One day he met Mabelle; she was walking to church with her fat, honest old mother, who preferred a man of saucepans with money far before one of irreproachable shirt cuffs and empty pockets.
She smiled at him from her brown, beautifully lashed eyes, a kind of for-goodness-sake-try-to-make-the-best-of-it-and-don’t-look-so-tragic smile, but he interpreted it as a sign of softening. When he got home he sent her the poem,—if anything in the wide world could touch her beautiful, stony heart he thought that would.
He entrusted it to the common post, and waited with an undisciplined heart for the answer.
[156]
]It came on a Monday morning. Poppet took it from the postman and carried it up to him, but she was too busy with a scheme of Bunty’s to notice how white he turned, and how his hand trembled.
It was painfully short and to the point:—
“What’s the use of writing poetery to me when all’s up and done with? I showed it to Ma and Pa and some one else, and they thort it very fine; but said you oughtent to write it as some one else writes poetery for me now. I think it’s very nice of course and I’ll keep it this time but don’t send any more.
“Your friend only and nothing more,
“Miss Jones (not Mabelle).
“P.S.—I suppose I may as well tell you as I’m engaged to be married to Mr. Wilkes.”
That was Pip’s death-blow, and, if a paradox may be allowed, from that minute he began to live again.
The thought that his cherished poem had been submitted to the critical gaze of a man who sold frying pans and wrote “poetery” himself, stung him to madness. He sat down and attacked his hydrostatics with savage frenzy to prevent himself doing anything desperate.