35. Backslidings
As the days grew shorter and the night frosts began to give tone to the atmosphere, Colonel Bonamy gradually improved in strength under the care of Roxy. He was very lame and walked with difficulty, leaning on the arm of his daughter-in-law. They would go down between the Lombardy poplars, through the front gate, across the open commons to the river-bank, where he would stare awhile in vacant fashion on the broad water and then petulantly demand to be taken back to the house. His faculties were evidently weakened ; when he wanted his hat he would demand his boots, and he called his watch his knife. Nouns, proper and common, were hopelessly mixed in his mind ; he almost never called anything by the right name, though he seemed generally to keep some sort of hold of the initial sounds. By some kind of quick sympathy Roxy was able to guess at his meaning and he always preferred to have her with him.
Amanda held toward her sister-in-law an air of patronizing toleration. Colonel Bonamy liked Roxy, in a selfish way, as the best nurse of all ; but he could not enduro that she should give Bobo a part of her kindness. So for the most part she taught the lad in another room for a short half-hour each day, getting scolded oy her father-inlaw on her return.
" Now, Roly, I know what you've been doing," he would say, with a querulous paralytic lisp. " You've been trying to teach little Bubble Ham. But you can't teach him He wont learn a shingle liver. No blubbers in his head Give me a goggle of fresh wash; I'm thirsty. Don't go away again."
But Roxy's chief trouble was not Amanda nor the colonel, but Mark. For, sisters-in-law and fathers-in-law and mothers-in-law, despite all stale jokes about them, chiefly trouble a body as the ailments of somebody else do through the sympathies. Real troubles are nearer of kin. More and more Roxy saw Mark drifting utterly away from all the missionary enthusiasms that gave significance to life in her eyes. At first this showed itself only in a total absorption in the large law business which had suddenly fallen into his hands. He knew that the eyes of court, clieuts and lawyers were on him, questioning whether he would or could take his father's place, should the senior remain disabled. He knew that the public was wondering whether he or the energetic and able Dan Barlow, who had lately come down from the eastern end of the county, would lead the bar. The pursuits in which he now engaged were more congenial to his nature than preaching, and he took them up again with eagerness. Law business gave a delightful play to his active mental faculties ; the conflict of the court-room stirred his combativenes, and victory pleased his ambitious vanity.
He threw himself with fiery impetuosity into the half-prepared cases of his father, and carried them through to success ; he more than held his own against young Barlow, and new business began to come to him freely. He was not a man to be insensible to this sudden opening of a prospect of wealth and reputation.
Luther might not have been an iconoclast if he had not begun by being a monk ; and Mark might have reached an average piety, if he had not striven for more. He had been held by external influences at a pitch of self-sacrifice foreign to his temper, and the reaction was rapid and dangerous. In three weeks after the Texas mission was given up, Roxy could see that all thinking and talking about religious matters grew irksome to him. He declined all requests to preach on the ground that he was overworked, and it was evident that even his license to preach would soon become hateful.
Those who had before admired his zeal lamented his backsliding. The severe ordeal of the Methodist confessional he shrunk from. He might have talked platitudes in class-meeting; but hypocrisy of that sort he did not like, and so he stayed away, consulting his own comfort in this, as he did in everything. When he went to church he did not sit any more among the great lights in the amen corner, but drifted gradually back until he found a seat aft the box-stove, wmich held a central place in the church, and was a sort of landmark dividing the sheep from the goats. On many Sundays he was so tired that he would not go to church at all ; he wanted to rest and keep his father company in the absence of Roxy. But, for the most part on such occasions, he walked up and down in the warmish winter sunshine, and in colder weather watched the grinding cakes of floating ice in the river, while he planned his business. When Roxy was well out of sight, he even wrote a little now and then on unfinished pleadings. The thoughtful Amanda generally contrived to let Roxy know that Mark had been writing such interest do we take in another's happiness.
Roxy was surprised at finding that marriage had not increased, but lessened her influence over Mark. A wife is something so different from a sweetheart ! There is uc poetic halo about a wife ; she is one of the commonest of commonplaces, like one of those every-day forces of nature to which one submits when one pleases or when one must, but which one never scruples to evade when one wishes to and can ! The interest of a sweetheart in your welfare is something flattering ; your wife's interest is a matter of course, an interest ex officio. It is an act of the highest grace to yield to the entreaty of a sweetheart ; the beseeching of a wife seems more like a behest ; it is to be resisted, according to the maxim that vigilance is the lowest market price of liberty.
Mark respected Roxy's enthusiasm. But he was tired of the strain on his easy disposition. He could not live at a moral concert-pitch, and every attempt to bring hira back to the old way of feeling and thinking only irritated him, and deepened his resolution to brook no further restraint. He was not sure that he did not owe himself certain compensations for what he had suffered in the past.
The prospect of his soon inheriting his father's property had increased his importance in the town, and the state of being important is not disagreeable to the self-love of any man. Mark's old visions of political ascendency again dominated over him, and he bent all his energies to satisfy his ambition. He was young, and full of vigorous life, rich, as the country went, popular, and with a great capacity for enjoyment. It is easy for such a man not to be religious, it is hard for such a man to be religious after the fashion of thirty years ago.
To add to the embarrassment of Roxy's situation, her sensitive father would not cross the Bonamy threshold, and it was not often that she could get away to see him, and then it was only to take a scolding for her folly in " wearing herself out " with taking care of Colonel Bonamy, and teaching Bobo. "An imbecile and an idiot!" Adams thundered.
Mark was often absent, while attending to business on other parts of the judicial circuit, and Roxy felt, with terror, when he returned, how far away, the one from the other, they were drifting. Mark's pleasure-loving disposition had revived with increased power since L:s long sel frestraint. He was the leader of every party in wit and buoyant spirits, and to be leader was to be happy. He was happier away from home, where he was petted and admired, than he was at home, where he was under condemnation.
Roxy's temper did not stand the strain very well. Her was a character noble in the direction of action, and selfsacrifice for an object. But the higher nobility of patient endurance of suffering, inevitable and apparently useless, she had not yet learned. Against Mark's neglect of her advice, his carelessness for her society, and the general disappointment and inactivity of her life, she rebelled bitterly. Only a high-spirited woman can undertake such a life as Roxy proposed, and no high-mettled woman can brook neglect. She had too much elevation to enjoy the only life that offered itself to her. She had not yet, at least, elevation enough to accept with peace and patience what she could not avoid. A young person full of energy is apt to beat against the impenetrable and insurmountable walls of fate. After awhile, one learns that this beating wound > the one who beats and flutters, but affects not a jot the wall. Then the imprisoned yields, it may be with a cheerful make-the-best-of-it, it may be with a sullen and sulky despair, it may be with querulous and hopeles longing. Roxy had yet to find out that she cou.d not beat down the wall.
The opportunities for Mark's ambition came to him rapidly. The death of the member for Luzerne County left a vacancy in the legislature ; a new election was ordered, and the Whigs, seeing a chance to seize once more a representation which they had not held since Mark's previous election, nominated him again for the place. The canvass was short and vigorous, and Mark won the election. He was just two weeks in the legislature, a leader in all the boisterous fun that members of the legislature find so necessary for recreation. Until this time, Mark had so far preserved his Methodism that he did not drink spirits or gamble; but when he came back, Roxy felt sure that this line also had been passed.
A collision of some kind with the severe discipline of the old-fashioned Methodism was not to be avoided by any one taking Mark's road. His prominence would only serve to insure his not being overlooked. Roxy awaited this inevitable collision with hope and fear. It might startle Mark into some kind of recoil from the downward tendency of his present course of greedy ambition and lazy self-indulgence ; but it might break all the restraints that held him. For the moral restraints of habit are but so many lines at which one stops with every line obliterated there are the fewer checks in the way of the impetuous man. Unhappily, the first collision was on one of those restrictions so often insisted, upon by religionists, with a stress in inverse ratio to their importance. Mark went to a circus. A man in that time might be a miser, he might be dishonest in a mild way, he might be censoridus and a backbiter from a pious stand-point, he might put the biggest apples on the top of the barrel or the little potatoes in the bottom of the bag, and the church could not reach him. But let him once see a man ride on two bare-back horses, and jump through a hoop! That was a tangible apostasy, sure to bring ecclesiastical penalties.
Brave old ironside forefathers ! Blessings on you for chopping Charles Stuart's head off, and planting Plymouth Rock ! You freed us from the Middle Ages; for which thanks. But you straightway bound upon us your own severe prejudices, and they have come down to us by all hands. The most dominant influence in this English-speaking world of ours today, is not that of Shakspere, but of the men who hated him and his play-house. The Puri'.an preachers, the brave cobblers and tinkers, whom the seventeenth century stuck in the stocks and prisonhouses, and the fervent Wesleyan village blacksmiths and Yorkshire farmers of the eighteenth century are yet masters of the nineteenth. To this dav we take our most innocent amusements in a guilty and apologetic fashion, bowing to the venerable prejudice, and saying: " By your leave, sir."
Mark was called before the church, with other like offenders. His pride w r as wounded, and he would fain have thrown up his membership, but that he could not quite resist the entreaties of Roxy. As it was, he surrendered his license to preach, and expressed his sorrow that he had offended, and solemnly promised not to go to a circus again ; not a hard promise, surely.
But though Mark had apologized, he was new entirely estranged from the influences of the church. For discipline may save the credit of the church, at the expense of destroying the offender. It seems never to have occurred to people that it is sometimes the business of a church to suffer, the just for the unjust.