Hilda's Home: A Story of Woman's Emancipation

by Rosa Graul

After having made up his mind that there was now but one proper course for him to pursue, that course he meant to pursue. Days passed on. He soon found that to harvest his crop of wild oats was not so easy or so pleasant as the sowing had been. Nellie’s temper was the rock upon which all his good resolves stranded. He would have taught her many things that would have had a tendency not only to make her a polished lady but which would have been of daily, almost hourly use to her, but she mistakenly argued that as she had been good enough in the past to while away the time with, pretty enough to cause him to fall in love with her, she was good and pretty enough now as his wife, just as she was. She did not understand that it was ever so much more difficult for a wife to attract and hold a husband, even in those few cases where love rules supreme in the home of the married couple, than it is for a bright and sparkling young girl to win a lover.

But time sped on; the months passed by and then came the hour when the cause of this most unhappy union was ushered into existence—a little brown eyed babe. The fair Imelda was born. For a while it seemed as if the young couple would return to the love of their earlier days. The advent of the little creature was something wherein they had a common interest. But as Nellie grew stronger her attention was all taken up by baby, who proved a charming dimpled darling, cooing and laughing in the faces of both parents alike.

But the young mother never was the old self again. The charming girl soon developed into a fretful discontented woman. The man that found life such a disappointment gave all his love to his baby daughter and it was not long until the baby screamed and struggled at his approach. Perched upon his shoulder, her tiny hands buried in his clustering curls, she would babble and crow with delight. For the time Herbert Ellwood would be happy, but even this sight—a sight that would have melted most young mothers’ hearts with pride and happiness, was only another bone of contention between them. Squabbles and quarrels were of daily occurrence.

Nellie was irritable and dissatisfied. Her health was failing her. Herbert was tired and disgusted with his unpleasant home, and began to spend his evenings away from it. In consequence many lonely hours fell to Nellie’s lot. Often her pillow would be wet with tears. She was unhappy and knew not the reason. She laid the blame at Herbert’s door; whereas he, poor fellow, had done all in his power to bring things to a different issue. He had miserably failed.

But neither knew the reason why. Both failed to understand that as they had ceased to attract, as they had scarcely so much as a single thought in common, they should long ago have parted. They were falling in with that most abominable practice of modern times and of modern marriage,—to “make the best of” what contained absolutely no best!—as their union was miserably barren of all good qualities. Each was conscious of a dull aching void, with no understanding as to how it could be filled.

Time passed on, and other babies came,—unwelcome, unwished for mites of humanity that sprang from the germ of a father’s passion, gestated by a mother with a feeling of repugnance amounting almost to hate. What mattered it that in the hour of birth each new comer was caught lovingly to the mother’s breast, when in that moment of mortal agony the wellspring of her love had been touched. No amount of later love could undo the mischief done before its advent.

Some of these babes were ill-natured and puny from their birth, born only to pine away and die, racking again the mother’s heart. Two others, a boy and a girl, grew to be the torment of the household and the bane of their mother’s life. And still the babies came, and oh! so close, one upon the other, until the poor mother thought life was a burden too great to be borne.

Such a flood of anger and hate towards the father and husband, would sweep over her heart as the knowledge of each conception was forced upon her! At such moments she felt as though she could kill him.

Reader, can you read between the lines? Can you see the hidden skeleton in this miserable home? Do you understand how it all could have been avoided? Herbert Ellwood, as stated before, was not a bad man. Instead, he possessed many noble qualities. But he was a child of modern society. He was a husband, possessed of a wife. He had always been what the world calls true to that wife. He was possessed of health, strength and passion. Is it necessary to say more? The story is a plain one, and an old one. The thinking reader will find little difficulty in discerning that theirs was the curse of modern marriage life.