 | People I have met, or, Pictures of society and people of mark, drawn under a thin veil of fiction |  |
MR. AND MRS. FOLLETT;
OR, THE DANGERS OF MEDDLING WITH MARRIED PEOPLE.
There are two commodities, much used by gentlemen, neither
of which will bear tinkering or tampering with—matrimony and
patent leather. Their necessities are fair weather and untroubled
wear and tear. Ponder on the following melancholy example!
My friend Follett married a lady, contrary to my advice. I
gave the advice contrary to my wont and against my will. He
would have it. The lady was a tolerably pretty woman, on
whose original destiny it was never written that she should be a
belle. How she became one is not much matter; but nature
being thoroughly taken by surprise with her success, had neglected
to provide the counterpoise. I say it is no great matter
how she became a belle—nor is it—for, if such things were to be
accounted for to the satisfaction of the sex, the world have little
time for other speculations; but I will devote a single paragraph
to the elucidation of this one of many mysteries, for a reason
I have. Fœnam habet in cornu.
Poets are the least fastidious, and the least discriminating of
men, in their admiration of women (vide Byron), partly because
their imagination, like sunshine, glorifies all that turns to it, without
from both causes waiting always to be sought. In some circles,
bards are rather comets than stars, and the one whose orbit for a
few days intersected that of Miss Adele Burham, was the exclusive
marvel of the hour. Like other poets, the one of which I
speak was concentrative in his attentions, and he chose (why, the
gods knew better than the belles of the season) to have neither
eyes nor ears, flowers, flatteries, nor verses, for any other than
Miss Burnham. He went on his way, but the incense, in which
he had enveloped the blest Adele, lingered like a magic atmosphere
about her, and Tom Follett and all his tribe breathed it in
blind adoration. I trust the fair reader has here nodded her
head, in evidence that this history of the belleship of Miss
Burnham is no less brief than natural and satisfactory.
When Follett came to me with the astounding information that
he intended to propose to Miss Burnham (he had already proposed
and been accepted, the traitor!) my fancy at once took
the prophetic stride so natural on the first breaking of such news,
and, in the five minutes which I took for reflection, I had travelled
far into that land of few delusions—holy matrimony. Before me,
in all the changeful variety of a magic mirror, came and went
the many phases of which that multiform creature, woman, is
susceptible. I saw her in diamonds and satin, and in kitchen-apron
and curl-papers; in delight, and in the dumps; in supplication,
and in resistance; shod like a fairy in French shoes, and
slip-shod (as perhaps fairies are, too, in their bed-rooms and
dairies). I saw her approaching the climacteric of age, and
receding from it—a mother, a nurse, an invalid—mum over her
breakfast, chatty over her tea—doing the honors at Tom's table,
and mending, with sober diligence, Tom's straps and suspenders.
The kaleidoscope of fancy exhausted its combinations.
“Tom!” said I (looking up affectionately, for he was one of
my weaknesses, was Tom, and I indulged myself in loving him
without a reason), “Miss Burnham is in the best light where she
is. If she cease to be a belle, as of course she will, should she
marry —”
“Of course!” interrupted Tom, very gravely.
“Well, in that case, she lays off the goddess, trust me! You
will like her to dress plainly—”
“Quite plain!”
“And, stripped of her plumage, your bird of Paradise would be
nothing but a very indifferent hen—with the disadvantage of
remembering that she had been a bird of Paradise.”
“But it was not her dress that attracted the brilliant author
of —”
Possibly not. But, as the false gods of mythology are only
known by their insignia, Jupiter by his thunderbolt, and Mercury
by his talaria and caduceus, so a woman, worshipped by accident,
will find a change of exterior nothing less than a laying aside of
her divinity. That's didactic sentence, but you will know what
I mean, when I tell you that I, myself, cannot see a pair of coral
ear-rings without a sickness of the heart, though the woman who
once wore them, and who slighted me twenty years ago, sits before
me in church, without diverting a thought from the sermon.
Don't marry her, Tom!”
Six weeks after this conversation, I was at the wedding, and
the reader will please pass to the rear the six succeeding months
—short time as it seems—to record a change in the bland sky of
matrimony. It was an ellipse in our friendship as well; for advice
(contrary to our wishes and intentions) is apt to be resented, and
I fancied, from the northerly bows I received from Mrs. Follett,
to my counsel. At the end of this period Tom called
on me.
Follett, I should have said, was a man of that undecided exterior
which is perfectly at the mercy of a cravat or waistcoat.
He looked “snob” or “nob,” according to the care with which
he had made his toilet. While a bachelor, of course, he could
never afford, in public, a negligence or a mistake, and was invariably
an elegant man, harmonious and “pin-point” from straps
to whiskers. But alas! the security of wedded life! When
Tom entered my room, I perused him as a walking homily. His
coat, still made on the old measure, was buttoned only at the top,
the waist being rather snug, and his waistcoat pockets loaded with
the copper which in his gayer days he always left on the counter.
His satin cravat was frayed and brownish, with the tie slipped
almost under his ear. The heel of his right boot (he trod
straight on the other foot) almost looked him in the face. His
pantaloons (the one article of dress in which there are no gradations—nothing,
if not perfect) were bulged and strained. He
wore a frightfully new hat, no gloves, and carried a baggy brown
umbrella, which was, in itself, a most expressive portrait of
“gone to seed.” Tom entered with his usual uppish carriage,
and, through the how-d'ye-dos, and the getting into his chair,
carried off the old manner to a charm. In talking of the weather,
a moment after, his eye fell on his stumpy umbrella, which, with
an unconscious memory of an old affectation with his cane, he was
balancing on the toe of his boot, and the married look slid over
him like a mist. Down went his head between his shoulders,
and down went the corners of his mouth—down the inflation of
his chest like a collapsed balloon; and down, in its youth and
assumed in a minute the style and countenance of a man ten
years older.
I smiled. How could I but smile!
“Then you have heard of it!” exclaimed Tom, suddenly
starting to his feet, and flushing purple to the roots of his hair.
“Heard of what?”
My look of surprise evidently took him aback; and, seating
himself again with confused apologies, Tom proceeded to “make
a clean breast,” on a subject which I had not anticipated.
It seemed that, far from moulting her feathers after marriage,
according to my prediction, Mrs. Follett clearly thought that she
had not yet “strutted her hour,” and, though everything Tom
could wish, behind the curtain, in society she had flaunted and
flirted, not merely with no diminution of zest from the wedding-day,
but, her husband was of opinion, with a ratio alarmingly
increasing. Her present alliance was with a certain Count
Hautenbas, the lion of the moment, and though doubtless one in
which vanity alone was active, Tom's sense of connubial propriety
was at its last gasp. He could stand it no longer. He
wished my advice in the choice between two courses. Should he
call out the Frenchman, or should he take advantage of the law's
construction of “moral insanity,” and shut her up in a mad-house.
My advice had been of so little avail in the first instance, that
I shrank from troubling Tom with any more of it, and certainly
should have evaded it altogether, but for an experiment I wished
to make, as much for my own satisfaction as for the benefit of
that large class, the unhappy married.
“Your wife is out every night, I suppose, Tom?”
“Every night when she has no party at home.”
“Do you go with her always?”
“I go for her usually—but the truth is, that, since I married,
parties bore me, and after seeing my wife off, I commonly smoke
and snooze, or read, or run into Bob Thomas's and `talk horse,'
till I have just time to be in at the death.”
“And when you get there, you don't dance?”
“Not I, faith! I haven't danced since I was married!”
“But you used to be the best waltzer of the day.”
“Well, the music sometimes gets into my heels now, but,
when I remember I am married, the fit cools off. The deuce
take it! a married man shouldn't be seen whirling round the room
with a girl in his arms!”
“I presume that, were you still single, you would fancy your
chance to be as good for ladies' favors as any French count's
that ever came over?”
“Ehem! why—yes!”
Tom pulled up his collar.
“And if you had access to her society all day and all night,
and the Frenchman only an hour or two in the evening, any
given lady being the object, you would bet freely on your own
head?”
“I see your drift,” said Tom, with a melancholy smile, “but
it won't do!”
“No, indeed—it is what would have done. You had at the
start a much better chance with your wife than Count Hautenbas;
but husbands and lovers are the `hare and the tortoise' of the
fable. We must resort now to other means. Will you follow my
advice, as well as take it, should I be willing again to burn my
fingers in your affairs?”
The eagerness of Tom's protestations quite made the amende to
my mortified self-complacency, and I entered zealously into my
little plot for his happiness. At this moment I heartily wish I
had sent him and his affairs to the devil, and (lest I should forget
it at the close of this tale) I here caution all men, single and
double, against “meddling or making,” marring or mending, in
matrimonial matters. The alliteration may, perhaps, impress
this salutary counsel on the mind of the reader.
I passed the remainder of the day in repairing the damage of
Tom's person. I had his whiskers curled and trimmed even, (his
left whisker was an inch nearer his nose than the right), and his
teeth looked to by the dentist. I stood by, to be sure that there
was no carelessness in his selection of patent leathers, and, on his
assuring me that he was otherwise well provided, I suffered him to
go home to dress, engaging him to dine with me at seven.
He was punctual to the hour. By Jove I could scarce believe
it was the same man. The consciousness of being well dressed
seemed to have brightened his eyes and lips, as it certainly
changed altogether his address and movements. He had a narrow
escape of being handsome. After all, it is only a “man of mark,”
or an Apollo, who can well afford to neglect the outer man; and
a judicious negligence, or a judicious plainness, is probably worth
the attention of both the man of mark and the Apollo. Tom was
quite another order of creature—a butterfly that was just now a
worm—and would have been treated with more consideration in
consequence, even by those least tolerant of “the pomps and
vanities.” We dined temperately, and I superseded the bottle by
a cup of strong green tea, at an early moment after the removal
of the cloth, determined to have Tom's wits in as full dress as his
person. Without being at all a brilliant man, he was—the next
fond of giving than receiving in all things, but particularly in conversation,
I was not uneasy as to his power of making himself
agreeable. Nor was he, faith!
The ball of the night was at the house of an old friend of my
own, and Mr. and Mrs. Follett were but newly introduced to the
circle. I had the company very clearly in my eye, therefore,
while casting about for dramatis personé, and fixing upon Mrs.
Beverly Fairlie, for the prominent character, I assured success,
though being very much in love with that coquettish widow
myself, I had occasion for some self-denial in the matter. Of
Mrs. Fairlie's weak points (on which it seemed necessary that I
should enlighten Tom), I had information not to be acquired short
of summering and wintering her, and, with my eye solely directed
to its effect upon Mrs. Follett, I put the clues into my friend's
hands in a long after-dinner conversation. As he seemed impatient
to open the campaign, after getting these definite and
valuable instructions, I augured well for his success, and we
entered the ball-room in high spirits.
It was quite enough to say to the mischievous widow that
another woman was to be piqued by any attentions she might
choose to pay Mr. Follett. Having said thus much, and presented
Tom, I sought out Mrs. Follett myself, with the double
purpose of breaking up the monopoly of Mons. Hautenbas, and of
directing her attention, should it be necessary, to the suavities
between Tom and the widow.
It was a superb ball, and the music, as Tom said, went to the
heels. The thing he did well was waltzing, and, after taking a
turn or two with Mrs. Fairlie, the rusée dame ran up to Mrs.
loan of her husband for the rest of the evening! I did not half
like the look of earnest with which she entered into the affair,
indeed, and there was little need of my taking much trouble to
enlighten Mrs. Follett; for a woman so surprised with a six
months' husband I never saw. They were so capitally matched,
Tom and the widow, in size, motion, style of waltzing, and all,
that not we only, but the whole party, were occupied with observing
and admiring them. Mrs. Follett and I (for a secret
sympathy, somehow, drew us together, as the thing went on)
kept up a broken conversation, in which the Count was even less
interested than we; and after a few ineffectual attempts to draw
her into the tea-room, the Frenchman left us in pique, and we
gave ourselves up to the observation of the couple who (we
presumed) severally belonged to us. They carried on the war
famously, to be sure! Mrs. Fairlie was a woman who could do
as she liked, because she would; and she cared not a straw for
the very prononcé demonstration of engrossing one man for all
the quadrilles, waltzes, and gallopades, beside going with him to
supper. Once or twice I tried to find an excuse for leaving Mrs.
Follett, to put in an oar for myself; but the little woman clung
to me as if she had not the courage to undertake another person's
amusement, and, new and sudden as the feeling must have been,
she was pale and wretched, with a jealousy more bitter, probably,
than mine. Tom never gave me a look after the first waltz; and
as to the widow, she played her part with rather more zeal than
we set down for her. I passed altogether an uncomfortable
night, for a gay one, and it was a great relief to me when Mrs.
Follett asked me to send Tom for the carriage.
“Be so kind as to send a servant for it,” said Follett, very
I am going to sup, or rather breakfast, with Mrs. Beverly
Fairlie!”
Here was a mess!
“Shall I send the Count for your shawl?” I asked, after giving
this message, and wishing to know whether she was this side of
pride in her unhappiness.
The little woman burst into tears.
“I will sit in the cloak-room till my husband is ready,” she
said; “go to him, if you please, and implore him to come and
speak to me.”
As I said before, I wished the whole plot to the devil. We
had achieved our object, it is true—and so did the man who
knocked the breath out of his friend's body, in killing a fly on his
back. Tom is now (this was years ago) a married flirt of some
celebrity, for, after coming out of the widow's hands with a three
months' education, he had quite forgot to be troubled about Mrs.
Follett; and, instead of neglecting his dress, which was his only
sin when I took him in hand, he now neglects his wife, who sees
him, as women are apt to see their husbands, through other
women's eyes. I presume they are doomed to quite as much
unhappiness as would have fallen to their lot, had I left them
alone—had Mrs. Follett ran away with the Frenchman, and had
Tom died a divorced sloven. But when I think that, beside
achieving little for them, I was the direct means of spoiling Mrs.
Beverly Fairlie for myself, I think I may write myself down as a
warning to meddlers in matrimony.
| People I have met, or, Pictures of society and people of mark, drawn under a thin veil of fiction | |