![]() 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. Wakefield that he is to take the night-coach into the country. His equipment is a drab greatcoat, a hat covered with an oil-cloth, top-boots, an umbrella in one hand and a small portmanteau in the other. Let us now imagine Wakefield bidding adieu to his wife. This latter quality is indefinable, and perhaps non-existent. She, without having analyzed his character, was partly aware of a quiet selfishness that had rusted into his inactive mind of a peculiar sort of vanity, the most uneasy attribute about him of a disposition to craft which had seldom 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. Only the wife of his bosom might have hesitated. With a cold but not depraved nor wandering heart, and a mind never feverish with riotous thoughts nor perplexed with originality, who could have anticipated that our friend would entitle himself to a foremost place among the doers of eccentric deeds? Had his acquaintances been asked who was the man in London the surest to perform nothing to-day which should be remembered on the morrow, they would have thought of Wakefield. Imagination, in the proper meaning of the term, made no part of Wakefield’s gifts. He was intellectual, but not actively so his mind occupied itself in long and lazy musings that tended to no purpose or had not vigor to attain it his thoughts were seldom so energetic as to seize hold of words. ![]() He was now in the meridian of life his matrimonial affections, never violent, were sobered into a calm, habitual sentiment of all husbands, he was likely to be the most constant, because a certain sluggishness would keep his heart at rest wherever it might be placed. What sort of a man was Wakefield? We are free to shape out our own idea and call it by his name. Thought has always its efficacy and every striking incident its moral. If the reader choose, let him do his own meditation or if he prefer to ramble with me through the twenty years of Wakefield’s vagary, I bid him welcome, trusting that there will be a pervading spirit and a moral, even should we fail to find them, done up neatly and condensed into the final sentence. ![]() Whenever any subject so forcibly affects the mind, time is well spent in thinking of it. ![]() To my own contemplations, at least, it has often recurred, always exciting wonder, but with a sense that the story must be true and a conception of its hero’s character. We know, each for himself, that none of us would perpetrate such a folly, yet feel as if some other might. ![]() But the incident, though of the purest originality, unexampled, and probably never to be repeated, is one, I think, which appeals to the general sympathies of mankind. And after so great a gap in his matrimonial felicity-when his death was reckoned certain, his estate settled, his name dismissed from memory and his wife long, long ago resigned to her autumnal widowhood-he entered the door one evening quietly as from a day’s absence, and became a loving spouse till death. During that period he beheld his home every day, and frequently the forlorn Mrs. The man, under pretence of going a journey, took lodgings in the next street to his own house, and there, unheard of by his wife or friends and without the shadow of a reason for such self-banishment, dwelt upward of twenty years. Howbeit, this, though far from the most aggravated, is perhaps the strangest instance on record of marital delinquency, and, moreover, as remarkable a freak as may be found in the whole list of human oddities. The fact, thus abstractedly stated, is not very uncommon, nor, without a proper distinction of circumstances, to be condemned either as naughty or nonsensical. In some old magazine or newspaper I recollect a story, told as truth, of a man-let us call him Wakefield-who absented himself for a long time from his wife. ![]()
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