Volume Three—Chapter Nine.
Pringle “Pecked.”
The nuptial couch is not always a bed of roses, and so the young incumbent of Hartwood found out after a time. Not that it was all the fault of his newly-married spouse. Laura loved him in her languid way, and would have endeavoured to make his home happy if she had been left to herself; but the old campaigner stood in the gap: she had became Herbert Pringle’s bête noir.
Shortly after the happy pair came back from their honeymoon to the parsonage, Lady Inskip made a proposition, which by dint of judicious manoeuvring she managed to carry into operation. Now that her eldest daughter was married, and Carry, “the bold, ungrateful girl,” had left her in that scandalous manner, there was no need for her to keep up any longer a special establishment as she had formerly done. She only had her darling boy, Mortimer, now to care for, and Laburnum Cottage would be too big for herself and him only. She suggested to her dear, kind, clever son-in-law what she would do. She would give up the cottage—her time would be out on Lady-day, and it did not want such a very long time now to that date, and come and live at the parsonage with her affectionate children. Nothing could be better! Of course she would insist on paying her share of the housekeeping expenses; but then she did eat so very little; that would be of little count. Would not her dear Herbert and Laura—she put it to them—welcome her? She was such a good manager, and they were so ignorant of the world.
“Of course, dear ma!” said Laura. “That will be so nice; and then I should not have any trouble with the house and that horrid cookery book. I hate it! I wish Soyer had never been born. I’m sure I cannot make head or tail of all his ‘economical dishes,’ as he calls them.”
“Certainly, my love!” responded the campaigner with alacrity. It was wonderful how very sweet and affectionate she could be when she had any point to gain. “I should take charge of all that off your hands, my dear! It would be hard if I could not be of use to my own children, whom I only have left to care for.”
“That’ll be all right, ma, then?” said Laura, considering the matter settled; but the campaigner was not so sure, for her son-in-law had not made any response yet to the offer.
“What does Herbert say, my pet?” exclaimed the old general, playfully, and looked the Rev. Herbert full in the face. “Will he turn his old mother into the street, or—?”
“Oh! certainly, Lady Inskip, certainly!” promptly answered up the young divine, confused at being appealed to. “That is, of course we’ll be glad to have you here for a time, and—”
“Oh! I see,” interposed the campaigner, with a capital assumption of offended pride and wounded feeling, “I should be intruding when I only offered to come here and help my darling child. Oh! that I have lived to hear this.”
“Oh! ma,” said Laura, “don’t go on so. Herbert didn’t mean anything of the kind.”
“That I have lived to see this day!” repeated the campaigner, with solemn emphasis, and looking as if she were going to cry; however as she was seldom given to lachrymals, tears did not come so readily as would have now suited her purpose, but she twisted up her eyes, nevertheless, and sniffed ominously.
“Pray don’t say so, ma! Don’t say so! Say something, Herbert, to her, and don’t be so unfeeling!” eagerly ejaculated Laura, turning to her husband, who did not know what to say. He certainly had hoped that he and his wife could have lived together without the services of his honoured mother-in-law, the lady in her own right; but what could he do? Here was she asking, and Laura urging it; and he was a single man against two energetic females. He was helpless, although he wished to do battle on his sister Lizzie’s behalf, being certain that she and the campaigner would not get on well together. He was driven to the wall, however, for Laura had called on him to say something, and he must speak!
“Certainly, Lady Inskip, certainly!” he began. “That is, I mean to say, we will be most happy, Laura, and myself, to have you to live with us. Delighted, I’m sure; and Laura can make all the arrangements; but if there’s anything you want me to see to, you have only to ask. That’s all, and—and—”
“You dear, impulsive creature,” interrupted the campaigner; “you are so good. I thought you did not mean to be unkind; but my feelings have been so lacerated of late that a very little affects me now.” The campaigner spoke of a very little affecting her as if she were alluding to the imbibition of gin, or some other stimulant. “And so that’s all arranged, and I can give up the cottage at once. It will be delightful to live here altogether; just like the happy family, won’t it?”
“Quite so, Lady Inskip, quite so!” responded the Reverend Herbert; but he did not speak cheerfully, and I fear he had other views in his own mind of what a “happy family” arrangement might be.
“Charming, ma!” chorused Laura. “We’ll see about making the arrangements at once, in order to prevent you from changing your mind.”
The incumbent’s wife need not, however, have been under any anxiety on that score: the campaigner knew very well when she had made a bargain, and she was not going to back out of it.
“I must send the darling boy Mortimer to school, however. It will be so sad parting with him, but it must be done. It would never do to have him here, would it?”
And she looked inquiringly at her son-in-law.
Pringle had sundry experiences of the darling boy’s tractable disposition, and was rather disinclined in being so intimately associated with the young hopeful, so he combatted the point.
“You’re quite right, Lady Inskip. He’d better be sent to school; not that I’d have any objections to his coming here, but then—”
“Yes,” sighed the campaigner, “I suppose he must go; it would be too much to ask.”
“Oh! have him here, ma. Don’t send him to school, poor little fellow! Herbert won’t mind, will you?” struck in Laura.
The incumbent was again doomed to defeat. He could refuse his young wife nothing when she was so judiciously “backed up” by the campaigner.
“Oh! certainly not, Lady Inskip. Have him here by all means.”
He gave in. He thought as the campaigner was coming the mischief was done; and he would be equally willing now to receive all the rest of the family; even Carry and her military husband, if it was suggested that they should all be invited; and the green parrot, too, the Persian cats, and all the other pets of My Lady’s. He succumbed hopelessly, and was thenceforth a pecked man.
I remember once coming across a little Oriental anecdote which lays particular stress on the relations of connubial folk. Pity that Pringle was not acquainted with it before he committed himself. The story runs as follows:—Once upon a time a gay young fellow married the widow of a great Khan—the scene is laid in Persia. On the wedding night the lady determined to assert her authority, and show who was the real lord and master. She accordingly treated her spouse with great contempt when he entered the ante-room, where she was seated on rose-leaf cushions caressing a large white cat, of which she pretended to be very fond indeed. She appeared very much annoyed at her husband’s entrance, and looked at him out of the corners of her eyes with cold disdain as he came in.
“I hate cats,” observed the young husband, blandly, as if he were only making a casual observation; “they offend my sight.”
If his wife had looked at him with glances of cold disdain before, her eyes now wore an expression of anger and contempt, such as no words can express. She did not even deign to answer him, but took the cat to her bosom and fondled it passionately: her whole heart seemed to be in the cat, and cold was the shoulder that she turned to her husband.
“When any one offends me,” continued her gallant, gaily, “I cut off his head. It is a peculiarity of mine which I am sure will only make me dearer to you.”
Then, drawing his sword, he took the cat gently but firmly from her arms, cut off its head, wiped the blade, sheathed it, and sitting down continued to talk affectionately to his wife as if nothing had happened. After which, says tradition, she became the best and most submissive wife in the world.
A hen-pecked fellow, meeting him the next day as he rode with a gallant train through the market place, began to condole with him.
“Ah!” said the hen-pecked one with deep feeling, “you, too, have taken a wife, and got a tyrant. You had better have remained the poor soldier that you were. I pity you from my very heart!”
“Not so,” replied the other, jollily; “keep your sighs to cool yourself next summer.”
He then related the events of his wedding night with their satisfactory results.
The hen-pecked man listened attentively, and pondered long.
“I also have a sword,” said he, “though it is rusty, and my wife is likewise fond of cats. I will cut off the head of my wife’s favourite cat at once.”
He did so, and received a sound beating. His wife, moreover, made him go down upon his knees and tell her what djinn, or evil spirit, had prompted him to do the bloody deed.
“Fool!” said the lady, when she had possessed herself of the hen-pecked’s secret, with a vixenish vinegar smile on her sallow lips, “you should have done it the first night!”
The moral is obvious: the Persians say “Advice is useless to fools!”
Pringle did not kill the cat at once; hence his position.
The old campaigner sold out at Laburnum Cottage in another week or two, and came with the young imp Mortimer, her Persian cats, and green parrot, and all her multitudinous belongings, settling down like a swarm of locusts on the devoted parsonage. Gone thenceforth were all its tranquil joys.
After a time the Lucca-oil-like-suavity which had formerly distinguished Lady Inskip in Pringle’s mind, disappeared. She appeared now as the concentrated essence of verjuice or tartaric acid, and ruled the whole house with a rod of iron, becoming in truth the master of all. Poor Lizzie’s life was made a burden to her; and she was treated as if she were a presumptuous intruder in her brother’s house. The old campaigner wrung her little heart with continual allusions to the “Young Squire,” and said how glad she “would have been to get him, miss!” making bitter comments on the way she said Lizzie had angled for Tom, and how he had gone off now and left her. “Served her right, too,” she ought not to be “pining and whining and breaking her heart after a man who never cared for her!” When, you may be sure, our little friend answered and stuck up for her rights, whereupon the campaigner would go and complain to the supposed head of the family, and declare that she could not stop in the house with “that virago of a girl,” and Pringle had to timidly urge that he would not keep Lady Inskip against her will for the world. Then the campaigner would commence with a stern philippic on ingratitude, and wind up by bursting into tears and wishing she had never been born to observe that particular day. Here Laura would interfere, Herbert Pringle beg the pardon of his mamma-in-law, and all would be soothed over for a time, and the campaigner would establish a fresh gap in the trenches she was engineering for universal sovereignty.
Pringle suffered in more ways than one. He had to walk now through the parish in discharging his parochial duties, for he could no more “prance about,” as Mrs Hartshorne called it, on his dapple grey pony. The campaigner had impounded that valuable little animal, and no more was it bestridden by the well shaped, albeit diminutive legs of the incumbent. The Macchiaevelli in petticoats said that “her daughter” must have a carriage to go about in, considering she could no longer afford to keep one of her own, which otherwise she would have been happy for Laura to have made free use of. The campaigner had sold her equipage when she cleared out from Laburnum Cottage along with other sundry theatrical “effects” which she had kept up for the sales of entrapping suitors for her daughters’ hands, and now they were both off her hands she melted down her appurtenances into the handier form of a banker’s balance. “No one knew what might come,” as she said to herself, sagely reflective.
She accordingly made Pringle buy a neat basket carriage, and build an enlargement to the parsonage stable for its accommodation. To this vehicle, dapple grey was thenceforth attached, and the campaigner used to drive out in it every afternoon, occasionally but seldom, accompanied by her daughter, and the small boy with the eruption of buttons on him, whom she had retained in her own service when she migrated to the house of her son-in-law. “It was so respectable to have a page,” as she said. Lizzie she never invited to drive with her, not that she would for a moment have consented to the penance of a tête-à-tête with the campaigner, whom she disliked as much almost as the other did her, although she tried to bear with her for her brother’s sake, whom she pitied. Lizzie in fact saw clearly that poor Herbert was sadly hen-pecked, not by his wife, for she was two apathetic, but by his mother-in-law.
Instead of the paradise of bliss which he had hoped to enter, by allying himself with Lady Inskip’s eldest daughter, the young incumbent found himself in a very miserable position; and I am inclined to think that he somewhat regretted his hasty step. He loved Laura as much as it was in his nature to do so, and so did she him; but both were very young—he just a boy from College, one might say; and they had yet much to learn of that mutual forbearance principle, and earnest trust and love, without which too many find marriage the “lottery” they declare it. What chance of happiness they had depended upon their being to themselves, without the odious presence of the campaigner; but she had established herself as a fixture, and was not going to stir herself in a hurry; and as Laura as yet took her part, principally because Herbert Pringle had his sister on his side, the pecktive state continued, unhappily for all parties.
No more did the ritualistic young divine devote much attention to his sermons; and the Ciceronian phraseology, which purely distinguished those works of composition, disappeared. He had no heart in his work—for the campaigner was always “nagging” at him at home, and no longer praised his eloquence as she had done at first.
No more did he chant in melodious strains the Psalms to his elaborately embroidered and besmocked congregation of farmers, but read them over hurriedly, in order to get rid of them. Even his ritualistic tendencies began to be toned down: the lectern was seldom made use of, and the white surplices were dispensed with for the boys of the choir.
Pringle was pecked with a vengeance, and its effect was shown, not only in his outward ways, but in his adornment—he became careless about his dress, and not half so particular as he had been for appearances before he became a Benedict. Bottom was very much translated, indeed. Pringle was pecked!
Lizzie saw all that was going on, and sympathised with her brother. The old campaigner she detested, and only the desire not to increase her brother’s miseries by having home broils, made her keep her hostility subdued; she even tried to coax the artful Macchiaevelli for him, all to no effect, as also her endeavours to awaken the languid Laura to a sense of the responsibility owing to her husband.
The campaigner ruled the roast in spite of all; and showed not the slightest desire to conceal her dislike for Lizzie. She tormented her constantly with spiteful allusions to the past, and Lizzie would not have minded so much what she said about herself, but she would abuse Tom, and that she could not stand. Besides, she encouraged the horrid imp Mortimer to spoil all poor Lizzie’s garden, and disarrange her pet conservatory, and even to break up a little artful contrivance for holding plants, which Tom had specially given her. It is true Pringle made up a row on that subject, and threatening to chastise the boy, somewhat checking his horticultural tendencies to the detriment of Lizzie in future. Still, the place was made very unhappy to her, and Lizzie would have been miserable and wished herself dead and out of the way if some consolation had not turned up suddenly for her in a most unexpected manner.
Thenceforth she bore the campaigner’s taunts with stolid and aggravating silence, making that lady wish time and again that Lizzie were “her child,” and she “would soon teach her manners.” Notwithstanding that poor Pringle was so sadly pecked, and the parsonage lost its Eden-like character since the invasion of the serpent, there was balm yet in Gilead for Lizzie.
What had happened? Whence came Lizzie’s consolation?
You would never suspect.