‘Oh Tom!’ Janet cried. She was too much excited by her own affairs to turn in a moment with this new evolution to his—but that panting cry bore any meaning according to the hearer’s apprehension, and he was too deep in his own thoughts to need more.
‘Yes,’ said Tom, ‘it’s all over with me. Just come of age and lots of money to spend, and all the world before me, as you might say—but I’ll never have the heart to make any stand again. To think that all I’ve got, and might have done so much with, is to go to a woman that never had sixpence in her life and knows no more than a dog how to behave herself! As for hurting her, it wouldn’t have hurt her, not a bit—and if she’d had the chance she would have done just as bad by me. Law,’ cried Tom, with bitter contempt, ‘what’s the good of law when it can’t protect a fellow before he comes to his full senses! To think I should have tied such a burden on my back, and done for myself for ever before I came of age. It’s horrible,’ he cried with the earnestness of conviction; ‘it’s damnable—that’s what it is.’
‘Oh Tom, perhaps it will not be so bad,’ said Janet, putting her hand within his to show her sympathy. She was very uncertain as to what it was that caused this despair, and she had been vaguely impressed with the fact that this time what Tom had done was something terrible; but neither her own trouble nor any doubt about his conduct (which was so seldom blameless) could quench the sympathy with which she responded to his appeal.
‘Oh, yes, it will be quite as bad and worse—and I’m a ruined man,’ cried Tom. ‘Done for! although it was only last week,’ he said with a piteous quiver of the lip which a half-grown moustache nearly shaded, ‘that I came of age.’
Janet felt the pathos of this appeal go to the bottom of her heart. She did not know what to say to comfort him, and she could not keep her own eyes from straying after Charlie, who after all had been very kind, who had gone away at her prayer like the most complete of gentlemen. She was very thankful to be released, yet her eyes followed him with something like pride in his docility, and in the vigour and strength and magnanimity of her first lover. Though she was much afraid of him, Janet forgave him kindly as soon as he was gone. The tears came into her eyes for Tom’s distress, while yet, with a thought for the other, she watched him with a corner of her eye over Tom’s bowed head. He turned round and took off his hat to her before he disappeared under the low arch, and Janet, in politeness and regret, made the faintest little bow and gave him a last glance. This made her pause before she answered Tom.
‘It’s all Beau’s fault,’ said Tom, as if he had been talking of stolen apples. ‘She would never have been any wiser, nor mother either, if it hadn’t been for Beau with his confounded law. And I don’t believe it now,’ he said; ‘I won’t believe it. Think, Jan—to be married and done for, and no way of getting out of it, before you are twenty-one!’
‘But wasn’t it—your own doing, Tom?’
Then Tom got up and gave vent to a great moral aphorism. ‘There is nothing in this world your own doing,’ he said; ‘you’re put up to it, or you’re led into it, and one tells you one thing and another another. But when you’ve been and done it after what’s been told you, and every one has had a hand in it to lead you on, then they all turn round upon you, and you have to bear it by yourself. And everybody says it’s your own doing. And neither the law nor your friends will help you. And you’re just ruined and done for—before you ever had begun at all.’
‘Oh Tom,’ cried Janet, ‘come home—and perhaps it will not turn out so bad after all.’
‘It can’t turn out anything but bad—and I’ll just go and drown myself and be done with it all.’