produced more positive effects than the keeping of petty secrets,
hardly worth revealing; and, lastly, of what she called a little
strangeness, sometimes, in the good man. This latter quality is
indefinable, and perhaps non-existent.
Let us now imagine Wakefield bidding adieu to his wife. It is the
dusk of an October evening. His equipment is a drab great-coat, a
hat covered with an oilcloth, top-boots, an umbrella in one hand
and a small portmanteau in the other. He has informed Mrs.
Wakefield that he is to take the night coach into the country.
She would fain inquire the length of his journey, its object, and
the probable time of his return; but, indulgent to his harmless
love of mystery, interrogates him only by a look. He tells her
not to expect him positively by the return coach, nor to be
alarmed should he tarry three or four days; but, at all events,
to look for him at supper on Friday evening. Wakefield himself,
be it considered, has no suspicion of what is before him. He
holds out his hand, she gives her own, and meets his parting kiss
in the matter-of-course way of a ten years' matrimony; and forth
goes the middle-aged Mr. Wakefield, almost resolved to perplex
his good lady by a whole week's absence. After the door has
closed behind him, she perceives it thrust partly open, and a
vision of her husband's face, through the aperture, smiling on
her, and gone in a moment. For the time, this little incident is
dismissed without a thought. But, long afterwards, when she has
been more years a widow than a wife, that smile recurs, and
flickers across all her reminiscences of Wakefield's visage. In
her many musings, she surrounds the original smile with a
multitude of fantasies, which make it strange and awful: as, for
instance, if she imagines him in a coffin, that parting look is
frozen on his pale features; or, if she dreams of him in heaven,
still his blessed spirit wears a quiet and crafty smile. Yet, for
its sake, when all others have given him up for dead, she
sometimes doubts whether she is a widow.
But our business is with the husband. We must hurry after him
along the street, ere he lose his individuality, and melt into
the great mass of London life. It would be vain searching for him
there. Let us follow close at his heels, therefore, until, after
several superfluous turns and doublings, we find him comfortably
established by the fireside of a small apartment, previously
bespoken. He is in the next street to his own, and at his
journey's end. He can scarcely trust his good fortune, in having
got thither unperceived--recollecting that, at one time, he was
delayed by the throng, in the very focus of a lighted lantern;
and, again, there were footsteps that seemed to tread behind his
own, distinct from the multitudinous tramp around him; and, anon,
he heard a voice shouting afar, and fancied that it called his
name. Doubtless, a dozen busybodies had been watching him, and
told his wife the whole affair. Poor Wakefield! Little knowest
thou thine own insignificance in this great world! No mortal eye
but mine has traced thee. Go quietly to thy bed, foolish man:
and, on the morrow, if thou wilt be wise, get thee home to good
Mrs. Wakefield, and tell her the truth. Remove not thyself, even
for a little week, from thy place in her chaste bosom. Were she,
for a single moment, to deem thee dead, or lost, or lastingly
divided from her, thou wouldst be wofully conscious of a change
in thy true wife forever after. It is perilous to make a chasm in