For they were young, and youth’s courage is high, and the burden of those days was not yet too hard to be borne.
Nea longed to help Maurice, but her pride, always her chief fault, came as a stumbling-block in her way; she could not bear to go into the world and face strangers. And Maurice on his side could not endure the thought that his beautiful young wife should be exposed to slights and humiliations; so Nea’s fine talent wasted by misuse.
Still, even these scruples would have faded under the pressure of severer needs, had no children come to weaken Nea’s strength and keep her drudging at home.
Nea had never seen her father nor heard anything from him all this time. Maurice, it was true, had humbled himself again and again, but his letters had all been returned unopened.
But when her boy was born, Nea’s heart, softened by the joys of maternity, yearned passionately for a reconciliation, and by her husband’s advice, she stifled all feelings of resentment, and wrote as she had never written before, as she never could write again, but all in vain; the letter was returned, and in her weakened state Nea would have fretted herself to death over that unopened letter if it had not been for her husband’s tenderness and her baby’s innocent face.
How the young mother doated on her child! To her he was a miracle, a revelation. Nature had opened a fount of consolation in her troubles. She would lie patiently for hours on her couch, watching her baby in his sleep. Maurice, coming in jaded and weary from his work, would pause on the threshold to admire the picture. He thought his wife never looked so beautiful as when she had their boy in her arms.
And so the years passed on. Maurice worked, and struggled, and pinched, till his face grew old and careworn, and the hard racking cough began to make itself heard, and Nea’s fine color faded, for the children were coming fast now, and the days were growing darker and darker.
By and by there was a baby girl, with her father’s eyes, and beautiful as a little angel; then twin boys whom Nea kissed and fondled for a few weeks, and then laid in their little coffins; then another boy who only lived two years; and lastly, after a long lapse of time, another girl.
But when this one was born the end was fast approaching. Mr. Huntingdon had been abroad for a year or two, and had just returned to Belgrave House—so Mr. Dobson informed Nea when he dropped in one evening on one of his brief visits—and he had brought with him a young widowed niece and her boy.
Nea remembered her cousin Erle Huntingdon and the dark-eyed girl whom he had married and taken with him to Naples; but she had never heard of his death.
Doubtless her father meant to put Beatrice in her place, and make the younger Erle his heir; and Nea sighed bitterly as she looked at her boy playing about the room. Mr. Dobson interpreted the sight aright.
“Try again, Mrs. Trafford,” he said, holding out his hand as he rose; “humble yourself in the dust, for the sake of your children.” And Nea took his advice, but she never had any answer to her letter, and soon after that their kind old friend, Mr. Dobson, died, and then everything went wrong.
Maurice’s employer gave up business, and his successor, a hard grasping man, found fault with Maurice’s failing health, and dismissed him as an incompetent clerk; and this time Maurice found himself without friends.
For a little time longer he struggled on, though broken in heart and health.
They left their comfortable lodgings and took cheaper ones, and sold every article of furniture that was not absolutely necessary; and the day before her baby was born, Nea, weeping bitterly, took her last relic, her mother’s portrait, from the locket set with pearls from her neck, and asked Maurice to sell the little ornament.
All through that long illness, though Heaven only knows how, Maurice struggled on.
Ill himself, he nursed his sick wife with patient care and tenderness.
Nea and her little ones had always plenty of nourishing food, though he himself often went without the comforts he needed; he kept the children quiet, he did all and more than all a woman would have done, before, worn out at last in body and mind, he laid himself down, never to rise again.
And Nea, going to him with her sickly baby in her arms, saw a look on his face that terrified her, and knelt down by his side, while he told her between his paroxysms of coughing what little there was to tell.
She knew it all now; she knew the poor, brave heart had been slowly breaking for years, and had given way at last; she knew what he had suffered to see the woman he loved dragged down to the level of his poverty, and made to endure such bitterness of humiliation; she knew, when it was too late, that the man was crushed under the consequences of his weakness, that his remorse was killing him; and that he would seal his repentance with his life. And then came from his pale lips a whispered entreaty that Nea shuddered to hear.
“Dearest,” he had said, when she had implored him to say what she could do to comfort him, “there is one thing; go to your father. Yes, my darling,” as she shivered at his words, “go to him yourself; let him see your dear face that has grown so thin and pale; perhaps he will see for himself, and have pity. Tell him I am dying, and that I can not die in peace until he has promised to forgive you, and take care of you and the children. You will do this for me, Nea, will you not? You know how I have suffered, and will not refuse me.”
Had she ever refused him anything? Nea kissed the drawn pallid face without a word, tied on her shabby bonnet, and took her baby in her arms—it was a puny, sickly creature, and wailed incessantly, and she could not leave it—then with tears blinding her poor eyes, she walked rapidly through the dark streets, hardly feeling the cutting wind, and quite unconscious of the driving sleet that pelted her face with icy particles.
For her heart felt like a stone; Maurice was dying; but no! he should not die: with her own hands she would hold back her beloved from the entrance to the dark valley; she would minister to his fainting soul the cordial of a tardy forgiveness, though she should be forced to grovel for it at her father’s feet. And then all at once she suddenly stopped, and found she was clinging, panting for breath, to some area railings, that the baby was crying miserably on her bosom, and that she was looking through the open door into her father’s hall.
There was a carriage standing there, and a footman was shivering as he walked up and down the pavement. No one took notice of the beggar-woman as they thought her, and Nea, moved by a strange impulse and desire for warmth and comfort, crept a few steps nearer and looked in.
There was a boy in a velvet tunic sliding up and down the gilded balustrades; and a tall woman with dark hair, and a diamond cross on her white neck, swept through the hall in her velvet dress and rebuked him. The boy laughed merrily and went a few steps higher.
“Beatrice and the young Erle Huntingdon,” said Nea to herself. And then a tall thin shadow fell across the door-way, and, uttering a half-stifled cry, Nea saw her father, saw his changed face, his gray hair and bowed figure, before she threw herself in his way.
And so, under the gas-light, with servants watching them curiously, Mr. Huntingdon and his daughter met again. One who stood near him says an awful pallor, like the pallor of death, came over his face for an instant when he saw her standing before him with her baby in her arms, but in the next he would have moved on had she not caught him by the arm.
“Father,” she sobbed; “father, come with me. Maurice is dying. My husband is dying; but he says he can not die until he has your forgiveness. Come home with me; come home with your own Nea, father;” but he shook off her grasp, and began to descend the steps.
“Here, Stephen,” he said, taking some gold from his pocket; “give this to the woman and send her away. Come, Beatrice, I am ready.”
Merciful Heaven! had this man a human heart, that he should disown his own flesh and blood? Would it have been wonderful if she had spoken bitter scathing words to the unnatural parent who was driving her from his door? But Nea never spoke, she only turned away with a shudder from the sight of the proffered gold, and