The Beth Book
are one; and I maintain that the money was given to me to pay a just
debt, and I paid a just debt with it. Now, what have you to say
against that to the disparagement of your husband?"
He looked Beth straight in the face as he spoke, as if the nature of
the transaction would be changed by staring her out of countenance,
and she returned his gaze unflinchingly; but not another word would
she say on the subject. There is a sad majority of wives whose
attitude towards their husbands must be one of contemptuous
toleration--toleration of their past depravity and of their present
deceits, whatever form they may take. Such a wife looks upon her
husband as a hopeless incurable, because she knows that he has not the
sense, even if he had the strength of character, to mend his moral
defects. Beth fully realised her husband's turpitude with regard to
the money, and also realised the futility of trying to make him see
his own conduct in the matter in any light not flattering to himself,
and she was deeply pained. She had taken it for granted that Dan would
pay interest on the money, but had not troubled herself to find out if
he were doing so, as she now thought that she ought to have done, for
clearly she should have paid it herself if he did not. True, she never
had any money; but that was no excuse, for there were honest ways of
making money, and make it she would. She was on her way upstairs to
her secret chamber to think the matter out undisturbed when she came
to this determination; and as soon as she had shut herself in, she
sank upon her knees, and vowed to God solemnly to pay back every
farthing, and the interest in full, if she had to work her fingers to
the bone. Curiously enough, it was with her fingers she first thought
of working, not with her brain. She had seen an advertisement in a
daily paper of several depots for the sale of "ladies' work" in London
and other places, and she determined at once to try that method of
making money. Work of all kinds came easily to her, and happily she
still had her two sovereigns, which would be enough to lay in a stock
of materials to begin with. Her pin-money Dan regularly appropriated
as soon as it arrived, with the facetious remark that it would just
pay for her keep; and so far Beth had let him have it without a
murmur, yielding in that as in all else, however much against her own
inclinations, for gentleness, and also with a vague notion of making
up to him in some sort for his own shortcomings, which she could not
help fancying must be as great a trouble to him as they were to her.
She had grown to have a very real affection for Dan, as indeed she
would have had for any one who was passably kind to her; but her
estimate of his character, as she gradually became acquainted with it,
was never influenced by her affection, except in so far as she pitied
him for traits which would have made her despise another man.
Since her marriage she had given up her free, wild, wandering habits.
She would go into the town to order things at the shops in the
morning, and take a solitary walk out into the country in the
afternoon perhaps, but without any keen enjoyment. Her natural zest
for the woods and fields was suspended. She had lost touch with
nature. Instead of looking about her observantly, as had been her
wont, she walked now, as a rule, with her eyes fixed on the ground,
thinking deeply. She was losing vitality too; her gait was less
buoyant, and she was becoming subject to aches and pains she had never
felt before. Dan said they were neuralgic, and showed that she wanted
a tonic, but troubled himself no more about them. He always seemed to
think she should be satisfied when he found a name for her complaint.
She had also become much thinner, which made her figure childishly
young; but in the face she looked old for her age--five-and-twenty at
least--although she was not yet eighteen.
There was one particularly strong and happy point in Beth's character:
she wasted little or no time in repining for the thing that was done.
All her thought was how to remedy the evil and make amends; so now,
when she had recovered from the first shock of her husband's
revelation, she put the thought of it aside, pulled herself together
quickly, and found relief in setting to work with a will. The exertion
alone was inspiriting, and re-aroused the faculty which had been
dormant in her of late. She went at once to get materials for her
work, and stepped out more briskly than she had done for many a day.
She perceived that the morning air was fresh and sweet, and she
inhaled deep draughts of it, and rejoiced in the sunshine. Just
opposite their house, across the road, on the other side of a wooden
paling, the park-like meadow was intensely green; old horse-chestnuts
dotted about it made refreshing intervals of shade; in the hedgerows
the tall elms stood out clear against the sky, and the gnarled oaks
cast fantastic shadows on the grass; while beyond it, at the farther
side of the meadow by the brook, the row of Canadian poplars which
bordered it kept up a continuous whispering, as was their wont, even
on the stillest days. When Beth first heard them, they spoke a
language to her which she comprehended but could not translate; but
the immediate effect of her life with Dan had been to deaden her
perception, so that she could not comprehend. Then the whispering
became a mere rustle of leaves, appealing to nothing but her sense of
hearing, and her delight in their murmur lapsed when its significance
was lost to her spirit.
But that morning Nature spoke to her again and her eyes were opened.
She saw the grey-green poplars, the gnarled oaks, the dark crests of
the elms upraised against the radiant blue of the sky, and felt a
thrill like triumph as she watched the great masses of cloud,
dazzlingly white, floating in infinite space majestically. The life
about her, too--the twittering of birds in the hedgerows; an Alderney
cow with its calf in the fields; a young colt careering wildly,
startled by a passing train; a big dog that saluted her with friendly
nose as he trotted by--all these said something to her which made her
feel that, let what might happen, it was good to be alive.
On her way into town she thought out a piece of work, something more
original and effective than the things usually sold in fancy-work
shops, which did not often please her. When she had bought all the
materials that she required, there was very little of her two pounds
left, but she returned in high spirits, carrying the rather large
parcel herself, lest, if it were sent, it should arrive when Dan was
at home and excite his curiosity. He always appeared if he heard the
door-bell ring, and insisted on knowing who or what had come, an
inquisitive trick that irritated Beth into baffling him whenever she
could.
She carried her precious packet up to her secret chamber, and set to
work at once. Dan, when he came in to lunch, was surprised to find her
unusually cheerful. After the temper she had displayed at breakfast,
he had expected to have anything but a pleasant time of it for a
little. Seeing her in good spirits put him also into a genial mood,
and he began at once to talk about himself--his favourite topic.
"Well, I've had a rattling hard day," he observed. "You'd be surprised
at the amount I've done in the time. I don't believe any other man
here could have done it. I was at that confounded hospital a couple of
hours, and after that I had a round! People are beginning to send for
me now as the last from school. They think I'm up to the latest
dodges. The old men won't like it! I had to go out to the Pettericks
to see that girl Bertha again. Their family doctor could make nothing
of her case, but it's simple enough. The girl's hysterical, that's
what she is; and I know what I'd like to prescribe for her, and that's
a husband. Hee-hee! Soon cure her hysterics! As to the old girl, her
mother, she's got"--then followed a minute description of her
ailments, told in the baldest language. Of two words Dan always chose
the coarsest in talking to Beth, now that they were married, which had
made her writhe at first; but when she had remonstrated, he assumed an
injured air, after which she silently endured the infliction for fear
of wounding him. And it was the same with regard to his patients. The
first time he described the ailment of a lady patient, and made gross
comments about her, Beth had exclaimed--
"O Dan! what would she think of you if she knew you had told me?
Surely it is a breach of confidence!"
"Well," he exclaimed, trying to wither her with a look, "you _have_ a
nice opinion of your husband! Is it possible that I cannot speak to my
own wife without bringing such an accusation upon myself! Well, well!
And I'm slaving for you morning, noon, and night, to keep you in some
sort of decency and comfort; and when I come home, and do my best to
be cheery and amuse you, instead of being morose after the strain of
the day, as most men are, all the thanks I get is a speech like that!
O holy matrimony!"
"I did not mean to annoy you, Dan; I'm sorry," Beth protested.
"So you should be!" he said; "so you should be! It's mighty hard for
me to feel that my own wife hasn't confidence enough in me to be sure
that I should never say a word either to her or anybody else about any
of my patients to which they'd object."
"People feel differently on the subject, perhaps," Beth ventured. "I
only know that if I had a doctor who talked to his wife about my
complaints, I should"--despise him, was what she was going to say, but
she changed the phrase--"I should not like it. But you should know
what your own patients feel about it better than I do."
Even as she spoke, however, her mother's remark of long ago about a
"talking doctor" recurred to her, and she felt lowered in her own
estimation by the kind of concession she was making to him. The
tragedy of such a marriage consists in the effect of the man's mind
upon the woman's, shut up with him in the closest intimacy day and
night, and all the time imbibing his poisoned thoughts. Beth's womanly
grace pleaded with her continually not to hurt her husband since he
meant no offence, not to damp his spirits even when they took a form
so distasteful to her. To check him was to offend him and provoke a
scene for nothing, since his taste was not to be improved; and she
would have to have checked him perpetually, and made a mere nag of
herself; for to talk in this way to her, to tell her objectionable
stories, and harp on depravity of all kinds, was his one idea of
pleasurable conversation. It was seldom, therefore, that she
remonstrated--especially in those early days when she had not as yet
perceived that by tacitly acquiescing she was lending herself to
inevitable corruption.
Just at that time, too, she did not trouble herself much about
anything. She was entirely absorbed in her new object in life--to get
the work done, to make the money, to pay her mother with interest;
there was continual exaltation of spirit in the endeavour. Every
moment that she could safely secure, she spent in her secret chamber,
hard at work. Her outlook was on the sky above, for ever changing; on
the gay garden below, whence light airs wafted the fragrance of
flowers from time to time, to her delight; and on a gentle green
ascent, covered and crowned with trees, which shut out the world
beyond. Here there was a colony of rooks, where the birds were busy
all day long sometimes, and from which they were sometimes absent from
early morning till sundown, when they came back cawing by ones and
twos and threes, a long straggling procession of them, their dark
iridescent forms with broad black wings outspread, distinct and
decorative, against the happy blue. Beth loved the birds, and even as