A year had passed by, and amid the hurry of business and the din of the great city, I had quite forgotten Glenburn and its fairy queen. It was a time to recall her to mind, that lovely June morning—with its soft fleecy clouds, its glad sunlight, its song of birds, and its breath of roses; and so I threw the reins on Romeo’s neck, that he might choose his own pace down the sweet-briar path, to John Morrison’s cottage. And there sat John, in the doorway, smoking his pipe, with Towser crouched at his feet, in the same old spot, just as if the sun had never gone down behind the hills since I parted with him.
“And ‘our Nelly?’” said I, taking up the thread of his year-old narrative as though it had never been broken—“and ‘our Nelly?’”
“Under the sod,” said the old man, with a dark frown; “under the sod. He broke her heart, just as I told you he would. Such a bridal as it was! I’d as lief have gone to a funeral. And then Walter carried her off to the city, where she was as much out of her element as a humming-bird in a meeting-house; and tried to make a fine lady of her, with stiff, city airs, and stiff, city manners. It was like trying to fetter the soft west wind, which comes and goes at its own sweet will; and Nelly—who was only another name for Nature—pined and drooped like a bird in a darkened cage.
“One by one her old friends dropped off, wearied with repeated and rude repulses from her moody husband, till he was left, as he desired, master of the field. It was astonishing the ascendency he gained over his sweet wife, contemptible as he was. She made no objection to his most absurd requirements; but her step lost its spring, her eye its sparkle; and one might listen long for her merry-ringing laugh. Slowly, sadly to Nelly came that terrible conviction from which a wife has no appeal.
“Ah! there is no law to protect woman from negative abuse!—no mention made in the statute book (which men frame for themselves), of the constant dropping of daily discomforts which wear the loving heart away—no allusion to looks or words that are like poisoned arrows to the sinking spirit. No! if she can show no mark of brutal fingers on her delicate flesh, he has fulfilled his legal promise to the letter—to love, honor and cherish her. Out on such a mockery of justice!
“Well, sir; Nelly fluttered back to Glenburn, with the broken wing of hope, to die! So wasted! so lovely! The lips that blessed her, could not choose but curse him. ‘She leaned on a broken reed,’ said her old gray-haired father, as he closed her blue eyes forever. ‘May God forgive him, for I never can,’ said an old lover, whose heart was buried in her grave.
“‘Nelly May, aged 18.’
“You’ll read it in the village churchyard, Sir. Eighteen! Brief years, Sir, to drain all of happiness Life’s cup could offer!”