A Poor Gentleman

by Mrs. Oliphant

After this came the strangest episode that could occur in a young man’s life. He was afloat on London, on that sea of pleasure and misery, amid all the perils and temptations that made the hearts of those who loved him sink within them. Even little Mab, with her little stock of worldly knowledge, who thought he would return home when he “tired,” or when his money was done, could form no other idea of the prodigal than that he was living in pleasure. He was amusing himself, Rochford thought, not without a half sympathy in the break-out of the home boy. As for his father and mother, unutterable terrors were in their minds, fears of they knew not what—of vice and depravity, evil associates, evil habits, the things that kill both body and soul. But Walter’s present life was a life more tedious than all the monotony of home. It had its bright moments, when he was with Emmy, who sometimes permitted him to take her to the play, sometimes to walk with her through the bright-lighted streets, sometimes even on Saturday afternoons or Sunday to take her to the country. It was only on these days that he saw her in daylight at all. She said, laughingly, that her occupation forbade it at other times, but she would not tell him what that occupation was. When they went to Richmond or Greenwich, or to a little box in one or other of the theaters, where they could sit half hidden by the curtains, and carry on their own little drama, which was more interesting than anything on the stage, Walter was in a strange elysium, in which the atmosphere was charged with painful elements, yet was more sweet than anything else in life. He made a hundred discoveries in her, sometimes sweet, sometimes—different. It made no alteration in his sentiment when they happened to be discoveries that wounded—sometimes even that shocked him. He was hurt, his sensitive nature felt the shock as if it had been a wound; but it did not affect his love. That love even changed a little—it became protecting, forgiving, sometimes remonstrating; he longed that she should be his, that he might put all that right, mold her to a more exquisite model, smooth away the points that jarred. Already he had begun to hint this and that to her, to persuade her to one little alteration and another. To speak more softly—she had spoken softly enough at Crockford’s, it was only the spirit of the street that had got into her blood—to move more gently, to know that some of the things she said were dreadful things—things that should not come from such lips. He had not perceived any of these things while she was at Crockford’s; he perceived them now, but they did not affect his love, they only penetrated that golden web with threads of shadow, with lines of pain, and smote his heart with keen arrows of anguish and regret—regret not that he had given his life and love to her, but only that she was less perfect than he had thought—that, instead of looking up to her always, and shaping his harsher being (as he had thought) upon her sweetness, it must be his first to shape and pare these excrescences away.

But, besides these glimpses of a paradise which had many features of purgatory, Walter had nothing at all to counterbalance the havoc he was making in his existence. He did not know what to do with himself in London. He rose late, having no occupation for the morning; he wandered about the streets; he eat the late breakfast and dinner, which were now all the meals he had time for, spinning out these repasts as long as possible. It was a wonder that he never met his father, who was straying about the streets in search of him; but Walter’s streets were not those which his father frequented. He acquired, or rather both acquired, a great knowledge of town in these perambulations, but not of the same kind. And then he would go to his occupation, the only tangible thing in his life, the meeting with Emmy. She was sadly shifty and uncertain even in these scraps of her time, which were all she would or could give him. She was not sure that she wanted to marry him at all. She was quite sure that she would only be married by special license at four in the afternoon, which was all the fashion now. But no; he was not to take that oath and make himself unhappy about her. He should not be obliged to swear. She would be married by bans—that was the fashion too. She knew all about what had to be done—everything that was necessary—but she would not tell him. She laughed and eluded him as before. Then she said, Why should they marry? they were very well as they were. “You are very good to me at present,” she said; “you think I must have a box whenever we go to the theater, and a bouquet, and everything that is nice; but after we are married, you will not be so kind.”

When Walter protested that neither marriage nor anything else could diminish his devotion, she shook her head, and said that they would not be able to afford it.

“You can’t have so much as five hundred a year,” she said; “most likely not more than four—and what would that be in London?”

“But we need not live in London,” he said; “my father would give us the Hook.”

Emmy threw up her arms with a scream.

“Should you like to murder me?” she cried.

It hurt the poor boy that she should have this opinion of his home—the home in which he had been born; and he listened with deep depression to the satirical description of it she began to make.

“We ought to be ducks to live in the damp like that. I’ve never been used to dabble in the water, and it would be my death—I know it would be my death. But we might let it, you know, and that would give us a little more money, say two hundred a year more—do you think it would bring two hundred a year?”

“Don’t talk of such things!” cried the young man; “it is not for you to be troubled about that.”