Eight years had elapsed since she had looked upon the home of her happy childhood, when at length came an invitation from her mother to pay her a visit. For a long time the pride of the wife and a sensitive spirit wounded by long repulse, battled against the yearning love for father, mother, sisters, and home. At length she decided to go, but when only a few days there, her mother endeavored to persuade her to renounce me. At once her constant and faithful heart revolted, and she went out and ordered a man to call for her trunk. At the family’s entreaties she finally consented to remain, but it was with the understanding that she had made her choice and would abide by it; that if she deplored our misfortunes she did not regret her love. This second separation from home and from the luxury and magnificence which she saw around her, tempting her the more by their inviting contrast to the hard conditions by which experience had tried her married life, have always seemed to me to be the noblest sacrifice and adds a hallowed lustre to the brightness with which memory enshrines the recollection of her unfaltering love and devotion.
Two years more we struggled on through varying fortunes. Her father on one or two occasions visited her, but having failed to separate us, her mother gave no more sign of reconciliation. One Saturday evening my wife and self and our colored boy, Charley, went to market, and while out I purchased for her a satin dress, jokingly remarking that it would “help her to catch a new beau.” She replied, “I[“I] might be buried in it.” After purchasing our Sunday supplies, I put her and the colored boy on the car to return home, while I left all that was best and dearest to me to follow the irresistible and fatal fascination of the green cloth table. I gambled till a late hour and then started for home.[home.] On the street everything seemed to be “turned around”[“turned around”] to me, so that I was compelled to ask a policeman for direction home. Arriving, I retired to bed, but a strange and somber feeling had taken possession of me. An unaccountable sadness seized my soul; a vague and irrepressible sense of impending calamity, without any palpable or definable reason, weighed upon me, and I burst into a passion of tears. My wife asked me what the trouble was, but that I did not know myself.
On Monday her mother called during my absence, and induced her to go down town. They remained together at the Laclede Hotel during Monday and Tuesday nights. This absence seemed to intensify the gloomy forebodings which I could neither explain nor comprehend, nor shake off. It almost seemed as if I were going to lose the one joy of my life. The pall of gloom upon my mind was such that sleep or rest was impossible. For hours I would get up and walk the floor, wrestling with the shadowy terror which seemed so close and incomprehensible. Was it the warning from another world of a direful grief so soon to befall? The dread rustling of the wings hovering even now over the happiness of my hearthstone?
Wednesday morning she returned home. I remember that we had a box of sardines, and ate them out of the same saucer. She said we would go down in the same car together and might possibly meet her mother at one of the stores. She requested me to speak to her mother if we met, which I at first declined, but on seeing that it grieved her, consented to. She also requested me to buy some little presents for her little invalid sister, Zollie, whom she tenderly loved, and on leaving her I went to the St. Bernard’s dollar store and made some purchases for this purpose and proceeded with them to the hotel. Enquiring for Mrs. Harvey, I was told that she and her daughter had left for home. “My God!” I exclaimed to myself, “has May forsaken me?” I immediately took a car home, and there, to my inexpressible relief and delight, was May, herself, looking a thousand times fairer than ever before. Doubtless, she had employed this last interview with her mother in endeavoring to promote the reconciliation which her tender heart, filled with affection for both husband and parent, so fully desired. She told a friend of ours that when her mother left her that morning she had said: “Daughter, I would rather see you in your grave than continue to live with that man.” Little she recked that before the sun should go down upon the bitterness of her heart the fell wish would become a tragic reality.
I was at this time interested in a foot race and was in training at Court Brilliant race track. I kissed her good-bye about 10 o’clock of the day her mother left St. Louis, saying that I would be back for dinner between 3 and 4 o’clock in the afternoon. Little did I dream that this embrace had parted us forever on earth! When I arrived home the colored boy, Charley, met me at the door, saying, “Miss’ May fell down stairs and was hurt bad.” Alarmed, I hastened into the house. It was full of strangers. I rushed to the bedside, and there, white and still, lay my wife, the dear one who had so often told me she would lay down her life for my sake. I put my lips to hers; they were not yet cold. With a cry of agony I knelt by her side and my heart seemed to cease to beat. It could not be possible that my May, so full of life when but a few hours before I had left her, was now lying dead before me! That those eyes would never again open to look upon me with an affection that never wearied or grew faint! That those lips were never more to open to speak to me one word of hope or love! Words fail to depict the anguish and the utterness of the loss which it seemed so hard to realize. Death is hard and cruel even when it comes to those whom age or disease has long marked for its own; but how unutterably sad when it comes without warning and sweeps away in one moment the brightness and sweetness of life alike from the victim and from those who are left to mourn!
I was informed subsequently that in descending the stairs she had caught her foot in her dress and fallen headlong, striking the door sill with her head. She was carried up to her room, insensible, and lay for about three hours in a comatose condition. At length she rose up in bed, exclaiming, “Where is John? Oh, ma! ma! you break my heart! You won’t forgive me! Take down my hair, I am dying!” This was the last effort of consciousness. She lay back in bed and passed quietly into the silent sleep from which there is no waking. She expired at half past three on April 29, 1880.
Her father, who had that morning arrived at the Union Stock Yards, was notified and came immediately, and I have often wondered what were his thoughts as he stood by the bedside of his dead child, to whose life his unforgiving spirit had brought so much sadness. In this trial there was one circumstance that has always afforded me a melancholy satisfaction. Although we had been poor almost the entire portion of our married life, at the time of her death I was in a position to give her honorable and reverent sepulture, and to respect her wishes oft expressed in life with regard to burial. She had always desired to be laid to rest in a corner of the lawn at her parental home, at Roanoke, and there it was agreed her remains should be taken. This time, as she crossed the threshold of the old home, there was no unkind look or word of reproach, for upon her pallid and peaceful brow there was enthroned the majesty of the sovereign fate of all, before which the paltry passions of pride and anger shrink away in shame. As she lay there surrounded by father, mother, sisters and friends, the look of trouble and care which had rested there of late had all disappeared, and only the sweetness and peace of eternal rest remained. Listening to the expressions of love, sympathy and admiration which came from those who surrounded her bier, I could not but think that it might have been better if a few of the tokens of affections now extended around her lifeless form had been bestowed while her warm and loving heart had hungered and yearned in vain during the struggle of our married life. But pride and anger had been allowed to stand in the way of natural affection, and both hearts had suffered. It was now too late for vain regrets to make atonement or to undo the wrong from which only death gave relief to her gentle spirit.
I certainly think if her parents could have seen us on several occasions struggling through the hard places, they would have come to our relief. Her father showed at times that he felt kindly for his child and was willing to take her back into his heart as he had taken her in his arms when a little child, but her mother, who exercised a great deal of influence over him, would not forgive nor allow him to forgive. I suppose she thought she was doing a mother’s duty and that morality compelled her to treat her child as a stranger and an outcast. I have sinned often in allowing the tears to gather in the eyes of my dear wife, but I know this: she was troubled more by the way her parents treated her than by any sorrow that came through my life. True, I was a gambler, and as she said, “God knows, that’s bad enough!” but I was always good to her, and so far as it was in my power, strove to make her happy.
I have sometimes thought that I did her a wrong in our marriage. From the time I was sixteen years of age I had been familiar with the vicissitudes of a gambler’s life, and had always in good luck or bad fortune remained light hearted. If fortune smiled upon me I was the gayest of the gay; if fortune frowned I whistled and waited for a better day. With my wife it was otherwise. She had been brought up so tenderly that she knew not what it was to have a wish ungratified or a want unsupplied. She was not in any way prepared to meet the fickle and uncertain experiences to which a gambler necessarily subjects his family. As a flower bends before the wind which blows too rudely upon it, so she bowed when ill luck brought us to want and privation. The only excuse I have to offer is that I sincerely loved her and thought I could make her life happy. If I failed may God forgive me, but I did the best I could.
As I look back after the experience of years, I come to this conclusion—she was too good for me. In the hours of gloom there was never a look or word of reproach. Had there been more of the force of a sterner character about her I might have yielded to her influence and stopped gambling, settled down and become a steady, industrious, God-fearing man. I say God fearing because I always had a deep sense of religious truth. My companions used to say, “John, you were never cut out for a gambler; you would make a good minister.” This element of sternness she did not possess. Her nature was all love and gentleness, and so, like two heedless children, we played with life; ate of its good things when fortune brought us plenty; drank of its bitter water when we had lost our all.