CHAPTER XII.
A year and five months had passed away since the evening when Lewis Hammond held his conscience-stricken wife upon his knee, and told her—in fervid words that singularly belied his calm and even demeanor at other times—of his faith in and love for her, and his abhorrence of the sin she felt in her trembling soul that she had committed. Yet she had not the superhuman courage required to contradict a trust like this. There was no alternative but to keep up the weary, wicked mockery.
"But in all these months she must have learned to care for him!" cries Mrs. Common Sense. "There is nothing disagreeable about the man. He is not brilliant; yet he has intelligence and feeling, and is certainly attached to his wife. I have no doubt but that he indulges her in every reasonable request, and comports himself in all respects like an exemplary husband."
Granted, to each and every head of your description, my dear madam! But, for all that, his obdurate wife had not come to love him. I blush to say it; but while we are stripping hearts let us not be squeamish! There had been seasons, lasting sometimes for weeks, when her existence was a continual warfare between repugnance to him and her sense of duty; when she dreaded to hear his step in the hall, and shrank inwardly from his caress; watched and fought, until strength and mind were well-nigh gone. Mark me! I do not deny that this was as irrational as it was reprehensible; but I have never held up my poor Sarah as a model of reason or propriety. From the beginning, I have made her case a warning. The fates forbid that I should commend it to any as an example for imitation! A passionate, proud, reticent girl; a trusting, loving, deceived woman; a hopeless, desperate bride—whose heart lay like a pulseless stone in her breast at the most ardent love-words of her husband, and throbbed with wild, uncontrollable emotion at the fraternal tone and kiss of her lost and only love—I have no plea for her, save the words of Infinite compassion and Divine knowledge of human nature and human woe: "Let him that is without sin among you cast the first stone at her!"
The highly respectable firm of which Mr. Hammond was the junior member, was adding, if not field to field, thousand to thousand, of the wherewithal for the purchase of fields, or, what was better still, city lots. Mrs. Lewis Hammond had set up her carriage about a year after her marriage; said equipage being a gift from her generous husband on the occasion of the first airing of the little "Baby Belle," as she was always called in the family. Not until subsequent events had endowed it with deeper and saddest interest did Sarah read Aldrich's beautiful poem bearing the above title. Lewis' mother's name was Isabella. Her grandchild received the same, which became "Belle" on the mother's tongue, and then, because it was natural to say "Baby" too, the pretty alliteration was adopted.
To a man of Lewis' domestic tastes the advent of this child was a source of the liveliest pleasure, and the tiny inmate of his household was another and a powerful tie, binding him to a home already dear. But to the mother's lonely life, so bare of real comfort or joy—haunted by memory and darkened by remorse—the precious gift came like a ray of Heaven's purest light, a strain of angel music, saying to care, "Sleep!" to hope, "Awake, the morning cometh!" Beneath the sunshine of so much love, the infant throve finely, and without being a greater prodigy than the nine hundred and ninety-nine miracles of beauty and sprightliness who, with it, composed the thousand "blessed babies" of the day, was still a pretty, engaging creature, whose gurgling laugh and communicative "coo" beguiled the mother's solitude and made cheerful the lately silent house.
It was late in the June afternoon, and arrayed in clean white frock, broad sash, and shoulder-knots of pink ribbon, the small lady sat on her mother's lap at the front window, awaiting the appearance of the husband and father. Sarah had altered much since her marriage; "improved wonderfully," said her acquaintances. There was still in her mien a touch of haughtiness; in her countenance the look that spoke profound thought and introspection. Still, when in repose, her brow had a cast of seriousness that bordered on melancholy; but over her features had passed a change like that wrought by the sculptor's last stroke to the statue. The mould was the same—the chiselling more clear and fine. Especially after the birth of her child was this refining process most apparent in its effects. There was a softness in her smile, a gentle sweetness in her voice, as she now talked to the babe, directing its attention to the window, lest the father's approach should be unnoticed, and he disappointed in his shout of welcome.
"How affected! gotten up for show!" sneered the childless Mrs. Bond, as she rolled by in her carriage, on her way to her handsome, cheerless home and its cross master.
"She has chosen her position well, at all events," rejoined her companion, a neighbor and gossip, who had taken Lucy's place in Victoria's confidence.