"I am going to marry him next week. Will you be so good as to notify Mr.
Perkins?"
Mrs. Perkins held up both hands and cried. Words might have hardened Hitty; but what woman that was not half tigress ever withstood another woman's tears?
Hitty's heart melted directly; she sat down by Mrs. Perkins, and cried, too.
"Please, don't be vexed with me," sobbed she. "I love him, Mrs. Perkins, and I haven't got anybody else to love,—and—and—I never shall have. He's very good to love me,—I am so old and homely."
"Very good!" exclaimed Mrs. Perkins, in great wrath, "good! to marry Judge Hyde's daughter, and—fifty thousand dollars," Mrs. Perkins bit off. She would not put such thoughts into Hitty's head, since her marriage was inevitable.
"At any rate," sighed Hitty, on the breath of a long-drawn sob, "nobody else ever loved me, if I am Judge Hyde's daughter."
So Mrs. Perkins went away, and declared that things had gone too far to be prevented; and Abner Dimock came on her retreating steps, and Hitty forgot everything but that he loved her; and the next week they were married.
Here, by every law of custom, ought my weary pen to fall flat and refuse its office; for it is here that the fate of every heroine culminates. For what are women born but to be married? Old maids are excrescences in the social system,—disagreeable utilities,—persons who have failed to fulfil their destiny,—and of whom it should have been said, rather than of ghosts, that they are always in the wrong. But life, with pertinacious facts, is too apt to transcend custom and the usage of novel-writers; and though the one brings a woman's legal existence to an end when she merges her independence in that of a man, and the other curtails her historic existence at the same point, because the novelist's catechism hath for its preface this creed,—"The chief end of woman is to get married"; still, neither law nor novelists altogether displace this same persistent fact, and a woman lives, in all capacities of suffering and happiness, not only her wonted, but a double life, when legally and religiously she binds herself with bond and vow to another soul.
Happy would it have been for Hitty Hyde, if with the legal fiction had chimed the actual existent fact!—happy indeed for Abner Dimock's wife to have laid her new joy down at the altar, and been carried to sleep by her mother under the mulleins and golden-rods on Greenfield Hill! Scarce was the allotted period of rapture past half its term, scarce had she learned to phrase the tender words aloud that her heart beat and choked with, before Abner Dimock began to tire of his incumbrance, and to invent plans and excuses for absence; for he dared not openly declare as yet that he left his patient, innocent wife for such scenes of vice and reckless dissipation as she had not even dreamed could exist.
Yet for week after week he lingered away from Greenfield; even months rolled by, and, except for rare and brief visits home, Hitty saw no more of her husband than if he were not hers. She lapsed into her old solitude, varied only by the mutterings and grumblings of old Keery, who had lifted up her voice against Hitty's marriage with more noise and less effect than Mrs. Perkins, and, though she still staid by her old home and haunts, revenged herself on fate in general and her mistress in particular by a continual course of sulking, all the time hiding under this general quarrel with life a heart that ached with the purest tenderness and pity. So some people are made, like chestnuts; one gets so scratched and wounded in the mere attempt to get at the kernel within, that it becomes matter of question whether one does not suffer less from wanting their affection than from trying to obtain it. Yet Hitty Dimock had too little love given her to throw away even Keery's habit of kindness to her, and bore with her snaps and snarls as meekly as a saint,—sustained, it is true, by a hope that now began to solace and to occupy her, and to raise in her oppressed soul some glimmer of a bright possibility, a faint expectation that she might yet regain her husband's love, a passion which she began in her secret heart to fear had found its limit and died out. Still, Hitty, out of her meek, self-distrusting spirit, never blamed Abner Dimock for his absence or his coldness; rather, with the divine unselfishness that such women manifest, did she blame herself for having linked his handsome and athletic prime with her faded age, and struggle daily with the morbid conscience that accused her of having forgotten his best good in the indulgence of her own selfish ends of happiness. She still thought, "He is so good to me!" still idealized the villain to a hero, and, like her kind, predestined to be the prey and the accusing angel of such men, prayed for and adored her husband as if he had been the best and tenderest of gentlemen. Providence has its mysteries; but if there be one that taxes faith and staggers patience more than another, it is the long misery that makes a good woman cringe and writhe and agonize in silence under the utter rule and life-long sovereignty of a bad man. Perhaps such women do not suffer as we fancy; for after much trial every woman learns that it is possible to love where neither respect nor admiration can find foothold,—that it even becomes necessary to love some men, as the angels love us all, from an untroubled height of pity and tenderness, that, while it sees and condemns the sin and folly and uncleanness of its object, yet broods over it with an all-shielding devotion, laboring and beseeching and waiting for its regeneration, upheld above the depths of suffering and regret by the immortal power of a love so fervent, so pure, so self-forgetting, that it will be a millstone about the necks that disregard its tender clasping now, to sink them into a bottomless abyss in the day of the Lord.