Miss Ayr of Virginia, & other stories

by Julia Magruder

At last, when she had sunk into a slumber too deep for dreams, and even the sobbing breaths of her scarcely spent emotion were stilled, he gently laid by his violin and came and sat down beside her. He placed himself, with extreme care not to disturb her, at the bottom of the sofa upon which she lay. His eyes lingered on her a moment, and then wandered around the room. The poor sketches on the walls, all so weak and ineffectual, looked back at him sadly, as it seemed to him, and the piano was another reproach.

This man—Hugh Eastin—had once thought that he would be a great musician, and many years of hard study had made him rather a distinguished one, within a limited field; but nothing had come of it. At the end of that time, in the impulsive way in which he did things, he had married, and of that marriage he was the victim. He did not say so to himself; perhaps he did not even know it; but the paralysis which had fastened on his mind and soul was directly the result of his marriage. It would hardly have been possible for him to realize this, as he had enthusiastically agreed with all his friends that he was an extraordinarily fortunate man to win for a wife the pretty, virtuous, healthy, good-tempered young girl, who was known to be the heiress of the neighborhood from which she came. Her father had manifested the ambition he had for his only child, by sending her off to the city to be educated, and she had not graduated at school before the young musician, who gave lessons to the advanced pupils, had seen and fallen in love with her, and had obtained her consent, as well at that of her father, to their marriage. The engagement might have been sufficiently long to give them an opportunity to discover their unfitness for each other, had it not been that the girl’s father died very suddenly. It was then decided that, as she had no near relations to be responsible for her, she should be married at once. The wedding was therefore hastened, and he found himself, almost before he could realize the change in the current of his life, settled at the obscure country place, which his wife resolutely determined never to leave, and all his dreams of foreign study, and achievement in his art were suddenly in ashes.

It took him many a day to realize the inevitableness of his present environment, and when at last he looked it in the face, it bewildered him. He was married to a woman as severely practical in her ideas, and systematic in her life, as he was visionary and erratic. She was stronger than he, both in nature and character, and the habit of yielding to her had now become the absolute rule of his life. Very shortly after their marriage she had found his music an inconvenience, and although she had made no outward objection to the arrival of the grand piano, she had, when it suited her, accomplished its removal to the old outhouse, where no one could be disturbed by it. It was not so much the noise she minded, as the sight of useless hours and misdirected energies. On coming into her property she had shown herself a capable business woman, and she managed the large farming operations in connection with it with ability and success. It had never seemed to occur to her to commit these matters to her husband, and he felt it a deep relief that he was spared an effort which he knew would have ended in failure. Early in their married life he had suspected that his wife felt her marriage to have been a foolish one, and as time went on the certainty of this conviction settled upon him. But then came the children, and in them, without doubt, she was more than compensated for her disappointment in her husband.

She was a woman of great shrewdness, and her decision that her husband had no capacity in him but music, once made, she ceased to expect anything but music from him. For herself, she had no respect for music as an art, and no perception of it as an enjoyment, and she did not scruple to say so. One day her husband heard her say to a friend, that she prayed every morning and evening of her life that she might never have a musical child. He never forgot that moment. It was not said to him, but she evidently had no objection to his hearing it. It was only an incidental remark, and the two women went on with the discussion of household affairs, from which it had been an off-shoot. As for Eastin, his heart-strings tightened, his breath came quick, his throat hurt him, and his eyeballs grew hot with the repression of tears. A sick terror seemed to take possession of him, and when he turned and walked to the window, his eyes seemed to look out on absolute despair.

For he, poor fellow, had been praying a prayer, too—the one consistent, fervid, passionately persevered in prayer of his life. Night, and morning, and at noonday, whether on his knees or walking in the fields or wandering along the river banks, or oftener still, when he held his precious violin beneath his chin, that prayer arose with suddenly uplifted eyes to the great God whose power was infinite, and who could, if He would, give him his heart’s desire—a child with the musical gift. He longed, too, that this child might have a nature and heart to comprehend and sympathize with his, though his wish he did not put into words. He felt absolutely sure that the greater would contain the less, and that if the music were there the sympathy could not lack. He knew his wife was right in holding that the musical faculty, alone, was a blessing to no one, and his hope was that this child might inherit from its mother the decision, industry and capableness that would complement the gift of music, which was the one thing of himself that he felt he could wish any child of his to possess. He was acutely aware that his life was a failure—that he had lacked the capacity to put his musical power to any use. He had worked hard over it for years, and although people had praised and admired his music, no advancement or recognition amounting to anything had come of it. He knew that it was his own fault—he claimed no sympathy for himself and no merit. He wished that the child might have all the traits that he lacked, but he passionately wished, also, that it might have one thing that he possessed—this spirit of music, that was to him alternately a devil of despair and an angel of consolation. Surely, surely, if another being should possess an inward prompting such as his, something would come of it! Surely, no other creature who possessed it could be so handicapped by the impotent body and incapable mind, which he knew to be its accompaniment in him!

Dreams of that child were the theme of all his aspirations and imaginations, and when, in the midst of some uplifting strain of music, he realized that it was absolutely a possibility—a thing that might simply and naturally come about, he would sometimes utter his soul in such sounds of harmony, that again would come the old haunting thought of composing some grand oratorio or opera, and he would begin desperately to try to get down on paper the music in his soul.

Sometimes the fit of exaltation and hope would last for hours, but it was enough to be brought for one moment into contact with the realities around him to stop it all. A summons to dinner would come, perhaps, and, if obeyed, the atmosphere produced by this change of scene was fatal. If he ventured to disregard such a summons, he felt the pall of coldness and disapproval hanging over him, and that feeling crippled him. It was a favorite remark of his wife, that considering how little she required or expected of him, she thought she had a right to demand that he should be regular at meals, and should not counteract the lesson of punctuality which she tried to instil into her children. He felt the force of this, and stifled his complaints, living in dread of meal-time, and often prevented by this dread from making any progress at all.

When the heavy discouragement which came from his continually frustrated efforts settled down upon him, he grew moody and silent, and feeling that he was a drone in this busy household, he would seek the wide and unreproaching fields, or sit by the placid river bank, and content himself for hours imagining what would happen if the wonder-child he dreamed of should be born to him. His own life and career were utterly without hope, but now he could live again a better, fuller, freer life in this fresh young one, unhampered by inherent difficulties and self-made hindrances.

As time went on his life became daily more circumscribed and aimless. His wife, with her usual shrewdness, had discovered that any effort to make a farmer and a man of business of him would be folly, and had long ago given it up. By degrees, she seemed to expect less and less of him, accepted the evident and inevitable, and ordered the life of her household in complete independence of him. She was a woman who felt it important to have the approval of her conscience and her neighbors, and both the one and the other acquitted her of blame concerning her duty as a wife. Sometimes people expressed wonder at her great patience with such a husband—a thing that she never encouraged them to say—but she felt that she deserved the tribute, and in this opinion her husband concurred. The task in life to which she set herself with the greatest fervor was to counteract in her children any tendency to resemble their father. So far, there had been slight indication of anything of the sort, and after having borne four little counterparts of herself in dispositions and tastes, she had almost ceased to dread a reproduction of her husband.

In the same way Eastin had almost ceased to hope for that which she dreaded. In four instances had he gone through that agitating conjecture, and wonder, and hope, and fear, and hung eagerly upon every sign of baby intelligence that he saw. He would make occasions for taking the babies—the first, the second, the third, the fourth, consecutively—apart from every observer, and would hum or whistle different tunes to them, play furtively on a little music-box he had procured for the purpose, and even—when he could keep them long enough from their watchful mother’s observation—try the effect of playing to them on his piano or violin, after having propped them safely on the sofa where he could watch every expression that crossed their little faces.