Samuel Edward Wilkinson duly left school, and became, of his own express will, an apprentice to a highly respectable grocer who enlarged upon his respectability by styling himself a tea merchant and an Italian warehouseman. The people who visited the shop (which was situate in a principal street in an important sea-port town) were invariably impressed by the powder-blueness of the sign and by the red-goldness of the letters which stood out so plainly from the powder-blue. It had a cachet of its own, and the proprietor had two daughters. But Samuel Edward was then scarcely over fourteen years of age, and as his parents and the proprietor were of a distinctly Dissenting nature, his time was passed much more in stealing sugar-candy out of newly-opened boxes, and in attending prayer-meetings at the nearest chapel, than in following the good example of London 'prentices of the other centuries. In fact, by the time Samuel Edward Wilkinson was nineteen years of age, he was not merely a money-grubber, but that worst of all things—a tradesman who looks upon God Almighty and the Bible as useful weights to put under an illegal scale. And as Samuel Edward gained more of his experience in the knowledge of his fellow make-weighters, the more he began to believe less in his fellow-men—with the natural result that certain women who were not his fellows suffered.
As he grew up, Samuel Edward, naturally, had to live somewhere else. His master had no room in his house for apprentices who had approached to maturity. But, like all masters of that early-Victorian age, he knew where accommodation in a highly Christian family was to be had, and Samuel Edward found himself en famille with a middle-aged dressmaker and a pretty child whose sweet sixteenity was much more appealing than the maturer charms of his master's daughters. Samuel Edward was not without good looks, and the child fell in love with him, and remained so for longer years than she had counted upon. But Samuel Edward was as philandering in love as he was pertinacious in business, and the idea of marriage was not within his immediate purview.
"At what age do you think, a man ought to marry, Poskitt?" he said to me during one of his periodical visits to the old village, he being then about two-and-twenty.
"When he feels inclined, and means it," said I.
"Of course, Poskitt, a man should never marry unless he marries money," he continued. "For a young man in my position, now, what would you say the young woman ought to be able to bring?"
I had sufficient common sense even at that age to make no reply to this question. I let him go on, silent under his sublime selfishness.
"Don't you think, Poskitt, that it's only right that when a man marries a woman he should expect her to make a certain amount of compensation?" he said. "It's a very serious thing, is marriage, you know, Poskitt. Anybody with my ambition—which is to be a man and not a mouse, or, in other words, to pay twenty shillings in the pound, and keep myself out of the workhouse—has to look forward a good deal. Now there's a young lady that I know of—where I lodge, in fact—that's very sweet on me, but I don't think her mother could give her more than a couple of hundred, and, of course, that's next to nothing. You see, Poskitt, I want to have a business of my own, and you can't get a business without capital. And money's very hard to make, Poskitt. I think—I really think—I shall put off the idea of getting married."
"That's the very wisest thing you can do," I said. "But you'd better tell the young lady so."
"Well, you see, Poskitt," he answered, stroking his chin, "the fact is—there are two young ladies. The other one is—my cousin Keziah. Now, of course, I know Keziah will have money when her father dies, but then I don't know when he will die. If I could tell exactly when he'll die, and how much Keziah will have, I should make up my mind—as it is, I think I shall have to wait. After all, it really doesn't make such a great deal of difference—one woman is about as good as another so far as marriage is concerned, Poskitt, isn't she? The money's the main thing."
"Why don't you go and find a rich heiress, then?" I asked.