There is a point of suffering beyond which sorrow destroys itself—is not felt as real—just as there is a crisis at which physical agony superinduces insensibility. So it had been with Alice, until she re-entered her native State, and memory and association were at work again,
“And the accustomed train
Of things grew round her brain again”;
then it was with the shrinking dread with which a burned child would approach fire that Alice drew near her home. She would have preferred to remain away for ever, amid the kaleidoscopic changes of her new, wandering, unreal life, rather than have awakened from the strange, painful, but very vague dream; rather than have consciousness forced upon her by the dear, old familiar scenes and associations of her home—her once peaceful, hopeful, happy home, as by
“Some monstrous torture-engine’s whole
Strength.”
The day of their arrival at home a large company had been invited to meet them at dinner. The days that followed were filled up with dinner parties. At length, late in the fall, they were quietly settled, and the monotonous routine of daily country life commenced. One thing Alice dreaded and avoided—appearing at church again under her new position and name. But Sinclair had accepted a “call” to a church in the West, which opened to him a new field of labor and usefulness. His departure followed; and this was a great relief to Alice, who, with the “sigh of a great deliverance, tried to leave the past with all its gloom and terror,” and turn to the future with some hope.
Two events of great domestic importance occurred in the second year of their marriage; one was the death of Colonel Chester, who died, as all their neighbors said, of nothing more than his diabolical temper; as their physician said, of congestion of the brain, brought on by excitement. And what do you think was the cause of this fatal excitement? That the child of Alice happened to be a girl instead of a boy, which he had set his heart upon.
CHAPTER VI.
COUNTRY NEIGHBORS.
Blest those abodes where want and pain repair