’Twould shake the throne of Grief and banish Wrong.
THE LOVES OF AN APOTHECARY.
As John Godwin entered Christ’s Hospital so he left it, with no other friends than an uncle, who was a Kentish miller, and an understanding which, if it was impermeable to much learning, retained and fostered whatever at any time it received. A stolid, quiet, precocious boy, with a generous and simple heart, in which strong self-will was seated at depths seldom disturbed, with an original imagination, of which he was always unconscious, with a new suit of clothes, a tall hat, and six shillings in a clothes-box, he was articled to an apothecary. This suit being worn out, another supplied its place; when this in its turn got threadbare, the process of renewal, not without ceremony, was repeated; and, with the best intentions to the contrary, that is as much as the most partial biographer could write of John Godwin’s life for some years. It is true that, in like manner, new notions and ideas, what may be called the provisional phases of manhood, were rapidly worn out and replaced; for every year between fifteen and twenty is itself a distinct era. It is also true, by the bye, that at seventeen he fell in love, desperately and sincerely, with a lady thirteen years his senior, whose great recommendation consisted not so much in an imposing, handsome person as in a baby.
This lady, neither married nor a widow, was somehow connected with the family of his master, and came often to the little parlor behind the shop, whence John, peeping over the muslin curtain, used to throw bashful glances on her as she sat silent and abstracted by the fire-side—silent, and with much sorrow in her great brown eyes. Indeed, she lived and moved in an atmosphere of sorrow; it seemed to encompass her in palpable clouds, so that one even felt her presence at the door before she entered in. A tearless Niobe, deserted and betrayed—a victim, so the little bird said, of a too intense devotion for a student in medicine—John wept for her, pitied her, loved her. When at church, it was the story of the Magdalen, that beautiful story, which kept his eyes on the Book all service-time. Putting the shutters up at night, he took long solitary walks, that, alone with Nature in suburban squares, he might dwell upon his Magdalen; or hastily retiring to bed, there, on the extreme verge of the bedstead, his arms extended into vacancy and night, he would send forth his imagination to feed like a ghoul on the quivering carcases of Susan’s joys. “Now,” he would exclaim, and strike his head emphatically upon the pillow—“Now,” in her sleeping apartment, at 17 Jemima street, Pentonville, she is tossing wildly on her bed, tearful, passionate, delirious, while Grief wrestles with Sleep!—“Now!” And looking through darkness and the intricacy of streets, he contemplated this picture of 17 Jemima street, until it faded into another, in which, having succeeded in reviving the confidence of Susan in the love and honor of man, he was represented as taking unto himself that crushed flower, fostering it into renewed radiance and fragrance, more lasting and more grateful, if more subdued.
John never told his love, for pecuniary reasons. Indeed, it lasted but six weeks, though, considering the instability of sentiment at seventeen, even that period was an age for such fervor to endure. As the lady’s melancholy, however, began visibly to subside, John’s fervor, subsided also; and collapsed altogether when, at the expiration of three months or so, she went on a pleasure excursion to Brighton with another student of medicine, and remained there with a distant and hitherto unknown relation.
The young apothecary soon learned to laugh supremely at this piece of extravagance, palliating his shame by repeating that, to the young, love and folly are constant companions; that a heart like his must always have some object of adoration, whether foolish or otherwise. His own experience entirely warranted the dictum at any rate; for he had had a sweetheart as soon as he was consummately breeched—a sweetheart who almost broke his heart by dividing an orange in his presence with a little boy who had the advantage over him in wearing large frilled collars. Again, in tenderest boyhood, he became possessed with an intense affection for the very tall daughter of a police-sergeant; but she despised him for his stockings. Rising thereat in indignant pride, he resolved at once to make himself renowned, that when Fame should so bruit his merits in the general ear that even the daughter of the policeman should hear the blast, she might learn painfully, and, alas! too late, that genius is not to be judged by its stockings. In pursuit of this end, he forthwith indited some affecting “Lines to E——n,” which were declined with thanks by the editor of the “Gentleman’s Magazine,” mainly in consequence of their being inscribed on paper with an ornamental border, and embellished with original designs, curiously colored. This failure disgusted him with the Muses, especially as he himself half suspected a lack of the poetical leaven. So he determined to turn the current of his ambition into channels better suited to it; and thus, begun out of desire to assuage the wounds his pride had received through the medium of his stockings, and continued afterward for its own sake and by natural bias, he managed to pursue the science of chemistry to very great lengths.
Boyhood, however, with all the follies and crudities of the outer boy, and much of the keen feeling, the trust, the ever misconstrued delicacies of the inner, has now gone by with the young apothecary. He puts all his youth behind him to-day, and advances into steady manhood; for to-morrow he is to be married. That fact fills his shop, and every nook of every chamber thereto pertaining; but particularly in the kitchen, where the fat fingers of the little maid are busy with the promising skeleton of a new cap and many yards of white and blue ribbon, and in the shop parlor, where John sits communing with his soul, the circumambient air is prophetic of it. This shop, it should be said, expensively furnished with such means as his careful mother beguiled her years of widowhood in accumulating for some such purpose, John had entered upon only a few months since. His customers, hitherto, were discouragingly few, perhaps in consequence of his having chosen Doctors’ Commons as the probable Tom Tidler’s ground of his future fortunes; not eligible ground for an apothecary. So he resolved on getting married. He had observed, he said, that “things frequently took a turn” upon such events; and this was the reason he assigned to himself for taking the step at this time. But there were many others.
John sits communing with his soul. It had surprised him, it had struck him more than once with a kind of superstitious suspicion, that even up to the very eve of his marriage some evil or perhaps good influence—he thought about it, but still doubted—seemed always to withdraw his mind from the subject. But bidding his boy—who, lost under a desk, his hands buried anxiously in his hair, had forgotten even the dignity due to his new livery in the perusal of a novel—bidding his boy attend carefully to the shop, and calling his handmaid from below to light the lamp and trim the fire, he now sat down to “have a good serious think.”
To think, and think hard on all things, was common to the bridegroom; and, seated in his easy chair, all quiet, he began to inquire within himself—how long it would be before the last button of his boy’s jacket would be gambled away with a leaden “nicker!” “Good heavens!” he exclaimed, suddenly arresting the panorama, alarmed at the puerility of the thing at such a moment; and, rising, he extinguished the light, drew his chair closer to the fire again, to try if the dusk would not soothe him to soberness. Half an hour later, when the buttoned Mercury emerged from beneath the shadow of the desk, breathing hard and looking stealthily into all dark corners where any cloaked bravo, such as he had just parted company with, might possibly be lurking, at length, reassured, peered through the window to discover what the governor was about, he found the governor thoughtfully posed indeed. His tall figure, clad in sad-colored raiment, disposed carelessly in the cushioned chair, his countenance, handsome but rough-cast, bent full upon the ruddy firelight, while he lazily balanced the burnished poker on his forefinger, he looked a very real if not a very conventional image of abstraction.