The Bride of the Mistletoe

by James Lane Allen

Thus scorn and satire became her speech; she soared above him with spurning; a frenzy of poisoned joy racked her that at the moment when he had let her know that he wanted to be free—at that moment she might tell him he had won his freedom at the cheap price of his unworthiness.

And thus as she descended, she enjoyed the triumph of rising; so the devil in us never lacks argument that he is the celestial guide.

Moreover, hatred never dwells solitary; it readily finds boon companions. And at one period of the night she began to look back upon her experience with a curious sense of prior familiarity—to see it as a story already known to her at second hand. She viewed it as the first stage of one of those tragedies that later find their way into the care of family physicians, into the briefs of lawyers, into the confidence of clergymen, into the papers and divorce courts, and that receive their final flaying or canonization on the stage and in novels of the time. Sitting at a distance, she had within recent years studied in a kind of altruistic absorption how the nation’s press, the nation’s science of medicine, the nation’s science of law, the nation’s practice of religion, and the nation’s imaginative literature were all at work with the same national omen—the decay of the American family and the downfall of the home.

Now this new pestilence raging in other regions of the country had incredibly reached her, she thought, on the sheltered lowlands where the older traditions of American home life still lay like foundation rock. The corruption of it had attacked him; the ruin of it awaited her; and thus to-night she took her place among those women whom the world first hears of as in hospitals and sanitariums and places of refuge and in their graves—and more sadly elsewhere; whose misfortunes interested the press and whose types attracted the novelists.

She was one of them.

They swarmed about her; one by one she recognized them: the woman who unable to bear up under her tragedy soon sinks into eternity—or walks into it; the woman who disappears from the scene and somewhere under another name or with another lot lives on—devoting herself to memory or to forgetfulness; the woman who stays on in the house, giving to the world no sign for the sake of everything else that still remains to her but living apart—on the other side of the locked door; the woman who stays on without locking the door, half-hating, half-loving—the accepted and rejected compromise; the woman who welcomes the end of the love-drama as the beginning of peace and the cessation of annoyances; the woman who begins to act her tragedy to servants and children and acquaintances—reaping sympathy for herself and sowing ruin and torture—for him; the woman who drops the care of house, ends his comforts, thus forcing the sharp reminder of her value as at least an investment toward his general well-being; the woman who endeavors to rekindle dying coals by fanning them with fresh fascinations; the woman who plays upon jealousy and touches the male instinct to keep one’s own though little prized lest another acquire it and prize it more; the woman who sets a watch to discover the other woman: they swarmed about her, she identified each.

And she dismissed them. They brought her no aid; she shrank from their companionship; a strange dread moved her lest they should discover her. One only she detached from the throng and for a while withdrew with her into a kind of dual solitude: the woman who when so rejected turns to another man—the man who is waiting somewhere near.

The man she turned to, who for years had hovered near, was the country doctor, her husband’s tried and closest friend, whose children were asleep upstairs with her children. During all these years her secret had been—the doctor. When she had come as a bride into that neighborhood, he, her husband’s senior by several years, was already well established in his practice. He had attended her at the birth of her first child; never afterwards. As time passed, she had discovered that he loved her; she could never have him again. This had dealt his professional reputation a wound, but he understood, and he welcomed the wound.

Many a night, lying awake near her window, through which noises from the turnpike plainly reached her, all earthly happiness asleep alongside her, she could hear the doctor’s buggy passing on its way to some patient, or on its return from the town where he had patients also. Many a time she had heard it stop at the front gate: the road of his life there turned in to her. There were nights of pitch darkness and beating rain; and sometimes on these she had to know that he was out there.

Long she sat in the shadow of her room, looking towards the bed where her husband slept, but sending the dallying vision toward the doctor. He would be at the Christmas party; she would be dancing with him.