The Two Wives; Or, Lost and WonArthur, T. S. (Timothy Shay)
General
The Two Wives; Or, Lost and Won
Arthur, T. S. (Timothy Shay)
Married people -- Fiction; Temperance -- Fiction
WE will not trace, minutely, the particulars attendant on the headlong
downward course of Henry Ellis. The causes leading thereto have been
fully set forth, and we need not refer back to them. Enough, that the
fall was complete. The wretched man appeared to lose all strength of
mind, all hope in life, all self-respect. Not even a feeble effort was
opposed to the down-rushing torrent of disaster that swept away every
vestige of his business. For more than a week he kept himself so
stupefied with brandy, that neither friends nor creditors could get
from him any intelligible statement in regard to his affairs. In the
wish of the latter for an assignment, he passively acquiesced, and
permitted all his effects to be taken from his hands. And so he was
thrown upon the world, with his family, helpless, penniless, crushed in
spirit, and weak as a child in the strong grasp of an over-mastering
appetite, which had long been gathering strength for his day of
weakness.
Over the sad history of the succeeding five years let us draw a veil.
We have no heart to picture its suffering, its desolation, its
hopelessness. If, in the beginning, there was too much pride in the
heart of Mrs. Ellis, all was crushed out under the iron heel of grim
adversity. If she had once thought too much of herself, and too little
of her husband, a great change succeeded; for she clung to him in all
the cruel and disgusting forms his abandonment assumed, and, with a
self-sacrificing devotion, struggled with the fearful odds against her
to retain for her husband and children some little warmth in the humble
home where they were hidden from the world in which they once moved.
From the drunkard, angels withdraw themselves, and evil spirits come
into nearer companionship; hence, the bestiality and cruelty of
drunkenness. The man, changing his internal associates, receives by
inflex a new order of influence, and passively acts therefrom. He
becomes, for the time, the human agent by which evil spirits effect
their wicked purposes; and it usually happens that those who are
nearest allied to him, and who have the first claims on him for
support, protection, and love, are they who feel the heaviest weight of
infernal malice. The husband and father too often becomes, in the hands
of his evil associates, the cruel persecutor of those he should love
and guard with the tenderest solicitude. So it was in the case of Henry
Ellis. His manly nature underwent a gradually progressing change, until
the image of God was wellnigh obliterated from his soul. After the
lapse of five miserable years, let us introduce him and his family once
more to the reader.
Five years! What a work has been done in that time! Not in a pleasant
home, surrounded with every comfort, as we last saw them, will they be
found. Alas, no!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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