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.
CHAPTER XVII.
| Beshrew me, but I love her heartily, For she is wise, if I can judge of her; And fair she is, if that mine eyes be true; And true she is, as she hath proved herself; And therefore, like herself, wise, fair, and true, Shall she be placed in my constant soul.—Merchant of Venice. |
A week after he had heard the tidings from the old housekeeper, Morton saw Dr. Steele coming out of a patient's door and getting into his chaise.
"Good morning, Dr. Steele."
"Sir, your servant," said the old-fashioned doctor.