Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart,
’Tis woman’s whole existence; man may range
The Court, camp, Church, the vessel and the mart,
Sword, gown, gain, glory, offer in exchange
Pride, fame, ambition to fill up his heart.
And the Honourable Bob, with his breezy self-assertion, had brought this home to him and, with a puff of everyday life, had blown the fantasy away.
He was still under this impression when he reached Queen’s Square, once the pride of Bristol, and still, in 1831, a place handsome and well inhabited. Uniformly and substantially built, on a site surrounded on three sides by deep water, it lay, indeed, rather over-near the quays, of which, and of the basins, it enjoyed a view through several openings. But in the reign of William IV. merchants were less averse from living beside their work than they are now. The master’s eye was still in repute, and though many of the richest citizens had migrated to Clifton, and the neighbouring Assembly Rooms in Prince’s Street had been turned into a theatre, the spacious square, with its wide lawn, its lofty and umbrageous elms, its colony of rooks, and, last of all, its fine statue of the Glorious and Immortal Memory, was still the abode of many respectable people. In one corner stood the Mansion House; a little further along the same side the Custom House; and a third public department, the Excise, also had offices here.
The Cathedral and the Bishop’s Palace, on College Green, stood, as the crow flies, scarce a bow-shot from the Square; on which they looked down from the westward, as the heights of Redcliffe looked down on it from the east. But marsh as well as water divided the Square from these respectable neighbours; nor, it must be owned, was this the only drawback. The centre of the city’s life, but isolated on three sides by water, the Square was as easily reached from the worse as from the better quarters, and owing to the proximity of the Welsh Back, a coasting quay frequented by the roughest class, it was liable in times of excitement to abrupt and boisterous inroads.
Vaughan entered the Square by Queen Charlotte Street, and had traversed one half of its width when his nonchalance failed him. Under the elms, in the corner which he was approaching, were a dozen children. They were at play, and overlooking them from a bench, with their backs to him, sat two young persons, the one in that mid-stage between childhood and womanhood when the eyes are at their sharpest and the waist at its thickest, the other, Mary Smith.
The colour rose to his brow, and to his surprise he found that he was not indifferent. Nor was the discovery that the back of her head and an inch of the nape of her neck had this effect upon him the worst. He had to ask himself what, if he was not indifferent, he was doing there, sneaking on the skirts of a ladies’ school. What were his intentions, and what his aim? For to healthy minds there is something distasteful in the notion of an intrigue connected, ever so remotely, with a girls’ school. Nor are conquests gained on that scene laurels of which even a Lothario is over-proud. If Flixton saw him, or some others of the gallant Fourteenth!