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LYDGATE STEEET.
Letty's whole life was now gathered about her boy, and she
thought little, comparatively, about Tom. And Tom thought so
little about her that he did not perceive the difference. When he
came home, he was always in a hurry to be gone again. He had
always something important to do, but it never showed itself to
Letty in the shape of money. He gave her a little now and then,
of course, and she made it go incredibly far, but it was ever
with more of a grudge that he gave it. The influence over him of
Sepia was scarcely less now that she was gone; but, if she cared
for him at all, it was mainly that, being now not a little stale-
hearted, his devotion reminded her pleasurably of a time when
other passions than those of self-preservation were strongest in
her; and her favor even now tended only to the increase of Tom's
growing disappointment, for, like Macbeth, he had begun already
to consider life but a poor affair. Across the cloud of this
death gleamed, certainly, the flashing of Sepia's eyes, or the
softly infolding dawn of her smile, but only, the next hour, nay,
the next moment, to leave all darker than before. Precious is the
favor of any true, good woman, be she what else she may; but what
is the favor of one without heart or faith or self-giving? Yet is
there testimony only too strong and terrible to the demoniacal
power, enslaving and absorbing as the arms of the kraken, of an
evil woman over an imaginative youth. Possibly, did he know
beforehand her nature, he would not love her, but, knowing it
only too late, he loves and curses; calls her the worst of names,
yet can not or will not tear himself free; after a fashion he
still calls love, he loves the demon, and hates her thralldom.
Happily Tom had not reached this depth of perdition; Sepia was
prudent for herself, and knew, none better, what she was about,
so far as the near future was concerned, therefore held him at
arm's length, where Tom basked in a light that was of hell--for
what is a hell, or a woman like Sepia, but an inverted creation?
His nature, in consequence, was in all directions dissolving. He
drank more and more strong drink, fitting fuel to such his
passion, and Sepia liked to see him approach with his eyes
blazing. There are not many women like her; she is a rare type--
but not, therefore, to be passed over in silence. It is little
consolation that the man-eating tiger is a rare animal, if one of
them be actually on the path; and to the philosopher a
possibility is a fact. But the true value of the study of
abnormal development is that, in the deepest sense, such
development is not abnormal at all, but the perfected result of
the laws that avenge law-breach. It is in and through such that
we get glimpses, down the gulf of a moral volcano, to the
infernal possibilities of the human--the lawless rot of that
which, in its attainable idea, is nothing less than
divine, imagined, foreseen, cherished, and labored for, by the
Father of the human. Such inverted possibility, the infernal
possibility, I mean, lies latent in every one of us, and, except
we stir ourselves up to the right, will gradually, from a
possibility, become an energy. The wise man dares not yield to a
temptation, were it only for the terror that, if he do, he will
yield the more readily again. The commonplace critic, who
recognizes life solely upon his own conscious level, mocks
equally at the ideal and its antipode, incapable of recognizing
the art of Shakespeare himself as true to the human nature that
will not be human.
I have said that Letty did her best with what money Tom gave her;
but when she came to find that he had not paid the lodging for
two months; that the payment of various things he had told her to
order and he would see to had been neglected, and that the
tradespeople were getting persistent in their applications; that,
when she told him anything of the sort, he treated it at one time
as a matter of no consequence which he would speedily set right,
at another as behavior of the creditor hugely impertinent, which
he would punish by making him wait his time--her heart at length
sank within her, and she felt there was no bulwark between her
and a sea of troubles; she felt as if she lay already in the
depths of a debtor's jail. Therefore, sparing as she had been
from the first, she was more sparing than ever. Not only would
she buy nothing for which she could not pay down, having often in
consequence to go without proper food, but, even when she had a
little in hand, would live like an anchorite. She grew very thin;
and, in-deed, if she had not been of the healthiest, could not
have stood her own treatment many weeks.
Her baby soon began to show suffering, but this did not make her
alter her way, or drive her to appeal to Tom. She was ignorant of
the simplest things a mother needs to know, and never imagined
her abstinence could hurt her baby. So long as she went on
nursing him, it was all the same, she thought. He cried so much,
that Tom made it a reason with himself, and indeed gave it as one
to Letty, for not coming home at night: the child would not let
him sleep; and how was he to do his work if he had not his
night's rest? It mattered little with semi-mechanical professions
like medicine or the law, but how was a man to write articles
such as he wrote, not to mention poetry, except he had the repose
necessary to the redintegration of his exhausted brain? The baby
went on crying, and the mother's heart was torn. The woman of the
house said he must be already cutting his teeth, and recommended
some devilish sirup. Letty bought a bottle with the next money
she got, and thought it did him good-because, lessening his
appetite, it lessened his crying, and also made him sleep more
than he ought.
At last one night Tom came home very much the worse of drink, and
in maudlin affection insisted on taking the baby from its cradle.
The baby shrieked. Tom was angry with the weakling, rated him
soundly for ingratitude to "the author of his being," and shook
him roughly to teach him the good manners of the world he had
come to.
Thereat in Letty sprang up the mother, erect and fierce. She
darted to Tom, snatched the child from his arms, and turned to
carry him to the inner room. But, as the mother rose in Letty,
the devil rose in Tom. If what followed was not the doing of the
real Tom, it was the doing of the devil to whom the real Tom had
opened the door. With one stride he overtook his wife, and mother
and child lay together on the floor. I must say for him that,
even in his drunkenness, he did not strike his wife as ho would
have struck a man; it was an open-handed blow he gave her, what,
in familiar language, is called a box on the ear, but for days
she carried the record of it on her cheek in five red finger-
marks.
When he saw her on the floor, Tom's bedazed mind came to itself;
he knew what he had done, and was sobered. But, alas! even then
he thought more of the wrong he had done to himself as a
gentleman than of the grievous wound he had given his wife's
heart. He took the baby, who had ceased to cry as soon as he was
in his mother's arms, and laid him on the rug, then lifted the
bitterly weeping Letty, placed her on the sofa, and knelt beside
her--not humbly to entreat her pardon, but, as was his wont, to
justify himself by proving that all the blame was hers, and that
she had wronged him greatly in driving him to do such a thing.
This for apology poor Letty, never having had from him fuller
acknowledgment of wrong, was fain to accept. She turned on the
sofa, threw her arms about his neck, kissed him, and clung to him
with an utter forgiveness. But all it did for Tom was to restore
him his good opinion of himself, and enable him to go on feeling
as much of a gentleman as before.
Reconciled, they turned to the baby. He was pale, his eyes were
closed, and they could not tell whether he breathed. In a
horrible fright, Tom ran for the doctor. Before he returned with
him, the child had come to, and the doctor could discover no
injury from the fall they told him he had had. At the same time,
he said he was not properly nourished, and must have better food.
This was a fresh difficulty to Letty; it was a call for more
outlay. And now their landlady, who had throughout been very
kind, was in trouble about her own rent, and began to press for
part at least of theirs. Letty's heart seemed to labor under a
stone. She forgot that there was a thing called joy. So sad she
looked that the good woman, full of pity, assured her that, come
what might, she should not be turned out, but at the worst would
only have to go a story higher, to inferior rooms. The rent
should wait, she said, until better days. But this kindness
relieved Letty only a little, for the rent past and the rent to
come hung upon her like a cloak of lead.
Nor was even debt the worst that now oppressed her. For, possibly
from the fall, but more from the prolonged want of suitable
nourishment and wise treatment, after that terrible night, the
baby grew worse. Many were the tears the sleepless mother shed
over the sallow face and wasted limbs of her slumbering treasure
--her one antidote to countless sorrows; and many were the foolish
means she tried to restore his sinking vitality.
Mary had written to her, and she had written to Mary; but she had
said nothing of the straits to which she was reduced; that would
have been to bring blame upon Tom. But Mary, with her fine human
instinct, felt that things must be going worse with her than
before; and, when she found that her return was indefinitely
postponed by Mr. Redmain's illness, she ventured at last in her
anxiety upon a daring measure: she wrote to Mr. Wardour, telling
him she had reason to fear things were not going well with Letty
Helmer, and suggesting, in the gentlest way, whether it might not
now be time to let bygones be bygones, and make some inquiry
concerning her.
To this letter Godfrey returned no answer. For all her denial, he
had never ceased to believe that Mary had been Letty's accomplice
throughout that miserable affair; and the very name--the Letty
and the Helmer--stung him to the quick. He took it, therefore, as
a piece of utter presumption in Mary to write to him about Letty,
and that in the tone, as ho interpreted it, of one reading him a
lesson of duty. But, while he was thus indignant with Mary, he
was also vexed with Letty that she should not herself have
written to him if she was in any need, forgetting that he had
never hinted at any door of communication open between him and
her. His heart quivered at the thought that she might be in
distress; he had known for certain, he said, the fool would bring
her to misery! For himself, the thought of Letty was an ever-open
wound--with an ever-present pain, now dull and aching, now keen
and stinging. The agony of her desertion, he said, would never
cease gnawing at his heart until it was laid in the grave; like
most heathen Christians, he thought of death as the end of all
the joys, sorrows, and interests generally of this life. But,
while thus he brooded, a fierce and evil joy awoke in him at the
thought that now at last the expected hour had come when he would
heap coals of fire on her head. He was still fool enough to think
of her as having forsaken him, although he had never given her
ground for believing, and she had never had conceit enough to
imagine, that he cared the least for her person. If he could but
let her have a glimmer of what she had lost in losing him! She
knew what she had gained in Tom Helmer.
He passed a troubled night, dreamed painfully, and started awake
to renewed pain. Before morning he had made up his mind to take
the first train to London. But he thought far more of being her
deliverer than of bringing her deliverance.
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