University of Virginia Library

37. CHAPTER XXXVII.
A FAMILY QUARREL.

The Murrays, as well as Bradford, discovered
about these times that Josie was still
pursuing her barn intrigue, and, like him,
they manifested what she considered an
unreasonable and disagreeable excitement
about it.

It was not the young Congressman who
had exposed her to them. His singular conscience
often urged him so to do, but on the

whole he considered himself bound not to
meddle. The informer was that strong-minded
sufferer, who madly loved Sykes
Drummond, and who hated our heroine as
her successful rival. Miss Appleyard sent
the Reverend Murray a long anonymous letter,
revealing not only the persistent prosecution
of the claim, but also some of Josie's
audacities in the way of flirtation, as, for instance,
her journey in the sole company of
Mr. Hollowbread, her lonely drive with that
rakish Senator Ironman, and her cupola adventure
with the beauteous Beauman.

If the rector had been alone, and if he had
been in the full vigor of his native sense and
gentility, he would probably have stopped
reading this document as soon as he discovered
its nature, and either handed it to Josie
or burned it. But he was almost never
alone; and, moreover, he was in the habit
of reading every speck and scrap of his correspondence
to Mrs. Murray; and finally, by
dint of long continuance in providing gossip
for that lady, he had himself become a ravenous
gossip-monger.

The two venerable, excellent people had
a horrid, entertaining, wretched, savory hour
over the vile manuscript. The rector mumbled
a passage aloud; then he laid the letter
down in indignation, saying that that
was enough; furthermore, he denounced the
writer as a low, mean, mischievous, lying
creature.

Mrs. Murray repeated his words after him
fervently, but could not help looking unsatisfied.
Next followed a discussion as to
whether anonymous missives ought to be
burned, or whether they ought to be perused
with unbelief, detestation, and scorn.
Obviously, if the first method of treatment
had the precedence, the second could not be
tried at all. It seemed well to make proof
of both, and see which worked the most
satisfactorily.

So they read another page; paused anew
for commination service, with responses; had
a fresh discussion concerning proprieties and
probabilities; went back for further light
to the manuscript; finally finished it.

“I don't believe a word of it,” said Mrs.
Murray, with both her hands up. “Do you,
Mr. Murray?”

“From Og, king of Bashan, and from Sihon,
king of the Amorites, good Lord deliver
us!” groaned the rector.

“But you don't believe it is true, Mr. Murray?”

“Oh dear! This is a wicked world. I
am afraid some of it is true.”

“Oh, Mr. Murray!” gasped the old lady.
“So am I,” she added, with a curious inconsequence.
“I am afraid some of it is true.
She is so highty-tighty!”

“I shall inquire into it,” burst out the rector.
“And if she is guilty of this, or the
least tittle of it, I will turn her out of the
house, bag and baggage,” he threatened, in
his hyperbolical fashion. “I will not have
you troubled and worried thus,” he persisted,
when his wife essayed some remonstrance
against extreme measures. “I tell
you, Huldah, that I must not have it.”

And inquire he did, and learned only too
much. At his request the colonel took up
the train of the claim, and discovered that it
was still being pushed with energy; while
at the same time two conscientious old ladies
of the parish brought in, of their own
accord, a tale about Josie's flirtations. The
joint result of these communications disagreeably
justified nearly all the statements
of the anonymous letter. Even Mrs. Murray,
despite her strong liking for her clever and
diverting young relative, was horrified and
indignant. She fretted; she moaned that
the family was being disgraced; she actually
sobbed and shed tears. Her distress filled
the rector with rage and nerved him to heroism;
and he made such an onset upon the
guilty Josie as to positively scare her.

“I insist upon your stopping that claim-business
forever,” he said, in a choking,
stammering voice. “I insist upon a solemn
promise from you that you will stop it. I
insist upon your oath,” he continued, pushing
a Bible toward her. “I want your oath
—your oath!”

It was too much, this tone of domination
and of contemptuous reproach, even for Josie's
cool temper and good-nature. With a
smart little poke, something like the quick
spat of a kitten, she thrust the heavy volume
from her, tumbling it upon the floor.

The spunky gesture and the loud slam
thoroughly startled old Mrs. Murray, who
had prepared herself for the interview by
two days' nervous anticipation of it, and was
rather less fitted for it than was Bob Acres
for his duel. She jumped in her chair as if
she had been shot, threw up her hands in a
hysterical way, and uttered a cry.

“There!” exclaimed the rector, as if all the
mischief in the world had been done at once.
“Huldah! Huldah!” he went on, getting
over to his wife's side as quickly as he could.
“My dear, be calm. No harm shall happen
to you.”

“You frightened her yourself,” asserted
Josie, too much stirred up to be wise. “If
you would only keep your own calmness, it
would be better for her.”

But it was Josie who had alarmed the old
lady, and the latter showed it in her countenance.
She had the sensitiveness of invalids
and other weak creatures, that timorous
sensitiveness which, when it is hurt, becomes
aversion. She gazed at the young woman,
so lately her divertissement and pet, with eyes
which expressed not merely fear, but also
dislike.

“It is you,” cried the rector, infuriated by
Josie's charge that it was he who had troubled

his Huldah. “It is you who torment
her with your managements and your violences.
Huldah, be calm. Do be calm.”

But to be calm was more than Huldah
could now do. She was too old and too feeble
to control herself; she began to cry, and
was soon sobbing spasmodically.

“Run and get the ammonia, quick!” cried
the rector, calling on Josie without hesitation
in this dire extremity. “She is going
to faint. Oh, Huldah! Huldah!” he whimpered—yes,
actually whimpered—his voice
breaking like that of a weeping child. “Get
the ammonia! Ring for Sarah! Send for a
doctor!”

Josie ran: she did not forget that she had
been scolded, and that she meant to leave
the house; but still, in her good-nature, she
ran eagerly to search for restoratives. She
found Sarah, and sent her to the sitting-room,
but not a drop of ammonia could be discovered
high or low, and she returned to report
the fearful deficit just as her aunt swooned
away completely.

“No ammonia!” exclaimed the rector, with
a glare of reproach. “Never let yourself be
in the house a day with Mrs. Murray without
ammonia!”

Josie often laughed afterward over this
speech, but at the time she made no response,
either in mirth or anger, and simply fell to
work bathing the white face of the old lady.
Meantime the mulatto girl had gone after a
neighboring physician, with instructions to
bring him at once, dead or alive. He arrived
presently, took the mite of an invalid
in his arms, carried her to her bedroom, and
after long labor brought her to her senses.

During this interval her husband stood
over her, a picture of affectionate grief and
fright, wringing his hands, and groaning,
“Huldah! Huldah!” At last, when his darling
was to some extent restored, he came
trembling out of her room and sought Josie
in the parlor.

“She is better!” were his first words, uttered
as if there were no other object of pity
in the world, and no other topic of interest.
“The Lord help her through with it! But
we must—”

“We must part,” Josie interrupted him,
deciding, in the phrase of Balzac, “to go nobly
down the stairs rather than wait to be
thrown out of the window.” “After what
has occurred, I can not stay here.”

“Yes, we must part—we must part,” stammered
the rector, confused and yet relieved.
“I say it not in anger. I make no reproaches,
and want no explanations. We simply
can not bear it. We are too old and feeble,
both of us. This is not the way, I know, to
part from connections. But we can not help
it. Go in peace. The Lord be good to you!
Go when you can find it convenient. I can
say no more. Good-bye.”

Hastily turning his back to avoid further
speech, he tottered feebly out of the room
and went to sit by his wife's bedside.

Josie remained alone. It seemed to her
for a while that she was alone in the world.
Within a few days she had lost the man
whom she had best loved and the friends
who had given her a home and a position in
Washington society.

Lobbying and universal coquetting having
brought such trouble upon her, it seemed
all of a sudden as if they must be very
wicked, and she had a pang of remorse. But
it was too late now to think of changing
her course, for her connections had cast her
off in the most positive and irreversible
manner; and lobbying and flirting were
henceforward her only possible paths to
prosperity, and perhaps her only means of
existence.

Moreover, in her momentary abasement
Josie doubted her power of reforming. She
remembered how often she had resolved to
be good, without the least permanent result;
and in her despair she sobbed to herself:

“I can't, and I know I can't; and I won't
try.”

Her next thought was that she would
marry Mr. Hollowbread, and then behave
like the very witch, and serve him right.

Of course she was in a pet; even a woman
can not very well be hurt, humiliated,
and scared without fuming about it; even
Josie's wonderful good temper could not sail
smoothly over her present sea of troubles.

But, meanwhile, action was necessary;
she must find a comfortable and genteel
home at once. While she packed her trunk
(putting away a few tears along with her
dresses) she pondered as to whither she
should betake herself.

After meditating upon hotels and rejecting
them as expensive, after taking into consideration
boarding-houses and revolting from
them as low, she concluded to knock for admission
at the door of her sister-claimant,
Mrs. Warden.

“Going to leave the Murrays!” stared that
lady, when Josie called upon her with her
proposition. “I had an idea that you were
settled there for life.”

“My dear, it was only a visit,” answered
our heroine, who had decided to say nothing
about the quarrel, at least for the present.
“I was invited for a month, and I have already
staid two. One must not ride hospitality
to death. If they want me back, they
can apply for me.”

“They will apply for you fast enough.
I don't see how the old lady can spare you
a day. She has often told me what an
amusement you are to her; how you bring
her every thing that is stirring in society,
all the pottage of gossip that she loves.”

“Yes, that is it. They use me—just a
little too much, don't you know? I should
like a resting spell; I should like a vacation.

They have been very good to me.”
(She said this with a swelling of anger and
grief in her pretty fibbing throat, for, in
reality, she felt just then that they had been
outrageously hard with her.) “But they
have also been exacting. You can't imagine
what a despotism that household lives under
in the way of cosseting and diverting
that old lady. Not that she herself seems
to demand it so very much. But her husband,
the dear old rector, is perfectly cracked
about her. He serves her himself constantly,
and wants every body else in the same
harness. I must tell Mrs. Murray every
thing that I see, hear, say, do, think, or
dream. I must be always on hand for her
sick turns, no matter when she chooses to
have them. I must walk tiptoe in the hall,
and laugh in a whisper in the parlor. If
my dress rustles as I go down stairs, Uncle
John opens his door and glares out awfully
to see who is making that deafening uproar.
If visitors stay after ten o'clock, he behaves
as if they were Indians come to scalp him.
Sometimes he gets into the study slyly, and
glowers through the hall at us without
speaking, and then goes back to talk to Mrs.
Murray about it. If he kept a gun, I should
think he was going to fire at us, or at least
to bang it out of the window, like old Mr.
Bronté. I am perfectly certain that they
have the longest and solemnest conversations
with each other about my worldliness
and levity and hoidenism and boisterousness.
And then when I go to them I must
tell it all, and they seem to like it. But the
very next gentleman that calls puts Uncle
John in a state again. Positively I sometimes
think he is crazy. He thinks of nothing
but his old wife; he wants to hush the
whole world for her sake. He would like
to make the omnibus pass his door at a walk.
He goes to his front door and orders away
niggers who are guffawing on the sidewalk.
Once, when an expressman dropped a heavy
package in the hall, he looked at the man
as though he had dropped it on Mrs. Murray's
head, and said out loud, `There is a hell!'
I have heard him talk for twenty minutes
about some old granny who, ten years ago,
or forty years ago, perhaps, bathed his wife's
feet nicely in hot water and mustard; and
he always declares, when he tells the story,
that she will go to Paradise for it.”

“Oh, but these are his jokes,” laughed
Mrs. Warden, who was quite fond of the old
gentleman in her flighty way, and who,
moreover, knew that he was an intelligent
talker and humorous.

“Yes, they are jokes, but jokes right out
of the heart. He is pretty serious in them,
with all his apologetical smiling. He partly
knows, I think, that he is irrational, and
tries to cover it up and excuse it by joking.
But he is clean addled, all the same.”

“It is hard for a woman to make mouths
at a man for being overfond of his wife,”
opined Mrs. Warden, who had long since decided
that it was a misfortune to lose a loving
husband, and that she should like to get
another.

“I don't know about that,” doubted Josie.
“I don't want such a husband as my uncle
is. I should fly at him. I would breathe
without him. I would not let him breathe
for me. It is a husband's business to support
his wife, and protect her, and give her
a position, but not to hold her in his lap forever,
and make her sit there. Who wants
to be kept in an egg-shell always? A woman
needs to get hatched some time or other,
and scratch and peck about a little by herself.
That is what I mean to do.”

“I rather think you will do it,” smiled the
elder lady.

“I rather think you won't attack me for
it.”

“No,” admitted Mrs. Warden, who had
herself pecked about quite independently,
even during the lifetime of the patient man
for whom she mourned.

“Besides, a woman who is worth sixpence
wants her husband to be a great man,” continued
Josie. “She wants a chance to be
proud of him. She wants to see him make
other men bow down to him and to her.
But how can he bring that about when he
is always holding her in lap? Just look at
my uncle's way of life, and what has come
of it. He is a clever man; he has a big
knowledge-box, and plenty of brains in it;
when he isn't in a twitter about his wife, he
can talk as wisely and wittily as any body
in Washington. Then look at his other advantages—family,
education, money, leisure
—every thing that a man needs to work
with. Well, what has he done? He has
not even got to be a Doctor of Divinity. I
don't believe he ever wrote a great sermon,
nor so much as a hundred middling ones,
such as he does write. He talks about exegesis,
but I don't think he ever did any of
it, whatever it may be. Nobody ever called
him a scholar, not even for fun. He has
just simply taken good care of one woman.
He has spent years in traveling with her,
when he should have been earning a bishopric.
He has settled down to a church merely
because she couldn't travel any longer;
and now, when he, perhaps, wants to work,
he can't. He has passed so much time in
amusing and trying to keep alive one aging
mind, that he has become a confirmed gossip-monger.
He reads the newspapers; he begins
where we do, with the deaths and marriages;
then he reads all the city items, the
fashions, the very advertisements—he reads
the whole daily tweedledum and tweedledee
aloud; he has done it for forty years, and he
can't stop. What will he leave behind him
to keep his name in remembrance? Nothing
but his tombstone—an epitaph written

by a liar, and chiseled by a dunce! Isn't it
a shame to have a head as big as a demijohn,
and not let posterity know that you
had a head at all? Do you call that doing
your duty by yourself, and by your kind,
and by your Maker? When the Lord calls
him to an account, pretty much all he will
be able to say will be, `I have taken care of
Huldah.' Now, of course, it is right and
lovely to take care of Huldah; but is that
all that a man of wealth and talents ought
to do? Oh, there is a lot of humbug among
us women about good, attentive husbands!
Some of the husbands best worth quarreling
for are husbands who are not a bit attentive.”

“Every thing may be abused, even affection,”
observed Mrs. Warden, warmed up to
a little more than her usual power of reflection
by the friction of Josie's superior intelligence.

“Women don't think so, but it is true.”

“Still, I like the rector. I like him for
his very weakness about his wife. I laugh
at him for it, and I like him for it.”

“When you see close at hand how it
works, you don't like him so well for it,”
affirmed Josie, who was naturally bitter
against her uncle, and disposed to disparage
him. “It almost makes him stupid. He is
really a witty man, and yet for her sake he
is not witty. His talk and his thoughts are
constantly broken up by his explanations to
her, and by her questions and responses. I
really think he is often afraid to say the best
thing he can, for fear she won't understand
it. She isn't a fool; she does catch at a joke
right smartly; but then he is so afraid she
won't! And if she shouldn't, somebody
might think she was broken, and that
would kill him. The gracious deliver me
from such a husband! When I lose my
wits, I want my protector and blessing to
tell me of it.”

“I see that you have suffered,” laughed
Mrs. Warden. “The old people must have
been very hard on you.”

“Yes, I have suffered,” emphasized Josie,
whose heart was swollen all the while with
indignation, although her speech was guarded
and sensible. “A man has a right to sacrifice
himself to his wife, I suppose; but I
deny that he has a right to sacrifice other
people to her. I know that he shall not sacrifice
me. Well, I must stop scolding. You
will think I have a bad temper, and I have
not. Did you ever see me cross before?”

“Never,” said Mrs. Warden, quite truthfully.

“And the sum of it is (I beg you never to
mention it to the old people), the sum of it
is, that I want to close my visit; but I don't
want to leave Washington, and I don't want
to go to a boarding-house, and I mustn't go
to a hotel. Will you let me keep house with
you, and bear my share of the expenses?”

Mrs. Warden did not like the idea, and
yet she could not say no to it. On the one
hand, she was afraid to receive permanently
under her roof such a rival for Belle; on the
other hand, the Commodore Hooker claim
had been a costly one to launch, and had
as yet brought in no booty; so that money
was becoming scarce in the family locker,
and financial help desirable. Josie could,
no doubt, help face the butcher, and might
be of use in the game of log-rolling.

“If you can make the change pleasant to
the Murrays, it will be delightful to me,”
she said.

“I can make it pleasant enough to them,”
answered Josie, with a little grimace. “I
wish I were sure of making it pleasant to
you.”