“I wouldn’t be slow to give him one of yours, John, only I know he wouldn’t take it,” said Mrs. Grimes. “Well now, look here, Sir;—we’ve that feeling for him that our young woman there would draw anything for him he’d ask—money or no money. She’d never venture to name money to him if he wanted a glass of anything,—hot or cold, beer or spirits. Isn’t that so, John?”
“She’s fool enough for anything as far as I know,” said Mr. Grimes.
“She aint no fool at all; and I’d do the same if I was there, and so’d you, John. There is nothing Mackenzie’d ask as he wouldn’t give him,” said Mrs. Grimes, pointing with her thumb over her shoulder to her husband, who was standing on the hearth-rug;—“that is, in the way of drawing liquor, and refreshments, and such like. But he never raised a glass to his lips in this house as he didn’t pay for, nor yet took a biscuit out of that basket. He’s a gentleman all over, is Mackenzie.”
It was strong testimony; but still we had not quite got at the bottom of the matter. “Doesn’t he raise a great many glasses to his lips?” we asked.
“No he don’t,” said Mrs. Grimes,—“only in reason.”
“He’s had misfortunes,” said Mr. Grimes.
“Indeed he has,” said the lady,—“what I call the very troublesomest of troubles. If you was troubled like him, John, where’d you be?”
“I know where you’d be,” said John.
“He’s got a bad wife, Sir; the worst as ever was,” continued Mrs. Grimes. “Talk of drink;—there is nothing that woman wouldn’t do for it. She’d pawn the very clothes off her children’s back in mid-winter to get it. She’d rob the food out of her husband’s mouth for a drop of gin. As for herself,—she aint no woman’s notions left of keeping herself any way. She’d as soon be picked out of the gutter as not;—and as for words out of her mouth or clothes on her back, she hasn’t got, Sir, not an item of a female’s feelings left about her.”
Mrs. Grimes had been very eloquent, and had painted the “troublesomest of all troubles” with glowing words. This was what the wretched man had come to by marrying a woman who was not a lady in order that he might escape the “conventional thraldom” of gentility! But still the drunken wife was not all. There was the evidence of his own nose against himself, and the additional fact that he had acknowledged himself to have been formerly a drunkard. “I suppose he has drunk, himself?” we said.