Falling out with the wife of one’s bosom is a process that bears
a marked affinity to two other domestic operations which, from time
immemorial, have lapsed into well-merited disrepute--viz., quarrelling
with one’s bread and butter, and cutting off one’s nose to spite
one’s face; the same moral but uncomfortable necessity of inherent
self-chastisement being common to all three. Thus Harry Coverdale,
having vindicated his marital dignity, and galloped off the irritation
consequent upon so acting, heartily wished the deed undone, and Alice
and himself friends again; for, little as he appeared to prize it, her
affection had become necessary to him, and he could no more do without
it, than he could have dispensed with sunshine in summer, or fires at
Christmas. Accordingly it was in no very amiable frame of mind that
he joined his fox-hunting ally; and it required all the allurements of
oysters, porter, devilled bones, and unimpeachable port wine, to
enable him to “cast dull care away,” sufficiently to take a proper and
sportsman-like interest in all the minutiæ of the proposed transfer
of stock, canine and equestrian. Once fairly in for it, however, his
stable-minded propensities asserted themselves, and he spent a deeply
interesting afternoon in feeling back-sinews, detecting incipient curbs
and spavins, condemning an incurable sand-crack, and otherwise testing
and pronouncing judgment upon the quadrupedal inmates of Squire
Broomfield’s hunting stables. As the waning light heralded the approach
of dinner-time (that important epoch in the day with all country
gentlemen, and with most London ones also), and the last horse had been
trotted out and trotted in again, and its petticoats (which grooms call
‘body-clothing’) replaced, Harry’s thoughts fell back into their former
gloomy train. Anxious, therefore, to learn how Alice was progressing
under the weight of his high displeasure, he was about to take leave,
when Tom Rattleworth drew him aside, observing in a confidential
whisper,--
“I say, Coverdale, old Broomfield is going to ask you to stay and
dine--I know he is, he looks so pleased with himself. For mercy’s sake
don’t refuse, or else I shall have to endure a _tête-à-tête_ with
the old boy, and that will use me up all together--horse, foot, and
artillery; for, besides being bored to extinction, he will do me out of
every advantage you have obtained for me to-day. He’s an awful screw,
and I’m good for nothing at a bargain after the first bottle; so if you
leave me to his tender mercies, I’m safe to be butchered like a lamb,
and served up in my own _mint sauce_ before we quit the mahogany.”
“I’m afraid I _must_ decline,” was the reply, “for my wife has been at
home by herself all day, and it is not fair to expect her to spend
the evening in solitude also. But you need not be victimised on that
account; come home and dine with us. You’ve never met my wife; she
was in the school-room and a pinafore when you went abroad with your
regiment. Say yes, and then you can tell old Broomfield that you are
engaged to me.”
“So be it then,” was the rejoinder, and thus was Mr. Broomfield cheated
of his guests, and Harry enabled to avoid a _tête-à-tête_ dinner, and
possibly a scene, with his outraged spouse. In the meantime, Alice had
been enduring all the mental torments consequent upon having been angry
with the person one loves best in the world. First, the idea that she
had been most cruelly used, and extensively sinned against, and put
upon, was the only one which presented itself to her mind in anything
like a clear and definite shape; and she bewailed her evil fortune in
a very thunderstorm of weeping. Having by this means condensed, and
disposed of, a vast amount of superfluous steam, she grew calmer and
more reasonable, when the uncomfortable possibility gradually dawned
upon her, that she also might have been to blame--that she had first
irritated, and then defied Harry, and utterly and completely failed in
her duty as a wife; and so penitent did she become on the strength of
this conviction, that if her husband had returned at that moment, she
would have thrown herself at his feet and humbly implored his pardon,
which act of unqualified submission must have disarmed Harry so entirely
and totally, that he would instantly have forgiven her, and frankly
confessed himself to blame, and Alice would never again have experienced
the effects of his “quiet manner.” But, unfortunately, Harry was at
that moment differently occupied, in impressing upon Tom Rattleworth
the important fact, that Lucifer would be all the better for having a
red-hot iron passed lightly over his off fetlock at the first convenient
opportunity, and thus Alice’s extreme penitence evaporated as her anger
had done. The final conclusion at which she arrived was, that she
would confess her fault to Harry on his return, and then try calmly and
quietly to convince him of his injustice. If she should succeed in this,
of which she did not feel by any means certain, they would exchange
forgiveness; and, warned by that which had occurred, take heed to their
ways, and live in harmony and affection ever after. All these
sentiments Alice proposed to deliver when she and her husband should be
_tête-à-tête_ after dinner, at which time she had observed Harry to be
usually in an amiable and convincible frame of mind. It may easily be
imagined, therefore, that when she heard Tom Rattleworth declare
with much enthusiasm, and in a voice raised to the pitch in which its
possessor had been wont to direct the gallant fraction of the British
army lately under his command to “Should--der ar-r-ums,” that he was
open to “be blessed,” on the spot, if “the jolly old place did not look
stunning,” she was by no means inclined to afford him the benediction he
had invoked, and heartily wished him at the bottom of the Red Sea, which
we take to be the lowest geographical limit to which a lady’s anathema
can be permitted to descend. She had not time to do more than condemn
her unknown visitor to the oceanic penal settlement aforesaid, ere a
sound as of a jibbing man impelled forward by some powerful agency in
the rear, together with the following expostulation, met her ear:--“My
dear fellow, I’m not fit to be introduced; I’m all over mud, I am upon
my life!”
In another moment the drawing-room door flew open, and her husband and
a tall, large, bushy-whiskered, bluff, young man, who looked as if he
could only have been brought in doors by way of a trick, like a pony, or
a wheelbarrow, stood before her.
“Alice, this is Tom Rattleworth, an old schoolfellow of mine, who is
very anxious to form your acquaintance, and has kindly consented to dine
with us,” observed Harry.
“Hey!--haw!” began Tom Rattleworth, uttering sounds like a bashful ogre
in his intense consciousness of his muddy disqualification for female
society; “haw!--hey! the kindnesses all--haw!--the other way. I
hope--Mrs. Coverdale--my dear fellow--will excuse--I told you I wasn’t
fit to be seen; but you seem to be--the roads are--impetuous as ever--so
very muddy.” Having delivered himself of this slightly incoherent
address, the embryo M.F.H. “made his reverence” to Alice, and then
performing the military evolution expressed in the mysterious terms,
“To the right about! wheel!” he laid violent hands upon his host, and
forced him out of the room as energetically as he had been himself
propelled into it.
The dinner soon made its appearance, and was a “real blessing” to
all parties, for it provided them something wherewith to occupy their
mouths, and thus obviated the painful necessity of manufacturing
small-talk--a toil compared with which the labours of Hercules appear
child’s play, and the up-hill work of Sisyphus a mere game at ball.
The first sharp edge of his appetite taken off, Tom Rattleworth began to
converse fluently upon the only topic which never failed him, and which
invariably formed the staple ingredient in his discourse, and, indeed,
in his thoughts generally--viz., himself and his own sayings and doings.
Alice, bored and unhappy, uttered monosyllabic replies, when she
perceived that she was expected to do so; and remained silent and
_distraite_ when such exertions were not required of her.
Harry, partly grieved at perceiving the accustomed sunshine in his
wife’s pretty face overcast, partly irritated at what he imagined to be
the sulkiness of her manner; annoyed at his friend’s egotistic chatter,
which he felt was disgusting Alice, and which he could not contrive
to check (seeing that the obtuseness of Tom Rattleworth’s faculties
rendered him totally impervious to a hint); and generally provoked by
the change from his usual state of careless, light-hearted happiness
to his present uncomfortable frame of mind--a change which he
rightly enough attributed in a great measure to his own hastiness and
mismanagement, almost lost his temper. This he displayed by rating the
lad who assisted Wilkins, until he reduced that unhappy juvenile to
such a pitch of nervousness and general mental debility, that, having
inveigled his mistress into sugaring instead of peppering a broiled
turkey’s leg, and replenished the Champagne glasses from a bottle of
bitter ale, he was sent out of the room in disgrace. But in this mortal
life (which would be quite unendurable if such were not the case)
all things sooner or later come to an end--and dull dinners are no
exceptions to the rule--thus, after the dessert had been placed on the
table, Alice, having finished her half-glass of sherry and nibbled a
fragment of some little vegetable absurdity preserved in candied sugar,
and looking like a geological specimen rather than a sweetmeat, reckoned
she had sufficiently fulfilled her duty as hostess, and was watching for
an opportunity to escape and go and be wretched comfortably by herself,
when Tom Rattleworth, addressing her especially, began:--
“’Pon my word,
my dear Mrs. Coverdale, when I see you and my friend Harry here so happy
together.” (Harry seized a pear and began denuding it of its rind with a
kind of ferocious eagerness, suggestive to any one acquainted with the
_dessous des cartes_ of his willingness to perform a similar operation
upon his _mal à-propos_ guest), “I declare it makes a fellow feel quite
down in the mouth when he thinks of going home to enjoy his own single
blessedness, as they call it--though single t’other thing would be more
like the truth, I fancy--but then it isn’t everybody that’s as lucky as
Harry and you--not suited to each other so charmingly, you understand.”
(Alice, avoiding her husband’s eye, bent over her sweetmeat as though
she were anxious to count the number of spangles of candied sugar
it took to cover a square inch thereof.) “Now there was a man in our
regiment--curious coincidence, _his_ name was Harry, too--but those
things do happen so curiously--Harry Flusterton his name was--well,
ma’am, when we were quartered up at Montreal, there was a family there
to whom Harry and I took out introductions, and as we found ourselves
decidedly hard up for amusement, we used to visit there pretty much.
There were two or three daughters in the family, but the eldest was
the one that took my fancy most, and Harry Flusterton was of the same
opinion. Accordingly we both laid siege to her, but Harry soon began
to shoot ahead, and I, finding that it was no go, quietly took up with
number two, who, although she hadn’t her sister’s points, figure, or
action, was by no means a girl to be despised, especially in a
dull place like that; well, my dear fellow--haw!--my dear ma’am, I
mean--’pon my word, I’m not fit for ladies’ society--but the long and
short of it is, Harry was married--everybody thought he was the luckiest
dog breathing--I’m sure I did for one, and said as much to Eliza--that
was the younger one, you understand, that I was obliged to put up with.
When I made that remark to her, she looked at me queer like, and says
she, ‘I hope your friend is a very sweet temper, Mr. Rattleworth?’ ‘Of
course he is,’ returned I, for he was, up to the day he married, as easy
tempered a fellow as you’d wish to meet with. Would you believe it, Mrs.
Coverdale, this charming creature that we had both fallen so desperately
in love with (not but that I liked Eliza just as well when I once got
used to her) turned, out a regular vixen--a perfect virago, ma’am; why
Harry himself told me that they hadn’t much more than got over the
honeymoon, when the first time he wanted her to do something she didn’t
like, some nonsense about visiting, or some such stuff, the way she
flared up was a caution to single men----”
“My dear Rattleworth, I’m sorry to interrupt you,” exclaimed Coverdale,
who could bear it no longer, “but I’m afraid my wife is a little
overcome by the heat of the room--those servants will make such
ridiculously large fires. My dear Alice, if you prefer the drawing-room,
I’m sure Rattleworth will excuse you; this place is like the black-hole
in Calcutta.” And while Rattleworth, talking all the time, sprang to
open the door, Harry covered his wife’s retreat by instituting a furious
onslaught upon the unoffending fire. It was well he came to the rescue
when he did, for in another minute Alice would have been in hysterics.
To get rid of his dear friend as soon as possible was Harry’s next
anxiety, but this was no such easy matter. Thomas Rattleworth,
Esq., M.F.H., was at that happy moment the victim of two strenuous
necessities--one to listen to the sound of his own voice, expressing
not so much his ideas as his paucity thereof; and the other to imbibe
a bottle of port wine, in twelve doses of a wine-glass each; and
these necessities had the unfortunate property of re-acting upon and
increasing each other; for talking made him thirsty, and drinking
made him talkative, so that it was eleven o’clock before he had talked
himself out, by which time the terminus of a second bottle of port had
been arrived at. With a feeling of relief such as Sinbad the Sailor
might have experienced when he felt the legs of the Old Man of the Sea
gradually relaxing their clasp around his wearied shoulders, did Harry
assist his friend to light a cigar, then watched its fiery tip gradually
disappear in the darkness, as Rattleworth’s cover hack cantered off with
its master’s six feet one of good-natured goose-flesh.
Left to his own meditations, Harry started a cigar on his own account,
and, the night being a fine one, he paced up and down the gravel walk in
front of the house until he should have cleared his brain from the fumes
of the wine civility had forced him to swallow. The calm stars came out
one by one, and as he watched their bright effulgence, an idea of
his childhood, that they might be the eyes of angels, recurred to
his memory; and he could even fancy they appeared to gaze upon him
reproachfully. No human being possessing even the lowest order of
reflective powers, or the faintest vestige of imagination, can watch the
tranquil splendour of a starlight night--a scene which at once proclaims
God’s omnipotence, and appears a work fitted to the majesty of the Great
Being who created it for his own glory--without becoming imbued with the
idea of rest and peace, and desirous of realising these blessings in his
own life. “With God and infinity so near us, how we loathe the trifles
of existence! and, above all, how we despise and contemn the littleness
of our fallen nature! how we repent with bitter tears of shame and
contrition the evils they have wrought in ourselves, and through us
to others! And how, at such a moment, do the qualities we inherit from
heaven--truth, and love, and mercy--expand within us, and fill our
souls, and raise us, for the time, above ourselves, and nearer to the
high estate from which we have fallen--alas I that it should be only for
the time! Coverdale was not insensible to these elevating influences;
his love for Alice returned in all its original strength and purity,
and he determined, before he slept that night, to bring about a
reconciliation, even if his wife should refuse to confess that she had
acted wrongly. Yes! he would actually go the length of owning that he
had been to blame and was sorry for it, and then Alice would forgive
him, and all would be as though this foolish disagreement had never
occurred.
False reasoning, Harry! there are two things a woman, however thoroughly
she may forgive them, never forgets--neglect and unkindness; and when
once these have cast their shadow across the bright eager gladness with
which she yields up her whole soul as a thank-offering to him she loves,
man, with his stronger, sterner nature, can no more bring back the
delicacy and freshness of that young affection, than he can restore to
the peach the bloom which his careless fingers have profaned--the
love may still exist in its full reality, but the bright halo of early
romance which surrounded it has been dispelled, never to return.