In three months she had ceased to pay rent for furniture; she had bought and paid for it, and was making weekly deposits of little sums in the savings bank. Then her husband came back. Where his thousand dollars had gone you may judge, when I tell you that Athalia had to go and redeem his trunk, retained on board a brig for his passage. He could not go himself for it, he was sick; with what complaint you may easily judge; I shall not tell you, as he did not tell his wife, until she too was sick, and in her ignorance, neglected to call a physician, until so bad that she was laid up from work, and of course lost custom. How her little store melted under this accumulation of expense! Finally, they got agoing again, and she persuaded him to get into some kind of employment. What could he do? There was but one "genteel"—mark the word—business that he knew of. He became a bar keeper. He had one regular customer. It was Walter Morgan!
Down hill is an easy road. He took it.
Athalia soon found some of her best customers dropping off.
"What was the cause?"
There were two. In the first place Walter had been the means of getting a notorious courtezan to give her custom to his wife. He brought her there and introduced her as Mrs. Layton, formerly of South Carolina, now living with her nieces and daughter in this city. She used to come often, always in her carriage, with liveried servants.
Once Athalia rode home with her to fit a dress to "a sick young lady, that boarded with her." She found that Mrs. Layton lived in an elegant four story house, near a church and in a very respectable neighborhood in a fashionable street.
Her rooms were furnished with a degree of splendor almost equal to the Morgans. Little did she suspect the character of the house, particularly as her husband had introduced her there.
But there was another cause why she lost her best customers. In a fashionable soirée, to which Walter still found his way occasionally, when questioned by a score of his old acquaintances, with whom he used to flirt, and every one of whom were envious and jealous of Athalia, they rallied him most unmercifully upon his marriage with a sewing girl, and then the base cowardly wretch—rum makes such of gentlemen—declared upon his honor that he was not married. It was only a marriage of convenience.
"A mistress—a mistress—oh! that alters the case. And only to think we have been getting the shameless thing to make our common dresses. Well, I never will go near her again."
"Nor I. Nor I. Nor I."