He holds out his arms as he speaks, and she goes to them. The serpent has coiled almost his last coil!
In no relation except that of wife can this woman be persuaded to live with Vanderlyn; but the law may be perverted, her marriage contract basely set aside and broken. “For better, for worse” she has taken John Thorndyke, and she has plighted him her troth; but she will not have the worse, and her troth she will not keep. Yet the law must make her seem a wife, even in this degradation. So it is agreed that steps shall be taken to obtain a divorce, Vanderlyn’s money being at her service. It is so agreed, but not without many struggles on her part. If she is not a loving wife, she is a tender mother. This new infatuation cannot crush the true maternal instinct in her heart. It requires the wildest assurances on Vanderlyn’s part that the law will give her the control of her children, and that he will care for them and educate them as if they were his own, to keep her from receding.
Vanderlyn is no longer an inmate of her house, but he hovers around her neighborhood, seeing her during her husband’s absence, upon which she can always count for a certain number of hours every day. He writes to her letters which seem to her gems of poetry and eloquence, but which are really only fulsome flatteries, and sophistries of a godless school which he studies and copies. He knows that it is necessary to keep her mind always clouded by these false arguments, and her vanity fed by these protestations, because she is not by nature prone to the falsity to which he is luring her. This woman with a better husband, or even with a worse husband, and better religious teaching, could not have been so tempted. She is no syren, no coquette; it really needs much careful tact, and study, and address on Vanderlyn’s part to make her take the first steps in this path.
The children seem to be her guardian angels now. In their innocent helplessness there is great strength. Vanderlyn often wishes them in their graves, for it seems to him, chafing in his vexation, as he repeats,
“Baby fingers, waxen touches, press me from the mother’s breast,”
that these are rivals indeed, which may yet laugh him down and bring her rest, unless he is unremitting in his efforts to prevent it.
As if in answer to his bad desires, scarlet-fever prostrates them all at once, but drives him, for the time, from the thoughts of their mother. Wan and pale with watching, anxiety, and dread, Agnes weeps and prays over her little flock—prays as she has not prayed for a long while. Yet two are taken. The youngest darlings are buried in one grave, leaving a boy of seven years to fill the empty places.
For a time, Vanderlyn almost thinks his game is lost to him, and that Death has checkmated him; for the dead children, whose lives have seemed in his way, are even yet his most powerful opponents. So truly does Agnes mourn now, so bitterly reproach herself, that, if her husband will meet her with any tender sympathy in this their common sorrow, some love for him may yet spring up, watered by her tears for children which were his as well as hers.
“Oh! the child, too, clothes the father with a dearness not his due.”
But John Thorndyke is not the man to be tender and delicate to any one whose grief takes such a form as hers. Her brooding melancholy he calls “moping.” Her silence and shrinking from every one, he speaks of as “airs” put on to disturb him. He thinks the loss is his as well as hers, and he is not inclined to “mope and take on so.” He goes to his work every day as usual, and, although he does miss his little prattlers, to whom he has always been indulgent, the world does not seem all dark to him. He is utterly incapable of understanding how differently this blow affects her, and it chafes him that she does not bear it as he does. He cannot see that the very need of going to his daily toil, of mixing with other men whose minds are not on his loss, and the leaving of his sad home every day, helps to dissipate much morbid feeling which might cling to him were he obliged to stay at home, as his wife is compelled to do. He never thinks of the greater difference which it has made to her in every little change which the absence of the children demands. The very lightening of her care and toil for them leaves greater time and room to grieve. Her bereaved heart cries for love and sympathy in this her sorest need, and her husband does not heed the cry; does not soften to her just at the time he can save her.