should never be used except for healing, it is too drying for a healthy
skin.”
“My mother used it invariably.”
“Now don’t begin to quote your mother--the way men always do; don’t
imagine your mother knew more than the doctor.”
“I imagine,” said Mr. Claxton, feeling it worth while to control his
vexation for the child’s sake, “that her experience was as good as his
books.”
“Well, your mother did as she chose, and this child’s mother will do as
she chooses. Crash towels, castile soap, and cold water! Cold water,
indeed!”
“Certainly. And don’t repeat my words in that offensive manner, if you
please. Any moderate intellect would understand that if the child is to
be strong, it is to be early inured--”
“I never shall use it--never!”
“Indeed, my darling, you are mistaken. You always will use it in the
future.”
“Well, we will see,” said Mrs. Claxton, laughing and shaking her head.
“Cold water on such a mite of a baby! That is all men know.”
“Decidedly we _shall_ see. For I shall make it a point to be present
until it has become an established custom.”
“Then I shall take my baby and run away. The law gives every woman her
child--at least, till she has weaned it.”
“I don’t think I shall have recourse to the law for possession of my
own child.”
“Take it!” cried Mrs. Claxton, in a passion; and she dumped the little
naked morsel into its father’s arms, and was running from the room.
“You are a wicked and unnatural woman!” cried Mr. Claxton in his
absolute bewilderment, not considering such remark at all in the light
of inexcusable language when used by himself, and completely at a loss
what to do with the thing that he found himself as free to handle as if
it had been a jelly-fish. And in another moment she was running back,
snatching her baby, hugging it to her throat, and crying over it.
“You are making yourself sick with your temper, and will hurt the child
accordingly,” said Mr. Claxton, calmly now. For a person can very well
be calm after having wrought the opposite party to a fever.
“It is your temper,” she retorted. “As if a mother didn’t know how to
dress her own baby without a man around!”
“I shall not be moved by anything you say in such a mood,” said the
husband. “But as the child is mine, I claim the right to see it
properly attended to. And to resume: I want, in the first place, all
the pins abolished that I observe you using in its flannels.”
“Pins! Why, everybody uses them. They are every one shield-pins, and
couldn’t prick her if they tried. Why, Queen Victoria herself invented
them.”
“I don’t care who invented them,” said Mr. Claxton, possibly regarding
royalty rather in the light of rivalry. “I want them abolished. Strings
are equally as good.”
“Oh no, indeed,” said Mrs. Claxton, quite forgetting her temper; “they
make knots, and the knots are so hard for the little soft body to lie
on.”
“Then sew the things on when you dress her. The needle is likely to
prick only in the sewing, the pins all day and all night.”
“It is sheer nonsense, Henry. I assure you the pins couldn’t prick if
they were alive. Do you suppose I want to hurt my own baby?”
“That is nothing to the purpose.”
“Well, I will compromise with you,” she said, laughing now as easily as
she had cried before. “I declare, if you’re not perfectly ridiculous!
Come, I will sew on her flannels and things every day, trouble as it
is, if you will forego the cold water.”
“I shall make no compromise as to my rights. I insist on the cold
water, on the castile soap, the rough towels, and that no pins shall
be used.”
“I should like to see you hinder it!” said Mrs. Claxton, stoutly.
“Very well,” said Mr. Claxton, and he took up the pin-cushion to show
her; and as at the same instant his wife darted for it, he began to
strip it of its pins in a haste very disagreeable to a man of his
deliberate dignity. But unable to retain the accumulating pins in
his unhandy hands, he suddenly turned away from her and slipped a
few of them into his mouth--for great men can be driven to desperate
expedients; and just as suddenly swallowing his breath, perhaps in
amazement, he found himself obliged to cough or to strangle, when
Nature took the matter into her own charge, and the pins flew in every
direction, so wildly and so instantaneously that one of them, he was
morally sure, had lodged in his throat. “Help! help!” he gurgled; “I
have swallowed a pin.”
Mrs. Claxton tossed the baby into the cradle and ran to slap his back,
in a terrible alarm; and Jane, answering her screams, burst into the
room with a dish of crusts and a pitcher of water. And only after the
coughing-fit was over, and he had examined his throat with a hand-glass
and a powerful light, did he convince himself that there was no pin
there, and become as grand and majestic once more as he could be with
shoulders that were nearly black and blue from the pounding that
Jane had perhaps been only too glad to administer in the effort of
dislodging the suspected pin.
But Mr. Claxton was very sore. His wife had contradicted him, had
resisted him, had threatened him with the law, had threatened him with
desertion, had thrown the baby in his face, had all but said, “Bother
your mother!” had hazarded his life with that pin, and, worse than
all, had made him ridiculous to himself, to her, and to a servant--he,
the great Mr. Claxton! A fish-bone would have been bad enough, but a
pin! He felt as if there were nothing nobler in the world than he,
when, seeing that he could not spend another moment from the business
that had been waiting, he started to go, and turned at the door to
say: “Your conduct has been, this morning, of the most reprehensible
description. But you are the mother of my child, and I will not leave
you in anger, and as such I forgive you.”
“I don’t want any of your forgiveness,” said the sinner. “I shall do
just as I please with my own baby, for all the men in the world. So!”
And then she ran and sprang upon the seat of a chair, and threw an arm
round his neck, and turned his chin up and his great sulky face, and
laughed at him, and kissed him. “Oh, I’m a little wretch!” she cried.
“But, indeed, you mustn’t ask me to use the cold water. It would break
my heart to do it.” And somehow Mr. Claxton felt his august demeanor of
no sort of consequence beside this little hysterical creature hanging
about his neck, and--well, he kissed her.
“Why didn’t you say so in the beginning, then?” he said. “I will
overlook the cold water; but I insist about the pins!” And he returned
to his own dressing-room, which he had left for the sake of a little
pleasant conversation.
Poor Mrs. Claxton! If she thought she had reached the end of her
troubles in her happy convalescence, she was sadly mistaken.
Previously she and her husband had really nothing material to dispute
about. Now they had the baby; and it was an unfailing source. If the
baby had the colic, and she wanted to use anise-seed, Mr. Claxton’s
mother had used gin; and as anise was innocent and gin deleterious,
of course the struggle was to the knife. If it had the croup, and
she wanted homœopathic treatment, it was altogether certain that Mr.
Claxton’s mother had used the allopathic, and of course in their mutual
opinion the difference involved life and death. If it were ill through
teething, and she wanted to administer a remedy, Mr. Claxton would
have the child go into fits, though his own heart ached, rather than
have anything done before the doctor came. If she wished to rock it,
Mr. Claxton was strenuously opposed, and she might declare till she
was tired that the process had not injured Daniel Webster or Martha
Washington; he would declare in return that at any rate his child
should not have its brains addled on a pair of rockers, although I do
not think he said “addled”--he said “undergo tabefaction.” In fact
there was no aspect of the child’s existence, from its being sung to
sleep to its being kissed by strangers, that they did not differ about.
And when the twins came, the differing was not merely doubled, but
tripled. After that, too, Mr. Claxton in some way became haunted by
the fear that his wife’s beauty would be impaired by care and illness.
He fancied he might have been neglectful of her in his concern for
his children, and experienced a sensation as near remorse as became
a Claxton, and then a new cause of dispute arose: he undertook to
separate her from her children, he insisted that their perpetual
presence occasioned a feverish nervous solicitude, and he contrived one
or another method of isolating her from them in the daytime; and, let
them cry their little hearts away at night, he would not allow her to
go to them; they had a nurse apiece, the very best to be had; Jane and
he himself were to be called if the matter were serious, and that must
answer; for his wife, he assured her, was worth more to him than all
the children in Christendom, and if she wouldn’t take care of herself
he must take care of her--which, of course, made Mrs. Claxton as happy
as he thought it should, and kept her from wearing herself to a white
shadow!
Mrs. Claxton had by this time divined that one way to have your will
was to submit in pale patience. Sometimes she was able to practise it,
and sometimes, as Paul says, she kicked against the pricks; generally,
indeed, she kicked, and in this affair she kicked to such purpose that
after one of the twins had had a night of convulsions in her absence,
Mr. Claxton found that a strait-jacket would conquer the mother’s
instinct sooner than he would, and the household was allowed to resume
its normal condition.
Its normal condition was a wrangle. Should baby-talk be addressed to
the babies, or sound English? Should the milk be boiled in the coffee
or not, when cream was not to be had, and should the coffee be settled
with an egg or with fish skin? Should the crusts be given to the
poor, or should money be given to the poor and the crusts saved for
a bread-pudding? Each day brought its fresh point of debate. If Mrs.
Claxton had expressed the first opinion, Mr. Claxton’s natural tendency
was to differ, both because she had no right to the first opinion, and
because he wished her to understand that her judgment was unsound;
but having expressed that opinion, Mrs. Claxton was bound to maintain
it till the sky fell; and there it was. If she wanted the horses, she
must mention it at breakfast, and go over the matter with statement and
question and answer till she wished she had gone afoot without speaking
of the thing; but if she did go afoot, then woe betide her!--she had
thrown a shadow on the Claxton name which it took a day and night of
Claxton severity to brighten.
And what else could be expected of a man in a place, as Mrs. Claxton
sometimes thought, where a thousand men hung on his will for a
livelihood, where the doctor kowtowed to him, and where the minister
would have lain down and let him walk over him?
If on one day Mrs. Claxton wanted to send the children to walk in the
mill-stream woods, then Mr. Claxton was sure they would be kidnapped.
And if on another day Mr. Claxton suggested their picnicking with the
nurses up on the lovely reservoir grounds, then Mrs. Claxton was sure
they would be drowned.
“Drowned!” cried the husband, indignantly--for the reservoir was his
especial plaything, having been constructed under his supervision to
turn the mill-wheels by damming into one basin the course of two small
streams, and insult to that was felt like insult to himself. “Drowned!
Pray what should drown them?”
“Water,” was the short reply. “I’ve heard that it could.”
“I really don’t know how it could in this instance,” replied Mr.
Claxton, with great disdain.
“By bursting that absurd dam!” cried the mother, out of patience. “It
will burst some day, and it may as easily be to-day as another, and
sweep them away in a breath. I’m sure I wake with every tap of the vine
on the pane all night, sure that now it’s going!”
“Let me hear no more talk of the sort,” said Mr. Claxton. “It is enough
to demoralize the whole valley. If such things were known to be uttered
by my wife I could not keep a hand. There is no more likelihood of
that dam’s bursting than of the mill’s falling. On the whole, though,
I don’t know that it _is_ a good place for the children to visit. They
might, as you say, be drowned, and without waiting for the dam to
burst.”
“What under the sun can drown them, I should like to know, if the dam
does not burst?”
“Water,” replied Mr. Claxton, in his turn.
“Water! As if they could tumble in with all that slope of the green
banks a mile above them, and the nurses with them too! I should as soon
think of fire.”
“I presume that would be quite possible to an inconsequential mind,”
said the lofty party of the first part.
“I never pretended to any sort of a mind. If I had--But I know how to
take care of my children,” she cried, suddenly. “And certainly neither
of the twins could climb if the carriage left them at the foot of the
hill itself, and Retta always obeys.”
“Henrietta, my dear. Understand that I will not have any abbreviations
used in my family. The names given in baptism are their only names, and
are those by which my children must and shall be known.”
“Well, you can call her what you please, and I’ll call her what I
please.”
“You seem entirely to forget, Caroline, that I am the head of this
house.”
“I don’t know how I can forget it. You reiterate it often enough.”
“I reiterate it!” he cried, in a blaze; for his magnanimity was one
of his darling virtues, and though he might taunt till he was tired
concerning the benefits he conferred, he not only wished it held that
he never taunted, but believed himself that he never did, probably
because his unused capabilities of taunting were so much greater than
those he used.
“Yes, you do,” she responded. “And I don’t care anything about the
house. The family, at all events, is as much my family as yours, and if
I choose I shall use pet names there to the end of time. So!”
“Is it possible that I comprehend you--that under my own roof you defy
me in this manner, and dare to say you will do this or you won’t do
that?”
“Yes, it is!” cried Mrs. Claxton, with a burning face and a trembling
voice. “I wonder if I sha’n’t have to ask you next if I may breathe
through my nose or my lips. Let me tell you, sir, you married the wrong
person when you thought you would have an abject slave in your wife.
I had rather have stayed a governess all my days than endure the life
you lead me! And I rue the hour I ever set my eyes on you!” she cried,
in her passion. And then, to give confirmation to her words, her lips
began to quiver and her breath began to catch, and she sank in a
little heap in the armchair, sobbing fit to dissolve herself in tears.
As for Mr. Claxton, he dared not trust himself to reply. He felt as
if he must shake her, and if he shook her he was very much afraid he
should do something worse, and so the _noblesse oblige_ of the Claxton
dignity took him from the room speechless, but glaring.
“I wish I was dead,” sobbed Mrs. Claxton, growing more hysterical with
every sob. “Or else I wish--” But she did not finish the sentence.
By this time you have doubtless become quite well aware of the nature
of Mrs. Claxton’s skeleton, and see how it was that it walked abroad
when she did, and always ran before and opened the door for her when
she came home; and she was slowly growing to see its likeness in her
face every time she looked in the glass--that pretty, gracious face,
where the lines had yet hardly deepened into settled frowns. She felt
herself stripped of identity and all personal importance--made a
mere puppet; she was not sure of peace from one moment to the next;
she had no fixed happiness in life but the love of her children; and
she was convinced that the moment they were old enough to exercise
intelligence, the habit of contempt would be caught, and they too
would set her at naught. Every day of her life she wished herself
free, and she began to recognize the phantom of a perception that the
only escape from her skeleton was through the door of death--death for
one or the other of them; sometimes she could not have been sure that
she was altogether unready to say which one, and that it would not be
herself. She thought that she was the victim of a wicked injustice on
the part of fate, for she realized what it might be to have the love of
a husband who regarded her as an individual, as a mate, who, far from
tyrannizing over her as an odalisque and a piece of acquired property
a little more valuable than Towser or Dash, wooed her still with kind
observances and unfailing respect. She loved her husband, but her
temper and his vainglory were always crossing swords in the way of the
love; she loved him, and she hated him; she was harassed by opposing
forces and feelings night and day. For all her sweet smiles and her
tranquil manners out-doors, she was an exceedingly wretched woman
within the house.
As for Mr. Claxton--But words fail to convey the emotion of that good
man when convinced of the rebellion in his household--the cockatrice
upon his hearth!
Mr. Claxton was indeed at a loss in his own thoughts. He was so much
aghast at his wife’s outbreak that he did not know how to formulate the
statement of affairs to himself. He felt unable to reach a solution
of the problem as to what could have caused such a mood of mind in
her, and his powers were inadequate to devise a fit punishment till
he should have looked the affair over more coolly. He stayed in his
counting-room that afternoon a good while beyond business hours, partly
to reflect on these matters, and partly because a thunder-cloud had
burst over the valley and among the hills, and he knew that his wife
was apt to be utterly prostrated by fear of thunder, and thought it
best to give her a more realizing sense of her dependence on him
through his absence at such a crisis.
However, he would not have been able to say what contradictory impulse
it was that made him at last, while the heavens were still pouring
a thick, suffocating sheet of rain, throw over his shoulders an old
pilot-cloth coat hanging in the place, and sally forth for home.
Certainly he had reason to regret it directly afterwards, for in three
minutes the rain had penetrated his umbrella and it was only a sodden
rag, and he shut it to find that in three minutes more he should be
wet to the skin, if not to the bone. Then the question was, should he
return? No, “returning were as tedious as go o’er.” To retrace one’s
steps was to acknowledge one’s error. Then should he run? Run? Mr.
Claxton run? Well, let him run never so swiftly, the rain was swifter
yet; he would be just as surely wet, since it was some distance. If he
could not retain his comfort, he might retain his dignity, he might
solace himself with the reflection that either Plato or Pericles or
Aristotle presented a much more preposterous appearance with the tail
of his gown turned up over his head in a shower. And accordingly he
stalked along in great strides, his hat ruined, his clothes too heavy
to carry, the rain running a cold river down his back and into his
boots, blinding his eyes, and streaming off a hundred little points
of his hair, and most humiliatingly off the end of his nose and chin,
feeling ignominiously like Lot’s wife in a rain-storm, and hearing an
ignorant little boy in the distance hoot at him. Certainly he was not
at all a worshipful object; no clod-hopper ever presented a more abject
appearance. Of what value to him at that moment was his money? Of what
value were his horses and carriages? He was as wet as the nakedest man
that ever swam. And as he had really, after all his anger with her,
been hastening home on Mrs. Claxton’s account, he transferred to that
account all the chagrin arising from the situation, the more readily
that it was of no use to be angry with the elements, and he was very
angry with something, with the indignity practised upon him by the
weather, with his wetness, his general discomfort, and with the little
boy.
And of course, when at length he reached the house, the rain still
raining a deluge, and the lightning falling round him every step of the
way, he expected doors to be thrown open before him, and a tumultuary
welcome to make itself heard, in which all the disagreements of many
days would be forgotten. He expected the house-servants to run this
way and the nurses that, and the children to shout and prance about
him, and his wife to fall on his neck, and hot flannels and toddy and
dry clothes to appear by magic. Instead of all which not a soul was
to be seen, not even the dogs; the servants had the children in some
remote part of the house, where they were telling of dreadful deaths
by lightning, and awful apparitions in the heavens; and he marched
along to his room, solitary and unheard, his feet squelching his soft
French boots like pulp, conscious of every separate toe, and the water
dripping from his clothes in puddles upon the bright carpets as he
stepped. He saw himself in this plight in a long mirror of the hall,
and surely for one instant the starch was taken out of Mr. Claxton--a
limp and helpless filter of rain-water. Possibly if anybody other
than that thing in the glass had seen him, he would have dropped on
the floor and resolved into a dew; but no one did, and the moment he
had closed his bedroom door he was all buckram again. For there was
Mrs. Claxton in bed, with the room darkened, utterly oblivious of his
coming or staying, her head wrapped about with the blankets, deaf to
the bubble and squeak of his boots, deaf to the thunder too, blind
to the image he presented, blind to the lightning, totally unaware
of his return, and indifferent to his condition. This was what a man
got for exposing himself in thunder-gust! Mr. Claxton did not swear:
the Claxtons never swore; possibly because if they had sworn it would
have been seen that they could not have things all their own way, or
else they would not swear about it: but he slipped himself out of
that entanglement of dripping garments and into dry ones with as much
desperate haste as became him; and without uttering a word save a
muttered vow that there should not be a feather-bed left in his house
by to-morrow, he went down to the dining-room. There dinner, in spite
of the delay, had not yet been served; partly because it had waited for
him in the first place, and partly because the storm was so tremendous
that all minor interests had been forgotten in it, and partly because
Mrs. Claxton had been lost to the household in the sheltering recesses
of that feather-bed. Dinner, however, after his exertions, was not
a minor interest to Mr. Claxton, and he forthwith proceeded to
raise--Those readers whose faulty house-keeping may have discovered to
them the possibilities of the hungry and infuriate animal can supply
the hiatus.
So Mr. Claxton ate his dinner in what Thomas afterwards called
“single cussedness,” having declined the proffered company of Miss
Henrietta--which he would not have, for the sake of feeling like the
forsaken merman--and having refused to let Mrs. Claxton be disturbed,
goading himself with every mouthful into a completer sense of the
outrageous way in which he was being rewarded for his magnanimity in
overlooking the morning’s occurrences, in getting wet through for his
wife’s relief, in making himself a ridiculous spectacle, in enduring
the hootings of that little boy in the distance. He read his evening
paper, and turned over the evening mail; wrote a few letters, in which
I am afraid he wreaked a poor sort of vengeance on his correspondents,
for want of other opportunity to relieve his surcharged spleen; and
finally went to bed, to be greeted by the pleasant sight of Mrs.
Claxton enjoying a peaceful sleep after the weariness of her day’s
emotions.