| ACT I |
| ACT II |
| ACT III |
At the most wretched hour between a black night and a wintry morning in theyear 1777, Mrs. Dudgeon, of New Hampshire, is sitting up in the kitchen andgeneral dwelling room of her farm house on the outskirts of the town ofWebsterbridge. She is not a prepossessing woman. No woman looks her best aftersitting up all night; and Mrs. Dudgeon’s face, even at its best, isgrimly trenched by the channels into which the barren forms and observances ofa dead Puritanism can pen a bitter temper and a fierce pride. She is an elderlymatron who has worked hard and got nothing by it except dominion anddetestation in her sordid home, and an unquestioned reputation for piety andrespectability among her neighbors, to whom drink and debauchery are still somuch more tempting than religion and rectitude, that they conceive goodnesssimply as self-denial. This conception is easily extended toothers—denial, and finally generalized as covering anything disagreeable.So Mrs. Dudgeon, being exceedingly disagreeable, is held to be exceedinglygood. Short of flat felony, she enjoys complete license except for amiableweaknesses of any sort, and is consequently, without knowing it, the mostlicentious woman in the parish on the strength of never having broken theseventh commandment or missed a Sunday at the Presbyterian church.
The year 1777 is the one in which the passions roused of the breaking off ofthe American colonies from England, more by their own weight than their ownwill, boiled up to shooting point, the shooting being idealized to the Englishmind as suppression of rebellion and maintenance of British dominion, and tothe American as defence of liberty, resistance to tyranny, and selfsacrifice onthe altar of the Rights of Man. Into the merits of these idealizations it isnot here necessary to inquire: suffice it to say, without prejudice, that theyhave convinced both Americans and English that the most high minded course forthem to pursue is to kill as many of one another as possible, and that militaryoperations to that end are in full swing, morally supported by confidentrequests from the clergy of both sides for the blessing of God on their arms.
Under such circumstances many other women besides this disagreeable Mrs.Dudgeon find themselves sitting up all night waiting for news. Like her, too,they fall asleep towards morning at the risk of nodding themselves into thekitchen fire. Mrs. Dudgeon sleeps with a shawl over her head, and her feet on abroad fender of iron laths, the step of the domestic altar of the fireplace,with its huge hobs and boiler, and its hinged arm above the smoky mantel-shelffor roasting. The plain kitchen table is opposite the fire, at her elbow, witha candle on it in a tin sconce. Her chair, like all the others in the room, isuncushioned and unpainted; but as it has a round railed back and a seatconventionally moulded to the sitter’s curves, it is comparatively achair of state. The room has three doors, one on the same side as thefireplace, near the corner, leading to the best bedroom; one, at the oppositeend of the opposite wall, leading to the scullery and washhouse; and the housedoor, with its latch, heavy lock, and clumsy wooden bar, in the front wall,between the window in its middle and the corner next the bedroom door. Betweenthe door and the window a rack of pegs suggests to the deductive observer thatthe me