Part 11 (1/2)
Oh, fathers! provoke not your children to wrath. It was that hard, cruel letter that changed Nea's repentance to unrelenting bitterness.
Instinctively she felt the iron of her father's will enter into her soul. In a moment she understood, as she had never done before, the hardness and coldness of his nature, the inflexibility of his purpose; as well might she dash herself against a rock as expect forgiveness.
Well, she was his own child, her will was strong too, and in the anguish of her despair she called upon her pride to support her, she leaned her fainting woman's heart upon that most rotten of reeds.
He had disinherited her, his only child; he had flung her away from him. Well, she would defy him; and then she remembered his ill-health, their projected trip to Pau, their happy schemes for the future, till her heart felt almost broken, but for all that she stood like a statue, crus.h.i.+ng down the pain in the very stubbornness of her pride.
Ah, Nea, unhappy Nea! poor motherless, willful girl; well may she look round her with that scared, hunted look.
Was this her future home, these poor rooms, this shabby furniture?
Belgrave House closed to her forever. But as she looked round with that fixed miserable glance, why did the tears suddenly dim her eyes?
Her glance had fallen on Maurice, still sitting motionless with his hands before his eyes--Maurice her husband; yes, there he sat, the man whom her own willfulness had dragged to the brink of ruin, whose faith and honor she had tempted, whose honest purpose she had shaken and destroyed, who was so crushed with remorse for his own weakness that he dared not look her in the face; and as she gazed at him, Nea's whole heart yearned with generous pity over the man who had brought her to poverty, but whom she loved and would love to her life's end.
And Maurice, sitting crushed with that awful remorse, felt his hands drawn down from his face, and saw Nea's beautiful face smiling at him through her tears, felt the smooth brown head nestle to his breast, and heard the low sobbing words--
”For better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, till death us do part, have I not promised, Maurice? Take me to your heart and comfort me with your love, for in all the world I have no one but you--no one but you!”
CHAPTER X.
IN DEEP WATERS.
Let our unceasing, earnest prayer Be, too, for light, for strength to bear Our portion of the weight of care That crushes into dumb despair One half the human race.
O suffering, sad humanity!
O ye afflicted ones, who lie Steep'd to the lips in misery, Longing, and yet afraid to die, Patient though sorely tried!
I pledge you in this cup of grief, Where floats the fennel's bitter leaf!
The battle of our life is brief, The alarm, the struggle, the relief; Then sleep we side by side.
LONGFELLOW.
Nea had to learn by bitter experience that the fruits of disobedience and deceit are like the apples of Sodom, fair to the sight, but mere ashes to the taste, and in her better mood she owned that her punishment was just.
Slowly and laboriously, with infinite care and pains, she set herself to unlearn the lessons of her life. For wealth she had poverty; for ease and luxury, privation and toil; but in all her troubles her strong will and pride sustained her; and though she suffered, and Heaven only knew how she suffered! she never complained or murmured until the end came.
For her pride sustained her; and when that failed, her love came to her aid.
How she loved him, how she clung to him in those days, no one but Maurice knew; in her bitterest hours his words had power to comfort her and take the sting from her pain. When it was possible, she hid her troubles from him, and never added to his by vain repinings and regrets.
But in spite of Nea's courage and Maurice's patience, they had a terribly hard life of it.
At first Maurice's efforts to find another clerks.h.i.+p were in vain, and they were compelled to live on the proceeds of the check; then Nea sold her jewels, that they might have something to fall back upon. But presently Mr. Dobson came to their aid.
He had a large family, and could not do much, as he told them, sorrowfully; but he found Maurice, with some trouble, a small clerks.h.i.+p at eighty pounds a year, advising him at the same time to eke out their scanty income by taking in copying work of an evening.
Indeed, as Maurice discovered many a time in his need, he did not want a friend as long as the good manager lived.
And so those two young creatures took up the heavy burden of their life, and carried it with tolerable patience and courage; and as in the case of our first parents, exiled by a woman's weakness from the fair gardens of Paradise, so, though they reaped thorns and thistles, and earned their bread by the sweat of their brow, yet the bitter-sweet memories of their lost Eden abode with them, and in their poverty they tasted many an hour of pure unsullied love.