“Be calm! I do love you—I swear it by every thing I hold dear—by my child—our child, Julia! by my—by his—cradle!”
“You may go to sea in your stupid old cradle, if you like, and the baby too. I was a fool for ever having either of you.”
Mr. Short was thunderstruck. Such a triple-armed denunciation from the lips of that wife upon whom his very soul doted, was too much—it was annihilation. She boasted that she cared nothing for him—that was dreadful, but he felt that, were it alone, the blow could have been borne. She declared her indifference for his child, his darling, in whose sweet face he was fain to trace, day after day, the mingling beauties of mother and father, softened and purified by the light of infancy. This was awful! But, worse than this, than these, than all—she had actually abused his cradle! she had called it “that stupid old cradle!” Horror! At first he was too overwhelmed to act, or scarcely to think; while the lady kept pinning and unpinning a splendid lace berta around her still more splendid shoulders, and humming a bar of Benedetti’s Tu che a Dio spiegasti l’ali. At length Mr. Short determined to be indignant, and assert the supremacy of outraged manhood. So, swallowing a tremendous mouthful of air, and putting his hands ominously into his trowsers’ pockets, he began,
“Mrs. Short—”
But at the instant her name was uttered, the magnificent creature, throwing aside the slight covering of her beautiful neck, as if by an impulse of spontaneous grace, turned round in a majestic attitude and fixed her eyes, whose fathomless fountains gleamed mysteriously beneath their willowy lids, full upon him.
Reader, have you ever gone a deer-hunting? Well, the first time you took your stand by the “station” where the older sportsmen told you the game was about to pass—you waited with cocked gun and beating heart. At length a rustle—a bound in the bushes, and another in your bosom—you turn, and the noble creature stands directly before you, looking calmly into your very eyes. Well, reader, did you shoot that deer?
Mr. Short took a house the next day in Dishwater Place.
In other cities one day in the year answers for the anniversary of fools, but in Gotham it would seem to require two—and the first of May has come to be infinitely more celebrated for its orgies to Folly than its illustrious predecessor, the first of April. I am not about to attempt its history. Wrecks are its records; strewed along the curb-stones and side-walks that encompass the great ocean of metropolitan life, they beacon with the phosphoric light of decaying wash-stands, and the bleaching bones of dislocated bedsteads, the way to ruin. Suffice it that Mr. Short must “move” on the first of May, simply because every body moved. He had as yet no distinct notion of what he was about to undergo, but it hung over him like a vague, terrible, dark cloud. He counted the days and nights like a criminal waiting the day of his execution, or an undetected bankrupt for the maturity of his first note. He grew thin with apprehension and a kind of nameless terror, which, I have no doubt, furnished Bulwer the hint for his “Dweller of the Threshold.”
At length came the eventful day. Mr. Short had at first tried to escape the horror of moving when every body else was moving, by precipitating his departure from Madison Street—but it was impossible. The house in Dishwater Place was not to be “vacated” until twelve o’clock on the first of May; and at that precise hour, so his landlord informed him, he must “vacate” the premises in Madison Street. Only think of it! Two hundred thousand people turned simultaneously out of house and home, with bed and baggage, on the striking of the clock, and each rushing madly about through a wilderness of fugitive furniture and cracked crockery, in search of a place to lay his head and set down his kettles and bandboxes!