Jilted! Or, My Uncle's Scheme, Volume 3

by William Clark Russell

I blushed, and looked a protest.

“She has deceived you,” he continued, “and if you can forgive her, ought not we, her parents, to do so? But I must think awhile, and confer with my wife before I act. Conny ought to know the torture of suspense, and be made to feel a little the grief and fear she has caused us. It is fortunate you have returned, for I could not do without you at the bank now.”

It was clear to me that the greatest kindness I could do him was to leave him alone. I therefore declined his invitation to breakfast, and returned to my lodgings, where breakfast awaited me, and then repaired to the bank.

Mr. Spratling was very glad to see me, and instantly began to talk of Curling. Wasn’t it wonderful? Wasn’t he cunning, just? Only the day before he had run away with Miss Hargrave, he had said he meant to ask the governor for a holiday, when Mr. Charles came back.

“He seemed to be afraid of meeting you,” Mr. Spratling told me. “He asked Mr. Hargrave several times when you were expected. I daresay he thought you would find out his game.”

Perhaps he did. Perhaps in his quiet, cautious way, he was jealous of Conny, and thought if he should give me time to make love to her again, I might win her away from him. He had very well known that I had her mamma on my side; that if my uncle had suspected his daughter’s attachment, I should have had him on my side too; that I could claim to be a gentleman; that I was a prospective partner in the bank; in a word, that I was hedged about with every condition calculated to secure me a triumph; whilst he on his side had literally nothing whatever to make him hopeful but Conny’s promises, which caprice might at any moment cause her to break.

I looked at his vacant stool, and thought of him sitting there and laughing internally at the trick he and Conny were playing me; of the grinning that must have gone on behind my back, when my cousin mockingly repeated the language I had addressed to her, and mimicked the attitudes of entreaty which I had no doubt unconsciously thrown myself into whilst begging her to tell me that—

Pshaw! never mind. It is all past. I never really loved her. I thought her bewitchingly pretty, and wanted to possess her; I thought it would be the agreeablest pastime to play with her sunny hair, and trace my haunting face in her deep eyes. It was a young man’s fancy. I fancied her. But could that mean I loved her, when the first puff that came blew my flame out, and left my heart free for thy clearer radiance, my T.?

Mortifying, fearfully mortifying the whole thing was, I agree. To be made ridiculous in the eyes of a cashier who touched his hat when he met me in the street and often called me Sir; to be jilted for a lean banker’s clerk whose learning lay in his ledger, the horizon of whose mind was the circle of a sovereign; who wrote like a copy-book, and counted like the sums in Colenso—as accurately, I mean (faugh! I wouldn’t give twopence for such plebeian parts!). Yes, fearfully mortifying all this was. How many years have passed since then? It matters not—but though my waistcoats of that epoch would require another foot added to them to bring the buttons and the button-holes together upon my present dignified figure, I cannot recur to this one great sackcloth-and-ashes experience of mine without feeling my spleen enlarged under my left ribs, and my multifarious perceptions grow jaundiced.

God knows whether I should have felt so magnanimously disposed towards the runaway couple had my heart been as much concerned in the matter as it ought to have been. All the morning I was resolving, should my uncle show himself stubborn, to plead their cause and petition his forgiveness.