AT THE LAST by Mrs. McVean Adams

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Aug 20, 1902

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 28, No. 34.

AT THE LAST.

By Mrs. McVean Adams

[Mrs. McVean Adams, in Union Signal.]

LOOK not thou upon the wine when it is red. . . . At the last it biteth like a serpent, and stingeth like an adder.”

When we were married and went directly to our new home, it seemed hardly like home to me, because we began boarding at a hotel.

The town was growing rapidly, and dwellings were not built half fast enough to accommodate the new-comers. The three hotels with many boarding-houses contained many newly-arrived families.

One day a lady came in whose lovely face looked familiar to me. I soon learned that she was one of my old associates in teachers’ institutes, and had come, like myself, a bride, into the thriving new town.

Mrs. Clyde, my new friend, was really attractive, with a fair, delicate face and charming manners. Her husband, who was much older, seemed very devoted and proud of her. He was a man of superior education and business ability, and would have been far above his present position of clerk had it not been for one obstacle, which my husband confided to me that evening, when I could talk of nothing but my pleasure in meeting my charming friend.

He had the fearful habit of drinking to intoxication at intervals, and at those times he left his employment for days at a time. But he had not drunk since his marriage, and, as I thought of the light heart and flower-face of his young wife, I prayed earnestly that he might never again.

Calls were exchanged and visits made, and one evening my husband had come to walk home with me from the Clyde’s, who boarded at a rival hotel. Not having household affairs, we two young wives were talking about our respective boarding-places, and the annoyances of hotel life. I agreed with Mrs. Clyde that her landlady was the more accommodating and did more for the comfort of her boarders. In confirming this, Mrs. Clyde told us that her hostess gave little parties, with wine suppers in her own private parlor.

“The choicest wine I ever tasted; it must have been very costly,” she said. “Now I’m sure your landlady never does that.”

“No,” said my husband, “she does not,” and our eyes met as I arose to go. Out under the stars, with my hand on my husband’s arm, I gave voice to the thought which I knew was in both our minds, whether the lovely young wife whom we had just left knew her own danger, or realized the peril of her husband, when she tasted and praised the wine-cup.

“One thing is certain,” said my husband, “we must not drop into their ways. Our principles are radically different. There must be a change before we can agree, and it is a sorrowful truth that we may deteriorate almost insensibly, while it requires a steadfast purpose to become stronger for good.”

Time passed on and we were just settled in a pleasant home of our own, when to the Clydes there came a baby boy. Then fell the first blow. The young father, elated at the birth of a son, in the reaction from the strain of sharp anxiety, called his friends together and drank to the health of mother and child, till he was no longer the tender husband and the courteous gentleman, but a senseless, drunken creature.

I sat, a silent watcher in that hallowed room, where the young mother yet lay close to the portals of death. Here, at last, he, her sworn protector, stumbled in, incoherently calling out maudlin endearments.

Never shall I forget the emotions that crowded into the face of his wife in the one moment before she became mercifully unconscious. Incredulity, fear, love, entreaty, wounded pride, and apology for him, all passed in turn over her features, and then they became like the porcelain lamp from which the inner radiance, shining through, has been suddenly stricken. One tiny hand of her baby yet lay, like a crumpled rose-leaf, against the sacred pallor of her face, as they forced the drunken man from the room where he had wounded nigh unto death the gentle heart that he had vowed to love and cherish.

Drinking to her health, indeed! He drank to her death and destruction. He failed her, in her hour of need.

Night swept darkly down like the wind of some ill-omened bird, day dawned pallid and cold, and evening drew again about her the purple curtains of the air and clasped them with a star, when a haggard, miserable, penitent man crept humbly into the room of his wife and laid a tear-wet face against the little nerveless hand she feebly moved to meet it.

The child grew and flourished, and Mr. Clyde was once more the happy husband and the genial companion he had been in former days. Still there was a difference. An anxious line began to show between the brows of the still beautiful young mother. Tho she was as gay as before, and her daintily-dressed boy was not more merry nor more admired than she, yet something seemed wanting. We heard that they gave charming little card parties, tho no one ever told us what mothers’ hearts bled when their young sons came home from them, flushed with wine, or daughters threw discretion and decorum to the winds on the homeward way, after sipping the social glass.

Prosperity came to the Clydes. Mrs. Clyde came to me, with pretty eagerness, one day, to tell of her good fortune. A relative had made a bequest to her of nine hundred dollars, and with it they were to begin building a home upon a lot which her husband already owned. I heartily rejoiced with her, but that was the last time I saw my pretty little friend for many a sad day. Her unfortunate husband had no strength to withstand sudden prosperity. From the time of getting her money into his possession, Mr. Clyde stopped work, treated his friends, and, being ashamed to appear before his wife, had gone to

a larger town where a horse fair was in progress, and, in a few days, returned, penniless, disheveled, and sick, unable to give any account of the manner in which the money had been taken from him. But others said it was lost at cards.

After an interval of discouragement and idleness, he was again taken into his old situation, and life went on much as before. Yet not the same. Fine lines were deepening on the face of the proud young wife, and the frank and upright bearing of Mr. Clyde was gone.

At a shorter interval the next blow fell. In an ill-fated moment Mr. Clyde yielded to temptation. Several days were given to drunkenness, and when he finally returned, sober, to his place, he found another man doing his work, and his long-suffering employer was adamant in refusing his entreaties and promises of reform. He had borne enough.

During that day and the next (which was Sunday), the disappointed man passed his time very cheerfully and kindly with his wife and little boy. When he left them on Monday, saying he had a new situation and must go to his work, the heart of his wife was busy, trustfully gathering up the threads of broken hopes, as women will, and weaving them into a firmer strand to hold her husband to her side.

As Mr. Clyde did not come to his meals or return at night, his wife made inquiries and found him drunk at a place of low resort. Overcome with shame and despair, she telegraphed to her father to come to her aid, hoping, by his assistance, to rescue her husband even yet. But, long before her father could arrive, all was over.

The unhappy man had returned to their room in her absence, and there she and the child found him on the bed, in the agonies of death, while the odor of carbolic acid told but too well by what means he had taken his own life.

News of the dreadful suicide spread through the town like wild-fire. But how could I go to my widowed friend? What touch could be tender enough for a heart so sore as hers must be! I dreaded to see that butterfly broken upon the cruel wheel of fate. I even dreaded that her shallow mind might be concerned about the fashion of her mourning, and whether black would be “becoming to her complexion.”

But I had cruelly misjudged her. Like Undine, the soul of her womanhood was coming to its slow awakening. She had sat, the messenger told me, wide-eyed and tearless all the long hours of that first awful night, while I, coward that I was, had wept at home not daring to go to her.

Womanlike, she blamed, not her husband, but herself, for all the wreck of his life and hers.

“O, why did I fail him in his need!” she sobbed. “I was a child, a doll, a butterfly, not fit to be a wife. I never had any will of my own, to guide, to persuade, to protect or shield him. He was older, and I thought he knew best. I ought to have known that men like him were like children, to be kept from temptation, for his appetite was inherited. I ought to have had a strong heart and a wise head, to mother him. But no! like a senseless child I poured the wine and shuffled the cards that made him a drunkard and a gambler. The fault was mine, I say. He was better than I. If I had been in his place, he would not have let me go down to ruin and death without a word of warning. He would have saved me—saved me even by force; but I failed him in his need. O, I see it now. It is a woman’s place to form the social atmosphere. Why didn’t I make a home and read with him! He was such a student when he married me. You know he had a fine mind. But no! reading was too dull for me. I had always been a gay, dancing girl, not fit to be a wife, and he went out to please me, because I was young and gay. O, if he had had a good wife, he would have been alive and honored to-day.”

Thus she accused herself till her passion had spent its force. Her father came, a tremulous, gray, old man, and took with him out of our little city the body of the disgraced suicide, the broken-hearted widow, and the pretty, fatherless boy. We had had our lesson. Ah! had we?

Alas! to-day as then, fair, young girls are holding up the wine glass and dealing the cards that make drunkards and gamblers; and manly boys are drinking a social glass just to show that they “can drink or let it alone.”

And parents are still looking on with indulgent smiles, speaking mildly about “dancing days,” and “sowing a few wild oats,” forgetting that “God is not mocked; for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap,” forgetting that “at the last it biteth like a serpent, and stingeth like an adder.”