I had confidently reckoned upon receiving an answer to my letter. Had her father forbidden her to write? No; that was improbable. He certainly would not wish her to treat me with rudeness. I grew jealous, uneasy, angry. Suppose all the time she had been allowing me to make love to her, she was pledged to Curling, was corresponding with him, was meeting him! How detestable to be tricked! How odious to pour your soft adoration into the ears of a woman who is laughing in her sleeve at your nonsense, and thinking, at the very moment you consider yourself most eloquent, how much better the other fellow expresses the same sentiments!
Lovers can never be ridiculous in each other’s eyes, if both are in earnest. But if one is insincere, then the other is inevitably absurd. So two mad people explaining to each other, the one his claims to the English throne, the other his claims to the moon as a family estate, listen with gravity, embrace with sympathy, and part with mutual admiration. But a lunatic, talking his nonsense to a sane man, is pitied and despised.
Oh, who that has been in love hasn’t suffered? Where is he? I would walk ten miles on the hottest July day to behold him. I say, it is impossible to love and not to suffer. Thy goddess is a divinity hedged about with furze, and whatever be thy fortune with her, inevitably art thou bound to carry away scars and blisters and wounds. Nay, madam, I never said that these sufferings, these agonies, were confined to one sex. You take your share; you, too, have your lacerations, your sleepless nights, your heavy eyelids. There is a Jack for every Jill—a Jill for every Jack. But do your sufferings mitigate ours? Does Sylvia weeping over Alexis’ cruel marriage with Phyllis, comfort Phœbus, who blubbers over Delia’s engagement to Hylas? Oh, this is a vale of tears! let us silence recrimination—and weep, if not in each other’s arms, at least for one another.
Nobody knows—nobody ever will know—and nobody had better ask—how I suffered (intermittently) whilst I waited for the letter I never got. “She doesn’t care for me!” I would cry. “She is in love with Curling. She has forgotten my very name. Or worse, she remembers me only to divert that rascally cashier, whom she meets, God knows how and where, with demure travesties of my pretty whispers.” And then—my imagination being always briskest when I was saddest, resembling a cat, that is friskiest at night—up would spring a vision: Conny with her sweet, deep eyes, her shining tresses, her adorable little figure, made love to by Curling, of the frizzy hair and pigeon-pie-shaped bosom; watching him (faugh!) with the divinest meaning in those eyes, into whose depths I had so often gazed, and gazed, and gazed, and still found nothing but a vacuum of moist and lambent blue! Then, Eugenio, would I clench my hands, and grind my teeth; then would I consign Mr. Curling’s soul to Mephistopheles, and hold an Imaginary Conversation with the faithless one, superior in wit, nature, satire, and the received beauties, to anything ever written by Savage Landor; in which I would now wither her with sarcasms, and now revive her with splendid entreaties, now overwhelm her with contempt, and now restore her with the most luxuriant tenderness.
Did you never indulge in these mental strifes? Then you have never been in love. Who that has been in love has not morally wrestled with his goddess, as fanatically as ever Luther wrestled with the Devil? Don’t say you trusted her. Don’t outrage experience by pretending that you always had the most unbounded confidence in her. You know you hadn’t. You know when you left her for a week, that you thought, that day, of the party she was going; to next evening, of the men she would meet there, of the waltzes she would dance there, of the conservatory she would retire to. Again, when you were miles away, don’t you remember thinking: “To-day is Lady Sloper’s picnic; Aurelia is going; she will meet that beast Lovall; she will come home by moonlight in a crowded vehicle, the beast Lovall at her side, while her mamma, her only protector, slumbers a mile behind in the slow omnibus.” Pshaw! he that writes this has gone through it all, and what consolation, fellow-sufferers, has he to offer you? Dean Swift said of the weather, “I never remember any weather not too hot or too cold, too wet or too dry; but, however God Almighty contrives it, at the end of the year ’tis all very well.”
So of love; at the end of the year ’tis all very well.
END OF VOL. II.
CHARLES DICKENS AND EVANS, CRYSTAL PALACE PRESS.