sent away when papa came in—then
he looked so odd and stood so unsteadily on the floor, besides mamma was
beginning to cry—they would go back and ask her what it was all about.
But no, the firm little maid held them tight and forced them,
struggling, through the door. She knew what those symptoms foreboded,
and a sudden dread seized upon her. Yes, she would save the little
ones—that was all she could hope for—and away she dragged them into her
own little room which was distant from the infected chamber.
Myra forgot her children, forgot every thing in the frightful symptoms
that burned on her husband’s face, and shot fire into the hands she
clasped and wrung in her own.
“O husband! my husband, it is not that—not the fever, God help us! You
have been in the heat—you are tired out; a glass of ice-water and a
little rest will drive this headache away.”
“Oh, it is terrible, Myra, my temples seem splitting with the pain,” he
murmured, holding his head between both hands and reeling to and fro.
“But it is the heat—it is the heat!” she persisted, determined to
believe herself.
“It is death!—O Myra! I fear it is death!”
She began to tremble in all her limbs, a wild terror broke into her
brown eyes, giving them an unearthly brightness.
“Oh, don’t—don’t! the bare idea kills me,” she pleaded, flinging her
arms around him.
He struggled and tried to force her away, but the fire of disease and
the power of her great love was stronger than his confused will. She
drew him toward the bed and forced him down to the pillows, praying him
to be quiet and to try and sleep.
While he lay moaning on the pillows, she ran for ice-water and gave it
to his hot lips, bound his forehead with wet napkins, and strove, in her
sweet feminine way, to assuage the pain which had seized so fiercely
upon him. To have seen that slight creature acting as a nurse to the
being she most loved, you would hardly have believed it possible that
she possessed sufficient energy to take a controlling lead in one of the
most important law-cases that ever astonished our country—that she had
breasted difficulties and outlived discouragements, before which strong
men might have retreated, without a forfeiture of courage. In that
sick-room she was gentle as childhood, but quick as lightning to seize
upon any means of mitigating the pain that held that young man as in the
embrace of a fiend.
Hour after hour she watched in that sick-chamber. The doctor came,
ordered the usual remedies, and went away again, with a heart that felt
little and a face that told nothing at all. His course of practice was
unvaried—the same medicines in almost every case—copious bleeding—vague,
wild hopes in the loving hearts that ached around the bed—then the last
fatal symptom and death—thus it went day after day.
Poor Myra! how she searched that man’s leaden eyes for some little gleam
of hope when he came into that sick-chamber! how eagerly she strove to
read features that never changed to a thought or a feeling, even when
death stood close by! Still she would not despair; had not every
obstacle given way to the force of her own will so far in her life,—was
she to be baffled and conquered now? To her warm heart it seemed
impossible that death could strike a form so full of manly strength, or
that she could live an hour after him if the great calamity did come.
Alas! with all her experience and force, Myra was yet to learn how
difficult it is for a human heart to break of grief, or exhaust itself
with trouble. If a wish to die could induce the dark destroyer to
strike, many a breathing—nay, blooming form would be lying low, which is
now doomed to run its course to the end.
One day, it was less than a week after the first attack, Myra was called
to the bedside of her husband. A great and terrible change had come upon
that splendid form; the flesh had seemed to melt away from his limbs
like mist from the uplands; his eyes were hollow; the skin upon his
forehead a yellowish brown.
“Myra, my poor wife.”
She bent down and kissed the fever-stained forehead.
“My husband! you are better; there, the brightness is coming back to
your eyes.”
“No, Myra, no; I feel strangely but not better.”
A movement of impotent sorrow revealed the struggle with which the poor
woman strove to disprove this truth to her heart.
“Don’t say that—you don’t understand; wait till the doctor comes, he
will tell you that I am right.”
The sick man moved his hand feebly on the pillow, and a moan broke from
his lips.
Just then the doctor came in from his rounds in the infested city. The
young wife appealed to him, with her mournful eyes trembling with an
awful dread as his fingers touched the pulse.
“O doctor! is he better?”
“Yes, undoubtedly.”
Myra burst into tears; the invalid brightened a little, then turned his
face on the pillow, and great tears rolled down his cheeks.
“No, doctor,” he murmured, “no!”
“It is my opinion we have every thing to hope here, madam. Let us take a
little more blood, and all will go on well.”
Bandages were brought; the sharp lancet bit its way a third time into
those hot veins, and directly a servant bore out a great white
toilet-bowl frothing over with the red life drawn from a frame already
exhausted with its battle against the fever.
“There, madam,” said the doctor, laying the wounded arm of his patient
tenderly on the counterpane. “He will do well now, have no fear; I will
drop in this evening; follow the old directions and keep him quiet.”
“O doctor! I can not speak my thankfulness, my heart is so full.”
“There is no necessity of words,” said the doctor, complacently; “or for
gratitude either, so far as I am concerned.”
Myra followed the man, whom she looked upon as something more than
human, into the hall.
“Ah, doctor, are you sure that he is better—it was not done to cheer him
up?” she cried, while her poor lips began to quiver with the fear that
crept over her.
“Nothing of the sort, dear lady. He is doing well enough; but take care
of yourself.”
Myra smiled on him through her tears. “God bless you for this comfort,”
she said, leaning over the baluster.
After he was gone, Myra ran into the room where her children were kept
safe from contagion, and gathering them to her bosom, lavished rapturous
caresses on their smiling faces.
“He is better—he is better, my darlings; he, your blessed, blessed papa.
Kiss me a thousand times, and when I am gone go down on your knees so,
with these angel faces lifted to heaven, and thank God—do you
understand, children?—thank God, that papa is better and will live.”
The children obeyed her, and dropping on their knees, lifted their
pretty faces heavenward, like the cherubs we see in Raphael’s pictures,
looking the prayers they had no language to utter.
Then Myra, having subdued her great joy, went back to the sick-room
again. How still and deathly he lay under the white cloud of sunshine
that brooded over the bed! Myra held her breath, and listened for some
sign of improvement. His eyes were closed, and his lips shrunk together
and closed motionless in their golden pallor. How the heart of that fond
woman cheated itself. His languid stillness was a good sign to her.
“Yes,” she whispered, sitting down by the bed, and softly clasping his
feeble hand. “There is no pain now; he rests sweetly.”
He heard her and clasped her fingers with feeble recognition, but did
not speak or attempt to utter a word. Still the great tears rolled down
his face, and she knew he was conscious.
Thus two or three hours passed and then the fever grew rampant again,
and fell upon that weak form like a vampyre, drinking up all the life
that the lancet had left. Myra began to be frightened, and hoped
impatiently for the doctor to come. There was something in the case that
she could not understand; doubtless, it was all right, but the look of
that haggard face was appalling.
At last the physician came slowly, and with that slow method which is so
irksome to an impatient heart. He came to the bed, felt of the patient’s
pulse, laid the hand gently down, and turned away muttering that she
might go on as before, there were no fresh directions to give.
Now the patient opened his eyes, and fixed them with mournful reproach
on the doctor’s face; he did not attempt to speak, but the great tears
gathered slowly in his eyes, and the dark lashes closed again.
As usual Myra followed the doctor out of the room.
“Tell me,” she said; “he is no worse—he is getting well; there is no
danger now.”
The doctor drew on his glove, smoothing it to the hand, while she was
speaking.
“There is no hope, my dear madam; not a gleam. He must die before
morning; did you not observe the black on his lips.”
“Die before morning—my husband. Oh, no! you want to see if I have all
the courage people talk about; but you see, doctor, I am a poor little
coward. One does not fight with death. Don’t you see how I tremble?
Don’t, don’t carry this any further. I’m not very strong, and—and—oh, my
God! my God! why don’t you speak to me?”
“Indeed, my poor lady, I have nothing more to say; it would give me
great satisfaction to give you hope if I had any myself. But the last
fatal symptom has come, no skill on earth can save him; it is but a
question of time now—hardly that, in fact.”
The doctor was going down-stairs as he spoke, for he would gladly have
avoided the anguish that came like a storm into that white face, but
Myra sprang after him, seizing hold of his arm.
“O doctor! O doctor!” she cried, gasping for breath; “is this true?”
“Indeed, I regret to say it, but nothing could be more certain.”
Her hand dropped from his arm, her whole being grew cold till the icy
chill penetrated to her heart. She watched him, as he glided down the
stairs, with a strained and wild look. Then she turned and went into the
chamber where her husband lay dying.
When Myra came forth again she was a widow. In one of those cemeteries
hemmed in by moss-grown walls and filled with gloomy verdure, they laid
the young husband down to his long rest. A pale little woman with two
fair children wondering at their black crape dresses, stood by silent
and filled with a dreary wonder that it took so little time to render a
human life desolate. There was no noisy grief in that solemn inclosure;
the little children held their breath in vague awe. The mother looked on
as if those strange men were burying her heart which she could never
rescue back from the grave.
Years went by—life made its inevitable claims, and the great battle of
the law went on, which Myra fought out in behalf of the parents who were
dead and the children of her husband. In the course of this struggle, a
brave old man, one who had served his country well and stood at the head
of its armies, laid his heart and his well-earned fame at Myra’s feet,
and she became his wife. A few years and he, in the very city which had
proved so fatal to her first love, lay down amid his ripe honors, and
died, blessing her with his last word on earth. And now she
still—indomitable still—untiring fights the great battle alone, and
another year will prove that the life-struggle of Myra Clark Gaines has
not been without its victory, and that energy, even in a delicate woman,
can at last overtake justice.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
1. Silently corrected obvious typographical errors and variations in
spelling.
2. Retained archaic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings as printed.
3. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.