Then, as gently as he was speaking, he stole to the door and left Letizia locked behind him in her bedroom. Oh, yes, he tamed her body gradually, and for a long time it looked as if he would tame her soul. She had no more daughters like herself, and each year for many years she flashed her eyes less fiercely and tossed her head less defiantly. She produced several other children, but they all took after their father. Dark-eyed Caterina was followed by stodgy Achsah. Stodgy Achsah was followed by podgy Thyrza. These were followed by two more who died almost as soon as they were born, as if in dying thus they expressed the listlessness of their mother for this life. Maybe Letizia herself would have achieved death, had not the way Caleb treated little Caterina kept her alive to protect the child against his severity.
“Her rebellious spirit must be broken,” he declared, raising once more the cane.
“You shall not beat her like this, Caleb.”
“Apostle Jenkins beat his son till the child was senseless, because he stole a piece of bread and jam.”
“I wish I could be as religious as you, Caleb,” said his wife.
He tried to look modest under the compliment.
“Yes,” she went on fiercely, “for then I’d believe in Hell, and if I believed in Hell I’d sizzle there with joy just for the pleasure of seeing you and all your cursed apostles sizzling beside me.”
But Letizia did not often break out like this. Each year she became more silent, taking refuge from her surroundings in French novels which she bought out of the meagre allowance for clothes that her husband allowed her. She read French novels because she despised the more sentimental novelists of England that were so much in vogue at this date, making only an exception in favour of Thackeray, whom she read word for word as his books appeared. She was learning a bitter wisdom from literature in the shadows and the silence of her wounded heart. After eight years of married life she bore a son, who was called Joshua. There were moments when Letizia was minded to smother him where he lay beside her, so horribly did this homuncule reproduce the lineaments of her loathed husband.
Meanwhile, the factory flourished, Caleb Fuller became the leading citizen of Brigham and served three times as Mayor. He built a great gloomy house on the small hill that skirted the mean little town. He built, too, a great gloomy tabernacle for the Peculiar Children of God. He was elected chief apostle and sat high up in view of the congregation on a marble chair. He grew shaggy whiskers and suffered from piles. He found favour in the eyes of the Lord, sweating the poor and starving even the cows that gave him milk. Yes, the renown of Fuller’s Fireworks was spread far and wide. The factory grew larger year by year. And with it year by year waxed plumper the belly and the purse of Caleb himself, even as his soul shrivelled.
In 1851 after twenty years of merciless prosperity Caleb suffered his first setback by failing to secure the contract for the firework displays at the Great Exhibition. From the marble chair of the chief apostle he called upon the Peculiar Children of God to lament that their Father had temporarily turned away His countenance from them. Caleb beat his breast and bellowed and groaned, but he did not rend his garments of the best broadcloth, because that would have involved his buying new ones. The hulla-balloo in Bethesda was louder than that in a synagogue on the Day of Atonement, and after a vociferous prayer-meeting the Peculiar Children of God went back to their stuffy and secretive little houses, coveting their neighbours’ wives and their neighbours’ maids, but making the best of their own to express an unattainable ideal. Horrid stuffy little bedrooms with blue jets of gas burning dimly through the night-time. Heavy lumps of humanity snoring beneath heavy counterpanes. Lascivious backbiting of the coveted wives and maids on greasy conjugal pillows. Who in all that abode of prurient respectability and savage industrialism should strip Caleb’s soul bare? Who should not sympathise with the chief apostle of the Peculiar Children of God?