Addie's Husband; or, Through clouds to sunshine

to pay him back the debt we owe him. I will brighten his home, and make it a happy one for him; I will never let him regret the day he married me and mine; I will be gentle, loving, companionable, always striving to please; I will curb my awful temper, put a check on my impetuous tongue. He will never guess, never suspect that I am not perfectly happy and contented, never know that I don't care for him as I might have cared for another--another not half as good, as noble, as generous, or as true as he is. Oh, why can't I--why can't I? How perverse and hard-hearted I am! But it won't matter; he'll never know--never! He'll never see me without a smile on my lips and cheerfulness in my eyes. I'll be a good wife to you, Tom, I will! Oh, help me, dear Heaven!" CHAPTER IX. The honeymoon is a fortnight old. Mrs. Armstrong, in a pale silk of grayish blue, with ruffles of creamy lace at throat and wrists, and sparkling diamonds in her pretty pink ears, is languidly toying with a bunch of muscatel grapes, listening to the grateful plash of the waves breaking on the pebbly shore below. The room in which she sits is a charming one, delicately yet luxuriously furnished, bright with hothouse flowers, with big French windows opening on to a canopied balcony overhanging the restless waters of St. George's Channel. Her husband is leaning back in his chair, sipping his post-prandial claret in blissful enjoyment. "Headache all gone, Addie?" he asks, breaking a pleasant drowsy silence. She turns her smiling face to him with a slight start. "Headache? Had I a headache, Tom? Oh, I remember! That was this morning--ages ago--after bathing! Fancy your remembering all that time!" "Well, I hope I am not such a callous wretch as to forget my wife's ailments, even after the long 'ages' of a summer morning." "That is a real pretty speech, as Miss Tucker, on the flat below us, would say. I'll treasure it in my memory, Tom, and recall it to you, say, this day five years." "You'll find it in tune, my dear. I'm not afraid." She shakes her head doubtfully. "Impossible! Even though your spirit was willing, the boys would have corrupted you long before. Fancy Bob or Hal inquiring after a headache six hours old! Listen to the music; how sweet it sounds!" "Like a turn on the pier, dear?" She assents gladly, and trips off to array herself, returning almost at once with a chip-hat and light lace-scarf thrown round her shoulders. "Addie, you're not going out in that flimsy garment at this hour of the night--quite a sharp wind rising too! Go and put on something warmer." "But I'm quite warm, Tom. Why, I have been out in the bitterest east wind, with snow on the ground and with a bad sore throat, not more heavily clad than this!" "Well, my dear, that is an experience you may boast of, but which you will not practically repeat. Go, like a good girl, and put on that white woolly thing I saw in your wardrobe this morning." She complies sweetly, but when out of sight, petulantly pulls the wrap from its shell, muttering-- "Well, I hope this will satisfy him. Why it's first cousin to a blanket! I shall be suffocated. Oh, dear!" They sally forth and stroll slowly through the fashionable crowd, Addie's feet keeping time to a swinging gavotte, while she furtively eyes some dozen couples whose demeanor and gay attire incline her to suspect that they are in the same interesting position as herself and Tom. After a time they leave the crowd and walk to the end of the pier, which they have all to themselves. They clamber over the moonlit rocks and stand arm in arm looking across the rippling waters, the music reaching them mellowed by distance into divinely soothing harmony. It is an hour, a moment to put poetry into the breasts of the Smallweed family. Armstrong feels its influence. He bends his dark face over his wife's, and asks sentimentally-- "Are you happy, Addie?" "Oh, yes--yes!" she whispers back, with sparkling eyes. "Why should I not be? You are so very k--" He blocks the sentence with a kiss. "You need not have been in such a hurry," she laughs. "How do you know I was going to say that, after all? There are lots of other adjectives beginning with a 'k,' besides 'kind.' Let me see--'kantankerous,' for instance--" "Hem! When I was at school, 'cantankerous' began with a 'c,' Mistress Addie." "Oh, dear! I won't try repartee again, no matter how grievous the assault. Tom, what a valuable governess you robbed the Moggeridges of! You owe them compensation, sir." A faint breeze brings to them a few bars of one of the sweetest, saddest love-songs ever written. Addie's voice drops; she says, scarcely above her breath-- "And you, Tom--are you happy too?" "Happier, dear, than I ever thought I could be, even in my wildest dreams of matrimonial bliss. I've had you only a fortnight, little wife, and yet I don't know how I did without you during all the past years, or what life would be to me it you went from me now." "I have no immediate intention of going," she remarks, rubbing her soft cheek against his coat-sleeve. "No, you're bound for life now, thank Heaven!" he says fervently. "And, when I think of the many times I have been within an ace of losing you, child, of throwing the whole thing up and letting you go, I rejoice in possessing the gift of pig-headedness, and--" "You were within an ace of giving me up! When, Tom? I never knew." "Scores of times. I thought I could not make you happy, or myself either. I shrunk from the risk." "Why? What risk?" "We were so different, you see, Addie--there was such a gulf between us, not only of years, but of experience, of habit, of thought and mode of life. My past had been so rough, so lonely, so self-sufficing. And then--then, you did not like me, Addie; I saw that plainly enough. You used to shrink if I tried to come near you; and the way you hedged yourself in with those blessed boys was disconcerting, to say the least of it." "I saw you did not like it," she says, with a low laugh. "Not like it! By Jove, if you could have guessed the many times my fingers have itched to close on the shapely throat of that brother of yours, my dear, you would--" "Poor Bob!"--a little anxiously. "You must not bear him ill-will, Tom; he's off his guard now. You see, I did not understand you then--did not know how to talk to you; you looked so big--so out of my world. But now it is all different." Then, after a short pause--"And so you think I can make you happy, husband--you don't regret it? You won't find us too much for you at Nutsgrove? For we're--we're not a comfortable family to live with, Tom! Oh, indeed we're not! Poor Aunt Jo had an awful time of it with us, and the Beechers found Pauline very trying at Greystones. Then I have a shocking temper; and Lottie, poor child, is dreadful when her questioning mood is on. Now don't be ridiculous, Tom, for I'm quite serious." "I like Lottie," he says, smiling; "she's persevering, to be sure, but quite without guile. Pauline I think I can put up with too. Your temper, sweetheart, may be a bit of a trial; but fortunately I've a broad back, and a constitution, physical and mental, of granite." "You'll want it, I suspect. But tell me, Tom, something about your early life. Had you no father or mother that you remember?" "No; my mother died when I was an infant, and my father left me on the parish and went to America." "How very strange--both our fathers behaving in much the same way! I think fathers are rather a mistake in families, Tom." He laughs. "So I began life unembarrassed by family connections--a--a--foundling, in fact--you don't mind, do you, Addie? And for the thirty-seven years of my life I've lived alone, entirely for myself--worked for myself, struggled for myself, dreamed for myself, built castles in the air to be inhabited by myself alone. A despicable state of existence, wasn't it? I blush when I look back on it now." "You were not unhappy?" "No, because I did not know any better. I could not go back to it now; you have broken the charm of egotism and sordid ambition. Oh, sweetheart, you cannot imagine how strange and refreshing it is to shake off the monotony of self at last, to be absorbed in another night and day, to forget one's separate existence, to feel that life before one will be full to overflowing of goodly promise, unfading blossom! It is like stepping back from the blightful shade of a late autumn night into the glory of a fresh spring morning. Ah, you cannot follow me there, little one! You have not been baptized in selfishness as I have been; and, though you like me well enough not to shrink from the future which is to me a vista of undimmed sunshine, yet I am not to you what you are to me, Addie; I doubt sorely if I can ever be." "Hush!" she says, quickly, with a shudder she cannot repress, "It is no good discussing such matters now. You cannot expect me to follow you in your pretty simile, because I am only passing from spring into summer, and so I do not know what autumn may be like--it will come in time. You like my youth, don't you? You would not have me older? I am young in years, in experience, and in feeling. I cannot help that. I do not know much; but I know that I like you, Tom. I know that; I know too that you are good and stanch and true--ah, twice too good for me!" she adds, with a dry sob that startles him and makes him drift into a more cheerful channel as quickly as he can, into which she follows him with evident relief. "And so, Tom," she asks, presently, "you have no relatives that you know of, except that old Mrs. Murphy who sent me that lovely patchwork quilt as a wedding present? And she is--" "Only a third or fourth cousin on my mother's side." "And have you lived all your life at Kelvick?" "No, dear. I have been half over the world, knocking about east and west since I was twelve years old." "Fancy that! I never knew. Your life must have been an interesting one." "Hardly. It was not exactly commonplace; but it certainly wasn't picturesque in any of its phases. I went to Australia when I was quite a lad--worked my way before the mast, and made a little money out there. I came home, and the demon of invention got hold of me. I conceived some wondrous piece of agricultural mechanism which was to make my name and my fortune, over which I spent every farthing I had scraped together. Well, it proved to be a mere worthless abortion, and the discovery was a smart blow to my conceit and my energy. I lost heart for a time, went to the States, where I joined the Confederate Army, fought for two years--it was the time of the struggle for emancipation--and, when it was over, I steered further west, to California, where I did fairly at mining." "Why, you have been a Jack-of-all-trades, Tom--sailor, soldier, inventor, miner, manufacturer--what else?" "That's the whole list. I found at last that liquid-manufacturing paid the best; so I stuck to it. Vitriol gave me my decisive lift. Now, Addie, I will not allow that disdainful little sniff, for vitriol lies very close to my bosom just now. Vitriol bought me Nutsgrove, and Nutsgrove bought me you, and you bought--" "Armstrong of Kelvick, is that you in the flesh? What can have tempted you into the giddy haunts of fashion, so far from your savory chimney-pots, my dear fellow?" "Like the man in the Scriptures, 'I married a wife.' Addie"--to his wife, who stands rather shyly in the background--"let me introduce you to my friend, Mr. Henderson." They leave the pier and walk to the hotel, remaining for a few minutes talking under the porch; then the two men return to the pier for a smoke. Addie watches them disappear, hatching a little moonlit scamper