My salary will be about 300L. a-year. Now, half of that ought to suffice a man of my moderate habits. Many a poor clerk, educated, and obliged to appear as a gentleman, has no larger income, and contrives to marry upon it, too, if love seizes hold of him while still in the venturesome stage of existence.
We men are strange animals: at twenty, ready to rush into matrimony on any prospects whatever, or none at all; at thirty, having thought better of it, rejoice in our escape; but after forty, when the shadows begin to fall, when the outer world darkens, and the fireside feels comfortless and lone, then, we sit and ponder—I mean, most men. Mine is an individual and special case, not germane to the subject.
With all deference to young Tom Turton, his friend Mr. Charteris, and others of the set, which I have lately been among in London, the sum of one hundred and fifty pounds a-year seems to me amply sufficient to maintain in as much comfort as is good for him, and in all the necessary outward decencies of middle-class life, a man without any expensive habits or relations dependent on him, and who has neither wife nor child.
Neither wife nor child! As I write them, the words smite hard.
To have no wife, no child! Never to seek what the idlest, most drunken loon of a mechanic may get for the asking; never to experience the joy which I saw on a poor fellow's face only yesterday; when, in the same room with one dead lad, and another sickening, the wife brought into the world a third, a living child, and the ragged, starved father cried out, “Lord be thankit!” that it was a living child.
O Lord, Thy ways are equal: it is ours only which are unequal. Forbid it Thou that I should have given Thee of that which cost me nothing!
Yet, on this night—this last night of a year so momentous—let me break silence, and cry—Thou alone wilt hear.
I want her—I crave her; my very heart and soul are hungry for her! Not as a brief possession, like gathering a flower and wearying of it, or throwing it away. I want her for always—to have her morning, noon, and night; day after day and year after year; happy or sorrowful, good or faulty, young or old; only mine, mine! I feel sometimes as if, found thus late, all eternity could not give me enough of her. It is not the body she inhabits,—though, from head to foot, my love is all fair, fair as daylight and pure as snow—it is herself I want, ever close at hand to be the better self of this me, who have tried vainly all these years to stand alone, to live and endure alone! Folly!—proud folly! such is not a natural state of things; God himself said, “It is not good for man to be alone.”
I think I never shall be so solitary as I have been. That good heart, pure and unselfish as I never saw woman's before, will always incline kindly to as much of mine as I dare show; those sweet, honest eyes will never be less trustful than now—unless I gave them cause to doubt me. Her friendship, like her character, is steadfast as a rock.
But oh! if she loved me! If I were one of those poor clerks at a hundred a-year; if we had only meat, raiment, and a roof to cover us, and she loved me! If I were, as I might have been, a young doctor, toiling day and night, with barely time for food and sleep; but with a home to come to, and her to love me! If we sat in this room, poor and mean as it is, with this scanty supper between us, asking a blessing upon it, while, her hand in mine and her lips on my forehead, told me, “Max, I love you!”