The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems Part 6

"I have told you that I used to cry a good deal. Weeping, though a relief to us in one way, by removing the pressure upon the brain, is terribly exhausting when excessive, and I was very much wasted by it. An incident occurred about the time I was just speaking of, which gave me comfort in a strange manner. I used sometimes, when my work for the day was done, to leave Benton with my German friend, and go out for a walk, or to call on an acquaintance. All the sights and sounds of nature are beautiful and beneficial to me in a remarkable degree. With trees and flowers and animals, I am happy and at home.

"One evening I set out to make a visit to Mrs. ----, my old neighbor, who lived at some distance from me. The path led through the fir forest, and at the time of day when I was at liberty, was dim and gloomy. I walked hurriedly along, fearing darkness would overtake me; and looking about me as I went, was s.n.a.t.c.hing a hasty pleasure from the contemplation of Nature's beneficence, when my foot caught in a projecting root of some tough shrub, and I fell prostrate.

"In good health and spirits I should not have minded the fall; but to me, in my weak condition, every jar to the nervous system affected me seriously. I rose with difficulty, and seating myself upon a fallen tree, burst into tears, and wept violently. It seemed as if even the sticks and stones were in league to injure me. Looking back upon my feelings, I can understand how man, in the infancy of the race, attributed power and will to everything in Nature. In his weakness and inexperience, Nature was too strong for him, and bruised him continually.

"As I sat weeping with pain and an impotent resentment, a clear sweet voice spoke to me out of the dusky twilight of the woods. '_Don't cry so much!_' it said. Astonishment dried my tears instantly. I looked about me, but no one was near; nor any sound to be heard, but the peculiar cry of a bird that makes itself heard in the Oregon woods at twilight only.

A calm that I cannot explain came over my perturbed spirit. It was like the heavenly voices heard upon the earth thousands of years ago, in its power to move the heart. It may make you smile for me to say so; but from that hour I regained a degree of cheerfulness that I had not felt since the day of my marriage to Mr. Seabrook. I did not go to Mrs.

----'s that evening, but returned home and went to my bed without putting on clothes to be buried in!"

We talked for a little of well attested instances of similar incidents of the seeming supernatural. Then I said:

"And how did your investment turn out?"

"As might have been expected by a more worldly-wise person. After succeeding, almost, I was defeated by the selfishness and indifference of the man I had trusted to help me through with it. He sold out his property, including that bonded to me, when nearly the whole indebtedness was paid, without mentioning his design, or giving me an opportunity to complete the purchase. The new proprietor went immediately to Mr. Seabrook, who, delighted with this unexpected piece of fortune, borrowed the small amount remaining to be paid, and had the property deeded to himself. A short time after he sold it at a handsome advance on the price I paid for it, and I had never one dollar of the money. The entire savings of the whole time I had been in a really profitable business, went with that unlucky venture."

"You were just as far from getting to California as ever? O, what outrageous abuse of the power society gives men over women!" I exclaimed with vehemence.

"You may imagine I was bitterly disappointed. The lesson was a hard one, but salutary. I took no more disinterested advice; I bought no more property. There are too many agents between a woman and the thing she aims at, for her ever to attain it without danger of discomfiture. The experience, as you may guess, put me in no amicable mood towards Mr.

Seabrook. Just think of it! There were three years I had supported, by my labor, a large family of men, for that is what it amounted to. My money purchased the food they all ate, and I had really received nothing for it except my board and the clothes I worked in. The fault was not theirs; it was Mr. Seabrook's and society's."

"I will tell you what you remind me of," I said: "You are like Penelope, and her train of ravenous suitors, in the _Odyssey_ of Homer."

"In my busy life, I have not had time to read Homer," Mrs. Greyfield replied; "but if any other woman has been so eaten out of house and home, as I was, I am sorry for her."

"Homer's Penelope, if we may believe the poet, was in much better circ.u.mstances to bear the ravages of her riotous boarders, than you were to feed yours gratuitously."

"Talking about suitors," said Mrs. Greyfield, "I was not without those entirely, either. No young mismated woman can escape them perhaps. The universal opinion among men seems to be that, if you do not like the man you have, you _must_ like some other one; and each one thinks it is himself."

The piquant tone in which Mrs. Greyfield uttered her observations always provoked a smile. But I caught at an intimation in her speech.

"Sometimes," I said, "you speak as if you acknowledged Mr. Seabrook as your husband, and it shocks me unpleasantly."

"I am speaking of things as they appeared to others. In truth, I was as free to receive suitors as ever I had been; but such was not the common understanding, and I resented the advances of men upon the ground that _they_ believed themselves to be acting unlawfully, and that they hoped to make me a party to their breaches of law and propriety. I laugh now, in remembering the blunders committed by self-conceit so long ago; but I did not laugh then; it was a serious matter at that time."

"Was Mr. Seabrook jealous in his behavior, fearing you might fancy some one else?"

"Just as jealous as vain and tyrannical men always are when they are thwarted in their designs. No real husband could have been more critical in his observations on his wife's deportment, than he was in his remarks on mine. If I could have been guilty of coquetry, the desire to annoy him would have been incentive enough; but I always considered that I could not afford to suffer in my own estimation for the sake of punis.h.i.+ng him. When I recall all these things, I take credit to myself for magnanimity; though then I was governed only by my poor uncultivated judgment, and my impulses. For instance, Mr. Seabrook fell ill of a fever not long after he appropriated my real estate. Of course, I was as bitter towards him in my heart as it is possible to conceive, but I could not know that he was lying unattended in his room, without offering a.s.sistance; so, after many struggles with myself to overcome my strong repulsion, I visited him often enough to give him such attentions as were necessary, but not more. I had no intention of raising any false expectations."

"I hope you took advantage of his being confined to his room, to collect board-money," I said.

"I found out, in time, several ways of managing that matter, which I would once have thought inadmissible. When I had begged some money from a boarder, Mr. Seabrook discovered it when payday came, very naturally.

He then ordered me to do the marketing. Without paying any attention to the command, I served up at meal-time whatever there was in the house.

This brought out murmurs from the boarders, and haughty inquiries from the host himself. All the reply I vouchsafed was, that what he procured I would cook. In this way I forced him to pay out the money in his possession, at the expense of my character as a good wife, and a polite one. He took his revenge in abusive language, and occasional fits of destructiveness in the kitchen, which alarmed my little German neighbor more than it did me. So long as he secured all my earnings, and deceived people thoroughly as to his real conduct, he maintained, before others at least, a gentlemanly demeanor. But this was gradually giving way to the pressure of a constant thorn in his flesh, and the consciousness of his own baseness. He could swear, threaten, and almost strike at slight provocation now. He never really attempted the latter, but once, and it was then I told him I should shoot him, if he dared it.

"I ought to say here, that in the last year I had two or three families in the house for a short time. I don't know what these real wives thought of me; that I was a termagant probably; but they were not the kind of women I could talk to about myself, and I made no confidences. A plan was maturing in my mind that was to make it a matter of indifference what any one thought. I had relinquished the idea of getting money enough together to make a sure start in California, and was only waiting to have enough to take me out of the country in any way that I could go cheapest. Another necessary point to gain was secrecy.

That could not be gained while I was surrounded by boarders, nor while Mr. Seabrook was in the house, and I resolved to be rid of both."

"Oh," I cried, delighted and relieved, "how _did_ you manage that?"

"I am going to tell you by how simple an expedient. _I starved them out!_"

"How strange that in all those years you never thought of that," I said laughing. "But, then, neither did Homer's heroine, who kept a first-cla.s.s free boarding house for twice or thrice as long as you. Do tell me how you accomplished the feat of clearing your house."

"It is not quite true that I had not thought of it; but I had not dared to do it. Besides, I wanted to get some money, if possible. Perhaps I should not have done it at the time I did, had not a little help come to me in the shape of real friends. I was all the time like a wild bird in a cage, and the continual attempts to escape I was making, only bruised my wings. It occurred to me one day to go to a certain minister who had lately come to Portland, and whose looks pleased me, as did his wife's, and tell them my story. This I did.

"Instead of receiving it as fiction, or doubting the strange parts of it in a way to make me wish I had never spoken of them, they manifested the greatest interest and sympathy, and promised me any a.s.sistance they could give. This was the first recognition I had gotten from anyone as being what I was; a woman held in bondage worse than that of African slavery, by a man to whom she owed nothing, and in the midst of a free, civilized, and Christian community. They were really and genuinely shocked, and firmly determined to help me. I told them all the difficulties in the way, and of the expedient I had almost decided upon, to free my house from every one; for I thought that when his income stopped, Mr. Seabrook would be forced to go away, and seek some other means of living. They agreed with me that there appeared no better way, and I decided to attempt it.

"It did not take long, of course, to drive away the boarders, for they were there only to eat; and when provisions entirely failed, or were uncooked, there was nothing to be done but to go where they could be better served. I did not feel very comfortable over it, as many of them were men I liked and respected, whose ill opinion it was disagreeable to incur, even in a righteous cause; and then no woman likes to be the talk of the town, as I knew I must be. The 'town talk,' as it happened, in time suggested my further course to me.

"Pray tell me if Mr. Seabrook followed the boarders, or did he stay and compel you to cook for him?"

"He stayed, but he did not compel me to cook for him. That I peremptorily refused to do. Neither would I buy any supplies. If he wanted a meal, he must go out, get his provisions, and cook them for himself. Then he refused to buy anything to come in the house, lest I should share _his_ plenty. This reduced our rations to nothing. I used to take Benton out and buy him good, wholesome food, myself eating as little as would support nature. Occasionally, now that I had time on my hands, I spent a day out among my few visiting acquaintances; and sometimes I took a meal with my German friend. In this way I compelled my former master to look out for himself.

"One night, there not being a mouthful in the house to eat, I went out and bought a loaf of bread and some milk for Benton's breakfast; for I was careful not to risk the child's health as I risked my own. In the morning when I came down stairs the bread and milk were gone. Mr.

Seabrook had breakfasted. 'Bennie' and I could go hungry. And that brings me back to what 'town talk' did for me.

"It soon became noised about that Mr. and Mrs. Seabrook, who had never got on well together, were now going on dreadfully, and that probably there would be a divorce. 'Divorce!' I said, when my new friend, the minister, mentioned it to me, 'divorce from what? How can there be a divorce where there is no marriage?' 'Nevertheless,' he replied, 'it is worth considering. If the society you live in insist that you are married, why not gratify this society, and ask its leave to be legally separated from your nominal husband?'

"At first I rebelled strongly against making this tacit admission of a relations.h.i.+p of that kind to Mr. Seabrook. It appeared to me to be a confession of falsehood to those few persons who were in my confidence, some of whom I felt had always half-doubted the full particulars, as being too ugly for belief. And what was quite as unpalatable as the other was that my enemy would rejoice that for once, at least, and in a public record, I should have to confess myself his wife. My friends argued that it could make little difference, as that was the popular understanding already, which nothing could alter; and that so far as Mr.

Seabrook was concerned his triumph would be short-lived and valueless.

They undertook to procure counsel, and stand by me through the trial."

"What complaint did you purpose making?" I interrupted.

"'Neglect of support, and cruel treatment;' the general charge that is made to cover so many abominable sins, because we women shrink from exposing the crimes we have been in a measure partners to. My attorney a.s.sured me that, under the circ.u.mstances, Mr. Seabrook would not make any opposition, fearing we might prove the whole, if he did so; but would let the case go by default. This was just what he did; and oh, you should have witnessed his abject humility when I at last had the acknowledged right to put him out of my house!

"Up to the time the divorce was obtained, he kept possession of the room he had first taken, on the lower floor, and which I hired an Indian woman to take care of as one of the ch.o.r.es a.s.signed her about the house.

For myself, I would not set my foot in it, except on the occasions referred to; but the rent, and the care of it, he had free. Such was the moral degradation of the man, through his own acts, that after all that had pa.s.sed, he actually cried, and begged of me the privilege to remain in that room, and be taken care of, as he had been used to be."

"What did you answer him?"

"I told him never to darken my door--never to offend my sight again; that I should never be quite happy while his head was above the sod. O, I was very vindictive! And he was as mild as milk. He 'could not see why I should hate him so, who had always had so high a regard for me. He had never known a woman he admired and loved so much!' Even I was astonished at the man's abjectness."

"It is not uncommon in similar cases. Dependence makes any one more or less mean; but it is more noticeable in men, who by nature and by custom are made independent. And so you were free at last?"

"Free and happy. I felt as light as a bird, and wondered I couldn't fly!

I was poor; but that was nothing. My business was broken up; but I felt confidence in myself to begin again. My health, however, was very much broken down, and my friends said I needed change. That, with the desire to quit a country where I had suffered so much, determined me to come to California. It was the land of promise to my husband--the El Dorado he was seeking when he died. I always felt that if I had come here in the first place, my life would have been very different. So, finally, with the help of my kind friends I came."

"_I_ should have felt, with your experience, no courage to undertake life among strangers, and they mostly men."

"On the contrary, I felt armed in almost every point. The fact of being a divorced woman was my only annoyance; but I was resolved to suppress it so far as I was able, and to represent myself to be, as I was, the widow of Mr. Greyfield. I took letters from my friends, to use in case of need; and with nothing but my child, and money enough to take me comfortably to the mines on the American River, left Oregon forever."

"To behold you as you are now, in this delightful home, it seems impossible that you should have gone through what you describe; and yet there must have been much more before you achieved the success here indicated."

"It was nothing--nothing at all compared with the other. I proceeded direct to the most populous mining town, hired a house, bought furniture on credit, and took boarders again. I kept only first-cla.s.s boarders, had high prices--and succeeded."

"Did you never have the mining-stock fever, and invest and lose?"

"Not to any dangerous extent. One or two parties, in whose judgment I knew I might confide, indicated to me where to invest, and I fortunately lost nothing, while I made a little. My best mining-stock was a present from a young man who was sick at my house for a long time, and to whom I was attentive. He was an excellent young fellow, and my sympathies were drawn out towards him; alone in a mining-camp, and sick, and, as I suspected, moneyless. When he was well enough to go away, he confessed his inability to pay up, and presented me with several shares in a mine then but little known; saying that it might not be worth the paper it was printed on, but that he hoped it might bring enough to reimburse my actual outlay on his account; 'the kindness he had received could not be repaid with filthy lucre.' A few months afterwards that stock was worth several thousand dollars. I made diligent inquiry for my young friend, but could get no news of him from that day to this. I have been fortunate in everything I have touched since I came to California.

Benton grew well and strong; I recovered my health; Fortune's wheel for me seemed to remain in one happy position; and now there seems nothing for me to do but to move slowly and easily down the sunset slope of life to my final rest."