At last we were blessed by the birth of a boy, and I thought my felicity complete.
Alas! whene’er we talk of bliss,
How prone we are to judge amiss!
I had sent to London for all my baby clothes, it seemed such a waste of time to work at them myself. They were beautiful, so was my boy; and so proud was I of him, that I was profuse in my generosity to all his attendants. I determined to nurse him, and to attend him night and day; and so completely was I engrossed by this new occupation, that I quite neglected Mr. P., whose inseparable companion I had been till then.
When I was so much away from him, he had more leisure to perceive the irregularity of the house. And when he went out and mixed with others, he could not help feeling the want of comfort at home. Still he could not bear to think that I was in the wrong.
In two years came another fine little boy, and with him fresh expenses. I just then began to feel that money was not always to be had; long accounts for dress, and fanciful furniture, for new books and scientific journals, for plants, shells, and mineralogical specimens, and a variety of other things equally necessary, came crowding in; and when I asked for money, there was none at command. My husband thought that I had paid for all these articles when I received them; and our ordinary expenses had already absorbed our income. With a blind confidence that almost amounted to weakness, he had trusted to my prudence, and made no inquiries into the household management: perhaps, he too had been a little inconsiderate in his farm and plantations; but far be it from me to shade my own errors by throwing blame on him.
I begged of the people whose bills I could not pay, to wait a little; and to keep them quiet I added debt to debt. But, at last, the crisis came, and these doubled and trebled debts, amounting to an enormous sum, appeared in dreadful array before Mr. P.
Then came demands from the country tradespeople who supplied our house; brewer, butcher, baker, &c.; and then, too, we discovered that the housekeeper, taking advantage of my foolish confidence, had never paid them; she had deceived me by false receipts, and had in every possible way betrayed her trust.
This shock awakened me; I understood the extent of my follies, and too late saw their consequences: I saw Mr. P. sink under the blow, and oh! Bertha, I did then, indeed, feel remorse. But, although wounded in the most sensitive of his feelings, and involved by me in what he had of all things most dreaded, he said he only reproached himself. His kindness never failed; but I saw that I had lost his respect, and that he could no longer rest his happiness on me. I became fretful and truly miserable, and a sort of reserve and mutual coldness gradually took place of that “boundless sympathy of soul” which we had till then enjoyed.
To be in debt, Mr. P. considered a state of actual disgrace, and he would have gladly sold his patrimony to emancipate himself from the load; but it was entailed. There were two other ways, either to raise money on mortgage; or, if his creditors would give him time, to devote the chief part of his income to a fund for the purpose of liquidating their full claims; and, in the mean time, to live on bread and water if necessary. He turned over in his mind also a hundred different schemes for employing his time and talents, so as to augment our means; for I could see, that though he dreaded the privations which I must endure, yet that one of his greatest difficulties was the doubt, whether I could conform to the rigorous parsimony that we were now called on to practise. Anxious for advice, he rode off to consult his old friend and counsellor Mr. Crispin, whom we had not seen for a long time; and I was rather surprised by his return the same evening, as he generally slept at the Hall, when he went there. He looked agitated, and though he treated me with more tenderness than usual, since our misfortune had burst upon him, yet he refused to tell me the result of his consultation.
In the evening, however, after a long silence he suddenly turned round to the table where I was actually endeavouring to discipline my fingers to the use of a needle, and said, “Gertrude, will you be contented to remain here in acknowledged embarrassment, shut up from the world, and endeavouring with me to save and to pay; or, will you for a time return to your father and mother? You know they will receive you with open arms; and you can there have the comforts so necessary to you and our poor little children. I really think it will be the wisest course to ask an asylum from them; for how can you adapt yourself to our present circumstances?”