["I MUST GO TO FETCH HER HOME."]
When Philip Ray left Crawford's House that night he felt anything at all but the elation supposed to be proper in the accepted suitor of a beautiful girl. He had, indeed, a great many troubles in his mind, and as he walked home to his lonely lodgings in Camberwell he was nearly a miserable man. It would not be true to say he was out and out miserable, but he was perilously close to it.
In the first place, he had to leave Hetty behind him, a thing almost beyond endurance. Then, when removed from the intoxicating influence of her presence and undistracted by the magic of her beauty, he began to turn his eyes inward upon himself, and investigate his own unworthiness with brutal candour--nay, with gross injustice.
What on earth was he that a faultless, an exquisite creature like Hetty should give herself to him? That was a question he asked himself over and over again, without being able to find any reason whatever for her sacrifice. More than once he felt inclined to go back, make a clean breast of it by telling her that as a friend he would recommend her to have nothing whatever to do with himself. The words of love and devotion she had spoken to him on the island were a source of intense pain to him. A nice kind of fellow he was indeed for her to say she would follow round all the world! He was obtaining love under false pretences, that's what he was doing. And such love! and from such a perfect creature! It was simply a monstrous fraud! There was something underhand and dishonourable about it; for if she had only known him for what he was, she would flee out of the very parish away from him. He must have been mad to ask her to marry him.
It had all come on him suddenly. When he suggested that she should go to the island with him on the excuse of seeing how the boy got on, he had no intention of proposing to her; and, nevertheless, no sooner had he set foot on the Ait than he must retain her hand and ask her to give it to him for ever! Could he have meant the whole thing as a joke, or was the Master of all Evil at the bottom of it?
But the full turpitude of his act did not appear until he considered ways and means. At present his salary was barely enough to keep himself in the strictest economy. He could not, after paying for food, lodgings, and clothes all on the humblest scale, save five pounds a year. It is true he had a yearly increase of salary, and by-and-by would have the chance of promotion. But at the most favourable estimate he could not hope to have an income on which he might prudently marry sooner than between twenty and thirty years. Say, in twenty-five years, when his salary would be sufficient, he would be fifty-two and she forty-five! If he had any hair left on his head then it would be snow-white, and he would be sure to have rheumatism and most likely a touch of asthma as well. He would have confirmed bachelor habits and exacting notions about his food and an abject horror of the east wind. He would tell old stories as new, and laugh at them, and the younger men in the office would laugh at him for laughing at these old tales, and mimic him behind his back, and call him an old fossil and other endearing names, indicative of pity in them and senility in him! What a poor idiot he had been to speak to the girl!
It was true the Layards were not very well off themselves now; but they had once been rich, and naturally Hetty ought to be raised by marriage far up above their present position. She was a lady and a beauty, and the most enchanting girl that ever the sun shone on, and ought to wear a coronet if such things went by charm; and here was he, a pauper junior clerk in one of the most miserably-paid branches of the Civil Service, coolly asking her to be his wife! His conduct had been criminal, nothing short of it.
What on earth would Frank say when he told him of it? If Frank was an honourable man he would go over to Layard, and advise the brother to forbid the suitor his house.
Suitor, indeed! Pretty suitor he was to go wooing such a girl as Hetty!
But then Hetty had told him she loved him and would follow him to the ends of the earth, and he'd just like to hear any man in his presence say Hetty wasn't to do what she pleased, even if her pleasure took such a preposterous form as love for him. Now that he came to think of it in that way, if it pleased Hetty to love him she should love him, in spite of all the Franks and all the brothers in Christendom; for wasn't Hetty's happiness and pleasure dearer to him than the welfare of empires? And if he hadn't quite a hundred a year, he could make it more by coaching fellows for the Civil Service and in a thousand other ways.