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

by William Clark Russell

“I shouldn’t mind anything else but a banker’s clerk!” I grumbled. “Roget’s a banker’s clerk, and what a snob he is!”

“Roget’s a Frenchman. Don’t confound monkeys with men. Always be lordly in your estimates of what you are about. I always was. Nothing gave me greater delight than to be magnificent in trifles. I have read of a composer who invariably sat down to write in full court dress, with fine lace ruffles on, and diamond rings. That was a great man. Let your personal characteristics, if you have any, overtop and overwhelm every consideration that seems in anywise mercenary or humble. Sink the Thing in the Man! Beau Brummel behind a counter showing scarves to gentlemen or silks to ladies, would make haberdasherising a gorgeous calling, fit for monarchs to pursue. If I were a banker’s clerk, the whole profession should feel themselves dignified by the accession of a man in whose rich and sumptuous individuality all paltry conditions of his employment should be merged, sunk, and annihilated!”

Saying which, he gave me a magnificent nod, and looked at himself in the glass.

“Happen what will,” said I, “I’ll live in lodgings. I suppose I shall be fearfully hardworked: but what time I have to myself, I mean to be free in. For anything I can tell, my aunt may hate the smell of tobacco. Perhaps uncle Tom is a one-pipe man, who blows his cloud up the kitchen-chimney. A pleasant look-out for a fellow like me, to find himself in a house, where, after tea, the wife pulls out ‘Emma,’ or ‘Cecilia,’ and reads aloud, whilst the husband snorts in an arm-chair, and the daughter works at an altar cloth! Bed at half-past nine—a knock at your door at a quarter to ten, with a shrill request to put your light out, as master’s afraid of fire. No boiled mutton and near relations for me! I’d rather be a missionary than endure that sort of thing.”

“By all means live in lodgings,” said my father, who, I could see, reflected with horror upon the picture I had drawn. “A hundred and fifty a year ought to get you some good wine and cigars, and I don’t see what the deuce is to upset you.”

“Well, I can but try banking, and see how I like it,” said I, dolefully, accommodating my prejudices after the established fashion.

“Oh, you’ll like it,” answered my father. “You’re not going among strangers: and Tom is too much my brother, I hope, not to know what is due to relations and gentlemen.”

Here Celestine brought in the coffee and omelettes, and we sat down to breakfast.

Of course you guess that I did as my father bade me, and accepted my uncle’s offer with an abundance of artificial gratitude. Really grateful I could not be. I was content to remain as I was, as I have told you, and heartily wished my uncle hanged for his kindness. Nor was I at all well-pleased to be reminded of my prospective necessities. What business had Harris to remind my father to tell me that, when he died, I should be a beggar? This was a most objectionable truth: a bold, naked, confounded fact, which, when I was made to look at it, I could not blink; which rendered work necessary; and which enforced my acceptance of uncle Tom’s offer. “Ah, my Pauline!” I remember thinking that evening as I wandered companionless around the stand on which the band of the Hundred Guards were playing, as only it can play, “Ah, my Pauline, would that I had but thy papa’s income, which, as he once assured me in a moment of supreme confidence, amounted to two thousand francs! Small are my wants and thine! What luxuries and bliss unspeakable were ours on two thousand francs of rent! Is not thine a smile that would make soupe maigre—accursed beverage!—more exquisite to the palate than turtle-soup? Hast thou not eyes whose sweet fires would give to the thinnest ordinaire the ruby radiance and the Paradisaical aroma of Burgundy’s vintage?” Was love a reason for my reluctance to leave Longueville? I almost forget. Seldom is the memory tenacious of early indiscretions, or, as a Scotchman said to me once, with intense gravity, “Sir, we forget what we canna remember.” I contrast those sighs I have just recorded with the emotions with which I surveyed Pauline last summer. Que voulez vous? She keeps a hotel. Fat? was she fat? Mr. Banting might have been cut out of her, and still left her a stout woman. I did not know her. Fat annihilates idealism, and I might as well have hunted for a vision of loveliness in the lump of marble which the sculptor has not yet struck, as have sought for the Pauline of my youth, the Pauline of my moonlight boating trips, the Pauline of the black eyes and little waist, in the Dutch and shaking rotundity that filled me, as I gazed, with mingled emotions of alarm and amazement. She knew me, and gasped out her name and—pouff! let me blow these recollections away. I have a story to tell of which Pauline is not the heroine.

So figure to yourself that I have bidden my father and a group of friends, in deer-stalking hats and tight pantaloons, good-bye, and that I am standing near the man at the wheel, who is steering the “King of the French” out through the piers, and that I continue waving my handkerchief to everybody who will look, until the town sinks behind the cliffs, and the piers melt into thin lines. Then I gaze ahead, and see nothing but a broad expanse of blue leaping water, through which the steamer cuts her way, straight for a cloud, a vague white cloud upon the horizon, which a Frenchman near me tells Madame, his wife, is “Le cliffs to Shak-ess-pear, comedian Angleesh.”