Alice did not rally in health or spirits after her marriage, as her
family, friends and physician had anticipated. She remained nervous,
ailing and despondent.
"Should maternity come to her, she would doubtless be very much
improved in health afterward," the doctor said, and Mabel,
remembering how true a similar prediction proved in her case, despite
her rebellion against it, was not sorry when she knew that Alice was
to become a mother, scarcely a year after her marriage.
But Alice grew more and more despondent as the months passed by; and
after the birth of her son, the young mother developed dementia of
the most hopeless kind. The best specialists in two worlds were
employed to bring her out of the state of settled melancholy into
which she had fallen, but all to no avail. At the end of two years,
her case was pronounced hopeless. Fortunately the child died at the
age of six weeks, so the seed of insanity which in the first Mrs
Lawrence was simply a case of "nerves," growing into the plant
hysteria in Mabel, and yielding the deadly fruit of insanity in
Alice, was allowed by a kind providence to become extinct in the
fourth generation.
This disaster to his only child caused a complete breaking down of
spirit and health in Preston Cheney.
Like some great, strongly coupled car, which loses its grip and goes
plunging down an incline to destruction, Preston Cheney's will-power
lost its hold on life, and he went down to the valley of death with
frightful speed.
During the months which preceded his death, Senator Cheney's only
pleasure seemed to be in the companionship of his son-in-law. The
strong attachment between the two men ripened with every day's
association. One day the rector was sitting by the invalid's couch,
reading aloud, when Preston Cheney laid his hand on the young man's
arm and said: "Close your book and let me tell you a true story
which is stranger than fiction. It is the story of an ambitious man
and all the disasters which his realised ambition brought into the
lives of others. It is a story whose details are known to but two
beings on earth, if indeed the other being still exists on earth. I
have long wanted to tell you this story--indeed, I wanted to tell it
to you before you made Alice your wife, yet the fear that I would be
wrecking the life and reason of my child kept me silent. No doubt if
I had told you, and you had been influenced by my experience against
a loveless marriage, I should to-day be blaming myself for her
condition, which I see plainly now is but the culmination of three
generations of hysterical women. But I want to tell you the story
and urge you to use it as a warning in your position of counsellor
and friend of ambitious young men.