The mischief was out at once, Tom,—I know you are laughing at it already; it's quite true, she was jealous,—mad jealous! Ah, Tom, my boy, it 's all very good fun to laugh at Keeley, or Buckstone, or any other of those diverting vagabonds who can convulse the house with such a theme; but in real life the farce is downright tragedy. There is not a single comfort or consolation of your life that is not kicked clean from under you! A system of normal agitation is a fine thing, they tell us, in politics, but it is a cruel adjunct of domestic life! Everything you say, every look you give, every letter you seal, or every note you receive, are counts in a mysterious indictment against you, till at last you are afraid to blow your nose, lest it be taken for a signal to the fat widow lady that is caressing her poodle at the window over the way!
You may be sure, Tom, that I repelled the charge with all the indignation of injured innocence. I invoked my thirty years' good character, the gravity of my demeanor, the gray of my whiskers; I confessed to twenty other minor misdemeanors,—a taste for practical jokes, a love of cribbage and long whist; I went further,—I expressed a kind of St. Kevenism about women in general; but she cut me short with, "Pray, Mr. D., make one exception; do be gallant enough to say that there is one, at least, not included in this category of horrors."
"What are you at now?" cried I, almost losing all patience.
"Yes, sir," said she, in a grand melodramatic tone that she always reserves for the peroration,—as postilions keep a trot for the town,—"yes, sir, I am well accustomed to your perfidy and dissimulation. I know perfectly for what infamous purposes abroad your family are treated so ignominiously at home; I'm no stranger to your doings." I tried to stop her by an appeal to common-sense; she despised it. I invoked my age,—egad! I never put my foot in it till then. That was exactly what made me the greatest villain of all! Whatever veneration attaches to white hairs, it must be owned they get mighty ill treated in discussions like the present; at least, Mrs. D. assured me so, and gave me to understand that one pays a higher premium for their morality, as they do for their life-assurance, as they grow older. "Not," added she, as her eyes glittered with anger, and she sidled near the door for an exit,—"not but, in the estimation of others, you may be quite an Adonis,—a young gentleman of wit and fashion,—a beau of the first water; I have no doubt Mary Jane thinks so,—you old wretch!" This, in all, and a bang of the door that brought down an oil picture that hung over it, closed the scene.
"Mary Jane thinks so!" said I, with my hand to my temples to collect myself. Ah, Tom! it would have required a cooler head than mine was at that moment to go hunting through the old archives of memory! Nor will I torment you with even a narrative of my struggles. I passed that evening and the night in a state of half distraction; and it was only when I was giving one of our lawyers a check the next morning that I unravelled the mystery, for, as I wrote down his name, I perceived it was Marie Jean de Rastanac,—a not uncommon Christian name for men, though, considering the length and breadth of the masculine calendar; a very needless appropriation.
This was "Mary Jane," then, and this the origin of as pretty a conjugal flare-up as I remember for the last twelvemonth!
Mrs. D. reminds me of the Opposition, and the Opposition of Vickars. I suppose he wants to be a Lord of the Treasury. It's very like what old Frederick used to call making a "goat a gardener." What rogues the fellows are! You write to them about your son or your nephew, and they answer you with some tawdry balderdash about their principles, as if any one of us ever believed they were troubled with principles! I'm all for fair straightforward dealing. Put James in the Board of Trade, and you may cut up the Caffres for ten years to come. Give us something in the Customs, and I don't care if New Zealand never has a constitution! 'Tis only the fellows that have no families ask questions at the hustings! Show me a man that wants pledges from his representative, and I 'll show you one that has got none from his wife!
And there's Vickars writing to me, as if I was a fool, about all the old clap-traps that we used to think were kept for the election dinner; and these chaps, like him, always spoil a good argument when they get hold of it. Now, when a parson has n't tact enough to write his sermons, he buys a volume of Tillotson or Blair, or any other, and reads one out as well as he can; but your member—God bless the mark!—must invent his own nonsense. How much better if he 'd give you Peel, or Russell, or Ben Disraeli in the original! There are skeleton sermons for drowsy curates; I wish any one would compose skeleton speeches for the county members. You 'll say that I 'm unreasonably testy about these things; but I 've got a letter this instant from Vickers, expressing his hope that I 'll be satisfied with the view he has taken on the "question of free-labor sugar." Did I ever dispute it, Tom? I drink no tea,—I hate sweet things, and, except a lump, and that a small one, that I take in my tumbler of punch, I never use sugar; and I care no more what 'a the color of the man that raises it than I do for the name of the supercargo that brought it over. Don't put cockroaches in it, and sell it cheap, and I don't care a brass farthing whether it grew in Barbary or Barbadoes! Not, my dear Tom, but it's all gammon, the way they discuss the question; for the two parties are always debating two different issues; one crying out cheap sugar, the other no slavery! and the consequence is, they never meet in argument As to the preference Vickars insists should be given to free-labor sugar, carry out the principle and see what it comes to. I ought to receive eight or ten shillings a barrel more for my wheat than old Joe M'Curdy, because I always gave my laborers eight-pence a day, and he never went higher than sixpence, more often fourpence. Is not that free labor and slavery, just as well exemplified as if every man in the barony was a black?
They tell me the niggers won't work if you don't thrash them, and I don't wonder, when I think of the heat of the climate; but sure if they've more idleness, they ought to get less money; and lastly, I take the Abolitionists—bother it for a long word!—on their own ground, and are they prepared to say that if you impose a duty on slave sugar, the Cubans and the rest of them won't only take more out of the niggers to meet "the exigency of the market," as the newspapers call it? If they do so, they 'll only be imitating our own farmers since the repeal of the corn law. "You must bestir yourselves," says Lord Stanley; "competition with the foreigner will demand all your activity. It won't do to go on as you used. You must buy guano, take to drainage, study Smith of Deanstown, and mind the rotation of your crops." Don't you think that some enlightened Cuban will hit upon the same train of argument, and make a fresh investment in whipcord? Ah, Tom! these are only party squabbles, after all; and so I told Vickars. I don't know why, but it always seemed to me that the blacks absorb a very unfair amount of our loose sympathies; whether it's the color of them, or that they 're so far away, or because they 're naked, I never knew; but certain it is, we pity them far more than our own people, and I back myself to get up a ladies' committee for a nigger question, before you collect three people to hear you discuss a home grievance.
I have just been interrupted to receive Monsieur Jellicot, my defender in action No. 3, a suit preferred by my late courier, "François Tehetuer, born in the canton of Zug, aged thirty-seven years, single, and a Protestant, against Monsieur Kenyidod, natif d'Irlande, près de Dublin, dans le Royaume de la Grande Bretagne," &c., &c.; the demand being for a year's wages, bed, board, and travelling expenses to his native country. He, the aforesaid François, having been sent away for a disgraceful riot in my house, in which he beat Pat, the other servant, and smashed about five-and-twenty pounds' worth of glass and china. A very pretty claim, Tom,—the preliminary resistance to which has already cost me about one hundred and fifty francs to remove the litigation into an upper court, where the bribery is higher, and consequently deemed more within the reach of my finances than those of honest Francis!