Portraits of women

by Gamaliel Bradford

The sister also kept a journal. But while Maurice’s was addressed to himself or to curious posterity, hers was addressed only to him; even after death had snatched him from her, only to him. All her inmost thoughts go there, all her hopes, all her sorrows, and to pour them out to him is the great preoccupation of her life. She can say to him things she cannot say to others. He will understand. He has always understood. With great and with little events it is the same. A sunset walk in the fields and the death of a dear friend—each alike must be discussed with Maurice. All the emotion each brings with it must be confided to him. Anxiety for his health, for his future, for his happiness, is constantly blended with her own daily doings, the whole making a curious tissue of love, as fine and delicate as it is tender and true.

To turn to the brother’s journal from the sister’s is a fruitful lesson in human nature. In her life everything is related to him. In his she is an element, an episode, beloved, delightful, nothing more. Her name hardly occurs in his Journal, even casually. The letters he writes to her are affectionate, and appeal for comfort when he needs it. He was the sun of her life. In his, even before his marriage, she was only a tranquil star, shining quietly, treasured, but not always remembered. She knew this. Love always knows. Looking back, after he was gone, she wonders if she did not sometimes bore him. While she had him with her, the longed-for letters used to come, not always bringing what she demanded of them. “How my fingers burned to open that letter in which at last I was to see you. I have seen you, but I do not know you. You open only your head to me. It was your heart, your soul, the very inmost of your being, what makes your life, that I hoped to see.”

No lack of response made any difference in the sister’s ardent affection, however, unless perhaps to increase the ardor, as sometimes happens in this inconsequent world. Eugénie’s thought was ever on the beloved object, on his reading, on his thinking, on his material condition, on his varied failure and success in his efforts to overcome the maddening poverty which hampered his progress. Yet how strange are the vagaries of the human heart. With all her passionate thought and affection, I do not find that she gave much heed to the one interest which was positive in Maurice’s life, his desire to achieve enduring beauty for the delight of men. When a life is devoured by this longing, it measures all things and all people by their sympathy with it and contribution to it. It is perhaps just here that Eugénie failed to evoke the entire response she looked for from her brother’s heart. To be sure, when his writings were gathered together after his death, she expressed great interest and some enthusiasm. Yet even then her chief anxiety was that he should not be misrepresented, misunderstood, mispraised as pagan rather than Christian, and she did not hesitate to assert that he had no thought of fame and did not desire it.

How even our most unselfish love is absorbed in its own point of view! How hard it is to love others as they would be loved, not as we would be loved. Eugénie worried perpetually about Maurice’s soul, but very little about his reputation. She had not learned the profound truth and beauty of Madame de Choiseul’s remark: “I have always had the vanity of those I love: that is my fashion of loving.”

I wonder whether the young wife from the far Indies, whom Maurice married when death was already beginning to lay its hand on him, had any more sympathy with his aspirations for this world. There is no evidence that she had, though she was tender and devoted in her care and ministrations to the very last.

It is most curious to observe Eugénie’s relation to this new sister. Even for a mother, who has her own distinct, assured claim, it is hard enough to give up a son she loves. But a sister, with all a mother’s love, but only a sister’s intimacy, cannot see the forming of a new and stronger bond without some dread, some repugnance, some coldness at the heart. Eugénie, like all persons who analyze their feelings, was naturally inclined to doubt others’ affection because she doubted her own desert. When her friends fail to write to her, she hints her grief about it. When the tone of Maurice’s letters is indifferent, or she fancies that it is, she frets and broods over it. “Do you remember that little short letter that tormented me for a fortnight?” How, then, did she bear the intrusion of a stranger heart, sure to see into all the hidden places where even she had not been privileged to come? We can divine well enough how hard it was. Her tone about her new sister might indeed seem to be all praise. She is good, she is beautiful, she is devoted to Maurice, she fulfils all her duties and is a sweet companion and friend. Nevertheless, there is the faintest, perfectly unintentional patronage. Her family are not, perhaps, quite all they should be. Her dress, charming, delightful, appropriate, but is it a little startling for a country town, that black velvet hat with an ostrich plume, fit to amaze earth and heaven, as a neighbor puts it? But we do so want to be friendly, to do our part. “I hope Maurice will be happy with her. She isn’t just the sort of woman I am used to, for character, or heart, or face. She is a stranger. I am studying her. I am trying to get her near to me, to enter into her life, if she cannot enter into mine.”

When they both together were soothing the last hours of the beloved one, Eugénie has nothing but praise and affection for her sister-in-law. But who could miss the poignancy of the quiet remark that the sister lies awake all night and hears the wife ministering to the husband as she herself would like to minister? It is hard to tell which is more significant, this comment or that of a few weeks earlier: “They are happy. Maurice is a perfect husband. He is worth a hundred of what he was a year ago. He told me so himself. He confides in me just as much as ever. We often talk together intimately.”

On one point Maurice’s marriage seems to be as satisfactory as it could be, that of religion. His wife does not appear to have distracted him in any way from his salvation, which would have been hard for Eugénie; nor yet does the wife promote it more than the sister did, which would have been even harder. Maurice’s salvation! That was the object of Eugénie’s daily thoughts and of her nightly prayers. Maurice’s salvation! While she had him under her own motherly wing, all was well. He might perhaps have been too easily distracted, not intensely serious, as she was; but at least his faith was firmly grounded and she sent him out into the great world, confident that he would be a white soldier of Christ always.

Alas, how often such hopes are disappointed! Not that Maurice really sinned, or went astray. Most would have thought him virtuous enough, Christian enough. But he took a certain interest in the heresies of his adored teacher, Lamennais, and, to the half-cloistered sister at any rate, he appeared much tainted with the follies and incredulities of an unbelieving age. How she longed to have him back with her, at least in spirit! How she prayed that he might pray! How she trembled and shrank at the thought that after being separated on earth they might not be united in heaven! “I am not holy enough to convert you, nor strong enough to draw you with me. God alone can do that. Oh, how I ask it of him, for all my happiness goes with it. Perhaps you cannot imagine, with your philosophic eye you cannot see, the tears of a Christian eye, weeping for a soul that may be lost, a soul so much beloved, a brother’s soul, the sister of one’s own.”

At least she had the satisfaction of feeling that in the end her prayers were answered and that the frail and wavering spirit returned to die in the faith in which she had cradled it. Taking a view with which the unregenerate will find it hard to sympathize, she declares that errors of the intellect are much more serious, more dangerous than errors of the heart. To her fond hope it seemed that on her brother’s deathbed intellectual errors were all forgotten, and after he had left her she resented bitterly the verdict of great writers, George Sand and Sainte-Beuve, that he would live to posterity as a poet of nature whose essential spirit was much less Christian than Greek.