It was half an hour from the time Mr. Dexter left his wife, when he returned. His hand upon the lock aroused her from the waking dream into which she had fallen. As she arose, her manner began to change, and, ere she had reached the door, the quicker flowing blood was restoring the color to her cheeks. She had passed through a long and severe struggle; and woman’s virtue, aided by woman’s pride and will, had conquered.
Mrs. Dexter spoke to her husband cheerfully as he came in, and met his steady, searching look without a sign of confusion. He was at fault. Yet not deceived.
“Are you better?” he asked.
“Much better,” she replied; and turning from him, went on with the arrangement of her toilet, which had been suspended from the period of her husband’s absence, until his return. Mr. Dexter passed into their private parlor, adjoining the bedroom, and remained there until his wife had finished dressing.
“Shall we go down?” he inquired, as she came in looking so beautiful in his eyes that the very sight of her surpassing loveliness gave him pain. The Fiend was in his heart.
“Not now,” she replied “I am still fatigued with the day’s travel, and had rather not see company at present.”
She glanced from the window.
“What a sublimity there is in the ocean!” she said, with an unusual degree of interest in her manner, when speaking to her husband. “I can never become so familiar with its grandeur and vastness, as to look upon its face without emotion. You remember Byron’s magnificent apostrophe?—
“‘Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll.’”
And she repeated several of the stanzas from “Childe Harold,” with an effect that stirred her husband’s feelings more profoundly than they had ever been stirred by nature and poetry before.
“I have read and heard that splendid passage many times, but never with the meaning and power which your voice has lent to the poet’s words,” said Dexter, gazing with admiration upon his wife.
He sat down beside her, and took her hand in his. Her eyes wandered to his face, and lingered there as if she were searching the lineaments for a sign of something that her heart could take hold upon and cling to. And it was even so; for she felt that she needed strength and protection in an hour of surely coming trial. A feeble sigh and a drooping of the eyelids attested her disappointment. And yet as he leaned towards her she did not sit more erect, but rather suffered her body to incline to him. He still retained her hand, and she permitted him to toy with it, even slightly returning the pressure he gave.
“You shall be my teacher in the love of nature.” He spoke with a glow of true feeling. “The lesson of this evening I shall never forget. Old ocean will always wear a different aspect in my eyes.”
“Nature,” replied Mrs. Dexter, “is not a mere dead symbol.—It is something more—an outbirth from loving principles—the body of a creating soul. The sea, upon whose restless surface we are gazing, is something more than a briny fluid, bearing ships upon its bosom—something more than a mirror for the arching heavens—something more than a symbol of immensity and eternity. There is a truth in nature far deeper, more divine, and of higher significance.”
She paused, and for some moments her thoughts seemed floating away into a world, the real things of which our coarser forms but feebly represent.
“It must be so. I feel that it is so; yet what to you seems clear as the sunbeams, hides itself from me in dusky shadows. But say on Jessie. Your words are pleasant to my ears.”
Mrs. Dexter seemed a little surprised at this language, for she turned her eyes from the sea to his face, and looked at him with a questioning gaze for some moments.
“This world is not the real world,” she said, speaking earnestly and gazing at him intently to see how far his thought reflected hers.
“Is not this real?” Dexter asked, raising the hand of his wife and looking down upon it. “I call it a real hand.”
“And I,” said Mrs. Dexter, smiling, “call it only the appearance of a hand; it is the real hand that vitalizes and gives it power. This will decay—this appearance fade—but the real hand of my spirit will live on, immortal in its power as the human soul of which it makes a part.”
“Into what strange labyrinths your mind is wandering Jessie!” said Mr. Dexter, a slight shade of disapproval in his voice. “I am afraid you are losing yourself.”
“Rather say that I have been lost, and am finding myself in open paths, with the blue sky instead of forest foliage above me.”
“Your language is a myth, Jessie. I never heard of your being lost. To me you have been ever present, walking in the sunlight, a divine reality. Not the mere appearance of a woman; but a real woman, and my wife. Pray do not lose yourself now! Do not recede from an actual flesh and blood existence into some world of dim philosophy whither I cannot go. I am not ready for your translation.”
Mr. Dexter was half playful, half serious. His reply disappointed his wife. Her manner, warmer than usual, took on a portion of its old reserve. But she went on speaking.
“The immortal soul, spiritual in its essence, yet organized in all its minutest parts—cannot attain its full stature unless it receives immortal food. The aliments of mere sensual life are for the body, and the mind’s lowest constituents of being; and they who are content to feed on husks must sort with the common herd. I have higher aspirations, my husband! I see within and above the animal and sensuous a real world of truth and goodness, where, and where only, the soul’s immortal desires can be satisfied. With the key in my hand shall I not enter? The common air is too thick for me. I must perish or rise into purer atmospheres.”
Mrs. Dexter paused, conscious that her husband did not appreciate her meanings. He was listening intently, and striving apparently after them; but to him only the things of sense were real; and he was not able to comprehend how lasting pleasure was to flow from the intellectual and spiritual. He did not answer, and she lapsed into silence; all the fine enthusiasm that had filled her countenance so full of a living beauty giving place to a cold, calm exterior. She had hoped to quicken her husband’s sluggish perceptions, and to create in his mind an incipient love for the pure and beautiful things after which her own mind was beginning to aspire.
In her intercourse with refined and intellectual persons, Mrs. Dexter had made the acquaintance of a lady named Mrs. De Lisle. Her residence was not far from Mrs. Dexter’s and they met often for pleasant and profitable conversation. In Mrs. De Lisle, Mrs. Dexter found a woman of not only superior attainments, but one possessing great purity of mind, and a high religious sense of duty. What struck her in the very beginning was a new mode of weighing human actions, and a quiet looking beneath the surface of things, and estimating all she saw by the quality within instead of by the appearance without. From the first, Mrs. Dexter was strongly attracted by this lady; and it was a little remarkable that her husband was as strongly repelled. He did not like her; and often spoke of her sneeringly as using an unknown tongue. His wife contended with him slightly at first in regard to Mrs. De Lisle; but soon ceased to notice his captious remarks.
In Mrs. De Lisle, the struggling and suffering young creature had found a true friend—not true in the sense of a weakly, sympathizing friend, but more really true; one who could lift her soul up into purer regions, and help it to acquire strength for duty.
There was another lady named Mrs. Anthony who had insinuated herself into the good opinion of Mrs. Dexter, and partially, also, into her confidence.
It does not take a quick-sighted woman long to comprehend the true marital standing of the friend in whom she feels an interest. Both Mrs. De Lisle and Mrs. Anthony soon discovered that no love was in the heart of Mrs. Dexter, and that consequently, no interior marriage existed. They saw also that Mr. Dexter was inferior, selfish, captious at times, and kept his wife always under surveillance, as if afraid of her constancy. The different conduct of the ladies, touching this relation of Mrs. Dexter to her husband, was in marked contrast. While Mrs. De Lisle never approached the subject in a way to invite communication, Mrs. Anthony, in the most adroit and insinuating manner, almost compelled a certain degree of confidence—or at least admission that there was not and never could be, any interior conjunction between herself and husband.