2. CHAPTER II.
In August of that same year, I followed the world
to Saratoga. In my first reconnoitre of the drawing-room
of Congress Hall, I caught the eye of Mr. McRueit,
and received from him a cordial salutation.
As I put my head right, upon its pivot, after an easy
nod to my familiar aversion, my eyes fell upon Miss
Jonthee Twitt—that was—for I had seen, in the
newspapers of two months before, that the resolve
(born of the dusty slipper outside her door), had been
brought about, and she was now on the irrevocable
side of a honeymoon sixty days old.
Her eyelid was down upon the pupil—motionless,
concentrated, and vigilant as a couched panther—and
from beneath the hem of her dress curved out the
high arched instep of a foot pointed with desperate
tension to the carpet; the little great toe (whose relying
pressure on the soiled slipper Mr. McRueit had
been captivated by), now rigid with as strong a purpose
as spiritual homeopathy could concentrate in so
small a tenement. I thought I would make Mr. and
Mrs. McRueit the subject of quiet study while I remained
at Saratoga.
But I have not mentioned the immediate cause of
Mrs. McRueit's resentment. Her bridegroom was
walking up and down the room with a certain Mrs.
Wanmaker, a widow, who was a better woman than
she looked to be, as I chanced to know, but as nobody
could know without the intimate acquaintance with
Mrs. Wanmaker upon which I base this remark.
With beauty of the most voluptuous cast, and a
passion for admiration which induced her to throw
out every possible lure to men any way worth her
time as victims, Mrs. Wanmaker's blood was as
“cold as the flow of Iser,” and her propriety, in fact,
wholly impregnable. I had been myself “tried on”
by the widow Wanmaker, and twenty caravan-marches
might have been made across the Desert of Sahara,
while the conviction I have just stated was “getting
through my hair.” It was not wonderful, therefore,
that both the bride and her (usually) most penetratious
bridegroom, had sailed over the widow's shallows, unconscious
of soundings. She was a “deep” woman,
too—but in the love line.
I thought McRueit singularly off his guard, if it
were only for “appearances.” He monopolized the
widow effectually, and she thought it worth her while
to let the world think him (a bridegroom and a rising
young politician), mad for her, and, truth to say, they
carried on the war strenuously. Perfectly certain as I
was that “the whirligig of time” would “bring about
the revenges” of Mrs. McRueit, I began to feel a
meantime pity for her, and had myself presented duly
by McRueit the next morning after breakfast.
It was a tepid, flaccid, revery-colored August morning,
and the sole thought of the universe seemed to
be to sit down. The devotees to gayety and mineral
water dawdled out to the porticoes, and some sat on
chairs under the trees, and the dandies lay on the
grass, and the old ladies on the steps and the settees,
and here and there, a man on the balustrade, and, in
the large swing, vis-à-vis, sat McRueit and the widow
Wanmaker, chattering in an undertone quite inaudible.
Mrs. McRueit sat on a bench, with her back
against one of the high-shouldered pine trees in the
court-yard, and I had called McRueit out of his swing
to present me. But he returned immediately to the
widow.
I thought it would be alleviative and good-natured
to give Mrs. McRueit an insight to the harmlessness
of Mrs. Wanmaker, and I had done so very nearly to
my satisfaction, when I discovered that the slighted
wife did not care sixpence about the fact, and that,
unlike Hamlet, she only knew seems. The more I
developed the innocent object of the widow's outlay
of smiles and confidentialities, the more Mrs. McRueit
placed herself in a posture to be remarked by the
loungers in the court-yeard and the dawdlers on the
portico, and the more she deepened a certain look—
you must imagine it for the present, dear reader. It
would take a razor's edge of analysis, and a Flemish
paint-pot and patience, to carve that injured look into
language, or paint it truthfully to the eye! Juries
would hang husbands, and recording angels “ruthlessly
overcharge,” upon the unsupported evidence of
such a look. She looked as if her heart must have
suffocated with forbearance long before she began to
look so. She looked as if she had forgiven and wept,
and was ready to forgive and weep again. She looked
as if she would give her life if she could conceal “her
feelings,” and as if she was nerving soul, and heart,
and eyelids, and lachrymatory glands—all to agony—
to prevent bursting into tears with her unutterable
anguish! It was the most unresisting, unresentful,
patient, sweet miserableness! A lamb's willingness
to “furnish forth another meal” of chops and sweet-bread,
was testy to such meek endurance! She was
evidently a martyr, a victim, a crushed flower, a “poor
thing!” But she did, now and then—unseen by anybody
but me—give a glance from that truncated orb
of a pupil of hers, over the top of her handkerchief,
that, if incarnated, would have made a hole in the hide
of a rhinoceros! It was triumph, venom, implacability—such
as I had never before seen expressed in human
glances.
There are many persons with but one idea, and that
a good one. Mrs. McRueit, I presume, was incapable
of appreciating my interest in her. At any rate
she played the same game with me as with other
people, and managed her affairs altogether with perfect
unity. It was in vain that I endeavored to hear
from her tongue what I read in the lowering pupil of
her eye. She spoke of McRueit with evident reluctance,
but always with discretion—never blaming
him, nor leaving any opening that should betray resentment,
or turn the current of sympathy from herself.
The result was immediate. The women in the
house began to look black upon McRueit. The men
“sent him to Coventry” more unwillingly, for he was
amusing and popular—but “to Coventry” he went!
And at last the widow Wanmaker became aware that
she was wasting her time on a man whose attentions
were not wanted elsewhere—and she (the unkindest
cut of all) found reasons for looking another way when
he approached her. He had became aware, during
this process, what was “in the wind,” but he knew
too much to stay in the public eye when it was inflamed.
With his brows lowering, and his face
gloomy with feelings I could easily interpret, he took
the early coach on the third morning after my introduction
to Mrs. McRueit, and departed, probably for
a discipline trip, to some place where sympathy with
his wife would be less dangerous.
