A THREAT.
One Sunday, the first snow had fallen in large flakes, and as
there had been no wind it had covered all things pretty evenly--it
had laden the trees, many of which had not as yet shed their leaves.
Mehetabel had not gone to church because of this snow; and Jonas
had been detained at home for the same reason, though not from
church. If he had gone anywhere it would have been to look for
holly trees full of berries which he might cut for the Christmas
sale of evergreens.
Towards noon the sun suddenly broke out and revealed a world of
marvellous beauty. Every bush and tree twinkled, and as the rays
melted the snow the boughs stooped and shed their burdens in shining
avalanches.
Blackbirds were hopping in the snow, and the track of hares was
distinguishable everywhere.
As the sun burst in at the little window it illumined the beautiful
face of Mehetabel and showed the delicate rose in her cheeks, and
shone in her rich dark hair, bringing out a chestnut glow not
usually visible in it.
Jonas, who had been sitting at his table working at his accounts,
looked up and saw his wife at the window contemplating the beauty
of the scene. She had her hands clasped, and her thoughts seemed
to be far away, though her eyes rested on the twinkling white world
before her.
Jonas, though ill-natured and captious, was fond of his wife, in
his low, animal fashion, and had a coarse appreciation of her
beauty. He was so far recovered from his accident that he could
sleep and eat heartily, and his blood coursed as usual through
his veins.
The very jealousy that worked in him, and his hatred of Iver, and
envy of his advantages of youth, good looks, and ease of manner,
made him eager to assert his proprietorship over his wife.
He stepped up to her, without her noticing his approach, put his
right arm round her waist and kissed her.
She started, and thrust him back. She was far away in thought,
and the action was unintentional. In very truth she had been
dreaming of Iver, and the embrace chimed in with her dream, and
the action of shrinking and repulsion was occasioned by the recoil
of her moral nature from any undue familiarity attempted by Iver.
But the Broom-Squire entirely misconceived her action. With
quivering voice and flashing eyes, he said--
"Oh, if this had been Iver, the daub-paint, you would not have
pushed me away."
Her eyebrows contracted, and a slight start did not pass unnoticed.
"I know very well," he said, "of whom you were thinking. Deny it
if you can? Your mind was with Iver Verstage."
She was silent. The blood rushed foaming through her head; but she
looked Bideabout steadily in the face.
"It is guilt which keeps you silent," he said, bitterly.
"If you are so sure that I thought of him, why did you ask?" she
replied, and now the color faded out of her face.
Jonas laughed mockingly.
"It serves me right," he said in a tone of resentment against
himself. "I always knew what women were; that they were treacherous
and untrue; and the worst of all are those who think themselves
handsome; and the most false and vicious of all are such as have
been reared in public-houses, the toast of drunken sots."
"Why, then, did you take me?"
"Because I was a fool. Every man commits a folly once in his life.
Even Solomon, the wisest of men, committed that folly; aye, and
many a time, too, for of wives he had plenty. But then he was a
king, and folly such as that mattered not to him. He could cut
off the head of, or shoot down any man who even looked at or spoke
a word to any of his wives. And if one of these were untrue to him,
he would put her in a sack and sink her in the Dead Sea, and--served
her right. To think that I--that I--the shrewd Broom-Squire, should
have been so bewitched and bedeviled as to be led into the bog of
marriage! Now I suffer for it." He turned savagely on his wife, and
said: "Have you forgotten that you vowed fidelity to me?"
"And you did you not swear to show me love?"
He broke into a harsh laugh.
"Love! That is purely! And just now, when I attempted to snatch a
kiss, you struck me and thrust me off, because I was Jonas Kink,
and not the lover you looked for?"
"Jonas!" said Mehetabel, and a flame of indignation started into
her cheek, and burnt there on each cheek-bone. "Jonas, you are
unjust. I swore to love you, and Heaven can answer for me that I
have striven hard to force the love to come where it does not exist
naturally. Can you sink a well in the sand-hill, and compel the
water to bubble up? Can you drain away the moor and bid it blossom
like a garden? I cannot love you--when you do everything to make me
shrink from you. You esteem nothing, no one, that is good. You
sneer at everything that is holy; you disbelieve in everything that
is honest; you value not the true, and you have no respect for
suffering. I do not deny that I have no love for you--that there is
much in you that makes me draw away--as from something hideous.
Why do not you try on your part to seek my love? Instead of that,
you take an ingenious pleasure in stamping out every spark of
affection, in driving away every atom of regard, that I am trying
so hard to acquire for you. Is all the strivin' to be on my
side?--all the thought and care to be with me? A very little pains
on your part, some small self-control, and we should get to find
common ground on which we could meet and be happy. As to Iver
Verstage, both he and I know well enough that we can never belong
to each other."
"Oh, I stand between you?"
"Yes you and my duty."
"Much you value either."
"I know my duty and will do it. Iver Verstage and I can never
belong to each other. We know it, and we have parted forever. I
have not desired to be untrue to you in heart; but I did not know
what was possible and what impossible in this poor, unhappy heart
of mine when I promised to love you. I did not know what love
meant at the time. Mother told me it grew as a matter of course
in married life, like chickweed in a garden."
"Am I gone crazed, or have you?" exclaimed Bideabout, snorting
with passion. "You have parted with Iver quite so but only till
after my death, which you will compass between you. I know that
well enough. It was because I knew that, that I would not suffer
you to give me doses of laudanum. A couple of drops, where one
would suffice, and this obstruction to your loves was removed."
"No, never!" exclaimed Mehetabel, with flashing eye.
"You women are like the glassy pools in the Moor. There is a smooth
face, and fair flowers floating thereon, and underneath the toad
and the effect, the water-rat and festering poison. I shall know
how to drive out of you the devil that possesses you this spirit
of rebellion and passion for Iver Verstage."
"You may do that," said Mehetabel, recovering her self-mastery, "if
you will be kind, forbearing, and gentle."
"It is not with kindness and gentleness that I shall do it,"
scoffed the Broom-Squire. "The woman that will not bend must be
broken. It is not I who will have to yield in this house I, who
have been master here these twenty years. I shall know how to bring
you to your senses."
He was in foaming fury. He shook his fist, and his short hair
bristled.
Mehetabel shrank from him as from a maniac.
"You have no need to threaten," she said, with sadness in her tone.
"I am prepared for anything. Life is not so precious to me that I
care for it."
"Then why did you crawl out of the marsh?"
She looked at him with wide-open eyes.
"Make an end of my wretchedness if you will. Take a knife, and
drive it into my heart. Go to your closet, and bring me that poison
you have there, and pour it between my lips. Thrust me, if you
will, into the Marsh. It is all one to me. I cannot love you unless
you change your manners of thought and act and speech altogether."
"Bah!" sneered he, "I shall not kill you. But I shall make you
understand to fear me, if you cannot love me." He gripped her
wrist. "Whether alive or dead, there will be no escape from me. I
will follow you, track you in all you do, and if I go underground
shall fasten on you, in spirit, and drag you underground as well.
When you married me you became mine forever."
A little noise made both turn.
At the door was Sally Rocliffe, her malevolent face on the watch,
observing all that passed.
"What do you want here?" asked the Broom-Squire.
"Nuthin', Jonas, but to know what time it is. Our clock is all
wrong when it does go, and now, with the cold and snow, I suppose,
it has stopped altogether."
Sally looked at the clock that stood in the comer, Jonas turned
sharply on his heel, took his hat, and went forth into the backyard
of his farm.
"So," said Mrs. Rocliffe, "my brother is in fear of his life of
you. I know very well how he got the shot in his elbow. It was not
your fault that it did not lodge in his head. And now he dare not
take his medicine from your hands lest you should put poison into
it. That comes of marrying into a gallows family."
Then slowly she walked away.
Mehetabel sank into the window seat.
However glorious the snow-clad, sunlit world might be without it
was nothing to her. Within her was darkness and despair.
She looked at her wrist, marked with the pressure of her husband's
fingers. No tears quenched the fire in her eyes. She sat and gazed
stonily before her, and thought on nothing. It was as though her
heart was frozen and buried under snow; as though her eyes looked
over the moor, also frozen and white, but without the sun flooding
it. Above hung gray and threatening clouds.
Thus she sat for many minutes, almost without breathing, almost
without pulsation.
Then she sprang to her feet with a sob in her throat, and hastened
about the house to her work. There was, as it were, a dark sea
tumbling, foaming, clashing within her, and horrible thoughts
rose up out of this sea and looked at her in ghostly fashion and
filled her with terror. Chief among these was the thought that
the death of Jonas could and would free her from this hopeless
wretchedness. Had the bullet indeed entered his head then now she
would have been enduring none of this insult, none of these
indignities, none of this daily torture springing out of his
jealousy, his suspicion, and his resentfulness.
And at the same time appeared the vision of Iver Verstage. She
could measure Jonas by him. How infinitely inferior in every
particular was Jonas to the young painter, the friend of her
childhood.
But Mehetabel knew that such thoughts could but breed mischief.
They were poison germs that would infect her own life, and make
her not only infinitely wretched but degrade her in her own eyes.
She fought against them. She beat them down as though she were
battling with serpents that rose up out of the dust to lash
themselves around her and sting her. The look at them had an
almost paralyzing effect. If she did not use great effort they
would fascinate her, and draw her on till they filled her whole
mind and lured her from thought to act.
She had not been instructed in much that was of spiritual advantage
when a child in the Sunday-school. The Rector, as has already been
intimated, had been an excellent and kindly man, who desired to
stand well with everybody, and who was always taking up one nostrum
after another as a panacea for every spiritual ill. And at the time
when Matabel was under instruction the nostrum was the physical
geography of the Holy Land. The only thing the parson did not teach
was a definite Christian belief, because he had entered into a
compromise with a couple of Dissenting farmers not to do so, and to
confine the instruction to such matters as could not be disputed.
Moreover, he was, himself, mentally averse to everything that
savored of dogma in religion. He would not give his parishioners
the Bread of Life, but would supply them with any amount of stones
geographically tabulated according to their strata.
However, Matabel had acquired a clear sense of right and wrong, at
a little dame's school she had attended, as also from Mrs. Verstage;
and now this definite knowledge of right and wrong stood her in
good stead. She saw that the harboring of such thoughts was wrong,
and she therefore resolutely resisted them. "He said," she sighed,
when the battle was over, "that he would follow me through life and
death, and finally drag me underground. But, can he be as bad as
his word?"