“I have not!” Bessie cried out passionately, with the jealousy of one whose grief is underestimated. “John and the boy are further away from me than my dead children are!”
The barrier was down. She had betrayed herself, and must tell the whole, though she might be sorry [pg 337] afterward for having spoken. Concealment and self-control were no longer possible.
It was a tale too often true, though not so often told. The husband, engrossed in business, and missing no home care which the love and duty of his wife could bestow, had forgotten, or did not care, or did not believe, that any return was due from him save a pecuniary support, or that he could be guilty of any sin of omission toward his wife, save the omission to provide her with food and shelter.
Perhaps no woman ever saw the heart she had once possessed slipping away from her, without making a mistake in her efforts to retain it. Indifference is her surest means of success, but indifference the loving heart can never affect. As well might flame hope to hide itself, living, in ashes.
The reserve and gravity of wounded feeling, when at length the husband noticed them, he named sulkiness, and the meanness of the causes to which he ascribed that were felt as an insult. The few timid reproaches and petitions the wife had brought herself to utter he listened to with surprise and annoyance, or with ridicule. Why, what in the world did she want?—to begin their courting days over again? In order to do that, they must first be divorced. What had he done? Had he beaten, or scolded, or starved her? Had he gone gallivanting about with other women? Nonsense! He had his business to attend to. Of course he loved her, but she mustn't bother him.
What reply is possible to such arguments? How small seem all our sweetest human needs when they are put into words, simply because words can never express them! In such a controversy, hard natures have always the advantage over sensitive ones, and seem to triumph by their very inferiority.
Bessie was silent, and her husband thought that she was convinced, and dismissed the subject from his mind. If he observed that she grew pale, he supposed that city air did not agree with her. He missed no home comfort, heard no complaint, and therefore took for granted that all was right. He frequently absented himself from home on business, never asking his wife to accompany him, women being in the way on such occasions, and she seemed satisfied to see nothing beyond her own fireside. He brought home his plans and studies at evening, and, when the children's play and caresses disturbed him, their mother took them away and amused them elsewhere. When, later, her little ones asleep, as she sat by her husband silently working, he found that the snip of her scissors and the rattle of her spools fretted him, Bessie said not a word, but went off to bed, and wet her pillow with bitter and unavailing tears, finding no comfort.
The thought of seeking comfort and help in her religion had not once entered her mind. She was dead to its obligations. They had never been impressed on her, and her heart had been engrossed by other interests. Her children had been baptized, and she usually went to an early Mass on Sunday, but never heard a sermon, and never read a religious book. She prayed often, but it was the outcry of pain, the petition for an earthly good, not the prayer for resignation and wisdom.
Of his wife's real life John Maynard knew no more than he did of life at the antipodes. His profession engrossed his heart. His happiness was to work and study over polished [pg 338] metals, to fit cylinder, crank, and valve with nicety into their places; and at last, when that exquisite but irresistible power of steam, so delicate in its fineness, yet so terrible in its strength, began to steal into his work, to see the creature of brass and iron grow alive, and become more mighty than an army of giants, how tenderly could he handle, how carefully arrange, how patiently study out, the parts of his work! For the problem of that infinitely more exquisite mechanism—his wife's heart—he had no time.
The boy, as boys will, followed in the footsteps of his father. He emulated the slighting of which the father was himself unconscious, and treated his mother with that intolerable mixture of patronizing kindness and impatient superiority so often witnessed in the presumptuous children of our time.