GUSTAVUS IS MYSTIFIED, AND RESOLVES ON A SCHEME PERFECTLY ORIGINAL.
He had now retreated from a bad position to one a mighty deal
worse; for, in the midst of a town, he could sometimes see a
friend, and smoke a pipe, in the fumes of which all his cares
were, for a time, enveloped, and kept from the eyes of his haunted
fancy; but now, in the midst of a comparative wilderness, he had no
associate, but that very limb of Satan herself, that was the source
and origin of the misery to which he was enslaved. He was, besides,
rolled up in a cloud of mystery, in which the wicked enchantress
sat and mocked him, like some of those eastern genii, that love
to look and speak through thick vapours which increase the mystic
character of their power. Still she contrived to get intoxicated;
and, so vain had been his efforts to trace the source of the
evil, that he verily believed the imp was possessed of some charm
whereby she realized a compact with the enemy of mankind. If he
went out to stalk round the house and brood over his misfortunes,
he found that she had, in the meantime, got herself made perfect in
insensibility; and if she, by any means, got to a short distance
from the house unobserved, she returned in a condition no less
lamentable. It was a big, crying evil, fronted with shame, and
adminicled with devilries of every degree and colour that ever
came from the box of Pandora. It was impossible that man could
stand it; and necessity, the mother of invention, stung the obtuse
brain of Gustavus to something like the _ingenium perfervidum_ of
genius itself. He knew very well that he had terrified men; and,
indeed, as love is said to be inspired by a look, so one glance of
him was, of a surety, sufficient to have produced fear in any one
but Julia, who valued his fierce looks no more than if they had
been smiles. But he could do more than look—he could threaten; and
the question that troubled him, for a time, was, what he should
threaten; for he had made up his mind to terrify her in some way;
and the sheer necessity of projecting something worthy of himself,
was the parent of one of the most extraordinary expedients that
ever came from the brain of genius.
The expedient was this: He told her, with a big oath, and a face
at which the walls of St Sebastian might have trembled to their
foundations, that, the first time he found her intoxicated, he
would put her in a coffin, and actually bury her in the earth, as
deep and sure as ever Jonah was buried in the belly of the biggest
monster of the deep. Nor was the threat a sheer gust of breath, for
he immediately set about making a real coffin—a performance which
he executed very well, painting it as black as fashion requires,
and studding it with a goodly portion of white buttons, which he
tore from a mass of old regimentals; and, having finished it, he
placed it in his bedroom, as a grim indication of the reality of
his intentions. But the woman who could defy the terrors of such a
face as that of Gustavus M’Iver, had nothing to fear from the sight
of a coffin; and so, of a surety, it turned out—for the determined
baggage not only laughed broad in his countenance, but told him to
it, that, so long as he was cowardly enough to have any fear of the
gallows, she had not a jot of reason to be afraid of being buried
alive.
Both parties, in this way, seemed equally determined. Gustavus took
his usual mighty strides along the room, and set the pulleys of his
facial muscles in rapid play; and Julia, the pert minx, indulged
in her laughing mockery, that seemed to set him and his coffin at
defiance. That she was as serious as Socrates in her disbelief of
his intentions, was very soon made manifest—for the coffin had not
been three days old, when she got as drunk as Midas; and that he
was apparently as determined as Draed, he very soon gave suitable
demonstrations—for, in place of lifting her into bed according to
his usual practice, he placed her into the grim chest, and, putting
a mattock on the top of it, he hoisted it on his shoulders, and
strode away forth to a wood as dark as the recesses of the Cumæan
witch, that stood at some distance from his habitation. There, as
good fortune would have it, he found, already dug to his hand, a
deep hole, round the edges of which grew a profusion of bushes and
furze, sufficient to make the pit as grim and frightful as the very
grave itself; and there, having deposited his charge, with plenty
of room for breath through the holes he had made in the lid, he
turned him round, and stalked away home to cook his dinner.