Her husband adored her and showed his devotion by humoring her extravagant tastes and prodigal fancies. He detested gayeties, yet complied with her slightest wish for social pleasures.
Although it was generally agreed that this young couple got on well together, at the end of two years the husband had to admit to himself that his efforts to render his wife happy had not been entirely successful. He saw that she fretted for her northern life, was bored by everything about her. She cherished a bitter resentment for the slaveholders, vowing that it was barbarous and inhuman to own human beings as her husband and neighbors did. Though expressing pity for the poor, simple, dependent creatures, she did little to make their tasks more healthful and reasonable ones, or to render them more capable and contented.
Her baby’s nurse was the one servant of her household who met with gracious treatment at her hands. This old slave came to her endowed with the womanly virtues of honor, self-respect and humility. But in marveling at her on these accounts, Mrs. Harding forgot that it was the former mistress—her husband’s mother—that had made her what she was.
At length the truth became clearly apparent that she was an obstinate, intensely prejudiced and very unreasonable woman, who, having lived for a time at a centre of fashionable intelligence in a city of culture, supposed herself to be quite beyond the reach of and entirely superior to ordinary country folk. Eventually, her morbid dissatisfaction became so extreme that her husband yielded to her importunities, closed the house, and with her and their baby boy, went to live in Boston.
This sacrifice he made quietly and uncomplainingly, his closest friends not then knowing how it wrenched his heart. A year passed, then another, and at the end of the third, the papers announced the death of Richard Harding.
Though never again seeing his southern home, where he had planned to live his life in peace and useful happiness, it had held to the end a most sacred place in his memory—a memory which he truly hoped would be transmittted to the heart and mind of his son. It was his last wish that the old homestead should remain as it was—closed to strangers—that no living being, unless of his own blood, should inhabit that abode of love and sorrow, that it be kept from the careless profanation of aliens.
The world prophesied that his widow would soon forget the wishes of the dead, but as witness that she had thus far kept faith, there stood the closed, abandoned home, upon which Nature alone laid a destroying hand.
CHAPTER II.
In process of time, hardly a brick was to be seen in this old house that had not grown purple with age and become cloaked with moss and ivy. Antiquity looked out from covering to foundation stone. Only the flowers were young, and flowers spring from a remote ancestry. This house, inlaid in solitude, was as quiet as some cloister hidden away within some French forest.
One summer afternoon, the quiet was broken by a group of college girls looking for some new flower for their botanical collection. But so full of youthful spirits were they that they hardly saw the valley lilies with stems so short that they could scarcely bear up their innocent, sweet eyes, distressed, and stare like children in a crowd.