THE BUTCHER'S BILLS.
CHAPTER I.
HUSBAND AND WIFE.
I am going to tell a story of married life. My title will prepare the
reader for something hardly heroic; but I trust it will not be found
lacking in the one genuine and worthy interest a tale ought to
have--namely, that it presents a door through which we may walk into
one region or another of the human heart, and there find ourselves not
altogether unacquainted or from home.
There was a law among the Jews which forbade the yoking together of
certain animals, either because, being unequal in size or strength,
one of them must be oppressed, or for the sake of some lesson thus
embodied to the Eastern mind--possibly for both reasons. Half the
tragedy would be taken out of social life if this law could be applied
to human beings in their various relations. I do not say that this
would be well, or that we could afford to lose the result of the
tragedy thus occasioned. Neither do I believe that there are so many
instances of unequal yoking as the misprising judgments of men by men
and women by women might lead us to imagine. Not every one declared by
the wisdom of acquaintance to have thrown himself or herself away must
therefore be set down as unequally yoked. Or it may even be that the
inequality is there, but the loss on the other side. How some people
could ever have come together must always be a puzzle until one knows
the history of the affair; but not a few whom most of us would judge
quite unsuited to each other do yet get on pretty well from, the
first, and better and better the longer they are together, and that
with mutual advantage, improvement, and development. Essential
humanity is deeper than the accidents of individuality; the common is
more powerful than the peculiar; and the honest heart will always be
learning to act more and more in accordance with the laws of its
being. It must be of much more consequence to any lady that her
husband should be a man on whose word she can depend than that he
should be of a gracious presence. But if instead of coming nearer to a
true understanding of each other, the two should from the first keep
falling asunder, then something tragic may almost be looked for.
Duncan and Lucy Dempster were a couple the very mention of whose
Christian names together would have seemed amusing to the friends who
had long ceased to talk of their unfitness. Indeed, I doubt if in
their innermost privacy they ever addressed each other except as Mr.
and Mrs. Dempster. For the first time to see them together, no one
could help wondering how the conjunction could have been effected.
Dempster was of Scotch descent, but the hereditary high cheek-bone
seemed to have got into his nose, which was too heavy a pendant for
the low forehead from which it hung. About an inch from the end it
took a swift and unexpected curve downwards, and was a curious and
abnormal nose, which could not properly be assorted with any known
class of noses. A long upper lip, a large, firm, and not quite ugly
mouth, with a chin both long and square, completed a face which, with
its low forehead, being yet longer than usual, had a particularly
equine look. He was rather under the middle height, slender, and well
enough made--altogether an ordinary mortal, known on 'Change as an
able, keen, and laborious man of business. What his special business
was I do not know. He went to the city by the eight o'clock omnibus
every morning, dived into a court, entered a little square, rushed up
two flights of stairs to a couple of rooms, and sat down in the back
one before an office table on a hair-seated chair. It was a dingy
place--not so dirty as it looked, I daresay. Even the windows, being
of bad glass, did, I believe, look dirtier than they were. It was a
place where, so far as the eye of an outsider could tell, much or
nothing might be doing. Its occupant always wore his hat in it, and
his hat always looked shabby. Some people said he was rich, others
that he would be one day. Some said he was a responsible man, whatever
the epithet may have been intended to mean. I believe he was quite as
honest as the recognized laws of his trade demanded--and for how many
could I say more? Nobody said he was avaricious--but then he moved
amongst men whose very notion was first to make money, after that to
be religious, or to enjoy themselves, as the case might be. And no one
either ever said of him that he was a good man, or a generous. He was
about forty years of age, looking somehow as if he had never been
younger. He had had a fair education--better than is generally
considered necessary for mercantile purposes--but it would have been
hard to discover any signs of it in the spending of his leisure. On
Sunday mornings he went with his wife to church, and when he came home
had a good dinner, of which now and then a friend took his share. If
no stranger was present he took his wine by himself, and went to sleep
in his easy chair of marone-coloured leather, while his wife sat on
the other side of the fire if it was winter, or a little way off by
the open window if it was summer, gently yawned now and then, and
looked at him with eyes a little troubled. Then he went off again by
the eight o'clock omnibus on Monday morning, and not an idea more or
less had he in his head, not a hair's-breadth of difference was there
in his conduct or pursuits, that he had been to church and had spent
the day out of business. That may, however, for anything I know, have
been as much the clergyman's fault as his. He was the sort of man you
might call machine-made, one in whom humanity, if in no wise
caricatured, was yet in no wise ennobled.
His wife was ten years younger than he--hardly less than
beautiful--only that over her countenance seemed to have gathered a
kind of haze of commonness. At first sight, notwithstanding, one could
not help perceiving that she was china and he was delft. She was
graceful as she sat, long-necked, slope-shouldered, and quite as tall
as her husband, with a marked daintiness about her in the absence of
the extremes of the fashion, in the quality of the lace she wore on
her black silk dress, and in the wide white sleeves of fine cambric
that covered her arms from the shoulder to the wrist. She had a
morally delicate air, a look of scrupulous nicety and lavender-stored
linen. She had long dark lashes; and when they rose, the eyelids
revealed eyes of uncommon beauty. She had good features, good teeth,
and a good complexion. The main feeling she produced and left was of
ladyhood--little more.
Sunday afternoon came fifty-two times in the year. I mention this
because then always, and nearly then only, could one calculate on
seeing them together. It came to them in a surburb of London, and the
look of it was dull. Doubtless Mr. Dempster's dinner and his repose
after it were interesting to him, but I cannot help thinking his wife
found it dreary. She had, however, got used to it. The house was a
good old one, of red brick, much larger than they required, but not
expensive, and had a general look of the refinement of its mistress.
In the summer the windows of the dining-room would generally be open,
for they looked into a really lovely garden behind the house, and the
scent of the jasmine that crept all around them would come in
plentifully. I wonder what the scent of jasmine did in Duncan
Dempster's world. Perhaps it never got farther than the general
ante-chamber of the sensorium. It often made his wife sad--she could
not tell why. To him I daresay it smelt agreeable, but I can hardly
believe it ever woke in him that dreamy sensation it gave her--of
something she had not had enough of, she could not say what. When the
heat was gone off a little he would walk out on the lawn, which was
well kept and well watered, with many flowering shrubs about it. Why
he did so, I cannot tell. He looked at nothing in particular, only
walked about for a few minutes, no doubt derived some pleasure of a
mild nature from something, and walked in again to tea. One might have
expected he would have cultivated the acquaintance of his garden a
little, if it were only for the pleasure the contrast would give him
when he got back to his loved office, for a greater contrast could not
well have been found than between his dingy dreary haunt on
weekdays--a place which nothing but duty could have made other than
repugnant to any free soul--and this nest of greenery and light and
odour. Sweet scents floated in clouds invisible about the place;
flower eyes and stars and bells and bunches shone and glowed and
lurked all around; his very feet might have learned a lesson of that
which is beyond the sense from the turf he trod; but all the time, if
he were not exactly seeing in his mind's eye the walls and tables of
his office in the City square, his thoughts were not the less brooding
over such business as he there transacted. For Mr. Dempster's was not
a free soul. How could it be when all his energies were given to
making money? This he counted his _calling_--and I believe actually
contrived to associate some feeling of duty with the notion of leaving
behind him a plump round sum of money, as if money in accumulation and
following flood, instead of money in peaceful current, were the good
thing for the world! Hence the whole realm of real life, the universe
of thought and growth, was a high-hedged park to him, within which he
never even tried to look--not even knowing that he was shut out from
it, for the hedge was of his own growing. What shall ever wake such a
man to a sense of indwelling poverty, or make him begin to hunger
after any lowliest expansion? Does a reader retort, "The man was
comfortable, and why should he be troubled?" If the end of being, I
answer, is only comfort in self, I yield. But what if there should be
at the heart of the universe a Thought to which the being of such men
is distasteful? What if to that Thought they look blots in light, ugly
things? May there not lie in that direction some possible reason why
they should bethink themselves? Dempster, however, was not yet a
clinker out of which all the life was burned, however much he looked
like one. There was in him that which might yet burn--and give light
and heat.
On the Sunday evenings Mrs. Dempster would have gladly gone to church
again, if only--though to herself she never allowed this for one of
her reasons--to slip from under the weight of her husband's presence.
He seldom spoke to her more than a sentence at a time, but he did like
to have her near him, and I suppose held, through the bare presence,
some kind of dull one-sided communication with her; what did a woman
know about business? and what did he know about except business? It is
true he had a rudimentary pleasure in music--and would sometimes ask
her to play to him, when he would listen, and after his fashion enjoy.
But although here was a gift that might be developed until his soul
could echo the music of the spheres, the embodied souls of Handel or
Mendelssohn were to him but clouds of sound wrapped about kernels--let
me say of stock or bonds.
For a year or so after their marriage it had been the custom that, the
first thing after breakfast on Monday morning, she should bring him
her account-book, that they might together go over her week's
expenses. She must cultivate the business habits in which, he said, he
found her more than deficient. How could he endure in a wife what
would have been preposterous in a clerk, and would have led to his
immediate dismissal? It was in his eyes necessary that the same strict
record of receipt and expenditure should be kept in the household as
in the office; how else was one to know in what direction things were
going? he said. He required of his wife, therefore, that every
individual thing that cost money, even to what she spent upon her own
person, should be entered in her book. She had no money of her own,
neither did he allow her any special sum for her private needs; but he
made her a tolerably liberal weekly allowance, from which she had to
pay everything except house-rent and taxes, an arrangement which I
cannot believe a good one, as it will inevitably lead some
conscientious wives to self-denial severer than necessary, and on the
other hand will tempt the vulgar nature to make a purse for herself by
mean savings off everybody else. It was especially distasteful to Mrs.
Dempster to have to set down every little article of personal
requirement that she bought. It would probably have seemed to her but
a trifle had they both been young when they married, and had there
been that tenderness of love between them which so soon sets
everything more than right; but as it was, she could never get over
the feeling that the man was strange to her. As it was she would have
got over this. But there was in her a certain constitutional lack of
precision, combined with a want of energy and a weakness of will, that
rendered her more than careless where her liking was not interested.
Hence, while she would have been horrified at playing a wrong note or
singing out of tune, she not only had no anxiety, for the thing's own
sake, to have her accounts correct, but shrunk from every effort in
that direction. Now I can perfectly understand her recoil from the
whole affair, with her added dislike to the smallness of the thing
required of her; but seeing she did begin with doing it after a
fashion, it is not so easy to understand why, doing it, she should not
make a consolation of doing it with absolute exactness. Not even her
dread of her husband's dissatisfaction--which was by no means
small--could prevail to make her, instead of still trusting a memory
that constantly played her false, put down a thing at once, nor
postpone it to a far less convenient season. Hence it came that her
accounts, though never much out, never balanced; and the weekly audit,
while it grew more and more irksome to the one, grew more and more
unsatisfactory to the other. For to Mr. Dempster's dusty eyes
exactitude wore the robe of rectitude, and before long, precisely and
merely from the continued unsatisfactory condition of her accounts, he
began, in a hidden corner of his righteous soul, to reflect on the
moral condition of his wife herself as unsatisfactory. Now such it
certainly was, but he was not the man to judge it correctly, or to
perceive the true significance of her failing. In business, while
scrupulous as to the requirements of custom and recognized right, he
nevertheless did things from which her soul would have recoiled like
"the tender horns of cockled snails;" yet it was to him not merely a
strange and inexplicable fact that she should _never_ be able to show
to a penny, nay, often not to a shilling or eighteenpence, how the
week's allowance went, but a painful one as indicating something
beyond perversity. And truly it was no very hard task he required of
her, for, seeing they had no children, only three servants, and saw
little company, her housekeeping could not be a very heavy or involved
affair. Perhaps if it had been more difficult she would have done it
better, but anyhow she hated the whole thing, procrastinated, and
setting down several things together, was _sure_ to forget some
article or mistake some price; yet not one atom more would she
distrust her memory the next time she was tempted. But it was a small
fault at worst, and if her husband had loved her enough to understand
the bearings of it in relation to her mental and moral condition he
would have tried to content himself that at least she did not exceed
her allowance; and would of all things have avoided making such a
matter a burden upon the consciousness of one so differently educated,
if not constituted, from himself. It is but fair to add on the other
side that, if she had loved him after anything like a wifely ideal,
which I confess was not yet possible to her, it would not have been
many weeks before she had a first correct account to show him.
Convinced, at length, that accuracy was not to be had from her, and
satisfying himself with dissatisfaction, he one morning threw from him
the little ruled book, and declared, in a wrath which he sought to
smother into dignified but hopeless rebuke, that he would trouble
himself with her no further. She burst into tears, took up the book,
left the room, cried a little, resolved to astonish him the next
Monday, and never set down another item. When it came, and breakfast
was over, he gave her the usual cheque, and left at once for town. Nor
had the accounts ever again been alluded to between them.
Now this might have been very well, or at least not very ill, if both
had done tolerably well thereafter--that is, if the one had continued
to attend to her expenditure as well as before, and the other, when he
threw away the account-book, had dismissed from his mind the whole
matter. But Dempster was one of those dangerous men--more dangerous,
however, to themselves than to others--who never forget, that is, get
over, an offence or disappointment. They respect themselves so much,
and, out of their respect for themselves, build so much upon success,
set so ranch by never being defeated but always gaining their point,
that when they are driven to confess themselves foiled, the confession
is made from the "poor dumb mouth" of a wound that cannot be healed.
It is there for ever--will be there at least until they find another
God to worship than their own paltry selves. Hence it came that the
bourn between the two spiritual estates yawned a little wider at one
point, and a mist of dissatisfaction would not unfrequently rise from
a certain stagnant pool in its hollow. The cause was paltry in one
sense, but nothing to which belongs the name of _Cause_ can fail to
mingle the element of awfulness even with its paltriness. Its worst
effect was that it hindered approximation in other parts of their
marching natures.
And as to Mrs. Dempster, I am sorry for the apparent justification
which what I have to confess concerning her must give to the severe
whims of such husbands as hers: from that very Monday morning she
began to grow a little careless about her expenditure--which she had
never been before. By degrees bill after bill was allowed to filch
from the provision of the following week, and when that was devoured,
then from that of the week after. It was not that she was in the least
more expensive upon herself, or that she consciously wasted anything;
but, altogether averse to housekeeping, she ceased to exercise the
same outlook upon the expenditure of the house, did not keep her
horses together, left the management more and more to her cook; while
the consciousness that she was not doing her duty made her more and
more uncomfortable, and the knowledge that things were going farther
and farther wrong, made her hate the idea of accounts worse and worse,
until she came at length to regard them with such a loathing as might
have fitted some extreme of moral evil. The bills which were supposed
by her husband to be regularly settled every week were at last months
behind, and the week's money spent in meeting the most pressing of its
demands, while what it could no longer cover was cast upon the growing
heap of evil for the time to come.
I must say this for her, however, that there was a small sum of money
she expected on the death of a crazy aunt, which, if she could but lay
hold of it without her husband's knowledge, she meant to devote to the
clearing off of everything, when she vowed to herself to do better in
the time to come.
The worst thing in it all was that her fear of her husband kept
increasing, and that she felt more and more uncomfortable in his
presence. Hence that troubled look in her eye, always more marked when
her husband sat dozing in his chair of a Sunday afternoon.
It was natural, too, that, although they never quarrelled, their
intercourse should not grow of a more tender character. Seldom was
there a salient point in their few scattered sentences of
conversation, except, indeed, it were some piece of news either had to
communicate. Occasionally the wife read something from the newspaper,
but never except at her husband's request. In general he enjoyed his
newspaper over a chop at his office. Two or three times since their
marriage--now eight years--he had made a transient resolve pointing at
the improvement of her mind, and to that end had taken from his great
glass-armoured bookcase some _standard_ work--invariably, I believe,
upon party-politics--from which he had made her read him a chapter.
But, unhappily, she had always got to the end of it without gaining
the slightest glimmer of a true notion of what the author was driving
at.
It almost moves me to pity to think of the vagueness of that
rudimentary humanity in Mr. Dempster which made him dream of doing
something to improve his wife's mind. What did he ever do to improve
his own? It is hard to understand how horses find themselves so
comfortable in their stables that, be the day ever so fine, the
country ever so lovely, the air ever so exhilarating, they are always
rejoiced to get back into their dull twilight: it is harder to me to
understand how Mr. Dempster could be so comfortable in his own mind
that he never wanted to get out of it, even at the risk of being
beside himself; but no doubt the dimness of its twilight had a good
deal to do with his content. And then there is that in every human
mind which no man's neighbour, nay, no man himself, can understand. My
neighbour may in his turn be regarding my mind as a gloomy place to
live in, while I find it no undesirable residence--though chiefly
because of the number of windows it affords me for looking out of it.
Still, if Dempster's dingy office in the City was not altogether a
sufficing type of the mind that used it, I consider it a very fairly
good one.
But wherein was Mrs. Dempster so very different from her husband as I
rudely fancy some of my readers imagining her? Whatever may have been
her reasons for marrying him--one would suppose they must have been
weighty--to do so she must have been in a very undeveloped condition,
and in that condition she still remained. I do not mean that she was
less developed than ninety-nine out of the hundred: most women affect
me only as valuable crude material out of which precious things are
making. How much they might be, must be, shall be! For now they stand
like so many Lot's-wives--so many rough-hewn marble blocks, rather, of
which a Divinity is shaping the ends. Mrs. Dempster had all the making
of a lovely woman, but notwithstanding her grace, her beauty, her
sweetness, her lark-like ballading too, she was a very ordinary woman
in that region of her which knew what she meant when she said "I." Of
this fact she had hardly a suspicion, however; for until aspiration
brings humility, people are generally pretty well satisfied with
themselves, having no idea what poor creatures they are. She saw in
her mirror a superior woman, regarded herself as one of the finer
works of creation. The worst was that from the first she had counted
herself superior to her husband, and in marrying him had felt not
merely that she was conferring a favour, which every husband would
allow, but that she was lowering herself without elevating him. Now it
is true that she was pleasanter to look at, that her manners were
sweeter, and her notions of the becoming far less easily satisfied
than his; also that she was a little less deficient in vague reverence
for certain forms of the higher than he. But I know of nothing in her
to determine her classification as of greater value than he, except
indeed that she was on the whole rather more honest. She read novels
and he did not; she passed shallow judgment, where he scorned to
judge; she read all the middling poetry that came in her way, and
copied books full of it; but she could no more have appreciated one of
Milton's or Shakspere's smallest poems than she could have laughed
over a page of Chinese. She liked to hear this and that popular
preacher, and when her husband called his sermons humbug, she heard it
with a shocked countenance; but was she better or worse than her
husband when, admiring them as she did, she permitted them to have no
more influence upon her conduct than if they had been the merest
humbug ever uttered by ambitious demagogue? In truth, I cannot see
that in the matter of worth there was much as yet to choose between
them.
It is hardly necessary, then, to say that there was little appreciable
approximation of any kind going on between them. If only they would
have read Dickens together! Who knows what might have come of it! But
this dull close animal proximity, without the smallest conscious
nearness of heart or mind or soul--and so little chance, from very
lack of wants, for showing each other kindnesses--surely it is a
killing sort of thing! And yet, and yet, there is always a
something--call it habit, or any poorest name you please--grows up
between two who are much together, at least when they neither quarrel
nor thwart each other's designs, which, tending with its roots towards
the deeper human, blossoms into--a wretched little flower indeed, yet
afar off partaking of the nature of love. The Something seldom reveals
its existence until they are parted. I suspect that with not a few,
Death is the love-messenger at the stroke of whose dart the stream of
love first begins to flow in the selfish bosom.
It is now necessary to mention a little break in the monotony of Mrs.
Dempster's life, which, but for what came afterwards, could claim no
record. One morning her page announced Major Strong, and possibly she
received the gentleman who entered with a brighter face than she had
ever shown her husband. The major had just arrived from India. He had
been much at her father's house while she was yet a mere girl, being
then engaged to one of her sisters, who died after he went abroad, and
before he could return to marry her. He was now a widower, a
fine-looking, frank, manly fellow. The expression of his countenance
was little altered, and the sight of him revived in the memory of Mrs.
Dempster many recollections of a happy girlhood, when the prospect of
such a life as she now led with tolerable content would have seemed
simply unendurable. When her husband came home she told him as much as
he cared to hear of the visitor she had had, and he made no objection
to her asking him to dine the next Sunday. When he arrived Mr.
Dempster saw a man of his own age, bronzed and big, with not much
waist left, but a good carriage and pleasant face. He made himself
agreeable at dinner, appreciated his host's wine, and told good
stories that pleased the business man as showing that he knew "what
was what." He accorded him his more particular approval, speaking to
his wife, on the ground that he was a man of the world, with none of
the army slang about him. Mr. Dempster was not aware that he had
himself more business peculiarities than any officer in her majesty's
service had military ones.
After this Major Strong frequently called upon Mrs. Dempster. They
were good friends, and did each other no harm whatever, and the
husband neither showed nor felt the least jealousy. They sang
together, occasionally went out shopping, and three or four times went
together to the play. Mr. Dempster, so long as he had his usual
comforts, did not pine in his wife's absence, but did show a little
more pleasure when she came home to him than usually when he came home
to her. This lasted for a few months. Then the major went back to
India, and for a time the lady missed him a good deal, which,
considering the dulness of her life, was not very surprising or
reprehensible.
