CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
As William and Clarissa talked over these scientific problems, the mother's anxiety and perplexity kept presenting new problems to William. His love for Clarissa, as well as for his children, made him negative and receptive to many thoughts and conjectures of theirs he would not have noticed in a stranger. One of the principal factors and questions occurring to Clarissa's mind was, having children of her own, a boy and a girl, would she wish to see them influenced and controlled by another and outside influence from their own, the same as Merle and Alice were?
She knew her husband's motives were worthy and excellent, that he would not impel them to do any deed he would not inspire his own child to do, but he was only one man, and all men are not as honorable and trustworthy as he. Many men, having the same degree of power, would have used it for less honorable purposes. She knew just enough of it, to know that the subject is not responsible and ought never to be blamed (where justice is rife,) for the motive or intent that inspired the operator.
Before her range of vision was continually rising the picture of Augustus or her baby girl, controlled and influenced by some powerful mind concentrator. How did she know what such a person might make them do?
This one thought haunted her like an unwelcome and unbidden guest, and as her latest darling, the baby girl, lay close to her breast, she pondered upon the subject more than she ever had with Augustus. Once there had been a time when she had courted this influence, thinking it might possibly, by some agency not known to her, restore strength and vigor to his limbs. To obtain the power of locomotion for him had been her supreme thought and desire. To gain this, she would have offered herself a glad and willing sacrifice upon any altar that might have presented itself between her and her goal.
When her girl baby was given her, for her keeping, its presence, enriched by her husband's love and solicitude, her thoughts instead of passing into the groove or channel of personal disappointment, roamed into the path of conjecture and speculation of what might happen in the babe's life.
She was still prejudiced by the popular thought, that will excuse in a man's life that which they will not endeavor to condone in a woman's. As she would hold that small, helpless baby close to her, finding satisfaction in the intimate association of touch, she could not help but think of the time or season when Augustus and this child would mature and reach conditions proximate to those of Merle and Alice.
Somehow, there was an innate horror in her mind, when she thought of their being in as complete subjection to the will and dictation of others as Merle and Alice were to that of her husband.
This thought did not arise from anything she had seen either suffer, or pass through at her husband's dictation; on the contrary, so far as man's sight is privileged to scan material conditions, they had been benefited and assisted by his presence and power in their lives; still, that was no guarantee that every mesmerist wrought equally good effects in his subjects' lives.