Adeline Mowbray; or, The Mother and Daughter

by Amelia Opie

Still Adeline, who had been used to attentions, could not but feel the neglect of Berrendale. Even while she kept her room he passed only a few hours in her society, and dined out; and when she was well enough to have accompanied him on his visits, she found that he never even wished her to go with him, though the friends whom he visited were married; and he met, from his own confessions, other ladies at their tables. She therefore began to suspect that Berrendale did not mean to introduce her as his wife; nay, she doubted whether he avowed her to be such; and at last she brought him to own that, ashamed of having married what the world must consider as a kept mistress, he resolved to keep her still in the retirement to which she was habituated.

This was a severe disappointment indeed to Adeline: she longed for the society of the amiable and accomplished of her own sex; and hoped that, as Mr Berrendale's wife, that intercourse with her own sex might be restored to her which she had forfeited as the mistress of Glenmurray. Nor could she help reproaching Berrendale for the selfish ease and indifference with which he saw her deprived of those social enjoyments which he daily enjoyed himself, convinced as she was that he might, if he chose, have introduced her at least to his intimate friends.

But she pleaded and reasoned in vain. Contented with the access which he had to the tables of his friends, it was of little importance to him that his wife ate her humble meal alone. His habits of enjoyment had ever been solitary: the school-boy, who had at school eaten his tart and cake by stealth in a corner, that he might not be asked to share them with another, had grown up with the same dispositions to manhood: and as his parents, thought opulent, were vulgar in their manners and low in their origin, he had never been taught those graceful self-denials inculcated into the children of polished life, which, though taught from factitious and not real benevolence, have certainly a tendency, by long habit, to make that benevolence real which at first was only artificial.

Adeline had both sorts of kindness and affection, those untaught of the heart, and those of education;—she was polite from the situation into which the accident of birth had thrown her, and also from the generous impulse of her nature. To her, therefore, the uncultivated and unblushing personnalité, as the French call it, of Berrendale, was a source of constant wonder and distress: and often, very often did she feel the utmost surprise at Berrendale's having appeared to Glenmurray a man likely to make her happy. Often did she wonder how the defects of Berrendale's character could have escaped his penetrating eyes.

Adeline forgot that the faults of her husband were such as could be known only by an intimate connexion, and which cohabitation could alone call forth;—faults, the existence of which such a man as Glenmurray, who never considered himself in any transaction whatever, could not suppose possible; and which, though they inflicted the most bitter pangs on Adeline, and gradually untwisted the slender thread which had began to unite her heart with Berrendale's, were of so slight a fabric as almost to elude the touch, and of a nature to appear almost too trivial to be mentioned in the narration of a biographer.

But though it has been long said that trifles make the sum of human things, inattention to trifles continues to be the vice of every one; and many a conjugal union which has never been assailed by the battery of crime, has fallen a victim to the slowly undermining power of petty quarrels, trivial unkindnesses and thoughtless neglect;—like the gallant officer, who, after escaping unhurt all the rage of battle by land and water, tempest on sea and earthquake on shore, returns perhaps to his native country, and perishes by the power of a slow fever.

But Adeline, who, amidst all the chimaeras of her fancy and singularities of her opinions, had happily held fast her religion, began at this moment to entertain a belief that soothed in some measure the sorrows which it could not cure. She fancied that all the sufferings she underwent were trials which she was doomed to undergo, as punishments for the crime she had committed in leaving her mother and living with Glenmurray. She therefore welcomed her afflictions, and lifted up her meek eyes to her God and Saviour, in every hour of her trials, with the look of tearful but grateful resignation.

Meanwhile her child, whom, after her mother, she called Editha, was nursed at her own bosom, and thrived even beyond her expectations. Even Berrendale beheld its growing beauty with delight, and the mulatto was wild in praise of it; while Adeline, wholly taken up all day in nursing and in working for it, and every evening in writing stories and hymns to publish, which would, she hoped, one day be useful to her own child as well as to the children of others, soon ceased to regret her seclusion from society; and by the time Editha was a year old she had learnt to bear with patience the disappointment she had experienced in Berrendale.

Soon after she became a mother she again wrote to Mrs Pemberton, as she longed to impart to her sympathizing bosom those feelings of parental delight which Berrendale could not understand, and the expression of which he witnessed with contemptuous and chilling gravity. To this letter she anticipated a most gratifying return; but month after month passed away, and no letter from Lisbon arrived. 'No doubt my letter miscarried,' said Adeline to Savanna, 'and I will write again:' but she never had resolution to do so; for she felt that her prospects of conjugal happiness were obscured, and she shrunk equally from the task of expressing the comfort which she did not feel, or unveiling to another the errors of her husband. The little regard, meanwhile, which she had endeavoured to return for Berrendale soon vanished, being unable to withstand a new violence offered to it.

Editha was seized with the hooping-cough; and as Adeline had sold her last little volume to advantage, Berrendale allowed her to take a lodging at a short distance from town, as change of air was good for the complaint. She did so, and remained there two months. At her return she had the mortification to find that her husband, during her absence, had intrigued with the servant of the house:—a circumstance of which she would probably have remained ignorant, but for the indiscreet affection of Savanna, who, in the first transports of her indignation on discovering the connexion, had been unable to conceal from her mistress what drove her almost frantic with indignation.