Stepping Heavenward Part 30

Then I felt injured and inwardly accused Ernest of unkindness in keeping so important a fact a secret. But when I went back to my children, vexation with him took flight at once. The coming of each new child strengthens and deepens my desire to be what I would have it become; makes my faults more odious in my eyes, and elevates my whole character. What a blessed discipline of joy and of pain my married life has been; how thankful I am to reap its fruits even while p.r.i.c.ked by its thorns!

JUNE 21.-It seems that the happy man who has wooed Martha and won her is no less a personage than old Mr. Underhill. His ideal of a woman is one who has no nerves, no sentiment, no backaches, no headaches, who will see that the wheels of his household machinery are kept well oiled, so that he need never hear them creak, and who, in addition to her other accomplishments, believes in him and will be kind enough to live forever for his private accommodation. This expose of his sentiments he has made to me in a loud, cheerful, pompous way, and he has also favored me with a description of his first wife, who lacked all these qualifications, and was obliging enough to depart in peace at an early stage of their married life, meekly preferring thus to make way for a worthier successor. Mr. Underhill with all his foibles, however, is on the whole a good man. He intends to take Amelia's little girls into his own home, and be a father, as Martha will be a mother, to them. For this reason he hurries on the marriage, after which they will all go at once to his country-seat, which is easy of access, and which he says he is sure father will enjoy. Poor old father I hope he will, but when the subject is alluded to he maintains a sombre silence, and it seems to me he never spent so many days alone in his room, brooding over his misery, as he has of late. Oh, that I could comfort him.

JULY 12.-The marriage was appointed for the first of the month, as old Mr. Underhill wanted to get out of town before the Fourth. As the time drew near, Martha began to pack father's trunk as well as her own, and brush in and out of his room till he had no rest for the sole of his foot, and seemed as forlorn as a pelican in the wilderness.

I know no more striking picture of desolation than that presented by one of these quaint birds, standing upon a single leg, feeling as the story has it, "den Jammer und das Elend der Welt."

On the last evening in June we all sat together on the piazza, enjoying, each in our own way, a refres.h.i.+ng breeze that had sprung up after a sultry day Father was quieter than usual, and seemed very languid. Ernest who, out of regard to Martha's last evening at home, had joined our little circle, ob served this, and said, cheerfully:

"You will feel better as soon as you are once more out of the city, father."

Father made no reply for some minutes, and when he did speak we were all startled to find that his voice trembled as if he were shedding tears. We could not understand what he said. I went to him and made him lean his head upon me as he often did when it ached. He took my hand in both his.

"You do love the old man a little?" he asked, in the same tremulous voice.

"Indeed, I do!" I cried, greatly touched by his helpless appeal, "I love you dearly, father. And I shall miss you sadly."

"Must I go away then?" he whispered. "Cannot I stay here till my summons hence? It will not be long, it will not be long, my child."

With the cry of a hurt animal, Martha sprang up and rushed past us into the house. Ernest followed her, and we heard them talking together a long time. At last Ernest joined us.

"Father," he said, "Martha is a good deal wounded and disappointed, at your reluctance to, go with her She threatened to break off her engagement rather than to be separated from you. I really think you would be better off with her than with us. You would enjoy country life, because it is what you have been accustomed to; you could spend hours of every day in driving about; just what your health requires."

Father did not reply. He took Ernest's arm and tottered into the house. Then we had a most painful scene. Martha reminded him with bitter tears that her mother had committed him to her with her last breath and set before him all the advantages he would have in her house over ours. Father sat pale and inflexible; tear after tear rolling down his cheeks. Ernest looked distressed and ready to sink.

As for me I cried with Martha, and with her father by turns, and clung to Ernest with a feeling that all the foundations of the earth were giving way. It came time for evening prayers, and Ernest prayed as he rarely does, for he is rarely so moved. He quieted us all by a few simple words of appeal to Him who loved us, and father then consented to spend the summer with Martha if he might call our home his home, and be with us through the winter. But this was not till long after the rest of us went to bed, and a hard battle with Ernest.

He says Ernest is his favorite child, and that I am his favorite daughter, and our children inexpressibly dear to him. I am ashamed to write down what he said of me. Besides, I am sure there is a wicked, wicked triumph over Martha in my secret heart. I am too elated with his extraordinary preference for us, to sympathize with her mortification and grief as ought. Something whispered that she who has never pitied me deserves no pity now. But I do not like this mean and narrow spirit in myself; nay more, I hate and abhor it.

The marriage took place and they all went off together, father's rigid, white face, whiter, more rigid than ever. I am to go to mother's with the children at once. I feel that a great stone has been rolled away from before the door of my heart; the one human being who refused me a kindly smile, a sympathizing word, has gone, never to return. May G.o.d go with her and give her a happy home, and make her true and loving to those motherless little ones!

Chapter 19

XIX.

OCTOBER 1.

I Have had a charming summer with dear mother; and now I have the great joy, so long deferred, of having her in my own home. Ernest has been very cordial about it, and James has settled up all her worldly affairs, so that she has nothing to do now but to love us and let us love her. It is a pleasant picture to see her with my little darlings about her, telling the old sweet story she told me so often, and making G.o.d and Heaven and Christ such blissful realities. As I listen, I realize that it is to her I owe that early, deeply-seated longing to please the Lord Jesus, which I never remember as having a beginning, or an ending, though it did have its fluctuations. And it is another pleasant picture to see her sit in her own old chair, which Ernest was thoughtful enough to have brought for her, pondering cheerfully over her Bible and her Thomas a Kempis just as I have seen her do ever since I can remember. And there is still a third pleasant picture, only that it is a new one; it is as she sits at my right hand at the table, the living personification of the blessed gospel of good tidings, with father, opposite, the fading image of the law given by Moses. For father has come back; father and all his ailments, his pill-boxes, his fits of despair and his fits of dying.

But he is quiet and gentle, and even loving, and as he sits in his corner, his Bible on his knees, I see how much more he reads the New Testament than he used to do, and that the fourteenth chapter of St.

John almost opens to him of itself.

I must do Martha the justice to say that her absence, while it increases my domestic peace and happiness, increases my cares also.

What with the children, the housekeeping, the thought for mother's little comforts and the concern for father's, I am like a bit of chaff driven before the wind, and always in a hurry. There are so many st.i.tches to be taken, so many things to pa.s.s through one's brain ! Mother says no mortal woman ought to undertake so much, but what can I do? While Ernest is straining every nerve to pay off those debts, I must do all the needlework, and we must get along with servants whose want of skill makes them willing to put up with low wages. Of course I cannot tell mother this, and I really believe she thinks I scrimp and pinch and overdo out of mere stinginess.

DECEMBER 30.-Ernest came to me to-day with our accounts for the last three months. He looked quite worried, for him, and asked me if there were any expenses we could cut down.

My heart jumped up into my mouth, and I said in an irritated way:

"I am killing myself with over-work now. Mother says so. I sew every night till twelve o'clock, and I feel all jaded out,"

"I did not mean that I wanted you to do anymore than you are doing now, dear," he said, kindly. "I know you are all jaded out, and I look on this state of feverish activity with great anxiety. Are all these st.i.tches absolutely necessary?"

"You men know nothing about such things," I said, while my conscience p.r.i.c.ked me as I went on hurrying to finish the fifth tuck in one of Una's little dresses. "Of course I want my children to look decent."

Ernest sighed.

"I really don't know what to do," he said, in a hopeless way.

"Father's persisting in living with us is throwing a burden on you, that with all your other cares is quite too much for you. I see and feel it every day. Don't you think I had better explain this to him and let him go to Martha's?"

"No, indeed!" I said. "He shall stay here if it kills me, poor old man!"

Ernest began once more to look over the bills.

"I don't know how it is," he said, "but since Martha left us our expenses have increased a good deal."

Now the truth is that when Aunty paid me most generously for teaching her children, I did not dare to offer my earnings to Ernest, lest he should be annoyed. So I had quietly used it for household expenses, and it had held out till about the time of Martha's marriage.

Ernest's injustice was just as painful, just as insufferable as if he had known this, and I now burst out with whatever my rasped, over-taxed nerves impelled me to say, like one possessed.

Ernest was annoyed and surprised.

"I thought we had done with these things," he said, and gathering up the papers he went off.

I rose and locked my door and threw myself down upon the floor in an agony of shame, anger, and physical exhaustion. I did not know how large a part of what seemed mere childish ill-temper was really the cry of exasperated nerves, that had been on too strained a tension, and silent too long, and Ernest did not know it either. How could he?

His profession kept him for hours every day in the open air; there were times when his work was done and he could take entire rest; and his health is absolutely perfect. But I did not make any excuse for myself at the moment. I was overwhelmed with the sense of my utter unfitness to be a wife and a mother.

Then I heard Ernest try to open the door; and finding it locked, he knocked, calling pleasantly:

"It is I, darling; let me in."

I opened it reluctantly enough.

"Come," he said, "put on your things and drive about with me on my rounds. I have no long visits to make, and while I am seeing my patients you will be getting the air, which you need."

"I do not want to go," I said. "I do not feel well enough. Besides, there's my work." "You can't see to sew with these red eyes," he declared. "Come! I prescribe a drive, as your physician."

"Oh, Ernest, how kind, how forgiving you are?", I cried, running into the arms he held out to me, "If you knew how ashamed, how sorry, I am!"

"And if you only knew how ashamed and sorry I am!" he returned. "I ought to have seen how you taxing and over-taxing yourself, doing your work and Martha's too. It must not go on so."

By this time, with a veil over my face, he had got me downstairs and out into the air, which fanned my fiery cheeks and cooled my heated brain. It seemed to me that I have had all this tempest about nothing at all, and that with a character still so undisciplined, I was utterly unworthy to be either a wife or a mother. But when I tried to say so in broken words, Ernest comforted me with the gentleness and tenderness of a woman.

"Your character is not undisciplined, my darling," he said. "Your nervous organization is very peculiar, and you have had unusual cares and trials from the beginning of our married life. I ought not to have confronted you with my father's debts at a moment when you had every reason to look forward to freedom from most petty economies and cares."

"Don't say so," I interrupted. "If you had not told me you had this draft on your resources I should have always suspected you of meanness. For you know, dear, you have kept me-that is to say-you 'could not help it, but I suppose men can't understand how many demands are made upon a mother for money almost every day. I got along very well till the children came, but since then it has been very hard."

"Yes," he said, "I am sure it has. But let me finish what I was going to say. I want you to make a distinction for yourself, which I make for you, between mere ill-temper, and the irritability that is the result of a goaded state of the nerves. Until you do that, nothing can be done to relieve you from what I am sure, distresses and grieves you exceedingly. Now, I suppose that whenever you speak to me or the children in this irritated way you lose your own self-respect, for the time, at least, and feel degraded in the sight of G.o.d also."

"Oh, Ernest! there are no words in any language that mean enough to express the anguish I feel when I speak quick, impatient words to you, the one human being in the universe whom I love with all my heart and soul, and to my darling little children who are almost as dear! I pray and mourn over it day and night. G.o.d only knows how I hate myself on account of this one horrible sin!"