Told in a French Garden, Mildred Aldrich [children's ebooks online TXT] 📗

everything you could, and more some ways than you ought. But, unluckily for you, gratifying me was not the way to mend the situation for yourself. It is cruel but it is the truth! If a man wants to keep a woman of my disposition attached to him, he'd do far better to beat her than over educate her, and teach her all the beauties of freedom. He should keep her ignorant, rather than cultivate her imagination, and open up the wonders of the world to her. It's rough on chaps like you, that with all your cleverness you've no instinct to set you right on a point like this but it is lucky for women like me at times! You were determined to force all this out of me, so you may as well hear the whole brutal truth. I'm sick of our stupid ways of life I have been sick of it for a long time. I've passed all power to pretend any longer. I have learned that there is a great and beautiful world within the reach of women who are clever enough and brave enough to grasp at an opportunity, without looking forward or back. I want to walk boldly to this. I'm not afraid of the stepping stones! This is really all your fault. When you married me, five years ago, I was only sixteen, and very much in love with you. Now, why didn't you make me do the housework and drudge as all the other women on the farms about yours did? I'd have done it then, and willingly, even to the washing and scrubbing. I had been working in a cotton mill. I didn't know anything better than to drudge. I thought that was a woman's lot. It didn't even seem terrible to me. But no you set yourself to amuse me. You brought me way up to town on a wedding journey. For the first time in my life I saw there idle women in the world, who wore soft clothes and were always dressed up. You bought me finery. I was clever and imitative. I pined for all the excitement and beauty of city life when we were back on the farm, in the life you loved. I cried for it, as a child cries for the moon. I never dreamed of getting it. And you surprised me by selling the farm, and coming nearer the town to live. Just because I had an ear for music, and could pick out tunes on the old melodeon, I must have a piano and take lessons. Just because my music teacher happened to be French and I showed an aptitude for studying, that must be gratified. Can you really blame me if I want to see more of the wide world that opened up to me? Did you really think French novels and music were likely to make a woman of my lively imagination content with her lot as wife of a mechanic however clever?"

The man looked down at her as if stunned. Arguments of that sort were a bit above the reasoning of the simple masculine animal, who seemed to belong to that race which comprehends little of the complex emotions, and looks on love as the one inevitable passion of life, and on marriage as its logical result and everlasting conclusion.

It was probable at this moment that he completed his alphabet in the great lesson of life and spelled out painfully the awful truth, that not all the royal service of worship and love in a man's heart can hold a woman.

There was something akin to a sob in his throat as he replied: "You were so young so pretty! I could not bear to think that you should soil your hands for me! I wanted to make up to you for all the hardships and sorrows of your childhood. I dreamed of being mother and father as well as husband to you. I thought it would make you happy to owe everything to me as happy as it made me to give. I would willingly have carried you every step of your life, rather than you should have tired your feet. Is that a sin in a woman's eyes?"

A whimsical smile broke over the woman's face. It quivered on her red lips for just a breath, as if conscious how ill timed it was. "I really like to tire my feet," she murmured, and she pointed the toe of her tiny boot, as if poised to dance, and looked down on it with evident admiration.

The man caught his breath sharply.

"It's that damned dancing that has upset you, Dora!"

"Sh! Don't swear! I do like dancing! I have always told you so. It was you who first admired it. It was you who let me learn."

"You were my wife! I thought that meant everything to you that it meant to me. I loved your beauty because it was yours; your pleasures because they gave you pleasure. All my ideas of right and wrong in marriage which I learned in my father's honest house bent to your desires and happiness."

She looked nervously at the clock. Ten minutes to six.

"Dora for God's sake look at me! Dora you're not leaving me?"

It was an almost inarticulate cry, as of a man who had foreseen his doom, and only protested from some unconquerable instinct to struggle!

She patted his clenched hand gently.

It was plainly evident that she hated the sight of suffering, and hated more not having her own way, and was possessed by a refined kind of cowardice.

"Don't make a row, there's a dear boy! It is like this: I am going over to New York, just for a few weeks. I would have told you yesterday, only I hated spoiling a nice day. It was a nice day? with a scene. You'll find a nice long letter at home it's a sweet one, too telling you all about it. Don't take it too hard! I am going to earn fifty dollars a week just fancy that and don't blame me too much!"

He didn't seem to hear! He hung his head the veins in his forehead swelled there were actually tears in his eyes and the mighty effort he made to restrain a sob was terrible and six feet of American manhood, as fine a specimen of the animal as the soil can show, animated by a spirit which represented well the dignity of toil and self respect, stood bowed down with ungovernable grief and shame before a merely ornamental bit of femininity.

Fate had simply perpetrated another of her ghastly pleasantries!

The woman was perplexed naturally! But it was evidently the sight of her work, and not the work, itself, that pained her.

"Don't cut up so rough, Zeke, please don't," she went on. "I'm very fond of you you know that but I detest the odor of the shop, and it is so easy for us both to escape it."

He shrank as if she had struck him.

Instinctively he must have remembered the cotton mill from which he took her. A man rarely understands a woman's faculty for forgetting that is to say, no man of his class does.

"Doesn't it seem a bit selfish of you," she went on, "to object to my earning nearly three times what you can and so easily and prettily?"

"I wanted you to be happy with what I could give you."

"Well, I'm sorry, but I'm not. No use to fib about it! It is too late. Your notions are so queer."

"I suppose it is queer to love one woman and to love her so that laboring for her is happiness! I suppose you do find me a queer chap, because I am not willing that my wife flesh of my flesh should flaunt herself, half dressed, to excite the admiration of other men all for fifty dollars a week!"

"See here, Zeke, you are making too much of this! If it is the separation you can't stand why come, too! I'll soon enough be getting my hundred a week, and more. That is enough for both of us. You can be with me, if that is what you mind!"

"If that is what I mind? You know better than that! Am I such a cur that you think, if there were no other reason, I'd pose before the world as the husband of a woman who owes nothing to him as if I were "

She interrupted him sharply.

"What odds does it make tell me that which of us earns the money? To have it is the only important thing!"

The man straightened up and squared his broad shoulders. A strange change came over him.

He laid his heavy hand on her shoulder, and, for the first time, he spoke with a disregard for self control, although he did not raise his voice.

"Look at me, Dora, and be sure I mean what I say. Leave me to day, and don't you ever come back to me. It may kill me to live without you. Well, better that than than the other! I married you to live with you not merely to have you! I've been a faithful husband to you! I shall remain that while I live. I never denied you anything I could get for you! But this I will not put up with! I thought you loved me even if you were sometimes vain, and now and then cruel. If you're ill if you disappoint yourself, I'll be ready to take care of you as I promised. But don't never dare to come back to me otherwise! Unless you're in want and homeless, unless you can't live, but by the labor of my hands, I'll never sleep under the same roof with you again. Never!"

"What nonsense, Zeke! Of course I'll come back! You won't turn me away! I only want to see a little of the world, to get a few of the things you can't give me no blame to you, either!"

He did not seem to hear her.

Almost as if speaking to himself, he went on: "I've feared for some time you didn't love me. I didn't want to believe it. I was a coward. I shut my eyes. I took what you gave me I daren't think of this which has come to me! I dared not! God punishes idolatry! He has punished mine. Be sure you're not making a mistake, Dora! There may be other men will admire you, my girl will any of them love you as I do? There's never a minute I'm not conscious of you, sleeping or waking. Think again, Dora, before you leave me!"

"I can't, Zeke. I've signed a contract. I couldn't reconsider if I wanted to. It's just seven minutes to train time. Kiss me there's a dear lad and don't row me any more!"

She raised herself on tip toes and approached her red lips to his face lips of an intense color to go with the marked pallor of the rest of the face, and which surely were never offered to him in vain before but he was beyond their seduction at last.

"You've decided?" he said.

"Of course!"

"All right! Good bye, then! You promised to cleave to me through