CHAPTER I.
“Mr. Jericho, when can you let me have some money?”
This curious question was coldly put by a gentlewoman in morning undress to a man in gown and slippers. The reader, who is always permitted to wear the old cloak of the old stage mystery—the cloak that maketh invisible—must at once perceive the tender relation that lives and flourishes between the interesting person who puts this familiar interrogative, and the being who suffers it. They are man and wife. The marriage certificate is legible in every line of Mrs. Jericho’s face. She asks for money with a placid sense of right; it may be, strengthened by the assurance that her debtor cannot escape her. For it is a social truth the reader may not have overlooked, that if a man be under his own roof, he must be at home to his own wife.
“I ask again, Mr. Jericho, when can you let me have some money?”
Mr. Jericho made no answer. He could not precisely name the time; and he knew that whatever promise he made, its performance would be sternly exacted of him by the female then demanding. Whereupon, Mr. Jericho laid down his pen, and resignedly upturned his eyeballs to the ceiling.
“When—can—you—let—me—have—some—money?”
There is a terrible sort of torture, the manner of which is to let fall cold water drop by drop upon the shaven head ofthe sufferer. We think Mrs. Jericho had never heard of this cruelty; and we are almost prepared to be bound for her, that she would have suffered herself to be cut into little diamond pieces ere, knowing the mode of torment, she would in any way have imitated it. And upon her incorporate self too—her beloved husband! Impossible. Nevertheless love, in its very idleness—like a giddy and rejoicing kitten—will sometimes wound when most playful. The tiny, tender clawswillnow and then transgress the fur.
Mrs. Jericho, without at all meaning it, distilled the question, letting it fall, cold syllable by cold syllable, upon the naked ear of her husband. Mr. Jericho bounced up in his chair; and then, like a spent ball, dropt dumbly down again. He had for a few moments raised himself above the earthy and material query of Mrs. Jericho, and with his eyes fixed upon the ceiling, was contemplating an antipodean fly that holding on with the rest of his legs, was passing two of them over his head and collar-bone, as flies are accustomed curiously to do. Mr. Jericho—so rapid is thought, especially when followed by a creditor—Mr. Jericho had already taken refuge in the republic of flies—for that flies, unlike bees, are not monarchical, is plain to any man who contemplates their equality and familiarity in his sugar-basin and other places—and was beginning to envy the condition of that domestic insect that had the run of his house, the use of his very finest furniture, gratis,—when he, the nominal master, the apparent possessor thereof, had truly no lawful hold thereupon.
What shall we say of a man of a decent and compact figure, a man of middle height; who nevertheless wishing to stand two inches taller in the world than fairly beseems him, consents to be stretched by the rack in the hope of walking the higher for the pulling?—Now Mr. Jericho was this foolish man. He wanted to stand higher in the world than his simple means allowed him; and he had submitted himself to the rack of debt, to be handsomely drawn out. To get appearance upon debt is, no doubt, every bit as comfortable as to get height upon the rack. The figure may be expanded; but how the muscle of the heart, how all the joints are made to crack for it.
Mrs. Jericho—when last she spoke—dropt her question in the coldest, and most measured manner. Mr. Jericho, recalled from the land of flies, with curved lips, looked silently, sternly at the life-tenant of his bosom. And now the syllables fall hotly, heavily, as drops of molten lead.
“When can I have some money?” and Mrs. Jericho’s figure naturally rose with the question.
Mr. Jericho jumped from his seat the better to measure himself to his wife’s attitude. His first purpose was to swear; the oath was ready; but some good anatomical genius twitched a muscle, the jaw of Jericho closed, and the unuttered aspick died upon his tongue. He would not swear; he would not enter upon that coward’s privilege; he felt the soreness of great provocation; felt that the smallest and least offensive oath would do him sudden and mysterious good. Nevertheless, he swallowed the emotion, striking his breast to keep the passion down. He would be cold as cream.
Mrs. Jericho, however, having the right of arithmetic upon her side, repeated her question; asking it with a terrible calmness, at the same time, as though to make the query stinging, waving her right hand before her husband’s face, with a significant and snaky motion.—“When can I have some money?”
“Woman!” cried Jericho, vehemently; as though at once and for ever he had emptied his heart of the sex; and, rushing from the room, he felt himself in the flattering vivacity of the moment a single man. The transient feeling fell from him as he ran up stairs; and ere he had begun to shave, all his responsibilities returned with full weight upon him. “I’m sure, after all, I do my best to love the woman,” thought Jericho, as he lathered his chin, “and yet she will ask for money.”
Mrs. Jericho, baffled but not subdued, half-confessed to herself that there never was such a man; and then, beginning a little household song—familiar to families as winter robin—she thought she would go out. She wanted to make a little purchase. She had tried it before; there was nothing like shopping for lowness of spirits; and—yes, she remembered—she wantedmany things. She would go forth; and—as Jericho was in his airs—she would lay out money on both sides of the street.
And Mr. Jericho, as he shaved, quietly built up the scheme of a day’s pleasure for himself and three special friends. As his wife was in one of her aggravating tempers, he thought it an opportunity—sinful to let pass—to have a little quiet dinner somewhere: he could hardly decide upon the place; but a quiet banquet, at which the human heart would expand in good fellowship, and where the wine was far above a doubt.
Shopping and a dinner! Thus was the common purse to bleed in secret, and at both ends.
Mr. Jericho drest himself with unusual care. He was a man not without his whimsies; and believed that a good dinner was eaten with better enjoyment, when taken in full dress. “I hold it impossible”—he would say—“quite impossible, for a man to really relish turtle in gown and slippers. No; when turtle was created, it was intended to be eaten in state; eaten by men in robes and golden chains, to a flourish or so of silver trumpets.” Mrs. Jericho was fully aware of this marital superstition. Thus, when with an eye—a wife’s eye—at the bed-room door, she saw her husband slide down stairs as though the bannister was buttered, she knew from his dress that it was a day out; and when the disturbed air wafted back the scent of lavender from the linen of her lord, mingled withhuile des rosesfrom his locks,—it will not surprise the student of human nature, when we aver that the heart of the married woman almost sank within her.
Speedily recovering herself, Mrs. Jericho determined upon her best and brightest gown; her richest shawl; her most captivating bonnet. These things endued, she took her purse, and as the bank-paper crumpled in her resolute palm, catching a departing look at the glass, it was plain to herself that she smiled mischief.
Mrs. Jericho had the profoundest opinion of the powers of her husband: she believed him capable of any amount of money. Nevertheless, the man would reject the flattery sometimes with argument, sometimes with indignation. Again and again the husband assured his wife, he must—and no help for it—die a beggar; but the woman armed her heart with incredulity—shelaughed, and would not believe it. Indeed, it seemed her one purpose to show and to preach an inextinguishable belief in the pocket of her husband. Everywhere, she made converts. Tradesmen bowed down to her and believed her. On all sides, dealers—cautious, knowing men, made circumspect by wives and children—humbled themselves at the door of her pony phaeton, taking orders. Mrs. Jericho did so possess them with a faith in Jericho, that had she required the doorway to be laid with velvet or cachemire, there would have been no scruple of hesitation in the dealer; the foot-cloth would have been surely opened out, and put down. Moreover, Mrs. Jericho was aided by her two daughters whom, on her second marriage, she had handsomely presented to Mr. Jericho; further enhancing the gift with a son; a young gentleman declared by the partiality of friends to be born for billiards.
Mr. Jericho was forty when he married; therefore that, in one day, he should find himself the father of three children, was taking the best means to make up for the negligence of former years.
Mrs. Captain Pennibacker was made a widow at two-and-twenty by an East Indian bullet; but it was not until she had laboured for eight years to become calm about Pennibacker, that she fluttered towards Jericho. And thus, at one blow, she made him her second husband, and the second father of Pennibacker’s son and daughters. Offering such treasures to Mr. Solomon Jericho, she naturally thought he could not make too much of them. And for a season, Mr. Jericho showed a proper sense of his good fortune; yet, though his wife would never fail to assure him that he possessed a priceless treasure in herself and children, as time wore on, the ungrateful man would now and then look doubtfully at the family jewels.
Somehow, the Pennibackers failed to see in Mr. Jericho a flesh and blood father-in-law. From their earliest introduction to him, they considered him as they would consider a rich plum cake; to be sliced, openly or by stealth, among them. As they grew up, Mr. Jericho merely held in their opinion the situation of the person who paid the bills. It was, we say, the householdsuperstition that Jericho had an unknown amount of wealth. Hence, he met with little thanks for what he gave; for the recurring thought would still condemn him for what he kept back. He possessed a sea of money; and yet he was mean enough to filter his gold by drops. In a word, he never gave anything that he, the donor, did not appear to the son or daughter receiving, the paltriest of human creatures.
And let the truth be said. Mr. Jericho was persecuted by the natural growth of his own falsehood. If at home he sat upon thorns, from his own tongue had dropt the seed that produced the punishment. In early times he had sown broadcast, notions of his abounding wealth; and the pleasant lies, as lies will do, had come up prickles. They grew thick in his daily path. Scarcely could he set foot forth without treading upon them.
The widow Pennibacker, it will at once be understood, had married Jericho wholly and solely for the sake of her children. It was, at the cost of any personal sacrifice, a duty she owed her infants to provide them with a wealthy father. She, herself—and we seek, we ask no other testimony than her own declaration—she would have been only too happy to join the dear deceased. But she had a duty to fulfil—a stern duty that held her to the earth. And she shrank not from its performance. No; suppressing her higher feelings, she gave her hand to Solomon Jericho, and chastised herself to think with calmness upon Pennibacker in his Indian tomb. She offered up—it was her frequent expression to all her bosom friends—she offered up the feelings of the widow to the duties of the mother. For what a man was Pennibacker! Especially in his grave. But such indulgent thought softens even asperity towards the departed. A natural and wholesome tenderness. The grave is the true purifier, and in the charity of the living, takes away the blots and stains from the dead.
When widow Pennibacker was first introduced to Mr. Jericho, he was whisperingly, confidentially, recommended to her indulgent notice as—a City Gentleman. Hence, Jericho appeared tothe imagination of the widow, with an indescribable glory of money about him. She was a woman of naturally a lively fancy; a quality haply cultivated by her sojourn in the East, where rajahs framed in gold and jewels upon elephants were common pictures: hence, Jericho of the City of London was instantaneously rendered by the widow a man of prodigious wealth. She gave the freest, the most imaginative translation of the words—City Gentleman. Though not handsome, he was instantly considered to be most precious. Had she looked upon the Idol Ape, Tinum Bug, whose every feature is an imperial jewel set in the thickest skull of gold, and then cast a glance at Jericho, she would, we fully believe it, have chosen the City Gentleman in preference to the idol; so far, in the dizzied judgment of an impulsive, imaginative woman, did Solomon Jericho outshine Tinum Bug.
And much, it must be granted, is to be allowed to Mrs. Pennibacker as a woman and a mother. A City Gentleman! What a vision; what exhalations rise from the ink that, like magic drops fallen from Circe’s finger tips, create the radiant animal upon the white sheet before us! What a picture to the imagination, the—City Gentleman! Calm, plain, self-assured in the might of his wealth. All the bullion of the Bank of England makes back-ground details; the India-house dawns in the distance; and a hundred pennants from masts in India Docks tremble in the far-off sky.
Great odds these, against the simplicity of woman! The Bank, the India-house, and a hundred ships! Mrs. Pennibacker had huge strength of character; but she succumbed to the unknown power of visionary wealth; to the mysterious attributes of the City Gentleman. No man could less look the part, yet Jericho bowed to the widow, a perfect enchanter.
Again, Jericho was charmed, elevated by the graciousness of the lady. Like an overlooked strawberry, he had remained until in his own modesty he began to think himself hardly worth the gathering. Therefore, when Mrs. Pennibacker vouchsafed to stoop to him, he was astonished at her condescension,and melted by his own gratitude. For Mrs. Pennibacker was a majestic woman. She had brought back nothing of the softness of the East. She was not—she never had been—an oriental toy for the grown child, man. It would have been hard to couple her with thoughts of love-birds, and antelopes and gazelles. No; she rather took her place with those legendary Indian queens who hide their softness under golden bucklers; whose bows are strung with tiger-gut; and whose feminine arrows, if parrot-feathered, are fanged with mortal steel. In the picture of an ancient panther-hunt, you would have looked to see such a figure as the figure of Mrs. Pennibacker, thrusting a spear with a dread smile of self-approbation in the bowels of the objecting pard.
And then, Jericho himself had in this case imagination too: indeed, everybody has, when money is the thought, the theme. The common brain will bubble to a golden wand.
It was whispered, sharply whispered to Jericho, that the widow had many relations, many hopes in India. Immediately, Jericho flung about the lady all the treasures of the East. Immediately she stood in a shower-bath of diamonds; elephants’ teeth lay heaped about her; and rice and cotton grounds, and fields of opium, many thousands of acres of the prodigal east, stretched out on all sides of her, and on all sides called her mistress. Yet for all this, Solomon Jericho was ordinarily a dull, matter-of-fact man. Talk to him of Jacob’s ladder, and he would ask the number of the steps.
All his life had Jericho trod upon firm earth; but widow Pennibacker whipped him off his leaden feet, and carried him away into the fairy ground of Mammon; and there his eyes twinkled at imaginary wealth, and his ears burned and stood erect at the sound of shaken shadowy money-bags.
And so, each trusting to each, Solomon Jericho and Sabilla Pennibacker wooed and won each other; and the winning over, each had to count the gains. It was very strange. Jericho himself could not bear to think of the folly, the crime of the omission. Such neglect had never before betrayed him. Whyhad he not assured himself of the woman’s property, ere he made the woman his own? And then, for his cold comfort, he would remember that he had, on two or three occasions touched a little gravely upon the subject, whereupon Mrs. Pennibacker so opened her large, black, mysterious orbs, that his soul, like a mouse when startled by Grimalkin’s eyes—ran back into its hole. Again and again—it was a wretched satisfaction for the married man to think it—the question had been upon his tongue; when some smile of haughty loveliness would curve the widow’s lips and—how well he recollected the emotion—he felt himself the meanest wretch to doubt her.
Mrs. Pennibacker had, on her part, just played about the property of Jericho; but, with the trustingness of her sex, she was more than satisfied when Jericho, with all the simplicity of real worth, spoke calmly, yet withal hopefully, of the vast increase of profit arising from his platina mines. The word “platina” sent Mrs. Pennibacker to her Encyclopædia, which, however, comforted her exceedingly. She had instinctively known it all along; but she now felt assured,—Solomon Jericho, the holder of mines, possessed wealth inexhaustible. Being a City Gentleman, of course he sold his platina on the Stock Exchange.
The wedding was very gorgeous. Very rarely are two people joined together with so much expense. Nevertheless the contribution of either party—had the other known it—would have somewhat shaken Hymen; if, indeed, it had not wholly frightened him out of the church. Mrs. Pennibacker, when introduced to Jericho, was so deep in debt, that often, let folks try as they would, they could not see her. And Jericho—doubtless from a short supply of platina—was an object of extreme solicitude to a large number of dealers. When, however, it was understood that the widow was to be married to a rich man in the City, the lady found the very handsomest outfit for herself and children made delightfully easy. And Jericho, bearing in mind the heavy expense of an intoxicating honeymoon, readily obtained the means, whenhiscircle—and every man has acircle, though of the smallest—rang with the news that he was in imminent likelihood of marrying the widow of an Indian Nabob!
And so bridegroom and bride—with a mutual trust even beyond mutual expectation—walked to the altar, there to be welded into one. They were married at St. George’s Church,—married in the bosom of a few surrounding friends. The bride’s children were present, and cast a mixed interest of pensiveness and pleasure on the ceremony. The bride had told her bridesmaids that, “It would cost her a struggle, but the dear children should be present; it was right they should. They ought to have the sacrifice impressed upon their minds in the most solemn way; the sacrifice that their poor mother consented to make for them. Nobody but herself knew what a struggle it was; but, it was her duty, and though her heart was with dear Pennibacker,—yes, she would go through with it. Mr. Jericho had given the dear girls the most beautiful lace frocks; and to Basil a lovely gold hunting-watch; therefore, they ought and they should, witness the sacrifice.”
And Miss Pennibacker and Miss Agatha Pennibacker, like little fairies, clothed in muslin and lace from elfin-looms, saw the sacrifice with a vivacity of heart that almost spirted out at the corners of their lips; and Basil Pennibacker, a gaunt, reedy boy of twelve, did nothing during the ceremony but take out his new gold hunting-watch—open it—snap it to—and return it again, as though he had already had a glimpse of the preparations for the wedding-breakfast, and with his thoughts upon all the delicacies of the season, was impatient for the sacrifice to be completed.
And the last “Amen”—the last blow on the rivet—was struck, and Solomon Jericho and Sabilla Pennibacker were man and wife. Whereupon, in a hysteric moment, the bride turning to her children, took the three in one living bunch in her arms, and sweeping them over to Jericho, said—“You are their father now.”
Turning to the church books of St. George’s we find thatthe date of this interesting deed of gift makes it about eight years to the date of the particular emphatic question with which Mrs. Jericho, as with a flourish of a silver trumpet, opened this little history.