Jilted! Or, My Uncle's Scheme, Volume 1

by William Clark Russell

I almost forget how that day passed. I had a seat on a high stool near Mr. Curling’s desk, and I remember that from time to time he would turn to explain something in connexion with the business, which, he told me, was important to know. He went about his work diligently and steadily, and particularly amazed me by the extraordinary capacity he manifested of counting any amount of money in an incredibly short space of time. Threepenny and fourpenny-bits, half-sovereigns and half-crowns, shillings and two-shilling-pieces, discharged out of the queer old bags in which the customers brought their hoards, fled like lightning, under his nimble fingers, up into a corner where they arranged themselves in piles. Nor was his perception of a bad or doubtful coin less remarkable. Now and then he would stay his miraculous counting to examine a piece of money, give it a sharp ring, fling it aside, and proceed in his work like a machine.

“If I were to live a thousand years,” I thought, “and were I to devote twelve hours of the day to counting money, I should never be able to do what that fellow does.”

I expressed my surprise, and he asked me to try my hand on two pounds of silver. It took me five minutes to tell twenty pieces. “Pshaw!” said I, turning away, when he showed me that I made eighteen shillings represent a pound, “this is somebody else’s work, for it certainly isn’t mine.” And then I began to talk of the superiority of the French over the English money.

Mr. Spratling worked like an automaton. I thought his zeal contemptible, and wondered that any human being should be gifted with so little tact as not to know how to qualify the vulgarity of labour with an occasional dash of the gentility of indolence. But speaking of him when he had gone out at one o’clock to get his dinner, my opinion of the youth was greatly improved, by Mr. Curling telling me that he got eighty pounds a year, on which he supported his blind mother, who had no other resources but her child’s salary.

“By George!” I exclaimed, “he is a worthy young man; and if I have any influence with my uncle, I’ll get his salary raised to a hundred pounds.”

I don’t know how it came about, but I have a clear recollection of leaving the bank at four o’clock, in a much more subdued mood than I had entered it. I was under an engagement to my aunt to dine at Grove End, but I felt so tired, after my long and unaccustomed confinement to one room, that I begged my uncle to excuse me to her. Why was I subdued? Perhaps because I was tired. Does physical weariness take the conceit out of one? if so, here you have a reason for the change in me. I am willing to look a little deeper, and attribute it to a feeling of, perhaps, the only wholesome pride that had ever stirred me; the pride of having been honestly occupied.

I left Mr. Curling still busy with his accounts, but he had told me there was no need for me to stay. I walked home to my lodgings and dined off a chop and half a pint of sherry, and then putting a pipe in my mouth, strolled out in the direction of the green lanes.

I was not much of a moralist in those days, but my mood happening to be a pliant one, certain thoughts seized the opportunity to intrude themselves and beget sundry reflections. I asked myself if I was not carrying my notions of gentility a little too far; if I was not making a very grave blunder in conveying the impression that I considered myself too good and fine to engage in work in which hundreds of men, in every sense my equals, and in many senses my betters, were employed? I enquired of my common sense whether it were possible for a gentleman—I don’t say a real gentleman, for I am aware of only one kind—to lose caste by adopting any pursuit in which he could preserve his honour and possess his proper dignity securely? Was not an assumed ignorance of the essential, if commonplace, interests of life a very impertinent coxcombry? Should I not be asserting myself as a very despicable kind of fop if I professed to look with contempt on a vocation of which I had not pride enough to restrain me from pocketing the profits?

I don’t pretend to say that I answered these questions in a manner such as a severe moralist would approve. My self-conceit was too tenacious of life to be killed by a single blow, and my prejudices were of too old a growth to be tamed by a single wise reflection. I merely wish to exhibit myself as having been capable of sometimes thinking correctly, however long it may have taken me to bend my character into a conformity with my better thoughts.

I so thoroughly enjoyed the fresh air and the exquisite serenity of that May evening, that, though you may conceive I thought a good deal about Conny, I don’t remember once regretting that I had not gone to Grove End. It is good for man to be sometimes alone. I am pretty certain that my solitary walk was more beneficial to me than a long evening’s coquetting with my sweet cousin would have been. Besides, I felt it only right that I should not avail myself too persistently of my kind relations’ hospitality.