64 BRIEF DAYS OF HAPPINESS. joined by the young Lafayette from America. But Lafayette was still under proscription, and his wife felt that she had still a mission to accomplish. She set out for Paris to observe the condition of political feeling. Napoleon was First Consul, and his vigorous administration had restored order and the authority of the law. Madame Lafayette, from what she observed, was induced to advise her husband to join her without waiting for special permission. He did so; but Napoleon was deeply irritated at this act of disobedience. Taking upon herself the responsibility, the heroic wife solicited and obtained an interview. With affectionate eloquence she pleaded her husband's cause, contending that he could not justly be considered either an exile or an emigrant, and therefore was not amenable to the regulations which affected those classes. She spoke of his patriotism, his earnestness, his courage, and Napoleon listened. He admired the wife's devotion. Madame," he said, "I am charmed to make your acquaintance. You have spoken admirably; but you are entirely ignorant of public affairs." Lafayette, however, received permission to remain in France, and the re-united family took up their residence at Lagrange, near Brie. 66 Here, then, Madame Lafayette, after the stirring experiences of her career, seemed to have found a secure haven of repose. But Providence has willed that we shall never do more than reach the frontier of the Eden land, and view the happy valleys, for whose peace our souls have yearned, from the summit of the Mount Pisgah to which we have painfully climbed. Madame Lafayette, in the completeness of her bliss, was attacked by a mortal disease. "We soon felt," writes her husband, "that her summons had come, and that no human skill could save her. The evening on which she became delirious she said to me, 'If I am going to another home, you know I shall think only of you. Whatever it may cost me to leave you, I would gladly sacrifice my life to ensure your eternal happiness.' It seemed as if her love for me was stronger than disease; as if it conquered it. Even when this angelic creature was, as it were, already dead; when the death-chill had seized upon her limbs, some warmth and consciousness lingered in the hand I clasped in mine. Perhaps had she had full command of her senses, her passionate affection might have found less lavish utterance. "I AM ALL YOURS." 65 "She had no fear of death; her religion was all faith and hope; she had fulfilled every religious duty, and it was her firm belief that the sincere and virtuous of all creeds would be saved. 'I know not,' she used to say, 'what will befall them at their death; but God will provide. They will be saved.' 66 During an interval of reason she exclaimed, 'How I thank God that my ardent love to you was a duty! How happy I have been! What a privilege to have been your wife!' "When I spoke of my own tenderness for her :-'Yes, it is true; yes. Say that again; it is delightful. If you think I did not love you in return, it is because God gave me no greater faculty of loving. I love you,' she repeated, 'I love you passionately!—as a woman—as a Christian-body and soul!' "All the scenes of her life passed before her. She repeated with infinite emotion the Canticle of Tobias she had recited on first seeing the towers of Olmütz; she recalled her secret tears at my departure for America-tears concealed in order that her parents might not blame me. 'Oh!' cried she, 'for six more years at Lagrange! But I am dying! Have I ever offended you? Have I been a loving wife ?'-'Yes, yes, surely.'-' Then bless me, and promise me while you live to think of me as you do now.'-' Bless me also,' said I; and she did so for the first time and the last. "On the day of her death we wondered to hear her say, 'To-day I shall see my mother.' When her sister for a few moments seated herself by her side, I confess that I felt my conjugal affection aroused by a sentiment of jealousy for the only time. I passionately longed to occupy her exclusively. I wanted all her looks, all her thoughts. And she, too, seemed impatient for me to take my old place again. When I had done so, she pressed my hand in hers and softly whispered, I am all yours.' "These were her last words. "We stood around her bed, which had been moved into the centre of the room; we threw ourselves on our knees, watching each breath she drew. Without a pang, a heavenly smile brightening her wan face, and still holding my hand, this angel of love and tenderness passed away." E 66 THE HOUR OF AWAKENING. Lafayette may not have been-we do not think he was— worthy of so much heroism, of such heights and depths of affection; but the glory of the wife is not the less because she idealised and exalted in her husband the virtues that were really her own. It is marvellous how the love of women will drape in royal robes the most unkingly of creatures; how it persists in seeing in the idol to which it has once given its allegiance a greatness and a goodness, an excellence of motive and conduct, which the world is unable to discover; how it finds a reason for a weakness and an excuse for a fault; how it seeks to divest even sin of its shame and repulsiveness. It has been said that no man is a hero to his valet; certain it is that if he appear not as one to his wife, the failure must be of his own making. She is anxious to the last to shut her eyes to anything that may impair her conception of the perfect man on whom she has poured out all the treasures of a virgin heart; and bitter indeed is the agony when she can no longer deceive herself, when the degradation or imbecility of her husband stands revealed in all its nakedness; when she is forced to confess that she has been mistaken. This stricken condition of the soul is finely depicted by George Eliot, when, in her novel of "Middlemarch," Mrs. Bulstrode discovers, what everybody else had long before known, the moral worthlessness of the husband she had loved and married. She needed time, this poor, miserably-awakened woman, to get used to her maimed consciousness, her pitifully lopped life. “A new searching light had fallen on her husband's character, and she could not judge him leniently; the twenty years in which she had believed in him and venerated him by virtue of his concealments came back with particulars that made them seem an odious deceit." But even in this hour of sorrow and suffering, when the heart is bleeding with the wound inflicted by the hand it had fondly cherished, the true wife harbours not a thought of disloyalty. It is true that the "has been," the old confidence, the old regard, the old esteem, the common interest, the natural sympathy, can never be again. It is true that between her and her husband has suddenly risen up a barrier which in this life can never be removed. Yet she does not, she will not, she cannot abandon him. The finger of scorn may be pointed at him, the voice of deserved censure may judge him, as she herself judges him, but she will remain THE PARTIALITY OF TRUE LOVE. 67 at his side. And so, in “Middlemarch," Mrs. Bulstrode seeks out her guilty husband. "The door opened, and his wife entered. He dared not look up at her. He sat with his eyes bent down, and as she went towards him she thought he looked smaller-he seemed so withered and shrunken. A movement of new compassion and old tenderness went through her like a great wave, and putting one hand on his which rested on the arm of the chair, and the other on his shoulder, she said, solemnly but kindly, 'Look up, Nicholas.'" And thus hand in hand, but never more heart with heart, the twain, between whom has come so sharp a severance, go forth into the desert of the Unknown. It is well for most of us that our wives, like the hero in Marmontel's fairy tale, look so perseveringly through rosecoloured glasses. We gather up so much that is petty and untrue in our daily contact with the world, that it would prove a grievous mishap if they saw us exactly as we are; if they could make out each speck and stain, and observe how the seemingly fine smooth texture of our characters is worn and abraded in many unsuspected places. Oh, the love of woman, how fond, how generous it is! No imagination of poet has so strong an idealising faculty as the affection of a true wife! Her unselfish devotion, Midas-like, turns all it touches to gold. Ordinary virtue swells into moral heroism; dull respectability rises to severe conscientiousness; commonplace cleverness masquerades as transcendent genius. Most wives believe that their husbands have in them a potentiality of intellect, and could become Shakespeares, Miltons, Rafaelles, Michael Angelos, if they liked. Even when the judgment is clearer, the affection is not lessened, and it is ready, at need, to supply every deficiency. What will not a wife forgive in her husband? Every day we see her condoning infidelity, ill-usage, suspicion, and arbitrary injustice, until we are led to wonder when the limit of her forbearance will be reached. Perhaps the one sin, unforgiven and unforgiveable, is meanness; not so much meanness in a pecuniary sense, for that does not greatly affect most women, but meanness of motive and conduct, a littleness which not only humiliates the man, but all who are nearly allied to him. Thackeray has painted this pettiness or mediocrity of character in the George Osborne of his "Vanity Fair;" and every reader must have rejoiced 68 A WIFE'S FORGIVINGNESS. that he was killed at Waterloo before his wife could know him as he really was, before the sad but inevitable moment of awakening had come upon her. “A man,” says Emerson, “is like a bit of Labrador spar, which has no lustre as you turn it in your hand, until you come to a particular angle, then it shows deep and beautiful colours." Herein lies the subtle skill of the true wife: she detects in her husband the latent vein of golden ore; she knows how to expose that particular angle of his character which reveals the finest hues. It is her pleasure and her pride to exhibit him to others as she herself sees him; and many a man owes half his fame, half his influence, to his wife's transports of tenderness. Frequently her affection kindles the dormant spark of intellectual life. More frequently still she keeps the divine fire a-light by her indefatigable care. She is always ready to soothe the lacerated heart or cheer the despondent spirit; to give her husband fresh confidence in himself by the fulness of her own belief in him. And all she asks in return is his love. "Mine, my own, without doubts or terrors, " Let him be what he will or do what he will, so that he places his heart in her keeping. Be his failures ever so many, or his errors ever so glaring, she will forgive, and she will plead, as Amelia does in Fielding's admirable novel, that he may be forgiven. Let us pause to note that Fielding's "Amelia is said to be a "true picture of his first wife." "They say," remarks Thackeray, "it was in his own home Fielding knew and loved her; from his own wife that he drew the most charming character in English fiction." It would be difficult to find a better portrait of an unselfish, forgiving, and generous-souled wife, who, in return for all she gives and bears, seeks nothing but a little tenderness. 1 "Poems," by the author of "John Halifax, Gentleman." |