“Do you know who A. Barton is, my dear?”
“Of course; it is old Mr. Barton, Tom’s father. Why, mother, I have read this a hundred times before. It is printed on my pap spoon, and on all the new-fashioned silver we have in the house. But what of that?”
“Simply this, Miss Jane Elliot, I shall never give my consent for you to receive as a lover the son of a man who makes our spoons, and cleans our watches, and who, in short, is only a mechanic. Good night.”
Jane was too much surprised and grieved to say any thing, and she went to her room, her heart cruelly divided between the duty she owed to her mother, and the love that she had so long cherished for her betrothed.
I ought not to have written that last word. I am not a good novelist, or I would have been brought to my confessions at a slower rate. However, it is a fact. Theirs was the rare case, in which neither the language, nor the feelings of childhood had ever changed. They had vowed themselves to each other at least a hundred times. More and more solemn the pledge had grown at every repetition; and when Tom came from college a few weeks before, it had been cemented with tears.
Ah! she was a noble girl, that Jane! Why did not fate give me a chance at her, or rather, why did not I, instead of flirting with all the pretty faces that I saw, why did not I love her, and cherish her, as Tom did from the first.
However, that is nothing to any body but myself. Jane rose next morning unrefreshed from her sleepless couch, and the first thing she did was to write the following note:
“Dear Tom,—My mother is angry with me for the intimacy to which I have admitted you, and has directed me to break it off. So you must not come here so often. Nothing in my life has grieved me more than this, but I am sixteen only, and my mother’s will is mine. Wont you travel? I prefer not seeing you at all, than not to see you as of old. But be assured, wherever you go, and whatever may be your fortune, one heart will be with you, that of yours ever,
Jane Elliot.”
Now was not she a dear girl. She wept when she wrote it, and she wept when she sent it, and she had not dried her tears when little Cæsar brought back this answer: