But Daniel didn’t take it quite in the same way. He humoured her at first, and cleaned the steps and cooked the dinner; but they say it was over the collect and the hymn on Sunday afternoon that they fell out.
He said if she went out Sunday mornings he should go out Sunday afternoons, and he should smoke his pipe out of doors and in the house, too. He wouldn’t give up his baccy for the best woman breathing.
They had awful quarrels about it, and neither would give way; and, what’s more, Mr. Smith wouldn’t hand over all his wages every week as Mr. Croker had done.
She must have led him a pretty life in consequence, for one Saturday morning Mr. Smith went out, and he didn’t come home to dinner, and he didn’t come home to tea. Mrs. Smith worked herself up into an awful rage, and was getting ready to make it warm for him when he did come in—but he didn’t come in to supper, and he didn’t come in all night.
Then she got awfully frightened, and the next morning, Sunday, she went down to the works and found out where the foreman lived, and went to see if he could tell her anything. The foreman told her that Dan had left his employment, having given a week’s notice the Saturday before, and had wished them all good-bye; and then she knew that her husband hadn’t meant to come home—in fact, that he had run away from her.
She went on anyhow about him then, and called him dreadful names, and said he was a villain, and vowed she would find him, if she went to the end of the world after him, and have him up for deserting her.
She didn’t get much sympathy from anybody, because people knew how she’d treated her first husband, and they said she didn’t deserve to have another; but some of the mischievous people played jokes on her. One would come to her and say, “Oh, Mrs. Smith, your husband was seen last night with a young woman in a public-house at Bow.”
Off she would go to the place, and insist on seeing the landlord, and make a fine to-do, accusing him of harbouring her husband. Wherever people told her her husband had been seen she would go, till she had been half over London, and she began to be known as “the old gal who was looking for her husband.”
But at last she gave up the search and sold up her home, and came back to live in her native village near where our house is; and then she pretended to be very poor, and used to ask herself out to tea to different people’s houses as often as she could, and would come in and talk about her wrongs, till people used to have to make all sorts of excuses to get rid of her.
She was said to wear all her clothes one set on top of the other, and she certainly looked very bulky always; and whenever she called and people were at tea, she’d have a cup, and manage to take a lump or two of sugar extra and put in her pocket, and was always asking to be obliged with a stamp, which she didn’t pay for, and all that sort of thing.