But Yethill hearkened not. There was excitement at the Arsenal, and much babbling in barracks, the day on which it was publicly made known that Yethill contemplated giving an object-lesson in support of his great system very shortly.
The object was Miss Sallis.
Miss Sallis was a fluffy little pink-and-white girl, the daughter of a retired Admiral, who lived near the Dockyard.
Men had dined with Miss Sallis, and played tennis with Miss Sallis, and flirted with Miss Sallis, during several seasons past. Some of them had asked for her hand—she wore fives in gloves—and had not got it. Thus, Yethill’s announcement was received with a certain degree of risibility. No bets were made upon the chances of Yethill’s getting her, the odds against his acceptance were too tremendous. Yethill proposed. He mentioned that his prospects of advancement in the Service were not very promising; that his scientific pursuits would have to be relinquished if he were to set up an establishment on even a moderate scale, and that he did not intend to relinquish those pursuits; that there were several hereditary diseases in his family; that, while bestowing upon the lady he honored with the offer of his hand a regard which justified his proposal, he should not have made that proposal had the lady been poor—with other statements of equal candor. A more wonderful proposal was never made.
What was more wonderful still, Miss Sallis accepted him! He bought her a ring, containing three small fragments of petrified red-currant jelly, embedded in fifteen-carat gold; and when she asked him to put it on her finger said, “Oh, rot!� and wouldn’t. He spent a certain amount of time with his betrothed, but invariably carried a scientific work in his pocket, wherein he might openly take refuge when the primrose paths of love proved wearisome. He forbade her to dance with other men, and did not dance with her himself. He snubbed her when she asked questions about his camera, his lathe, his batteries, and tried timidly to be interested in magnets and inductors, acids and cells, because they interested him. He carried out his system thoroughly. If Miss Sallis had any illusions about Yethill he bowled the poor little thing over, right and left, like ninepins, long before the wedding day.
With the loss of her illusions went some of her good looks. She made a pretty-looking little bride. With her fluffy pale hair, her pink nose, and her pink eyelids, a not remote resemblance to an Angora kitten was traced in her. She was married in a traveling-gown, without any bridesmaids; and after the wedding-breakfast Captain and Mrs. Yethill drove home to their lodgings on the Common. The wedding-trip had been abandoned—from no lack of money, but because Yethill said he had had enough of traveling, and the custom of carrying a bride away, as if in triumph, to the accompaniment of rice and slippers, was “guff.� He certainly played the gorilla as if to the manner born. The poor little woman loved him; he loved her. But as his skull was made of seven-inch armor-plate, he went on knocking it against his system. He had got used to the gorilla-business, and couldn’t leave it off. Yet, out of his wife’s sight and hearing, he was a doting husband. The Duke in the Story of Patient Griseldis must have been a man of Yethill’s stamp.
Mrs. Yethill, as time went on, began to be a walking manifestation of the effects of the system. She lost her gaiety and her pink cheeks; her smile became nervous and her dress dowdy. The little vanities, the little weaknesses, the little affectations, which had helped to make Miss Sallis charming, had been bullied out of Mrs. Yethill’s character until it was as destitute of any blade of verdure as a skating-rink. She had proved herself the most patient, loving, tolerant of wives; but Yethill went on trying her. She stood the trials, and he invented new tests—exactly as if she had been a Government bayonet or a regulation sword-blade. A bright man Yethill!
They were called upon, and returned visits, at intervals. A taste for society was one of the tendencies which were to be chastened. Female friends were prohibited, as being likely to sow the seed of incipient rebellion against the system.
“I don’t care, Tom, if I have you!� said Mrs. Yethill, patting her gorilla, who, mindful of his own tenets, was careful not to exhibit any appreciation of her attention. But he made up for it by boasting that evening in the smoking-room, until those who hearkened with difficulty prevented themselves from braining him with legs of chairs. Their wives would have commended them for the deed. Yethill had not many admirers about this period.
But he went on blindly. Can one ever forget how he crowed over having cured Mrs. Yethill of a tendency toward jealousy, of the vague and indiscriminating kind? The prescription consisted in posting to himself letters highly scented and addressed in a variety of feminine scrawls. Yethill was good at imitating handwriting!—and he absented himself from the domestic hearth for several days together whenever there was a recurrence of the symptoms. The method wrought a wonderful cure; but Mrs. Yethill began to grow elderly from about this period. You could hardly have called her a young woman, when the baby came, and brought his mother’s lost youth back to her, clenched in one pudgy hand. The vanished roses fluttered back and perched upon her thin cheekbones again. She was heard to laugh. Her husband, who secretly adored her, and who had continued to stick to the system more from a desire for her glorification than his own, feared a retrogression. So he thought out a new torture or two, and put them into active application. He sneered at the puerilities of nursery talk. He downcried the beauty and attainments of the baby when she praised them. He pooh-poohed her motherly fears, when the ailments inseparable from the joyous period of infancy overtook his heir. This was the last straw laid upon Mrs. Yethill’s aching shoulders. The downfall of the great system followed.