The New Penelope, and Other Stories and Poems. Frances Fuller Victor
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 circumstances 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 punishing 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 assistance; 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-class 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 assistance 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