Miss Ayr of Virginia, & other stories

by Julia Magruder

Few souls, the greatest and strongest, can have known deeper pain than that endured by this starved and eager man, as the result of all these experiments. If by any chance an illusive look or smile led him to believe that for which he so thirsted was at last held to his lips, the disappointment which followed was only the keener. Each one of his children, boys and girls, had proved to be almost mysteriously like their mother. He used to wonder at this, and at times some bitterness mingled with the wonder in his gentle breast. Were they not his children, too? Why was it that, as if by instinct, each one of them would range itself with their mother, while he stood perpetually alone? The paternal instinct, at first so profoundly stirred in him, grew weak and meaningless, as the sure development of time would place the child by nature and instinct, and later by choice, with his wife and her other children.

In every instance, the children, beginning with indifference about music, grew to dislike it, encouraged by their mother, who always showed her approval when this feeling was manifested. It was simple and explicable enough. The mother was a strong, compelling, intensely alive personality, whose importance and authority everyone recognized, while the father was gentle, deprecating and insignificant, and it was not hard for the intuition of childhood to discover that he was tolerated rather than approved. There were even occasions upon which they had heard him laughed at and turned into amiable ridicule.

Once, in the presence of the older children, some neighbors had come to make a visit, one of the number being so unusually experienced for that country as to have lived for a winter in the city where Eastin had met his wife. This woman, whose face and voice had a certain quality of sympathy which touched his heart, drew Eastin into conversation—a thing which scarcely any one ever took the trouble to do. She remembered to have heard him play at a concert with a very beautiful young girl, who had been compelled by illness to stop in the midst of her performance. After reminding Eastin that she had been present at this concert, the visitor said suddenly:

“What became of that lovely girl who was taken ill that night?”

“Dead, darling,” Eastin astonished her by saying, throwing into his answer all the plaintive tenderness aroused by the reminiscence, and not noticing the fact that he had applied a term of endearment to the decorous matron before him. He perhaps would never have realized it, if a suppressed titter, in which his own children took part, had not called his attention to the fact. Then he recollected himself, and a hot flush rose to his face. He got up and left the room, not in the least comforted by the fact, that, as he did so, he heard his wife rebuking the children for laughing at their father. It seemed to put him in such a miserable position that the rebuke should be necessary, and that his wife, in giving it, manifested a degree of wifely dutifulness for which her friends gave her their admiration.

There were tears in his eyes as he took up his old slouch hat from the hall table and put it on, letting himself out into the sunlit fields where the birds made their music without calling contempt upon themselves, and where nature seemed to hold out her arms to him and to invite him to repose upon the only breast which harbored no disapproval or criticism of him.

One thing which had bitten deep into Eastin’s heart was shame at the lack of resolution and purpose, which had allowed him all these years to go on with this idle and aimless life. Once or twice he had made an effort to escape it, but those had been the occasions of the most painful and bitter scenes he had ever known. His idea of going forth into the world and making a career for himself with his music was the one thing his wife would not tolerate. She was afraid of what this break from his family might lead to, and she had all a country-bred woman’s horror of being pointed at as a deserted wife. It mattered little that her husband was separated from her in soul, compared to what it would be to have him separated from her visibly. It was pride—pride for her wifehood and motherhood—that made her feel so intensely on this subject, and she made no pretense of any more tender feeling.

If she had made it the appeal of love, even at this late hour, and had shown him that she wanted him to stay, because he was dear to her, he would have stayed and been happy. But his reason for staying was that when she told him that it was the one thing he could ever do for her or for her children—that neither had anything besides this to ask at his hands—her words, scathing and mortifying as they were, carried conviction, and he felt a moment’s divine thrill in making the sacrifice.

Another motive which prompted him to stay was a natural and unconquerable self-distrust, which warned him unceasingly that failure and disappointment were to be his lot in life. There was still a third motive—stronger, perhaps, than either of the others, and the one of all the three which he was most reluctant to own. This was a feeling deep in his soul, that a return to the conditions of life which he had once known would put him to a terrible test. His artistic temperament made him keenly susceptible to appeals to the senses, and during all these years his senses had been so starved that he was actually afraid to go willfully into places of temptation. A life of that sort would be infinitely more dangerous to him now than it had been before, for the reason that in youth he had always an ideal to live up to, and he had no ideal now. He had then been constrained to keep from self-abasement by the thought of bringing a clean body and soul to offer to the woman he would some day love. But the clear star of ideal love no longer shone for him, and the thought of what he might do if opportunity came was a powerful restraint upon him. This, with the two other strong reasons, was sufficient to bind him to the spot of earth on which his wife and children lived.

He was not without a real attachment to his family, and he was proud of the two healthy boys and the two rosy-faced girls in a deprecating sort of way, which implied his knowledge that he deserved the least possible credit for them. But these were quiet, serious feelings, which had more the nature of opinions than emotions. He had been acutely disappointed to find almost immediately after his marriage that his wife was in no sense a companion to him, and he had since become convinced that any possibility of a companionship with his children was out of the question.