CHAPTER XXVI.—THE ATMOSPHERE REMAINS CLOUDY.
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.