University of Virginia Library

16. CHAPTER XVI.

— Pope.

It was nine years since, in an evil hour, Leslie had first
seen Miss Cynthia Everille, playing on a harp, and accompanying
herself in a thin, sweet voice, with words of her
own composing. His weak heart succumbed: he fell in love
off hand; and within a year after the death of his first wife,
Edith's mother, her picture was taken from the wall, and a
second Mrs. Leslie reigned in her stead.

“Sweet,” — “charming,” — “fascinating,” — were the
least of the adjectives lavished on the interesting bride.
Some of his lady acquaintance felicitated him that he had
espoused an angel, an embodied beatitude not more than
half pertaining to this world. In fact, there was a certain
aerial grace in her movements, a certain translucency in her
small alabaster features, which might countenance such a notion.
The winning smile, too, with which she met her visitors
on her reception Thursdays, savored wholly of the
angelic. She breathed courtesies around her as the beneficent
royalty of Naples scatters sugar plums among his loving subjects

at the carnival, and, on the next day, sends them to
prison by the cart load.

The tyranny of the strong is bad enough; but the tyranny
of the weak is intolerable; and this latter visitation came
upon Leslie in its most rueful form — that, namely, whose
weapons are sobs, sighs, vapors, and the dire coercion of
hysteric fits. He was a soft-hearted fool, and a fair subject
for such oppression. Not that his newly-installed mistress
— his mistress, since she made him her slave — was naturally
of an ill temper. On the contrary, she was somewhat amiable,
or, at least, much given to tears and tenderness; but in
process of time, this profuse sensibility had all centred on
herself. In short, she was profoundly selfish, though nothing
could have astonished her more than to tell her so; for, in
her own eyes, she seemed a miracle of sensibility, as indeed
she was, though her sensibility had learned to give little
response to any woes but her own. What these woes might
be would be hard to say: she had a wonderful talent for
finding and inventing grievances. She was submerged and
drowned in a sentimental melancholy, which wore in turn ten
thousand different aspects, each worse than the other. She
was a sea-anemone, covered with a myriad of filaments, all
more shrinking and sensitive than a snail's horns.

One reads of famished wretches who have tried to nourish
life from the current of their own veins. So, in a figurative
sense, did she. She was always anatomizing her own ridiculous
heart; groping among the depths of her own sickly
fancies, and making them her daily food. She was a busy
gatherer of tokens, souvenirs, and mementoes, and was

beset with blighted hopes, vain longings, sad remembrances,
and all the spectral ills engendered between a frail mind and
a depraved stomach. She was a great reader, and floated
rudderless through a sea of books, fishing out of it all that
was tender, morbid, and despairing, and stowing it up in
albums.

It may be thought that some disconsolate memory, some
affection nipped in the bud, or the like catastrophe, had
brought her to this pass. Far from it. She mourned that
her fate had been too flat and sterile; that the rapturous
emotions of her heart had never been awakened; that no
sentimental passion, in short, had ever stirred her soul from
its depths. This was the grievance which rankled most in
her reveries. To give her her due, she never told it to her
husband; but she brooded upon it in secret; and the result
was, a multitude of affecting verses, which she treasured in
her album as anonymous.

Leslie, though none of the wisest of men, was one of the
most amiable; and, under his wife's discipline, he learned to
be one of the most discreet. It behooved him to be watchful
and circumspect. His married life was a voyage through
shoals and shallows, and needed sagacious pilotage; for no
common eye could see where the danger lay. There was an
endless variety of subjects tabooed to him; matters to all
appearance quite indifferent, but to which he must never
allude, because, Heaven knows how, they touched some trembling
susceptibility, or wakened some grievous memory from
its blessed sleep. The penalty, if the case were mild, would
be a deep-drawn sigh; if more aggravated, a flood of tears;

if extreme, an hysteric fit. And if, in his efforts to console
her, he ventured to add any thing in the form of remonstrance,
or let fall any word which might intimate that her
conduct was not quite reasonable, the outraged sufferer would
cease weeping, cast up her eyes reproachfully, and murmuring,
“O William, is it come to this?” relapse again instantly
into the depths of sobbing affliction. It was only by the
most abject submission, coupled with all the resources of
conjugal eloquence, that Leslie could succeed at length in
purchasing a look of resignation and a faint smile of forgiveness.

Use, it is said, will blunt the sharpest of troubles. In
time, he became acclimated to his fate; yet, on one or two
occasions, his equanimity was quite overset. He thought
that his wife was losing her wits; for, as he came into her
room, she fixed on him a melting gaze, sank on his shoulder,
and flooded him with such a freshet of tears, that he might
have complained with De Bracy, that a water fiend possessed
her. The truth was, she had just been musing on her own
dissolution, and imagining, in a luxury of woe, her own funeral,
with all the circumstance of that sad event. As she
looked around and bethought her how desolate that chamber
would be when she was gone, and how each trifle that had
once been hers would be treasured by those she left behind,
her sensitive heart had dissolved in tenderness, and produced
the hydraulic demonstration just mentioned.

This libel on womankind became the mother of a pair of
twins — the same infant prodigies whom Morton had seen at
the White Mountains. Both perished at the age of seven,

their precocious brains having by that time usurped all the
vitality of their miserable little bodies. She was inconsolable
at their death, though, while they lived, her delicate nerves
could seldom abide their presence for five minutes at a time.

There was once an idiot, who, being of a conciliating temper,
thought to appease a fire and persuade it to go out by
feeding it with fuel till it should be satisfied, and crave no
more. On the same principle Leslie tried to satisfy the exacting
spirit of his wife by a most watchful and anxious devotion
to all her whims; but the greater his devotion, the
more exacting she grew. She felt her power, and used it
without mercy. She was, withal, intolerably jealous, not so
much of any living rival, as of the memory of a dead one,
Leslie's former wife. Here, indeed, she had some show of
reason; for the poles are not wider asunder than were the
characters of herself and her predecessor.

Those who had known the latter in her maidenhood — she
married young, or perhaps she would never have married Leslie
— knew her as the dominant belle of the season, conspicuous
for her beauty, her position, and for a degree of culture
rare in America at that time; devoted and ardent towards a
few close friends, haughty and distant towards the many;
greatly loved by her few intimates, and either greatly admired
or greatly disliked by most others around her. Those who
knew her in the last years of her life knew her as one who
had passed through a fiery ordeal. Of her many children,
only one was left. They had fallen around her in a sudden
and sharp succession, till it seemed to her that a destroying
doom had gone forth against her race, and that the world of

her affections was turned to a field of carnage. Leslie felt
the shock acutely, not to say intensely, for a while; but the
storm passed, and left on him very little trace. It sank into
the deeper nature of his wife with such a penetrating sense
of the vanity of life and the rottenness of mortal hope, as, in
the olden time, drew saints and anchorites to renounce the
world and give themselves to penance and seclusion. It
made no anchorite of her. She rose from her baptism of fire
saddened, but not broken nor unstrung; with a rooted faith
and an absolute resignation; a nice perception of all human
suffering; sympathies broad and embracing as the air; a
benevolence pervading as the sunshine; and a spirit so calm
in its elevation that no wind of calamity had power to ruffle it.

Edith Leslie was a child when her mother died, yet old
enough to feel the loss profoundly, and to be greatly shocked
and cast down at the alacrity with which her father contrived
to forget it. Having reduced Leslie to obedience, his bride
essayed the same experiment on his daughter, but failed notably.
There was something in the nature of the latter which
revolted so impatiently against the selfish caprices and morbid
fooleries which were played off hourly before her, — she was
so indignant, moreover, at seeing her father sunk inch by inch
in the slough of matrimonial thraldom, — that the issue might
easily have been a protracted household feud. None but herself
could know with how costly an effort she schooled herself
to patience. With a caustic wit, and a fervent fancy
which haunted her with images of an ideal life brighter than
the work-day world around her, a nature with impulses
which, less curbed and tempered, might have carried her

through all the mazes of morbid rebellion, she still bent herself
to accept her lot as she found it, in the full faith that
flowers may be taught to grow on the flintiest soil. And
now that the imagined maladies of a lifetime were turned at
last into a mortal reality, and her step-mother lay on her death
bed, Edith Leslie watched by her side with as much care as
if this wretched piece of perverted sensibility had deserved
her affection and esteem.