The comfortless evening repast was over, and he betook himself to the library, Sarah's favorite room, as it was also his. Her low easy-chair stood in its usual place opposite his at the center-table, but her workbasket was missing; likewise the book with its silver marker, that he was wont to see lying side by side with some volume he had selected for his own reading. But one lay there now, and there was an odd choking in his throat as he read the title on the back. He had expressed a wish for it in Sarah's hearing some days before, and her delicate forethought had left it here as a solace and keepsake, one that should, while reminding him of her, yet charm away sad feelings in her absence. Even in the exterior of the gift, she had been regardful of his taste. The binding was solid and rich; no gaudy coloring or tawdry gilt; the thick smooth paper and clear type were a luxury to touch and sight. Lewis was no sentimentalist in the ordinary acceptation of the term, yet he kissed the name his wife had traced upon the fly-leaf ere he sat down to employ the evening as she by her gift tacitly requested him to do. But it was a useless attempt. The book was not in fault, and he should have read it intently if only because she had bestowed it; still the hand that held it sank lower and lower, until it rested upon his knee, and the reader was the thinker instead.
The most prosaic of human beings have their seasons of reverie—pleasing or mournful, which are, unknown often to themselves, the poetry of their lives. Such was the drama Lewis Hammond was now rehearsing in his retrospective dreams.
The wan and weary mother, whom he remembered as always clothed in widow's weeds, and toiling in painful drudgery to maintain herself and her only boy; who had smiled and wept, rendered thanksgivings and uttered prayers for strength, alternately, as she heard Mr. Marlow's proposal to protect and help the lad through the world that had borne so hardly upon her; who had strained him to her bosom, and shed fast, hot tears of speechless anguish at their parting—a farewell that was never to be forgotten in any meeting on this side of eternity; this was the vision, hers the palladium of love, that had nerved him for the close wrestle with fortune, guarded him amid the burning ploughshares of temptation, carried him unscathed past the hundred mouths of hell, that gape upon the innocent and unwary in all large cities. Cold and unsusceptible as he was deemed in society, he kept unpolluted in his breast a fresh living stream of genuine romantic feeling, such as we are apt to think went out of fashion—aye, and out of being—with the belted knights of yore; wealth he had vowed never to squander, never reveal, until he should pour it, without one thought of self-reserve, upon his wife! He never hinted this to a living creature before the moment came for revealing it to the object of his choice. He was a "predestined old bachelor!" and "infidel to love and the sex," said and believed the gay and frivolous, and he let them talk. His ideal woman, his mother's representative and successor—the beauty and crown of his existence—was too sacred for the gaze and comment of indifferent worldlings. For her he labored and studied and lived; confident in a fatalistic belief that, at the right moment, the dream would become a reality—the phantasm leave her cloudy height for his arms.
Love so beautiful and intense as this, like snow in its purity, like fire in its fervor, cannot be won to full and eloquent utterance but by answering love—a sentiment identical in kind, if not equal in degree; and Sarah Hammond's estimate of her husband's affection was, in consequence of this want in herself, cruelly unjust in its coldness and poverty. His patience with her transient fits of gloom or waywardness in the early months of their married life; his noble forgetfulness of her faults, and grateful acknowledgment of her most trifling effort to please him; his unceasing care; his lavish bounty—all these she attributed too much to natural amiability and conscientious views of duty; too little to his warm regard for her personally. In this persuasion she had copied his conduct in externals so far as she could; and applauding observers adjudged the mock gem to be a fair and equitable equivalent for the rare pearl she had received.
Lest this digression, into which I have been inadvertently betrayed, should mislead any with the idea that I have some design of dignifying into a hero this respectable, but very commonplace personage, return we to him as he hears eleven o'clock rung out by the monitor on the mantel, and says to himself, "Baby Belle has been asleep these three hours, and mamma, caring nothing for beaux and ball-room, is preparing to follow her."
Beaux and ball-room! Pshaw! why should the nonsensical talk of that jackanapes, George Bond, come to his mind just then? The whole tenor of the remarks that succeeded the name that he imagined was his disproved that imagination. But who had left his wife at Newport in the care of a "good-looking" brother-in-law? who had been domesticated in the family of the deluded husband for a fortnight?
Pshaw again! What concern had he with that scandalous, doubtless slanderous tattle?
"Why did you not marry her when you had the opportunity? She was willing enough!"
Could Lucy have spoken thus of her sister? Sarah was barely acquainted with Philip Benson when Lucy wedded him, having met him but once prior to the wedding day at the house of her aunt in the country, from which place his own letter, penned by her father's sick-bed, recalled her. How far from his thoughts then was the rapid train of consequences that followed upon this preliminary act of their intercourse!
Did that scoundrel Bond say "Hammond"? It was not a common name, and came quite distinctly to his ears in the high, unpleasant key he so disliked. A flush of honest shame arose to his forehead at this uncontrollable straying of his ideas to a topic so disagreeable, and so often rejected by his mind.