She took pride in her furniture. Only married people of her class usually had as much, and certainly Maria had not. “After all,” she more than once muttered to herself, “I ’ave a comfortable house to come to, an’ perhaps Maria don’t ’ave a penny to-day.”
Yet she was not long comforted by this reflection. Maria had practically triumphed, and her success at the court-house might embolden her to attempt to capture Tom outright. Susan did not care much for Tom; in fact, she rather despised him. But times were hard in Kingston, and lovers were not easy to obtain; so if Maria should succeed. . . . “But that can’t be done,” she concluded; for what was Maria when compared with her?
Susan was not given to following out a train of thought for any length of time; she usually jumped from one subject to another as it came up in her mind. But the experience of that morning, and its unknown but dreaded consequences, caused her now to dwell lengthily upon the days before she became acquainted with Tom. Her past had not been a pleasant one. Her father was a carpenter, and when in good health he had earned a fair amount of money by working at his trade. But some sixteen years before he had been prostrated by a severe attack of rheumatism, and when he recovered he found that he had almost lost the use of his lower limbs. Then her brother went away to Nicaragua, and only wrote occasionally, sometimes sending a few dollars to his parents. After her father’s illness her mother had turned washerwoman, and what the old woman earned helped to keep the family from starvation. Her father did a few light jobs, when he could get them, but these did not bring in much. Susan herself, on leaving the Government elementary school when a little over fourteen years of age, had tried to find a situation; but there was hardly anything she could do at that age.
In those days she lived in a yard-room with the rest of the family. She could remember herself as often standing at the gate of the yard, her feet thrust into a pair of slippers, and looking with envy at those girls who could afford to wear shoes and go to all the Sunday-school picnics and treats. There were days when she went to bed without dinner, a fate by no means unknown to hundreds of other persons in her position. On other days she was glad if her dinner consisted of a piece of dry bread. The rent of the room her family occupied was always the great problem that faced them continually; for if it was not paid their few belongings might be levied upon, and the old people would have to go to the almshouse. Semi-starvation was better than that, so they not infrequently starved.
When she was nearly eighteen, what she called “a luck” befell her. She was in the habit of attending, every Wednesday evening, a little church near where she lived. There had been revival meetings in that church a short time before she had taken to going to the services, and nearly everybody in its immediate neighbourhood had been converted. Amongst these converts was a young fellow of nineteen, a clerk by occupation; and seeing Susan in the church once or twice, he was moved to attempt the saving of her soul. He only succeeded in losing his heart.
For some months he gave her five shillings a week out of the fifteen he earned; then he unfortunately lost his situation, and Susan’s father awoke to a sense of outraged morality. It was edifying to hear Mr. Proudleigh lecture that young man on the moral obliquity of endeavouring to “draw a youthful feminine away from religion.” There was no arguing with him, for very little argument is left in any youth who has lost his situation; so the young man quietly drifted out of Susan’s life.
For some time longer the family was compelled to exist on the mother’s earnings and on what Mr. Proudleigh’s son in Nicaragua occasionally sent home. It was then that Susan tried her hardest to obtain work of some kind. But it required influence to secure a position as a barmaid; the small shops had as many assistants as they required, and in any case usually employed young women fairer than she was; as for crochet-making, that had become so common that very few persons now cared to trim their clothes with crochet. She might have got a situation as nurse in one of the wealthier families of Kingston, but to domestic work she had a strong aversion. It was not, in her opinion, genteel. She did not want to be what she called “a common servant.” So she waited in idleness day after day, a prey to discontent, and wondering if her luck would ever turn.
It did turn when she was twenty years of age. She was standing at the gate of her yard one Sunday afternoon, very plainly dressed, but with her hair neatly combed and plaited. Tom was walking down the lane, with no object in particular, and seeing her all alone he thought he might as well try to make her acquaintance and have a little chat with her. As he was well dressed, from his polished yellow boots up to his new straw hat, Susan did not object to his inquiry after her health; and being thus encouraged he made further advances.
That afternoon he talked of trifling things for about a quarter of an hour. The following evening he again walked down the lane, and Susan was once more at the gate. On the subsequent night, when Tom met her by appointment, she asked him why he did not come inside, and on his accepting her invitation he was welcomed by her family with every mark of cordiality and respect. In fact, they all went out of the room and left him with Susan, so that the young couple’s conversation might not be interrupted in any way.
A week after that, she removed into the house which she now occupied. Thus she had realized, at a bound, one of the great ambitions of her life.