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Just as his case became extremely delicate, there arrived sudden tidings both from East and West that one of his wife’s brothers had dissipated the whole of Roderigo’s profits in play, and that while the other was returning with a rich cargo uninsured, his ship had the misfortune to be wrecked, and he himself was lost.
“Well, if that isn’t successful,” Laura said, “there’s another way of finding out who your husband or wife’s going to be. You must walk down the cellar-stairs backwards with a candle in one hand and a mirror in the other. You must look in the mirror all the time and, when you get to the foot of the stairs, you will see, reflected in it, the face of your husband or wife.”
The husband goes to live in the wife’s village; thus the women in each group are a compact unity, while the men are strangers to each other and enter as unorganised individuals. This is the real basis of the women’s power.
“Come,” said I, “let’s have another glass of grog, and I’ll drink your wife’s good health and speedy promotion to yourself.” “That’s a good fellow,” said he, giving me his hand, and brushing away a tear. “Should you ever be spliced, which I hope for your own sake will not be for some years, may you anchor alongside just such another saucy frigate as mine.” I am truly happy to inform my reader that my good-hearted messmate was shortly afterwards promoted into a frigate going to England.
Dax lost the job, and boards with us; p’r’aps it’s because she is my wife’s successor in office, or p’a’ps it’s jest the natural grudge that wimmin seem to harbor agin each other, I dunno, but they don’t sandwich none."
He looked up, and beheld a bundle tied in a check apron, and hanging in the branches of the tree, with a great vulture perched hard by, as if keeping watch upon it. He leaped with joy; for he recognized his wife’s apron, and supposed it to contain the household valuables. “Let us get hold of the property,” said he, consolingly to himself, “and we will endeavour to do without the woman.”
No feeling of resentment remained with him; only wonder at his wife’s misshapen knowledge and keen self-rebuke of his own momentary forgetfulness. Even knowing Fanny as he did, he could not rid himself of the haunting dread of having wounded her nature cruelly.
It appeared that Mr Verloc was ready to take him over together with his wife’s mother and with the furniture, which was the whole visible fortune of the family. Mr Verloc gathered everything as it came to his broad, good-natured breast. The furniture was disposed to the best advantage all over the house, but Mrs Verloc’s mother was confined to two back rooms on the first floor.
Through his energy she is enabled to dispense largess with a lavish hand, and thus to dignify her clan and honour her spouse in the most effective way known to primitive life; and at the same time she enjoys the immeasurable moral stimulus of realising she is the arbiter of the fate of a man who becomes a warrior or an outcast at her bidding, and through him of the future of two clans she is raised to a responsibility in both personal and tribal affairs which, albeit temporary, is hardly lower than that of the warrior chief.” At the close of the year, if all goes well, the probation ends in a feast provided by the lover, who now becomes the husband, and finally enters his wife’s jacal as “consort-guest.” His position is wholly subordinate, and without any authority whatever, either over his children or over the property.
This is illustrated further by the Musquakies, also belonging to the Algonquian stock. Though still organised in clans, descent is no longer reckoned through the mother; the bridegroom, however, serves his wife’s family, and he lives in her home. This does not make him of her clan, but she belongs to his, till his death or divorce separates her from him.
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