He would now have left them, but nobody there would part with him; behooved him to stay and eat fish and pudding with them—the meat they would excuse him if he would be good and not talk about going again. And after dinner George and Tom must tell their whole story; and, as they told their eventful lives, it was observed that the hearers were far more agitated than the narrators. The latter had been in a gold mine; had supped so full of adventures and crimes and horrors that nothing astonished them, and they were made sensible of the tremendous scenes they had been through by the loud ejaculations, the pallor, the excitement of their hearers. As for Susan, again and again during the men's narratives the tears streamed down her face, and once she was taken faint at George's peril, and the story had to be interrupted and water sprinkled on her, and the men in their innocence were for not going on with their part, but she peremptorily insisted, and sneered at them for being so foolish as to take any notice of her foolishness—she would have every word. After all was he not there alive and well, sent back to her safe after so many perils, never, never to leave England again!
“Oh, giorno felice!” A day to be imagined; or described by a pen a thousand times greater and subtler than mine, but of this be sure—it was a day such as, neither to Susan nor George, nor to you nor me, nor to any man or woman upon earth, has ever come twice between the cradle and the grave.
CHAPTER LXXXV.
A MONTH of Elysium. And then one day George asked Susan, plump, when it would be agreeable to her to marry him.
“Marry you, George?” replied Susan, opening her eyes; “why, never! I shall never marry any one after—you must be well aware of that.” Susan proceeded to inform George, that, though foolishness was a part of her character, selfishness was not; recent events had destroyed an agreeable delusion under which she had imagined herself worthy to be Mrs. George Fielding; she therefore, though with some reluctance, intended to resign that situation to some wiser and better woman than she had turned out. In this agreeable resolution she persisted, varying it occasionally with little showers of tears unaccompanied by the slightest convulsion of the muscles of the face. But, as I am not, like George Fielding, in love with Susan Merton, or with self-deception (another's), I spare the reader all the pretty things this young lady said and believed and did, to postpone her inevitable happiness. Yes, inevitable, for this sort of thing never yet kept lovers long apart since the world was, except in a novel worse than common. I will but relate how that fine fellow, George, dried “these foolish drops” on one occasion.
“Susan,” said he, “if I had found you going to be married to another man with the roses on your cheek, I should have turned on my heel and back to Australia. But a look in your face was enough; you were miserable, and any old fool could see your heart was dead against it; look at you now blooming like a rose, so what is the use of us two fighting against human nature? we can't be happy apart—let us come together.”
“Ah! George, if I thought your happiness depended on having—a foolish wife—”
“Why, you know it does,” replied the inadvertent Agricola.
“That alters the case; sooner than you should be unhappy—I think—I—”