Any one would laugh at the foolish things I did. I kept the kettle boiling, day and night, until there was a hole in it, and I had to buy another; I dusted all the chairs three times a day; I kept a bunch of roses on the window-sill, and cut a fresh tea-rose, every morn and evening, to go into Kitty’s bosom, when she should appear. I ordered a cold chicken every day from Mr. Rasp, and garnished it with parsley, and handed it over with a sigh to Mrs. Tompkins, when nobody came to taste it; and I made Polly Tompkins sleep with a string round her arm, and the end hanging out of the window. Every man on the place swore that I was cracked, except Selsey Bill, who stuck a spade up at my door.
“Afore the rust cometh down the blade of that there tool, you’ll be a happy man, Master Kit,” he said; and as he spoke, his little squinny eyes were bright with something that removes the rust of human nature’s metal.
At last I was truly getting genuinely cracked. Another week of burning hope and weltering dejection, of tossing to the sky and tumbling to the depths of darkness, must have left my dull brain empty of the little gift God put in it.
When a whole month had expired from the day when hope awoke, reason fell upon me like a flail, and hope was chaff. I made my usual preparations, with a bitter grin at them, and set the roses in the window, with contempt of their loveliness.
“The last time of all this tomfoolery,” I said; “to-morrow I shall work hard again. Everything is lies, and tricks, and rot. Kitty has taken up with some fellow, and they are laughing at me in some gambling-den. I have a great mind to smash it up altogether. I shall sleep where that Regulus slept to-night. Much good I did by stealing him. Hard work is the only thing worth doing.”
It was the first time that I had ever dared to think such a shameful thing of my pure wife; and I hope that I did not think it now, but said it by the devil’s prompting. If any one had said it in my hearing, he would have said little else for another month. And I could have knocked my own self on the head, with great pleasure, when I came to think of it.
We laugh very nicely—when they cannot hear us—at women, for not knowing their own minds; but no woman ever born, since they began to bear us, could have gainsayed herself, as a man did, that day. I wandered about and lay under trees, for now it was the 15th of June, and the weather warm and sunny; then I climbed up trees and watched the river, and the roads, and even the meadow-path, where the cows were, and the mushrooms grew. Then I went and had a talk with Widow Cutthumb, and when she began to run down the race of women, I went so much further, that she grew quite sharp, and extolled them, and put all the blame upon us. It was waste of time to reason with her; so I let her have her own way, as they always do.
Then I went to the butcher’s, and saw a fine sweet-bread, the very thing for any one just come from a long journey, and perhaps a little giddy from the rolling of a ship. With a sigh of despair I pulled out half a crown, and made him lend me a basket and a clean white napkin. Then I could not run home with it quick enough, for it seemed as if some one would be dying without it; but as soon as I got to our door, I set it down, and could not bring myself even to enter the house. Away I went, and got into the loneliest place I could find; and being rather light of head from grief and want of food, fell over an old apple-trunk, and fell asleep beside it.
When I awoke, the sun was set; and the men (who were now working overtime, to be ready for the strawberries) were all gone home with their frails upon their backs, and their little ones coming down the road to meet them. Dizzily I pushed my way into a grassy alley, and sauntered homeward, wishing only to go home for ever.
The front-door was open, which did not surprise me, for I often left it so, and the basket containing the sweet-bread was gone, and the roses were moved from the window. The sound of my boots did not ring as it used, and the air seemed less empty, and softer. In a stupefied hurry, I opened the door of the parlour—and there sat Kitty!