God sent them a little babe, but the child brought no tenderness to the heart of either parent for each other. Then trouble came upon Ralph Murray in his business—unfortunate speculations, bad failures in others he had trusted; but instead of going to his wife, and talking affectionately, but candidly, remembering all the while what a spoiled darling she had been, he considered himself aggrieved by her lavish expenditure, and told her haughtily that she was now the wife of a young merchant, and not the niece of a rich man, and ought to have sense enough to observe economy. Poor Edda was offended, bitter words passed between them, and they parted in anger. Her aunt found her in tears—happening to come in just as the irritated husband had left her. Edda turned to her thoughtless, childish aunt, for comfort, telling her the whole story of her wrongs; and Mrs. Martin pronounced Mr. Murray a brute, to treat her poor child so unkindly. Mr. Martin thought always as his wife did, and in the first flush of temper, they carried the weeping, angry wife, with her young babe, away from her husband’s roof; the exasperated uncle leaving for Mr. Murray an angrily worded note, in which he said that Edda had never ceased to be his niece, even if she had been so unfortunate as to become the wife of a parsimonious merchant, and an unkind husband. The following day Ralph Murray was a bankrupt.
The news of other heavy failures of houses indebted to him, brought his affairs to a crisis, and all his troubles seemed piled mountain high upon him at once. Poor Edda would have gone instantly to her husband when she heard of his trouble—for she had immediately repented of her hasty step—but she did not dare; she remembered his sternness, and dreaded a repulse which she felt she deserved. Then a new cause of anxiety displayed itself, her boy sickened, and, after a few hours’ illness, he died in her arms. Her husband was sent for, but he did not notice her; he stood beside the coffin of his child, pale, tearless, and with a countenance as unchanging as a statue of marble; he never looked at his sobbing wife, who, softened by her grief, would have willingly thrown herself into his arms, and asked pardon for the past, and forbearance for the future; but he coldly turned from her after the funeral, without speaking a word.