If you have ever had the fortune to be married to a Vassar graduate of
the gushing and kittenish order, between nineteen and twenty, you will
understand how difficult it was to explain my dilapidated appearance
that memorable morning.
The ingenuity of my fabrications would have stocked a popular romance
writer with all the modern conveniences; and I am sure the recording
angel must have had difficulty in keeping pace with my transgressions
unless he or she understood short-hand.
Vandeleur took an early opportunity to escape to the city, knowing
very well that he would be held accountable for my degraded and
dilapidated condition. The friends of a married man always are held
responsible by his wife for any of his moral lapses, no matter when or
where they may occur.
If I had only succeeded in my undertaking I might have viewed even my
wounds--of which there were many--with some equanimity. But to have
suffered in vain was enough to try the strongest soul; and I am afraid
I was unnecessarily brusque to Ethel when she insisted on soaking me
hourly in the most horrible liniments of her mother's decoction. I was
pickled for about a week by her fair hands, and had become so
impregnated with camphor and aromatic compounds that I exhaled spices
like an Eastern mummy or a shopworn sachet-bag, and longed to get away
from myself and the drugstore smell that clung to me closer than I
ever want my brother to cling. I consented to the embalming process,
because I wanted to look respectable when Ethel's mother, Mrs.
McGoozle, put in an appearance. I knew I could not so easily satisfy
her mind regarding that night of folly without the sworn affidavits of
half-a-dozen reputable citizens. She said I wrote so much fiction
that it had become a habit with me never to tell the truth.
My eyes had just begun to lay aside mourning when I received at the
dinner-table one stormy night the local paper. I took it for my wife,
who had a penchant for reading the patent-medicine advertisements; but
on the present occasion I displayed an unholy eagerness to get at its
contents. More misery! More horrible complications!
Almost the entire sheet was given up to a description of the burglary.
There was a picture of Bella's house and of Bella herself; of the
cook, of the coachman--yes, and even of the bloodhounds.
I had puzzled my brain since that night in trying to imagine why the
hounds had sped past our tree, our noble tree, instead of gathering in
convention at its base and talking the matter over among themselves
while we starved to death upstairs. The paper gave the solution of the
problem. They were pursuing the trail that led to our milkman's
farm--the poor creature of whom I had basely borrowed our suits and
overshoes.
The worthy man had been arrested and haled before the nearest justice
of the peace, and had he not been able to prove an _alibi_ to the
effect that he was watering his cows at the time, he would have been
summarily dealt with.
But he had held his peace about my share in the transaction--bless
him! and being a thrifty man, had brought a suit against Bella for
threatening his life with her dogs.
Yet I had no cause for congratulation, for now I was in the milkman's
power as well as Bella's; and the very next day the honest fellow put
in an appearance, very humble and yet very decided, and insisted that
I should present him with Ethel's prize Frisian cow as a premium on
his silence.
And I had to consent, though my wife had hysterics in parting with the
animal, and sobbed out her determination to tell Mrs. McGoozle
everything when that lady arrived in a few days.
This may not sound very terrible to you, but I knew the dreadful
import of her words.
There was a flash of light through the gloom of my suicidal thoughts
the next morning that made my heart beat high with hope.
I read in the morning paper that Bella, the cause of all my trouble,
was dead, and that there was to be a sale of her effects at a New York
auction-room the next day.
Of course that dreadful bureau was in the lot, and I knew that if it
fell into unscrupulous hands there was enough material in that little
drawer to stock a blackmailing establishment for years and years.
I took the first train for the city on the day of the sale. The
bureau--Bella's bureau--was just being put up as I entered the place.
I had a thousand dollars in my pocket, so I felt rather contented in
mind. The bidding on the bureau began in a discouraging way. The
hunger of the crowd had been appeased before I came, and they
displayed a lukewarm interest in the bureau. I bid two hundred dollars
finally to settle the argument. I was tired of the delay. I wanted to
settle forever the incubus that preyed upon my spirits. "Two hundred,"
I cried exultantly.
"Three hundred dollars," came in quiet tones from the corner of the
room. The words seem to ripple in an icy stream down the back of my
neck. Could it have been the echo of my voice that I heard?
"Four hundred," I cried uneasily. The terrible thought flashed over
me, that perhaps another lover had turned up, who believed that his
letters were in the bureau, and was just as anxious to get it as I.
Horrible!
"Four hundred is bid for this beautiful Louis Fourteenth bureau,"
howled the auctioneer, repeating my bid. "Why, gents, this is a shame:
it's--"
"Five hundred," said the voice from the corner, in calm, cold tones.
Ah, if I could slip through the crowd and throttle his utterance
forever.
"Six hundred," I screamed, in desperation.
Then my unseen foe woke up and we began to bid in earnest. Six, seven,
eight hundred, ran the bids.
In one of the lulls of the storm, when the auctioneer began to wax
loquacious regarding the beauties of that bureau, I slipped secretly
around to the cashier's desk.
Would he take a check? I implored. No, he would not; and I thought he
wore a triumphant glitter in his fishy eyes. The terms of the sale
were cash: it was to conclude that day. I turned away, sick at heart.
"A thousand!" I cried, in desperation, staking my last dollar. There
was a moment's ominous silence. I began to feel encouraged. I watched
the fateful gavel poised in the air, with my heart in my teeth. It
wavered a moment, then began to slowly descend. Never had I seen such
a graceful gesture defined by man as the freckled fist of the
auctioneer described at that moment of hope.
"Twelve hundred," croaked the demon in the corner.
The crowd blended into a pulp of color. I fainted.
I lingered about the city all that night, searching in vain for a
lethean draught at the haunts where consolation is retailed at two
hundred per cent profit. I did not find the nepenthe I sought for
anywhere on draught, so I went home in disgust.
Ethel received me in her usually effusive manner. She knows I object
to being hugged at all hours of the day, yet I have never been able to
cure her of that affection-garroting process so much in vogue with
young wives of the gushing order.
"What do you think?" she chirped, when I had staggered to a chair in a
half-strangled condition. "Dear mother has just sent us the most
beautiful present--"
"Oh, I suppose so," I sneer savagely. "She generally does present us
with something beautifully useless. Perhaps this time it's a
dancing-bear, or a tame codfish"--with a wild laugh.
"Oh, how can you talk so!" lifting a dab of cambric to her nose with a
preliminary sniff that is generally the signal of tears, according to
our matrimonial barometer. "You know dear mother is so fond of you."
"Well, it's a case of misplaced affection," I growl, lounging out of
the room just in time to avoid the rising storm.
I dash upstairs and smoke a cigar in my own room. Then I feel better,
and stroll into Ethel's boudoir, resolved to pitch her mother's
present in the fire if it doesn't suit me. She ought to be suppressed
in this particular. "Wha--what! No--yes, it is!" The bureau, Bella's
bureau, stands in the chaste confines of Ethel's satin-lined nest. I
fling myself upon it, tear the little drawer open--hurl the bundle of
letters into the grate with a cackling laugh.
Ethel enters timidly just then, and looks first at me and then at the
burning papers with doubt and wonderment in her blue eyes.
"I have been paying some old debts," I say, with an uneasy laugh.
"These are some of the I.O.U.'s you see burning."
She lays a soft little arm around my neck and a curly head on my
immaculate shirt-front. Oh, spotless mask for such a darksome heart!
I wonder she cannot catch the sound of its wicked beating.
"I have been worried about you lately, dear," she whispers, with a
tender tremor in her voice. "I thought perhaps you might--you
might--have become entangled with some other--other--" Then she burst
into tears.
"How often must I tell you, darling," patting her cheek softly, "that
you are the only woman I ever loved?"
"Oh, Jack!"