Lover and Husband: A Novel

by Mrs. Molesworth

Awful words! with bated breath only to be murmured, and reverence approaching that of Mrs. Appleby as she peeped out of the kitchen at the end of the passage, to behold, though at a distance, her lodger’s illustrious visitor.

For Mrs. Baxter was not in the least pretty. Her “air,” or “style” as dressmakers say, was the whole secret of the admiration she excited in the Millington world.

It was thought good taste to admire her, as “far more than a merely pretty person,” —there was a faint flavour of aristocratic proclivities in the refinement of perception which saw more in this plain-looking little woman than in the sweet, rosy beauty we all love as we do the daisies, which depends not on the sweep of the robe or the richness of the material in which it is clothed. For, though I tremble while saying it, at my own audacity, there is not the shadow of a doubt that the magnificence of Mrs. Baxter was more than half due to her clothes. The other half lay simply in her entire, unimpregnable self-satisfaction, a quality far surpassing the fainter shades of vanity or self-conceit, which enabled her to hold her small person erect as a poker, which would have carried her without the slightest embarrassment through any conceivable womanly ordeal, from being presented at court, to rating (and soundly, too), a six-foot “Jeames” who would have made at least three of herself.

Ideas, I was going to say, she had none. But this is incorrect. She had two—herself and Mr. Baxter—and round these, revolving as lesser satellites, deriving of course all their glory from the greater luminaries, “the little Baxters.” You could hardly have called her purse-proud. She was rather purse-accepting. Money to her was a simple fact, a necessity of existence like the air we breathe, the blood that flows in our veins. How people lived without it, had, once or twice in her life, occurred to her as a curious problem, with which, however, she was in no wise concerned, any more than one might be with the manner of life or physical peculiarities of the inhabitants of one of the fixed stars. But that by any terrible mistake on the part of Providence, she, or Mr. Baxter, or any of the little Baxters could ever come to want money, to have even to think about it at all, never entered the somewhat circumscribed space allotted to her brain.

There were poor people in the world, she knew. At least, if questioned on the subject, she would of course have admitted the fact, adding doubtless, that Mr. Baxter gave largely to charitable institutions, and that she herself had more than once officiated as lady patroness at some fancy fair or charity ball.

Poor people in the world? Yes, of course there are. But so likewise are there lions and tigers, and various species of ferocious or disagreeable animals, black beetles and toads, and black people and cannibals who eat each other. Ugh! But they don’t come in our way, and so there’s no use thinking of them.

So much for Mrs. Baxter’s “philosophy of life and things.” Breeding, in the generally accepted sense of the word, as might have been expected from her Millington education, she had none. Always of course excepting the imposing “air de duchesse,” which really was very wonderful in its way, and may be cited as an instance of the great perfection to which electro-plate has been brought in these modern days. Breeding of the higher kind, culture of mind and spirit, she was even yet more deficient in. Under no possible circumstances, indeed, could such have been attainable by her to any great extent.

Yet after all she was far from a bad little woman; only her light was so very small! Not even sufficient to make visible to the owner thereof the surrounding darkness. Which quotation by-the-by is hardly applicable to immaterial objects, for we are not spiritually in such a very hopeless condition if we have attained to a perception of the darkness yet to be dispersed; we are some little way up the ladder when our sight descries the bewildering multitude of rungs yet to be ascended.

Mrs. Baxter, I say, was not a bad little woman. She was the most dutiful of wives and “exemplary” of mothers; she paid her bills punctually, and nursed her babies irreproachably. Which latter occupation may be considered as the great end of her existence, as year after year brought a new olive branch to the Baxter nursery, each in turn received by its parents with perfect equanimity, and installed in its place as a member of the august household.

She went to church twice every Sunday throughout the year, excepting during the few weeks of her customary retirement; she never lost her temper, and she spoke kindly to the housemaid when she had the toothache.