Chapter V: Turned Inside Out

"WELL, well, who'd have thought it?" said one of a group of women who stood supporting a street corner while the operation was going forward of getting a poor invalid, wrapped in blankets, out of a neat cottage at a little distance into a carriage that stood at its door.

The speaker was a type of a class needing no introduction. The bit of black cap over the wilful dark hair that after affording a nestling-place for dust of every quality, receives an occasional plaister of grease to quiet it down; the little shawl pinned together over the shoulders to hide the decay, dirt, and ill-fit of the every-day gown, the torn bottom of which is spread over a crinoline that no longer describes a circle; the boots, with broken elastic sticking out in little brown ends from the sides, one heel loose, and one toe gaping; the bold, sharp stare, the lazy attitude, the unattractive voice, are only too familiar sights in the streets of our towns.

No industrious, managing, true-hearted wife can be a gossip—she has too much that is useful, and good, and interesting to do, too much that is affectionate and anxious to think of. And her only interference in the affairs of her neighbours is when she can speak a kind word to some one in trouble, or shake up a pillow, and make something nice for one who is sick.

But this was not Mrs. Swinden's way, and the more she talked about other people, the worse and worse still became her own particular affairs.

"Well, well, who would have thought it? What do you think?" said she, as the carriage drove off with the sick man from the cottage. "That's Mrs. 'Oatland's' fine doings. She's gone and sent poor Mr. Hill to the infirmary; he that can have all he wants at home, as comfortable as a lord. Isn't it a shame?"

"To be sure it is," said a congenial spirit with a similar cap and gown, but instead of a similar shawl, an old blacker brown jacket with broken button-holes and two buttons hanging despairingly down, while a steel pin from a broken brooch does their duty in a slovenly manner.

"To be sure it is a shame, while deserving people would be the better of a little help. But they say it's all because of that termagant wife of his."

"Well, that's likely enough," responded Mrs. Swinden; "you see it has a very ugly look, and if he had died, who knows what might have happened to Mrs. Hill. I know all about it on the best authority."

"She'd have been hung," said another of the group, decidedly.

"Hush, Mrs. Boult; it isn't always wise to say all you think, but among ourselves, I may say that I never did think any good would come of her ways. Why, she makes the poor little children sit without shoes for fear of dirtying the floor, and go to bed in daylight to save candle. What can 'she' need to save her money for, I wonder? It looks suspicious, 'I' think, for all she made Matthew take the pledge before she would marry him. But they do say that she and he have awful fights over the money-box, and the other night he got hold of it, and went off and spent every penny, spite of her, at the 'Crown.' And when he came in, she nearly strangled him with rage, and made him stay in the kitchen all night in his wet clothes, and she wished he might die, the wicked creature. So Mrs. 'Oatland,' instead of making peace between them as she ought—oughtn't she now?—"

"Of course she ought; it's shameful of her!" chimed in two other of these peace-loving ladies.

"Well, she comes and takes him away to the hospital, at least she helps him to go, poor man, instead of letting him be nursed and tended by his own wife. Such meddling and making in families, I've no patience with it. That's the way they want to keep us down, those meddlesome district people with their tracts and their talk. Why, she actually wanted to make me go to her meetings! Who's she, I wonder, to take upon herself, when I can go to any church or chapel and hear any parson I please, and send my children to school too? Me, indeed! As if I wanted dictating where I'd go, and what I should do with my own children. It's coming to something, indeed, if we're not to be mistresses in our own homes."

Leaving the excited neighbours to talk it out and rehearse the pleasant consequences that might ensue if Matthew Hill should die, with the inquest, and the verdict against the unnatural wife, and her committal, trial, and execution, all which stood out in distinct probability before their fertile imaginations, let us just enter that door, and survey the "home" of which Mrs. Swinden indignantly proclaimed her resolution to be sole mistress.

Three chairs, one without a bottom, and another with a broken back, and a box turned over to represent a fourth; a rickety table which broke its leg in a squabble, and had been re-set by unskilled hands; a heap of cups, plates, jugs, and bottles on a shelf, huddled together as if mutually commiserating broken noses, cut lips, and other misfortunes which had befallen them in their domestic experience; a bed not yet "made," and a bundle of something that was intended for another bed in one corner; dirty floors, an expiring fire with a heap of dust and ashes beneath it; a kettle that has never sung since its lid was lost, and the bottom of an old tin case substituted, which it took the liberty of unseating as soon as the water got hot—on purpose, as Mrs. Swinden said, that she might scald her fingers in getting it out, such freaks have kettles, specially lidless ones. A poker, a shovel without a handle, a frying pan with sundry holes burnt through it, a little skeleton of clock with a wry face and fingers that indicated some great internal disorder, with a few more odds and ends of make-shift housekeeping, completed the short list of furniture of Mrs. Swinden's "home."

There had been other possessions; whither had they decamped? Is an explanation needed? Is there any housewife who would hesitate to point instinctively to two well-known receptacles whence character and property seldom revisit the scenes of their better days? The public-house and the pawnshop could have told solemn tales of both in Mrs. Swinden's family chronicle.