“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 of the 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 claws will now 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.
