After the body of her mother had been laid away, by the side of that of her dead husband, with the youngest of eight children clasped in her arms, Imelda changed her home to a little attic room. When all was over she returned to the store where she had now been employed three years.
In the early days of her engagement there she had become acquainted with a bright cheery little girl, Alice Day by name, with whom she had become fast friends, although a greater contrast one could scarcely imagine than existed between the personalities of the two girls. The one, small, bright, saucy, sparkling; the other, tall, stately, sad. Although Alice did not have that high order of intelligence that Imelda was the possessor of, yet she was so purely child-like and frank, that they at once attracted each other; each supplying to the other that which she did not possess. Their friendship, however, was of short duration. Pretty Alice had a lover, a traveling salesman at the time, whose home was in the east. He was about to establish a business of his own and so would no longer have opportunities of seeing his little lady-love; a state of affairs that did not meet the approval of either the young gentleman in question or that of the fair Alice. So he proposed to take her with him as his wife.
Alice was married and Imelda saw no more of her friend. Now and then a letter came and she knew that the husband was prospering; that Alice lived in a beautiful home, and that two sweet babies, girl babies, had come to make music in that stately home.
About the time that Alice left the store to become a wife another girl found employment with the same firm; a tall, stately girl whom to describe would be extremely difficult. Fair as a lily, ruddy as a rose, with a bearing almost haughty. One moment a laughing, rollicking sprite, the next if some unlucky individual dared to address her with a freedom she thought uncalled for her blue eyes would emit such scornful flashes that you almost felt their scorching heat. The color would rise in her cheeks until they were stained a dark hue; her lips would be compressed so firmly that they appeared almost white.
Sometimes it appeared as though two distinct and separate spirits inhabited the body of this girl, so utterly would the different moods change her from one to the other. We might go still farther, and say there were three spirits. Three in one, for there was still another phase of her character. In the first, she was the rollicking, teasing, mirth-provoking sprite, the next, she was soft, melting, a child of dreams, and in the last a proud, scornful, haughty woman. Talented and gifted by nature, her character was as yet unformed. Future events would determine which phase would predominate.
Such was Margaret Leland when first Imelda knew her. The two girls were soon strongly attached to each other. Margaret was very sympathetic and Imelda was in need of sympathy. Misery loves company, it is said. So when Imelda one evening told her the story of her life, with all its trials and shadows,—which revelation was made after the death of her father, Margaret reciprocated by giving a history that was fully as sad as her own. Interwoven with her life were just as bitter tears, and if Margaret had not stood above an open grave her life had nevertheless been overshadowed by such tragic events that it took all the innate pride of her nature to enable her to hold up her head. Probably to this very cause was due the fact that she sometimes let this pride carry her to extremes.
It was on a fine summer evening not long before wayward Cora had deserted them that Imelda and Margaret had been walking together and found a seat in beautiful Lincoln Park. Imelda had just finished relating her story, omitting nothing of the mistakes that had been so fatal to the happiness of her parents. “I cannot understand,” she concluded, “why it was they were so utterly unhappy. It often appeared to me that my mother almost hated my father, although he was far above her mentally, possessed of remarkable intelligence, having had the benefit of an education so thorough that often I have wondered how a match so unsuited was ever made. I have never known my father to be really unkind, although often impatient, as my mother could be very trying. However, I have often sought to excuse her for that; her health for years had not been of the best and the babies would come oh, so close! Poor mother! I suppose almost any woman would have broken down under it.”
“I should think so,” replied Margaret’s low sweet voice. “Only think! eight children in how many years?”
“Fifteen,” answered Imelda, “and you must remember, too, she had three miscarriages in that time. Yes, it was too much. Do you know,” she continued musingly, “that the thought often comes to me, that while lover’s love must be great, it is not great enough, not strong enough to withstand the storm of married woes. I have never had a lover, but have often dreamed of lover’s joys. But tell me, where do you see lovers among married people?”
“Married lovers are indeed a rare sight,” Margaret answered, “and,” she continued, startling the ear of the listening Imelda, “love certainly is a beautiful dream. I know of what I am speaking, for it has come to me, e’en that; but ‘marriage is a failure,’ and, as I think now, I do not believe I shall ever trust myself to its deceiving, cruel fetters.”
“Then what will you do?”
“Remain as I am, free as the birds of the air. No man shall ever say to me, ‘thou shalt’ or ‘thou shalt not’!”
Imelda stared at her friend in open-eyed wonder.
“What then will become of your love?” she asked.
Margaret’s lips trembled as a sigh escaped them. “Ah, Love, sweet entrancing Love! Imelda, he is a fickle boy; promising you heavenly bliss to entice you into his meshes. They sound so fair, these promises, so bewitching in the rosy hue he weaves about them, until——”
“Until what?”
“Until you permit his alluring voice to entice you into those rose-woven and satin-covered fetters called marriage bonds. Then, in a most tantalizing manner, after all loopholes of escape have been closed, he takes his departure with mocking laughter and leaves you only the blackness of despair. Your weak hands are not powerful enough to hold him with all the man-made laws of the land. He comes to us all unsought, in rose-strewn dreams. If you would retain his blissful presence you must meet him full of trust and confidence. Fetter this laughing, happy boy and he will slip from between your clinging, clutching fingers. In spite of yourself he is gone. You are alone, bound to a loathsome corpse. Never again will the sweet little cajoler walk by your side, in the old form, to soothe your aching heart with his warm perfumed breath. And if ever, in very pity for you, he shall make the attempt to draw near in another form, to warm your frozen heart, you are forced by the cruel laws of a cruel society with your own trembling hands to murder him.
“Marry? No! I may enjoy a lover’s love, may mount with him to realms of bliss, and when the time comes that we have outgrown each other, the time when one may be mounting too fast for the other to keep up, as when one becomes a weight, clogging the footsteps of the other, then at least, no unnatural fetters will have bound us. We can still follow our own sweet wills, and should Love again with his winsome wiles approach me with his golden dreams, I shall then be free to clasp him in my embrace. I may once again be happy in the sunshine he is sure to bring with him, and shed around him.”
Awestruck Imelda listened. Margaret’s cheeks were glowing with excitement. Her eyes shone with a splendor Imelda had never noted there before, while the look in them seemed far-away. Where were her thoughts? What visions floated before her mind? Was it the lover she spoke of, with whom she was mounting to unknown heights of bliss, or was she looking into the far-away future where he was the same, and yet not the same? When Love shall have taken upon himself a different guise than he at present wears? Who knows? Imelda listened spellbound to this dreaming girl, almost fearing to break the silence that ensued.
“Margaret, who taught you that? Where did you learn to hold such views of love and marriage?”
Almost instantly the entranced look faded from the face of the beautiful blonde. That most holy glow gave way to a sickly pallor. The lips quivered like those of a grieved child, and the eyes filled with tears.
“Experience,” she faltered.
“Experience? You?”
“Yes, Imelda. Listen. I will now tell you the story of my life. Or, more properly speaking, that of my mother; but which has nevertheless influenced mine to such an extent that all my life, I suppose, the results of it must walk by my side, follow me wherever I go. To begin with, my mother has been what the world calls ‘a divorced woman’.”
“Divorced!” Imelda exclaimed in a startled manner.
“Yes, divorced! Married at the tender age of sixteen, she thought all that was needed to make earth a heaven was the complete union with the man she loved. A few week’s she lived in a fool’s paradise. She was young, inexperienced, with character undeveloped, else even in that short time she must have seen and understood the innate coarseness of the man who was her husband, whom she had promised to love, honor and obey, and who is my——father! In a very short time it dawned upon her that they had no tastes whatever in common. A brutal coarseness soon became manifest that caused her to shrink at his every touch. He soon came to understand this and it roused the very devil in him. He delighted in torturing her in every conceivable way. He did not even stop at blows.”
“Blows! Oh,—” gasped Imelda. A bitter smile for a moment curled Margaret’s lips, and then she proceeded:
“And that man is my father. Oh, why must I say it!” It cost her a great struggle to proceed. Imelda asked her to refrain, but Margaret insisted that she must tell her all, saying, “I would have to tell you some time that we may fully understand each other,” and in a few moments she continued:
“The thought of separation never entered her mind in those days. She worked; a slave could scarcely have been more driven. A slave! Can it be possible there ever has been a worse slave than my mother was? And then the babies came. All through the time of gestation she had to work, to perform the hardest labor, and often my——father would come home intoxicated and, if it was possible for him to descend a step lower than was his wont, that was the time. I myself know little or nothing of those days, but my mother has made me her confidante, and every word she has told me is engraven on my heart. Oh, how she must have suffered in those awful, awful times! She was helpless under his brute power, and the relations that should only be the expression of a pure and holy love, that should, in my opinion, be fraught with divinest bliss, became to her the tortures of hell. Many a night sleep was a stranger to her eyes, and, other nights again, sleep came only after her pillow had been drenched with tears. Under such circumstances her children were born. Is it any wonder that the world is filled with criminals and idiots?
“How it was ever possible for me to be what I am is more than I can comprehend. I know I am far from perfect. I am terribly self-willed and can never bear being crossed. My mother was proud and self-willed also, and though she learned to hate and loathe the man whom according to law she was in duty bound to love, and though she suffered untold agonies I think her pride, her self-respect, would never permit her to stoop to anything that would degrade her, if we except the fact that she was forced to live in marriage with a man who was in every way a brute. It is to this pride and self-respect, I think, that I owe it that I am able to lay claim to a higher and better nature than it could otherwise have been possible for me to possess.
“Oh, the disgust that I feel when I hear matters pertaining to sex made light of. These relations to my mind are something sacred and pure. But the sensual man who believes that woman was made for his use only—the man who commits continual outrages upon the woman who is legally bound to him, upon her who bears the name of wife—such men defile the air with their very breath.
“If under such circumstances a woman in her own soul, through her superior mind, can create and hold a world of her own, making it possible to ward off many evils that would naturally be the inheritance of her children, what may she not do under conditions that are favorable? Thus I think it was that mother stood above my father as the stars are above the earth.
“But I have deviated. The years passed, and three times she had become a mother. Always for a short time after the advent of a little one my father seemed to show some marks of humanity, treating mother with some show of kindness, but not for long. It would soon wear away and when the trying season of gestation was upon her again he would be tenfold worse. My mother thinks the reason for this was that during those seasons she was more averse than ever to sex relations, which relations on his part meant neither more nor less than debauchery of what should have been an act personifying and realizing holy love. She would shrink from his touch as from a reptile. Not being able to understand her, as he was not possessed of a single refined instinct, it had the effect to infuriate him.
“Seven years my mother led this life. Her first born, a boy, died when he was a little more than a year old. Then I was born. After that came another boy. When Osmond was two years old and I four, my mother one day, with both of us left my father’s house forever. During the last year or two matters had been growing worse and still worse, until finally they had become unendurable.
“My mother being a well-developed woman and possessing strong attractive powers would unconsciously draw the passing glances of men wherever she might chance to be. In spite of all she had been compelled to pass through, feeling was not yet dead within her. An intelligent and attractive man always had the power to move her to animation and life. This, again, my father could not understand, and to his many other faults was added that of an insane jealousy. It was the last straw that broke the camel’s back. Having been subjected to his indignities until she was able to bear them no longer she resolved to submit to no more. So one wet, cold evening in the early autumn she returned to her childhood’s home.”