After The Storm, T. S. Arthur [best summer reads txt] 📗

"We wont say anything against him," replied Irene, trying to understand exactly her father's state of mind and accommodate herself thereto. "Forgive and forget is the wisest rule always."

"Yes, dear, that's it. Forgive and forget—forgive and forget. There's nothing like it in this world. I'm glad to hear you talk so."

The mind of Mr. Delancy did not again wander from the truth. But the shock received when it first came upon him with stunning force had taken away his keen perception of the calamity. He was sad, troubled and restless, and talked a great deal about the unhappy position of his daughter—sometimes in a way that indicated much incoherence of thought. To this state succeeded one of almost total silence, and he would sit for hours, if not aroused from reverie and inaction by his daughter, in apparent dreamy listlessness. His conversation, when he did talk on any subject, showed, however, that his mind had regained its old clearness.

On the third day after Irene's arrival at Ivy Cliff, her trunks came up from New York. She had packed them on the night before leaving her husband's house, and marked them with her name and that of her father's residence. No letter or message accompanied them. She did not expect nor desire any communication, and was not therefore disappointed, but rather relieved from what would have only proved a cause of disturbance. All angry feelings toward her husband had subsided; but no tender impulses moved in her heart, nor did the feeblest thought of reconciliation breathe over the surface of her mind. She had been in bonds; now the fetters were cast off, and she loved freedom too well to bend her neck again to the yoke.

No tender impulses moved, we have said, in her heart, for it lay like a palsied thing, dead in her bosom—dead, we mean, so far as the wife was concerned. It was not so palsied on that fatal evening when the last strife with her husband closed. But in the agony that followed there came, in mercy, a cold paralysis; and now toward Hartley Emerson her feelings were as calm as the surface of a frozen lake.

And how was it with the deserted husband? Stern and unyielding also. The past year had been marked by so little of mutual tenderness, there had been so few passages of love between them—green spots in the desert of their lives—that memory brought hardly a relic from the past over which the heart could brood. For the sake of worldly appearances, Emerson most regretted the unhappy event. Next, his trouble was for Irene and her father, but most for Irene.

"Willful, wayward one!" he said many, many times. "You, of all, will suffer most. No woman can take a step like this without drinking of pain to the bitterest dregs. If you can hide the anguish, well. But I fear the trial will be too hard for you—the burden too heavy. Poor, mistaken one!"

For a month the household arrangements of Mr. Emerson continued as when Irene left him. He did not intermit for a day or an hour his business duties, and came home regularly at his usual times—always, it must be said, with a feeble expectation of meeting his wife in her old places; we do not say desire, but simply expectation. If she had returned, well. He would not have repulsed, nor would he have received her with strong indications of pleasure. But a month went by, and she did not return nor send him any word. Beyond the brief "I have gone," there had come from her no sign.

Two months elapsed, and then Mr. Emerson dismissed the servants and shut up the house, but he neither removed nor sold the furniture; that remained as it was for nearly a year, when he ordered a sale by auction and closed the establishment.

Hartley Emerson, under the influence of business and domestic trouble, matured rapidly, and became grave, silent and reflective beyond men of his years. Companionable he was by nature, and during the last year that Irene was with him, failing to receive social sympathy at home, he had joined a club of young men, whose association was based on a declared ambition for literary excellence. From this club he withdrew himself; it did not meet the wants of his higher nature, but offered much that stimulated the grosser appetites and passions. Now he gave himself up to earnest self-improvement, and found in the higher and wider range of thought which came as the result a partial compensation for what he had lost. But he was not happy; far, very far from it. And there were seasons when the past came back upon him in such a flood that all the barriers of indifference which he had raised for self-protection were swept away, and he had to build them up again in sadness of spirit. So the time wore on with him, and troubled life-experiences were doing their work upon his character.

IT is two years since the day of separation between Irene and her husband. Just two years. And she is sitting in the portico at Ivy Cliff with her father, looking down upon the river that lies gleaming in sunshine—not thinking of the river, however, nor of anything in nature.

They are silent and still—very still, as if sleep had locked their senses. He is thin and wasted as from long sickness, and she looks older by ten years. There is no fine bloom on her cheeks, from which the fullness of youth has departed.

It is a warm June day, the softest, balmiest, brightest day the year has given. The air comes laden with delicate odors and thrilling with bird melodies, and, turn the eye as it will, there is a feast of beauty.

Yet, the odors are not perceived, nor the music heard, nor the beauty seen by that musing old man and his silent daughter. Their thoughts are not in the present, but far back in the unhappy past, the memories of which, awakened by the scene and season, have come flowing in a strong tide upon them.

Two years! They have left the prints of their heavy feet upon the life of Irene, and the deep marks will never be wholly obliterated. She were less than human if this were not so. Two years! Yet, not once in that long, heart-aching time had she for a single moment looked backward in weakness. Sternly holding to her act as right, she strengthened herself in suffering, and bore her pain as if it were a decree of fate. There was no anger in her heart, nor anything of hardness toward her husband. But there was no love, nor tender yearning for conjunction—at least, nothing recognized as such in her own consciousness.

Not since the days Irene left the house of her husband had she heard from him directly; and only two or three times indirectly. She had never visited the city since her flight therefrom, and all her pleasant and strongly influencing associations there were, in consequence, at an end. Once her very dear friend Mrs. Talbot came up to sympathize with and strengthen her in the fiery trial through which she was passing. She found Irene's truer friend, Rosa Carman, with her; and Rose did not leave them alone for a moment at a time. All sentiments that she regarded as hurtful to Irene in her present state of mind she met with her calm, conclusive mode of reasoning, that took away the specious force of the sophist's dogmas. But her influence was chiefly used in the repression of unprofitable themes, and the introduction of such as tended to tranquilize the feelings, and turn the thoughts of her friend away from the trouble that was lying upon her soul like a suffocating nightmare. Mrs. Talbot was not pleased with her visit, and did not come again. But she wrote several times. The tone of her letters was not, however, pleasant to Irene, who was disturbed by it, and more bewildered than enlightened by the sentiments that were announced with oracular vagueness. These letters were read to Miss Carman, on whom Irene was beginning to lean with increasing confidence. Rose did not fail to expose their weakness or fallacy in such clear light that Irene, though she tried to shut her eyes against the truth presented by Rose, could not help seeing it. Her replies were not, under these circumstances, very satisfactory, for she was unable to speak in a free, assenting, confiding spirit. The consequence was natural. Mrs. Talbot ceased to write, and Irene did not regret the broken correspondence. Once Mrs. Lloyd wrote. When Irene broke the seal and let her eyes rest upon the signature, a shudder of repulsion ran through her frame, and the letter dropped from her hands to the floor. As if possessed by a spirit whose influence over her she could not control, she caught up the unread sheet and threw it into the fire. As the flames seized upon and consumed it, she drew a long breath and murmured,

"So perish the memory of our acquaintance!"

Almost a dead letter of suffering had been those two years. There are no events to record, and but little progress to state. Yes, there had been a dead level of suffering—a palsied condition of heart and mind; a period of almost sluggish endurance, in which pride and an indomitable will gave strength to bear.

Mr. Delancy and his daughter were sitting, as we have seen, on that sweet June day, in silent abstraction of thought, when the serving-man, who had been to the village, stepped into the portico and handed Irene a letter. The sight of it caused her heart to leap and the blood to crimson suddenly her face. It was not an ordinary letter—one in such a shape had never come to her hand before.

"What is that?" asked her father, coming back as it were to life.

"I don't know," she answered, with an effort to appear indifferent.

Mr. Delancy looked at his daughter with a perplexed manner, and then let his eyes fall upon the legal envelope in her hand, on which a large red seal was impressed.

Rising in a quiet way, Irene left the portico with slow steps; but no sooner was she beyond her father's observation than she moved toward her chamber with winged feet.

"Bless me, Miss Irene!" exclaimed Margaret, who met her on the stairs, "what has happened?"

But Irene swept by her without a response, and, entering her room, shut the door and locked it. Margaret stood a moment irresolute, and then, going back to her young lady's chamber, knocked for admission. There was no answer to her summons, and she knocked again.

"Who is it?"

She hardly knew the voice.

"It is Margaret. Can't I come in?"

"Not now," was answered.

"What's the matter, Miss Irene?"

"Nothing, Margaret. I wish to be alone now."

"Something has happened, though, or you'd never look just like that," said Margaret to herself, as she went slowly down stairs. "Oh dear, dear! Poor child! there's nothing but trouble for her in this world."

It was some minutes before Irene found courage to break the imposing seal and look at the communication within. She guessed at the contents, and was not wrong. They informed her, in legal phrase, that her husband had filed an application for a divorce on the ground of desertion, and gave notice that any resistance to this application must be on file on or before a certain date.

The only visible sign of feeling that responded to this announcement was a deadly paleness and a slight, nervous crushing of the paper in her hands. Moveless as a thing inanimate, she sat with fixed, dreamy eyes for a long, long time.

A divorce! She had looked for this daily for more than a year, and often wondered at her husband's tardiness. Had she desired it? Ah, that is the probing question. Had she desired an act of