The Disappearance VII - A Widow Subject To Fears

The position of the missing man's wife was a particularly trying and painful one—a position imperatively calling for the sympathy of the community in which she lived. That sympathy was freely accorded to her, but time alone could bring any thing like tranquillity to a mind harassed by such manifold anxieties as hers. After a lapse of a few weeks Squire Harrington generously offered to take the farm off her hands, but to this proposal she was for some time loath to assent. In spite of her fears and misgivings, fitful gleams of hope that her husband would return to her flitted across her mind. If he came back he should find her at her post. Meanwhile the neighbours showed her much kindness. They voluntarily formed an organisation of labour, and harvested her crops, threshed them out and conveyed them to market for her. Her brother, a young man of eighteen, came out from town and took up his abode with her, so that she would not be left wholly desolate among strangers. And so the summer and autumn glided by.

But this state of things could not last. The strange solitude of her destiny preyed sorely upon her and when the first snows of winter arrived, bringing with them no tidings of the absent one, the fortitude of the bereaved woman broke down. She gave up the farm, and with her little baby boy and such of her household belongings as she chose to retain, went back to the home of her parents in Millbrook. She was a few hundred dollars better off in this world's goods than she had been when she had left that home about thirteen months before, but her spirit was sadly bent, if not altogether broken, and the brightness seemed to have utterly faded out of her life.

In process of time she became in some degree accustomed, if not reconciled to her lot. But her situation was, to say the least, anomalous. Her parents were, on the whole, kind and considerate, but she was conscious of being, after a fashion, isolated from them and from all the rest of the world. She felt, as one who was, in the language of the proverb, neither maid, wife nor widow. She knew not whether her child's father was living or dead. She was barely twenty-three years of age, but she was not free to form a second marriage, even if she had had any inclination for such a union, which, to do her justice, she had not, for she cherished the memory of her absent lord with fond affection, and persisted in believing that, even if he were living, it was through no fault of his own that he remained away from her. She lived a very quiet and secluded life. In spite of her mother's importunities, she seldom stirred out of doors on week days, and saw few visitors. She was a regular attendant at church on Sundays, and sought to find relief from mental depression in the consolations of religion. Her chief consolation, however, lay in her child, upon whom she lavished all the tenderness of a soft and gentle nature. She fondly sought to trace in the little fellow's bright features some resemblance to the lineaments of him she had loved and lost. To do this successfully required a rather strong effort of the imagination, for, to tell the truth, the boy favoured his mother's side of the house, and was no more like his father than he was like the twelve patriarchs. But a fond mother often lives in an ideal world of her own creation, and can trace resemblances invisible to ordinary mortals. So it was with this mother, who often declared that her boy had a way of "looking out of his eyes," as she expressed it, which forcibly brought back the memory of happy days which had forever passed away.

Of course Savareen's relatives in the old country received due notice of his strange disappearance, and of the various circumstances connected with that event. Mrs. Savareen had herself communicated the facts, and had also sent over a copy of the Millbrook Sentinel, containing a long and minute account of the affair. A letter arrived from Herefordshire in due course, acknowledging the receipt of these missives, and enquiring whether the lost had been found. Several communications passed to and fro during the first few months, after which, as there was really nothing further to write about, the correspondence fell off; it being of course understood that should any new facts turn up, they should be promptly made known.

The stars do not pause in their spheres to take note of the afflictions of us mortals here below. To the bereaved woman it seemed unaccountable that the succeeding months should come and go as formerly, and as though nothing had occurred to take the saltiness and savour out of her young life. Ever and anon her slumbers were disturbed by weird dreams, in which the lost one was presented before her in all sorts of frightful situations. In these dreams which came to her in the silent watches of the night, she never seemed to look upon her husband as dead. He always seemed to be living, but surrounded by inextricable complications involving great trouble and danger. She sometimes awoke from these night visions with a loud cry which startled the household, and proved how greatly her nerves had been shaken by the untoward circumstances of her fate.

In the early spring of the ensuing year she sustained another painful bereavement through the death of her mother. This event imparted an additional element of sadness to her already cloudy existence; but it was not without certain attendant compensations, as it rendered necessary a more active course of life on her part, and so left her less time to brood over her earlier sorrow. No Benvolio was needed to tell us that

      "One fire burns out another's burning:
       One pain is lessened by another's anguish."

Most of us have at one time or another been forced to learn that hard truth for ourselves. This forlorn woman had probably never read the passage, but her experience brought abundant confirmation of it home to her at this time. She was driven to assume the internal management of the household, and found grateful solace in the occupations which the position involved. She once more began to take an interest in the prosaic affairs of everyday life, and became less addicted to looking forward to a solitary, joyless old age. So that, all things considered, this second bereavement was not to be regarded in the light of an affliction absolutely without mitigation.

It might well have been supposed that the place she was now called upon to fill would have been the means of drawing closer the ties between her surviving parent and herself. For a time it certainly had that effect. Her presence in his house must have done much to soften the blow to her father, and her practical usefulness was made manifest every hour of the day. She carefully ministered to his domestic needs, and did what she could to alleviate the burden which had been laid upon him. But the old, old story was once more repeated. In little more than a year from the time her mother had been laid in her grave, she was made aware of the fact that the household was to receive a new mistress. In other words, she was to be introduced to a stepmother. The event followed hard upon the announcement. As a necessary consequence she was compelled to assume a secondary place in her father's house.

It may be true that first marriages are sometimes made in Heaven. It is even possible that second marriages may now and then be forged in the same workshop. But it was soon brought home to Mrs. Savareen that this particular marriage was not among the number. Her stepmother, who was not much older than herself, proved a veritable thorn in her side. She was made to perceive that she and her little boy were regarded in the light of encumbrances, to be tolerated until they could be got rid of. But not passively tolerated. The stepmother was a rather coarse-grained piece of clay—an unsympathetic, unfeeling woman, who knew how to say and to do unpleasant things without any apparent temper or ill-will. The immortal clockmaker, when he was in a more quaintly sententious humour than common, once propounded the doctrine that the direct road to a mother's heart is through her child. He might have added the equally incontestable proposition that the most effectual method of torturing a mother's heart is through the same medium. The mother who has an only child, who is all the world to her, is actually susceptible to anything in the shape of interference with her maternal prerogatives. Such interference, by whomsoever exercised, is wholly intolerable to her. This susceptibility may perhaps be a feminine weakness, but it is a veritable maternal instinct, and one with which few who have observed it will have the heart to find fault. In Mrs. Savareen's bosom this foible existed in a high state of development, and her stepmother so played upon it as to make life under the same roof with her a cross too hard to be borne. After a few months' trial, the younger of the two women resolved that a new home must be found for herself and her little boy. The carrying out of this resolve rendered some consideration necessary, for her own unaided means were inadequate for her support. Her father, though not what could be called a poor man, was far from rich, and he had neither the means nor the will to maintain two establishments, however humble. But she was expert with her needle, and did not despair of being able to provide for the slender wants of herself and child. She rented and furnished a small house in the town, where she found that there was no ground for present anxiety as to her livelihood. There was plenty of needlework to be had to keep her nimble fingers busy from morn till night, and her income from the first was in excess of her expenditure. She was constrained to lead a humdrum sort of existence, but it was brightened by the presence and companionship of her boy, who was a constant source of pride and delight to her. Whenever she caught herself indulging in a despondent mood, she took herself severely to task for repining at a lot which might have lacked this element of brightness, and which lacking that, would, it seemed to her, have been too dreary for human endurance.

No useful purpose would be served by lingering over this portion of the narrative. Suffice it to say that the current of the lonely woman's life flowed smoothly on several years, during which she received no tidings of her lost husband and heard nothing to throw the faintest scintilla of light upon his mysterious disappearance. Little Reginald grew apace, and continued to be the one consolation in her great bereavement—the solitary joy which reconciled her to her environment.