Only a clod
Susan is a brown-eyed angel--an angel who leads the life of a low-bred
drudge, and for whom any possible change of circumstances _must_ be a
change for the better.
“Of course I questioned her about the sermon as we walked home. Take an
interest in sermons, and women will believe in you, though you were the
veriest scoundrel that ever admired Voltaire and considered the
‘Pucelle’ his _chef-d’œuvre_. What a little Puritan she is! She has been
to church twice every Sunday ever since she can remember, she told me,
and to Sunday-school, and to all kinds of examinations and
cross-examinations in the vicar’s parlour. I don’t suppose _she_ would
have floundered as I did, and come to grief over some of the questions
those old fogies at Oxford asked me about Biblical history. She knows
all about Saul, and David, and Jonathan, and those everlasting wars with
the Philistines, I dare say. She is very pretty, lovely--yes, lovely,
though _not_ high-bred. I sometimes fancy, though, that she must have
decent blood in her veins. I never saw a prettier little hand upon my
arm than that which rested there to-day, as I brought her home from
church. If I were--something utterly different from what I am, I would
get my degree, go in for a country curacy, and little Susy should be my
wife. But _noblesse oblige_: which very elastic aphorism means, in my
case, that I must marry a rich woman, and hold my own in my native
county whenever the reigning potentate is polite enough to retire to the
dusky shades whither all earthly sovereigns must go.
“Poor little Susan! pretty little Susan! When I am a county magnate,
laying down the law at the head of my table in the great dining-room at
the hall, shall I look back and think of these days, and smile at
myself, remembering that I could be so foolish as to go out on a wet
Sunday to escort a little nursemaid along a damp clay road?
“Read hard all the afternoon: dined on an elderly fowl flavoured with
Dutch oven--a bird that must have known Coltonslough when the first
bow-windowed house was a damp brickwork skeleton, grim and open to the
howling of the winds. Read for some time after dinner, and let my fire
out. Went downstairs to hunt up matches and firewood, and found my
landlady and Susan sitting opposite to each other at a little table with
one tallow-candle, reading pious compositions of an evangelical
tendency. They both seemed glad to see me; so I stopped and talked to
them. Susan had read the ‘Prisoner of Chillon;’ she read it last night,
and cried over it ‘fearful,’ my landlady informed me; so we were able to
talk about the poem, and I read two or three of the fugitive pieces
aloud. I used to be rather great at the debating-club at O., and I gave
them the ‘Thyrzas’ and ‘Day of my Destinys’ very strong. I could see the
tears shining in Susan’s eyes before I’d finished. I used to recite
poetry to Rosa sometimes, when I’d been taking too much Bass, and we
stood in the moonlit porch at the King’s Arms, with the river, and the
willows, and the towing-path all of a shimmer in the silvery light; but
one is apt to get tired of reciting sentimental poetry to a young person
who cries, ‘Lor’, how funny!’ at the close of some passionate verse. I
remember thundering out that grand anathema of Tom Moore’s against the
Prince Regent, ‘Go, deceiver, go!’ and my Rosa asked me naïvely what the
gentleman had done that the other gentleman should use such bad language
to him. No, Rosa, your strong point was not intellect. In the matter of
sticky curls and large black eyes you are unsurpassed, but the
sentimental element in your nature may be represented by zero.
“_November 30th._--More blanks in my journal. I said we were growing
alarmingly intimate; such an intimacy is alarming to a fellow who came
to Coltonslough bent on devoting himself to Aristotle and Aristophanes,
Æschylus and Euripides, and all that sort of people. Have been reading
‘The Clouds’ all this morning, but found a strange undercurrent of Susan
Turner pervading that classic satire; and I mean to go in and win this
time: those fellows at St. Boniface sha’n’t be able to laugh at my
discomfiture a second time. Why were women created for the trouble and
confusion of the superior sex? I thought I should be so safe at
Coltonslough, remote from Rosa, the Delilah of my youth; and lo! here is
another Delilah, a thousand times more dangerous--a shy, brown-eyed
Omphale, for whose sake any intellectual Hercules on this earth would
meekly hold the distaff. She is _so_ pretty; and all those modest,
shrinking ways have such an unspeakable fascination after a long course
of Rosa’s sharp repartees, all redolent of the bar and the beer-engines.
I can never dissociate Rosa from the smell of malt liquors and ardent
spirits, with just a faint suspicion of lemons and stale pork-pie. But
there must be something extraordinary about _this_ girl, for her vulgar
surroundings do not seem to vulgarize her. I don’t mean that she is one
of nature’s duchesses, or any humbug of that sort. I have no belief in
nature’s nobility, and to my mind a duchess is a person who has been
cradled in Belgravia, whose long-clothes were flounced with _point
d’Alençon_, and to whom the wrong side of Temple Bar would be as strange
as the centre of Africa. I should by no means care to see my little Susy
in a London drawing-room; but I can fancy her domiciled in some rustic
cottage in the lake district, a patient Wordsworthian little handmaiden,
waiting upon and worshipping her husband, and getting him cosy
breakfasts, with silvery trout broiled to perfection, and mushrooms
newly-gathered from the neighbouring plains. If I were only an embryo
curate, with neither expectations nor ambitious desires, I scarcely
think that I could find a better wife than this simple gazelle-eyed
maiden; but---- Oh, that terrible monosyllable! The history of all the
world seems made up of buts and ifs.
“My afternoon stroll upon the Esplanade has grown into an established
thing. Sixpence judiciously bestowed upon the children despatches those
young abominations scurrying over the waste ground to an emporium which
they call ‘the shop,’ whence they return after an interval, embrowned
and sticky with the traces of ginger-bread and barley-sugar. In the
meanwhile Susan and I are alone on that dreary Esplanade. What is it
Byron says about youth, and solitude, and the sea? Well, that sort of
thing _is_ rather a dangerous combination; and I begin to think that if
I want to redeem my character at St. B., I shall be obliged to take
myself and my books away from Coltonslough. ‘Breathes there the wretch
with soul so dead,’ who could sit in that dingy parlour, coaching
himself in the classics, while one of the prettiest girls in all the
British dominions is walking up and down the Esplanade opposite his
window, and thinking of him? Yes, she thinks of me, and expects me, when
that yellow streak begins to glimmer in the west. I have seen her head
turned towards my window; and then I pitch my friend Sophocles into the
remotest corner, and go out for my afternoon stroll.
“_December 10._--Yes, the dismal confession must be written, or the
account between R. L. and self closed for ever. I am in love--seriously,
desperately, unreasonably in love--with a young person whose social
status is something between that of a parlour-maid and a
nursery-governess. Could she be worse off than she is now? Could any
turn in the wheel of fortune leave her in a lower place than that she
now occupies? Scarcely! I don’t believe in those dismal histories which
the Minerva Press was wont to disseminate. Susan is just the sort of
girl to fall on her feet. Those shy, sensitive creatures always know how
to take care of themselves, and often do remarkably well in life. It’s
your dashing, high-spirited, strong-minded girl who goes to the bad.
Goodness knows I’m not a bad-hearted fellow. I can’t look at such a girl
as Susan without worrying myself about her future career. There’s
scarcely any sacrifice I wouldn’t make--short of the sacrifice of my own
prospects--in order to insure her welfare. Yes, the little stranger, let
into my dwelling unawares, has strung his bow and twanged his arrow home
to my heart. I am really in love this time. I used to feel savage with
those St. B. fellows when they talked nonsense to Rosa: but I think I
should annihilate the man who so much as looked at this girl. Yes; I am
prepared to make any sacrifice--short of the destruction of my own
prospects. Your really rich man, or your penniless beggar, can afford to
make a fool of himself; but I stand just in that middle distance between
the golden lands of plenty and the sterile plains of poverty, in which a
man must needs be peculiarly circumspect.
“_17th._--I have broken the ice at last. What a little Puritan she is!
And yet I know that she loves me, with the regular Haidee or Zuleika
sort of devotion: would like to kneel at my feet and offer me tiresome
flowers, when I was absorbed in the classic fogies, and all that sort of
thing. A long interview on the Esplanade this afternoon. I beat the
ground with the greatest discretion; for it would have been the easiest
thing in the world to frighten her. It must be a marriage--a _bonâ fide_
marriage, secret, of course. She won’t object to that. But upon the
other point I can see she would be inflexible. Those quiet people are
always obstinate. Ay di me, my pretty Susy, I fear that you and I must
say Good-bye. And I am really over head and ears in that dismal pit. I
am most absurdly fond of her; that’s the worst of it. Yes, we must say
Good-bye. The catechisms in the rector’s parlour and the Sunday-school
have done their work, and Susan Turner will be a drudge all her life
rather than surrender those ridiculous prejudices which it is the
fashion to implant in the minds of rustic youth. _Addio_, my pretty
Susan. I cannot imagine anything more delightful than our quiet walks in
the cold gray twilight; I cannot conceive any eyes--out of a Murillo--so
beautiful as those brown orbs of yours--orbs is the proper phrase, I
think, when a fellow is sentimental;--but the price demanded is too
heavy. One may buy gold in too dear a market; and ten years hence, with
blighted prospects, and half-a-dozen children, I might grow tired of my
white doe of what’s-its-name, and fancy a blue-eyed Greuze--how
wonderful that man was in his manipulations of violet-hued pupils
swimming in enamelled whiteness!--instead of my Murillo.
“_20th._--I began to pack my books the day before yesterday, and yet I
linger. ‘Tell me, my heart, if this be love!’ Not much doubt about it, I
fear. But only a day or two more, and then--and then good-bye, pretty
puritanical Susan, with your Sunday-school morality, and all that innate
obstinacy peculiar to quiet women. I shall have forgotten her in six
weeks, I dare say. But then that consolatory idea of the future oblivion
won’t lessen the present anguish of parting. We may forget all about a
gigantic triple-pronged carious tooth when we turn our back upon the
dentist’s torture-chamber, but the pang of extraction is none the less.
I shall forget her, and some other eyes will haunt me in my sleep; but
there must be a long blank interval of weariness before the Lethean
waters can wash away that artless face. I have plumbed her simple mind
to its uttermost depths, and have found nothing like deception or
pretence. So we must part. I to go forth and do my best at opening the
great oyster; she to remain here as my landlady’s drudge and companion.
Poor little thing! I hope she’ll miss me when I go. I shouldn’t like to
think of her enjoying a flirtation with some new lodger--a city clerk,
who would wear ready-made clothes bought somewhere in Shoreditch, and