Bloomington Herald

THE TRUANT HUSBAND.
"The painful vigil may I never know,
That anxious watches o'er a wandering heart."
MRS. TIGHE.
It was past midnight, and she sat leaning her pale cheek on her hand, counting the dull ticking of the French clock that stood on the marble chimney-piece, and ever and anon lifting her weary eye to its dial to mark the lapse of another hour. It was past midnight, and yet he returned not! She arose, and taking up the lamp, whose pale rays alone illuminated the solitary chamber, proceeded with noiseless step to a small inner apartment. The curtains of his little bed were drawn aside, and the young mother gazed on her sleeping child. What a vivid contrast did that glowing cheek and smiling brow present, as he lay in rosy slumber, to the faded, yet beautiful face that hung over him in tears! "Will he resemble his father?" was the thought that passed for a moment through her devoted heart, and a sigh was the only answer!
'Tis his well known knock-and the steps of the drowsy porter echoed through the lofty hall, as with a murmur on his lip, he drew the massy bolts and admitted his thoughtless master. "Four o'clock, Willis, is it not!" and he sprung up the staircase-another moment he is in her chamber-in her arms!
"Julia, I have been a wandering husband."
"But you are come now, Charles, and all is well."
And all was well, for, from that hour, Charles Danvers became an altered man. Had his wife met him with frowns and sullen tears, he had become a hardened libertine; but her affectionate caresses, the joy that danced in her sunken eye, the hectic flash that lit up her pallid cheek at his approach, were arguments he could not withstand. Married in early life, while he felt all the ardor, but not the esteem of love; possessed of a splendid fortune, and having hitherto had the entire control of his own pleasures, Danvers fell into that common error of newly married men-the dread of being controlled. In vain did his parents, who beheld with sorrow the reproaches and misery he was heaping up for himself in after life, remonstrate; Charles Danvers turned a deaf ear to advice, and pursued, with companions every way unworthy of his society, the path of folly if not of absolute guilt. The tavern, the club-room, the race-course, too often left his wife a solitary mourner, or a midnight watcher.
Thus the first three years of their wedded life had passed-to him in fevered and restless pleasure, to her in blighted hope, or unmurmuring regret. But this night crowned the patient forbearance of Julia with its just reward, and gave the death blow to folly in the bosom of Danvers. Returning with disgust from the losses of the hazard table, her meekness and long suffering touched him to the soul: the film fell from his eyes, and vice, in her own hideous deformity, stood unmasked before him.
Ten years have passed since that solitary midnight, when the young matron bent in tears over her sleeping boy. Behold her now! still in the pride of womanhood, surrounded by their cherub faces, who are listening ere they go to rest to her sweet voice, as it pours forth to the accompaniment of her harp and evening song of joy and melody; while a manly form is bending over the music page to hide the tear of happiness and triumph that springs from a swelling bosom, as he contemplates the interesting group.
Youthful matrons! ye who watch over a wandering, perhaps an erring heart-when a reproach trembles on your lips towards a truant husband, imitate Julia Danvers, and remember, though Hymen has chains, like the sword of Harmodius, they may be covered with flowers: that unkindness and irritability do but harden, if not wholly estrange the heart-while on the contrary patience and gentleness of manner (as water dropping on the flinty rock will in time wear it into softness) seldom fail to reclaim to happiness and virtue the Truant Husband.