Miriam Monfort | Page 2

by the circumstances of the case, when,
fortunately perhaps for both, she suddenly sickened, drooped, and died,
in his absence, during her brief sojourn at a watering-place, and all
considerations were lost sight of at the time, in view of this unexpected
and stunning blow--for Reginald Monfort was devoted, in his chivalric
way, to his beautiful and fragile wife, as it was, indeed, his nature to be
to every thing that was his own. Her very dependence had endeared her
to him, nor had she known probably to what straits her exactions had
driven him, nor what were his exigencies. Perhaps (let me strive to do
her this justice, at least), had he been more open on these subjects,
matters might have gone better. Yet he found consolation in the
reflection that she had been happy in her ignorance of his affairs, and

had experienced no strict privation during their short union, inevitably
as this must later have been her portion, and certainly as, in her case,
misery must have accompanied it.
Her child, in the absence of all near relatives, became his charge, and
the little three-year-old girl, her mother's image, grew into his closest
affections by reason of this likeness and her very helplessness. Two
years after the death of his wife, he espoused my mother, a bright and
beautiful woman of his own age, with whom he met casually at a
banker's dinner in London, and who, fascinated by his Christian graces,
reached her fair Judaic hand over all lines of Purim prejudice, and
placed it confidingly in his own for life, thereby, as I have said,
relinquishing home and kindred forever.
A hundred thousand pounds was a great fortune in those days and in
our then modest republic, and this was the sum my parents brought
with them from England--a heritage sufficiently large to have enriched
a numerous family in America, but which was chiefly centred on one
alone, as will be shown.
My father, a proud, shy, fastidious man, had always been galled by the
consciousness of my mother's Israelitish descent, which she never
attempted to conceal or deny, although, to please his sensitive
requisitions, she dispensed with most of its open observances. That she
clung to it with unfailing tenacity to the last I cannot doubt, however,
from memorials written in her own hand--a very characteristic one--and
from the testimony of Mrs. Austin, her faithful friend and
attendant--the nurse, let me mention here, of my father's little
step-daughter during her mother's lifetime, and her brief orphanage, as
well as of his succeeding children.
Stanch in his love of church and country, we, his daughters, were all
three christened, and "brought up," as it is termed, in the Episcopal
Church, and early taught devotion to its rites and ceremonies. Yet, had
we chosen for ourselves, perhaps our different temperaments might,
even in this thing, have asserted themselves, and we might have
embraced sects as diverse as our tastes were several. I shall come to
this third sister presently, of whom I make but passing mention here.

She was our flower, our pearl, our little ewe-lamb--the loveliest and the
last--and I must not trust myself to linger with her memory now, or I
shall lose the thread of my story, and tangle it with digression.
With my Oriental blood there came strange, passionate affection for all
things sharing it, unknown to colder organizations--an affection in
whose very vitality were the seeds of suffering, in whose very strength
was weakness, perhaps in whose very enjoyment, sorrow. I have said
my mother died of an insidious and inscrutable malady, which baffled
friend and physician, when I was five years old. She had been so long
ill, so often alienated from her household for days together, that her
death was a less terrible evil, less suddenly so, at least, than if each
morning had found her at her board, each evening at the family hearth,
and every hour, as would have been the case in health, occupied with
her children.
My father's grief was stern, quiet, solitary; ours, unreasonable and
noisy, but soon over as to manifestation. Yet I must have suffered more
than I knew of, I think, for then occurred the first of those strange
lethargies or seizures that afterward returned at very unequal intervals
during my childhood and early youth, and which roused my father's
fears about my life and intellect itself, and gave me into the hands of a
physician for many years thereof, vigorous, and healthy, and intelligent
otherwise as I felt, and seemed, and was.
It was soon after the first settling down of tribulation in our household
to that flat and almost unendurable calm or level that succeeds
affliction, when a void is felt rather than expressed, and when all
outward observances return to