“She is rather an encumbrance—that’s a fact,” quietly replied Mrs. Thompson. “But we are never troubled with her.”
“She knows better than to come near me,” said the captain, with a wise shake of the head. “Why, she had the impudence to taunt me with having turned my own son out of doors!”
“Indeed!” said his wife, hardly able to conceal a smile.
“Yes, she did; and she’d heard that, spite of me, the boy had gone through college. Plague take her!”
“Indeed! Well, Aunt Hulda never picks her words. She is sometimes very aggravating.”
“Aggravating! She’s insolent. The idea of her daring to talk so to me! O, if there was only a law to shut the mouths of such meddling old tattlers, I’d spend every cent I have but what I’d lock her up where her voice could never be heard!”
The captain, unable longer to keep quiet, here rose, dashed about the room two or three times, then darted out, and his angry tirade died away in the distance as he made his way to the barn.
Mrs Thompson sat quiet a moment, then burst into such a merry peal of laughter that the Canary in the cage above her head was inspired, and burst into a torrent of song. The audacity of Aunt Hulda seemed to affect Mrs. Thompson far less severely than it did her husband, for that was the cause of her mirth.
Had Captain Thompson really been a bad man, his frequent outbursts of passion might have terrified, and his fierce threats have pained her; but a long acquaintance with the defect in his otherwise good disposition had made these stormy passages too familiar to be dreaded. His one defect—Mrs. Thompson’s cross—was obstinacy. Give the man his own way, and he was ready for any good act or work: thwart him in the slightest particular, and he was immovable. And so Mrs. Thompson, like a wise woman, never openly arrayed herself against his wishes or opinions. And yet the captain would have been astonished, had he calmly investigated the matter, to find how seldom he really had his own way. This shrewd woman knowing it was useless to combat his stubborn spirit, was continually setting up safety-rods to attract this destructive fluid where it could do no harm; contriving plans for him to combat, herself triumphing in their downfall, while he exulted in his supposed victory.
Miss Becky’s career was a case in point. She had been pained to see and hear of the girl’s wild, mischievous pranks, and felt it was time she should be sent to school. She took occasion one day when, in sight of the window, Becky had climbed up the lightning-rod on the church, and seated herself in a window over the door, to call her husband’s attention to the fact, with the remark that “such exercise must be excellent for a girl’s constitution.” The captain fired up at once, denounced such tomboy tricks, and declared the girl should go to school, or he’d know the reason why.