And let me ask any of my gentle readers if, under similar circumstances, honeyed words would have been uttered by you? If you had suffered such treatment, and not only you but your children, who were bone of your bone and flesh of your flesh, do you not think you would protest? If you were being dragged down into the slough of poverty, disgrace, and wretchedness, and you knew that he who was thus dragging you down could, if he were a true husband and father, place you in a position of comfort and respectability, but who was devouring from you and your children food that you had earned by the most menial drudgery—by the sweat of body and brain—and leaving you all to nearly famish for bread, would you not remonstrate? Nay, would not feelings of outraged confidence, of soul-anguish, sorrow, and shame coin themselves into bitter chiding words which you would be powerless to repress?
How many thousands of sweet, pure souls, who, in their innocent maiden days, were the embodiment of gentleness and affection, have, after marriage to some brute in human shape, been brought, by years of neglect and abuse, to become that which is among the most maligned and despised of all creatures—a scolding wife.
We must, in all fairness, admit that such Nancy Flatt had become. Her nature, as we have said, was intense, and she had endured a great deal in her early married life. At first she would gently remonstrate, but as years rolled on and she had not only to suffer neglect and abuse herself, but her helpless little ones also, her remonstrances became tinged with the acidity of her soured nature; and finally as toil, neglect, and hunger reduced her to the haggard, dejected creature we have presented to the reader, she would meet Tom's oaths and blows with her only weapon of defence, and pour out sharp, rasping words from her woman's tongue.
"I tell you what it is, Nance," said Tom, in answer to her chiding; "I want you to shut that jaw of thine and get me some grub, or I'll make you wish you had never been born."
"You have made me wish that a thousand times, Tom," she answered with passionate bitterness. "See that wasted arm," and suiting the action to her words she stripped up her sleeve; "look at my fleshless face—what has brought me to this but starvation and drudgery? Hear the moaning of that helpless babe in the cradle, crying for nurse that starvation has dried up. Oh, Tom! how can you spend your money in whiskey when you know we are starving at home? You knew when you left this morning there was not a morsel of food in the house, nor money to buy it, for you have not brought in a cent for weeks, and you promised when you left to come right back with bread, but instead of that you have spent the day in drinking whiskey and fighting with great hulking loafers like yourself, and now you come home to abuse your wife and children. You are worse than a brute; for brutes do provide for their own flesh and blood, while you have nothing better than oaths and blows for yours."
With fearful oaths Flatt sprang forward to answer his wife's passionate arraignment of his conduct by the method he usually adopted on such occasions—that was, by the irresistible logic of his ponderous fist. As she saw he was about to make the rush, her first impulse was to open the door and run for safety, for well she knew, from a terrible experience, that when he was aroused he had the ferocity of a brute with the temper of a demon. But as she was about to do so she saw he did not heed the cradle which lay in his way. The danger of her child caused the mother to be heedless of her own, and, with the wild cry, "Look out for the babe, Tom!" she sprang forward and snatched it from the cradle, thus bringing herself into the power of the furious brute. In his mad rage he picked up a trowel which, unfortunately, lay near him, and, as his wife was rising with her babe, he struck her with terrific force upon the head, the sharp corner of the instrument cutting through the flesh and imbedding itself deep into the skull, carrying the hair with it.
"Oh, Tom! you have killed me!" she groaned, as she fell forward on her face, covering her babe as she fell. But even in that terrible moment she must have had some thought of it, for she managed to shift over on her side, clasping it to her breast as she did so.
All the ferocity in Tom's brutal nature seemed to be aroused, and the sight of his wife's blood running down over her forehead and dyeing with red the pallid face of his child, which one would think might have moved even a demon to pity, only seemed to arouse the latent tiger within him, for he struck the prostrate woman again and again, until she settled heavily on to the floor and was limp and still. This act in the tragedy was complete, for Nancy Flatt was dead, and her infant lay clasped in her arms bespattered with the life-blood of its dead mother.
The children, who had been cowering under the beds, witnessed the terrible scene, and though they were frightened at their father's and mother's jangling, as they thought it would result in the latter being beaten—which was usually the case—at first they kept perfectly still, for fear of what the result might be to themselves if they drew their father's attention. But when he struck their mother with the trowel and she fell forward with her face bathed in blood, they gave vent to their terror in wild and frantic screams.
"Oh, dad!" cried little Jack, almost fiercely, "you've killed our mamma." And as he thus spoke he stepped boldly out and faced his father, seeming to have lost all fear in the presence of the calamity that had befallen them; and then he and Nanny escaped from the house and ran over to Tremaine's. When they reached there Nannie, who had outrun her brother, burst into the door and said in a ghastly whisper, which appeared all the more horrible because of her pallid face, over which her hair was streaming in tangled masses, giving her a ghost-like appearance: