University of Virginia Library

23. CHAPTER XXIII.
DEATH IN LIFE.

It was long past the hour of midnight, and the form of
the little boy, upon whom two parents had built such fond,
and dazzling, but worldly hopes, lay stretched upon the
bed, white and cold—as white, as cold, as motionless, and
as inanimate as a human figure cut in marble. Beside the
bed, and so disposed that her eyes could rest upon the face
of her lifeless son, sat the mother. She had not spoken,
scarcely moved, since an hour before his spirit's departure.
She had displayed no other emotion than she now displayed
—a fixed, piercing look of utter, blank despair—a despair
which saw no future—no hope in time—no hope in eternity!
They had taken the child from her, and she had
made no resistance, and had followed the form only with
her eyes. They had closed his eyes, wiped the death-damps
from his face, straightened out his limbs, robed him
in a clean night-garment, and thus prepared him for the
hands of the dresser of the dead. The mother had marked
the whole proceedings, and had only moved to make signs,
that she wished him deposited on the bed, with his face
uncovered, and herself so disposed that her eyes could rest
upon it. This had been done—the gas turned down to a
dim, solemn light—and all had stealthily retired but two
female watchers, who still remained with the living mother
and dead boy, one on either side of the bed, and both
silent. They would have tried to console the mother—but
they knew that was beyond human power; and they were

strictly following the Doctor's advice—which was, not to
mock her grief with any such vain attempt.

“Her case is very critical,” he had told them; “and
there may be two coffins at one funeral. She may recover
from this shock with a flood of tears, and tears will be a
favorable sign; she may be struck down with apoplexy;
or she may lose her senses altogether, and become a raving
maniac. I can do nothing for her now. Watch her carefully,
and constantly; and if you see any unfavorable
sign, call me at once.”

This was the physician's departing advice; and with
this knowledge of her critical situation, it will readily be
perceived, the hopeless mother was constantly watched,
with feelings of painful anxiety, by those whose unpleasant
duty it was to remain with her and the dead.

Mrs. Pinchbeck, as we have shown, was a woman of violent
passions, very selfish, and possessing but few of the
gentler qualities which render her sex so attractive. She
had, as we have also stated before, been married three
times; and, in every instance, had married from purely
selfish motives. Her first husband soon left her a widow,
with one child, which died young. Two children were the
fruits of her second marriage, both of whom died under
five years of age. Her marriage with Pinchbeck had
resulted in one son—the cold corpse which now lay before
her.

Selfish people, of violent passions, have generally very
few objects to love; but those few objects they love with a
concentrated intensity of feeling, of which none but such
as thoroughly understand all the various operations of the
human heart, have any adequate conception. It is in the
nature of every human being to love something; it is a
law of nature which can not be set aside; and just in the
ratio of the decrease in the ordinary number of heart-attractions,

all things being equal, is the increased intensity
of affection for the favored one or few.

Now Mrs. Pinchbeck really loved but two beings on
earth—her child and herself; and hence the voiceless woe
which she experienced at the loss of her heart's idol. She
had married Pinchbeck for his fortune—detested him at
heart—but loved his child, which was also her own.

And now, while that child lay dead before her, and she
thus sat buried in speechless grief, she felt her bosom
swell with the bitterest hate toward the author of his being,
to whose neglect she laid the charge of his untimely death.
With this little insight into the mysterious workings of one
dark heart, the reader will be the better prepared for what
follows.

For nearly an hour from the time with which this chapter
opens, Mrs. Pinchbeck remained motionless, in the
self-same attitude we presented her to the reader. Then,
with a sudden start, she burst into tears, bowed her head
upon the bed, and wept for half an hour. This was the
favorable sign mentioned by the physician; and the
watchers were rejoiced, that at last she had found a proper
vent to her grief. Until she began to grow calm and composed,
they said nothing to her; but on perceiving this happy
termination to their fears, they began to offer expressions
of sympathy. She listened to them quietly—but for some
time made no reply. At length, she said:

“This is indeed a heavy stroke of affliction, and Heaven
only knows what agonies I have already suffered!”

“Indeed you have!” replied one; “and we have been
deeply pained to witness your sufferings. But bear up,
Mrs. Pinchbeck, and strive not to let your grief again get
the mastery! You are a professing Christian; and in this
stroke, heavy as it is, you should see only the hand of

Him who chasteneth, and endeavour to be resigned to
His holy will!”

“He was my only son!” sobbed the mother; “and I
have nothing left to love!”

`Say not so—think not so—you still have a kind, affectionate,
and worthy husband!” returned the other.

“Yes, I have a husband,” rejoined Mrs. Pinchbeck,
getting up and glancing quickly about the apartment—“a
dear, devoted husband—where is he?”

There was a singularly wild, unnatural light in her eye,
as she spoke, which was not noticed by the others, or they
might have had some suspicion that all was not as it
should be.

“He left the room, soon after the child breathed its last,
in great distress of mind, and I think he is now below, in
the back-parlor,” was the reply of one of the ladies. “If
you desire it, I will call him—it will be a great relief to
his mind to see you so much better—for we all have feared
the worst.”

“No! no! do not call him!” said Mrs. Pinchbeck,
quickly. “I will go down to him; I would rather see him
alone; there should be no third party present on an occasion
like this.”

She turned to the bed, and, bending over the corpse of
her son, wept violently, for some minutes. Then she dried
her eyes; and going to a bureau, and unlocking one of the
drawers, she took out something, which she hastily concealed
in her bosom.

“Be kind enough to remain here,” she said to the
watchers; “I would be alone with my dear husband;” and
as she spoke, she quitted the apartment, and descended the
stairs.

But we must precede her to the room below.

The grief of Deacon Pinchbeck, immediately succeeding

the death of his child, displayed itself, for some time, in a
very violent way. He moaned, and groaned, and wrung
his hands, and occasionally ejaculated:

“O Lord, have mercy on me! O Lord, have mercy on
my soul! Oh! good Lord, restore my son to life again, as
Thou didst to them of old! Oh! how wretched I am!
Oh! how miserable I am! No child to love—no son to
succeed me! Oh! oh! oh!”

At last, he became in some degree composed; but the
presence of strangers was not pleasant to his sight; and
he retired to the apartment below, as already mentioned,
that he might be alone. Perhaps he had some feelings of
sympathy for his then speechless wife, whom he certainly
did not wish to lose; but, under the circumstances, he felt
it a wonderful relief, to be free from the taunts and upbraidings—to
say nothing of the more forcible demonstrations
of her sweet disposition—which he knew he would
have to encounter, were she only possessed of her usual
freedom of tongue and limbs; and so that she might be
finally restored to life and health, he thought it rather
Providential, that he was not to be called on, at this particular
time, by the only being he really feared, to give an
account of himself, during the period occupied in his dark
and guilty transactions.

So he retired to his back-parlor, and, throwing himself
upon a sofa, gave way to some very bitter reflections, and
began to have some very serious doubts whether he was on
quite as good terms with the Lord as he had thought.
The death of his child was certainly no evidence that his
prayers were more efficacious than the prayers of others;
and though a Deacon of high standing, in a very high
standing church, he was not quite so sure now, as he once
was, that the recording angel had not made a few suspicious

looking entries on the debit side of his spiritual account.

It was perfectly natural that he should have some very
serious reflections—reflections which could not but harrow
up his guilty soul. His child, on whom he had so fondly
doted, with all the selfish feelings of a selfish nature—
with all the worldly hopes of a worldly ambition—his child
was dead; and might not his death in some degree be laid
to his own neglect? Had he gone for a physician, when
first informed of his illness, instead of plotting against the
life of another, might not the life of his child have been
saved? He groaned aloud at the very thought, and felt
how terrible is the recoil of a guilty deed, when it comes
back upon the guilty doer in all its native blackness, enveloping
him in a thick cloud of horrors, and shutting out
every heavenly ray of hope and joy. Heaven and hell
are only conditions; and it is not essential that the thread
of mortal life should be clipped, for the overreached man of
crime to feel all the torments of the damned.

For hours the Deacon had rolled to and fro on his now
thorny couch, striving in vain to lose some of his misery in
the forgetfulness of sleep. At last, almost stupefied by the
violence of his grief, a dim, half-conscious, drowsy feeling
began to steal over him—his eyelids drooped and closed—
and his mind began to wander and become filled with unnatural,
hideous images, as in a nightmare-dream. Suddenly
the figure of the little orphan came floating along on
a sea of blood, and, stopping in front of him, seemed to
shoot rays of fire from her eyes, which, by some unaccountable
process, began to burn into his very soul. With a
cry of horror, he started up from his recumbent posture,
stared wildly around, and, to his utter astonishment, beheld
Mrs. Pinchbeck standing before him, and glaring upon him,

with a fiendish expression of concentrated, malignant hate
and scorn.

“Why, my—my dear—ha-ha-have you recovered?” he
stammered, not yet fully satisfied in his own mind,
whether he was addressing an airy phantom, or a being
of flesh and, blood—and in either case, feeling he had sufficient
cause for alarm.

To this question, Mrs. Pinchbeck did not deign to reply;
and the trembling Deacon, not knowing better what to do,
repeated it.

“Murderer!” she now rather hissed than said, without
removing her glaring eyes from his.

“Wha-wha-what do you mean?” he gasped, sinking
back upon the sofa.

“Murderer!” she repeated, in the same hissing tone.

“I—I—don't know what—you mean—my—my—a—
ah—love!” he whined out, in tremulous, doleful accents.

“Shall I explain?” she demanded, in the same low,
hissing voice of passion.

“If you please—that is—that is—confound the thing—
I mean if you think best, my dear.”

“Who let poor Nelson die? answer me that!” she said,
fairly foaming with suppressed rage.

“He—he—died himself, poor child—Nelson did!” answered
Pinchbeck, cowering beneath the piercing glance
of his conjugal partner, and groaning at the recollection
of the awful death of his son.

“Do you not feel his death weighing down your guilty
soul, Absalom Pinchbeck?” she demanded, advancing a
single step toward her frightened husband.

“What did I do, my love?” he whined again, glancing
quickly about him, and evidently preparing himself to beat
a hasty retreat, in case the enemy should endeavor to come
to close quarters.

“Do? you brute!” rejoined Mrs. Pinchbeck; “you did
nothing—you let him die! Why did you not come when
I sent for you?”

“Why, my angel—I—I had some business—”

“What business?” she interrupted.

“I can't—ex-ex-act-ly—say what!” stammered the Deacon;
“but it was some money business—with a—gentleman—that
I—that I—a—ah—wanted to get through with
—and did get through with, my love.”

“And you could let Nelson die for a mere money transaction,
you sordid wretch!” she cried, choking with anger.
“Oh! how I hate you—despise you—loathe you, from my
very soul!”

“I—I didn't think he was going to—die—or I should
have attended to him at once!” groaned Pinchbeck.
“Don't go on so, my love—don't!” he said, pleadingly.
“Oh! if you only knew how miserable I am!”

“Miserable!” she repeated, with a withering sneer; “you
miserable! I only wish you were—but you haven't soul
enough to be miserable! Why did you go away, and remain
away, till too late? Was that to complete a business
transaction?”

“Why, my love, I just stepped out, for a minute or two,
to see a gentleman; and it so happened that I was summoned
to make up a Coroner's jury, and couldn't get back,”
replied the Deacon.

“I wish the jury had held an inquest on your loathsome
body!” rejoined the other, biting her lips, to keep her
rage within bounds—“and that you never had come back
alive!”

“It costs me an effort to thank you, for your kindness,”
said the Deacon, a little more boldly.

“I wish you were dead!” cried the other, fairly gnashing
her teeth. “So long as Nelson lived, I managed to

endure your hateful presence; but now I wish you were
dead!”

“So that you could swell out on my money, and wheedle
somebody else into the matrimonial noose, as you wheedled
me, I suppose!” retorted the Deacon, who began to
feel his courage rise with his indignation. “I thought you
were going to die,” he continued; “and I knew if you
did, I'd be rid of your tongue, to say nothing worse; but
disagreeable people, it seems, have as many lives as a cat;
and the Lord permitted patient Job to be very severely
tried.”

On hearing this, Mrs. Pinchbeck could hardly credit
her senses; for the Deacon, though a regular tyrant to
those he could with impunity oppress, had almost invariably
been meekly submissive to his termagant wife, even when
kicks and cuffs had spiced her arguments; and it was not
on record, that, before the present moment, his voice had
been heard in open rebellion but three times, since the
commencement of their honey-moon. It will therefore be
a matter of no surprise to the reader, that Mrs. Pinchbeck,
being previously excited to a degree but little short of
frenzy, should, on hearing this insulting rejoinder of her
usually submissive lord, find herself actually choking with
a rage that could not get vent through the ordinary
channels. She clutched her throat with one hand, and her
forehead and temples with the other; while the blood
rushed up into her face, till it seemed to swell and grow
black, and her small eyes shot fiery gleams of fiendish
malice and implacable hate.

The Deacon, seeing the awful storm of passion he had
raised, began to grow alarmed for the consequences to
himself. And there was really more cause for his alarm,
than he even now supposed; for Mrs. Pinchbeck, on going
to the bureau up stairs, as already mentioned, had actually

provided herself with a dagger; and had come down with
the intention of taking his life; and her now excessively
violent and overpowering rage, was the only thing that
prevented her design being carried into instant execution.

The Deacon, after looking at her for a moment, thought
it best for him to beat a hasty retreat; and springing from
his seat, he darted past her, and had just gained the door,
when a strange, unearthly sound fell upon his ear, and
caused him to look around. To his surprise—and we may
add, alarm—he beheld his wife in the act of falling. Impulsively
he sprung, forward to catch her—but he was too
late. She fell, with a dull, heavy shock, that jarred the
whole building; and then lay perfectly still and senseless,
apparently dead, her face almost black, and her features
horribly distorted.

One glance was enough to convince the now really terrified
Deacon, that he could render her no assistance; and
springing to the door, he tore it open, and shrieked for
help.

The watchers came down in haste; and the moment their
eyes rested on the senseless form of Mrs. Pinchbeck, one
turned to the Deacon, and said:

“This is what we have been told to fear. “Oh! sir, if
you would save her life, fly for Dr. Jennings! there is not
a moment to be lost!”

The Deacon, to his credit be it spoken, made all haste
to summon the physician; but, what with one delay and
another, it was nearly half an hour before the latter
reached the side of Mrs. Pinchbeck. He found her
stretched upon the bed, in the apartment above stairs,
along side of the corpse of her son, whither she had been
carried by the watchers. Hastening to her side, he seized
her hand, and placed his fingers upon her pulse.

“Well, Doctor?” exclaimed the excited Deacon.

The physician shook his head gravely; and turning to
the questioner, said, solemnly:

“My friend, may He who `tempers the wind to the
shorn lamb,' enable you to bear your heavy affliction with
Christian fortitude! You are wifeless and childless.”

“Surely, you do not mean, Doctor—

The Deacon paused, and looked the question he could
not utter.

“Yes,” replied the other—“it is true—your wife is
dead. As I feared, a sudden stroke of apoplexy has terminated
her earthly existence.”

And the light of morning streamed in through the darkened
windows, and seemed to rest mournfully upon the
mortal remains of mother and son.

The guilty doer may escape the justice of human laws;
but none ever did, and none ever will, escape the retributive
justice of the eternal, unchangeable laws of God!