'You know that you can trust me to do the best with your money if I could get hold of it, I suppose?' She certainly did not know this, and held her tongue.'You could assure him of that?'
'I could only tell him to judge for himself.'
'What you mean is that you'd see me d-d before you would open your mouth for me to the old man!'
He had never sworn at her before, and now she burst out into a flood of tears.It was to her a terrible outrage.I do not know that a woman is very much the worse because her husband may forget himself on an occasion to 'rap out an oath at her', as he would call it when making the best of his own sin.Such an offence is compatible with uniform kindness and most affectionate consideration.I have known ladies who would think little or nothing about it,--who would go no farther than the mildest protest,--'Do remember where you are!' or 'My dear John!'--if no stranger were present.But then a wife should be initiated into it by degrees and there are different tones of bad language, of which by far the most general is the good-humoured tone.We all of us know men who never damn their servants or inferiors, or strangers, or women,--who in fact keep it all for their bosom friends, and if a little does sometimes flow over in the freedom of domestic life, the wife is apt to remember that she is the bosomer of her husband's friends, and so to pardon the transgression.But here the word had been uttered with all its foulest violence, with virulence and vulgarity.It seemed to the victim to be the sign of a terrible crisis in her early married life,--as though the man who had spoken to her could never again love her, never again be kind to her, never again be sweetly gentle and like a love.And as he spoke it he looked at her as though he would like to tear her limbs asunder.She was frightened as well as horrified and astounded.She had not a word to say to him.She did not know in what language to make her complaint of such treatment.She burst into tears, and throwing herself on the sofa, hid her face in her hands.'You provoke me to be violent,' he said.But still she could not speak to him.'I come away from the city, tired with work and troubled with a thousand things, and you have not had a kind word to say to me.' Then there was a pause, during which she still sobbed.'If your father has anything to say to me, let him say it.I shall not run away.But as to going to him of my own accord with a story as long as my arm about my affairs, I don't mean to do it.' Then he paused a moment again.'Come, old girl, cheer up! Don't pretend to be broken-hearted because I used a hard word.There are worse things than that to be borne in the world.'
'I--I--I was so startled, Ferdinand.'
'A man can't always remember that he isn't with another man.
Don't think anything more about it, but do bear this in mind,--that, situated as we are, your influence with your father may be the making or marring of me.' And so he left the room.
She had sat for the next ten minutes thinking of it all.The words which he had spoken were so horrible that she could not get them out of her mind,--could not bring herself to look upon them as a trifle.The darkness of his countenance still dwelt with her,--and that absence of all tenderness, that coarse, un-marital and yet marital roughness, which should not at any rate have come to him so soon.The whole man too was so different from what she had thought him to be.Before their marriage no word as to money had ever reached her ears from his lips.He had talked to her of books,--and especially of poetry.Shakespeare and Moliere, Dante and Goethe, had been or had seemed to be, dear to him.And he had been full of fine ideas about women, and about men in their intercourse with women.For his sake she had separated herself from all her old friends.For his sake she had hurried into a marriage altogether distasteful to her father.
For his sake she had closed her heart against the other lover.
Trusting altogether in him she had ventured to think that she had known what was good for her better than all those who had been her counsellors, and had given herself to him utterly.Now she was awake, her dream was over, and the natural language of the man was still ringing in her ears.
They met together at dinner and passed the evening without a further allusion to the scene which had been acted.He sat with a magazine in his hand, every now and then making some remark intended to be pleasant but which grated on her ears as being fictitious.She would answer him,--because it was her duty to do so, and because she would not condescend to sulk; but she could not bring herself even to say to herself that all should be with her as though that horrid word had not been spoken.She sat over her work till ten, answering him when he spoke in a voice which was also fictitious, and then took herself off to her bed that she might weep alone.It would, she knew, be late before he would come to her.
