_Dec. 31st,_ 1855. |The merry-making of my neighbours in the flat
above--probably Scotch or Irish, both of which greatly abound in this
town--is a sad counteraction of work for to-night. But why grumble,
when I am one of the few people who pretend to work at all on this
holiday--a night which used to be such a treat to us boys. The sounds
overhead put me in mind of that old festival of Hogmanay, which, for
a good many things, would be “more honoured in the breach than the
observance.”
This Liverpool is an awful town for drinking. Other towns may be as
bad; statistics prove it; but I know no place where intoxication is so
open and shameless. Not only in bye streets and foul courts, where
one expects to see it, but everywhere. I never take a short railway
journey in the after part of the day, but I am liable to meet at least
one drunken “gentleman” snoozing in his first-class carriage; or, in
the second class, two or three drunken “men,” singing, swearing, or
pushed stupidly about by pale-faced wives. The sadness of the thing
is, that the wives do not seem to mind it, that everybody takes it
quite as a matter of course. The “gentleman,” often grey-haired, is but
“merry,” as he is accustomed to be every night of his life; the poor
man has only “had a drop or two,” as all his comrades are in the habit
of taking, whenever they get the chance: they see no disgrace in it; so
they laugh at him a bit, and humour him, and are quite ready to
stand up for him against all in-comers who may object to such a
fellow-passenger. _They_ don't; nor do the women belonging to them, who
are well-used to tolerate drunken sweethearts, and lead about and
pacify drunken husbands. It makes me sick at heart sometimes to see a
decent, pretty girl, sit tittering at a foul-mouthed beast opposite; or
a tidy young mother with two or three bonnie children, trying to coax
home, without harm to himself or them, some brutish husband, who does
not know his right hand from his left, so utterly stupid is he with
drink. To-night, but for my chance hand at a railway-station, such a
family party as this might have reached home fatherless, and no great
misfortune, one might suppose. Yet the wife had not even looked
sad--had only scolded and laughed at him.
In this, as in most cases of reform, it is the women who must make the
first step. There are two great sins of men: drunkenness in the lower
classes; a still worse form of vice in the higher, which I believe
women might help to stop, if they tried. Would to God I could cry to
every young working woman, “Never encourage a drunken sweetheart!” and
to every young lady thinking of marriage, “Beware! better die, than
live to give children to a loose-principled, unchaste father.”
These are strong words--dare I leave them for eyes that may, years
hence, read this page?--Ay, for by then, they will--they must, in
the natural course of things--have gained at least a tithe of my own
bitter knowledge of the world. God preserve them from all knowledge
beyond what is actually necessary! when I think of any suffering
coming to them, any sight of sin or avoidable sorrow troubling those
dear eyes, it almost drives me mad. If, for instance, you were to
marry a man, like some men I have known, and who indeed form the
majority of our sex, and he were unkind to you, or wronged you in the
smallest degree, I think I could murd----
Hush!--not that word!
You see how my mind keeps wandering purposelessly, having nothing to
communicate. I had indeed, for some time, avoided writing here at all.
And I have been, and am, necessarily occupied, laying the groundwork
of that new plan of life which I explained to you.
Its whole bearing you did not see, noe did I intend you should; though
your own words originated it; lit it with a ray of hope so exquisite
that I could follow on cheerfully for indefinite years.
It only lasted an hour or two; and then your father's words--though,
heaven be praised, they were not yours--plunged me into darkness
again; a darkness out of which I had never crept, had I been still the
morbid coward I was a year ago.
As it was, you little guessed all the thoughts you shut in with me
behind the study door, till your light foot came back to it--that
night. Nor that in the interval I had had strength to weigh all
circumstances, and form a definite deliberate plan, firm as I believe
my heart to be--since I have known you.
I have resolved, in consequence of some words of yours, to change my
whole scheme of life. That is, I will at some future day, whether near
or far, circumstances must decide, submit to you every event of my
history, and then ask you dispassionately as a friend, to decide if I
shall still live on according to my purpose, in prospect of _the
end_, or, shaking off the burthen of it, shall trust in God's mercy,
consider all things past and gone, and myself at liberty like any
other, to love, and woo, and marry.
Afterwards, according to your decision, may or may not follow that
other question--the very hope and suspense of which is like passing
into a new life, through the gate of death.
Your father said distinctly--but I will not repeat it. It is enough
to make me dread to win my best blessing, lest I might also win her
father's curse. To evoke that curse, knowingly to sow dissension
between a man and his own daughter, is an awful thing. I dare not do
it. During his life-time I must wait.
So, for the present, farewell, innocent child! for no child can be more
innocent and happy than you.
But you will not always be a child. If you do not marry--and you seem
of an opposite mind to your sisters in that particular--you will,
years hence, be a woman, no longer young, perhaps little sought
after, for you are not beautiful to most eyes, nor from your peculiar
temperament do you please many people. By then, you may have known
care and sorrow--will be an orphan and alone. I should despise myself
for reckoning up these possibilities, did I not know that in so far
as any human hand can shield you from trouble, you shall be shielded,
that while one poor life lasts, you never shall be left desolate.
I have given up entirely my intention of quitting England. Even if I
am not able to get sight of you from year's end to year's end, if I
have to stretch out and diminish to the slenderest link which will
remain unbroken my acquaintance with your family, I must keep within
reach of you. Nothing must happen to you or any one belonging to you,
without my informing myself of it. And though you may forget--I say
not you will, but you may--I am none the less resolved that you shall
never lose me, while a man can protect a woman, a friend sustain and
comfort a friend.
You will probably set down to mere friendship one insane outburst
of mine. Wrong, I confess; but to see you standing in the lamplight,
looking after me into the dark, with a face so tender, mild, and
sweet, and to know I should not look at that face again for so long,
it nearly maddened me. But you were calm--you would not understand.
It will never do for me to see you often, or to live in your
neighbourhood, and therefore it was best to take immediate steps for
the change I contemplate, and of which I told you. Accordingly, the
very next day, I applied for leave of absence. The colonel was just
riding over to call at Rockmount, so I sent a message to your father.
I shrank from writing to him: to you, it was of course impossible.
In this, as in many a future instance, I can only trust to that good
heart which knows me--not wholly--alas, will it ever know me wholly?
but better than any other human being does, or ever will. I believe it
will judge me charitably, patiently, faithfully; for is it not itself
the truest, simplest, faithfullest heart?
Let me here say one word. I believe there is no love in it; nothing
that need make a man hesitate lest his own happiness should not be
the only sacrifice. Sympathy, affection, you have for me; but I do not
think you ever knew what love was. Any one worthy of you may yet have
free opportunity of winning you--of making you happy. And if I saw you
happy, thoroughly and righteously happy, I could endure it.
I will tell you my plans.
I am trying for the appointment of surgeon to a gaol near this town.
I hope to obtain it: for it will open a wide field of work--to me the
salt of life: and it is only fifty miles from Treherne Court, where
you will visit, and where, from time to time, I may be able to meet
you.
You see--this my hope, dim as it is in the future, and vague enough
as to present comfort--does not make me weaker but stronger for the
ordinary concerns of life; therefore I believe it to be a holy hope,
and one that I dare carry along with me in all my worldly
doings and plannings. Believe one fact, for my nature has sufficient
unity of purpose never to do things by halves--that no single plan,
act, or thought, is without reference to you.
Shall I tell you my ways and means, as calculated to-night, the last
night of the year?
Selling out of the army will supply me with a good sum. Which I
mean to put by, letting the interest accumulate, as a provision for
accidental illness, or old age, if I live to be old: or for--do you
guess?
My salary will be about 300L. a-year. Now, half of that ought to
suffice a man of my moderate habits. Many a poor clerk, educated, and
obliged to appear as a gentleman, has no larger income, and contrives
to marry upon it, too, if love seizes hold of him while still in the
venturesome stage of existence.
We men are strange animals: at twenty, ready to rush into matrimony
on any prospects whatever, or none at all; at thirty, having thought
better of it, rejoice in our escape; but after forty, when the shadows
begin to fall, when the outer world darkens, and the fireside feels
comfortless and lone, then, we sit and ponder--I mean, most men. Mine
is an individual and special case, not germane to the subject.
With all deference to young Tom Turton, his friend Mr. Charteris, and
others of the set, which I have lately been among in London, the sum
of one hundred and fifty pounds a-year seems to me amply sufficient
to maintain in as much comfort as is good for him, and in all the
necessary outward decencies of middle-class life, a man without any
expensive habits or relations dependent on him, and who has neither
wife nor child.
Neither wife nor child! As I write them, the words smite hard.
To have no wife, no child! Never to seek what the idlest, most drunken
loon of a mechanic may get for the asking; never to experience the joy
which I saw on a poor fellow's face only yesterday; when, in the same
room with one dead lad, and another sickening, the wife brought into
the world a third, a living child, and the ragged, starved father
cried out, “Lord be thankit!” that it _was_ a living child.
O Lord, Thy ways are equal: it is ours only which are unequal. Forbid
it Thou that I should have given Thee of that which cost me nothing!
Yet, on this night--this last night of a year so momentous--let me
break silence, and cry--Thou alone wilt hear.
I want her--I crave her; my very heart and soul are hungry for her!
Not as a brief possession, like gathering a flower and wearying of it,
or throwing it away. I want her for always--to have her morning, noon,
and night; day after day and year after year; happy or sorrowful,
good or faulty, young or old; only mine, mine! I feel sometimes as if,
found thus late, all eternity could not give me enough of her. It is
not the body she inhabits,--though, from head to foot, my love is all
fair, fair as daylight and pure as snow--it is herself I want, ever
close at hand to be the better self of this me, who have tried
vainly all these years to stand alone, to live and endure alone!
Folly!--proud folly! such is not a natural state of things; God
himself said, “It is not good for man to be alone.”
I think I never shall be so solitary as I have been. That good heart,
pure and unselfish as I never saw woman's before, will always incline
kindly to as much of mine as I dare show; those sweet, honest eyes
will never be less trustful than now--unless I gave them cause to
doubt me. Her friendship, like her character, is steadfast as a rock.
But oh! if she _loved_ me! If I were one of those poor clerks at a
hundred a-year; if we had only meat, raiment, and a roof to cover us,
and she loved me! If I were, as I might have been, a young doctor,
toiling day and night, with barely time for food and sleep; but with a
home to come to, and her to love me! If we sat in this room, poor and
mean as it is, with this scanty supper between us, asking a blessing
upon it, while, her hand in mine and her lips on my forehead, told me,
“Max, I love you!”
God forgive me if I murmur! I am not young; my life is slipping
away--my life, which is _owed_. Oh! that I might live long enough to
teach her to say, “Max, I love you!”
Enough. The last minutes of this year--this blessed year! shall not be
wasted in moans.
Already the streets are growing quiet. People do not seem to keep
this festival here as we do, north of the Tweed; they think more of
Christmas. Most likely she will have forgotten all about the day,
and be peacefully sleeping the old year out and the new year in--this
little English girl. Well, I am awake, and that will do for both.
My letter to Treherne--could you have seen it? I suppose you did. It
made no excuses for not coming at Christmas, because I intended to
come and see you as to-morrow.
I mean to wish you a happy New Year, on this, the first since I knew
you, since I was aware of there being such a little creature existing
in the world.
Also, I mean to come and see you every New Year, if possible. The word
possible, implying so far as my own will can control circumstances.
I desire to see you; it is life to me to see you, and see you I will.
Not often, for I dare not, but as often as I dare. And--for I have
faith in anniversaries, always on the anniversary of the day I first
saw you, and on New Year's Day.
One--two--three; I waited for the clock to cease striking, and now
all the bells are ringing from every church-tower. Is this an
English custom? I must ask you tomorrow, that is, to-day, for it is
morning--it is the New Year.
My day-dawn, my gift of God, my little English girl, a happy New Year!
Max Urquhart.