 | My third book |  |
The Record of a Troubled Life.
Yesterday the earth was laid
Over my father full of years,
Him whose steps I have watched and stayed.
All my work is finished here;
Every slumber that shuts my eye
Brings the forms of the lost and dear,
Shows me the world of spirits nigh.
This deep wound that bleeds and aches,
This long pain—a sleepless pain—
When the Father my spirit takes,
I shall feel it no more again.
BRYANT.
TOLL, toll, toll! I counted the strokes of the village
bell until it had numbered twenty-nine.
Then they ceased, and unbidden my tears fell—tears
of mingled sorrow and joy; sorrow for the long-enduring,
patient, troublous life that was over; joy for
the glad, new, glorious life that had begun. Bertha
Whitney was dead. There were few on earth to
whom these words would bring even a passing pang.
She was born of poor parents, and she had been poor
all the days of her life. Even her childish memories
were of suffering and wrong. Her father was one of
those men whose names you sometimes meet in the
unread annals of the poor; an unappreciated mechanical
genius, with a shy, sensitive nature, and a brain
full of glorious schemes.
But what might have won him fame and fortune in
another sphere was only a curse to the poor machinist.
With these splendid fancies running riot in his
brain, how could he bear a dull, daily routine of journeyman
labor, under some phlegmatic master, who
was entirely incapable of appreciating a single one of
his far-reaching plans? It was hardly strange that he
neglected the daily toil on which his bread depended,
to spend day after day alone, inventing a wonderful
a fortune.
His wife was a gentle, trusting woman, perfect in
her faith and devotion, thinking no one so good or so
gifted as her husband, and gilding in a sweet, unconscious
romance all the after years with the sunshine
of love and hope streaming downward from their bridal
morning. So, with barely food enough to supply
the little Bertha's hunger, and keep the life-breath in
their own shivering frames, she encouraged her husband
in working month after month on his machine,
doing only a few days' work outside, now and then, to
keep the gaunt hunger-wolf at bay.
At last the labor of months was completed, and
Walter Whitney set out to offer it for acceptance to
the head machinist of the large Beverley Mills. It
was a bright, beautiful morning, and his heart beat
very high as he kissed the little Bertha, playing with
a few shavings upon the hearth, and departed with
the hopeful tones of his wife ringing like a prediction
of success in his ears.
For several hours he was closeted with Mr. Meags,
the machinist. He explained to him all the minute
niceties of his invention, and as he spoke his clear blue
eyes sparkled, and his attenuated figure dilated and
grew noble with the majesty of thought. Mr. Meags
listened intently; his form bent forward, and his small
eyes twinkling with suppressed eagerness as he took
in every point of the invention. At last he rose and
brushed Walter Whitney's little model from before
him:
“It is of no use, my good sir,” he said, “our wasting
any more time over this. Your theory is very
utility about it. Utopian, sir, perfectly Utopian.”
“But,” Mr. Whitney ventured timidly to remonstrate,
“I thought you admitted, half an hour ago, that
it would save the labor of twenty men?”
“Of course, if it could be used, nothing more certain.
But it can't be used; there's the trouble. Entire
want of practical utility. Perfectly Utopian, sir.”
Thus saying, the worthy Mr. Meags arose, and the
disappointed Whitney understood that he was expected
to make his bow and retire. His wife saw him
coming home afar off, and burned with eager questions—had
his machine been accepted? would it make
all their fortunes? how much had been paid him on
the spot? But, as he came nearer, her loving eyes
read the sorrowful index of his face, and she was quite
silent when she met him at their cottage door.
He did not kiss her. He took no notice of the little
Bertha, who began tugging at his coat. He came
in gravely and sadly, and deliberately set down his
little model upon the table.
“There, Mary,” he said, “you may put that away.
It will be the ruin of me. How much time I have
lost over it, and it's all of no use. Put it away; I
never want to see it again.”
“Won't they take it?”
“No, Mr. Meags says it has no practical use; he calls
it a Utopian scheme. At first I thought he was pleased
with it. He spoke about its saving the labor of twenty
men, but apparently there was something wanting,
for he declared he could do nothing with it, at last.
Take it away, wife; the sight of it makes me sick.
To think of all those wasted days!”
Mary Whitney was a true wife; would there were
more of them. She went up to her husband's side,
and laid against his her cheek, fair still in his eyes,
though the freshness of early youth was gone. She
brushed back the thin hair from his flushed and heated
brow, and dropped a tender, sympathizing kiss upon
it. Then she said,
“Not so, not so, dear husband. The time was not
lost. No time is lost when we are cultivating the talents
a good God has given us. I will put away the
machine with care. I am proud of it—I have faith in
it—if it should never be used, you should be glad that
you have made it, and, who knows? perhaps it may
bring you a fortune yet. It is only to go to work for
a while, just as if you had never thought of it. Only
have faith, my husband. We shall do very well, Bertha
and I.”
He took her hand as she was moving away from
him, and looked steadfastly in her face.
“Mary, I am not given to many words. I do not
very often tell you what I think of you, but I do believe
God sent you to me for a comforting angel. I
do not think you are made of the same clay as other
women.”
She turned away in silence when he loosed her hand
from his clasp, but the tears were in her eyes.
For the next six months Walter Whitney worked,
uncomplainingly, at his laborious, uncongenial tasks.
Comfort began to sit smiling at their hearthstone. But
the machinist would have been far happier to stay day
after day working out plans and models in his attic,
dreaming glorious dreams the while of being a public
benefactor, of realizing impossible fortunes, and living
bread would have better pleased his palate than the
comfortable suppers his wife now nightly set before
him could ever do, coming thus after the work he hated.
One night he came home as his wife had never before
seen him, moody and sullen. Neither Mary's tender
voice nor little Bertha's playful wiles had power
to exorcise the evil spirit. At length he brought down
his hand on the table with a fierce oath, the first one
that loving woman had ever heard from his lips.
“Mary, I was tempted to step into Green's as I came
along, and buy a paper of arsenic. If it wasn't for
you, I wouldn't be long in putting an end to my miserable
life. What's the use of my living, poor as I am,
so poor that every unwhipped sneak under heaven can
take advantage of me.”
“Who is it, Walter? Who has wronged you?”
“I can't tell it—I haven't patience to tell it. Oh,
Mary, if I had that man under my heel!”
“What man, Walter?”
The quiet, sympathizing gentleness of her tone seemed
to soothe him a little, and he answered her more
calmly:
“You know my model that I carried to Mr. Meags,
and which he persuaded me wasn't worth a farthing?
Well, he has copied it, and got a patent, and his invention—they
call it his, Mary—goes into operation next
Monday at the Beverley Mills.”
Even Mary Whitney's calm nature was roused to
wrath.
“Surely,” she cried, “surely, husband, you will not
bear this in silence? Surely you will go to law with
him, and get your rights? To think of his making a
it with him?”
“Mary, it's of no use. The right is mine, but the
might is all on his side. I must bear it. I can not
prove that he had not got his model finished before I
showed him mine, or, indeed, that I did show it to him
at all. He was a cunning villain. He has made his
invention differ from mine in half a dozen unimportant
particulars—a sharp knave—he has left no loophole.
I could bear it for myself, but oh! Mary, to think this
might have made you rich; that you might have held
up your head, as you ought, among the proudest of
your neighbors; that we might have sent Bertha to
school, and cultivated her gift for music. May God
forgive me, but I believe I am possessed with the
devil. If I had that man in my sight, I could murder
him.”
“No, you couldn't, Walter.” The momentary flush
of indignation had passed from the woman's cheek.
She knelt down by her husband's side, and looked
pleadingly into his face. “No, you couldn't, Walter.
Much as he has wronged you, you must bear no malice
against him. God will punish him in his own way
and time. If there is no legal remedy, just let it go,
and try to forget it. Don't think of Bertha and me.
We shall do well.”
But her soothing words had lost their usual power.
That was the beginning of Walter Whitney's downfall.
A friend, who had heard something of his story,
urged him that night into the village inn, where he
recounted his wrongs to an audience at least outwardly
vehement in their demonstrations of sympathy and
indignation. Liquor was pressed upon him. He
was half maddened by the stimulus. For the
time he forgot all his troubles, and when the reaction
came, he drank again, and fancied himself happy as a
king.
At that time Bertha was eight years old, and for
the next ten years her father's downward course blotted
all the sunshine out of her life. Schooling she had
none, for she had neither books or clothes suitable to
make her appearance with the other children.
It was difficult for Walter Whitney to get employment
now. For this he had been chiefly dependent
on the Beverly Mills hitherto; but one day, when his
courage and indignation were plentifully stimulated
with brandy, he forced himself into Mr. Meags's presence
and demanded a reparation from him, taunting
him with his perfidy. The result was his discharge
from all employment about the mills. He had thus
aroused against himself the full venom of Mr. Meags's
vindictive, malignant nature; and that worthy gentleman,
restrained by no considerations of justice or humanity,
lost no after opportunity of paying him back
with interest the grudge he owed him.
It was only occasionally that the machinist could
get a few days' work to do, and in the interim he
drank up almost all he had thus earned at the tavern.
His wife clung to him patiently through every thing.
Night and day she toiled to make home comfortable,
or rather habitable, for comfort was no longer a word
in the Whitneys' vocabulary; and when her husband
came home, she never failed to meet him with a welcome
and a smile. Sometimes her long-suffering patience,
and the sight of her pale, wasting face, would
he would be moved to a sudden paroxysm of tears, a
vague, desperate resolve of amendment. But none
of these emotions possessed enough of abiding power
to reclaim him. He had drunk at first to drown his
sense of wrong, to lighten his crushing weight of despair,
and now habit was too strong for him.
As I have said, Mary Whitney struggled bravely to
make what headway she could against misfortune.
She herself taught reading, writing, and the simplest
rudiments of education to her poverty-stricken child.
When Bertha was fourteen, the village dress-maker, a
slender, consumptive woman, with narrow chest and
hacking cough, as genuine a missionary in her sphere
as ever Florence Nightingale was in hers, gave the
poor child a trade. In her unemployed days, and
often in the evening, after a hard day's work, she
taught Bertha to cut and fit dresses, and to sew in her
own neat and beautiful fashion. There was a sad satisfaction
to Mary Whitney in this knowledge of her
daughter's.
“You will need it all, Bertha,” she used to say,
sometimes; “you will need it all when I am gone.
You will have to take care of him then.”
And so the girl grew up with this great, prospective
responsibility, this one object, of being able to take
care of her father, forever before her mind. Over and
over her mother had recounted to her the story of his
genius and his wrongs, the sad excuse for his after
downfall; and she grew up with an exaggerated idea
of him, thinking him at once the most gifted and the
most unfortunate of men. And so, day by day, his
fatal habit strengthened its hold upon him, and, day
away.
It was a winter night when Bertha Whitney was
eighteen. She had never known what it was to be
young. She had had no childhood, and she was not
youthful now. There was a certain beauty, altogether
sad, in her pale face, her thin features, her sweet yet
sorrowful brown eyes. Her figure was slight, but her
shoulders had acquired a little stoop from bending so
constantly over her needle. She was sitting by her
mother's bedside; for, during the last few days, Mrs.
Whitney had been unusually ill. It was a stormy
night; but, heedless of the commotion of the elements,
the invalid appeared to sleep. At length she started
up suddenly.
“Bertha, you have a good deal more work since
Miss Hurst died?”
Miss Hurst was the kind-hearted dress-maker who
had given Bertha her trade. Consumption had at
last numbered her among its victims. Bertha looked
up with a sigh: “Yes, mother.”
“You will be the better able to take care of him.
Bertha, I beseech you not to weep at what I am going
to say. You have known a long while that I must
leave you soon. I am going to-night. I leave him in
your charge. You know his wrongs and his sufferings.
He will have only you in the world. Bertha,
promise me, upon your soul's faith, that you will never
desert him!”
The girl's head was bent lower. Her eyes could
not see for the tears which she was resolutely struggling
to force back; but she put her hand blindly forth
and touched her mother's:
“Mother, I promise.”
“Dear child, good child, I knew I could trust you.
When did you ever fail me? I am satisfied.”
With those words she sank again into silence, and
seemed to slumber. Outside, the rain hurtled against
the windows, and the wind sobbed, and wailed, and
moaned, and now and then burst forth in a loud, prolonged
shriek. And in the night and the tempest,
these two women, the dying and the watching, were
all alone. An hour had passed in this solemn silence
of coming death, when suddenly the outside door was
burst open, and Walter Whitney staggered in. His
potations had just reached a stage of maudling, sentimental
tenderness.
“Well, Mary,” he cried, “I'm glad to find you taking
your comfort. It's a great thing, my darling, when
a man has got a good home and a pretty wife such a
night as this.”
By this time he had pulled off the wet and ragged
garment which did him service as an overcoat, and
Bertha had seized his arm.
“Father,” she said, in a stern, solemn whisper, “do
you not see? Mother is dying.”
These words had power to penetrate even to his
dormant senses. In a moment he was thoroughly
sobered. He tottered toward the bed; he knelt down
beside it, and with a groan, a shriek I should say rather,
of wild, despairing agony, he cried out,
“Dying! she shall not die—she must not die—my
wife, my poor, faithful wife, Mary. Oh, Mary, only
live—only wake up again! I'll never drink another
drop, so help me Heaven. Mary! Mary!”
The wan face turned toward him. Slowly the eyes
smile of an angel, kindled up the death-stricken features.
With one last convulsive effort of despairing
life she drew his lips down to hers, and clung to them
with her dying breath. When Walter Whitney lifted
up his head, his wife was with the angels.
By this blow he was utterly paralyzed. He had
only mind enough left to remember the oath he had
sworn to her in her dying moments. He renewed it at
her grave, with his hand upon her coffin. After this
he subsided into a kind of simple, harmless, yet melancholy
insanity. He would ask every one who came
near him, with a touching pathos in his trembling
voice,
“Did I kill her? Do you s'pose I killed her?”
But he never once showed the slightest disposition
to break the pledge he had made at her death-bed.
Sometimes he would sit for a whole half day in the
sun, in the long summer days, saying over to himself,
like the refrain of a mournful song,
“Poor Mary's dead. Poor Mary's dead and gone.”
For five years Bertha continued to devote herself
to him, finding her only happiness in ministering to
his comfort, and in the memory of the dead mother
whose last wishes she was thus fulfilling. But at
twenty-three love came to her. It was not a romantic
love; indeed, in all the quiet heroism of her most heroic
life, there was nothing befitting the heroine of a
modern novel. James Carpenter had known her from
her childhood. He had grown up to manhood thinking
there was no one so good and true as Bertha, and, unconsciously
to himself, associating her sad yet gentle
face with all his visions of the future. Nor was this
truth, her exceeding self-devotion.
James Carpenter, at twenty-four—he was one year
older than Bertha—was a thriving young mechanic.
He was handsome, with a manly, cheerful face, and a
strong, stalwart figure, such as any timid maiden might
look to for protection in the rough places of life. I
think his love was a great surprise to Bertha. Her
ideas of her own attractions were very limited, or perhaps
I should come nearer the truth by saying she did
not think she had any attractions at all; so she received
with as much surprise as pleasure the young
mechanic when he came to her one night, as she sat on
the door-step of her humble dwelling, singing, as her
wont was, in her rich, sad voice, an old ballad tale of
such sorrow as had darkened all her own life. There
was much of embarrassment in her manner when he
seated himself beside her, and more still when he told
her of the place she had so long filled in his heart and
his dreams, and besought her to tell him whether he
might hope, one day, to win her as his wife. For one
moment her heart fluttered toward him longingly.
For one moment an enchanted garden of delights
seemed opening at her feet. For her, so lonely, might
be home, and friends, and smiles. But no; what had
Bertha Whitney to do with these? She remembered
her promise to her dead mother. She closed her eyes
on the forbidden picture. Calmly, and not altogether
sadly, for a sense of fulfilled duty strengthened her
voice, she said nay to his suit. He offered to take her
father also; to be as good to him as if he were his own.
He told her he had always meant this; he had known
her too well even to think she would give up her
never leave her father, nor would she ever burden another
with his care. He must go out into the world
unfettered by the sorrow of her life. He would find
some one else to love him, and she, looking toward
them from afar off, would pray heaven to make them
happy.
When at length he found that her resolution was
indeed unalterable, he rose to go.
“Bertha,” he said, “it may be years before you see
me again. I shall go next week to California. Fortunes
are being made there, and I was only waiting to
know your answer before deciding whether to join a
company that will be leaving here next week. But I
shall not go with a heart so heavy as I feared. I believe—I
do believe, Bertha, that under other circumstances
you could have loved me, and I will have hope
in the future. I ask no pledge from you, but I have
faith that we shall meet again when your heart will
be free to make answer to mine.”
This was their parting. He sailed for the land of
gold, and Bertha was left to her silent life with her
imbecile, helpless father. But she had one more memory
in her hours of solitude. A good man had loved
her—had chosen her, unlovely and unattractive as she
deemed herself, to be his wife. He might marry another
now she had sent him away, but no one could
ever take from her the memory that he had loved her
first. Unconsciously her voice took a tenderer tone
as she murmured his name in her nightly prayers.
She had no scarcity of employment. Ever since
her mother's death she had had all the sewing that
she could do, and her earnings were quite sufficient to
years longer she lived thus, but all the time her father's
feeble steps seemed tottering nearer and nearer
to the grave. At last the Dark River flowing between
us and the other side ingulfed him utterly. There
was a momentary brightening of the intellect, one fond
blessing, an almost painless death, a humble funeral,
and then Bertha Whitney was alone in the world,
while the summer roses bloomed, and the winds rustled
over those two graves where her father and mother
lay sleeping side by side.
During the lonely year that followed she thought
often of James Carpenter. She would have been less
than woman if she had not; but I do not think she
thought of him expectantly, or even hopefully. Many
sorrows had crushed the hope out of her nature. She
only did her duty, and waited passively for destiny to
draw nigh her; that destiny which had met her hitherto,
not as an angel of consolation scattering flowers,
but rather as an avenging spirit, whom she could not
choose but meet, even though he stood with a drawn
sword in her path. Thus passed autumn, and winter,
and spring, and again it was summer.
Again under the old locust-tree, in full blossom,
hanging over the stone door-step, Bertha sat watching
the last sun-rays gild the white tomb-stone above those
two graves, and the stars rising slowly one by one, and
pacing forth into the night. And again James Carpenter
came and took a seat beside her. After their
first greetings were over, he said,
“I heard of your father's death in California, Bertha,
and I lost no time in settling up my business and
hastening to you. I could not have you here alone.
under God, the memory of you has brought me safely
through them. For months I have lived in the bright
hope of this hour, when I could sit beside you thus,
and ask you to be my wife.”
That night the stars and the young June moon witnessed
their plighting, and holier vows have never been
spoken by truer hearts since our first father wooed our
mother in the undimmed brightness of Eden.
Now, indeed, upon Bertha Whitney's desolate life
broke the full glory of the sunshine. Who shall say,
after all, that our heavenly Father bestows his good
gifts in such unequal measure upon his children? Perhaps
into the six weeks that followed was compressed
joy enough to make amends for all the sorrows of that
patient woman. She was sad no longer—lonely no
longer. Before her the future stretched out a sunny
path, bright with flowers.
Her betrothed was an impatient lover. He could
not bear to leave her for an hour alone in that abode
of shadows where her sorrowful life had been passed.
He longed to lead her out into the light, to have her
patient face win a happier smile in the peace and rest
of a home of her own. And so, in six weeks from his
return, they were to be married.
The day had come. With a strange, exhilarating
sense of perfect joy and content such as she had never
experienced before, she had adorned her little dwelling
with flowers; she had decked herself in her simple but
graceful robe of white muslin. Already the minister
was there, and one or two of her truest friends. They
had come early, they said, for a shower seemed rising
in the west. And now it was time for the bridegroom.
length she took her station at the door. Soon the rain
began to fall, and the thunder to resound with sharp,
terrific peals. In the midst she could see him coming,
riding rapidly toward the house.
“Too bad,” she heard one of the guests murmur,
who had also seen him from the window—“too bad
he didn't start sooner; he'll be wet through and
through.”
Bertha said nothing. With her heart in her eyes
she watched him eagerly. Oh, heaven! that wild,
wild peal; that sudden, blinding flash; that horse rushing
franticly by the house; that falling weight. They
hear one piercing shriek. A white figure rushes from
the door—out into the storm.
Bertha raises her betrothed's head to her bosom, and
then once more rings on the air that fearful shriek,
and she has fallen to the earth by his side. They bring
them in. Alas! her heart is beating still. She must
waken to her long agony, her life of misery, but he,
her manly bridegroom, is dead. No voice of love, no
prayers, ever so long and all-prevailing, can bring him
back. Heaven's own thunderbolt has struck the life
from out his veins in the very hour of fruition.
It was many weeks before consciousness came fully
back to Bertha Whitney. In the touching disorder
of her intellect she seemed to live over only the bright
moments of that day which should have witnessed her
bridal. She would insist on putting on her bridal
robes, and waiting for her lover at the window. More
than one kind heart hoped that she would die thus—
die before she woke to the knowledge that earthly
love was gone from her forever; that beside her father
should have been her husband.
But the awakening came at last, and the knowledge
of her heart's widowhood. Thank God! she who had
struggled with so many sorrows did not yield utterly,
even to this, the last and heaviest.
“I shall go to him,” she said, “though he can never
come to me. There shall be no partings there.”
And so day by day her step grew feebler and her
cheek paler. Soon we knew that her words were true;
that she was indeed going to him. She lived until
the crocus sprang up in the meadows and the spring
violets opened their blue eyes in the clefts of the rocks.
But when a kind hand laid the spring blossoms upon
her pillow, she turned from them, lifting her dim eyes
to heaven.
“There are brighter flowers there,” she whispered.
“Father—mother—James—I am coming.”
And thus, in the pleasant spring morning, she fell
asleep. Said I not well that there should be joy for
the bright, new, glorious life, begun that hour, in the
Hereafter? She had closed her eyes on earth, where
for her had been twenty-nine winters, and only one
bright, brief, yet golden summer. On earth few had
known, few loved her; but in heaven was joy, unceasing;
supernal; and for the tired wanderer, weary and
footsore with the rough paths of earth, a long rest.
Where all sorrow, pain, and care,
And grief and death shall disappear.
The horologe of Eternity
Sayeth this incessantly—
Never—Forever—
Forever—Never!”
| My third book | |