IV
Poor Amelia, in her bedroom, in the chilly December dusk, sopped her eyes with cold water and looked in the glass. "I mustn't cry any more," she said to herself, despairingly—"they're so red now!"
A door opened down-stairs, and there was a burst of laughter; and Mrs. Dilworth, in the cold twilight, went on sopping her eyes. Tom and the girls evidently didn't need her. "They could get along just as well without me. And if the Lord would take me, Tom could—could—so he could—"
Her soul was dumb, even to itself; but she knew what it was that Tom "could" do.
And she knew it without bitterness. Like every other woman whose love for her husband has in it the maternal element (and most good women's love has this element), she had always felt that if she died Thomas ought to marry again; but this simple creature went one ahead of that rather elementary feeling, and specified: she was willing to have him marry her.
"If the Lord would only remove me," said poor Milly, looking miserably in the glass at her plump figure, which showed no indications of removal. Her eyes were hopelessly red; she didn't see how she could possibly go down to supper. But of course she had to go down. The mother of a family and the mistress of one servant must go down to supper, no matter what the condition of her eyes may be. She slunk into her seat behind her teacups, and scarcely dared to look about her noisy, hungry circle, still less at her Thomas, who was smiling to himself, but who did not share his amusement with his family. Still, when he suddenly said something about the refreshment of talking to intelligent people, it was not hard to guess the direction of his thoughts. "It sharpens your brains up," said Thomas. "I was going to suggest, Milly, that you should ask Helen Hayes to tea again; but she's got company; and when they leave she's going off to make a visit to some of her relations, she tells me."
Amelia's mild lips tightened silently. So they had been together again. Her hand shook as she poured out another cup of tea for her Thomas, who took that moment to say, with all a husband's candor, that she was getting fatter than ever. "I thought you were starving yourself to get thin, Milly?" he said, smiling. Milly smiled, too, faintly; but she was saying to herself: "What did they talk about? How long were they together? Oh, if I could only be taken away!"
It would be interesting to follow the processes of a mind like Mrs. Dilworth's: how did a wife and mother of children reach the point of feeling that her family would be better off without her? Anybody in Old Chester could have told her such a belief was folly, and wicked folly at that. But it seemed just plain reason to Milly Dilworth: "I'm not necessary to anybody. Thomas likes somebody younger. He can't marry her because I'm alive; he could marry her (and she would be good to the children) if I were not here. But I am!" she would end, hopelessly.
Morning after morning, as she went about her household duties, or when before tea she sat in her little, old rocking-chair, mending the family stockings, she used to break herself against the hopelessness of the situation: She was there; and unless the Lord would remove her (any other sort of removal was impossible to her devout imagination) Tom could not have what he wanted—yes, and needed, too. For it was at this period that Mrs. Dilworth recognized, what most wives of men do recognize at one time or another, that although being a wife and mother is the only vocation of a married woman, being a husband and father is only one of many vocations of a married man. Hence the companionship of an eminently worthy wife is almost never enough for the male creature. When this harsh truth burst upon Milly, she wiped her eyes on the stocking she was mending and groaned aloud. But she did not rail against the fact, nor did she attempt to deny it; wherein she showed a superfeminine intelligence. She only said to herself that Thomas could not have what he wanted while she was alive; yet she couldn't, it seemed, die, although she was so miserable that she didn't know how she lived! It was at this point that she began to make wild schemes to relieve the situation: Suppose she asked that Hayes girl to come and make them a visit? But no—a man wants more than to just look at a pretty girl across the table. Suppose she went away herself and made a visit, and asked Miss Helen Hayes to come and keep house for her? (Like all good wives, Milly had no hesitation in offering up another woman to the pleasure of her lord.) No; people would talk about Tom if she did that.... The amount of it was, poor Milly, although she did not know it, was really planning that Thomas should have two wives at the same time—and, dear me! how that would simplify things! There would be the old, sensible, matter-of-fact wife to mend his stockings and order his good dinner and nurse him through the indigestion consequent upon the dinner—the old, anxious wife, who has had the children and reared them, who has planned and economized and toiled with him, who has borne the burden and heat of the day at his side—the prosaic wife, who gives, unasked, such good advice. Every one will admit that this elderly person has been, and (to a limited degree) still is, a necessity to every Thomas. But sometimes Thomas thinks, in his simple way, that it would be pleasant to have the luxuries as well as the necessities of life; to have, for instance, a young wife—a pretty wife, clever and light-hearted and gayly tyrannical; a wife who never knew enough to advise anybody, who should be a relaxation and a refreshment, and just a little bit of a fool; for, as every intelligent (unmarried) woman knows, men like fools; feminine fools. Of course the trouble is that if you supply a wife for two sides of a man's character—for utility, so to speak, and for diversion—he may, not unreasonably, demand that every side and angle and facet of his jewel-like nature have its own feminine setting. That was probably Solomon's idea. Well, well! the time is not yet for this reasonable arrangement; and it is possible that trade in galvanized buckets will never warrant its extensive existence.
But all this is very frivolous compared to the reality of this poor woman's pain, a pain that finally evolved a plan which, although less picturesque than the harem, was of the same grade in the eye of the law, though, curiously enough, not in her own eye. She could not, as she expressed it to herself, be dead, so that her Thomas might have his wish; but he could think she was dead.