After the Storm

On the third day after Irene's arrival at Ivy Cliff, her trunks came

up from New York. She had packed them on the night before leaving

her husband's house, and marked them with her name and that of her

father's residence. No letter or message accompanied them. She did

not expect nor desire any communication, and was not therefore

disappointed, but rather relieved from what would have only proved a

cause of disturbance. All angry feelings toward her husband had

subsided; but no tender impulses moved in her heart, nor did the

feeblest thought of reconciliation breathe over the surface of her

mind. She had been in bonds; now the fetters were cast off, and she

loved freedom too well to bend her neck again to the yoke.

No tender impulses moved, we have said, in her heart, for it lay

like a palsied thing, dead in her bosom--dead, we mean, so far as

the wife was concerned. It was not so palsied on that fatal evening

when the last strife with her husband closed. But in the agony that

followed there came, in mercy, a cold paralysis; and now toward

Hartley Emerson her feelings were as calm as the surface of a frozen

lake.

And how was it with the deserted husband? Stern and unyielding also.

The past year had been marked by so little of mutual tenderness,

there had been so few passages of love between them--green spots in

the desert of their lives--that memory brought hardly a relic from

the past over which the heart could brood. For the sake of worldly

appearances, Emerson most regretted the unhappy event. Next, his

trouble was for Irene and her father, but most for Irene.

"Willful, wayward one!" he said many, many times. "You, of all, will

suffer most. No woman can take a step like this without drinking of

pain to the bitterest dregs. If you can hide the anguish, well. But

I fear the trial will be too hard for you--the burden too heavy.

Poor, mistaken one!"

For a month the household arrangements of Mr. Emerson continued as

when Irene left him. He did not intermit for a day or an hour his

business duties, and came home regularly at his usual times--always,

it must be said, with a feeble expectation of meeting his wife in

her old places; we do not say desire, but simply expectation. If she

had returned, well. He would not have repulsed, nor would he have

received her with strong indications of pleasure. But a month went

by, and she did not return nor send him any word. Beyond the brief

"I have gone," there had come from her no sign.

Two months elapsed, and then Mr. Emerson dismissed the servants and

shut up the house, but he neither removed nor sold the furniture;

that remained as it was for nearly a year, when he ordered a sale by

auction and closed the establishment.