CHAPTER VIII.
THE INCIDENTS AND ACCIDENTS OF MARRIAGE.
But even if you have chosen the best of women for your companion, whether it be due to your merit or your good fortune, the great problem of happiness is not yet solved, for there are so many incidents and accidents which disturb it when least we expect them.
Your wife is never a meteorite fallen from the sky, but a fruit still attached to the branch, and this branch is taken from a trunk, which is the family to which she belongs. When you marry her you must inevitably marry her relations also; you must enter a clan which may be a garden of roses, but may be also a wasp’s nest—nay, even a nest of vipers.
Do not allow yourself any illusions, believing that when once you are legitimate master of your companion you will be able to isolate yourself in the nest of your domestic felicity, chasing away wasps and crushing the vipers, if there should be any. I will suppose that the woman loves you much, and adores you above all creatures in the world, but the clan from which she has been taken will complain of you, protest and conspire against you. Her parents have ceded the government of one of their provinces to you, but still hold the protectorate and place a resident near, and they reserve the right of intervention in many, unfortunately in too many, cases.
The idea of a wife, then, would be that she should be an orphan with only the most distant relations or guardians, who are happy to have her well married. But here again there are new complications. To be an orphan at an early age means, since the parents died young, to belong to an unhealthy stock. The decadence of many English families is due to this very fact. The younger sons of the nobility, who bear a noble name, but have an empty purse, seek to equalize blazonry and finance by marrying orphans, or only daughters, and thus they bring into the new family the risk of an infirm state of health and sterility.
It is only too true that all the gravest problems of life are so framed that when you have succeeded with patience and labour in untying one knot, others form under your fingers.
The wife, however, might be an orphan from other causes, independent of the health of the parents, and that would be the highest ideal—for example, a girl who had escaped from a fire, or a railway accident, in which both parents (alike robust) were killed. I am supposing things incredible, or at least improbable; I make cruel conjectures, but what can I do? A scolding, wicked, or jealous mother-in-law is worse than a fire and railway disaster together.
Those good, courteous, intelligent mothers-in-law need not alarm themselves—those who become a second mother to their sons-in-law, who double the delights of the dual life, who bring you the valuable blessing of experience and disinterested affection, and who act in the domestic storm as conciliatory judges. Hosanna and everlasting glory to such beings, sent by Providence to double your happiness.
For I only speak of others who, without being bad, are women, or rather men, with all the congenital defects of the race of Adam.