University of Virginia Library

5. CHAPTER V.
THE HONEYMOON

FROM Mrs. Senator Woodhull's elegant house,
where Mrs. Judge Markham had been petted,
and flattered, and caressed, and Mr. Judge Markham
had been adroitly tutored and trained, the newly
wedded pair went on to Quebec and Montreal, and thence
to the White Mountains, where Ethelyn's handsome travelling
dress was ruined, and Richard's linen coat, so obnoxious
to his bride, was torn past repair, and laid away in
one of Ethelyn's trunks, with the remark that “Mother
could mend it for Andy, who always took his brother's
cast-off clothes.” The hair trunk had been left in Chicopee,
and so Ethelyn had not that to vex her.

Noticed everywhere, and admired by all whom she met,
the first part of her wedding-trip was not so irksome as she
had feared it might be. Wholly infatuated with his young
bride, Richard was all attention, and Ethelyn had only to
express a wish to have it gratified, so that casual lookers-on
would have pronounced her supremely happy. And
Ethelyn's heart did not ache one-half so hard as on that
terrible day of her bridal. In the railway-car, on the
crowded steamboat, or at the large hotels, where all
were entire strangers, she forgot to watch and criticise
her husband; and if any dereliction from etiquette did
occur, he yielded so readily to her suggestion that to
polish him seemed an easy task. The habits of years,
however, are not so easily broken; and by the time Saratoga

was reached Richard's patience began to give way
beneath Ethelyn's multifarious exactions, and the ennui
consequent upon his travelling about so long. Still he did
pretty well for him, growing very red in the face with his
efforts to draw on gloves a size too small, and feeling excessively
hot and uncomfortable in his coat, which he wore
even in the retirement of his own room, where he desired
so much to indulge in the cool luxury of shirt sleeves,—a
suggestion which Ethelyn heard with horror, openly exclaiming
against the glaring vulgarity, and asking, a little
contemptuously, if that were the way he had been accustomed
to do at home.

“Why, yes,” he answered. “Out on the prairies we go
in for comfort, and don't mind so small a matter as shirt
sleeves on a sweltering August day.”

“Please do not use such expressions as sweltering and go
in,—they do not sound well,” Ethelyn rejoined. “And
now I think of it, I wish you would talk more to the ladies
in the parlor. You hardly spoke to Mrs. Cameron last
evening, and she directed most of her conversation to you,
too. I was afraid she would either think that you were
rude, or else that you did not know what to say.”

“She hit it right, if she came to the latter conclusion,”
Richard said, good-humoredly; “for the fact is, I don't
know what to say to such women as she. I am not a
ladies' man, and it's no use trying to make me over. You
can't teach old dogs new tricks.”

Ethie fairly groaned as she clasped her bracelets upon her
arms and shook down the folds of her blue silk; then after
a moment she continued, “You can talk to me, and why
not to others?”

“You are my wife, Ethie, and I love you, which makes

a heap of difference,” Richard said, and winding his arm
around Ethie's waist he drew her face toward his own and
kissed it affectionately.

They had been three days at Saratoga when this little
scene occurred, and their room was one of those miserable
little apartments in the Ainsworth block which look out
upon nothing but a patch of weeds and the rear of a church.
Ethelyn did not like it at all, and liked it the less because
she felt that to some extent her husband was to blame.
He ought to have written and engaged rooms beforehand,—
Aunt Van Buren always did, and Mrs. Col. Tophevie, and
everybody who understood the ins and outs of fashionable
life. But Richard did not understand them. He believed
in taking what was offered to him without making a fuss,
he said. He had never been to Saratoga before, and he
secretly hoped he should never come again, for he did not
enjoy the close, hot room any better than Ethelyn did, but
he accepted it with a better grace, saying, when he first
entered it, that “he could put up with most anything,
though to be sure it was hotter than an oven.”

His mode of expressing himself had never suited Ethelyn.
Particular, and even elegant in her choice of language, it
grated upon her sensitive ear, and forgetting that she had
all her life heard similar expressions in Chicopee, she
charged it to the West, and Iowa was blamed for the faults
of her son more than she deserved. At Saratoga, where
they met many of her acquaintances, all of whom were
anxious to see the fastidious Ethelyn's husband, it seemed
to her that he was more remiss than ever in those little
things which make up the finished gentleman, while his
peculiar expressions sometimes made every nerve quiver
with pain. The consequence of this was that Ethelyn became

a very little cross, as Richard thought, though she
had never so openly attacked him as on that day, the third
after their arrival, when to her horror he took off his coat,
preparatory to a little comfort, while she was dressing for
dinner. At Ethelyn's request, however, he put it on again,
saying as he did so, that he was “sweating like a butcher,”
which remark called out his wife's contemptuous inquiries
concerning his habits at home. Richard was still too much
in love with his young wife to feel very greatly irritated.
In word and deed she had done her duty toward him thus
far, and he had nothing to complain of. It is true she was
very quiet and passive, and undemonstrative, never giving
him back any caress, as he had seen wives do. But then
he was not very demonstrative himself, and so he excused
it the more readily in her, and loved her all the same. It
amused him that a girl of eighteen should presume to criticise
him, a man of thirty-two, a Judge, and a Member of
Congress, to whom the Olney people paid such deference,
and he bore with her at first just as a mother would bear
with the little child which assumed a superiority over
her.

This afternoon, however, when she said so much to him,
he was conscious of a little irritation. But he put the feeling
down, and gayly kissed his six weeks' bride, who,
touched with his forbearance, kissed him back again, and
suffered him to hold her cool face a moment between his
hot, moist hands, while he bent over her.

She did respect him; nor was she unconscious of the
position which, as his wife, she held. It was very pleasant
to hear people say of her when she passed by,

“That is Mrs. Judge Markham, of Iowa,—her husband is
Member of Congress.”

Very pleasant, too, to meet with his friends, other M.C.'s,
who paid her deference on his account. Had they stayed
away from Saratoga all might have been well; but they
were there, and so was all of Ethelyn's world,—the Tophevies,
the Hales, the Hungerfords, and Van Burens, with
Nettie Hudson, opening her great blue eyes at Richard's
mistake, and asking Frank in Ethelyn's hearing, “if Judge
Markham's manners were not a little outré.”

They certainly were outré, there was no denying it, and
Ethelyn's blood tingled to her finger-tips as she wondered
if it would always be so. It is a pitiable thing for a wife
to blush for her husband, to watch constantly lest he depart
from the little points of etiquette which women catch intuitively,
but which some of our most learned men fail to
acquire in a lifetime. And here they greatly err, for no
man, however well versed he may be in science and literature,
is well educated, or well balanced, or excusable, if he
neglects the little things which good breeding and common
politeness require of him, and Richard was somewhat to be
blamed. It did not follow, because his faults had never
been pointed out to him, that they did not exist, or that
others did not observe them besides his wife. Ethelyn, it
is true, was more deeply interested than any one else, and
felt his mistakes more keenly, while at the same time she
was over-fastidious, and had not the happiest faculty for
correcting him. She did not love him well enough to be
careful of wounding him; but the patience and good-humor
with which he received her reprimand that hot August
afternoon, when the thermometer was one hundred in the
shade, and any man would have been excusable for retorting
upon the wife who lectured him, awoke a throb of
something nearer akin to love than anything she had felt

since the night when she stood upon the sandy beach, and
heard the story of Daisy.

Richard was going to do better. He would wear his
coat all the time, both day and night, if Ethelyn said so.
He would not lean his elbow on the table while waiting
for dessert, as he had more than once been guilty of doing;
he would not help himself to a dish before passing it to
the ladies near him; he would talk to Mrs. Cameron in the
evening, and would try and not be so absorbed in his own
thoughts as to pay no attention when Mrs. Tophevie was
addressing herself directly to him; he would laugh in the
right place, and, when spoken to, would answer in something
besides monosyllables. In short, he promised a
complete reformation, even saying that if Ethelyn would
select some person who was au fait in those matters in
which he was so remiss, he would watch and copy
that man to the letter. Would she name some one?
And Ethelyn named her cousin Frank, while Richard felt
a flush of resentment that he should be required to imitate
a person whom in his secret heart he despised as dandyish,
and weak, and silly, and “namby-pamby,” as he would
probably have expressed it if he had not forsworn slang
phrases of every kind. But Richard had pledged his
word, and meant to keep it; and so it was to all appearance
a very happy and loving couple which, when the
dinner-gong sounded, walked into the dining-room with Mrs.
Dr. Van Buren's set, Ethelyn's handsome blue silk sweeping
far behind her, and her white bare arm just touching
the coat-sleeve of her husband, who was not insensible to
the impression made by the beautiful woman at his side.

There were no lectures that night, for Richard had done
his best, talking at least twenty minutes with both Mrs.

Cameron and Mrs. Col. Tophevie, both of whom he found
more agreeable than he had supposed. Then he had held
Ethelyn's white cloak upon his arm, and stood patiently
against the wall, while up at the United States she danced
set after set—first, the Lancers, with young Lieut. Grey,
then a polka with John Tophevie, and lastly a waltz with
Frank Van Buren, who whirled his fair partner about the
room with a velocity which made Richard dizzy and awoke
sundry thoughts not wholly complimentary to that doubtful
dance, the waltz. Richard did not dance himself, at
least not latterly. In his younger days, when he and Abigail
Jones attended the quilting frolics together and the
“paring bees,” he had, with other young men, tried his
skill at “Scotch Reels,” “French Fours,” “The Cheat,” and
the “Twin Sisters,” with occasionally a Cotillon, but he was
not accomplished in the art. Even the Olney girls called
him awkward, preferring almost any one else for a partner,
and so he abandoned the floor, and cultivated his head
rather than his heels. He liked to see dancing, and at
first it was very pleasant watching Ethelyn's lithe figure
gliding gracefully through the intricate movements of the
Lancers; but when it came to the waltz, he was not so sure
about it, and he wondered if it were necessary for Frank
Van Buren to clasp her so tightly about the waist as he
did, or for her to lean so languidly upon his shoulder.

Richard was not naturally jealous,—certainly not of Frank
Van Buren; but he would rather his wife should not waltz
with him or any other man, and so he said to her, asking this
concession on her part in return for all he had promised to
attempt; and to Ethelyn's credit we record that she yielded
to her husband's wishes, and, greatly to Frank's surprise,
declined the waltz which he proposed the following evening.

But she made amends in other dances, and kept poor
Richard waiting for her night after night, until he once fell
asleep and dreamed of the log cabin on the prairie, where
he had danced a quadrille with Abigail Jones to the tune
of Moneymusk, as played by the Plympton brothers.

A tap of Mrs. Tophevie's fan brought him back to consciousness,
and he was almost guilty of a sigh as the log
cabin faded from his vision, with the Plymptons and Abigail
Jones, leaving instead that heated ball-room, with its
trained orchestra, its bevy of fair young girls, its score of
white-kidded dandies, with wasp-like waists and perfumed
locks, and Ethie smiling in their midst.

Saratoga did not agree with Richard. He grew sick
first of the water; then of the fare; then of the daily
routine of fashionable follies; then of the people; and then,
oh! so sick of the petty lectures which Ethelyn gradually
resumed as he failed in his attempts to imitate Frank Van
Buren and appear perfectly at ease in everybody's presence.
Saratoga was a “confounded bore,” he said, and though he
called himself a brute, and a savage, and a heathen, he was
very glad when, toward the last of August, Ethelyn became
so seriously indisposed as to make a longer stay in Saratoga
impossible. Newport of course was given up, and
Ethelyn's desire was to go back to Chicopee and lie down
again in the dear old room which had been hers from childhood.
Aunt Barbara's toast, Aunt Barbara's tea, and Aunt
Barbara's nursing, would soon bring her all right again, she
said; but in this she was mistaken, for although the toast
and the tea, and the nursing each came in its turn, the September
flowers had faded, and the trees on the Chicopee
hills were beginning to flaunt their bright October robes
ere she recovered from the low, nervous fever, induced by

the mental and bodily excitement through which she had
passed during the last three or four months.

Although he knew it was necessary that he should be at
home if he would transact any business before the opening
of his next session in Washington, Richard put aside all
thoughts of self, and nursed his wife with a devotedness
which awakened her liveliest gratitude.

Richard was not awkward in the sick-room. It seemed
to be his special province; and as he had once nursed and
cared for Daisy and the baby brother who died, so he now
cared for Ethelyn, until she began to miss him when he left
her side, and to listen for his returning step when he went
out for an hour or so to talk politics with his uncle, Col.
Markham. With Mrs. Dr. Van Buren and Frank and the
fashionable world all away, Richard's faults were not so
perceptible, and Ethelyn began to look forward with considerable
interest to the time when she should be able to
start for her Western home, about which she had built
many delusive castles. Her piano had already been sent
on in advance, she saying to Susie Granger, who came in
while it was being boxed, that as they were not to keep
house until spring she should not take furniture now. Possibly
they could find what they needed in Chicago; if not,
they could order from Boston.

Richard, who overheard this remark, wondered what it
meant, for he had not the most remote idea of separating
himself from his mother. She was very essential to his
happiness, and he was hardly willing to confess to himself
how much he had missed her. She had a way of petting
him and deferring to his judgment, and making him feel that
Richard Markham was a very nice kind of man, far different
from Ethelyn's criticisms, which had sometimes led him

seriously to inquire whether he were a fool or not. He
could not live apart from his mother,—he was firm upon
that point; but there was time enough to say so
when the subject should be broached to him. So he went
on nailing down the cover to the piano-box, and thinking
as he nailed what a nice kitchen cupboard the box would
make when once it was safely landed at his home in the
prairie, and wondering, too, how his mother,—who was not
very fond of music,—would bear the sound of a piano, and
if Ethie would be willing for Melinda Jones to practise upon
it. He knew Melinda had taken lessons at Camden,
where she had been to school, and he had heard her express
a wish that she had an instrument, as she should soon
forget all she had learned. Somehow Melinda was a good
deal in Richard's mind, and when a button was missing
from his shirts, or his toes came through his socks,—as
was often the case at Saratoga,—he found himself thinking
of the way Melinda had of helping “fix his things”
when he was going from home, and of hearing his mother
say what a handy girl she was, and what a thrifty, careful
wife she would make. He meant nothing derogatory to
Ethelyn in these reminiscences; he would not have exchanged
her for a thousand Melindas, even if he had to pin
his shirt-bosoms together and go barefoot all his life. But
Melinda kept recurring to his mind much as if she had
been his sister, and he thought it would be but a simple
act of gratitude for all she had done for him to give her the
use of the piano for at least one hour each day.

In blissful ignorance of all that was meditated against
her, Ethelyn saw her piano taken away from the sitting-room,
where it would never stand again, and saw the tears
which rolled down Aunt Barbara's cheeks as she too watched

its going, and tried to fill up the vacancy it left by moving
a chair and a table and a footstool into the gap. Those
were hard days for Aunt Barbara, harder than for Ethelyn,
who liked the excitement of travelling, and was almost
glad when the morning came on which she was to say good-by
to the home which was hers no longer. Her two huge
trunks stood in the hall, together with the square hair
trunk which held Richard's wardrobe, and the three tin
cans of peaches Mrs. Markham was sending to her sister-in-law,
with the injunction to be sure and get that particular
patent for cans if she wished her fruit to keep. In
addition to these, an immense box had been forwarded by
express, containing many little ornaments and pictures and
brackets, which, during the winter, might perhaps adorn
the walls of the parlor where Daisy's picture hung, and
where, Richard had said, was also an oil-painting of Niagara,
omitting to add that it was the handiwork of Melinda
Jones, that young lady having dabbled in paints as
well as music during her two terms schooling at Camden.
Tucked away in various parts of the box were also sundry
presents, which, at Mrs. Dr. Van Buren's suggestion, Ethelyn
had bought for her husband's family. For James, who,
she had heard Richard say, was an inveterate smoker, there
was a handsome velvet smoking-cap, which, having been
bought at Saratoga, had cost an enormous sum; for John,
an expensive pair of elaborately-wrought slippers had been
selected; but when it came to Anderson, as Ethelyn persisted
in calling the brother whom Richard always spoke of as
Andy, she felt a little perplexed as to what would be appropriate.
Richard had talked very little of him,—so little, in
fact, that she knew nothing whatever of his tastes, except
from the scrap of conversation she once accidentally over
heard when the old Colonel was talking to Richard of his
brothers.

“Does Andy like busts as well as ever?” the captain
had asked, but Richard's reply was lost as Ethelyn walked
on.

Still, she had heard enough to give her some inkling with
regard to the mysterious Andy. Probably he was more
refined than either James or John,—at all events, he was
evidently fond of statuary, and his tastes should be gratified.
Accordingly, Boston was ransacked by Mrs. Dr. Van
Buren for an exquisite head of Schiller, done in marble, and
costing thirty dollars. Richard did not see it. The presents
were a secret from him, all except the handsome
point-lace coiffeur which Aunt Barbara sent to Mrs. Markham,
together with a letter which she sat up till midnight
to write, and in which she touchingly commended her darling
to the new mother's care and consideration.

The writing this letter was not the wisest thing Aunt

Barbara could have done, but she was incited to it by what
her sister Sophie told her of the rumors concerning Mrs.
Markham, and her own fears lest Ethelyn should not be as
comfortable with the new mother-in-law as was wholly desirable.
To Richard himself she had said that she presumed
that his mother's ways were not like Ethie's—old people
were different from young ones—the world had improved
since their day, and instead of trying to bring young folks
altogether to their modes of thinking, it was well for both
to yield something. This was the third time Richard had
heard his mother's ways alluded to; first by Mrs. Jones,
who called them queer; second, by Mrs. Dr. Van Buren,
who, for Ethie's sake, had also dropped a word of caution,
hinting that his mother's ways might possibly be a little
peculiar; and lastly by good Aunt Barbara, who signalized
them as different from Ethelyn's.

What did it mean, and why had he never discovered
anything amiss in his mother? He trusted that Mrs. Jones,
and Mrs. Dr. Van Buren, and Aunt Barbara were mistaken.
On the whole, he knew they were; and even if
they were not his mother could not do wrong to Ethie,
while Ethie would, of course, be willing to conform to
any request made by a person so much older than herself
as his mother was. So Richard dismissed that subject
from his mind, and Ethelyn,—having never heard it agitated,
except that time when, with Mrs. Jones on his mind,
Richard had thought it proper to suggest the propriety of
her humoring his mother,—felt no fears of Mrs. Markham
Senior, whom she still associated in her mind with heavy
black silk, gold-bowed spectacles, handsome lace and
fleecy crochet-work.

The October morning was clear and crisp and frosty,

and the sun had not yet shown itself above the eastern
hills, when Captain Markham's carryall drove to Aunt
Barbara's gate, followed by the long, democrat-wagon
which was to take the baggage. Ethelyn's spoiled travelling
dress had been replaced by a handsome poplin,
which was made in the extreme fashion, and fitted her admirably,
as did every portion of her dress, from her jaunty
hat and dotted lace veil to the Alexandre kids and fancy
little gaiters which encased her feet and hands. She was
prettier than on her bridal-day, Richard thought, as he
kissed away the tears which dropped so fast even after
the last good-by had been said to poor Aunt Barbara, who
watched the flutter of Ethie's veil and ribbons as far as
they could be seen, and then in the secrecy of her own
room knelt and prayed that God would bless and keep
her darling, and make her happy in the new home to
which she was going.

It was very quiet and lonely in the Bigelow house that
day, Aunt Barbara walking softly, and speaking slowly, as if
the form of some one dead had been borne from her side;
while on the bed which the housemaid Betty had made
up so plump and round there was a cavity made by Aunt
Barbara's head, which hid itself there many times as the
good woman went repeatedly to God with the pain gnawing
so at her heart. But in the evening, when a cheerful
wood-fire was kindled on the hearth of her pleasant sitting-room,
and Mrs. Colonel Markham came in with her
knitting-work, to sit until the Colonel called for her on his
return from the meeting where he was to oppose with
all his might the building of a new school-house, to pay
for which he would be heavily taxed, she felt better, and
could talk composedly of the travellers, who by that time

were nearing Rochester, where they would spend the
night.

Although very anxious to reach home, Richard had
promised that Ethelyn should only travel through the day,
as she was not as strong as before her illness. And to this
promise he adhered, so that it was near the middle of the
afternoon of the fifth day that the last change was made,
and they took the train that would in two hours' time deposit
them at Olney. At Camden, the county seat, they
waited for a few moments. There was always a crowd of
people here going out to different parts of the country, and
as one after another came into the car Richard seemed to
know them all, while the cordial and rather noisy greeting
which they gave “the Judge” struck Ethelyn a little oddly,
—it was so different from the quiet, undemonstrative manners
to which she had been accustomed. With at least a
dozen men in shaggy overcoats and slouched hats she shook
hands with a tolerably good grace, but when there appeared
a tall, lank, bearded young giant of a fellow, with a
dare-devil expression in his black eyes, and a stain of tobacco
about his mouth, she drew back, and to his hearty
“How are ye, Miss Markham? Considerable tuckered out,
I reckon?” she merely responded with a cool bow and a
haughty stare, intended to put down the young man, whom
Richard introduced as “Tim Jones,” and who, taking the
seat directly in front of her, poured forth a volley of conversation,
calling Richard sometimes “Dick,” sometimes
“Markham,” but oftener “Square,” as he had learned to do
when Richard was Justice of the Peace in Olney. Melinda,
too, or “Melind,” was mentioned as having been over to
the “Square's house helping the old lady fix up a little,”
and then Ethelyn knew that the “savage” was no other

than brother to Abigail Jones deceased. The discovery
was not a pleasant one, and did not tend to smooth her
ruffled spirits or lessen the feeling of contempt for Western
people in general, and Richard's friends in particular, which
had been growing in her heart ever since the Eastern
world was left behind and she had been fairly launched
upon the great prairies of the Mississippi Valley. Richard
was a prince compared with the specimens she had seen,
though she did wonder that he should be so familiar with
them, calling them by their first names, and even bandying
jokes with the terrible Tim Jones spitting his tobacco-juice
all over the car floor and laughing so loudly at all the
“Square” said. It was almost too dreadful to endure, and
Ethelyn's head was beginning to ache frightfully when the
long train came to a pause, and the conductor, who also
knew Judge Markham, and called him “Dick,” screamed
through the open door “O-l-ney!”

Ethelyn was at home at last.