Lenette did what every good wife, and her lap dog, would have done; she left off the noise by degrees. At last she laid down the besom, and merely whisked three straws and a little feather fluff gently with the hair-broom, from under the bed, not making as much noise even as he did with his writing. However the editor of the ‘Devil’s Papers’ managed to hear it, in a manner beyond his fondest hopes. He rose up, went to the bedroom door and called in at the room, “My darling, it’s every bit as hellish a torment to me if I can hear it at all. You may fan those miserable sweepings with a peacock’s feather, or a holy-water asperger, or you may puff them away with a pair of bellows, but I and my poor book must suffer and pay the piper all the same.”
“I’m quite done now, at all events,” she said.
He set to work again, and gaily took up the threads of his fourth satire, “Concerning the five Monsters and their receptacles, whereon I at first intended to subsist.”
Meanwhile Lenette gently closed the door, so that he was driven to the conclusion that there was something or other going on to annoy him again in his Gehenna and place of penitence. He laid down his pen and cried—
“Lenette, I can’t hear very distinctly what it is—but you’re up to something or other in there that I can not stand. For God’s dear sake, stop it at once, do put a period to my martyrdom and sorrows of Werther, for this one day—come here, let me see you.”
She answered, all out of breath with hard work—
“I’m not doing anything.”
He got up and opened the door of his chamber of torture. There was his wife rubbing away with a piece of grey flannel, polishing up the green rails of the bed. The author of this history once lay sick of smallpox in a bed of this kind, and knows them well. But the reader may not be aware that a green slumber cage of this kind is a good deal like a magnified canaries’ breeding cage with its latticed folding doors or portcullises, and that this trellis and hothouse for dreams is, though less handsome in appearance, much better for health than our heavy bastille towers all hung about with curtains which keep away every breath of fresh air. The advocate swallowed about half a pint of bedroom air, and said, in measured accents—
“You’re at your brushing and sweeping again, are you? although you know quite well that I’m sitting there working like a slave for you and myself too, and that I’ve been writing away for the last hour with scarcely an idea in my head. Oh! my heavenly better half! out with all your cartridges at one shot, for God’s sake, and don’t finish me off altogether with that rag of yours.”
Lenette, full of astonishment said, “It’s simply impossible, old man. that you can hear me in the next room”—and polished away harder than ever. He took her hand, somewhat hastily, though not roughly, and said in a louder tone, “Come, get up!—It’s exactly that which I complain of, that I can’t hear you in the next room; I’m obliged to rack my brains to guess what you’re at—and the only ideas left in my head are connected with brushing and scrubbing, so that all the brilliant notions which I might otherwise be putting down on paper are driven away. My darling child, nobody could possibly sit and work away here more composedly and contentedly than I, if it were only grape-shot and canister, howitzer shells, and hundred-pounders that you were banging away with at my back out of these embrasures of yours. What it is that I really can not stand, is a quiet noise.”