Page:Once a Week Jul - Dec 1859.pdf/462

26, 1859.] Patience Hams sat in the window of her sitting-room, with her hymns and her songs unpractised, her embroidery faded and entangled; her copies of sweet, cool, wholesome Izaak Walton, and John Evelyn, and Samuel Daniel, and George Herbert, ay, and even some of the best verses of Master Waller and Master Dry den, which Benjamin had loved to read to her and have her read to him, neglected for the curses of some maddened man; irking herself, harrowing herself with miseries, which she could neither fathom nor relieve, as she would drink wormwood-water for her health in place of succory- water for her solace — there was Patience, dark and abstracted as Benjamin Harris least liked to see her, as it pricked him to the heart to find her.

Patience had seen little of her husband for the last few days: he was unusually engrossed with business, and had been obliged to depart on a little journey without informing her of its import, although he had come in and embraced her affectionately in his riding-coat, with a blush on his cheek and a stammer on his tongue. Afterwards he had sent her a little note dated from his coffee-house, urging her, in place of living lonesome, to pay a visit to Mistress Lucy Soule, who was prepared to receive her and amuse her with the last new prints and women’s recipes; because her worthy father with whom she was aware he was so unhappy as to have a dryness, was not at present, as far as he had sounded him, disposed to accept his daughter’s company for a week or so, with the entire contentment and thankfulness which he regarded as the due of his honoured wife, to whom he was forced to bid a brief but reluctant farewell.

Patience was not greatly enlightened or charmed by this communication of her husband, clearly as it indicated his concern for her. It was an annoyance, a provocation. In the first place, she would have much rather been trusted to keep house in Gracechurch Street; in the second, she would have preferred feeling an intruder on her own family circle to rendering herself a dependent on Mrs. Lucy’s notice. In the last there was already sprouting between the elder and younger ladies one of those civil perennial grudges which the wisest husbands will obliviously overlook. It was all very well for Mrs. Lucy to patronise her young acquaintance, Patience Chiswell, and Patience liked the sweet tempered, affected great lady immensely; but Mrs. Benjamin Harris judged Mrs. Lucy too self-satisfied, learned, and affable, and did not admire her trade connection with Benjamin, who had no consultations or arguments for his wife, only admiration and courtship.

Still do not credit that Patience was very sulky or actually rebellious: she obeyed the injudicious mandate, entering her hackney chair and forwarding her bundles and boxes the moment a messenger arrived for her. Mrs. Lucy deputed a journeyman to pass her onwards, because she could not come and carry her off herself by reason of her dear old mother having had some spasms on hearing of the difficulties of a friend. But wherefore Mrs. Lucy despatched a chair when she knew that Patience hated it, in spite of that old progress from the Mercers’ Gardens, and greatly preferred a walk through the streets, unless to imply a doubt of her prudence, or to despise her inclinations, Patience could not conceive.

Patience bore as long as she was able the aggravation of Mrs. Lucy’s pointed, tolerably fantastic attentions, and her mother’s doting way of staring at her, and shaking her head, and being told over and over again, “Please, madam, it is young Mrs. Benjamin Harris, who knows nothing of older folks’ cares and pains, and whom dear Mr. Harris has entrusted to us to be looked after and kept cheerful.” While the Soules had her all to themselves, and saw no other private company.

At last, something impelled Patience to be naughty and independent; and getting up early one morning, she stole a march upon Mrs. Lucy — who was a little of a slug-a-bed — ere she betook herself to her gay back shop (front shops were the public libraries), and her dainty desk. Patience broke her fast with a porringer of sops, left a message that she had gone abroad to see her own people, and would be back before nightfall, and started all alone for Lombard Street.

Really Patience was so perverse, that she felt excited and elated by the rare sense of solitude, and the flavour of adventure and danger as she walked away in her hat and mantle, without the mask, which the court ladies adopted largely for no creditable purpose, if all tales were true, but with the old decent muffler, in remembrance of her husband’s scruples, drawn over her round chin and up to the arched mouth, which ought never to have been drawn hard and still. There seemed already many people abroad, and they were hurrying to Chepe, as Patience could catch, to witness some aggravated instance of exposure and con- tumely by command of the lords or magistrates of the city. But Patience was so far her old self for the moment, that instead of pondering the severity of these usages and the shameless venality of the one in question, and racking her head and heart hopelessly in abasing herself for the unrighteousness in power, she was more tempted to buy from the buxom country girl, calling the “Cherry, cherry, ripe“ of Herrick, or the brown water-cress boy, who might have made up his dark green bunches by a flowing stream, peaceful as the Lea, wuth a lord of the manor attached as Cotton, and a lady well chosen as the sister of Bishop Ken.

Patience entered Lombard Street in good spirits, passed rapidly through her father’s shop, with its sculptured models, like the figure-heads of ships, its huge carved testers and waved canopies, and entered suddenly into the Chiswells’ back parlour, threading its heavy oak -chairs and treading lightly its tesselated floor in the style of the master of the house, and dispensing with a foot-cloth.

Patience’s sisters were in the kitchen helping to cook the mid-day dinner, or putting the sleeping-rooms in order, or even painting some of the simpler screens which her father furnished; her brothers were at school, or in the working booths, or abroad attending to orders, but her father and mother sat here at leisure engaged in close conversation. They both stopped and stared, Patience fancied because she had not been home recently, or in relation to an ill-judged interference which Chiswell had taken upon him to make in Harris’s concerns — his dealings with the Dissenters, his