Roxy

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38. Going Wrong



Colonel Bonamy died sitting in his chair on the porch while Roxy was reading to him. That is all there is to say about it, except that there was a very large concourse at the funeral. It is quite worth while to be a leading man in one's town, if one wants to be followed to the grave by a great procession of indifferent people, and discussed adversely by all the gossips of the county. Of what use was Colonel Bonamy's money now? The unanswerableness of this question gave great satisfaction to those who had envied him all his life. " Pie couldn't take the money with him." " Wonder if his property will do him any good where he's gone ? " " Guess he's found out to his satisfaction by this time whether there's any here after." It is a great comfort to us all that death brings everybody to a level at last.

All the world, as the French say, had talked about Mark's backsliding, and now all the world wondered whether this solemn warning would do him any good. Mark was not without feeling, though he had never loved his father, except with what might be called a conventional affection. He shed conventional tears, and felt a conventional sorrow. He reallv thought himself bereaved, and, in a conventional way, he was bereaved. He did feel touched to have so active a force as his father had been, wholly gone out of his life. He went softly for a while.

He attended church for two consecutive Sundays, and one even staid to class-meeting with Roxy.

But the habits of life he had been form ins: were too congenial to his ambitious and self-indulgent nature to be easily broken. When the will was read, it was found that fully one-half of the property was his. Stepping at once into the position of a rich man rich, as the times and the town went was not a means of grace to a young man prone to regard himself as the most important person within the horizon, and to deduce from that importance an inference of self-indulgence. It surely is not needful that I weary the reader with the story of his moral decline during the year following his father's death. Look into the face of your next neighbor, and perhaps you can read this same trite story of vanity and egotism, ambition and self-indulgence, pampered by the flattery of friends. It is one of the oldest stories in the world. Nevertheless, this world of ours, which is always learning and ever forgetting, never fails to be filled with surprise when a man of ability travels in this way the "easy descent to perdition." Hasn't a smart man sense enough not to walk straight into the fire ? But it is the smartness that helps to drive a man sometimes, the smartness and the power of intense enjoyment and of intense suffering that a man of active faculties possesses, the intoxication that comes of flattery and success, the provocations to pleasure that beset a man of vivid imagination above all his fellows. The dull man is only tried by those temptations that can reach his senses ; the man of imagination is be-deviled by a thousand sirens that others never see, and he has the power of putting garments of light on Diabolns, for his own delectation. If you will add to all this the self-confidence that is fed by a sense of power, you will have some of the elemeLts that make men of quick intelligence walk face forward into moral perdition. Genius is, indeed, " the worst horse in the stable," as sajs the clown. A little helm for a little ship, but a greater vessel needs a larger rudder, and woe to him who has imagination and mental activity and passion, disproportioned to his moral sense.

It matters not to this story that I shall tell you how Amanda Bonamy was married. It was not a marriage you would care to hear about. A matter of active, pushing, self-seeking young Benjamin Barlow, attorney and counselor-at-law, on the one side, and Miss Amanda Bonamy and ten thousand dollars on the other. Roxy's life was all the less unhappy after Amanda had moved to the other end of the village, though she could not help hearing repeated the words by which Mrs. Barlow suggested to her friends that it was hardly fair that Roxy Adams should have crowded her out of the house her father built. And all the town imagined that the luckiest woman of all the town was the shoe-maker's daughter, whose principal occupation in life it was to entertain the local politicians in the brick house behind the two rows of Lombardies, which stood like stiff grenadiers guarding the entrance. Her distaste for her occupations and her sharp discipline in living under the surveillance of Amanda, had given her an air that passed among superficial observers for hauteur. The politicians, when they were her guests at dinner, thought her proud. Her old neighbors deemed that she "put on airs," and consoled themselves by remembering how poor she had been.

So came the summer of 1843. Mark's father had been dead a year. Mark's habits in the matter of occasional drinking and frequent gambling for small amounts had come to be so well known that he preferred to withdraw from the church rather than to fall under discipline again. His ambition was now his consuming passion. The Whig victory of 1840 had been barren enough. It had brought the party nothing but chagrin and John Tyler. Despite the all-prevailing Millerite excitement about the end ol the world, the Whigs were now preparing to win victory, if possible, once more in 1844. And Mark was so absorbed with desire to be the candidate for Congress in that next year's campaign that more than ever he became uncongenial to his home and his home distasteful to him.

For the more he wandered the more did Roxy, like many another wife, seek to make atonement for his sins by redoubled faithfulness and severity in her own Christian life. Not that she would have confessed any belief in the transferable value of works of supererogation. But we all believe in our secret superstitious selves many things that would horrify us if written out in creeds. And had she not been taught by ministers of every name, that the incessant prayer of a faithful wife would surely be answered ? Her growing austerity was partly for Mark's sake, and this growing austerity repelled the husband she sought to reclaim.

What a reconciler of uncongenialities may a child become ! Given a child and there is at least one strong common interest, for when man and wife are partners in a new life there are a thousand things to draw them together. But there was no heir to the Bonamy home and tho Bonamy ascendancy. So that Amanda being married and Janet having found the discord between Mark and his wife uncomfortable and having betaken herself to <o residence with a widowed aunt in Louisville, Roxy's life was lonely, inactive and unhappy. Disappointments that would have made some women viragoes, made Roxy austere. She was afraid that in the temptations about her she should somehow " compromise her religion," as the phrase went. Much of her attitude of censure and rebuke toward Mark came from this resolution not to compromise her integrity in any way.

There was only one person who profited by Roxy's unhappiness. All the wealth of her love and benevolence were poured out upon Bobo, whose intelligence slowly increased under her teaching. He could read a little now, and he learned to recite a great deal of poetry, but his understanding was very one-sided and lame. Mark disliked him with a sort of jealousy, and he in turn shrank away from Mark, and so he added to the division of feeling in the house.

As Roxy's loneliness increased the old intimacy with Twonnet came back by degrees. But there was always a little sacred fiction kept up between them. Both pretended that Roxy's married life was happy, both knew that the pretense was a hollow one, and both knew that its hollowness deceived neither of them. But there are some hypocrisies that are purely provisional, meant to impose on no one, but only to furnish a basis for possible intercourse. Any confession of her nnhappiness on Roxy's part would have put an end to the intimacy at once.

As for Twonnet, life went on with her much as ever. She still attended in the winter Mr. Whittaker's school. She still cried over her lessons. She still tormented the good man with her mischief. And though he had a sense of being perpetually ridiculous in her eyes she was the one piquant element in his life full of dry and dusty application to duty. He had come by degrees to tolerate her slowness in getting her lessons, though he could not understand how so stupid a student could be so bright a woman. For woman he knew she was, a woman hiding jet under the mask of a merry and thoughtless girl. He understood enough of her to guess at her purpose in seeing so much of Roxy. And when one evening in the latter part of the September of 1843, Twonnet came back from Roxy's with a sobered face, Whittaker guessed thai the uncongeniality in the house behind the poplars had brought on some kind of a climax.