Pink and White Tyranny Part 15

"Well, John, I can't to-night, anyhow, because I have a headache. Just this talk has got my head to thumping so,--it's really dreadful! and I'm so low-spirited! I do wish you had a wife that would suit you better." And forthwith Mrs. Lillie dissolved in tears; and John stroked her head, and petted her, and called her a nice little p.u.s.s.y, and begged her pardon for being so rough with her, and, in short, acted like a fool generally.

"If that woman was _my_ wife now," I fancy I hear some youth with a promising moustache remark, "I'd make her behave!"

Well, sir, supposing she was your wife, what are you going to do about it?

What are you going to do when accounts give your wife a sick headache, so that she cannot possibly attend to them? Are you going to enact the Blue Beard, and rage and storm, and threaten to cut her head off? What good would that do? Cutting off a wrong little head would not turn it into a right one. An ancient proverb significantly remarks, "You can't have more of a cat than her skin,"--and no amount of fuming and storming can make any thing more of a woman than she is. _Such_ as your wife is, sir, you must take her, and make the best of it. Perhaps you want your own way. Don't you wish you could get it?

But didn't she promise to obey? Didn't she? Of course. Then why is it that I must be all the while yielding points, and she never? Well, sir, that is for you to settle. The marriage service gives you authority; so does the law of the land. John could lock up Mrs. Lillie till she learned her lessons; he could do any of twenty other things that no gentleman would ever think of doing, and the law would support him in it. But, because John is a gentleman, and not Paddy from Cork, he strokes his wife's head, and submits.

We understand that our brethren, the Methodists, have recently decided to leave the word "obey" out of the marriage-service. Our friends are, as all the world knows, a most wise and prudent denomination, and guided by a very practical sense in their arrangements. If they have left the word "obey" out, it is because they have concluded that it does no good to put it in,--a decision that John's experience would go a long way to justify.

CHAPTER XIII.

_JOHN'S BIRTHDAY_.

"My dear Lillie," quoth John one morning, "next week Wednesday is my birthday."

"Is it? How charming! What shall we do?"

"Well, Lillie, it has always been our custom--Grace's and mine--to give a grand _fete_ here to all our work-people. We invite them all over _en ma.s.se_, and have the house and grounds all open, and devote ourselves to giving them a good time."

Lillie's countenance fell.

"Now, really, John, how trying! what shall we do? You don't really propose to bring all those low, dirty, little factory children in Spindlewood through our elegant new house? Just look at that satin furniture, and think what it will be when a whole parcel of freckled, tow-headed, snubby-nosed children have eaten bread and b.u.t.ter and doughnuts over it! Now, John, there is reason in all things; _this_ house is not made for a missionary asylum."

John, thus admonished, looked at his house, and was fain to admit that there was the usual amount of that good, selfish, hard grit--called common sense--in Lillie's remarks.

Rooms have their atmosphere, their necessities, their artistic proprieties. Apartments _a la_ Louis Quatorze represent the ideas and the sympathies of a period when the rich lived by themselves in luxury, and the poor were trodden down in the gutter; when there was only aristocratic contempt and domination on one side, and servility and smothered curses on the other. With the change of the apartments to the style of that past era, seemed to come its maxims and morals, as artistically indicated for its completeness. So John walked up and down in his Louis Quinze _salon_, and into his Pompadour _boudoir_, and out again into the Louis Quatorze dining-rooms, and reflected.

He had had many reflections in those apartments before. Of all ill-adapted and unsuitable pieces of furniture in them, he had always felt himself the most unsuitable and ill-adapted. He had never felt at home in them. He never felt like lolling at ease on any of those elegant sofas, as of old he used to cast himself into the motherly arms of the great chintz one that filled the recess. His Lillie, with her smart paraphernalia of hoops and puffs and ruffles and pinkings and bows, seemed a perfectly natural and indigenous production there; but he himself seemed always to be out of place. His Lillie might have been any of Balzac's charming d.u.c.h.esses, with their "thirty-seven thousand ways of saying 'Yes;'" but, as to himself, he must have been taken for her steward or gardener, who had accidentally strayed in, and was fraying her satin surroundings with rough coats and heavy boots. There was not, in fact, in all the reorganized house, a place where he felt _himself_ to be at all the proper thing; nowhere where he could lounge, and read his newspaper, without a feeling of impropriety; nowhere that he could indulge in any of the slight Hottentot-isms wherein unrenewed male nature delights,--without a feeling of rebuke.

John had not philosophized on the causes of this. He knew, in a general and unconfessed way, that he was not comfortable in his new arrangements; but he supposed it was his own fault. He had fallen into rusty, old-fashioned, bachelor ways; and, like other things that are not agreeable to the natural man, he supposed his trim, resplendent, genteel house was good for him, and that he ought to like it, and by grace should attain to liking it, if he only tried long enough.

Only he took long rests every day while he went to Grace's, on Elm Street, and stretched himself on the old sofa, and sat in his mother's old arm-chair, and told Grace how very elegant their house was, and how much taste the architect had shown, and how much Lillie was delighted with it.

But this silent walk of John's, up and down his brilliant apartments, opened his eyes to another troublesome prospect. He was a Christian man, with a high aim and ideal in life. He believed in the Sermon on the Mount, and other radical preaching of that nature; and he was a very honest man, and hated humbug in every shape. Nothing seemed meaner to him than to profess a sham. But it began in a cloudy way to appear to him that there is a manner of arranging one's houses that makes it difficult--yes, well-nigh impossible--to act out in them any of the brotherhood principles of those discourses.

There are houses where the self-respecting poor, or the honest laboring man and woman, cannot be made to enter or to feel at home.

They are made for the selfish luxury of the privileged few. Then John reflected, uneasily, that this change in his house had absorbed that whole balance which usually remained on his accounts to be devoted to benevolent purposes, and with which this year he had proposed to erect a reading-room for his work-people.

"Lillie," said John, as he walked uneasily up and down, "I wish you would try to help me in this thing. I always have done it,--my father and mother did it before me,--and I don't want all of a sudden to depart from it. It may seem a little thing, but it does a great deal of good. It produces kind feeling; it refines and educates and softens them."

"Oh, well, John! if you say so, I must, I suppose," said Lillie, with a sigh. "I can have the carpets and furniture all covered, I suppose; it'll be no end of trouble, but I'll try. But I must say, I think all this kind of petting of the working-cla.s.ses does no sort of good; it only makes them uppish and exacting: you never get any grat.i.tude for it."

"But you know, dearie, what is said about doing good, 'hoping for nothing again,'" said John.

"Now, John, please don't preach, of all things. Haven't I told you that I'll try my best? I am going to,--I'll work with all my strength,--you know that isn't much,--but I shall exert myself to the utmost if you say so."

"My dear, I don't want you to injure yourself!"

"Oh! I don't mind," said Lillie, with the air of a martyr. "The servants, I suppose, will make a fuss about it; and I shouldn't wonder if it was the means of sending them every one off in a body, and leaving me without any help in the house, just as the Follingsbees and the Simpkinses are coming to visit us."

"I didn't know that you had invited the Follingsbees and Simpkinses,"

said John.

"Didn't I tell you? I meant to," said Mrs. Lillie, innocently.

"I don't like those Follingsbees, Lillie. He is a man I have no respect for; he is one of those shoddy upstarts, not at all our sort of folks. I'm sorry you asked him."

"But his wife is my particular friend," said Lillie, "and they were very polite to mamma and me at Newport; and we really owe them some attention."

"Well, Lillie, since you have asked them, I will be polite to them; and I will try and do every thing to save you care in this entertainment. I'll speak to Bridget myself; she knows our ways, and has been used to managing."

And so, as John was greatly beloved by Bridget, and as all the domestic staff had the true Irish fealty to the man of the house, and would run themselves off their feet in his service any day,--it came to pa.s.s that the _fete_ was holden, as of yore, in the grounds. Grace was there and helped, and so were Let.i.tia and Rose Ferguson; and all pa.s.sed off better than could be expected. But John did not enjoy it.

He felt all the while that he was dragging Lillie as a thousand-pound weight after him; and he inly resolved that, once out of that day's festival, he would never try to have it again.

Lillie went to bed with sick headache, and lay two days after it, during which she cried and lamented incessantly. She "knew she was not the wife for John;" she "always told him he wouldn't be satisfied with her, and now she saw he wasn't; but she had tried her very best, and now it was cruel to think she should not succeed any better."

"My dearest child," said John, who, to say the truth, was beginning to find this thing less charming than it used to be, "I _am_ satisfied.

I am much obliged to you. I'm sure you have done all that could be asked."

"Well, I'm sure I hope those folks of yours were pleased," quoth Lillie, as she lay looking like a martyr, with a cloth wet in ice-water bound round her head. "They ought to be; they have left grease-spots all over the sofa in my boudoir, from one end to the other; and cake and raisins have been trodden into the carpets; and the turf around the oval is all cut up; and they have broken my little Diana; and such a din as there was!--oh, me! it makes my head ache to think of it."

[Ill.u.s.tration: "Oh, me! it makes my head ache to think of it."]

"Never mind, Lillie, I'll see to it, and set it all right."

"No, you can't. One of the children broke that model of the Leaning Tower too. I found it. You can't teach such children to let things alone. Oh, dear me! my head!"

"There, there, p.u.s.s.y! only don't worry," said John, in soothing tones.

"Don't think me horrid, _please_ don't," said Lillie, piteously. "I did try to have things go right; didn't I?"

"Certainly you did, dearie; so don't worry. I'll get all the spots taken out, and all the things mended, and make every thing right."

So John called Rosa, on his way downstairs. "Show me the sofa that they spoiled," said he.

"Sofa?" said Rosa.

"Yes; I understand the children greased the sofa in Mrs. Seymour's boudoir."

"Oh, dear, no! nothing of the sort; I've been putting every thing to rights in all the rooms, and they look beautifully."

"Didn't they break something?"

"Oh, no, nothing! The little things were good as could be."