Jasper Republican, Volume 1, Number 27, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 March 1875 — REDEEMED. [ARTICLE]

REDEEMED.

The fact is, we were both too young to marry. She was eighteen; I was barely out of my majority; but she was a poor, desolate little orphan sent out into the cold world to do the best she could for herself as a governess; I was madly in love with her, and I was my own master; we had no wiser heads to advise us and no more experienced hands to guide us—so we took our own way, as was but natural, and married on my clerkship of three hundred a year. I need scarcely say we were happy. For the first two years indeed it seemed to me as if I had never really lived until now. Our pretty little home at Kilburn was bright and cheerful. Edith was always affectionate, always good-tempered, and like Annabel Lee seemed to live “ with no other thought than to love and be loved by me.” My work sat on me easily; ana being young people of moderate tastes we had money enough for all we wanted. There was not a flaw anywhere, and the days were scarely long enough for the toy that filled them with sunshine from beginning to end. All this continued for two years, and then my wife became a mother. This was the first break in our manner of life, the first shadow cast over the brightness of our happy love. It changed the whole order of things, and the change told heavily against me. Edith was no longer my companion as she had been. The baby was delicate, and her health also gave way. She was obliged to go to her own room quite early in the evening, sometimes at seven o’clock or so, and even when she was well she was up in the morning with the child, and the evenings hung on me heavy and long. I was no student in those days. I was social, and if not inordinately yet undoubtedly fond of amusement; hence, sitting alone for all these hours after my solitary dinner —for Edith dined early by the doctor’s or ders—was dreary work for me, and I grew daily more fretted by the dullness of my once sunshiny home. I tell the 'story just as it was; not to excuse myself, but to explain. Also, too, the desire for more experience natural to my age began to make itself felt, and more than once I found myself confessing: “We married too young.” Yet I did not wish for dissipation;! was not conscious of a reserve of wild oats that I was longing to sow, but I did want a little change from the dead monotony of my spoiled home. I was yearning for the society of men of my own age and standing, and naturally the boy, though I loved him well enough—for all that I thought him the ugliest and oddest little imp I had ever seen—was not to me what he was to his mother. To her indeed he was everything. The mother had superseded the wife, and the husband was nowhere in •omparison with the child. Edith was angry too that I did not, as she phrased it, “ take to him more,” and I was angry that she took to him so much. May be that I was jealous. On looking back I should say that I was. Just when Bertie was three months old a fellow in our office introduced me to Jack Langhorne. Handsome, well-man-nered, rich, gay, good-tempered, generous, Jack was just the man to fascinate a comparatively raw lad, as I still was. He knew everything, being one of the kind who start at seventeen as men and “ see life” systematically from that time. There was not an .accomplishment in which he was not a proficient; not a game he could not play, giving long odds and winning. He was lavish of his money, and a gambler by inbred instinct. He was always staking his fate on chance, and hitherto chance had been his friend. He used often to say that he had been too lucky, and that he should have to pay for it before he had done. Nevertheless the day of payment gave no sign ©f dawning, and Jack went on staking and landing, backing the right color and the winning horse as if he had a private Nostradamus at hi© elbow, and could read the future as other men could read the past. I dare say many of my readers will laugh at me for the confession, but I had never seen a race until Jack Langhorne took me down to the Derby on his drag. It was a day both of great enjoyment and great excitement to me, for under his auspices I netted fifty pounds and I felt a millionaire. I was wild with pleasure; perhaps, too, the champagne counted for something in my hilarity as I took home to Edith a sixth of my yearly income, made in fewer hours than it took me to earn my paltry diumial guinea. Visions of fortune, golden and bright, passed before my eyes, and already I saw Edith queening it in the park with her high-stepping bays and faultless turn-out. She should have everything money could command. Whatever else my visions showed me she was always In my thoughts and highest in mv hopes. Hut when I gave her the money she turned away from me coldly and a minute after had buried her face in the pillow of the sofa where she was lying and was sobbing. I was a good deal surprised, a little shocked and greatly hurt —I had better use the harsher word and say vexed—at this outburst. I did not see the good of It and Ldid not understand it. Besides jt chills a man sb painfully to be received with boldness and tears after such a day as I had spent!

It makes the contrast between life inside and outside the home too sharp, and only sends him further off instead of drawing him nearer. However, tears were too scarce yet for me to or withstand them, so I kissed my vflre'hnd did my best to soothe her, and by degrees brought her round so far that she left oft crying, and began to kiss the baby as if it was something quite new and she had never kissed it before.

Though I was sorry to see her cry this vexed me again. She had not seen me all the day, and she had had the boy. I thought she might have paid a little attention to the one who had been absent, to put it on no other ground. But when I remonstrated she only answered: “ 1 know, George, you do not care for baby. You never have cared for him, and if it were not for pie he might die of neglect.” I began to laugh at this. It struck me as too comical that a wife should reproach her husband for not taking care of the baby; for surely if there is such a thing as “woman’s work” in the world, ana they are not meant by nature and the eternal fitness of things to be soldiers and sailors and lawyers and doctors and the Lord knows what besides, that work is to be found in the home and the nursery. But she was angry when I laughed, and raising herself on her elbow drew such a picture of the infamy, ruin, degradation that was to follow on my taking to bad courses, founded on my not caring for baby and my having won fifty pounds at the Derby, that I seemed to be listening to a maniac, not the Edith I bad left in the morning and had loved for so long. Perhaps I was too impatient and ought to have remembered that if I found my life dull hers was not too gay; I ought to have made allowance for the morbid nervousness and brooding fancies of a woman left alone for the whole day; but I was younger then than I am now, and the thing ended by our having our first grave quarrel, wherein we were both silly, both unjust, and neither of us woula give way.

The bad blood made between us tonight grew worse as time went on; and the circle we were in was a vicious one. I kept away more and more from home because my wife made it too miserable for me by her coldness, her tears, her complaints, her ill-humor; and the more I kept away the more she resented it. She took an almost insane hatred and suspicion of my friends and my actions, and did not scruple to accuse me ana them of vices and crimes because I was often late, from no worse cause than playing pool and billiards. Her reproaches first wearied and then hardened me; and by degrees a kind of fierce feeling took possession of me—a kind of revengeful determination that I would be what she imagined me to be, and give her cause to denounce me as she did. Harmless amusement became amusement not so harmless, petty little 'stakes of half-a crown and a shilling grew to gold; the glass of beer became the glass of brandy—and more than one; ana the facilis descensus had one more self-direct-ed victim on its slippery way. Work was intolerable to me. What I did I did badly, and I shirked all I could. I was often late, I as often left too early; and my employers were really good and lenient. As it was, however, I wearied out their patience, and they remonstrated with me firmly but kindly. This sobered me for a moment; but I had gone too far to retreat —until I came out at the other side I must go on. Th© fortune which had so long befriended Jack Langhorne deserted him now, and with his fortune his nerve. Where he had staked with judgment he now backed wildly, recklessly, and the more he lost the more recklessly he staked. His fortune seemed to influence mine. Hitherto I had been immensely successful; now the luck ran dead against me, ans I lost mere than I could afford, ana soon more than 1 could pay, and so came face to face with ruin.

During all this time the estrangement between Edith and myself grew daily wider. She took the wrong method with me, and being a woman she kept to it. She thought to dragoon me back to the quiet of my former life, and made my private actions personal to herself; seeking to force me into rendering an account of all my doings, and of every item of expenditure, then taking it as an affront when I refused to answer questions. But now there was no hope for it. I must perforce confess. With that writ out against me it was useless to attempt concealment, and if marriage is not feminine Buperiority yet it is-partnership. You may be sure it was a bitter moment for me when I had to tell my wife that all her worst anticipations were realized; that she had been right throughout and I wrong, and that the destruction she had prophesied had overtaken us. In her temper ijf so many months now it was doubly *Ard. But it seems that I knew as little of women as she of men, and had miscalculated the depth of her goodness underneath all her wrong-headedness, just as she had miscalculated my power of will and truth of love when fairly pulled up. She heard me out to the end without making a sign. There was no interruption, no angry expression, no scornful look. I saw the hand with which she held the child tighten round his body, the one playing with his curls tremble. But that was all. When I had finished she looked up and said quietly: “It is better to know the worst, George, for then we can meet it Now that 1 know the worst I know what to do.” And you do not reproach me, Edith?" Tasked.

She rose from, her seat and came over to me. Her eyes were full of tears, her lips we»e quivering, and yet there was more love, more softness in her face through its sorrow than there had been for all these long, bad, dreary months, passing now into years. She slid the boy from her arms and pressed them round my neck. “ Why should I reproach you?” she said. “Is not your burden heavy enough without that? While I thought I could help to keep you straight I tried—if clumsily and to no good, yet loyally. Now I know that all is over I have only to try and help you both by my work and my love.” Something seemed to choke me while she spoke. I could have been hard enough if she had been angry, but this sudden return to the old- love—this unexpected magnanimity—was too much for mp- Still, lam thankful to say I did not break down. I was man enough for that. “ Will you trust me, Edith?” said L hi a tone sq rough and husky I scarcely recognized it qa my own. “ Love me as you uled, be to me what you were, and I swear you shall never have cause to re-

proach me again. I am young, I can work, I can be resolute. I have bought my experience of life and I find the taste too bitter in my mouth. A man may be a man and yet not be ashamed to think of his wife©* well as of bis pleasures, and I will think of you now.” She sighed and then she smiled. “You come back to what you left,” she sard in a tender, caressing kind of way that seemed as if it buried now forever all that had gone wrong between US. Of course the struggle was a tremendous one. I lost my clerkship and every sixpence I possessed, both in goods and money. My wife had to give lessons and I had to accept anything that would keep us from starvation; but we pulled through in time, and the suffering we had encountered was perhaps a good thing in the end. It taught us to value each other in a deeper and truer manner than ever before; and it gave us a friend. For dear old Jack’s luck turned with his uncle’s death, and he used his influence to get me a situation that began at 600 a year, and has steps upward in the future. Things have gone well with me since then. Edith’s health has come back, and my boy is at the head of his class. I have traveled a good deal, and lately I have taken up chemistry as a study. Edith declares I will blow the house up some day, but I have not done so yet, and I think I am on the track of a discovery that will do a great deal of good—make me a name, and bring in a lot of money. I find that as one grows older work is a more satisfying thing than pleasure, and knowledge goes further than excitement; and Edith finds that a wife’s influence is greatest when least visibly exerted, and that when a woman abandons the persuasion of love for authoritative command, anti tenderness for ill temper, she loses her power and *only deepens the unhappiness she aims at preventing.