“But, mother,” I essayed, consolingly, “you knew he loved you best all the time!”
“Of course, child, but she didn’t! There was the rub!”
I can respond now. It always is the bitter drop at the bottom of the cup held to the lips of the wife who cannot resent her lord’s innocent flirtation with “that other woman.” She knows, and he is serenely conscious of his unshaken loyalty, but the other woman has her own beliefs and hugs them.
In May, 1826, my brother William Edwin was born in the cosey home on the slope of Church Hill overlooking the “Pineapple Church.” More than forty years afterward, in the last drive I had with my mother, she leaned forward in the carriage to point out the neat three-story brick dwelling, now in the heart of the business section of the city:
“That was the house in which I spent the first three years of my married life!”
Then, dreamily and softly, she related what was the peaceful tenor of those first years. Her father was alive, and she saw him often; her sister, “Aunt Betsy,” and her children kept the old home-nest warm for him; the young couple had hosts of friends in town and country, and both were as deeply interested, as of yore, in church-work.
Edwin was two years old when a single bolt from the blue changed life for her.
My father’s partner was a personal and trusted friend before they went into business together. They had kept bachelor’s hall in partnership up to the marriage of the junior member of the firm. It transpired subsequently that the senior, who was the financial manager of the concern, had “cooked” accounts and made up false exhibits of the status of the house to coax the confiding comrade to join his fortunes with his. The tale is old and as common to-day as when my father discovered that his own savings and my mother’s wedding-portion would be swallowed up in the payment of his partner’s debts.
It was dark and bitter weather that swept down upon the peaceful home and blighted the ambitions of the rising young merchant.