I now turn back to her first marriage. The bride (pitiful to tell) was in her fourteenth year, the bridegroom in his twenty-eighth. It was a fellowship of misery—and her parents, who abetted it, ought to have prevented it. The Haytians speak of escaping out of the river by leaping into the sea. From the endurable cruelty of her parents, she fled to the unendurable cruelty of her husband. She had been from her twelfth to her fourteenth year a double victim, first to chills and fever, and then to rheumatism, which had jointly played equal havoc with her beauty and health, until she was brought within a step of "the iron door." Dr. Canning Woodhull, a gay rake, but whose habits were kept hid from her under the general respectability of his family connections (his father being an eminent judge, and his uncle the mayor of New York), was professionally summoned to visit the child, and being a trained physician arrested her decline. Something about her artless manners and vivacious mind captivated his fancy. Coming as a prince, he found her as Cinderella—a child of the ashes. Before she entirely recovered, and while looking haggard and sad, one day he stopped her in the street, and said, "My little chick, I want you to go with me to the pic-nic"—referring to a projected Fourth of July excursion then at hand. The promise of a little pleasure acted like a charm on the house-worn and sorrow-stricken child. She obtained her mother's assent to her going, but her father coupled it with the condition that she should first earn money enough to buy herself a pair of shoes. So the little fourteen-year-old drudge became for the nonce an apple-merchant, and with characteristic business energy sold her apples and bought her shoes. She went to the pic-nic with Dr. Woodhull, like a ticket-of-leave juvenile-delinquent on a furlough. On coming home from the festival, the brilliant fop who, tired of the demi-monde ladies whom he could purchase for his pleasure, and inspired with a sudden and romantic interest in this artless maid, said to her, "My little puss, tell your father and mother that I want you for a wife." The startled girl quivered with anger at this announcement, and with timorous speed fled to her mother and repeated the tale, feeling as if some injury was threatened her, and some danger impended. But the parents, as if not unwilling to be rid of a daughter whose sorrow was ripening her into a woman before her time, were delighted at the unexpected offer. They thought it a grand match. They helped the young man's suit, and augmented their persecutions of the child. Ignorant, innocent, and simple, the girl's chief thought of the proffered marriage was as an escape from the parental yoke. Four months later she accepted the change—flying from the ills she had to others that she knew not of. Her captor, once possessed of his treasure, ceased to value it. On the third night after taking his child-wife to his lodgings, he broke her heart by remaining away all night at a house of ill-repute. Then for the first time she learned, to her dismay, that he was habitually unchaste, and given to long fits of intoxication. She was stung to the quick. The shock awoke all her womanhood. She grew ten years older in a single day. A tumult of thoughts swept like a whirlwind through her mind, ending at last in one predominant purpose, namely, to reclaim her husband. She set herself religiously to this pious task—calling on God and the spirits to help her in it.
Six weeks after her marriage (during which time her husband was mostly with his cups and his mistresses), she discovered a letter addressed to him in a lady's elegant penmanship, saying, "Did you marry that child because she too was en famille?" This was an additional thunderbolt. The fact was that her husband, on the day of his marriage, had sent away into the country a mistress who a few months later gave birth to a child.
Squandering his money like a prodigal, he suddenly put his wife into the humblest quarters, where, left mostly to herself, she dwelt in bitterness of spirit, aggravated from time to time by learning of his ordering baskets of champagne and drinking himself drunk in the company of harlots.
Sometimes, with uncommon courage, through rain and sleet, half clad and shivering, she would track him to his dens, and by the energy of her spirit compel him to return. At other times, all night long she would watch at the window, waiting for his footsteps, until she heard them languidly shuffling along the pavement with the staggering reel of a drunken man, in the shameless hours of the morning.
During all this time, she passionately prayed Heaven to give her the heart of her husband, but Heaven, decreeing otherwise, withheld it from her, and for her good.
In fifteen months after her marriage, while living in a little low frame-house in Chicago, in the dead of winter, with icicles clinging to her bed-post, and attended only by her half-drunken husband, she brought forth in almost mortal agony her first-born child. In her ensuing helplessness, she became an object of pity to a next-door neighbor who, with a kindness which the sufferer's unhomelike home did not afford, brought her day by day some nourishing dish. This same ministering hand would then wrap the babe in a blanket, and take it to a happier mother in the near neighborhood, who was at the same time nursing a new-born son. In this way Victoria and her child—themselves both children—were cared for with mingled gentleness and neglect.
At the end of six days, the little invalid attempted to rise and put her sick-room in order, when she was taken with delirium, during which her mother visited her just in time to save her life.
On her recovery, and after a visit to her father's house, she returned to her own to be horror-struck at discovering that her bed had been occupied the night before by her husband in company with a wanton of the streets, and that the room was littered with the remains of their drunken feast.
Once, after a month's desertion by him, until she had no money and little to eat, she learned that he was keeping a mistress at a fashionable boarding-house, under the title of wife. The true wife, still wrestling with God for the renegade, sallied forth into the wintry street, clad in a calico dress without undergarments, and shod only with india-rubbers without shoes or stockings, entered the house, confronted the household as they sat at table, told her story to the confusion of the paramour and his mistress, and drew tears from all the company till, by a common movement, the listeners compelled the harlot to pack her trunk and flee the city, and shamed the husband into creeping like a spaniel back into the kennel which his wife still cherished as her home.
To add to her misery, she discovered that her child, begotten in drunkenness, and born in squalor, was a half idiot; predestined to be a hopeless imbecile for life; endowed with just enough intelligence to exhibit the light of reason in dim eclipse:—a sad and pitiful spectacle in his mother's house to-day, where he roams from room to room, muttering noises more sepulchral than human; a daily agony to the woman who bore him, hoping more of her burden; and heightening the pathos of the perpetual scene by the uncommon sweetness of his temper which, by winning every one's love, doubles every one's pity.