TURNED INSIDE OUT.
"WELL, well, who'd have thought it?" said one of a group of women who
stood supporting a street corner while the operation was going forward
of getting a poor invalid, wrapped in blankets, out of a neat cottage
at a little distance into a carriage that stood at its door.
The speaker was a type of a class needing no introduction. The
bit of black cap over the wilful dark hair that after affording a
nestling-place for dust of every quality, receives an occasional
plaister of grease to quiet it down; the little shawl pinned together
over the shoulders to hide the decay, dirt, and ill-fit of the
every-day gown, the torn bottom of which is spread over a crinoline
that no longer describes a circle; the boots, with broken elastic
sticking out in little brown ends from the sides, one heel loose,
and one toe gaping; the bold, sharp stare, the lazy attitude, the
unattractive voice, are only too familiar sights in the streets of our
towns.
No industrious, managing, true-hearted wife can be a gossip—she has too
much that is useful, and good, and interesting to do, too much that is
affectionate and anxious to think of. And her only interference in the
affairs of her neighbours is when she can speak a kind word to some one
in trouble, or shake up a pillow, and make something nice for one who
is sick.
But this was not Mrs. Swinden's way, and the more she talked about
other people, the worse and worse still became her own particular
affairs.
"Well, well, who would have thought it? What do you think?" said she,
as the carriage drove off with the sick man from the cottage. "That's
Mrs. 'Oatland's' fine doings. She's gone and sent poor Mr. Hill to the
infirmary; he that can have all he wants at home, as comfortable as a
lord. Isn't it a shame?"
"To be sure it is," said a congenial spirit with a similar cap and
gown, but instead of a similar shawl, an old blacker brown jacket with
broken button-holes and two buttons hanging despairingly down, while a
steel pin from a broken brooch does their duty in a slovenly manner.
"To be sure it is a shame, while deserving people would be the better
of a little help. But they say it's all because of that termagant wife
of his."
"Well, that's likely enough," responded Mrs. Swinden; "you see it has a
very ugly look, and if he had died, who knows what might have happened
to Mrs. Hill. I know all about it on the best authority."
"She'd have been hung," said another of the group, decidedly.
"Hush, Mrs. Boult; it isn't always wise to say all you think, but among
ourselves, I may say that I never did think any good would come of
her ways. Why, she makes the poor little children sit without shoes
for fear of dirtying the floor, and go to bed in daylight to save
candle. What can 'she' need to save her money for, I wonder? It looks
suspicious, 'I' think, for all she made Matthew take the pledge before
she would marry him. But they do say that she and he have awful fights
over the money-box, and the other night he got hold of it, and went
off and spent every penny, spite of her, at the 'Crown.' And when he
came in, she nearly strangled him with rage, and made him stay in the
kitchen all night in his wet clothes, and she wished he might die, the
wicked creature. So Mrs. 'Oatland,' instead of making peace between
them as she ought—oughtn't she now?—"
"Of course she ought; it's shameful of her!" chimed in two other of
these peace-loving ladies.
"Well, she comes and takes him away to the hospital, at least she helps
him to go, poor man, instead of letting him be nursed and tended by his
own wife. Such meddling and making in families, I've no patience with
it. That's the way they want to keep us down, those meddlesome district
people with their tracts and their talk. Why, she actually wanted to
make me go to her meetings! Who's she, I wonder, to take upon herself,
when I can go to any church or chapel and hear any parson I please, and
send my children to school too? Me, indeed! As if I wanted dictating
where I'd go, and what I should do with my own children. It's coming to
something, indeed, if we're not to be mistresses in our own homes."
Leaving the excited neighbours to talk it out and rehearse the pleasant
consequences that might ensue if Matthew Hill should die, with the
inquest, and the verdict against the unnatural wife, and her committal,
trial, and execution, all which stood out in distinct probability
before their fertile imaginations, let us just enter that door, and
survey the "home" of which Mrs. Swinden indignantly proclaimed her
resolution to be sole mistress.
Three chairs, one without a bottom, and another with a broken back, and
a box turned over to represent a fourth; a rickety table which broke
its leg in a squabble, and had been re-set by unskilled hands; a heap
of cups, plates, jugs, and bottles on a shelf, huddled together as if
mutually commiserating broken noses, cut lips, and other misfortunes
which had befallen them in their domestic experience; a bed not yet
"made," and a bundle of something that was intended for another bed
in one corner; dirty floors, an expiring fire with a heap of dust
and ashes beneath it; a kettle that has never sung since its lid was
lost, and the bottom of an old tin case substituted, which it took the
liberty of unseating as soon as the water got hot—on purpose, as Mrs.
Swinden said, that she might scald her fingers in getting it out, such
freaks have kettles, specially lidless ones. A poker, a shovel without
a handle, a frying pan with sundry holes burnt through it, a little
skeleton of clock with a wry face and fingers that indicated some
great internal disorder, with a few more odds and ends of make-shift
housekeeping, completed the short list of furniture of Mrs. Swinden's
"home."
There had been other possessions; whither had they decamped? Is an
explanation needed? Is there any housewife who would hesitate to
point instinctively to two well-known receptacles whence character
and property seldom revisit the scenes of their better days? The
public-house and the pawnshop could have told solemn tales of both in
Mrs. Swinden's family chronicle.
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