New Grub Street, George Gissing [10 best books of all time TXT] 📗

I’m afraid?”

“Yes. I shall feel it a cruelty when I have to leave him. He has only just told me that his sight is beginning to fail. Oh, why didn’t his brother leave him a little money? It was such unkindness! Surely he had a much better right than Amy, or than myself either. But literature has been a curse to father all his life. My uncle hated it, and I suppose that was why he left father nothing.”

“But how am I to see you often? That’s the first question. I know what I shall do. I must take new lodgings, for the girls and myself, all in the same house. We must have two sitting-rooms; then you will come to my room without any difficulty. These astonishing proprieties are so easily satisfied after all.”

“You will really do that?”

“Yes. I shall go and look for rooms tomorrow. Then when you come you can always ask for Maud or Dora, you know. They will be very glad of a change to more respectable quarters.”

“I won’t stay to see them now, Jasper,” said Marian, her thoughts turning to the girls.

“Very well. You are safe for another hour, but to make certain you shall go at a quarter to five. Your mother won’t be against us?”

“Poor mother⁠—no. But she won’t dare to justify me before father.”

“I feel as if I should play a mean part in leaving it to you to tell your father. Marian, I will brave it out and go and see him.”

“Oh, it would be better not to.”

“Then I will write to him⁠—such a letter as he can’t possibly take in ill part.”

Marian pondered this proposal.

“You shall do that, Jasper, if you are willing. But not yet; presently.”

“You don’t wish him to know at once?”

“We had better wait a little. You know,” she added laughing, “that my legacy is only in name mine as yet. The will hasn’t been proved. And then the money will have to be realised.”

She informed him of the details; Jasper listened with his eyes on the ground.

They were now sitting on chairs drawn close to each other. It was with a sense of relief that Jasper had passed from dithyrambs to conversation on practical points; Marian’s excited sensitiveness could not but observe this, and she kept watching the motions of his countenance. At length he even let go her hand.

“You would prefer,” he said reflectively, “that nothing should be said to your father until that business is finished?”

“If you consent to it.”

“Oh, I have no doubt it’s as well.”

Her little phrase of self-subjection, and its tremulous tone, called for another answer than this. Jasper fell again into thought, and clearly it was thought of practical things.

“I think I must go now, Jasper,” she said.

“Must you? Well, if you had rather.”

He rose, though she was still seated. Marian moved a few steps away, but turned and approached him again.

“Do you really love me?” she asked, taking one of his hands and folding it between her own.

“I do indeed love you, Marian. Are you still doubtful?”

“You’re not sorry that I must go?”

“But I am, dearest. I wish we could sit here undisturbed all through the evening.”

Her touch had the same effect as before. His blood warmed again, and he pressed her to his side, stroking her hair and kissing her forehead.

“Are you sorry I wear my hair short?” she asked, longing for more praise than he had bestowed on her.

“Sorry? It is perfect. Everything else seems vulgar compared with this way of yours. How strange you would look with plaits and that kind of thing!”

“I am so glad it pleases you.”

“There is nothing in you that doesn’t please me, my thoughtful girl.”

“You called me that before. Do I seem so very thoughtful?”

“So grave, and sweetly reserved, and with eyes so full of meaning.”

She quivered with delight, her face hidden against his breast.

“I seem to be newborn, Jasper. Everything in the world is new to me, and I am strange to myself. I have never known an hour of happiness till now, and I can’t believe yet that it has come to me.”

She at length attired herself, and they left the house together, of course not unobserved by the landlady. Jasper walked about half the way to St. Paul’s Crescent. It was arranged that he should address a letter for her to the care of his sisters; but in a day or two the change of lodgings would be effected.

When they had parted, Marian looked back. But Jasper was walking quickly away, his head bent, in profound meditation.

XXV A Fruitless Meeting

Refuge from despair is often found in the passion of self-pity and that spirit of obstinate resistance which it engenders. In certain natures the extreme of self-pity is intolerable, and leads to self-destruction; but there are less fortunate beings whom the vehemence of their revolt against fate strengthens to endure in suffering. These latter are rather imaginative than passionate; the stages of their woe impress them as the acts of a drama, which they cannot bring themselves to cut short, so various are the possibilities of its dark motive. The intellectual man who kills himself is most often brought to that decision by conviction of his insignificance; self-pity merges in self-scorn, and the humiliated soul is intolerant of existence. He who survives under like conditions does so because misery magnifies him in his own estimate.

It was by force of commiserating his own lot that Edwin Reardon continued to live through the first month after his parting from Amy. Once or twice a week, sometimes early in the evening, sometimes at midnight or later, he haunted the street at Westbourne Park where his wife was dwelling, and on each occasion he returned to his garret with a fortified sense of the injustice to which he was submitted, of revolt against the circumstances which had driven him into outer darkness, of bitterness against his wife for saving her own comfort rather than share his downfall.