"I must make the sacrifice complete, and incur any harsh judgment it may bear. I see that I shall be driven for sympathy to the last place in the world I anticipated: to my husband's heart. Yes, there is something besides love in marriage: if I cannot love him, he can understand me."
Vesta had come to a place all come to who volunteer an act of great sacrifice—to have it put upon a low motive from the lower plane of sacrifice in many otherwise kind people. We give our money to an institution of charity, and it is said that it was for notoriety, or self-seeking, or at the expense of our kin. We lead a forlorn hope in politics, or some other arena, to establish a cause or assist a principle, with the certain result of defeat, and we are said to be jealous or malignant. Perhaps we make a book to illustrate some old region off the highways of observation, drawn to it by kindred strings or early patterings, and the politician there regards it as an attack, the old family fossil as an intrusion, the very youth as if it were a queer and gratuitous thing from such an outer source. So we wince a little, but feel that it was necessary to be misunderstood to complete the sacrifice.
The feeling of despondency increased after the little company separated, and Vesta went to her room and laid herself upon her still maiden bed. She had said her prayer and asked the approval of God, but her nervous system, under the tension of almost two days' excitement and events such as she had never known, was alert and could not fall to slumber. Old passages of Testament lore haunted her soul, such as: "Thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee;" "A man shall leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife." She began to see that marriage was not merely the solution of a family trouble, and the giving of her body as a hostage for a pecuniary debt, but that it was a rendition of all her liberty, even the liberty of sympathy and of sorrow, to the man to whom she must cleave.
In marrying him she had left friendship, father and mother, everything, at a greater distance than she ever dreamed; and they resented the desertion to the degree that they now confounded her with her new interest, let go their claim upon her, and could scarce conceive of her except in the dual relation of a woman subject to her husband, and selfish as himself.
"I wonder if he will grow weary of me, too," she thought, with anguish, "after his possession is established and I shall have no other source of confidence? What did I know of this world only yesterday? Then every way seemed clear and open for me, my friends abundant, and love profuse; to-day I am in awful doubts, and yet I must not lose my will and drift with every passing fear and confusion into the fickleness which makes woman contemptible after she has given her hand. I will never give up two persons—my father, and my husband!"
As she turned down the lamp, it being nearly midnight, a short, fierce cry, quickly stifled, as if some wild animal had howled once in nightmare and fallen asleep in his kennel again, seized on her ears and chilled her blood.
Vesta started up in bed and listened. It seemed to her that there were footsteps, but they passed away, and she listened in vain for any other sounds, till sleep fell deep and dreamless upon her, like black Lethe winding through a desert wedding-day.