Chapter V: The Husband’s Authority

Yet haply there will come a weary day,
When overtasked at length,
Both Love and Hope beneath the weight give way;
Then with a statue’s smile, a statue’s strength,
Stands the mute sister, Patience, nothing loth,
And both supporting does the work of both.
_—Coleridge._

Let us hasten over the next few hideous weeks. Alice had a serious illness, from which she recovered slowly; her spirit utterly broken; her heart utterly crushed; her very brain clouded. Her whole being bowed down by the storm of sorrow, yet with no one to support, comfort, sympathize with her. Sinclair, that only living being who could have saved her, was absent, forbidden to approach her. She was left alone, almost imbecile, and so quite defenseless in the terrible power of her father.

And what words are these to write! and what a position was hers when that divinely appointed parental authority—that protective and beneficent power—was perverted by pride, ambition, and selfishness into an engine of mighty torture, inflicting a fatal and life long calamity!

Yet the father verily believed that he was disinterestedly serving his daughter’s best interests. There is no more profoundly mournful illustration of the ruined archangel than that of any perverted love.

With the support of her feeble mother, had she lived—with the support of Sinclair, had his piety been less æscetic, more hopeful—Alice might have successfully resisted the fate impending over her; but she was alone, reduced by sorrow and illness to a state of imbecility of mind and body, and she succumbed to her destiny.

So, in just three months from the death of her mother Alice Chester, pallid, cold, nearly lifeless, whiter than the pearls in her pale hair, stood in bridal array before God’s holy altar, to vow in the hearing of men and angels to love and honor one whom she found it difficult not to hate and despise.

Immediately after the marriage they set out upon a bridal tour through the North. They were absent all summer. Early in autumn they returned to Mount Calm, where, at the earnest desire of Colonel Chester, they took up their residence. Alice would have preferred it otherwise.

After their marriage, and during their long and varied bridal tour, she had, as it were, lost her identity, seeming to herself to be someone else. The varied scenes of her journey—the stage-offices, turnpike roads, country taverns, great cities with their masses of brick and mortar, public edifices, forests of shipping, gay shops, theaters, concerts, balls, illuminations, dancings, splendid attire, stage pageantry, the ranting and the after silence, land journeys, water journeys—all haunted by one painful presence—had passed before her like a phantasmagoria; like a continuation of her brain fever, with its nervous delirium and grotesque or hideous visions and hallucinations. So all had seemed to her, while she seemed to all a pale, pretty, silent girl.

There is a point of suffering beyond which sorrow destroys itself—is not felt as real—just as there is a crisis at which physical agony superinduces insensibility. So it had been with Alice, until she re-entered her native State, and memory and association were at work again,

“And the accustomed train
Of things grew round her brain again”;

then it was with the shrinking dread with which a burned child would approach fire that Alice drew near her home. She would have preferred to remain away for ever, amid the kaleidoscopic changes of her new, wandering, unreal life, rather than have awakened from the strange, painful, but very vague dream; rather than have consciousness forced upon her by the dear, old familiar scenes and associations of her home—her once peaceful, hopeful, happy home, as by

“Some monstrous torture-engine’s whole
Strength.”

The day of their arrival at home a large company had been invited to meet them at dinner. The days that followed were filled up with dinner parties. At length, late in the fall, they were quietly settled, and the monotonous routine of daily country life commenced. One thing Alice dreaded and avoided—appearing at church again under her new position and name. But Sinclair had accepted a “call” to a church in the West, which opened to him a new field of labor and usefulness. His departure followed; and this was a great relief to Alice, who, with the “sigh of a great deliverance, tried to leave the past with all its gloom and terror,” and turn to the future with some hope.

Two events of great domestic importance occurred in the second year of their marriage; one was the death of Colonel Chester, who died, as all their neighbors said, of nothing more than his diabolical temper; as their physician said, of congestion of the brain, brought on by excitement. And what do you think was the cause of this fatal excitement? That the child of Alice happened to be a girl instead of a boy, which he had set his heart upon.