Chapter III: Part 3

“She never knew,” said Mr. Fernalde, “she does not know to-day, that I died that night. I can’t say how I lived through those moments even. They were but moments she had stolen away. She had to return at once. We parted at the foot of the mock-orange walk, and I went to my bed and lay there in a trance of despair. Perhaps sunlight brought some relief. The parson told at the breakfast-table the news that Alicia was betrothed to the army officer I had seen. I wrote a word, saying I was called away. And I was gone a week or more. But in that blank I must have something to love me--to have an interest in. Better Rosalie than the absolute negation of those days. She thought nothing of my absence--after my return. She was as full of romance as a flower of nectar. And, to sum it up, if she was not the rose, she had lived with the rose. One day we married; and here we are. A long life, a happy life, and I have never regretted the day in it that made her my wife. After all, one cannot marry among the angels--clay must mate with clay.

“What do you say? Not love her, my child? You never were more mistaken. I love her tenderly, absorbingly. She is a perfect woman. She has been a perfect wife. She has made me calmly and completely happy. If once in a while the old hope, the old dream of a passion arises and sweeps before me in its bloom and light, it is because it means youth to me--that youth which we do not know till we are old--is itself the ideal that it holds up for worship. Yet, perfect as my wife is, fifty years of this smooth life with her wear something of the common-place, and if across their dead level of same content sometimes gleams the shining of Alicia’s face, it is not in any disloyalty to her. I often wonder what became of the lovely creature. Once I could not have spoken of her. At seldom times, when I sit alone by the fire, she comes and sits beside me, and gleams of light and shadow make a face with her sweetness, her beauty, her pensive and ethereal grace. Dear girl! I suppose she sleeps in her grave by this; but she is a shaft of the light of heaven in my memory!”

And Mr. Fernalde rose, walking to the window, just as the screen began to tremble, and a smothered cough, and then an undisguised one, betrayed to me, if not to him, that Mrs. Fernalde had heard the chief part of the monologue.

“And I had heard it in fragments and sections more than once before,” she afterwards told me with her pleasant smile. “I know it means nothing--that he is just as wholly mine as I am his--that our love is the imperishable sort--that we are welded into one by fifty years together. And perhaps it was ignoble of me to break the pretty bubble, to take away his little ideal, with which he has found comfort whenever I would have my own way too much. Yet I thought it was about time.”

But she said nothing of this at all as she came bustling round the corner of the screen that morning.

“There is such a gale blowing outside,” she said, “that the dust really rises in the house fit to choke one.”

“You haven’t caught cold, Rosalie?” said her husband, turning in concern.

“Not the least. But I shall if the hall-door is open another moment. There she comes now. Make haste, and bid Alicia good-bye, my love. She is just going.”

“Who?” he cried, suddenly opening his eyes like lamps in their deep settings.

“Alicia--Mrs. Talliafero--dear. She married again, you know. Oh, it has been a fine jest,” she cried, with her low laugh, “to think that you should not have recognized Alicia in all these weeks and months!”

Mr. Fernalde was silent for a few moments, looking at the cruel little lady before him, with her color like the half-tarnished rose, with the soft brilliancy of her smile. Then he crossed over the hearth before me, and he took her hands and bent down and kissed her mouth.

“My Rosalie,” said he, “will you not make my adieus to Mrs. Talliafero yourself? Tell her--tell her I have gone to the funeral of an old friend!”

MRS. CLAXTON’S SKELETON

MRS. CLAXTON’S SKELETON

She always carried it about with her; but it was not her bones. And as this is not a conundrum, I may as well say at once that it was--well, it was connected with her domestic difficulties.

Nobody, casually observing Mrs. Claxton, would have dreamed her to be the possessor of so disagreeable an article, least of all one that was constantly a companion, and that could not be locked up in a closet, and left behind when she went where folks were gay and happy.

For my own part, understanding how unreasonable it would be to expect any lot to be a perfect thing, and inclining towards the old saw about a skeleton in every closet, I sometimes used to wonder what earthly material there was from which Mrs. Claxton could get one up; yet felt tolerably sure, for all her smiles and her pleasant manners, for all her fineries and luxuries, that there must be something to make her resigned to the necessity of one day surrendering her hold upon those desirable things surrounding her at present in such abundance.

For why should Mrs. Claxton be an exception? Look up and down the hills, with the familiar sight that neighbors have, and you could have seen trouble in too many houses to be able to believe the Claxton house exempt. For in this house bitter, grinding poverty and pride had their perpetual battle-ground; that house death had robbed of its sunshine; in the next house the disgrace of a defalcation had made life a burden; still beyond, a cloud of insanity hung, ready to fall; here a drunken son, there an unfaithful husband; in such a house a frivolous wife, in such another idiotic children: up and down the streets, in every house, something; no matter what the compensations were, no matter how much happiness otherwise; yet always some one bitter thing, perhaps to give a better relish with its tang to all the sweet.

So what could Mrs. Claxton’s trouble be? She lived in the finest place in the town, her handsome house upon a sightly knoll, a shaven lawn dotted with noble trees sloping away from it on all sides. Within, it seemed to our rustic eyes a witch-land of beauty and of all the cunning appliances of art for comfort. She had her open landau and her span for summer driving, her sleighs full of costly robes for winter, her servants, her overflowing purse, her husband and children, her dresses. Yes, her dresses; no one in Claxtonberg had any to compare with them. She had the glory of setting the fashion, and of holding a lofty pre-eminence in it, and the bliss of knowing that the last new wrinkle in her pouf, or her sleeve, or her back hair was being studied every Sunday with an assiduity that put the prayer-book to open shame. And besides all this Mrs. Claxton was very pretty: everybody admired her; everybody else loved her. She had company when she pleased, so far as we knew; she went on journeys when she chose; and when the bishop came he always stayed with her. What was there out of which Mrs. Claxton’s skeleton could be made?

It could not be that this skeleton had found existence because her husband was not a distinguished man in politics, for no woman who had any regard for her own happiness, or his either, would want her husband in politics; and Mrs. Claxton had the greatest regard for the happiness of both. It could not be because she had no children, for she had four, fine ones. It could not be because her children were not boys or were not girls, for there were two sisters and two brothers among them. It couldn’t be because her husband was still in business, since his mills brought him in a royal revenue every year, and he would be lost without the business. It could not be because her husband was tired of her, for everybody in Claxtonberg knew to the contrary, knew that he surrounded his wife with everything heart could wish, knew that the breath of scandal had never approached him. It could not be because of any impending disease that was to darken her house, for they were all in a state of notorious health. What in the world could this skeleton be?

I had just as lief tell you as not--if you will listen.

When this lady first met the gentleman who became her husband, his high-bred courtesy, his knightly manner, rivalled that of the great dignitaries around them; he, not any of them, seemed to her the true nobleman; and, not to weary you, she accepted him the moment he asked her. She was the governess of a friend’s children, and the family were staying at some wonderful foreign baths where the marble basins were more than a mile around, and where the court came to bathe. Every morning the Majesties and Sublimities and high and mighty Excellencies went into the bath, king and queen and chamberlains, grand duchesses and princesses and ladies-in-waiting, and from unobserved chinks the commonalty watched the shoal of nobility disporting itself. And what a scene it was to watch! For the flannel bathing suits were under water, but out of water what elaborate hair-dressing, what a blaze of jewelled tiaras and coronets, what flashing diamond necklaces upon white throats, what point-lace fichus and berthas overlaid with strings of resplendent gems to the water’s edge, what loading of bracelets on bare arms, what glancing of rings on fingers! for the court was in full-dress in the presence of the sovereign.

As Mr. Claxton looked from the window of his room upon the brilliant scene he felt a lofty republican contempt--indeed, contempt was Mr. Claxton’s forte--which was not lessened when the crowd of commoners went in, in their turn, aping the bediamonded ways of those who went before. One young girl among the throng, who wore only the dress suitable to the occasion, and was without any other ornament than the shrouding veil of her own long hair, attracted him--in the first place by her simplicity, and in the next place by a manner that seemed to be at once sweet and stately: there was a sort of shy and startled look in her great soft brown eyes if one addressed her; there was so rich a color on her cheek too; and the features of her lovely face were so finely in keeping with that half-defiant carriage of the perfect head. In such a pack of frippery her plain attire was pre-eminence to Mr. Claxton, whose feelings were exceedingly ruffled; for he was accustomed to obsequious consideration at home, and here he was less than a cipher; and revenging himself by despising the whole affair, he knew no better way of proclaiming it than by passing over all the titled and spangled beauties, and devoting himself to this simple young girl. If, meanwhile, the titled beauties did not know of his existence, that was something he never suspected, and he lost no time in making the young girl’s acquaintance. It mattered not to him that she was a governess, as it would not if she had been a beggar and had attracted him. He was one of those men who consider their actions their own justification; his desires were a law to themselves. After he married her she would be Mrs. Claxton--a glory which every Claxton that had ever married felt to be quite capable of blotting out all that might ever have gone before in the lives and histories of the poor brides. As for the young girl, treated kindly by her friend, but kept in the background, and not wont to have the attention of young men, and with that vague longing for it natural to girls, somewhat lonely, and altogether dependent, her heart leaped up in gratitude to this stranger, with whose family and antecedents her friend was well acquainted. People said he was like a young prince: she never remembered to think, in liking to hear them, that princes are the masters of slaves, and that for a plain private to be a young prince simply meant that he was a person who would have his own way if he had to be a tyrant to do it. When he proposed she accepted him, as I said; she already loved him with devotion; she married him in all haste--to repent in all leisure.

And Mr. Claxton, making the tour of Europe like a good American, was suddenly summoned home by an event which left him the possessor of the great mills and the great business, and he installed his wife in his great house, and he felt that he had done more for her than she had a right to ask, and he expected from her thenceforward a slavish obedience.

To tell the whole truth, though, Mr. Claxton did not know that he expected a slavish obedience. His intention was to do right exactly, and perhaps lean to mercy’s side. He had been reared in a school that held the wife to be, so to say, a chattel, and he would have been as much surprised to find his wife differing from him as he would have been to hear his wooden dining-table speak up and complain of the dinner: he looked for absolute agreement. If you had asked him if he believed that a man had a right to beat his wife, he would have indignantly answered no, and demanded of you, furthermore, what it was you took him for; but if he himself had chanced to strike his wife, he would not have felt it an act to be questioned by anybody. His wife was his. That he did not put a rope round her neck and sell her in open market was out of his abounding condescension. He allowed her many favors--such, for instance, as the liberty to breathe. For her to reward him by having an opinion of her own on any subject would have astounded him. If he had chosen to take her children away from her he would have thought her complaint monstrous; if he had knocked down her own mother and trodden on her he would have thought her remonstrance culpable, and would have punished her for it to the best of his ability, not by whips and stocks, not by imprisonment or deprivation, but by withholding his royal favor in some signal manner. In fact, in Mr. Claxton’s ideal household there was but one will, one mind, one identity, and that was Mr. Claxton’s. And that household was a not at all uncommon instance of an unrecognized tyranny worse than Diocletian’s own.

In spite of all this, if you can believe me, Mr. Claxton loved his wife--not as he did his own soul, indeed, but next to that, one might say. She had only to ask--but ask she must--to have her wish gratified. If she were ill, he knew no peace, and let no one else know any, till she were well again. He admired her beauty, her lovely manner, her stately air; he did not object to that _soupçon_ of spirit when directed towards other people; he felt that she added a lustre to his station. He was, in short, very proud of her; but he would not for the world have had her know it. For where would discipline be then?

Well, it might perhaps have answered with somebody else, but it did not answer at all with Mrs. Claxton. In truth, Mr. Claxton had been married hardly a year before he began to suspect that he had a rebel in his house, or, as he phrased it, a viper in his bosom; and he prepared to take extraordinary measures.

As for Mrs. Claxton, her feeling for her husband was of the warmest; she regarded him for a long time as the best and greatest man alive, and by far the handsomest. She knew he had faults, but understood that all men abounded in faults, and presumed that other men’s faults were very much worse than his. She thought it likely that he could not have written the Iliad, but then she didn’t know that it was desirable to have written the Iliad; yet she was sure he could have written Tillotson’s _Sermons_, or Macaulay’s _Essays_, or Mill’s _Logic_, and that he could be President of the United States on any day he wished it, and confer new dignity upon the office. There was only one thing she would have liked different about him: she would have liked him to consider her more on an equality with himself.

And yet at first she used to question if that were not an unreasonable exaction on her part--she, who had been nothing but a poor little governess, to demand so much, and he the owner of the vast Claxtonberg mills, the descendant of the old Claxtons of Claxtonberg, a castle across the water that had defied assault for generations, and in which monarchs had held state, if the Claxtonberg legends could be trusted. Though, between ourselves, I always imagined that the person whom Mr. Claxton’s grandfather employed, after he had acquired wealth, to hunt up his family traditions for him, his coat-of-arms and crest, found only and exactly what his employer wanted him to find.

However that might be, Mrs. Claxton’s eyes used to follow her husband with an adoring look in them. His noble figure, his lofty bearing, the large, fair comeliness of his fresh face and its aquiline contour, his great gray eyes and his bright, curling hair, seemed to her a representation of the noblest type of manhood; the sound of his voice was music, the sound of his foot-fall was something she always ran to meet--that is, in the first year.

It was an odd little circumstance that caused Mrs. Claxton’s cloudy suspicion of her husband’s injustice to settle into an absolute curd of sourness. Odd, because so slight: it was the naming of their first child.

“You are looking peculiarly well, my love,” said Mr. Claxton, condescendingly, happening to see his wife in the glass as he drew his razor over the hone. “Like a flower in full bloom,” jocosely.

Mrs. Claxton blushed and looked lovelier yet. “I am so glad you think so,” said she. “I was really afraid I was falling off. And that would be such a shame, for I want the baby to remember me when I look my best.”

“Let me hear him,” said Mr. Claxton, gayly, “expressing any opinion other than my own on that subject, if he thinks best!” And he kissed his wife as she came and stood beside him while looking for something in the dressing-case drawer, and then he plunged into the business on hand.

“I think,” said Mrs. Claxton, after a few moments, looking up timidly, from the seat she had taken, to the spot where her husband stood holding the tip of his nose with one hand while he flourished his razor beneath it with the other--for Mr. Claxton never risked his greatness sufficiently to have a _valet de chambre_--“I think Henry would really be the fit name, after all, being yours, and your father’s--and your grandfather’s too, wasn’t it? And then, do you know, it was my father’s also. And I should so like to unite them all in one!”

I doubt if Mrs. Claxton would have ventured to reopen this subject, after a previous conversation, but for the little compliment she had received, and for the fact that when a man stands holding the tip of his nose in one hand, with his upper lip stretched like an apron beneath it, he is not altogether an object of awe.

But Mr. Claxton did not give an immediate answer. He seldom did; whether to signify that he was on such an altitude above common mortals that it took some time for the sound of their voices to reach him, or whether it cost him an effort to acknowledge the independent existence, and therefore the voluntary remarks, of anybody else in the universe, though just now he had the excuse of a delicate use of his razor. When he sought his shaving-paper, however, he turned and looked at his wife in some displeasure, reminiscent of that previous conversation.

“This is quite unnecessary, my love,” he said. “I told you I intended to revive an old family name sunk in desuetude.”

“But, my dear,” persisted Mrs. Claxton, “it would be so nice to continue the one name for four generations; it is a sort of immortality in itself--as if Henry Claxton never died.”

“Never died!” cried Mr. Claxton, nettled, since this very thing had been a temptation to him before resolving to rekindle the ancient family grandeur with one of the legendary names--“Never died! What blasphemy is this!” And he made himself livid with fresh lather.

“Blasphemy? How you talk! Why, you know what I mean, dear.”

“Pray how should I know what you mean? I know what you say. And it shocks me.”

“Well, never mind; it’s of no consequence.”

“Of no consequence that you shock me?” began the young prince.

“Oh, no, no, indeed!” said the trembling subject, shocked herself at offending him. “I mean it is of no consequence what I say. I talk so heedlessly, you know.”

“Indeed, I have reason to know it,” was the severe ejaculatory.

“And I am really sorry about it. I try to think twice before I speak, but--”

“I wish you found more success in the trial. A year ago it would have been less matter, but now Mrs. Claxton should never forget the dignity of her station, and that inconsiderate babbling detracts--”

“Oh, I don’t think I do anything like that!”

“When you say that it is of no consequence whether you shock me or not, you do.”

“But I didn’t say anything of the sort.”

“Don’t contradict me again, if you please.”

“Don’t you allow people to defend themselves?” said Mrs. Claxton, opening her brown eyes in a spirited way.

“I don’t allow people to insult me.”

“Insult you! What nonsense!” cried the wife at last. “But that is neither here nor there. We were speaking of the baby’s name. I am sure I had no intention, no idea, of offending you by suggesting a choice in the matter. It would give me such pleasure to remember my father in the name, and unite yours with it--Henry Claxton, Fourth,” said Mrs. Claxton, musingly, her thimble on her lip.

“We have had enough of that,” said Mr. Claxton, firmly, and quite vexed with her persistency. “The child’s name is Reginald.”

Mrs. Claxton stood up a moment in one of her sudden little angers that she was always under the necessity of humiliating herself about afterwards, and looked at the man as he engaged himself just then with his chin in a manner that made silence imperative, and she took advantage of the opportunity.

“I never heard of anything so outrageous in my life!” she exclaimed, passionately. “Anybody would suppose your wife was a mere bondwoman, the mother of your child a nonentity, that it was not as much mine as yours, more mine than yours! It is an odious piece of tyranny!”

Mr. Claxton gathered his mug and materials with one sweep of his hand, and faced her. “When you apologize to me for your utterly inexcusable language,” said he, “I shall re-enter this room, but not before.” And he intrenched himself in a spare chamber.

And after a couple of days of blank silence and loneliness and misery, of course Mrs. Claxton gave in, and apologized with tears for her utterly inexcusable language. But the peculiarity of the dialogue was that at the time of its occurrence the child to whom reference was made was not born, and when it was born it was a girl!

But Mr. Claxton was made of flesh like the rest of us, and when he was called into his wife’s darkened room, and the little bundle of flannel was put into his arms and declared to be his daughter, he kissed it fondly, and laid it on the pillow beside his wife, and as he saw her so pale and faint, so starry-eyed and beautiful, looking as if she might vanish out of his sight at any moment, he bent and hid his face beside her own.

“My dear love,” said he, in magnanimous concession, some little while afterward, “we will call this baby Henrietta.”

Now of all the names in or out of the calendar the one that Mrs. Claxton the most detested was Henrietta. Mrs. Claxton, however, accepted the concession in the spirit in which it was made, offering, indeed, on her part, an exchange of Henrietta for Regina, which offer was not listened to for a moment; and during her convalescence her husband so invested her with kindness that she looked forward to a happiness of which she had begun to despair in the midst of that wilderness of rebellion and altercation where she had almost lost herself.

But it was an easy thing for Mr. Claxton to be kind to a sick person; since it is the part of an invalid to have no will, to receive favors, and obey orders. And if Mrs. Claxton had been an invalid all her life, paradoxical as it sounds, she would have had no skeleton. But, on the contrary, she was a healthy young thing, and in a few weeks was as rosy and vigorous as ever, as spirited, and perhaps as wilful. The presence of her baby, though, turned her thoughts, more from herself, and she anticipated in her absorption less opportunity for strife than before. Accordingly she was very much discomposed when one day her husband being present, accidentally and for the first time, at Miss Baby’s toilet--which the mother found as much pleasure in attending to herself as she used to find in playing dolls--he insisted that everything should be done precisely the other way: that the water should be cold and not tepid, that the soap should be castile and not scented, that the towel should be a crash and not a damask one.

“I never heard of such a thing!” cried the young mother.

“There are probably many things of which you have not heard, my love,” replied the young father.

“But a rough towel on this little soft flesh!”

“It will make it the firmer and healthier.”

“It will take the skin off. And castile soap--why, the doctor says it should never be used except for healing, it is too drying for a healthy skin.”

“My mother used it invariably.”

“Now don’t begin to quote your mother--the way men always do; don’t imagine your mother knew more than the doctor.”

“I imagine,” said Mr. Claxton, feeling it worth while to control his vexation for the child’s sake, “that her experience was as good as his books.”

“Well, your mother did as she chose, and this child’s mother will do as she chooses. Crash towels, castile soap, and cold water! Cold water, indeed!”

“Certainly. And don’t repeat my words in that offensive manner, if you please. Any moderate intellect would understand that if the child is to be strong, it is to be early inured--”

“I never shall use it--never!”

“Indeed, my darling, you are mistaken. You always will use it in the future.”

“Well, we will see,” said Mrs. Claxton, laughing and shaking her head. “Cold water on such a mite of a baby! That is all men know.”

“Decidedly we _shall_ see. For I shall make it a point to be present until it has become an established custom.”

“Then I shall take my baby and run away. The law gives every woman her child--at least, till she has weaned it.”

“I don’t think I shall have recourse to the law for possession of my own child.”

“Take it!” cried Mrs. Claxton, in a passion; and she dumped the little naked morsel into its father’s arms, and was running from the room.

“You are a wicked and unnatural woman!” cried Mr. Claxton in his absolute bewilderment, not considering such remark at all in the light of inexcusable language when used by himself, and completely at a loss what to do with the thing that he found himself as free to handle as if it had been a jelly-fish. And in another moment she was running back, snatching her baby, hugging it to her throat, and crying over it.

“You are making yourself sick with your temper, and will hurt the child accordingly,” said Mr. Claxton, calmly now. For a person can very well be calm after having wrought the opposite party to a fever.

“It is your temper,” she retorted. “As if a mother didn’t know how to dress her own baby without a man around!”

“I shall not be moved by anything you say in such a mood,” said the husband. “But as the child is mine, I claim the right to see it properly attended to. And to resume: I want, in the first place, all the pins abolished that I observe you using in its flannels.”

“Pins! Why, everybody uses them. They are every one shield-pins, and couldn’t prick her if they tried. Why, Queen Victoria herself invented them.”

“I don’t care who invented them,” said Mr. Claxton, possibly regarding royalty rather in the light of rivalry. “I want them abolished. Strings are equally as good.”

“Oh no, indeed,” said Mrs. Claxton, quite forgetting her temper; “they make knots, and the knots are so hard for the little soft body to lie on.”

“Then sew the things on when you dress her. The needle is likely to prick only in the sewing, the pins all day and all night.”

“It is sheer nonsense, Henry. I assure you the pins couldn’t prick if they were alive. Do you suppose I want to hurt my own baby?”

“That is nothing to the purpose.”

“Well, I will compromise with you,” she said, laughing now as easily as she had cried before. “I declare, if you’re not perfectly ridiculous! Come, I will sew on her flannels and things every day, trouble as it is, if you will forego the cold water.”

“I shall make no compromise as to my rights. I insist on the cold water, on the castile soap, the rough towels, and that no pins shall be used.”

“I should like to see you hinder it!” said Mrs. Claxton, stoutly.

“Very well,” said Mr. Claxton, and he took up the pin-cushion to show her; and as at the same instant his wife darted for it, he began to strip it of its pins in a haste very disagreeable to a man of his deliberate dignity. But unable to retain the accumulating pins in his unhandy hands, he suddenly turned away from her and slipped a few of them into his mouth--for great men can be driven to desperate expedients; and just as suddenly swallowing his breath, perhaps in amazement, he found himself obliged to cough or to strangle, when Nature took the matter into her own charge, and the pins flew in every direction, so wildly and so instantaneously that one of them, he was morally sure, had lodged in his throat. “Help! help!” he gurgled; “I have swallowed a pin.”

Mrs. Claxton tossed the baby into the cradle and ran to slap his back, in a terrible alarm; and Jane, answering her screams, burst into the room with a dish of crusts and a pitcher of water. And only after the coughing-fit was over, and he had examined his throat with a hand-glass and a powerful light, did he convince himself that there was no pin there, and become as grand and majestic once more as he could be with shoulders that were nearly black and blue from the pounding that Jane had perhaps been only too glad to administer in the effort of dislodging the suspected pin.

But Mr. Claxton was very sore. His wife had contradicted him, had resisted him, had threatened him with the law, had threatened him with desertion, had thrown the baby in his face, had all but said, “Bother your mother!” had hazarded his life with that pin, and, worse than all, had made him ridiculous to himself, to her, and to a servant--he, the great Mr. Claxton! A fish-bone would have been bad enough, but a pin! He felt as if there were nothing nobler in the world than he, when, seeing that he could not spend another moment from the business that had been waiting, he started to go, and turned at the door to say: “Your conduct has been, this morning, of the most reprehensible description. But you are the mother of my child, and I will not leave you in anger, and as such I forgive you.”

“I don’t want any of your forgiveness,” said the sinner. “I shall do just as I please with my own baby, for all the men in the world. So!” And then she ran and sprang upon the seat of a chair, and threw an arm round his neck, and turned his chin up and his great sulky face, and laughed at him, and kissed him. “Oh, I’m a little wretch!” she cried. “But, indeed, you mustn’t ask me to use the cold water. It would break my heart to do it.” And somehow Mr. Claxton felt his august demeanor of no sort of consequence beside this little hysterical creature hanging about his neck, and--well, he kissed her.

“Why didn’t you say so in the beginning, then?” he said. “I will overlook the cold water; but I insist about the pins!” And he returned to his own dressing-room, which he had left for the sake of a little pleasant conversation.

Poor Mrs. Claxton! If she thought she had reached the end of her troubles in her happy convalescence, she was sadly mistaken. Previously she and her husband had really nothing material to dispute about. Now they had the baby; and it was an unfailing source. If the baby had the colic, and she wanted to use anise-seed, Mr. Claxton’s mother had used gin; and as anise was innocent and gin deleterious, of course the struggle was to the knife. If it had the croup, and she wanted homœopathic treatment, it was altogether certain that Mr. Claxton’s mother had used the allopathic, and of course in their mutual opinion the difference involved life and death. If it were ill through teething, and she wanted to administer a remedy, Mr. Claxton would have the child go into fits, though his own heart ached, rather than have anything done before the doctor came. If she wished to rock it, Mr. Claxton was strenuously opposed, and she might declare till she was tired that the process had not injured Daniel Webster or Martha Washington; he would declare in return that at any rate his child should not have its brains addled on a pair of rockers, although I do not think he said “addled”--he said “undergo tabefaction.” In fact there was no aspect of the child’s existence, from its being sung to sleep to its being kissed by strangers, that they did not differ about. And when the twins came, the differing was not merely doubled, but tripled. After that, too, Mr. Claxton in some way became haunted by the fear that his wife’s beauty would be impaired by care and illness. He fancied he might have been neglectful of her in his concern for his children, and experienced a sensation as near remorse as became a Claxton, and then a new cause of dispute arose: he undertook to separate her from her children, he insisted that their perpetual presence occasioned a feverish nervous solicitude, and he contrived one or another method of isolating her from them in the daytime; and, let them cry their little hearts away at night, he would not allow her to go to them; they had a nurse apiece, the very best to be had; Jane and he himself were to be called if the matter were serious, and that must answer; for his wife, he assured her, was worth more to him than all the children in Christendom, and if she wouldn’t take care of herself he must take care of her--which, of course, made Mrs. Claxton as happy as he thought it should, and kept her from wearing herself to a white shadow!

Mrs. Claxton had by this time divined that one way to have your will was to submit in pale patience. Sometimes she was able to practise it, and sometimes, as Paul says, she kicked against the pricks; generally, indeed, she kicked, and in this affair she kicked to such purpose that after one of the twins had had a night of convulsions in her absence, Mr. Claxton found that a strait-jacket would conquer the mother’s instinct sooner than he would, and the household was allowed to resume its normal condition.

Its normal condition was a wrangle. Should baby-talk be addressed to the babies, or sound English? Should the milk be boiled in the coffee or not, when cream was not to be had, and should the coffee be settled with an egg or with fish skin? Should the crusts be given to the poor, or should money be given to the poor and the crusts saved for a bread-pudding? Each day brought its fresh point of debate. If Mrs. Claxton had expressed the first opinion, Mr. Claxton’s natural tendency was to differ, both because she had no right to the first opinion, and because he wished her to understand that her judgment was unsound; but having expressed that opinion, Mrs. Claxton was bound to maintain it till the sky fell; and there it was. If she wanted the horses, she must mention it at breakfast, and go over the matter with statement and question and answer till she wished she had gone afoot without speaking of the thing; but if she did go afoot, then woe betide her!--she had thrown a shadow on the Claxton name which it took a day and night of Claxton severity to brighten.

And what else could be expected of a man in a place, as Mrs. Claxton sometimes thought, where a thousand men hung on his will for a livelihood, where the doctor kowtowed to him, and where the minister would have lain down and let him walk over him?

If on one day Mrs. Claxton wanted to send the children to walk in the mill-stream woods, then Mr. Claxton was sure they would be kidnapped. And if on another day Mr. Claxton suggested their picnicking with the nurses up on the lovely reservoir grounds, then Mrs. Claxton was sure they would be drowned.

“Drowned!” cried the husband, indignantly--for the reservoir was his especial plaything, having been constructed under his supervision to turn the mill-wheels by damming into one basin the course of two small streams, and insult to that was felt like insult to himself. “Drowned! Pray what should drown them?”

“Water,” was the short reply. “I’ve heard that it could.”

“I really don’t know how it could in this instance,” replied Mr. Claxton, with great disdain.

“By bursting that absurd dam!” cried the mother, out of patience. “It will burst some day, and it may as easily be to-day as another, and sweep them away in a breath. I’m sure I wake with every tap of the vine on the pane all night, sure that now it’s going!”

“Let me hear no more talk of the sort,” said Mr. Claxton. “It is enough to demoralize the whole valley. If such things were known to be uttered by my wife I could not keep a hand. There is no more likelihood of that dam’s bursting than of the mill’s falling. On the whole, though, I don’t know that it _is_ a good place for the children to visit. They might, as you say, be drowned, and without waiting for the dam to burst.”

“What under the sun can drown them, I should like to know, if the dam does not burst?”

“Water,” replied Mr. Claxton, in his turn.

“Water! As if they could tumble in with all that slope of the green banks a mile above them, and the nurses with them too! I should as soon think of fire.”

“I presume that would be quite possible to an inconsequential mind,” said the lofty party of the first part.

“I never pretended to any sort of a mind. If I had--But I know how to take care of my children,” she cried, suddenly. “And certainly neither of the twins could climb if the carriage left them at the foot of the hill itself, and Retta always obeys.”

“Henrietta, my dear. Understand that I will not have any abbreviations used in my family. The names given in baptism are their only names, and are those by which my children must and shall be known.”

“Well, you can call her what you please, and I’ll call her what I please.”

“You seem entirely to forget, Caroline, that I am the head of this house.”

“I don’t know how I can forget it. You reiterate it often enough.”

“I reiterate it!” he cried, in a blaze; for his magnanimity was one of his darling virtues, and though he might taunt till he was tired concerning the benefits he conferred, he not only wished it held that he never taunted, but believed himself that he never did, probably because his unused capabilities of taunting were so much greater than those he used.

“Yes, you do,” she responded. “And I don’t care anything about the house. The family, at all events, is as much my family as yours, and if I choose I shall use pet names there to the end of time. So!”

“Is it possible that I comprehend you--that under my own roof you defy me in this manner, and dare to say you will do this or you won’t do that?”

“Yes, it is!” cried Mrs. Claxton, with a burning face and a trembling voice. “I wonder if I sha’n’t have to ask you next if I may breathe through my nose or my lips. Let me tell you, sir, you married the wrong person when you thought you would have an abject slave in your wife. I had rather have stayed a governess all my days than endure the life you lead me! And I rue the hour I ever set my eyes on you!” she cried, in her passion. And then, to give confirmation to her words, her lips began to quiver and her breath began to catch, and she sank in a little heap in the armchair, sobbing fit to dissolve herself in tears.

As for Mr. Claxton, he dared not trust himself to reply. He felt as if he must shake her, and if he shook her he was very much afraid he should do something worse, and so the _noblesse oblige_ of the Claxton dignity took him from the room speechless, but glaring.

“I wish I was dead,” sobbed Mrs. Claxton, growing more hysterical with every sob. “Or else I wish--” But she did not finish the sentence.

By this time you have doubtless become quite well aware of the nature of Mrs. Claxton’s skeleton, and see how it was that it walked abroad when she did, and always ran before and opened the door for her when she came home; and she was slowly growing to see its likeness in her face every time she looked in the glass--that pretty, gracious face, where the lines had yet hardly deepened into settled frowns. She felt herself stripped of identity and all personal importance--made a mere puppet; she was not sure of peace from one moment to the next; she had no fixed happiness in life but the love of her children; and she was convinced that the moment they were old enough to exercise intelligence, the habit of contempt would be caught, and they too would set her at naught. Every day of her life she wished herself free, and she began to recognize the phantom of a perception that the only escape from her skeleton was through the door of death--death for one or the other of them; sometimes she could not have been sure that she was altogether unready to say which one, and that it would not be herself. She thought that she was the victim of a wicked injustice on the part of fate, for she realized what it might be to have the love of a husband who regarded her as an individual, as a mate, who, far from tyrannizing over her as an odalisque and a piece of acquired property a little more valuable than Towser or Dash, wooed her still with kind observances and unfailing respect. She loved her husband, but her temper and his vainglory were always crossing swords in the way of the love; she loved him, and she hated him; she was harassed by opposing forces and feelings night and day. For all her sweet smiles and her tranquil manners out-doors, she was an exceedingly wretched woman within the house.

As for Mr. Claxton--But words fail to convey the emotion of that good man when convinced of the rebellion in his household--the cockatrice upon his hearth!

Mr. Claxton was indeed at a loss in his own thoughts. He was so much aghast at his wife’s outbreak that he did not know how to formulate the statement of affairs to himself. He felt unable to reach a solution of the problem as to what could have caused such a mood of mind in her, and his powers were inadequate to devise a fit punishment till he should have looked the affair over more coolly. He stayed in his counting-room that afternoon a good while beyond business hours, partly to reflect on these matters, and partly because a thunder-cloud had burst over the valley and among the hills, and he knew that his wife was apt to be utterly prostrated by fear of thunder, and thought it best to give her a more realizing sense of her dependence on him through his absence at such a crisis.

However, he would not have been able to say what contradictory impulse it was that made him at last, while the heavens were still pouring a thick, suffocating sheet of rain, throw over his shoulders an old pilot-cloth coat hanging in the place, and sally forth for home. Certainly he had reason to regret it directly afterwards, for in three minutes the rain had penetrated his umbrella and it was only a sodden rag, and he shut it to find that in three minutes more he should be wet to the skin, if not to the bone. Then the question was, should he return? No, “returning were as tedious as go o’er.” To retrace one’s steps was to acknowledge one’s error. Then should he run? Run? Mr. Claxton run? Well, let him run never so swiftly, the rain was swifter yet; he would be just as surely wet, since it was some distance. If he could not retain his comfort, he might retain his dignity, he might solace himself with the reflection that either Plato or Pericles or Aristotle presented a much more preposterous appearance with the tail of his gown turned up over his head in a shower. And accordingly he stalked along in great strides, his hat ruined, his clothes too heavy to carry, the rain running a cold river down his back and into his boots, blinding his eyes, and streaming off a hundred little points of his hair, and most humiliatingly off the end of his nose and chin, feeling ignominiously like Lot’s wife in a rain-storm, and hearing an ignorant little boy in the distance hoot at him. Certainly he was not at all a worshipful object; no clod-hopper ever presented a more abject appearance. Of what value to him at that moment was his money? Of what value were his horses and carriages? He was as wet as the nakedest man that ever swam. And as he had really, after all his anger with her, been hastening home on Mrs. Claxton’s account, he transferred to that account all the chagrin arising from the situation, the more readily that it was of no use to be angry with the elements, and he was very angry with something, with the indignity practised upon him by the weather, with his wetness, his general discomfort, and with the little boy.

And of course, when at length he reached the house, the rain still raining a deluge, and the lightning falling round him every step of the way, he expected doors to be thrown open before him, and a tumultuary welcome to make itself heard, in which all the disagreements of many days would be forgotten. He expected the house-servants to run this way and the nurses that, and the children to shout and prance about him, and his wife to fall on his neck, and hot flannels and toddy and dry clothes to appear by magic. Instead of all which not a soul was to be seen, not even the dogs; the servants had the children in some remote part of the house, where they were telling of dreadful deaths by lightning, and awful apparitions in the heavens; and he marched along to his room, solitary and unheard, his feet squelching his soft French boots like pulp, conscious of every separate toe, and the water dripping from his clothes in puddles upon the bright carpets as he stepped. He saw himself in this plight in a long mirror of the hall, and surely for one instant the starch was taken out of Mr. Claxton--a limp and helpless filter of rain-water. Possibly if anybody other than that thing in the glass had seen him, he would have dropped on the floor and resolved into a dew; but no one did, and the moment he had closed his bedroom door he was all buckram again. For there was Mrs. Claxton in bed, with the room darkened, utterly oblivious of his coming or staying, her head wrapped about with the blankets, deaf to the bubble and squeak of his boots, deaf to the thunder too, blind to the image he presented, blind to the lightning, totally unaware of his return, and indifferent to his condition. This was what a man got for exposing himself in thunder-gust! Mr. Claxton did not swear: the Claxtons never swore; possibly because if they had sworn it would have been seen that they could not have things all their own way, or else they would not swear about it: but he slipped himself out of that entanglement of dripping garments and into dry ones with as much desperate haste as became him; and without uttering a word save a muttered vow that there should not be a feather-bed left in his house by to-morrow, he went down to the dining-room. There dinner, in spite of the delay, had not yet been served; partly because it had waited for him in the first place, and partly because the storm was so tremendous that all minor interests had been forgotten in it, and partly because Mrs. Claxton had been lost to the household in the sheltering recesses of that feather-bed. Dinner, however, after his exertions, was not a minor interest to Mr. Claxton, and he forthwith proceeded to raise--Those readers whose faulty house-keeping may have discovered to them the possibilities of the hungry and infuriate animal can supply the hiatus.

So Mr. Claxton ate his dinner in what Thomas afterwards called “single cussedness,” having declined the proffered company of Miss Henrietta--which he would not have, for the sake of feeling like the forsaken merman--and having refused to let Mrs. Claxton be disturbed, goading himself with every mouthful into a completer sense of the outrageous way in which he was being rewarded for his magnanimity in overlooking the morning’s occurrences, in getting wet through for his wife’s relief, in making himself a ridiculous spectacle, in enduring the hootings of that little boy in the distance. He read his evening paper, and turned over the evening mail; wrote a few letters, in which I am afraid he wreaked a poor sort of vengeance on his correspondents, for want of other opportunity to relieve his surcharged spleen; and finally went to bed, to be greeted by the pleasant sight of Mrs. Claxton enjoying a peaceful sleep after the weariness of her day’s emotions.