died that night. I can’t say how I lived through those moments even.
They were but moments she had stolen away. She had to return at once.
We parted at the foot of the mock-orange walk, and I went to my bed
and lay there in a trance of despair. Perhaps sunlight brought some
relief. The parson told at the breakfast-table the news that Alicia
was betrothed to the army officer I had seen. I wrote a word, saying
I was called away. And I was gone a week or more. But in that blank I
must have something to love me--to have an interest in. Better Rosalie
than the absolute negation of those days. She thought nothing of my
absence--after my return. She was as full of romance as a flower of
nectar. And, to sum it up, if she was not the rose, she had lived with
the rose. One day we married; and here we are. A long life, a happy
life, and I have never regretted the day in it that made her my wife.
After all, one cannot marry among the angels--clay must mate with clay.
“What do you say? Not love her, my child? You never were more mistaken.
I love her tenderly, absorbingly. She is a perfect woman. She has
been a perfect wife. She has made me calmly and completely happy. If
once in a while the old hope, the old dream of a passion arises and
sweeps before me in its bloom and light, it is because it means youth
to me--that youth which we do not know till we are old--is itself the
ideal that it holds up for worship. Yet, perfect as my wife is, fifty
years of this smooth life with her wear something of the common-place,
and if across their dead level of same content sometimes gleams the
shining of Alicia’s face, it is not in any disloyalty to her. I often
wonder what became of the lovely creature. Once I could not have
spoken of her. At seldom times, when I sit alone by the fire, she comes
and sits beside me, and gleams of light and shadow make a face with
her sweetness, her beauty, her pensive and ethereal grace. Dear girl!
I suppose she sleeps in her grave by this; but she is a shaft of the
light of heaven in my memory!”
And Mr. Fernalde rose, walking to the window, just as the screen
began to tremble, and a smothered cough, and then an undisguised one,
betrayed to me, if not to him, that Mrs. Fernalde had heard the chief
part of the monologue.
“And I had heard it in fragments and sections more than once before,”
she afterwards told me with her pleasant smile. “I know it means
nothing--that he is just as wholly mine as I am his--that our love
is the imperishable sort--that we are welded into one by fifty years
together. And perhaps it was ignoble of me to break the pretty bubble,
to take away his little ideal, with which he has found comfort whenever
I would have my own way too much. Yet I thought it was about time.”
But she said nothing of this at all as she came bustling round the
corner of the screen that morning.
“There is such a gale blowing outside,” she said, “that the dust really
rises in the house fit to choke one.”
“You haven’t caught cold, Rosalie?” said her husband, turning in
concern.
“Not the least. But I shall if the hall-door is open another moment.
There she comes now. Make haste, and bid Alicia good-bye, my love. She
is just going.”
“Who?” he cried, suddenly opening his eyes like lamps in their deep
settings.
“Alicia--Mrs. Talliafero--dear. She married again, you know. Oh, it has
been a fine jest,” she cried, with her low laugh, “to think that you
should not have recognized Alicia in all these weeks and months!”
Mr. Fernalde was silent for a few moments, looking at the cruel little
lady before him, with her color like the half-tarnished rose, with the
soft brilliancy of her smile. Then he crossed over the hearth before
me, and he took her hands and bent down and kissed her mouth.
“My Rosalie,” said he, “will you not make my adieus to Mrs. Talliafero
yourself? Tell her--tell her I have gone to the funeral of an old
friend!”
MRS. CLAXTON’S SKELETON
MRS. CLAXTON’S SKELETON
She always carried it about with her; but it was not her bones. And as
this is not a conundrum, I may as well say at once that it was--well,
it was connected with her domestic difficulties.
Nobody, casually observing Mrs. Claxton, would have dreamed her to be
the possessor of so disagreeable an article, least of all one that was
constantly a companion, and that could not be locked up in a closet,
and left behind when she went where folks were gay and happy.
For my own part, understanding how unreasonable it would be to expect
any lot to be a perfect thing, and inclining towards the old saw about
a skeleton in every closet, I sometimes used to wonder what earthly
material there was from which Mrs. Claxton could get one up; yet felt
tolerably sure, for all her smiles and her pleasant manners, for all
her fineries and luxuries, that there must be something to make her
resigned to the necessity of one day surrendering her hold upon those
desirable things surrounding her at present in such abundance.
For why should Mrs. Claxton be an exception? Look up and down the
hills, with the familiar sight that neighbors have, and you could have
seen trouble in too many houses to be able to believe the Claxton house
exempt. For in this house bitter, grinding poverty and pride had their
perpetual battle-ground; that house death had robbed of its sunshine;
in the next house the disgrace of a defalcation had made life a burden;
still beyond, a cloud of insanity hung, ready to fall; here a drunken
son, there an unfaithful husband; in such a house a frivolous wife, in
such another idiotic children: up and down the streets, in every house,
something; no matter what the compensations were, no matter how much
happiness otherwise; yet always some one bitter thing, perhaps to give
a better relish with its tang to all the sweet.
So what could Mrs. Claxton’s trouble be? She lived in the finest place
in the town, her handsome house upon a sightly knoll, a shaven lawn
dotted with noble trees sloping away from it on all sides. Within, it
seemed to our rustic eyes a witch-land of beauty and of all the cunning
appliances of art for comfort. She had her open landau and her span
for summer driving, her sleighs full of costly robes for winter, her
servants, her overflowing purse, her husband and children, her dresses.
Yes, her dresses; no one in Claxtonberg had any to compare with them.
She had the glory of setting the fashion, and of holding a lofty
pre-eminence in it, and the bliss of knowing that the last new wrinkle
in her pouf, or her sleeve, or her back hair was being studied every
Sunday with an assiduity that put the prayer-book to open shame. And
besides all this Mrs. Claxton was very pretty: everybody admired her;
everybody else loved her. She had company when she pleased, so far as
we knew; she went on journeys when she chose; and when the bishop came
he always stayed with her. What was there out of which Mrs. Claxton’s
skeleton could be made?
It could not be that this skeleton had found existence because her
husband was not a distinguished man in politics, for no woman who had
any regard for her own happiness, or his either, would want her husband
in politics; and Mrs. Claxton had the greatest regard for the happiness
of both. It could not be because she had no children, for she had four,
fine ones. It could not be because her children were not boys or were
not girls, for there were two sisters and two brothers among them.
It couldn’t be because her husband was still in business, since his
mills brought him in a royal revenue every year, and he would be lost
without the business. It could not be because her husband was tired of
her, for everybody in Claxtonberg knew to the contrary, knew that he
surrounded his wife with everything heart could wish, knew that the
breath of scandal had never approached him. It could not be because of
any impending disease that was to darken her house, for they were all
in a state of notorious health. What in the world could this skeleton
be?
I had just as lief tell you as not--if you will listen.
When this lady first met the gentleman who became her husband, his
high-bred courtesy, his knightly manner, rivalled that of the great
dignitaries around them; he, not any of them, seemed to her the true
nobleman; and, not to weary you, she accepted him the moment he asked
her. She was the governess of a friend’s children, and the family were
staying at some wonderful foreign baths where the marble basins were
more than a mile around, and where the court came to bathe. Every
morning the Majesties and Sublimities and high and mighty Excellencies
went into the bath, king and queen and chamberlains, grand duchesses
and princesses and ladies-in-waiting, and from unobserved chinks the
commonalty watched the shoal of nobility disporting itself. And what a
scene it was to watch! For the flannel bathing suits were under water,
but out of water what elaborate hair-dressing, what a blaze of jewelled
tiaras and coronets, what flashing diamond necklaces upon white
throats, what point-lace fichus and berthas overlaid with strings of
resplendent gems to the water’s edge, what loading of bracelets on
bare arms, what glancing of rings on fingers! for the court was in
full-dress in the presence of the sovereign.
As Mr. Claxton looked from the window of his room upon the brilliant
scene he felt a lofty republican contempt--indeed, contempt was Mr.
Claxton’s forte--which was not lessened when the crowd of commoners
went in, in their turn, aping the bediamonded ways of those who went
before. One young girl among the throng, who wore only the dress
suitable to the occasion, and was without any other ornament than the
shrouding veil of her own long hair, attracted him--in the first place
by her simplicity, and in the next place by a manner that seemed to be
at once sweet and stately: there was a sort of shy and startled look
in her great soft brown eyes if one addressed her; there was so rich
a color on her cheek too; and the features of her lovely face were so
finely in keeping with that half-defiant carriage of the perfect head.
In such a pack of frippery her plain attire was pre-eminence to Mr.
Claxton, whose feelings were exceedingly ruffled; for he was accustomed
to obsequious consideration at home, and here he was less than a
cipher; and revenging himself by despising the whole affair, he knew no
better way of proclaiming it than by passing over all the titled and
spangled beauties, and devoting himself to this simple young girl. If,
meanwhile, the titled beauties did not know of his existence, that was
something he never suspected, and he lost no time in making the young
girl’s acquaintance. It mattered not to him that she was a governess,
as it would not if she had been a beggar and had attracted him. He was
one of those men who consider their actions their own justification;
his desires were a law to themselves. After he married her she would be
Mrs. Claxton--a glory which every Claxton that had ever married felt to
be quite capable of blotting out all that might ever have gone before
in the lives and histories of the poor brides. As for the young girl,
treated kindly by her friend, but kept in the background, and not wont
to have the attention of young men, and with that vague longing for
it natural to girls, somewhat lonely, and altogether dependent, her
heart leaped up in gratitude to this stranger, with whose family and
antecedents her friend was well acquainted. People said he was like a
young prince: she never remembered to think, in liking to hear them,
that princes are the masters of slaves, and that for a plain private
to be a young prince simply meant that he was a person who would have
his own way if he had to be a tyrant to do it. When he proposed she
accepted him, as I said; she already loved him with devotion; she
married him in all haste--to repent in all leisure.
And Mr. Claxton, making the tour of Europe like a good American, was
suddenly summoned home by an event which left him the possessor of
the great mills and the great business, and he installed his wife in
his great house, and he felt that he had done more for her than she
had a right to ask, and he expected from her thenceforward a slavish
obedience.
To tell the whole truth, though, Mr. Claxton did not know that he
expected a slavish obedience. His intention was to do right exactly,
and perhaps lean to mercy’s side. He had been reared in a school that
held the wife to be, so to say, a chattel, and he would have been as
much surprised to find his wife differing from him as he would have
been to hear his wooden dining-table speak up and complain of the
dinner: he looked for absolute agreement. If you had asked him if
he believed that a man had a right to beat his wife, he would have
indignantly answered no, and demanded of you, furthermore, what it
was you took him for; but if he himself had chanced to strike his
wife, he would not have felt it an act to be questioned by anybody.
His wife was his. That he did not put a rope round her neck and sell
her in open market was out of his abounding condescension. He allowed
her many favors--such, for instance, as the liberty to breathe. For
her to reward him by having an opinion of her own on any subject
would have astounded him. If he had chosen to take her children away
from her he would have thought her complaint monstrous; if he had
knocked down her own mother and trodden on her he would have thought
her remonstrance culpable, and would have punished her for it to the
best of his ability, not by whips and stocks, not by imprisonment or
deprivation, but by withholding his royal favor in some signal manner.
In fact, in Mr. Claxton’s ideal household there was but one will, one
mind, one identity, and that was Mr. Claxton’s. And that household was
a not at all uncommon instance of an unrecognized tyranny worse than
Diocletian’s own.
In spite of all this, if you can believe me, Mr. Claxton loved his
wife--not as he did his own soul, indeed, but next to that, one might
say. She had only to ask--but ask she must--to have her wish gratified.
If she were ill, he knew no peace, and let no one else know any,
till she were well again. He admired her beauty, her lovely manner,
her stately air; he did not object to that _soupçon_ of spirit when
directed towards other people; he felt that she added a lustre to his
station. He was, in short, very proud of her; but he would not for the
world have had her know it. For where would discipline be then?
Well, it might perhaps have answered with somebody else, but it did not
answer at all with Mrs. Claxton. In truth, Mr. Claxton had been married
hardly a year before he began to suspect that he had a rebel in his
house, or, as he phrased it, a viper in his bosom; and he prepared to
take extraordinary measures.
As for Mrs. Claxton, her feeling for her husband was of the warmest;
she regarded him for a long time as the best and greatest man alive,
and by far the handsomest. She knew he had faults, but understood that
all men abounded in faults, and presumed that other men’s faults were
very much worse than his. She thought it likely that he could not have
written the Iliad, but then she didn’t know that it was desirable
to have written the Iliad; yet she was sure he could have written
Tillotson’s _Sermons_, or Macaulay’s _Essays_, or Mill’s _Logic_, and
that he could be President of the United States on any day he wished
it, and confer new dignity upon the office. There was only one thing
she would have liked different about him: she would have liked him to
consider her more on an equality with himself.
And yet at first she used to question if that were not an unreasonable
exaction on her part--she, who had been nothing but a poor little
governess, to demand so much, and he the owner of the vast Claxtonberg
mills, the descendant of the old Claxtons of Claxtonberg, a castle
across the water that had defied assault for generations, and in which
monarchs had held state, if the Claxtonberg legends could be trusted.
Though, between ourselves, I always imagined that the person whom Mr.
Claxton’s grandfather employed, after he had acquired wealth, to hunt
up his family traditions for him, his coat-of-arms and crest, found
only and exactly what his employer wanted him to find.
However that might be, Mrs. Claxton’s eyes used to follow her husband
with an adoring look in them. His noble figure, his lofty bearing, the
large, fair comeliness of his fresh face and its aquiline contour,
his great gray eyes and his bright, curling hair, seemed to her a
representation of the noblest type of manhood; the sound of his voice
was music, the sound of his foot-fall was something she always ran to
meet--that is, in the first year.
It was an odd little circumstance that caused Mrs. Claxton’s cloudy
suspicion of her husband’s injustice to settle into an absolute curd
of sourness. Odd, because so slight: it was the naming of their first
child.
“You are looking peculiarly well, my love,” said Mr. Claxton,
condescendingly, happening to see his wife in the glass as he drew his
razor over the hone. “Like a flower in full bloom,” jocosely.
Mrs. Claxton blushed and looked lovelier yet. “I am so glad you think
so,” said she. “I was really afraid I was falling off. And that would
be such a shame, for I want the baby to remember me when I look my
best.”
“Let me hear him,” said Mr. Claxton, gayly, “expressing any opinion
other than my own on that subject, if he thinks best!” And he kissed
his wife as she came and stood beside him while looking for something
in the dressing-case drawer, and then he plunged into the business on
hand.
“I think,” said Mrs. Claxton, after a few moments, looking up timidly,
from the seat she had taken, to the spot where her husband stood
holding the tip of his nose with one hand while he flourished his razor
beneath it with the other--for Mr. Claxton never risked his greatness
sufficiently to have a _valet de chambre_--“I think Henry would really
be the fit name, after all, being yours, and your father’s--and your
grandfather’s too, wasn’t it? And then, do you know, it was my father’s
also. And I should so like to unite them all in one!”
I doubt if Mrs. Claxton would have ventured to reopen this subject,
after a previous conversation, but for the little compliment she had
received, and for the fact that when a man stands holding the tip
of his nose in one hand, with his upper lip stretched like an apron
beneath it, he is not altogether an object of awe.
But Mr. Claxton did not give an immediate answer. He seldom did;
whether to signify that he was on such an altitude above common
mortals that it took some time for the sound of their voices to reach
him, or whether it cost him an effort to acknowledge the independent
existence, and therefore the voluntary remarks, of anybody else in
the universe, though just now he had the excuse of a delicate use of
his razor. When he sought his shaving-paper, however, he turned and
looked at his wife in some displeasure, reminiscent of that previous
conversation.
“This is quite unnecessary, my love,” he said. “I told you I intended
to revive an old family name sunk in desuetude.”
“But, my dear,” persisted Mrs. Claxton, “it would be so nice to
continue the one name for four generations; it is a sort of immortality
in itself--as if Henry Claxton never died.”
“Never died!” cried Mr. Claxton, nettled, since this very thing had
been a temptation to him before resolving to rekindle the ancient
family grandeur with one of the legendary names--“Never died! What
blasphemy is this!” And he made himself livid with fresh lather.
“Blasphemy? How you talk! Why, you know what I mean, dear.”
“Pray how should I know what you mean? I know what you say. And it
shocks me.”
“Well, never mind; it’s of no consequence.”
“Of no consequence that you shock me?” began the young prince.
“Oh, no, no, indeed!” said the trembling subject, shocked herself at
offending him. “I mean it is of no consequence what I say. I talk so
heedlessly, you know.”
“Indeed, I have reason to know it,” was the severe ejaculatory.
“And I am really sorry about it. I try to think twice before I speak,
but--”
“I wish you found more success in the trial. A year ago it would have
been less matter, but now Mrs. Claxton should never forget the dignity
of her station, and that inconsiderate babbling detracts--”
“Oh, I don’t think I do anything like that!”
“When you say that it is of no consequence whether you shock me or
not, you do.”
“But I didn’t say anything of the sort.”
“Don’t contradict me again, if you please.”
“Don’t you allow people to defend themselves?” said Mrs. Claxton,
opening her brown eyes in a spirited way.
“I don’t allow people to insult me.”
“Insult you! What nonsense!” cried the wife at last. “But that is
neither here nor there. We were speaking of the baby’s name. I am sure
I had no intention, no idea, of offending you by suggesting a choice
in the matter. It would give me such pleasure to remember my father in
the name, and unite yours with it--Henry Claxton, Fourth,” said Mrs.
Claxton, musingly, her thimble on her lip.
“We have had enough of that,” said Mr. Claxton, firmly, and quite vexed
with her persistency. “The child’s name is Reginald.”
Mrs. Claxton stood up a moment in one of her sudden little angers
that she was always under the necessity of humiliating herself about
afterwards, and looked at the man as he engaged himself just then
with his chin in a manner that made silence imperative, and she took
advantage of the opportunity.
“I never heard of anything so outrageous in my life!” she exclaimed,
passionately. “Anybody would suppose your wife was a mere bondwoman,
the mother of your child a nonentity, that it was not as much mine as
yours, more mine than yours! It is an odious piece of tyranny!”
Mr. Claxton gathered his mug and materials with one sweep of his hand,
and faced her. “When you apologize to me for your utterly inexcusable
language,” said he, “I shall re-enter this room, but not before.” And
he intrenched himself in a spare chamber.
And after a couple of days of blank silence and loneliness and misery,
of course Mrs. Claxton gave in, and apologized with tears for her
utterly inexcusable language. But the peculiarity of the dialogue was
that at the time of its occurrence the child to whom reference was made
was not born, and when it was born it was a girl!
But Mr. Claxton was made of flesh like the rest of us, and when he was
called into his wife’s darkened room, and the little bundle of flannel
was put into his arms and declared to be his daughter, he kissed it
fondly, and laid it on the pillow beside his wife, and as he saw her so
pale and faint, so starry-eyed and beautiful, looking as if she might
vanish out of his sight at any moment, he bent and hid his face beside
her own.
“My dear love,” said he, in magnanimous concession, some little while
afterward, “we will call this baby Henrietta.”
Now of all the names in or out of the calendar the one that Mrs.
Claxton the most detested was Henrietta. Mrs. Claxton, however,
accepted the concession in the spirit in which it was made, offering,
indeed, on her part, an exchange of Henrietta for Regina, which offer
was not listened to for a moment; and during her convalescence her
husband so invested her with kindness that she looked forward to a
happiness of which she had begun to despair in the midst of that
wilderness of rebellion and altercation where she had almost lost
herself.
But it was an easy thing for Mr. Claxton to be kind to a sick person;
since it is the part of an invalid to have no will, to receive favors,
and obey orders. And if Mrs. Claxton had been an invalid all her life,
paradoxical as it sounds, she would have had no skeleton. But, on the
contrary, she was a healthy young thing, and in a few weeks was as rosy
and vigorous as ever, as spirited, and perhaps as wilful. The presence
of her baby, though, turned her thoughts, more from herself, and she
anticipated in her absorption less opportunity for strife than before.
Accordingly she was very much discomposed when one day her husband
being present, accidentally and for the first time, at Miss Baby’s
toilet--which the mother found as much pleasure in attending to herself
as she used to find in playing dolls--he insisted that everything
should be done precisely the other way: that the water should be cold
and not tepid, that the soap should be castile and not scented, that
the towel should be a crash and not a damask one.
“I never heard of such a thing!” cried the young mother.
“There are probably many things of which you have not heard, my love,”
replied the young father.
“But a rough towel on this little soft flesh!”
“It will make it the firmer and healthier.”