JUDGE OWEN AND HIS DOMESTIC DISCIPLINE--TWO CRIMINALS AT THE BAR, WITH A
SPECIAL EDICT FOLLOWING--A ROW AT WALLACK'S, AND ONE MORE RECOGNITION.
It has again been unavoidable, in following the fortunes of other
characters connected with this narration, to lose sight of those who
have prominently figured in the mansion of Judge Owen--the Judge
himself, his wife, his daughter Emily, Aunt Martha, and the two lovers
who fought over that very pretty little bone as if they had been dogs
and she a tit-bit of very different description. But it is one of the
first principles of conducting the successful march of an army, that no
stragglers should be allowed to lag too far behind, lest a sudden
onslaught upon them might cause a panic extending to all the other
portions of the force. Let the Judge and his family, then, be kept up as
nearly as possible to the march of the main body; and especially let not
pretty Emily Owen and her mischievous printer-lover be lost from the
ranks by any contingency.
Aunt Martha saw farther into futurity than her niece, when she decided
that the row between Frank Wallace and Colonel John Boadley Bancker, if
it came to the Judge's ears, would be likely to make affairs much worse
instead of better; and Emily and she had some serious conversation over
the prospect, that night of the street accident, after both the rivals
had gone,--which did not tend to make the young girl go to her white
pillow with the most blissful of anticipations. The younger lady thought
it doubtful whether the matter need come to the knowledge of her father
at all, as she did not believe that the Colonel would so far bemean
himself as to make a complaint to the father of the young girl he was
pursuing, of the advantages which another suitor might possess over him
in the mind of the girl herself. Aunt Martha, who had seen somewhat more
than her niece of the world and its meanness, did not consider the
Colonel too proud to take such a course, if he believed himself likely
to gain by it; and besides--she remembered, what her niece did not, that
they were by no means alone in the house when the little affair
occurred. Servants--those important personages, who in modern days keep
the houses and permit their masters and mistresses, on the payment of a
round sum per week, to live in the house with them--those ubiquitous
personages, who seem to have the faculty of being precisely where they
are not wanted, when any family trouble is to be ventilated,--servants
were in the house at the time, and there was no guaranty whatever that
they had not been sufficiently near to hear every awkward word that had
been spoken.
The good Aunt felt that she had the more cause to be apprehensive in the
latter direction, from some observations that she had accidentally made
a few weeks before. Not long after the coming into the house of Miss
Hetty, cook and kitchen girl, (she is certainly entitled to the prefix
of "Miss," at least once, from the fact of her holding her head a little
higher than any member of the family) a little after her advent, we say,
Aunt Martha happened one evening to pass through the lower hall, in list
slippers, and accidentally became aware that two persons were talking in
a very low tone, just within the door of the dining-room. Perhaps it may
have been accidentally, but possibly on purpose, that she took one
glance through the crack of the door, herself unobserved, and noticed
that the talkers were Judge Owen and Hetty. The tone was certainly
confidential, and the two stood very near together. Had Mrs. Martha
West not been aware of certain points in her brother's character which
would make a criminal flirtation with a servant-girl in his own house
impossible, she might have drawn the conclusion that some impropriety of
that kind was on foot. As it was, she became satisfied that some of her
previous suspicions were correct, and that Judge Owen, who habitually
went to the intelligence-offices and selected the servants when any
change became necessary, was capable of the ineffable meanness of
bribing his domestics to play the spy on his own household and detail
all the occurrences to him! Where the estimable man had picked up that
particular meanness, she had no idea, nor is this a place in which to
hazard a suggestion. If it was so, it might be suggested that the
practice of hearing and allowing weight to spy testimony, caught through
key-holes and the cracks of doors, or picked up by lounging at people's
elbows on sidewalks and in bar-rooms, had possibly some connection with
the application of the same system to his own household.
Perhaps there may be persons upright and straight-forward enough
themselves, and unsuspicious enough of the vices and meannesses of
others, to doubt whether such things as those just hinted at, exist in
the great city. To such it might not be amiss to say, that there are
operations of this character, in what is called "respectable society,"
so much worse than the mere procured espionage of servants, that they
make that atrocity almost endurable. Fancy the husband of a second wife
keeping his eldest daughter by a former marriage, herself a married
woman, in the same house with his wife, with orders to keep that wife
constantly in view, to watch her when she receives company, dog her when
she goes out, and dole out to her the necessaries for the family from
closets, chests and cupboards of which she [the daughter] keeps the
keys! Fancy these things, and the wife submitting to them, perforce! And
then understand, what is the humiliating truth, that the lady subjected
to these practices is a most beautiful and accomplished favorite,
delighting thousands by her public appearances, envied by all, and
supposed to be rolling in wealth and revelling in comfort!
Not long ago there was a story going the rounds of the press, of some
spicy sporting operations in England, in which one trainer and jockey
threw one of his creatures, in the disguise of a stable-boy, into the
stables of another, to watch the appearance and action of his horses, to
overhear what he could of the conversation of the trainer, to discover
for what cups and matches they were about to be entered, and to make
weekly reports to him, through letters pretendedly addressed to the
boy's "mother," so that he could take advantage of the knowledge so
unfairly attained, in making up his betting-book. By a mere accident the
trainer discovered what kind of an emissary of the enemy was quartered
in his stables, and instead of kicking him out he merely _gave him
plenty to report_. He managed to have the boy overhear all sorts of
manufactured conversations, rode his horses unfairly on the
training-course, stuffed him with false reports of the matches for which
they were entered, and, in short, gave him such budgets to send home to
his master, that the latter grew completely mystified, bet on the losing
chances instead of the winning ones, and lost about twenty thousand
pounds, which went into the pocket of the intended victim. The story is
a good one, and for the honor of humanity ought to be true.
Not many years ago a jealous old husband in this city, who had fallen
into the misfortune of a young and handsome wife, grew jealous of her
without the least cause, and descended to the execrable meanness of
putting one of the chamber-maids under pay to play the detective and
report to him what letters her mistress received and all the "goings on"
in the house. Biddy was not quite keen enough for her new position, and
the bright eyes of the young wife were not long in discovering that she
was watched and dogged! What did the outraged wife? Send the vixen
packing, bag and baggage, with a boxed ear for a parting present, as she
might have done with all propriety? Not at all--she retained her and
kept her own discovery a secret, merely adopting the same plan as our
friend the trainer, and giving her _something to tell_. The wife
fortunately had half a dozen male cousins, living at a distance, and as
many female friends, living near. Between these two corps of assistants
she managed to receive such letters, accidentally dropped for the
servant-girl to finger, and received such clandestine visits when her
husband was absent and at suspicious hours, as left no doubt whatever in
the mind of a _reasonable_ man like the husband, that she must be
terribly false to her marital vows. The catastrophe of all this need not
be given: it was final enough, in all conscience, and sent the husband
down town one day with a dim consciousness that he had made himself the
greatest fool since Adam, and that an early burial would not be so great
a calamity after all!
Unfortunately Judge Owen, of this writing, had no such sharp-witted and
reckless opponent, and his meanness was left to work itself out in a
natural manner. Aunt Martha's apprehensions were not idle, as was proved
very soon after. The Judge and his wife returned from their little trip
up the Hudson, on the second day after their departure; and within three
hours after their arrival, before the Judge had been absent from the
house a moment and before Colonel Boadley Bancker could by any means
have managed to see him, the storm of paternal wrath and indignation
burst on the devoted heads for which it was intended.
The gas had just been lighted on the floor below, and Aunt Martha and
Emily were seated enjoying the summer twilight in the front-room of the
latter, up-stairs, when the stentorian voice of the Judge was heard
bawling from the hall:
"Martha--Emily--come down here a moment!"
"There it is! there is trouble ahead! I knew it!" said Aunt Martha.
"He _cannot_ have heard anything about it, yet," said the niece.
"He _has_, I am sure of it!" answered the Aunt. "We may as well go down
and take the thunder-storm, at once, as have it hanging over us for a
month."
"Oh, Aunt, I cannot endure to have Papa scold, when he is in one of his
terrible humors," said the frightened girl. "I have done nothing, that I
know of; but you don't know what rough words he says to me sometimes,
and I have been almost afraid that he would strike me with that heavy
hand! I believe I should _die_ if he did."
"No, child, you would not _die_, I think," said the more practical Aunt,
"but something might occur for which your father would one day be quite
as sorry--your last particle of love and respect for him might die, and
that would be sadder than the death of many bodies. But come, Emily; we
shall be called again in a moment."
Aunt and niece descended the stairs to the parlor, the latter trembling
like a leaf in the wind and the former in a strange flutter that was
part trepidation and part indignation. They found affairs in the parlor
in a very promising condition, as the aunt had suspected. Judge Owen was
too angry to sit in his large chair, as he would have liked to do, and
receive the culprits with judicial dignity. He was walking the floor,
with his hands behind his back and every indication of very stormy
weather on his countenance. He looked bigger and more burly than ever,
and less than ever like what the brother and father should have been, to
the two who entered. Mrs. Owen sat in a rocking-chair, swaying backward
and forward, with her hand to her eyes and very much the appearance of a
whipped child who had been set down in that chair with orders to be
"good." It was not supposable that the Judge had been whipping her,
physically; but he had unquestionably been "getting his hand in" for the
exercise that was to come, by reading her a severe lecture upon
everything that she had done and everything she had _not_ done, since
the day they were married.
"So then!" he broke out, the moment the culprits appeared in view. "This
is the kind of order you keep in my house--_my_ house!" and he
emphasized the possessive pronoun so severely that the poor little word
must have had a hard time of it among his strong front teeth.
Emily, as yet, replied nothing. But Aunt Martha said:
"Well really, brother, I do not see that the house is in very bad order!
Perhaps that rocker is a little out of place, and the _etagere_--"
"D--n it, woman, I am not talking of the furniture, and you know it!"
thundered the Judge.
"William Owen!" said Aunt Martha, who had not gone through fifty or a
hundred such conflicts without deriving some controversial profit from
them--"I do not choose to be sworn at, in _your_ house or the house of
any other man. If you were a gentleman, you would not be guilty of the
outrage."
Emily trembled. Here was Jupiter plucked by the beard, and called hard
names to his face, by one of the mere underlings of his dominions!
William Owen not a gentleman! _Judge_ Owen not a gentleman! Could human
presumption go farther? What would be the end of this?
"I will swear as I like, and when I like!" said the Judge, after a pause
of an instant. But he did not swear again immediately, and not at all
again at his sister, during the whole interview, it was noticeable.
Brutality is not best met by brutality; but it is a mistake to suppose
that it is best met by abject submission. What it needs, as its master
and corrective, is _dignified firmness_.
"So this is the way, is it," the Judge went on. "The moment my back is
turned, my house is full of low characters, and quarrelling and fighting
become the order of the day."
"When did all this occur?" asked Aunt Martha, innocently.
"The very evening I left!" thundered the Judge.
"And how have you found it all out, so soon?" queried his sister,
looking him very calmly in the eyes.
It may be a libel, for which an action would lie, to say that Judge Owen
blushed at this home-thrust. He certainly reddened, but that may have
been with anger--not shame.
"How do I know it? What business is that of yours, woman? It is enough
to say that I _do_ know it, and that I will break all that sort of thing
up, or I will break half a dozen heads!" This was a favorite simile of
the Judge's, because it brought in the word "break" twice, in such an
effective manner. "Well, Miss Emily Owen, what have you to say to all
this?" It may be libel, again, to say that the Judge was sheering off
his vessel from a battery that worried him, to engage one that seemed
comparatively helpless; but really the whole thing bore that appearance.
"I, father? I have nothing to say," returned the daughter, "and for that
reason I have not said anything."
"You do not deny, then," thundered the Judge, his voice rising higher
because he had a younger, lower-voiced and less formidable antagonist,
"that on the very night I went away there was low company in this house,
and that--"
Perhaps Emily Owen had never presumed to interrupt her father half a
dozen times during her life, but we have before seen that she _could_ do
so, even wickedly, when fully aroused, and the temptation to do so in
the present instance was overpowering. Besides, she had just caught a
lesson from her aunt, in the "_womanly_ art of self-defence," the
muscular development for which lies in the tongue.
"Do you call Colonel Bancker low company, father?"
"Colonel Bancker? No, girl! Colonel Bancker is a gentleman and a
soldier," replied the Judge. "I am speaking of that low, contemptible
scoundrel, Wallace."
"And _he_ has been in the habit of coming here with your consent, papa,"
answered the daughter, "and so I do not know how we were to blame for
receiving the visits of people when you were gone, whom you were in the
habit of receiving when you were at home."
"Hush, child! Hush, Emily!" Mrs. Owen felt it necessary to say at this
moment. She had not before spoken a word, but she may have felt that
that incarnation of reason and dignity, her husband, was "taking damage"
at the hands of very ordinary mortals. "Hush, child--do not bandy words
with your father."
"No, miss, do not bandy words with _me_!" roared the Judge, put exactly
upon the right track, from which he had before strayed a little, by the
words of his wife. "_I_ am master in this house, as I mean to let you
know!" Humble Judge!--he _had_ let them know it, long before, quite as
much as lay in his power. "I will not allow myself to be run over in
this manner, any longer!" Ponderous and self-sacrificing Judge!--apart
from the fact that no one in that house had ever tried the experiment,
what a vehicle it would have been that could "run over" that man without
danger from the encounter! And now gathering strength and force as well
as anger, as he rolled down the mountain of denunciation, he went on: "I
have called you down, both of you, and you especially, Emily, to make a
final settlement with you! I have told you before that you should marry
Colonel John Boadley Bancker, and I need not tell you again, for by
G--you _shall_! And now I tell you something more. If you ever permit
that d--d low-lived, miserable, contemptible puppy, whom you call Frank
Wallace, to cross the door-step of this house again, I will break every
bone in his infernal carcase; and when he goes into the street, you go
with him! Do you hear?"
"Yes, father, I hear," said his daughter.
"Yes, we both hear, as I suppose you intended it for both of us," said
his sister.
"I intended it for _everybody_!" roared the Judge. "Now let us see
whether you obey or not! Come, Mrs. Owen, is supper ready?"
Probably the Judge supposed that he had supplied both the others with
quite as much supper as they needed, as he did not extend the invitation
to either. He certainly had done so: they were both "full," in one sense
of the word if not in the other. His daughter was "full" of trouble and
anxiety; and Aunt Martha was "full" of a more dangerous
feeling--outraged pride and indignation.
"Poor Frank!--he cannot come to the house any more!" said the young
girl, when they had left the parlor. "What shall I do? Aunt--Aunt--don't
scold me, but I _love him_. That is the truth; and don't _you_ scold me,
but help me if you can."
"Until this hour, Emily," said the aunt, gravely, and taking the hand of
her niece kindly in her own, "I had simply been determined that you
should not be forced into a marriage with Colonel Bancker, if I could
prevent it. Within this half hour I have made up my mind to go farther.
I know that you love Frank Wallace; I believe him to be a good man, and
I know him to be a brave one; and now you shall marry him, if any aid
_I_ can offer will help you to that end!"
"Aunt! Aunt! dear, good, kind Aunt!" cried the young girl, throwing
herself into the widow's arms and giving her such a hug and such a storm
of kisses as would have made Frank Wallace whistle "Hail Columbia" and
"Abraham's Daughter" for forty-eight hours in succession.
Such was the radical effect, towards carrying out his determination in
regard to each of the two rivals, produced by Judge Owen's ultimatum. He
was not the first man, and he probably will not be the last, to pour the
drop too much into the bucket of endurance and add that last feather to
the load which weighs down the camel of patience. Something more of the
"effect" will be seen in this immediate connection.
Judge Owen had occasion to attend a political caucus, at one of the
down-town hotels, early in the evening of the second day from that on
which the collision with his sister and daughter had occurred; and he
consequently did not go home to dinner when his court adjourned. He
dined at the hotel where the caucus took place, and afterwards strolled
up Broadway, airing his portly figure, and intending to take the
Third-Avenue cars at Astor Place or Fourteenth Street. When he came
opposite Wallack's Theatre, at about nine o'clock, the lights shone
brightly before the door, the placards announcing the "Returned
Volunteer" and "Mischievous Annie" looked tempting, and as Judge Owen
had an eye for the drama and was officially marked "D.H." on the book at
the gate, he concluded to see the balance of the performance.
He passed in. Florence was just indulging in that terrible war-dance of
jealousy which follows the supposed discovery of the fact that the wife
of Bill Williams has taken up with a Picaninny, and the laughter and
applause were uproarious. The Judge found some acquaintances in the
lobby, and chatted with them while he watched the piece and while
waiting for the next.
Finally another friend, a family acquaintance, came up the aisle, from
the orchestra-seats, probably on his way to those pleasant lower regions
in which refreshment to the inner man is dispensed. As he shook hands
with the Judge, he said:
"Ah, Judge, I did not know that you were here. I saw your daughter, just
now, down in the orchestra, but I am sure she did not come in with you."
"My daughter!" said the Judge, surprised, "I think you must be mistaken.
Mrs. Owen did not speak of coming to the theatre this evening."
"Oh," said the acquaintance, "Mrs. Owen is not here. I should have seen
her if she had been. Your daughter came in with a young man, and they
are sitting together down there in the second row from the front."
"You do not know the young man?" asked the Judge, on whom the compound
noun for some cause produced an unpleasant effect.
"No," answered the acquaintance, "I do not know him. He is a rather
good-looking young fellow, short, with brown curly hair, and a
moustache, and dressed in light-gray. No doubt you know him by the
description."
Judge Owen _did_ know him by the description, but too well! That short
good-looking young man with the curly hair, the moustache and the
light-gray clothes, was as certainly the man he had forbidden his house
and the company of his daughter, as his own name was Owen and his
dignity a judicial one!
Here was an outrage!--witness it ye fathers whose daughters do not
always obey your high behests. Here was a call for the exercise of the
highest qualities of authority!--bear witness to that, all you good
people who have at one time or another dragged your wives out of
churches because you did not like the ritual, or who have dragged them
_into_ churches because suitors armed with money-bags or aristocratic
names or political influence, stood within and beckoned! Here was a
necessity for proving what Judge Owen had only a day or two before so
loudly asserted--his ascendency in his own household. Here was an
opportunity to show to the public that Judge Owen, arbiter of the legal
destinies of his fellow-men when they did not range beyond a certain
insignificant number of dollars, was at once a Solon and a Draco in his
own domestic relations. Great men _will_ develope themselves at some
period or other in their lives, however they may previously have been
kept back by adverse circumstances; and Judge Owen had never yet enjoyed
the opportunity of showing half his mighty energies. Armed with the
double power of a parent and the law, he felt that he could combat
anything--even a young and delicate woman: gifted with a rigid sense of
right which rose above all personal considerations, he felt that to that
right he could sacrifice anything--even the privacy and sanctity of his
domestic relations.
The great men of old had done something in that way: Brutus had laid his
son, without a tear or a groan, on the altar of his country; Virginius
had slain his daughter when her perilled honor demanded that violent
deed; and only half a century before his own time, Napoleon had given up
a beloved Empress and married a royal nobody, for the sake of preserving
the dynasty that his people so demanded. It only remained for William
Owen, Judge, to emulate those great examples and drag his daughter out
of the theatre!
It may have been that Judge Owen did not think of quite all those great
examples, as he walked broadly and pompously down the aisle, disturbing
the audience just when the curtain was rising on the second piece; but
he certainly bore himself as if he remembered all of them and a few
hundreds more. Anxious spectators looked at him as he came down,
speculating painfully whether he was likely to take his seat in front of
_them_, and calculating what would be their chances of seeing in that
event. But the Judge was not going to sit down--no! At the gate he
encountered a momentary obstruction, in the shape of the usher who
looked after the orchestra tickets; but he swept him away as a spring
freshet might carry away a bundle of obstructing sedge, by a majestic
wave of the hand and the information that he was merely going down there
for a moment on business.
Then he strode on down the aisle, unobserved as yet by the lovers, who
sat in the seat next the front and within three or four places of the
end of the row, enjoying the dramatic entertainment and each others'
company about equally. Perhaps they sat a very little closer together
than they might have done had there been no parental objection in the
way; and under the folds of Emily's dark mantilla, which lay upon her
lap, there may have been two hands clasped together. Let the young and
the loving, whose province it is to make such follies half the material
of their lives, decide whether affairs were likely to be exactly in the
shape suggested,--as also, whether at any time during the evening, when
it had become necessary for Frank Wallace to make a remark to his
companion, he had or had not leaned down his lips so close to her ear as
almost to kiss its pink pendant.
The first intimation had by the absorbed lovers that the paternal bomb
was bursting in the neighborhood, was conveyed by the Judge halting at
the end of their row, leaning over the two or three people between,
without any apology, stretching out his arm, and saying in his loud,
coarse voice:
"Miss Emily Owen, you are wanted at home."
The blood flew to the face of the young girl in an instant, though it
was the blood of anxiety and not of shame, and she asked:
"Is any one ill--hurt?--My mother--"
"Your mother is well, and there is no one sick at home," said the Judge,
determined that his lesson to his daughter should not be balked by any
one of the audience thinking him less a brute than he was. "But I find
you here in improper company and against my orders; and I command you to
leave that man and come home with me instantly."
Decided sensation in the orchestra-seats, and even on the stage, where
Mrs. Florence paused in the middle of one of her most effective
Yankeeisms, to know what caused the interruption. Sensation in a good
many fingers, that they would like to be applied violently to the ears
of the man who could speak in that manner to so sweet-looking a girl, no
matter under what provocation. A few hisses and cries of "Hush-h-h!"
"Hush-h-h!" Poor Emily had sunk back in her chair, the moment her
anxiety was relieved by mortification, merely saying in a pleading
voice, as if to disarm her tyrant:
"Oh, father!"
Frank Wallace, meanwhile, had sprung to his feet, the moment the
opprobrious epithet was applied to him; and though he distinctly saw
that the intruder was the puissant Judge Owen, Emily's father, and large
enough, physically, to eat him for lunch--he was on the point of
springing across the intervening space and giving him a taste of his
gymnastic quality. This would have been terribly improper, no doubt,
towards a man much older than himself, and the father of the girl he yet
hoped one day to make his wife; but the spectators, had he done so, and
could they have known all the facts of the case, would have been much
more likely to forgive him than the miserable hound (now a miserable
secessionist--thank Heaven for his choice!) who bore a military title to
his name, a few years ago, and sat still in one of the theatres of this
city, without daring to lift a hand in opposition, while the
just-married wife by his side was brutally caned by her millionaire
father for daring to marry _him_! High temper may be dangerous, and the
rough hand something to be avoided and reprobated; but there is
something worse in the extreme opposite, and humanity worse sickens at
the sight of an abject poltroon, than at any other worthless fungus that
springs as an excrescence from God's footstool.
All the saints be praised for these little women! They _are_, after all,
the balance-wheels of life, and the whole machinery would run riot and
go to destruction without them. They bring us to ourselves, often, and
so save us _from_ ourselves. When they advise peace and patience, they
are generally right, for at such times violence is seldom politic. Frank
Wallace would probably have carried out his violent first intention, but
for the hand of Emily which dropped upon his arm almost before he had
risen, and the soft voice which spoke in his ear, very hurriedly:
"Don't, Frank, for _my_ sake! Let me go, and sit still. You shall see me
again in a day or two. _I'll_ pay Pa for this!"
Very much consoled by these words, and especially by the last clause,
Frank Wallace resumed his seat, merely indulging in a remark which was
heard by many around him, and which may or may not have been heard by
the person at whom it was aimed:
"Bah! you big brute!"
A little suppressed clapping of hands in the neighborhood, which the
actors probably thought intended for themselves, but which certainly was
not. Meanwhile Emily Owen, dropping her hand by some kind of
unexplainable intuition to the very spot where Frank's was lying, gave
it a quick squeeze, then stumbled gracefully over the legs of the
persons sitting between her and the aisle, and followed her father. As
she passed two or three steps up the aisle, the Judge leading
pompously, and the gate-keeper calculating the chances of being able to
crush him by accidentally letting the iron gate slam to against his
legs,--she encountered a recognition that was almost an adventure. A
young girl who sat in the next to the end seat of the back-row of the
orchestra, leaned over the gentleman outside and caught her hand,
saying:
"Emily Owen--I know it is! Do you not remember me?"
"Josephine Harris! How glad I am to see you!" was the reply of Emily,
the moment her eyes fairly took in the face and figure before her.
"I could not see your face before, and did not know that you were here.
How long it is since I saw you!--ever since I left Rutgers, and you were
still hammering away there!" said Josephine Harris, who was indeed the
other, having come down to Wallack's with a party of friends, for the
evening, and who had not before had a chance to recognize her old friend
and school-fellow at the Rutgers Institute.
"Come and see me. Papa is in a hurry, and I cannot wait," said Emily,
doubtful whether her friend had or had not observed the preceding
movements. "I have not time for a card--look in the Directory and send
me yours. Good night!" and in a moment she was gone, following the Judge
to that mental slaughter involved in riding home with him in his present
mood, and leaving the performance to pass on again as if no interruption
had occurred.
As may be supposed, Frank Wallace was something of an "object of
interest" for the small remainder of the evening; but he had no
acquaintances in the neighborhood, and not much remark was ventured. One
man behind him, indeed, leaned over and said: "Lost your girl, eh?" but
Frank's "Ya-a-s!" was so broad and discouraging for any further
questions, that the inquiry was not pursued. Most men, under similar
circumstances, would have left the theatre at once, to avoid observation
and to hide annoyance: he did not, and he may have acted wisely or
unwisely in that course of conduct.
Josephine Harris _had_ observed the preceding movements on the part of
Judge Owen, and it was through recognition of his figure that she looked
after and recognized Emily. Had the latter been left quietly sitting
beside her lover, her schoolmate would probably not have seen her face,
they would have left the theatre without recognition of each other, and
Judge Owen's house might have escaped a very early visit destined to
work important changes in the relations of residents and visitors. The
puissant and pompous Judge had effected two _coups d'etat_ within as
many days. The one had driven Aunt Martha fairly over into the ranks of
the enemy: had the second introduced Joe Harris, an electric wire full
charged with destruction, into the immediate vicinity of his domestic
magazine?