“Sweet is never so sweet as we imagine it will be; bitter is always at least a shade bitterer than we are prepared for. Imagination slurs over the little things—and the little things, trifles in themselves, are the things that add to the poignancy of suffering. Bernard Peixada had a copy of Dante’s Inferno, illustrated by Doré, on his sitting-room table. You may guess what my life was like, when I tell you that I used to turn the pages of that book, and literally envy the poor wretches portrayed there their fire and brimstone. The utmost refinement of torture that Dante and Doré between them could conceive and describe, seemed like child’s play when I contrasted it to what I had to put up with everyday. Bernard Peixada was cruel and coarse and false. It did not take him a great while to fathom the disgust that he inspired me with; and then he undertook to avenge his wounded self-love. He contrived mortifications and humiliations for me that I can not bring myself to name, that you would have difficulty in crediting. Besides, this period of my life is not essential to what I have set myself to make plain to you. It was simply a period of mental and moral wretchedness, and of bodily decline. My health, which, I think I have said, had been failing before the eighth of August, now proceeded steadily from bad to worse. It was aggravated by the daily trials I had to endure. Of course I strove to bear up as bravely as I could.
“I did not wish Bernard Peixada to have the satisfaction of seeing how unhappy he had succeeded in making me. I did not wish my poor father and mother to witness the misery I had taken upon myself in obedience to their behests. I said, ’That which is done is done, and can not be undone, therefore let it not appear what the ordeal costs you.’ And in the main I think I was successful. Only occasionally, when I was alone, I would give myself the luxury of crying. I had never realized what a relief crying could be till now. But now well, when I would be seized by a paroxysm of grief that I could not control, when amid tears and sobs I would no doubt look most pitiable—it was then that I came nearest to being happy. I remember, on one of these occasions—Bernard Peixada had gone out somewhere—I was surprised by a sanctimonious old woman, a friend of his, if friendship can subsist between such people, a certain Mrs. Washington Shapiro. ’My dear,’ said she, ’what are you crying for?’ I was in a desperate mood. I did not care what I said; nay, more than this, I enjoyed a certain forlorn pleasure in speaking my true mind ’for once, especially to this friend of Bernard Peixada’s. ’Oh,’ I answered, ’I am crying because I wish Bernard Peixada was dead and buried.’ I had to smile through my tears at the horror-stricken countenance Mrs. Shapiro now put on. ’What! You wish Bernard Peixada was dead?’ she exclaimed. ’Shame upon you! How can you say such a thing!’—’He is a monster—he makes me unhappy,’ I responded. ’In that case,’ said Mrs. Shapiro, ’you ought to wish that you yourself were dead, not he. It is you who are monstrous, for thinking and saying such wicked things of that good man.’—’Oh,’ I rejoined, ’I am young. I have much to live for. He is an old, bad man. If he should die, it would be better for every body.’—This was, as nearly as I can remember, a month or two before the night of July 30th. As I have told you, it was a piece of self-indulgence.
“I enjoyed speaking my true sentiments; I enjoyed horrifying Mrs. Shapiro. But I was duly punished. She took pains to repeat what I had said to Bernard Peixada. He did not fail to administer an adequate punishment. Afterward, when I was tried for murder, Mrs. Shapiro turned up, and retailed our conversation to the jury, for the purpose of establishing my evil disposition.
“It was in the autumn after my marriage that my father was stricken with paralysis, and died. It was better for him. If he had lived, he could not have: remained ignorant of his daughter’s misery; and then he would have had to suffer the pangs of futile self reproach. Of course he left nothing for my mother. The creditors took possession of every thing. Bernard Peixada had been false to his bargain. Instead of canceling my father’s indebtedness to him, as he had promised, he had simply j sold his claims. Immediately after my father’s death, the creditors swooped down upon his house and shop, and sold the last stick of: furniture over my mother’s head. Mr. Nathan generously bought in the things that were most precious as keep-sakes and family relics, and returned them to my mother, after the vultures had flown away. Oddly enough, they did not appear to blame Bernard Preixada—did not hold him accountable.
“They continued to regard him as a paragon of manly virtue. Perhaps he contrived some untruthful explanation, by which they were deceived I had naturally hoped that now my mother would come to live with us. It would have been a great comfort to me, if she had done so. But Bernard Peixada wished otherwise. He cunningly persuaded her that she and I had best dwell apart. So he supplied her with enough money to pay her expenses and sent her to board in the family of a friend of his.
“Well, somehow, that fall and winter dragged away. It is something terrible for me to look back at—that blackest, bleakest winter of my life. I not understand how I managed to live through it without going mad. I was a prisoner in Bernard Peixada’s house. My mother and Mr. Nathan came to see me quite frequently; but Bernard was present during their visits and therefore I got but little solace from them.
“The only persons except my mother and Mr. Nathan whom Bernard Peixada permitted me to receive, were his own friends. And they were one and all hateful to me. To my friends he denied admittance, I was physically very weak. My ill health made it impossible for me to forget myself in my books. The effort of reading was too exhausting. I could not sit for more than a quarter of an hour at the piano? either, without all but fainting away. (Mr. Nathan had given me a piano for a wedding-present.) At the time I am referring to—when I was unable to play upon it—Bernard Peixada allowed me the free use of it. But afterward—when I had become stronger, and began to practice regularly—one day I found it locked. Bernard Peixada stood near by, and watched me try to open it. I looked at him, when I saw that I could not open it, and he looked at me. Oh, the contortion of his features, the twisting of his thin blue lips, the glitter of his venomous little eyes, the loathsome gurgle in his throat, as he laughed! He laughed at my dismay. Laughter? At least, I know no other word by which to name the hideous spasm that convulsed his voice. The result was, I passed my days moping. He objected to my leaving the house, except in his company. I had therefore to remain within doors. I used to sit at the window, and watch the life below in the street, and look across at our house—now occupied by strangers—and live over the past—my childhood, my girlhood—always stopping at the day and the hour when my father had called me from the reading of that story of Hawthorne’s, to announce my doom to me. But I am wasting your time. All this is aside from the point. I did survive that winter. And when the spring came, I began to get better in health, and to become consequently more hopeful in spirit. I said, Why, you are not yet twenty-one years old. He is sixty—and feeble at that. Only try hard to hold out a little longer—a few years at the most—and he must, in the mere course of nature, die. Then you will not yet be an old woman. Life will still be worth something to you. You will have your music, and you will be rid of him.’ Wicked? Unwomanly? Perhaps so; but I think it was the way every girl in my position would have felt. However, the consolation that came from thoughts like this, was short-lived. The next moment it would occur to me, ’He may quite possibly live to be ninety!’ And my heart would sink at the prospect of thirty years—thirty years—more of life as his wife.
“In March, 1879, Bernard Peixada spoke to me as follows: ’Judith, you are not going to be a pawnbroker’s wife much longer. I have, made arrangements to sell my business. I have leased a house up-town. We shall move on the 1st of May. After that we shall be a gentleman and lady of leisure.’
“Surely enough, on the 1st of May we moved. The house he had leased was a frame house, standing all alone in the middle of the block, between Eighty-fifth and Eighty-sixth Streets and Ninth and Tenth Avenues. It was a large, substantial, comfortable house, dating from Knickerbocker times. He had caused it to be furnished in a style which he meant to be luxurious, but which was, in truth, the extreme of ugliness. The grounds around it were laid out in a garden. We went to live there punctually on the 1st of May.
“Bernard Peixada now began to spend money with a lavish hand. He bought fine clothes and jewels, in which he required me to array myself. He even went to the length of purchasing a carriage and a pair of horses. Then he would make me go driving at his side through Central Park. He kept a coachman. The coachman was Edward Bolen. (Meanwhile, I must not forget to tell you, Bernard Peixada had quarreled and broken with my mother and Mr. Nathan. Now he allowed neither of them to enter his house.) I was in absolute ignorance concerning them. Once I ventured to ask him for news of them. He scowled. He said, ’You must never mention them in my presence.’ And he accompanied this injunction with such a look that I was careful to observe it scrupulously thereafter. I received no letters from them. You may imagine what an addition all this was to my burden.