[“FOR BETTER—FOR WORSE.”]
The mother of a family of three children sits musing while she mends their clothing which lies heaped upon a table beside her. The pile has lowered slowly under her patient and busy fingers during the long afternoon. The slanting sun now shines across her bowed head while she still continues her work. It touches up the homely furniture of the room with a glow richer than the gilding of art, and lends to the place a cheerful aspect which does not accord with the mood of its occupant. She is a woman of about twenty-four years, with considerable claim to beauty in her regular features and dark, intelligent eyes. But there is a look of discontent on her face, and a querulousness in her voice, as she occasionally reproves the noisy children playing about her. Yet the eyes wear a patient look, in spite of the discontent expressed, and a sort of hushed resolve seems stamped upon her features, as if, whatever is the trouble with which she battles, no acknowledged recognition of it shall find vent. Nature, however, has her way, and that which the voice refuses to utter the eye often betrays, and there will be found lines written upon the human face which those who study physiognomy may translate. It is the chirography of the soul. She writes upon the face as upon a tablet, often also extending the characters to the whole of the frail temple she occupies, leaving her traces in motions of the hands, carriage of the head, the very posture of the body, and in the gait, so that all are eloquent of her subtle influence. How often a pure pious soul, dwelling on heavenly things, recoiling from grossness, and courting all that is divine, praying fervently always not to be led into temptation, but delivered from evil, glorifies a plain face into a seraphic beauty which makes the beholder wonder whence comes this loveliness! We see plain features. We wonder that this face should please as much as it does, forgetting the soul’s high mission. We see not the lamp behind the screen of flesh: we only see the effect of the rays. Again, we see faces where nature has done much to beautify, and where a soul not delivered from evil has written such ugly marks that the fair tablet is disfigured with blots and stains of sinful ink flowing from the pen held in the grasp of passion.
Whence comes the writing on the face of this mother sitting in the golden sunshine, doing the work which mothers are usually content to perform? She is striving as best she may with a lot in life distasteful to her, but from which she sees no means of escaping, and, indeed, as yet does not dream of trying to escape. This lot is that of being married to a man of coarser nature than her own, who seldom sympathizes with her in anything at all above the most grovelling interests. Why she married him seems to her now an ever-unsolved puzzle, a never-ceasing source of regret. If she had read the lines, she might conclude with the poet that it was “accident—blind contact and the strong necessity of loving.” Not being acquainted with that answer to her riddle, she blames fate and her own inexperienced youth, and the need of a home and protection at a time when her own heart had not yet asserted its rights. Now, she knows she does not love her husband, and she thinks she hates him at times. Not that he is cruel, not that he is unfaithful—he is neither of these; but he is narrow, jealous, exacting, unintellectual, and coarse; while she is aspiring, even poetic, in her nature. Fond of the beautiful, seeking it in every way, cultivating her intellect as best she can against the odds of a deficient education, limited means and time, and overtaxed strength of body, she longs for a better position in life. Care has fretted, if not furrowed, her fair white forehead already; yet still she reaches out and clings to every refining influence. All books that have fallen in her way she has read, stealing the time from toiling hours already filled to overflowing with household work. On this particular afternoon, there lies among the stockings she is mending a poem of Whittier’s, which has taken such a hold upon her fancy and morbid feeling that the discontent deepens and the hunger of her starving heart gnaws more sharply than usual. This poem, Maud Muller, read so gaily by the happy many, with pleasure at its pretty conceits, allies itself so to this woman’s experience that it finds an echo she cannot silence, in the lines—
“She wedded a man unlearned and poor,
And many children played round her door;
But care and sorrow and childbirth pain
Left their traces on heart and brain.”
Although she has never had any other lover, or even a passing fancy for any other man, save some vague ideal of some one different from her husband John Thorndyke, as she reads:
“And for him who sat by the chimney lug,
Dozing and grumbling o’er pipe and mug,
A manly form by her side she saw,
And joy was duty, and love was law,”
she seems to herself the heroine of the poem, and John Thorndyke the very unpleasant companion portrayed. And yet no thought of escaping from what she considers her “shackles” obtrudes upon her musings. She is a severe Puritan in her education and faith, and thus far has escaped the base free-thinking and “free-love” tendencies of the day. Marriage, disagreeable as it has proved to her, seems still, if not a sacrament, a binding, honorable state, to be borne with according to her promise, “for better or for worse.” She has been married by an Episcopal clergyman, because it had been most convenient, and her husband had preferred that form; and thus her spoken promise has always seemed to her yet more definite. “For better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love, cherish, and to obey, till death us do part.” That sounds always to her like a doom. Joy is not duty, and love is not law, in her case; but she patiently takes “up her burden of life again, saying only, ‘It might have been.’”
But in her lonely heart, she has one pure God-given instinct to glorify her otherwise gloomy religion, and ennoble her dull, hard lot. This is charity in its loveliest form—a disposition for nursing the sick and attending to the needy—a positive vocation for the work, which she does from enthusiasm, not from cold duty. Ever her willing hands minister to the suffering, and often is she called to watch through lonely nights at their bedsides. In this way, her acquaintance has extended far beyond her husband’s sphere of life. Often in the houses of her neighbors, both rich and poor, are her skill and kindness called into requisition. Tact and cleverness, and, above all, a willingness to help in time of need, soon make a woman appreciated and respected among those by whom she is surrounded, and so it happens that her own life presents itself to her in sharper contrast with the lives of other women.
That unsatisfied hunger at her heart gnaws more and more, and her husband grows to her more and more repulsive; but while he repels her thus, and every tendril of her nature reaches out vainly for supporting strength, she fails not in any duty as wife and mother. While her heart calls vainly, her conscience is answered and obeyed in every exaction. Courting no admiration from others, even where willing tribute is paid to her beauty and refinement; dressing in Quaker-like simplicity, not only in accordance with her limited means, but her own severe taste; leading a quiet, industrious life, Agnes Thorndyke is irreproachable, and esteemed by all who know her. The serpent coiled down in the shadows of her soul is waiting to rear its head—waiting for an evil hand, an evil breath, to warm it into strength, that its venom may poison this pure life.