GUSTAVUS IS MARRIED.
In the week afterwards, the couple were united in the holy bands of
matrimony; and, surely, to say that there was any ceremony about
such a union, would be a burlesque of the mysteries of Hymen. Yet,
rapid as were the movements, and wholesale the conclusion, no man
ever put his neck in the noose with such imperturbable gravity,
for, during the whole period occupied by the feast, which was in
the form of a supper, no man could have observed in his gaunt
face any one of the three laughs, Ionic, Megaric, or Sardonic,
with which the face is usually convulsed; the only indication
approaching to a cachination in the midst of the whoops and yells
of the feasters, being a grin in the shape of a _risus Ajacis_,
that defied all power of analysis. But even this caricature of a
display of good humour, insignificant as it may seem, shewed to
those who knew the man that he was labouring under the influence
of some extraordinary emotion, as nothing of the kind had ever
been seen in his countenance since the day on which he hewed down
so unmercifully the French at St Sebastian. Nor, on the following
day, when he had fairly entered upon the supreme happiness of
the married state, was there seen any palpable sign of the joy
that, of course, penetrated through all his well-mailed thoracic
viscera—unless it were, perhaps, that his face had even increased
in length, and the leathery aspect of all the “celestial index” of
the soul was, if possible, more grim than ever.
The getting of a wife is, after all, but a very small matter in
comparison of the ruling of her; and sure, if ever there was a man
in the world, since the days of the grim Hercules, who bungled the
matter out and out, that had any chance of subjecting his wife
to the requisite thraldom and subordination, Gustavus was that
man; for a look of him was enough to tame a Bucephalus any day;
and it was evident that he cogitated mighty achievements in that
way, if one might have judged from the marshalling character of
his step as he paraded the house; his taciturnity, deeper than
the wells of truth; and the air of a resolute importance that was
enthroned among the deep furrows of his extraordinary countenance.
The first fruits of his study—and verily he must have been a man
of no common nerve that could study during the honeymoon—was the
important conclusion, that the sooner his Julia was entoiled in
the multifarious affairs of domestic economy, and the imperative
duties of ministering to his every want and comfort, the better
chance he enjoyed of subjecting her thoroughly to the power of
his stern discipline. So straight began he, accordingly, upon
the instant, and, by the aid of a small douceur, got quit of his
servant—an act that savoured of extraordinary sagacity and wisdom,
in so much as it involved the additional advantages of saving her
wages, and keeping and turning his wife into a source of profit,
as she would doubtless be the fountain of much delectation. It is
not unlikely that the maxim, when the devil finds a man or woman
idle, he straightway sets them aworking—or, as Erasmus expresses
it, _Ocium ad omnem nequitiam impellit_—had a large share in this
determination; for, as to the opinion of Shakspeare, that idleness
is the source of love, he despised it hepatically, and calculated
with certainty that love’s sweetest labour—the contributing to the
comfort of her lord—would be diligently pursued by his beloved and
most adorable Julia Briggs.
All this was just as fair a piece of human calculation, and as
probable a conclusion, as could ever be found beyond the regions
of pure mathematics; and so, placing every fibre of his big body,
excepting some portion of the heart, under the rigid authority of
the genius of command, he issued, with an air a deuced deal more
martial than marital, his stern orders, which were as recondite as
they were energetic—going into the very medullary _penetralia_
of the matter of cooking and housekeeping with a knowledge and
consideration that would have done honour to Mrs Margaret Dods of
the Cleikum Inn herself. Nor was this to be much wondered at; for,
had he himself not washed and dressed in the Peninsula, and had he
not there also foraged, and cooked, and swallowed as no _bon vivan_
ever did before, since the days of the three Apicii? The never a
man had ever doubted it; and if he had, it would just have been
as safe for the unhappy wretch to have disputed his courage as to
have expressed one word of scepticism on a subject that so nearly
concerned his honour—for, in either case, he would have been
knocked down.
It would be a libel on womankind to say, that the _polite_ Julia,
who had been a standing toast among the small men of fashion
connected with the depots of millinery wares about the town, had
any affection for the bare-boned Colossus she had wedded on a
week’s notice; and it would have been an insult to her spirit to
have said that she feared him, though he was at least three times
the size of any of her former lovers. She had married him, as all
women of her stamp do, just for a living and protection—the one
to be afforded from his pay, and the other from his bones and
sinews—a very fair calculation for a woman of so small a calibre
to make; and, accordingly, she would have declared war against
him at once, big and terrible as he was, if she could have seen
any good to come of it; for, as to the fearful expression of his
leather-bound jaws, when he issued the order for work, she cared
no more for it than if it had been a smile of mawkish love-doting.
It is not likely that she had ever heard of Omphale, who ruled
the biggest man of the world by her slipper; but she had not
thrown away the needle, which had been used on the linens of fair,
personable men, to take it up again to sew for a husband that
never was intended by nature to be loved; and, as for supplying
its place with the spit, she looked upon the proposition with as
much contempt as she would have bestowed on a proposal that she
should love the gigantic caricature she had married for nothing
else in the world but her own convenience. All that was as plain
as noon-day; but open war was not her tact, any more than it is
the tact of Puck to fight the regular Goliaths of the earth at a
fair stand-up or monomachy; and it is scarcely necessary to say,
that the open _duellum_ is no more relished by the women of her
class generally, than it was by the “eel or deil” of a creature
that Gustavus had raised to the high station of his wife. Nor had
she any difficulty in fixing on her plans; for nature was just as
kind to her as to the rest of her sex in suggesting the means of
perplexing her lord, though it is not improbable that, if she had
known that his intention in making her work was to keep her out of
all that species of devilry that comes to women out of idleness,
she might have been inclined to vindicate the nobility of her
kind, by some more devilish trick than mere unaided nature might at
first have prompted.
The sharp, vixen eye of the pigmy sempstress had not been slow in
perceiving that the two grand _sine quibus non_ of her husband’s
comfort, were pure linens and well-cooked victuals; and she knew,
moreover—doubtless in the way by which the sex come to their
secret knowledge of men’s ways—that he had been in the habit of
securing these grand objects by the labour of his own hands. The
antipodes of each other in everything, they were as unlike each
other in respect of these domestic duties, as they were in the
sizes of their bodies; for while, as has been already hinted, there
never was a man since the days of Pope Joan that excelled more in
the mysteries of washing, dressing, and cooking than Gustavus,
there never was a woman that knew less of these recondite arts
than Mrs Julia M’Iver. The sexes of the two should, therefore,
clearly have been reversed—he should have been the wife, and she
the husband; and Julia knew this just as well as we or any other
individual who presumes to question the excellence of the laws that
regulate matrimonial matches, when she resolved to bring about a
state of matters that would just be the same as if the potentiality
we have mentioned had just in fact been a reality. She accordingly
began by spoiling every piece of domestic labour to which she
applied her hands; his linens being as much of the tint of saffron
as ever were those of a gareteer, who enjoys the luxury of a pole
and rope put forth from a skylight; and his victuals as wretchedly
dressed as ever a devil-sent cook in the kingdom could have mangled
out of the fair gifts of nature. Nothing in the way of destruction
could have been more skilfully managed; and it is not too much to
say, that, though the fair Julia had lifted her delicate hand, and
attempted to knock him down, or performed any of the other _culpæ
gravissimæ_ that appertain to the privileges of the sex, she could
not have more effectually roused the wrath, of the mighty Gustavus.