“You know that I would be glad to come in and stay in for ever and ever. It seems now as if life were made for nothing but talking to you. But my fellow-men no doubt think differently. There are such things as lectures, and I must prepare a few of them. I really have pressing work to do.”
What he furthermore had in his mind was, “I am bound as a gentleman to do it”; but he refrained from saying that: he was conscious that he sometimes said it too much; little by little he was learning that he was bumptious, and that he ought not to be.
“And you will come to-morrow?” still urged Bessie, grasping at the next best thing to to-day.
“Yes, I shall walk out. This driving every day won’t answer, on a professor’s salary,” he added, swelling his chest over this grand confession of poverty. “Besides, I need the exercise.”
“How good of you to walk so far merely to see me!” exclaimed the humble little beauty.
Until he came again she brooded over the joys of being his betrothed, and over the future, the far greater joy of being his wife. Was not this high hope in love, this confidence in the promises of marriage, out of place in Bessie? She has daily before her, in the mutual sayings and doings of her grandfather and his spouse, a woful instance of the jarring way in which the chariot-wheels of wedlock may run. Squire Tom Lauson does not get on angelically with his second wife. It is reported that she finds existence with him the greatest burden that she has ever yet borne, and that she testifies to her disgust with it in a fashion which is at times startlingly dramatic. If we arrive at the Lauson house on the day following the dialogue which has been reported, we shall witness one of her most effective exhibitions.
It is raining violently; an old-fashioned blue-light Puritan thunder-storm is raging over the Barham hills; the blinding flashes are instantaneously followed by the deafening peals; the air is full of sublime terror and danger. But to Mrs. Squire Lauson the tempest is so far from horrible that it is even welcome, friendly, and alluring, compared with her daily showers of conjugal misery. She has just finished one of those frequent contests with her husband, which her sickly petulance perpetually forces her to seek, and which nevertheless drive her frantic. In her wild, yet weak rage and misery, death seems a desirable refuge. Out of the open front door she rushes, out into the driving rain and blinding lightning, lifts her hands passionately toward Heaven, and prays for a flash to strike her dead.
After twice shrieking this horrible supplication, she dropped her arms with a gesture of sullen despair, and stalked slowly, reeking wet, into the house. In the hall, looking out upon this scene of demoniacal possession, sat Bessie Lauson and her maiden aunt, Miss Mercy Lauson, while behind them, coming from an inner room, appeared the burly figure of the old Squire. As Mrs. Lauson passed the two women, they drew a little aside with a sort of shrinking which arose partly from a desire to avoid her dripping garments, and partly from that awe with which most of us regard ungovernable passion. The Squire, on the contrary, met his wife with a sarcastic twinkle of his grim gray eyes, and a scoff which had the humor discoverable in the contrast between total indifference and furious emotion.
“Closed your camp-meeting early, Mrs. Lauson,” said the old man; “can’t expect a streak of lightning for such a short service.”