“You think being rude to your friends and unkind to your wife a silly trifle, do you?” inquired Alice.
Harry’s colour rose as he took a turn up and down the room to compose his feelings ere he would trust himself to reply. “You want to make me angry,” he said, “but I do not intend to afford you that satisfaction. Listen to me,” he continued, seeing that his wife was again about to interrupt him, “listen to me, and when you have heard what I am about to say, you can reply as you please. I made this engagement to oblige my friend, without at the moment recollecting that to-day was the time appointed for calling on the Duchess; but when I reflected that one was business of importance, and the other a mere visit of ceremony, I hoped and believed you would be reasonable enough, when I should have explained the matter to you, not even to wish me to give up my engagement, and would exercise sufficient common sense and self-control, to go and pay the visit alone.”
“Then you thought wrongly,” returned Alice, with vehemence; “if you required a wife who could go about by herself and visit a set of proud, stiff people, who are strangers to her, and keep up your position in the county, while you are out hunting and shooting all day, for your own selfish amusement, you should have chosen some fashionable woman of the world, and not a poor simple country girl like myself, who relied on your affection to protect and encourage her;” and here Alice showed strong symptoms of a disposition to bring that “young wife’s last resource” of a flood of tears to bear upon her disobedient and refractory spouse.
Harry, seeing this, and having been throughout the interview haunted by a latent consciousness that he was in the wrong, was strongly tempted to yield, and, dispatching a messenger to Tom Rattleworth furnished with some good and sufficient social white lie to account for his non-appearance, to stay quietly at home till the time should have arrived to accompany his wife to visit their aristocratic neighbours; but, unhappily, Colonel Crossman’s caution, “You’ve married a nice gal and a pretty gal, take care you don’t go and spoil her,” flashed across him: “women are all alike, more or less; it’s the nature of ’em to choose to have their own way; if you indulge ’em at first, they will be your masters ever after; show your wife she has met her match,” &c. &c.—these, and such like precepts, rang in Harry’s ears. Alice was angry and unreasonable, striving for the upper hand, in fact; he must not permit this: for her sake, as much as for his own, he was called upon to assert himself, and vindicate his marital authority. Yes, painful as it was to his feelings to speak or act harshly to his young wife, whom, even at that moment, he cared for more than any other created being, he would give her a lesson which should cure the evil at once and for ever. So putting on a very grave look he began: “My dear Alice, you are forgetting yourself, forgetting our relative positions; but there is a quiet way of settling such affairs; verbose discussions of this nature do not suit me—I am essentially a man of action. It is the husband’s right to command, the wife’s duty to obey. I had hoped your own proper feeling would have saved me the pain of being forced to remind you of this. I must now add, that I consider myself bound to fulfil my engagement to my friend, and intend to do so: during my absence, it is my wish and desire that you should drive and call on the Duchess of Brentwood; if, which I can scarcely conceive possible, you still refuse to do as I have pointed out, I shall, before I leave this room, write a note to Lady Allerton, informing her that we are unable to dine with her to-morrow, without assigning any cause whatsoever for this change of intention—which, as I cannot give the true reason, and will not stoop to invent a false one, is the only course left open to me.”
Having delivered himself calmly and firmly of this despotic speech, Harry folded his arms across his broad chest, and leaning his autocratic back against the chimney-piece, stood looking as if he felt himself completely “monarch of all he surveyed,” his wife included. Meanwhile a fearful struggle between good and evil was proceeding in Alice’s mind; a kind word or look would instantly have caused the good to triumph: but her husband stood cold and inexorable as a statue of Fate. Then the same personage who tempted Eve to the sin which lost her Eden, suddenly caused to flash across Alice’s recollection all Mrs. Crossman’s arguments, and she determined to follow her advice, to “pluck up a spirit, and treat her husband as he treated her,” &c. Accordingly, by a great effort restraining her tears, which during Harry’s harangue had begun to flow, she looked up with flashing eyes and crimson cheeks, as she replied:
“The obedience you require is not that of a wife but of a slave, and I refuse to yield it. You have treated me unkindly and unjustly, and I will not sacrifice myself to oblige you.” Harry made no reply, though his lips moved convulsively, as though he could scarcely command himself to keep silence; then snatching pen and ink, he scrawled a hasty note, sealed and directed it, and rising, quitted the room without uttering a single word. As the door closed behind him, the tears which Alice had hitherto with such difficulty repressed, burst forth unrestrained. She was roused from a paroxysm of weeping by the sound of horses’ feet, and springing to the window, reached it in time to see Harry give a note to a groom, who rode away at speed in the direction of Allerton House; then mounting his own horse, he also galloped off, ere Alice could muster sufficient presence of mind to attempt to recall him.
CHAPTER XXVI.—THE ATMOSPHERE REMAINS CLOUDY.
Falling out with the wife of one’s bosom is a process that bears a marked affinity to two other domestic operations which, from time immemorial, have lapsed into well-merited disrepute—viz., quarrelling with one’s bread and butter, and cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face; the same moral but uncomfortable necessity of inherent self-chastisement being common to all three. Thus Harry Coverdale, having vindicated his marital dignity, and galloped off the irritation consequent upon so acting, heartily wished the deed undone, and Alice and himself friends again; for, little as he appeared to prize it, her affection had become necessary to him, and he could no more do without it, than he could have dispensed with sunshine in summer, or fires at Christmas. Accordingly it was in no very amiable frame of mind that he joined his fox-hunting ally; and it required all the allurements of oysters, porter, devilled bones, and unimpeachable port wine, to enable him to “cast dull care away,” sufficiently to take a proper and sportsman-like interest in all the minutiæ of the proposed transfer of stock, canine and equestrian. Once fairly in for it, however, his stable-minded propensities asserted themselves, and he spent a deeply interesting afternoon in feeling back-sinews, detecting incipient curbs and spavins, condemning an incurable sand-crack, and otherwise testing and pronouncing judgment upon the quadrupedal inmates of Squire Broomfield’s hunting stables. As the waning light heralded the approach of dinner-time (that important epoch in the day with all country gentlemen, and with most London ones also), and the last horse had been trotted out and trotted in again, and its petticoats (which grooms call ‘body-clothing’) replaced, Harry’s thoughts fell back into their former gloomy train. Anxious, therefore, to learn how Alice was progressing under the weight of his high displeasure, he was about to take leave, when Tom Rattleworth drew him aside, observing in a confidential whisper,—