LITERATURE.

Globe, Volume V, Issue 591, 11 May 1876, Page 3

LITERATURE.

ONE DAY IN A SETTLER’S LIFE. “ If you had had a grain of real love for me, you never would have dragged me out into this desolate wilderness,” said Mrs Rowland Hardy, half sobbing, and really angry. She arose, and flashed round to the window; there pressing her hot face so closely against the pane that her nose immediately began a grotesque pattern of herself in the sparkling frostwork. “ Had you been a gentleman, Rowland, you never would have thought of doing it. ” When wives get into a passion they are apt to say things that they may hereafter bitterly regret. Mrs Hardy was no exception. Her husband stood breathlessly silent, his face paling. They had not been married a year yet. “ Jane,” he answered at last, in tones hard and cold, “ if I had not thought you were willing, ay, and more than willing, to risk it, I should never have brought you, and you know it. Remember, I told you it would be a rough life ; yet you were eager to come.” Jane Hardy remembered very well. But the memory of her ardent protestations, her generous forgetfulness of self, only angered her the more just now. “ How was I to know it would be like this?’ There ! You can go if you are going. I should like to be alone —with all this work to do.” “I am going directly,” was Mr Hardy’s answer, striving for tranquility. “ Will you be good enough to put up my luncheon. I shall not come back until night.” “ Oh dear, yes,’ she replied with alacrity, bringing her face away from the window with a jerk; and proceeding to make a great clatter in the cupboard, which in this pioneer cabin was a combination of pantry and china closet. * I fear there is but a short allowance of wood : will it last till evening !’ asked Mr Hardy, dubiously looking at the wood-box he had just replenished, and turning to brush up the bits of bark that had fallen on the neat rug-carpet. His words were kind, but his tone was as chilly as an icicle. * There is plenty ; do not trouble yourself,’ responded his wife resentfully, her eyes bent on the bread she was buttering. In five minutes, man, dinner-pail, axe, and dog had vanished in the direction of the great forest; and the young wife was alone, as she had vehemently desired to be. Roland Hardy had gone forth to his day’s work of felling timber. Most young and angry wives would have burst into tears at this point. Jane Hardy did not. She leaned against the rude mantelshelf when her husband’s footsteps no longer sounded in the crisp snow, and looked unutterably sad and hopeless, as if the light of her life had suddenly gone out; looked remorseful, too, as if concious of having had something to do with its annihilation. The story is one of those often enough enacted in the New World. Certain expectations suddenly failing him, Roland Hardy manfully resolved to betake himself to the mighty woods, clear out a settlement for himself, erect his own house, Robinson Crusoe fashion : and in time, by dint of his hands’ hard labour, become prosperous. Hardy, the settler, he would be then, with his farm lands around him, his flocks and herds, his people and his comforts. But all that would have to be patiently worked on for, and the beginu’ng must, of necessity, be weary and toilsome, Jane Deane, to whom he was engaged, decided to go out with him : his wife. He told her he had better go on first, say for a year or two: if her friends urged the same advice; but the young lady would not listen. So far as he was able, Mr Hardy, before his marriage, described what their toil and their lonely life would be. Jane Deane looked at it with rose-coloured spectacles, and thought it would be charming, a kind of perpetual picnic. It is true she did not bargain for the help they had taken with them, in the shape of a man and woman servant, deserting them speedily, tired with the new rough work, sick at the loneliness ; and those engaged in their places (after endless trouble and long negotiations) had not yet come. But she had put her own shoulder bravely to the wheel in the summer weather, and made light of hardships. It was winter now. And for the first time her temper had given way. Everything seemed to have gone wrong in the cabin that morning ; and her husband’s calm cheerfulness through it all had provoked her most unwarrantably. But she was not feeling well. It is possible that many of us have such mornings—mornings when everything animate, and inanimate, conspires to bring to the surface the original gorilla that slumbers within the soul. These vexations have to be beaten down properly under one’s feet, and Mrs Hardy had stopped to squabble with hers. A dear little rose had been discovered frozen, though wrapped in flannel and placed in the warmest corner of the burrow under the floor, called, as a matter of dignity, the cellar. To be sure, the potatoes had been kiudly spared; but what were gross potatoes when lovely Lamarque buds drooped in death? Mourning over them, Mrs Hardy forgot the milk-toast, and the milk-toast indignantly boiled over. Catching the pair from the stove, lo ! a splash of hot milk fell on the front breadth of her clean crisp French gingham, and another on the ear of poor David, stretched on the hearth, and the dog howled responsively. At another time Jane would have laughed ; but laughing was very far from her mood this morning; life in general was looking depressedly gloomy; and when Mr Hardy came into this atmosphere of burnt milk and piteous dog-whin-ings, she was declaring in her fervid way, that housekeeping out west was simply villanous, and that she hated it —here she

caught his provokingly smiling eyes—yes j hated it, and him, and the place, and everyJ thing. He met the words jokingly, and it incensed her. In her angry spirit she said unforgiveable things, and Mr Hardy was provoked into retorting. So they jarred and jangled through breakfast. That is, she did. For some little time Roland Hardy had feared that a sort of suppressed discontent had taken possession of his wife. She was quiter at times, almost sad, and less given to laughter than in their old bright days, as he had got to calling them. He had hoped everything of her love and devotion—hoped that he might ever remain as near and dear, as much “ all the world ” to her as she had often declared him to be. And now this had come of it; this dreadful quarrel. She had spoken out of her mind. His heart was aching with her reproaches; but, generous ever, he excused her to himself as he walked along to the woods. It was asking too much of mortal woman, he argued, anxious to make himself wretched, to tear her far away from home, and friends, and all the comfortable delights of wellregulated New England life, and to expect her to be always glad, and buoyant, and brave, and hopeful, keeping his own soul up with the wine-like tonic of her blithe spirits. No. It was the same old beginning of the end, a mere question of time. Eventually she would become the indifferent, matter-of-fact sort of woman that most wives appeared to be ; regarding him—the lover—as a kind of mild, inevitable evil, necessary to her support, and respectable to have about the home. Sooner or later, he supposed, all husbands and wives awoke from their dream of love, to the long, dreary reality of making the best of things. Nevertheless, her fierce outburst on this particular morning took him by surprise ; somewhat aroused his indignation. Had he not been her free choice to enter on this “villainous” housekeeping? Had he not warned her freely and fully that her days, if she came with him, would be anything but a bed of roses ? Was not life harder for him, inexpressibly harder, than it had ever been, a totally different thing altogether; but he bore on perseveringly and untiringly, looked to the end in view, and making matters light for her sake. Suppose—suppose—a flush dyed the young man’s patient face as the thought occurred to him—suppose she refused to stay here and went home to her friends ? Meanwhile, Mrs Hardy stood on by the mantelpiece, horribly miserable—more miserable than she had ever dreamed of being in any of the love quarrels that had flickered their courtship. There seemed to be no “making-up” in this sort of thing; there was no light in it : it was unmitigated, hopeless wretchedness. For Mrs Jane Hardy, her passion over, was chewing the husks of bitter repentance. He did not love her any more ; he could not; or he never would have said such harsh things to her; and this was the end of it all 1 •* To call me ‘ Jane 1’ ” she exclaimed aloud, as if the word “Jane” contained all forms of vituperation. “Nobody has been cruel enough to call me that in all my life 1” turning to the breakfast dishes with a bravely-conquered sob. For this young lady, who had been a pet as home, had never been called by her husband, or anybody else, by a harder name than Oehny. Work is so good a thing. Auerbach says it should have been the first commandment —“ Thou shalt work !” Jenny was too unfamiliar with heart torture to be conscious of how good her work was ; but she could not but be aware, as the morning passed away, that something was driving the clouds out of her sky. Roland could not despise her all at once, she was sure. She would gather up the remnant of his love, and guard and nourish it so tenderly that, like her poor Lamarque rose, it must still lift itself to the sun again, and some time blossom into a little beauty of sweetness, and to make life endurable. She would, in so many noble and heroic ways, prove to him —but no ; how could she do that ?—there was nothing noble or heroic to do. Women’s lives—ordinary women’s lives, like hers—had no heroic chances. She could only keep his house in nice order, cook his favourite dishes, watch over his shirt buttons, forget the old days of ease when she was a listless young lad and never, never, never lose her temper again. It was all dreadfully common place, and of no account, but she had embrace! this lot of her own free will, and out of her deep love for him, and it was the only way by which she could hope to climb to the heights of his regard again. As for his old romantic love for her, his tender chivalrous devotion, that could never come back ; she wasn’t worth it. And so, accepting the dust of humiliation, and, like a genuine woman, having no mercy on herself she went through the household duties, thinking all the time how dear to her were husband and home, and how she would strive to make herself endurable, please God, to them. (To be continued)