Part 4 — CHAPTER III.

“Lucy,” said Emily, “we have taken our season tickets for the Opera near the centre of the house, Nos. 22, 24. Mr. Coolidge had better take yours joining ours, so that if he happens to be engaged, or don’t want to go, or any thing, you can go with us. At any rate, it will be pleasanter to be together.”

“We are not going to take a season ticket,” said Lucy,

“Why not?” inquired Emily. “It’s cheaper, you know, than paying by the single ticket.”

“There’s no cheap way of going to the Opera,” said Coolidge, rather rudely, as Emily thought.

“It costs something, certainly,” she replied. “Every thing does. But I think it’s quite as economical as any other amusement, and much more delightful. It’s a great improvement, too, Lucy, to one’s own music; and with your voice you ought to take every opportunity of hearing good music.”

“Accomplished wives are somewhat expensive articles for a poor man,” said Tom. “A taste for music costs no trifle in these days.”

“Is a taste for yachting cheaper?” said Emily, looking at him as if she thought him a bear.

Tom colored at this, having just joined a yachting club, composed of some of the most expensive young men in town, and looked very angry, but said nothing—what could he?

However, if he was angry, so was Emily—and Lucy looked fairly frightened between the two. She turned the conversation as quickly as she could, and the subject dropped.

He said to her afterward,

“Lucy, if you would like to go the Opera, I’ll take a season ticket for you with your family. When I want to go, I can buy a ticket at the door, as I don’t care about going every night.”

“Oh, no, Tom, I don’t care about going at all; and you know I never wish to go without you.”

He looked very much perplexed and worried.

“I can’t bear to have you give up a pleasure you are so fond of,” he pursued. “And then it seems so selfish. I wish to heavens I had not joined that confounded club. I’ll give it up as soon as the year is out.”

“Oh, I am sure, Tom,” said his sweet wife, “you require relaxation and exercise. I think you’ve been a great deal better this summer in consequence of having joined the club.”

Still he did not seem at ease. In fact, Emily’s fling at his being able to gratify his own tastes while he found fault with Lucy’s, nettled him. And, moreover, he was honest and generous enough to feel its truth. Besides, no man likes the insinuation of selfishness—if there is any truth in the charge, so much the worse. So, though it was inconvenient, Tom made a point of Lucy’s having a season ticket—whether he took some money he had meant to appropriate to house expenses, I don’t know, but I should not be surprised; at any rate they were much behind hand this year.

They had a bill now at the grocer’s—butcher’s ditto—and “paid on account” what they did pay.

Fifty dollars more was added next year to the house-rent—and yet they did not move. Lucy looked embarrassed when she was asked “if they meant to remain,” and “why they did not move up town?” and Tom was almost rude when similar inquiries were made of him. That, indeed, was not the unusual thing now that it had once been. Tom was growing cross. He was harassed and fretted, and often answered hastily where he had no right to do so; particularly to his sweet, pretty little wife, who, to do him justice, he did love with all his heart and soul—but that was no excuse for being cross to her, as he was sometimes, when she handed him a bill.

“Why, Lucy, what is this? Five dollars for ice! I’ve paid that bill before.”

“No, dear, you have not.”

“I gave you the money, I am sure. Do you take receipts? for if you don’t, they always send the bill a second time.” No one but Tom would ever have thought of any body’s sending him a bill a second time. If they got paid once, they did very well. “And I can’t afford to be paying bills two or three times over.”

“Indeed, dear, I always take receipts—and this I know has not been paid. It has been sent in two or three times, but it has not been paid, I know. Here’s the baker’s account just sent in,” continued Lucy, who thought while she was in for a disagreeable subject, she might as well go through with it all.

“Twenty dollars for bread!” exclaimed he, eyeing the sum total; “why it must be a mistake.”

“No,” she said, “it is correct.”

“Then, Lucy,” said he, “there must be great waste somewhere; and,” he added angrily, “I can’t afford it. Twenty dollars for bread! It’s enormous.”

“It has been running a good while,” said Lucy, meekly. “See, it begins in June.”

“Well, well, no matter when it begins,” said he, impatiently, “I can’t pay it now, that’s all.”

The door opened just then, and Emily came in. Lucy was always glad to see her, doubly so now, as she interrupted a tête-à-tête that threatened to be unpleasant.

“I have come, Lucy,” she said, “to ask you to go and look at bonnets. The French importations open to-day. Mamma will join us presently.”

“It seems to me,” said Tom, somewhat rudely, “that you women spend all your time running round after finery.”

Emily looked at him for a minute as if she had a great mind to retort, but Lucy quickly interposed with,

“If you want the benefit of my taste to aid you in selecting for yourself, Emily, I am ready to go. I don’t mean to get any thing for myself. I don’t want a hat.”

“You may not mean to get one,” said Emily, “but that you want one is certain. Yours is shabby enough in all conscience.”

“It will do well enough for the present,” said Lucy in a dejected tone.

“You can’t wear a summer bonnet all winter, Lucy; and if you are going to get one at all, you might as well get it now, and have the comfort of it.”

Tom looked cross, however; and though what Emily said was true, Lucy did not feel as if she ought to indulge herself in even getting what she must have while he was out of temper. It was wonderful how much richer she felt when he was in a good humor.

Mrs. Sutherland now joined her daughters, and after a little while said,

“Oh, Emily, I have just come from Dudevant’s. The hats don’t open to-day. She was going to send you word. It was a mistake of the printer’s. To-morrow is the day.”

“Then I will call for you to-morrow, Lucy,” said Emily. “And now, as it is late, we may as well go, mamma.”

“How cross Coolidge grows,” said Emily, as they drove off.

“Is any thing the matter, do you think,” inquired Mrs. Sutherland anxiously.

“No,” replied Emily, “nothing that I could see.”

The next morning, as Emily called at an early hour at her sister’s, as by appointment, Coolidge, who had not yet gone out, looked up and said pleasantly,

“Hats the order of the day, hey, Emily?”

And as Lucy rose hastily from the breakfast table and tied on hers, he added,

“That does look shabby enough, Lucy. Do get a white bonnet this time. I do like to see a woman in a white hat.”

“They soil too soon,” replied his wife, “and beside are only fit for full dress.”

“Well,” he replied, “can’t you have another for common wear?”

Tom had got some money, that was clear. The very atmosphere of the house seemed changed since yesterday. The sunshine was to be taken advantage of however, and Lucy went up to him and said something to him in a low voice, to which he answered,

“I can’t this morning. Tell her to send it up.”

Emily had heard this often enough to understand what it meant. The hat was to be charged, that was evident. However, as it was to be bought, that was all she cared about. The rest only concerned Tom and Madame Dudevant.

These fits of liberality and good humor, however, were becoming rare. Coolidge was certainly growing cross. His naturally fine, generous temper was becoming clouded by his embarrassments. When a man is harassed he is apt to forget himself even toward those he loves best. And he did love his little wife dearly, notwithstanding that he frequently spoke almost harshly to her. And this again acted upon her poor thing. She was becoming nervous and timid, and sorry are we to add—fretful.

“Do keep quiet, Harry,” she would say to her eldest child, a fine spirited boy, in the tone of a person who had the toothache, “You are enough to set one distracted with your noise. Now put your blocks away and sit down and read.”

But Harry, being in the midst of a high game of fun with his little sister, did not want to throw down the castle he was building, would say,

“Oh, mamma, pray let me finish. I don’t want to read. I wont do any harm.”

“How troublesome you are, Harry. Do as I bid you. And, Fanny, do you go up into the nursery. You make too much noise here, both of you. Go, nurse wants you up stairs.”

And so the poor children’s pleasures were often cut short, because mamma had a bill preying upon her mind, that made the sound of mirth absolutely painful to her.

And yet Coolidge was doing a good business. His profits were quite equal perhaps to his expenses, if he could only have paid as he went along. But as it was, he was working against tide all the time. He was forever paying back accounts, while the present ones went rolling up, inferior articles at high prices, at a fearful rate.

“Poverty begets poverty, that’s certain. And then it brings such a train of evils—big and little—and the smaller ones are worse to bear than the great. A man who has his pocket always drained of change is not a pleasant companion, at least not to his wife. Let him be ever so affectionate he will be unreasonable.”

“Three shillings! What do you want three shillings for, Lucy?” he would say as impatiently sometimes as if she had asked for a hundred dollars.

“For the girl who has been sewing here to-day, dear.”

“It seems to me that girl is sewing here forever. It’s three shillings here and three shillings there all the time,” he would say pettishly.

“Shall you want me next week, Mrs. Coolidge?” asked the girl, as she was paid.

“No,” she replied in a melancholy tone; “no, I will finish the rest of the work myself.”

Then perhaps feeling good-humored, he would say affectionately,

“Do, Lucy, put that eternal work-basket aside. I hate to see you stitching away so the whole time.”

“I must finish these things for the children,” she replied.

“Oh, it’s no matter for the children. You look fagged to death, dear. Send for that girl. Indeed I’d rather give fifty dollars than see you wear yourself out as you do.”

Now, if Coolidge would only have given the fifty, or twenty, or even ten dollars, instead of talking about it, it would have saved his poor wife many a side-ache, and back-ache, and heart-ache to boot, for she almost stitched her soul out to save five dollars. But there was nothing she would not rather do than ask for money. It was bad enough to be obliged to hand the necessary house-bills. As to her own milliner’s and mantua-maker’s accounts! the mental agony she went through for them would have been almost ludicrous, so disproportioned was the amount of suffering to the amount charged, had it not been so sincere.

“Catch me going to Lucy’s again to spend an evening,” said one of her younger sisters to Emily, now the rich and gay Mrs. Woodberry.

“Why? How was it—what was the matter?” asked Emily.

“I am sure I do not know—nothing that I could see. But you would have supposed there was a corpse in the house, certainly. There was but one light, and that shaded, on the table where Lucy and the children sat—she sewing, they studying. And if the poor little souls spoke loud, or laughed, Lucy hushed them at once, and with such reproachful looks, as if they had done something very naughty, and were shockingly unfeeling. And Mr. Coolidge scarcely raised his eyes from his paper, but to say something cross two or three times during the course of the evening. And poor Lucy sat stitching away, looking the image of grief and despair. If both the children had been up stairs dying of scarlet fever, she could not have looked worse. I asked her what was the matter, and she replied, ‘Nothing.’ But, really, if people look so about ‘nothing,’ they deserve to have ‘something’ to look miserable about.”

“I suppose it was some bill or other—the old story,” replied Mrs. Woodberry. “Lucy is so silly to let Coolidge be so cross about things that are no more her fault than his. If she had only fired up in the beginning, and told him, as I should have done, when he scolded about the butcher and baker, &c., ‘That he ate five times as much bread as I did; and as to meat, I did not care if I did not eat a morsel from one week’s end to another,’ and followed it up by ordering no dinner, I think she might have taught him better manners. Men are so detestable,” she continued, with vexation, “one would think it was not enough to be poor, but they must add to the charm by being cross.”

“Then you think poverty a great evil,” said Susan with sorrowful earnestness—for there was a certain young lawyer she thought very captivating.

“An evil—to be sure it is,” replied Mrs. Woodberry, who, being very rich and expensive, thought there was no living without money, and plenty of it, too. “Just look at Lucy—did you ever see such a poor, forlorn, faded, fretful looking thing as she has become. You don’t remember her, Susan, when she married. You would scarcely believe what a sweet, fresh, pretty young creature she was. And now look at her! She looks as if she might have gone in the wash with those poor old faded calicoes of hers, that have been rubbed and pounded till there’s scarce a shade of color in them. And Coolidge, too—what a pleasant, merry, joyous tempered fellow he was. I never shall forget them the first time they appeared in society after their marriage. It was at a Fancy Ball. She went as Titania, he as Bully Bottom. They were the admiration and life of the room. One would not have thought, to have seen them then, how they would look fifteen years later.”

“Well,” said old Mrs. Rutledge, an aunt of the Sutherlands, joining in the conversation for the first time, “there I don’t agree with you, Emily. It was just the beginning that might have foretold the ending.”

“How so?” said both sisters, looking up at once.

“They have lived too fast. Poverty, my dear Susan, is an evil, nay, a curse, or not, just as people choose to make it. Be prudent, live within your means, and small though they may be, there will always be enough for happiness.”

Susan, whose feelings were deeply interested in this question, said,

“But, aunt, do you think it is Lucy’s fault that her husband is cross and poor?”

“Not entirely, my dear. A man should govern himself, and his own destiny. But still, I think a prudent, firm wife, a fine balance-wheel. Lucy did not use her influence rightly. She never seemed to know the power she had in her hands. She rather encouraged her husband’s extravagance; and it has been debt that has been the ruin of their happiness. Had they begun differently, it would have ended differently. God only knows, now, poor things, where they will wind up.”

The error was, they started wrong.