CHAPTER XXVII.

MISS CLARE AMONGST HER FRIENDS.

I must give an instance of the way in which Marion—I am tired of calling her Miss Clare, and about this time I began to drop it—exercised her influence over her friends. I trust the episode, in a story so fragmentary as mine, made up of pieces only of a quiet and ordinary life, will not seem unsuitable. How I wish I could give it you as she told it to me! so graphic was her narrative, and so true to the forms of speech amongst the London poor. I must do what I can, well assured it must come far short of the original representation.

One evening, as she was walking up to her attic, she heard a noise in one of the rooms, followed by a sound of weeping. It was occupied by a journeyman house-painter and his wife, who had been married several years, but whose only child had died about six months before, since which loss things had not been going on so well between them. Some natures cannot bear sorrow: it makes them irritable, and, instead of drawing them closer to their own, tends to isolate them. When she entered, she found the woman crying, and the man in a lurid sulk.

"What is the matter?" she asked, no doubt in her usual cheerful tone.

"I little thought it would come to this when I married him," sobbed the woman, while the man remained motionless and speechless on his chair, with his legs stretched out at full length before him.

"Would you mind telling me about it? There may be some mistake, you know."

"There ain't no mistake in that," said the woman, removing the apron she had been holding to her eyes, and turning a cheek towards Marion, upon which the marks of an open-handed blow were visible enough. "I didn't marry him to be knocked about like that."

"She calls that knocking about, do she?" growled the husband. "What did she go for to throw her cotton gownd in my teeth for, as if it was my blame she warn't in silks and satins?"

After a good deal of questioning on her part, and confused and recriminative statement on theirs, Marion made out the following as the facts of the case:—

For the first time since they were married, the wife had had an invitation to spend the evening with some female friends. The party had taken place the night before; and although she had returned in ill-humor, it had not broken out until just as Marion entered the house. The cause was this: none of the guests were in a station much superior to her own, yet she found herself the only one who had not a silk dress: hers was a print, and shabby. Now, when she was married, she had a silk dress, of which she said her husband had been proud enough when they were walking together. But when she saw the last of it, she saw the last of its sort, for never another had he given her to her back; and she didn't marry him to come down in the world—that she didn't!

"Of course not," said Marion. "You married him because you loved him, and thought him the finest fellow you knew."

"And so he was then, grannie. But just look at him now!"

The man moved uneasily, but without bending his outstretched legs. The fact was, that since the death of the child he had so far taken to drink that he was not unfrequently the worse for it; which had been a rare occurrence before.

"It ain't my fault," he said, "when work ain't a-goin,' if I don't dress her like a duchess. I'm as proud to see my wife rigged out as e'er a man on 'em; and that she know! and when she cast the contrairy up to me, I'm blowed if I could keep my hands off on her. She ain't the woman I took her for, miss. She 'ave a temper!"

"I don't doubt it," said Marion. "Temper is a troublesome thing with all of us, and makes us do things we're sorry for afterwards. You're sorry for striking her—ain't you, now?"

There was no response. Around the sullen heart silence closed again. Doubtless he would have given much to obliterate the fact, but he would not confess that he had been wrong. We are so stupid, that confession seems to us to fix the wrong upon us, instead of throwing it, as it does, into the depths of the eternal sea.

"I may have my temper," said the woman, a little mollified at finding, as she thought, that Miss Clare took her part; "but here am I, slaving from morning to night to make both ends meet, and goin' out every job I can get a-washin' or a-charin', and never 'avin' a bit of fun from year's end to year's end, and him off to his club, as he calls it!—an' it's a club he's like to blow out my brains with some night, when he comes home in a drunken fit; for it's worse and worse he'll get, miss, like the rest on 'em, till no woman could be proud, as once I was, to call him hers. And when I do go out to tea for once in a way, to be jeered at by them as is no better nor no worse 'n myself, acause I ain't got a husband as cares enough for me to dress me decent!—that do stick i' my gizzard. I do dearly love to have neighbors think my husband care a bit about me, let-a-be 'at he don't, one hair; and when he send me out like that"—

Here she broke down afresh.

"Why didn't ye stop at home then? I didn't tell ye to go," he said fiercely, calling her a coarse name.

"Richard," said Marion, "such words are not fit for me to hear, still less for your own wife."

"Oh! never mind me: I'm used to sich," said the woman spitefully.

"It's a lie," roared the man: "I never named sich a word to ye afore. It do make me mad to hear ye. I drink the clothes off your back, do I? If I bed the money, ye might go in velvet and lace for aught I cared!"

"She would care little to go in gold and diamonds, if you didn't care to see her in them," said Marion.

At this the woman burst into fresh tears, and the man put on a face of contempt,—the worst sign, Marion said, she had yet seen in him, not excepting the blow; for to despise is worse than to strike.

I can't help stopping my story here to put in a reflection that forces itself upon me. Many a man would regard with disgust the idea of striking his wife, who will yet cherish against her an aversion which is infinitely worse. The working-man who strikes his wife, but is sorry for it, and tries to make amends by being more tender after it, a result which many a woman will consider cheap at the price of a blow endured,—is an immeasurably superior husband to the gentleman who shows his wife the most absolute politeness, but uses that very politeness as a breastwork to fortify himself in his disregard and contempt.

Marion saw that while the tides ran thus high, nothing could be done; certainly, at least, in the way of argument. Whether the man had been drinking she could not tell, but suspected that must have a share in the evil of his mood. She went up to him, laid her hand on his shoulder, and said,—

"You're out of sorts, Richard. Come and have a cup of tea, and I will sing to you."

"I don't want no tea."

"You're fond of the piano, though. And you like to hear me sing, don't you?"

"Well, I do," he muttered, as if the admission were forced from him.

"Come with me, then."

He dragged himself up from his chair, and was about to follow her.

"You ain't going to take him from me, grannie, after he's been and struck me?" interposed his wife, in a tone half pathetic, half injured.

"Come after us in a few minutes," said Marion, in a low voice, and led the way from the room.

Quiet as a lamb Richard followed her up stairs. She made him sit in the easy-chair, and began with a low, plaintive song, which she followed with other songs and music of a similar character. He neither heard nor saw his wife enter, and both sat for about twenty minutes without a word spoken. Then Marion made a pause, and the wife rose and approached her husband. He was fast asleep.

"Don't wake him," said Marion; "let him have his sleep out. You go down and get the place tidy, and a nice bit of supper for him—if you can."

"Oh, yes! he brought me home his week's wages this very night."

"The whole?"

"Yes, grannie"

"Then weren't you too hard upon him? Just think: he had been trying to behave himself, and had got the better of the public-house for once, and come home fancying you'd be so pleased to see him; and you"—

"He'd been drinking," interrupted Eliza. "Only he said as how it was but a pot of beer he'd won in a wager from a mate of his."

"Well, if, after that beginning, he yet brought you home his money, he ought to have had another kind of reception. To think of the wife of a poor man making such a fuss about a silk dress! Why, Eliza, I never had a silk dress in my life; and I don't think I ever shall."

"Laws, grannie! who'd ha' thought that now!"

"You see I have other uses for my money than buying things for show."

"That you do, grannie! But you see," she added, somewhat inconsequently, "we ain't got no child, and Dick he take it ill of me, and don't care to save his money; so he never takes me out nowheres, and I do be so tired o' stopping indoors, every day and all day long, that it turns me sour, I do believe. I didn't use to be cross-grained, miss. But, laws! I feels now as if I'd let him knock me about ever so, if only he wouldn't say as how it was nothing to him if I was dressed ever so fine."

"You run and get his supper."

Eliza went; and Marion, sitting down again to her instrument, improvised for an hour. Next to her New Testament, this was her greatest comfort. She sung and prayed both in one then, and nobody but God heard any thing but the piano. Nor did it impede the flow of her best thoughts, that in a chair beside her slumbered a weary man, the waves of whose evil passions she had stilled, and the sting of whose disappointments she had soothed, with the sweet airs and concords of her own spirit. Who could say what tender influences might not be stealing over him, borne on the fair sounds? for even the formless and the void was roused into life and joy by the wind that roamed over the face of its deep. No humanity jarred with hers. In the presence of the most degraded, she felt God there. A face, even if besotted, was a face, only in virtue of being in the image of God. That a man was a man at all, must be because he was God's. And this man was far indeed from being of the worst. With him beside her, she could pray with most of the good of having the door of her closet shut, and some of the good of the gathering together as well. Thus was love, as ever, the assimilator of the foreign, the harmonizer of the unlike; the builder of the temple in the desert, and of the chamber in the market-place.

As she sat and discoursed with herself, she perceived that the woman was as certainly suffering from ennui as any fine lady in Mayfair.

"Have you ever been to the National Gallery, Richard?" she asked, without turning her head, the moment she heard him move.

"No, grannie," he answered with a yawn. "Don'a' most know what sort of a place it be now. Waxwork, ain't it?"

"No. It's a great place full of pictures, many of them hundreds of years old. They're taken care of by the Government, just for people to go and look at. Wouldn't you like to go and see them some day?"

"Donno as I should much."

"If I were to go with you, now, and explain some of them to you? I want you to take your wife and me out for a holiday. You can't think, you who go out to your work every day, how tiresome it is to be in the house from morning to night, especially at this time of the year, when the sun's shining, and the very sparrows trying to sing!"

"She may go out when she please, grannie. I ain't no tyrant."

"But she doesn't care to go without you. You wouldn't have her like one of those slatternly women you see standing at the corners, with their fists in their sides and their elbows sticking out, ready to talk to anybody that comes in the way."

"My wife was never none o' sich, grannie. I knows her as well's e'er a one, though she do 'ave a temper of her own."

At this moment Eliza appeared in the door-way, saying,—

"Will ye come to yer supper, Dick? I ha' got a slice o' ham an' a hot tater for ye. Come along."

"Well, I don't know as I mind—jest to please you, Liza. I believe I ha' been asleep in grannie's cheer there, her a playin' an' a singin', I make no doubt, like a werry nightingerl, bless her, an' me a snorin' all to myself, like a runaway locomotive! Won't you come and have a slice o' the 'am, an' a tater, grannie? The more you ate, the less we'd grudge it."

"I'm sure o' that," chimed in Eliza. "Do now, grannie; please do."

"I will, with pleasure," said Marion; and they went down together.

Eliza had got the table set out nicely, with a foaming jug of porter beside the ham and potatoes. Before they had finished, Marion had persuaded Richard to take his wife and her to the National Gallery, the next day but one, which, fortunately for her purpose, was Whit Monday, a day whereon Richard, who was from the north always took a holiday.

At the National Gallery, the house-painter, in virtue of his craft, claimed the exercise of criticism; and his remarks were amusing enough. He had more than once painted a sign-board for a country inn, which fact formed a bridge between the covering of square yards with color and the painting of pictures; and he naturally used the vantage-ground thus gained to enhance his importance with his wife and Miss Clare. He was rather a clever fellow too, though as little educated in any other direction than that of his calling as might well be.

All the woman seemed to care about in the pictures was this or that something which reminded her, often remotely enough I dare say, of her former life in the country. Towards the close of their visit, they approached a picture—one of Hobbima's, I think—which at once riveted her attention.

"Look, look, Dick!" she cried. "There's just such a cart as my father used to drive to the town in. Farmer White always sent him when the mistress wanted any thing and he didn't care to go hisself. And, O Dick! there's the very moral of the cottage we lived in! Ain't it a love, now?"

"Nice enough," Dick replied. "But it warn't there I seed you, Liza. It wur at the big house where you was housemaid, you know. That'll be it, I suppose,—away there like, over the trees."

They turned and looked at each other, and Marion turned away. When she looked again, they were once more gazing at the picture, but close together, and hand in hand, like two children.

As they went home in the omnibus, the two averred they had never spent a happier holiday in their lives; and from that day to this no sign of their quarrelling has come to Marion's knowledge. They are not only her regular attendants on Saturday evenings, but on Sunday evenings as well, when she holds a sort of conversation-sermon with her friends.