Stepmother

“ I dare to say that my stepmother blessed the young gentlemen as heartily in her mind as I did, for I can’t conceive how she and I should have faced one another, or how we should have conversed, had we been left to ourselves. ”

“ Gertrude Say rather, of women, which is even more terrible! Savages torment the body alone; while we direct our arrows against the heart, the self-love, the pride, the soul of those whom we attack in the very midst of their happiness.
Pauline That is truly said. It is the whole woman-nature that I attack. Therefore, my dear and truly honored stepmother, you must eliminate by to-morrow, and not later, all the obstacles that stand between me and Ferdinand; or you may be sure my father shall learn from me the whole course of your conduct, both before and after your marriage. ”

“ In a moment a beautiful lady stood beside her. ‘Do not be afraid,’ said the lady, stroking Dotterine’s head. ‘I am your godmother, and have come to pay you a visit. Your red eyes tell me that you are unhappy. I know that your stepmother is very unkind to you, but be brave and patient, and better days will come. She will have no power over you when you are grown up, and no one else can hurt you either, if only you are careful never to part from your basket, or to lose the eggshells that are in it. ”

“ But the boy's mother was really a wicked witch-woman, and so jealous that she wanted all the boy's love for herself, and when the girl-baby grew white as milk, with cheeks like roses and lips like cherries, and when her hair, shining like golden silk, hung down to her feet so that her father and all the neighbours began to praise her looks, the stepmother fairly hated her, and did all in her power to spoil her looks. ”

“ He had been dumbfounded by Mary's passionate sorrow. He had expected that she would have been rather pleased, than otherwise, at the idea of a young stepmother,––a companion in those vast lonely rooms, an instructress and a friend as she grew to womanhood.
"I was only talking nonsense, Polly darling," he said. "You mustn't make yourself unhappy about any absurd fancies of mine. I think your papa admires my cousin Olivia: and I thought, perhaps, you'd be glad to have a stepmother." ”

“ It'll be awful if you get a stepmother."
"I'm sure we won't," said Una tremulously. "Father won't marry anybody else."
"He'll be hounded into it, I expect," said Mary darkly. "All the old maids in the settlement are after him. There's no being up to them. And the worst of stepmothers is, they always set your father against you. He'd never care anything about you again. He'd always take her part and her children's part. You see, she'd make him believe you were all bad."
"I wish you hadn't told me this, Mary," cried Una. "It makes me feel so unhappy." ”

“ Such is that action represented in the ambitious Stepmother, where a venerable old man, raised to the height of fury and despair, rushes against a pillar, and striking his head upon it, besmears it all over with mingled brains and gore. ”

“ The little attentions of the one and the caressing tenderness of the other are admired by all who know them. I, too, thought it charming, at first; then I became surprised, not that a stepdaughter and stepmother should love each other,—for there is nothing unnatural in such an affection,—but that they should love each other so dearly. Excess spoils all things. ”

“ AMELIA. So this one is my stepmother? Well, God was good when he let me keep my mother's image free from stain—and hereafter I shall find it quite natural that this other woman is cruel to me.
NEIGHBOUR. Cruel stepmothers exist to make children kind. And you were not kind, Amelia, but you have become so, and for that reason I shall now give you a Christmas present in advance. ”

“ Popular fancy, however, has been busy filling up the gaps, and introduces a cruel stepmother, who, untouched by the piety of the maiden in drawing water for her every day from the only well whose water she cares to drink, is so angry with her for, by her radiant beauty, attracting suitors to the house, that the poor girl ends by drowning herself, upon which the neighbours declare her to be a goddess, and erect a temple in her honour. ”

“ You understand well that you and she as is to be your stepmother can't agree. As soon as you have cleared out, then in comes she; and as I powerfully want her in the house, the sooner you go the better. ”

“ He smiled pleasantly through the grey fringe of his whiskers and beard, and turning to the girls said, 'Now come forrard, and shake hands properly with your stepmother.'
Thus she made their acquaintance, and he went out, leaving them together. On examination the poor girls turned out to be not only plain-looking, which she could have forgiven, but to have such a lamentably meagre intellectual equipment as to be hopelessly inadequate as companions. Even the eldest, almost her own age, could only read with difficulty words of two syllables; and taste in dress was beyond their comprehension. ”

“ The stepmother is a gentle, languid, gracious creature, born in America though French by race, a beautiful Creole from Louisiana. Needless to say, she is bored to death at Loches—not quite at first, when her young loveliness, her position as bride, her gift for music, ensure her a certain social importance and consideration. ”

“ In old days she had always regarded her stepmother as an easy-going, rather self-indulgent creature, who liked pleasant food and stuffed chairs, and could be best managed or propitiated through some attention to her taste in sofa-cushions or in tea-cakes. ”

“ Osmond’s stopping at home! Otherwise, a week hence, we shall have my niece arriving at the conviction that her mission in life’s to prove that a stepmother may sacrifice herself—and that, to prove it, she must first become one.”
“She would make a charming stepmother,” smiled Madame Merle; “but I quite agree with you that she had better not decide upon her mission too hastily. Changing the form of one’s mission’s almost as difficult as changing the shape of one’s nose: there they are, each, in the middle of one’s face and one’s character—one has to begin too far back. ”

“ The stepmother was a rather coarse-grained piece of clay—an unsympathetic, unfeeling woman, who knew how to say and to do unpleasant things without any apparent temper or ill-will. The immortal clockmaker, when he was in a more quaintly sententious humor than common, once propounded the doctrine that the direct road to a mother's heart is through her child. ”

“ In fact a good stepmother may always be taken to mean a bad or indifferent mother. This is so little realized by most people, that I believe I am the first person in history who has ventured to defend the bad stepmother on these lines. On the contrary, the whole tendency of the modern world is to deprecate the bad stepmother and to honour the good stepmother. In this way are woman’s best virtues being undermined. ”

“ The angel disappeared, and the king reigned there in great happiness. [46]
[Contents]
THE WICKED STEPMOTHER
There was once on a time a stepmother who hated her stepdaughter exceedingly, because she was more beautiful than her own daughter whom she had brought with her into the house. By-and-by the father learned also to hate his own child; he scolded her, and beat her, in order to please his wife. One day his wife said to him, “Let us send your daughter away. Let her look out for herself in the world.” Upon this the man asked, “Where can we send her? Where can the poor girl go alone?” ”

“ I have quite lost faith in the unkind stepmother of fairy-tale tradition. It is a step-daughter whom Mrs. Frederick, the Swiss woman, is caring for in the midst of her struggle. Three or four times I found a woman utterly uncomforted after the loss of a stepson. There was Conley, for instance, a car inspector who was killed in a wreck. A stepmother had brought him up since he was ten years old, loving him as few mothers love their own sons. ”

“ The stepmother, on the other hand, endowed, as a rule, with the maternal affection that springs eternal in the woman’s breast, but unblinded by the other’s bias for the children of her flesh, more frequently approaches her often thankless task, governed by a sense of duty, rather than by affection merely, and many have there been as a result, both men and women, Vice-Chancellor Pitney’s dictum to the contrary notwithstanding, to rise up and call the stepmother blessed. ”

“ It was the maid whom my stepmother, with characteristic hardness, had left to await her on the street, while she transacted her business with the family solicitor. The girl did not know who I was; the opportunity too golden to be lost; and I was soon hearing the latest news of my father’s rectory and parish. ”

“ Well, time went on, and the little girl grew up, and the daughters of the stepmother were as ugly as could be. Their eyes were always cross, and their mouths were always complaining. Their mother saw that no one would want to marry either of them while there was Martha about the house, with her bright eyes and her songs and her kindness to everybody. ”

“ That's what I call a discriminating child, mamma. It isn't every boy of five who knows a possible stepmother when he sees her. I am proud of Jay. I wish I were as confident of his father's discretion. Poor man, how he will be cajoled! How he will learn to reverence the opinion of Mrs. Eustace, how he will dote on the airy graces of the daughter. I wish you could see them, mamma. They rather affect the attitude of sisters. ”

“ The wedding was scarcely over, when the step-mother's bad temper began to show itself. She could not bear the goodness of this young girl, because it made her own daughters appear the more odious. The stepmother gave her the meanest work in the house to do ”

“ The stepmother's daughter became the meanest sewing maid in the palace, the stepmother was tied to a wild horse, and every one knew and has never forgotten that whoever has a mind turned to wickedness is sure to end badly. ”

“ Grandma isn’t our real grandmother; she’s only a step, and steps are never any good. Even Aunt Kate isn’t our real aunt, because Grandpa was only her stepfather.”
“Steps are pretty bad,” remarked Dulcie, “but the worst of all is a stepmother, and, thank goodness, we haven’t got that. If I thought we were ever going to have a stepmother, I’d—I’d do something awful.”
“What would you do?” inquired Molly, eagerly. ”

“ For the stepmother that succeeds, hateth children of a former match, cruel as the viper's are her tender mercies. A son, 'tis true, hath in his sire a tower of strength, [to whom he speaks and has his answer back] ; [12] but thou, my daughter, how shall thy maidenhood be passed in honour? What shall thy experience be of thy father's wife? She may fasten on thee some foul report in thy youthful bloom, and frustrate thy marriage. Never shall thy mother lead thee to the bridal bed, nor by her presence in thy travail hearten thee, my child, when a mother's kindness triumphs over all. ”

“ Of one class of secondary relations, I cannot but say a word in justice to the subject, and in a different tone from that which usually prevails. The word stepmother has become a proverb in the language, and persons who should know better, sometimes idly speak, so as to add to its odious significance. ”

“ If, on the contrary, it is he who has children by another wife, although you may be the most loving of mothers, you are condemned as a stepmother by all the rhetoric of the comedies, the pantomimes, and orators. ”

“ But it is a woman's danger to be petty and mean, and stepmothers are proverbial all the world over, and this one's heart was not as her first smiles were. As the days and weeks grew into months, the step-mother began to treat the motherless girl unkindly and to try and come between the father and child. ”

“ There be some that call me a stepmother, because that among so great heaps of things of my making I have brought forth some venomous things (and yet have I ordained the selfsame venomous things for man’s behoof) ; and because I have made some beasts very fierce and perilous: and yet is there no beast so wild nor so perilous, but that by craft and diligence he may be made tame and gentle. ”

“ The king then brought home the inevitable cruel stepmother, who could not endure the sight of the children. When the princess was ten years old, her nurse put the talisman round her neck, but the thoughtless girl stowed it away with some other relics of her mother, and forgot it till a year or two afterwards, when the king was absent, and her stepmother cruelly beat her. ”

“ She ought to go home, in spite of that stepmother. He must insist gravely but firmly upon that. She was the spirited sort, of course, but still— Wonder if she had any money? Wonder what the second-class fare from Havant to London is? Of course he would have to pay that—it was the regular thing, he being a gentleman. Then should he take her home? He began to rough in a moving sketch of the return. The stepmother, repentant of her indescribable cruelties, would be present,—even these rich people have their troubles,—probably an uncle or two. ”

“ I have another Stepmother story, the place of which is here, but it is too long to give in its entirety. It begins like the last, and the next, and many others, with a widower, the teacher of whose children, a boy and girl, insists on marrying him. Soon after, of course, she turns the children out of doors; the boy is made the slave of a witch, and comes well at last out of many adventures; it is one of the nearest approaches to a heroic story that I have met with in Rome. There are details in it, however, like Filagranata and others, not actually of the Stepmother group. ”

“ THE STEPMOTHER. First she come to our house, Tommy run and hid; And Emily and Bob and me We cried jus' like we did When Mother died,—and we all said 'At we all wisht 'at we was dead! And Nurse she couldn't stop us, And Pa he tried and tried,— We sobbed and shook and wouldn't look, But only cried and cried; And nen someone—we couldn't jus' Tell who—was cryin' same as us! Our Stepmother! Yes, it was her, Her arms around us all— 'Cause Tom slid down the bannister And peeked in from the hall.— And we all love her, too, because She's purt nigh good as Mother was!
THE RAIN. I. The rain! the rain! ”