_Sganarelle_. O, la grande fatigue quo d'avoir une femme, et
qu'Aristote a bien raison quand il dit qu'une femme est pire qu'un
demon!--_Le Medecin Malgre Lui_.
Thus day by day and month by month we past;
It pleased the Lord to take my spouse at last--_Pope_.
It was nine years since, in an evil hour, Leslie had first seen Miss
Cynthia Everille, playing on a harp, and accompanying herself in a
thin, sweet voice, with words of her own composing. His weak heart
succumbed: he fell in love off hand; and within a year after the death
of his first wife, Edith's mother, her picture was taken from the
wall, and a second Mrs. Leslie reigned in her stead.
"Sweet,"--"charming,"--"fascinating,"--were the least of the
adjectives lavished on the interesting bride. Some of his lady
acquaintance felicitated him that he had espoused an angel, an
embodied beatitude not more than half pertaining to this world. In
fact, there was a certain aerial grace in her movements, a certain
translucency in her small alabaster features, which might countenance
such a notion. The winning smile, too, with which she met her visitors
on her reception Thursdays, savored wholly of the angelic. She
breathed courtesies around her as the beneficent royalty of Naples
scatters sugar plums among his loving subjects at the carnival, and,
on the next day, sends them to prison by the cart load.
The tyranny of the strong is bad enough; but the tyranny of the weak
is intolerable; and this latter visitation came upon Leslie in its
most rueful form--that, namely, whose weapons are sobs, sighs, vapors,
and the dire coercion of hysteric fits. He was a soft-hearted fool,
and a fair subject for such oppression. Not that his newly-installed
mistress--his mistress, since she made him her slave--was naturally of
an ill temper. On the contrary, she was somewhat amiable, or, at
least, much given to tears and tenderness; but in process of time,
this profuse sensibility had all centred on herself. In short, she was
profoundly selfish, though nothing could have astonished her more than
to tell her so; for, in her own eyes, she seemed a miracle of
sensibility, as indeed she was, though her sensibility had learned to
give little response to any woes but her own. What these woes might be
would be hard to say: she had a wonderful talent for finding and
inventing grievances. She was submerged and drowned in a sentimental
melancholy, which wore in turn ten thousand different aspects, each
worse than the other. She was a sea-anemone, covered with a myriad of
filaments, all more shrinking and sensitive than a snail's horns.
One reads of famished wretches who have tried to nourish life from the
current of their own veins. So, in a figurative sense, did she. She
was always anatomizing her own ridiculous heart; groping among the
depths of her own sickly fancies, and making them her daily food. She
was a busy gatherer of tokens, souvenirs, and mementoes, and was beset
with blighted hopes, vain longings, sad remembrances, and all the
spectral ills engendered between a frail mind and a depraved stomach.
She was a great reader, and floated rudderless through a sea of books,
fishing out of it all that was tender, morbid, and despairing, and
stowing it up in albums.
It may be thought that some disconsolate memory, some affection nipped
in the bud, or the like catastrophe, had brought her to this pass. Far
from it. She mourned that her fate had been too flat and sterile; that
the rapturous emotions of her heart had never been awakened; that no
sentimental passion, in short, had ever stirred her soul from its
depths. This was the grievance which rankled most in her reveries. To
give her her due, she never told it to her husband; but she brooded
upon it in secret; and the result was, a multitude of affecting
verses, which she treasured in her album as anonymous.
Leslie, though none of the wisest of men, was one of the most amiable;
and, under his wife's discipline, he learned to be one of the most
discreet. It behooved him to be watchful and circumspect. His married
life was a voyage through shoals and shallows, and needed sagacious
pilotage; for no common eye could see where the danger lay. There was
an endless variety of subjects tabooed to him; matters to all
appearance quite indifferent, but to which he must never allude,
because, Heaven knows how, they touched some trembling susceptibility,
or wakened some grievous memory from its blessed sleep. The penalty,
if the case were mild, would be a deep-drawn sigh; if more aggravated,
a flood of tears; if extreme, an hysteric fit. And if, in his efforts
to console her, he ventured to add any thing in the form of
remonstrance, or let fall any word which might intimate that her
conduct was not quite reasonable, the outraged sufferer would cease
weeping, cast up her eyes reproachfully, and murmuring, "O William, is
it come to this?" relapse again instantly into the depths of sobbing
affliction. It was only by the most abject submission, coupled with
all the resources of conjugal eloquence, that Leslie could succeed at
length in purchasing a look of resignation and a faint smile of
forgiveness.
Use, it is said, will blunt the sharpest of troubles. In time, he
became acclimated to his fate; yet, on one or two occasions, his
equanimity was quite overset. He thought that his wife was losing her
wits; for, as he came into her room, she fixed on him a melting gaze,
sank on his shoulder, and flooded him with such a freshet of tears,
that he might have complained with De Bracy, that a water fiend
possessed her. The truth was, she had just been musing on her own
dissolution, and imagining, in a luxury of woe, her own funeral, with
all the circumstance of that sad event. As she looked around and
bethought her how desolate that chamber would be when she was gone,
and how each trifle that had once been hers would be treasured by
those she left behind, her sensitive heart had dissolved in
tenderness, and produced the hydraulic demonstration just mentioned.
This libel on womankind became the mother of a pair of twins--the same
infant prodigies whom Morton had seen at the White Mountains. Both
perished at the age of seven, their precocious brains having by that
time usurped all the vitality of their miserable little bodies. She
was inconsolable at their death, though, while they lived, her
delicate nerves could seldom abide their presence for five minutes at
a time.
There was once an idiot, who, being of a conciliating temper, thought
to appease a fire and persuade it to go out by feeding it with fuel
till it should be satisfied, and crave no more. On the same principle
Leslie tried to satisfy the exacting spirit of his wife by a most
watchful and anxious devotion to all her whims; but the greater his
devotion, the more exacting she grew. She felt her power, and used it
without mercy. She was, withal, intolerably jealous, not so much of
any living rival, as of the memory of a dead one, Leslie's former
wife. Here, indeed, she had some show of reason; for the poles are not
wider asunder than were the characters of herself and her predecessor.
Those who had known the latter in her maidenhood--she married young,
or perhaps she would never have married Leslie--knew her as the
dominant belle of the season, conspicuous for her beauty, her
position, and for a degree of culture rare in America at that time;
devoted and ardent towards a few close friends, haughty and distant
towards the many; greatly loved by her few intimates, and either
greatly admired or greatly disliked by most others around her. Those
who knew her in the last years of her life knew her as one who had
passed through a fiery ordeal. Of her many children, only one was
left. They had fallen around her in a sudden and sharp succession,
till it seemed to her that a destroying doom had gone forth against
her race, and that the world of her affections was turned to a field
of carnage. Leslie felt the shock acutely, not to say intensely, for a
while; but the storm passed, and left on him very little trace. It
sank into the deeper nature of his wife with such a penetrating sense
of the vanity of life and the rottenness of mortal hope, as, in the
olden time, drew saints and anchorites to renounce the world and give
themselves to penance and seclusion. It made no anchorite of her. She
rose from her baptism of fire saddened, but not broken nor unstrung;
with a rooted faith and an absolute resignation; a nice perception of
all human suffering; sympathies broad and embracing as the air; a
benevolence pervading as the sunshine; and a spirit so calm in its
elevation that no wind of calamity had power to ruffle it.
Edith Leslie was a child when her mother died, yet old enough to feel
the loss profoundly, and to be greatly shocked and cast down at the
alacrity with which her father contrived to forget it. Having reduced
Leslie to obedience, his bride essayed the same experiment on his
daughter, but failed notably. There was something in the nature of the
latter which revolted so impatiently against the selfish caprices and
morbid fooleries which were played off hourly before her,--she was so
indignant, moreover, at seeing her father sunk inch by inch in the
slough of matrimonial thraldom,--that the issue might easily have been
a protracted household feud. None but herself could know with how
costly an effort she schooled herself to patience. With a caustic wit,
and a fervent fancy which haunted her with images of an ideal life
brighter than the work-day world around her, a nature with impulses
which, less curbed and tempered, might have carried her through all
the mazes of morbid rebellion, she still bent herself to accept her
lot as she found it, in the full faith that flowers may be taught to
grow on the flintiest soil. And now that the imagined maladies of a
lifetime were turned at last into a mortal reality, and her
step-mother lay on her death bed, Edith Leslie watched by her side
with as much care as if this wretched piece of perverted sensibility
had deserved her affection and esteem.