For six weeks was Julia M’Iver as sober as the Chief Justice of England, or the President of the Supreme Court, and it was manifest that never a drop of anything stronger than river water had got beyond her parched lips.
Now, Gustavus triumphed as no man ever triumphed under less than an ovation itself; and Julia was forced to be contented with the limited tyranny of making him continue his domestic duties; for the more sober she was kept, the less she would do, and her time was chiefly occupied in reading novels, which Gustavus was glad to give her as an inadequate surrogation for whisky. But all this was too good to last, though how it should be interrupted, no man with less than the spirit of one Davo versatior could possibly tell. Jove’s greatness is, however, no less true, than the fact that Gustavus came in one night and found, and staggered with perfect amazement as he found, Mrs Julia M’Iver lying on the floor, more perfectly obnubilated, speechless, and senseless, from the effects of the liquid enemy, than he had ever seen her in his life. Yet there was no one near; the carrier had not called for a week; she could not have been absent from the house for more than half-an-hour; and he himself had been out stalking for exercise, and rejoicing in his triumph for no more than three full quarters. The matter seemed a mystery as deep as any that ever was covered by the Eleusinian veil; and having put her to bed, as he had done a thousand times before, he set about an investigation and search through all the premises, which ended in a look of gaunt amazement, and an ineffectual striding backwards and forwards, till he threw himself on a seat, and gave up the task in despair. Nor, after he had nursed her into sobriety, could he make a jot more of the inexplicable subject; for Julia had too much good sense to tell where she got the treasure, and only smiled at him as his heavy lips twisted themselves into a question, where, in the name of the author of all evil himself, she had fallen upon that infernal element.
No light was to be thrown upon the subject from any of the quarters from which evidence could have been looked for, and the circumstance might have remained as one of those mystical wonders that have perplexed mankind from the beginning of the world, and been passed over in despair, if Julia had afterwards remained sober, but she had scarcely recovered, and Gustavus had only begun to hope once more, when she was found again in the same state; and, every two days, or at farthest three, she repeated the habit, till at last she was as bad, if not worse, than she had ever been in the midst of dram shops in the city of Edinburgh. Never a word of explanation would she give on the subject; the carrier was watched, and found to deposit nothing; the inhabitants at the distance of miles were interrogated in vain; the house was again searched—no one had been seen to call, and all was as obscure as the numbers of Pythagoras, the Bæotic enigma, or the poems of Carcinus; the deuce a beam of light could Gustavus get for love or money, to clear up the dark mystery.
CHAPTER VI.
GUSTAVUS IS MYSTIFIED, AND RESOLVES ON A SCHEME PERFECTLY ORIGINAL.
He had now retreated from a bad position to one a mighty deal worse; for, in the midst of a town, he could sometimes see a friend, and smoke a pipe, in the fumes of which all his cares were, for a time, enveloped, and kept from the eyes of his haunted fancy; but now, in the midst of a comparative wilderness, he had no associate, but that very limb of Satan herself, that was the source and origin of the misery to which he was enslaved. He was, besides, rolled up in a cloud of mystery, in which the wicked enchantress sat and mocked him, like some of those eastern genii, that love to look and speak through thick vapours which increase the mystic character of their power. Still she contrived to get intoxicated; and, so vain had been his efforts to trace the source of the evil, that he verily believed the imp was possessed of some charm whereby she realized a compact with the enemy of mankind. If he went out to stalk round the house and brood over his misfortunes, he found that she had, in the meantime, got herself made perfect in insensibility; and if she, by any means, got to a short distance from the house unobserved, she returned in a condition no less lamentable. It was a big, crying evil, fronted with shame, and adminicled with devilries of every degree and colour that ever came from the box of Pandora. It was impossible that man could stand it; and necessity, the mother of invention, stung the obtuse brain of Gustavus to something like the ingenium perfervidum of genius itself. He knew very well that he had terrified men; and, indeed, as love is said to be inspired by a look, so one glance of him was, of a surety, sufficient to have produced fear in any one but Julia, who valued his fierce looks no more than if they had been smiles. But he could do more than look—he could threaten; and the question that troubled him, for a time, was, what he should threaten; for he had made up his mind to terrify her in some way; and the sheer necessity of projecting something worthy of himself, was the parent of one of the most extraordinary expedients that ever came from the brain of genius.
The expedient was this: He told her, with a big oath, and a face at which the walls of St Sebastian might have trembled to their foundations, that, the first time he found her intoxicated, he would put her in a coffin, and actually bury her in the earth, as deep and sure as ever Jonah was buried in the belly of the biggest monster of the deep. Nor was the threat a sheer gust of breath, for he immediately set about making a real coffin—a performance which he executed very well, painting it as black as fashion requires, and studding it with a goodly portion of white buttons, which he tore from a mass of old regimentals; and, having finished it, he placed it in his bedroom, as a grim indication of the reality of his intentions. But the woman who could defy the terrors of such a face as that of Gustavus M’Iver, had nothing to fear from the sight of a coffin; and so, of a surety, it turned out—for the determined baggage not only laughed broad in his countenance, but told him to it, that, so long as he was cowardly enough to have any fear of the gallows, she had not a jot of reason to be afraid of being buried alive.
Both parties, in this way, seemed equally determined. Gustavus took his usual mighty strides along the room, and set the pulleys of his facial muscles in rapid play; and Julia, the pert minx, indulged in her laughing mockery, that seemed to set him and his coffin at defiance. That she was as serious as Socrates in her disbelief of his intentions, was very soon made manifest—for the coffin had not been three days old, when she got as drunk as Midas; and that he was apparently as determined as Draed, he very soon gave suitable demonstrations—for, in place of lifting her into bed according to his usual practice, he placed her into the grim chest, and, putting a mattock on the top of it, he hoisted it on his shoulders, and strode away forth to a wood as dark as the recesses of the Cumæan witch, that stood at some distance from his habitation. There, as good fortune would have it, he found, already dug to his hand, a deep hole, round the edges of which grew a profusion of bushes and furze, sufficient to make the pit as grim and frightful as the very grave itself; and there, having deposited his charge, with plenty of room for breath through the holes he had made in the lid, he turned him round, and stalked away home to cook his dinner.