CHAPTER III.

GUSTAVUS IS MARRIED.

In the week afterwards, the couple were united in the holy bands of matrimony; and, surely, to say that there was any ceremony about such a union, would be a burlesque of the mysteries of Hymen. Yet, rapid as were the movements, and wholesale the conclusion, no man ever put his neck in the noose with such imperturbable gravity, for, during the whole period occupied by the feast, which was in the form of a supper, no man could have observed in his gaunt face any one of the three laughs, Ionic, Megaric, or Sardonic, with which the face is usually convulsed; the only indication approaching to a cachination in the midst of the whoops and yells of the feasters, being a grin in the shape of a _risus Ajacis_, that defied all power of analysis. But even this caricature of a display of good humour, insignificant as it may seem, shewed to those who knew the man that he was labouring under the influence of some extraordinary emotion, as nothing of the kind had ever been seen in his countenance since the day on which he hewed down so unmercifully the French at St Sebastian. Nor, on the following day, when he had fairly entered upon the supreme happiness of the married state, was there seen any palpable sign of the joy that, of course, penetrated through all his well-mailed thoracic viscera—unless it were, perhaps, that his face had even increased in length, and the leathery aspect of all the “celestial index” of the soul was, if possible, more grim than ever.

The getting of a wife is, after all, but a very small matter in comparison of the ruling of her; and sure, if ever there was a man in the world, since the days of the grim Hercules, who bungled the matter out and out, that had any chance of subjecting his wife to the requisite thraldom and subordination, Gustavus was that man; for a look of him was enough to tame a Bucephalus any day; and it was evident that he cogitated mighty achievements in that way, if one might have judged from the marshalling character of his step as he paraded the house; his taciturnity, deeper than the wells of truth; and the air of a resolute importance that was enthroned among the deep furrows of his extraordinary countenance. The first fruits of his study—and verily he must have been a man of no common nerve that could study during the honeymoon—was the important conclusion, that the sooner his Julia was entoiled in the multifarious affairs of domestic economy, and the imperative duties of ministering to his every want and comfort, the better chance he enjoyed of subjecting her thoroughly to the power of his stern discipline. So straight began he, accordingly, upon the instant, and, by the aid of a small douceur, got quit of his servant—an act that savoured of extraordinary sagacity and wisdom, in so much as it involved the additional advantages of saving her wages, and keeping and turning his wife into a source of profit, as she would doubtless be the fountain of much delectation. It is not unlikely that the maxim, when the devil finds a man or woman idle, he straightway sets them aworking—or, as Erasmus expresses it, _Ocium ad omnem nequitiam impellit_—had a large share in this determination; for, as to the opinion of Shakspeare, that idleness is the source of love, he despised it hepatically, and calculated with certainty that love’s sweetest labour—the contributing to the comfort of her lord—would be diligently pursued by his beloved and most adorable Julia Briggs.

All this was just as fair a piece of human calculation, and as probable a conclusion, as could ever be found beyond the regions of pure mathematics; and so, placing every fibre of his big body, excepting some portion of the heart, under the rigid authority of the genius of command, he issued, with an air a deuced deal more martial than marital, his stern orders, which were as recondite as they were energetic—going into the very medullary _penetralia_ of the matter of cooking and housekeeping with a knowledge and consideration that would have done honour to Mrs Margaret Dods of the Cleikum Inn herself. Nor was this to be much wondered at; for, had he himself not washed and dressed in the Peninsula, and had he not there also foraged, and cooked, and swallowed as no _bon vivan_ ever did before, since the days of the three Apicii? The never a man had ever doubted it; and if he had, it would just have been as safe for the unhappy wretch to have disputed his courage as to have expressed one word of scepticism on a subject that so nearly concerned his honour—for, in either case, he would have been knocked down.

It would be a libel on womankind to say, that the _polite_ Julia, who had been a standing toast among the small men of fashion connected with the depots of millinery wares about the town, had any affection for the bare-boned Colossus she had wedded on a week’s notice; and it would have been an insult to her spirit to have said that she feared him, though he was at least three times the size of any of her former lovers. She had married him, as all women of her stamp do, just for a living and protection—the one to be afforded from his pay, and the other from his bones and sinews—a very fair calculation for a woman of so small a calibre to make; and, accordingly, she would have declared war against him at once, big and terrible as he was, if she could have seen any good to come of it; for, as to the fearful expression of his leather-bound jaws, when he issued the order for work, she cared no more for it than if it had been a smile of mawkish love-doting. It is not likely that she had ever heard of Omphale, who ruled the biggest man of the world by her slipper; but she had not thrown away the needle, which had been used on the linens of fair, personable men, to take it up again to sew for a husband that never was intended by nature to be loved; and, as for supplying its place with the spit, she looked upon the proposition with as much contempt as she would have bestowed on a proposal that she should love the gigantic caricature she had married for nothing else in the world but her own convenience. All that was as plain as noon-day; but open war was not her tact, any more than it is the tact of Puck to fight the regular Goliaths of the earth at a fair stand-up or monomachy; and it is scarcely necessary to say, that the open _duellum_ is no more relished by the women of her class generally, than it was by the “eel or deil” of a creature that Gustavus had raised to the high station of his wife. Nor had she any difficulty in fixing on her plans; for nature was just as kind to her as to the rest of her sex in suggesting the means of perplexing her lord, though it is not improbable that, if she had known that his intention in making her work was to keep her out of all that species of devilry that comes to women out of idleness, she might have been inclined to vindicate the nobility of her kind, by some more devilish trick than mere unaided nature might at first have prompted.

The sharp, vixen eye of the pigmy sempstress had not been slow in perceiving that the two grand _sine quibus non_ of her husband’s comfort, were pure linens and well-cooked victuals; and she knew, moreover—doubtless in the way by which the sex come to their secret knowledge of men’s ways—that he had been in the habit of securing these grand objects by the labour of his own hands. The antipodes of each other in everything, they were as unlike each other in respect of these domestic duties, as they were in the sizes of their bodies; for while, as has been already hinted, there never was a man since the days of Pope Joan that excelled more in the mysteries of washing, dressing, and cooking than Gustavus, there never was a woman that knew less of these recondite arts than Mrs Julia M’Iver. The sexes of the two should, therefore, clearly have been reversed—he should have been the wife, and she the husband; and Julia knew this just as well as we or any other individual who presumes to question the excellence of the laws that regulate matrimonial matches, when she resolved to bring about a state of matters that would just be the same as if the potentiality we have mentioned had just in fact been a reality. She accordingly began by spoiling every piece of domestic labour to which she applied her hands; his linens being as much of the tint of saffron as ever were those of a gareteer, who enjoys the luxury of a pole and rope put forth from a skylight; and his victuals as wretchedly dressed as ever a devil-sent cook in the kingdom could have mangled out of the fair gifts of nature. Nothing in the way of destruction could have been more skilfully managed; and it is not too much to say, that, though the fair Julia had lifted her delicate hand, and attempted to knock him down, or performed any of the other _culpæ gravissimæ_ that appertain to the privileges of the sex, she could not have more effectually roused the wrath, of the mighty Gustavus.