“I am not aware that I have objected to your talk,” said Mr Crediton, restraining his passion.
“Not in words,” said Kate, now fairly up in arms; “but it is not just, papa. It makes John unhappy and it makes me unhappy. He has a right to have me to himself when he comes. You cannot forget that we are engaged. I never said a word when you insisted on once a-week, though it was a disappointment; but you know he ought not to be cheated now.”
All this time John had been moving about at the further end of the room, at once angry to the verge of violence, and discouraged to the lowest pitch. He had cleared his throat and tried to speak a dozen times already. Now he came forward, painfully restraining himself. “I ought to speak,” he said; “but I dare not trust myself to say anything. Mr Crediton cannot expect me to give up willingly the only consolation I have.”
“It is time enough to speak of giving up when any one demands a sacrifice,” said Mr Crediton, taking upon him suddenly that superiority of perfect calm with which a middle-aged man finds it so often possible to confute an impatient boy. “I am sorry that my innocent remarks should have irritated you both. You must school me, Kate,” he added, with a forced smile, “what I am to do and say.”
And then he went to his room, with a sense that he had won the victory. And certainly, if a victory is won every time the other side is discomfited, such was the case at this moment. John did not say anything—did not even come to be comforted, but kept walking up and down at the other end of the room. It was Kate who had to go to him, to steal her hand within his arm, to coax him back to his usual composure. And it was a process not very easy to be performed. She moved him quickly enough to tender demonstrations over herself, which indeed she had no objection to, but John was chilled and discouraged and cast down to the very depths.
“He was only cross,” said Kate; “when he is cross I never pay any attention. Something has gone wrong in business, or that sort of thing. John, dear, say you don’t mind. It is not me that am making myself disagreeable: it is only papa.”
But it was hard to get John to respond. Notwithstanding that Mr Crediton had retired and left the field open, and that Kate did all in her power to detain him, the young man left her earlier than usual, and with a sufficiently heavy heart. Kate’s father was seeking a quarrel—endeavouring to show him the falseness of his position, and make it plain how obnoxious he was. John walked all the long way home to his little lodgings, which were at the other end of the town, contemplating the dim Sunday streets, all so dark, with gleams of lamplight and dim reflections from the wet pavement—for in the mean time rain had fallen. And this was all he had for all he had sacrificed. He did not reckon Kate herself in the self-discussion. She was worth everything a man could do; but to be thus chained and bound, within sight, yet shut out from her—to be made the butt of another man’s jealous resentment—to have a seeming privilege, which was made into a kind of torture—and to have given his life for this;—what could he say even to himself? He sat down in his hard arm-chair and gazed into the flame of his two candles, and felt himself unable to do anything but brood over what had happened. He could not read nor turn his mind from the covert insult, the unwilling consent. And what was to come of it? John covered his face with his hands when he came to that part of the subject. There was nothing to look forward to—nothing but darkness. It was natural that she, a spoiled child of fortune, should smile and trust in something turning up; as for John, he saw nothing that could turn up; and in all the world there seemed to him no single creature with less hope of moulding his future according to his wishes than himself.
CHAPTER XVI.
This moment of dismay, however, passed over, as the moments of delight did, without bringing about any absolute revolution in John’s life. The next day Mr Crediton took occasion to be more than ordinarily civil, repenting of his bad humour, and Kate stopped short before his window as she rode by to wave her hand to him. A man cannot build the comfort of his life permanently on such trifles; but there is a moment when the wave of a girl’s hand as she passes is enough to strengthen and exhilarate his heart. So the crisis blew over as the others had done, and the routine went on. John set his teeth, and confronted his position with all its difficulties, making a desperate effort. A woman might bear such a trial, and live through it; but it is hard upon a man, when he is no longer a boy, to be called upon to give up everything, to change the entire current of his occupations, and make an unquestionable descent in the social scale, for love, without even giving him its natural compensations. An imprudent marriage is a different thing, for then the consequences are inevitable when once the step has been taken, and have to be borne, will he nill he. But to make love his all—the sole object and meaning of his life—there was in this a certain humiliation which by turns overwhelmed John’s fortitude and courage. It was indeed almost a relief to him, and helped him to bear his burden more steadily when the annual removal of the family to Fernwood took place, and Kate vanished from before his eyes. She cried when she parted with him that last Sunday, and John felt a serrement du cœur which almost choked him; but still, at the same time, when it was over and she was gone, life on the whole became easier. He made an effort to interest himself in his brother clerks, and enter into their life; but what was a humiliation to John was to them such a badge of superiority that he could make but little of that. He was Mr Crediton’s future son-in-law, probably their own future employer, in the eyes of the young men around him, who accepted his advances with a deference and half-concealed pride which threw him back again upon himself. He had no equals, no companions. To be sure there were plenty of people in Camelford who would have been glad to receive Dr Mitford’s son, but he had no desire for the ordinary kind of society. And it is not to be described with what pleasure he saw Fred Huntley, a man whom he had never cared for heretofore, push open the swinging door of the bank, and peer round the place with short-sighted eyes. “Mr Mitford, if you please,” Fred said, perhaps rather superciliously, to the clerk who was John’s superior, expecting, it was clear, to be ushered into some secret retirement where the principals of the bank might be. When John rose from his desk, Huntley gazed at him with unfeigned astonishment. “What! you here!” he said; and opened his eyes still wider when John turned round and explained to Mr Whichelo that he was going out, and why. “You don’t mean to say they stick you at a desk like that, among all those fellows?” Fred said, as they left the bank together; which exclamation of wonder revived the original impatience which use and wont by this time had calmed down.
“Exactly like the other fellows,” said John; “and quite right too, or why should I be here?”