Life's Little Ironies

‘I just called as I was passing,’ he said.

‘For some paper?’ She hastened behind the counter.

‘No, no, Emily; why do ye get behind there? Why not stay by me? You seem to hate me.’

‘I don’t hate you. How can I?’

‘Then come out, so that we can talk like Christians.’

Emily obeyed with a fitful laugh, till she stood again beside him in the open part of the shop.

‘There’s a dear,’ he said.

‘You mustn’t say that, Captain Jolliffe; because the words belong to somebody else.’

‘Ah! I know what you mean. But, Emily, upon my life I didn’t know till this morning that you cared one bit about me, or I should not have done as I have done. I have the best of feelings for Joanna, but I know that from the beginning she hasn’t cared for me more than in a friendly way; and I see now the one I ought to have asked to be my wife. You know, Emily, when a man comes home from sea after a long voyage he’s as blind as a bat – he can’t see who’s who in women. They are all alike to him, beautiful creatures, and he takes the first that comes easy, without thinking if she loves him, or if he might not soon love another better than her. From the first I inclined to you most, but you were so backward and shy that I thought you didn’t want me to bother ’ee, and so I went to Joanna.’

‘Don’t say any more, Mr. Jolliffe, don’t!’ said she, choking. ‘You are going to marry Joanna next month, and it is wrong to – to – ’

‘O, Emily, my darling!’ he cried, and clasped her little figure in his arms before she was aware.

Joanna, behind the curtain, turned pale, tried to withdraw her eyes, but could not.

‘It is only you I love as a man ought to love the woman he is going to marry; and I know this from what Joanna has said, that she will willingly let me off! She wants to marry higher I know, and only said “Yes” to me out of kindness. A fine, tall girl like her isn’t the sort for a plain sailor’s wife: you be the best suited for that.’

He kissed her and kissed her again, her flexible form quivering in the agitation of his embrace.

‘I wonder – are you sure – Joanna is going to break off with you? O, are you sure? Because – ’

‘I know she would not wish to make us miserable. She will release me.’

‘O, I hope – I hope she will! Don’t stay any longer, Captain Jolliffe!’

He lingered, however, till a customer came for a penny stick of sealing-wax, and then he withdrew.

Green envy had overspread Joanna at the scene. She looked about for a way of escape. To get out without Emily’s knowledge of her visit was indispensable. She crept from the parlour into the passage, and thence to the front door of the house, where she let herself noiselessly into the street.

The sight of that caress had reversed all her resolutions. She could not let Shadrach go. Reaching home she burnt the letter, and told her mother that if Captain Jolliffe called she was too unwell to see him.

Shadrach, however, did not call. He sent her a note expressing in simple language the state of his feelings; and asked to be allowed to take advantage of the hints she had given him that her affection, too, was little more than friendly, by cancelling the engagement.

Looking out upon the harbour and the island beyond he waited and waited in his lodgings for an answer that did not come. The suspense grew to be so intolerable that after dark he went up the High Street. He could not resist calling at Joanna’s to learn his fate.

Her mother said her daughter was too unwell to see him, and to his questioning admitted that it was in consequence of a letter received from himself; which had distressed her deeply.

‘You know what it was about, perhaps, Mrs. Phippard?’ he said.

Mrs. Phippard owned that she did, adding that it put them in a very painful position. Thereupon Shadrach, fearing that he had been guilty of an enormity, explained that if his letter had pained Joanna it must be owing to a misunderstanding, since he had thought it would be a relief to her. If otherwise, he would hold himself bound by his word, and she was to think of the letter as never having been written.

Next morning he received an oral message from the young woman, asking him to fetch her home from a meeting that evening. This he did, and while walking from the Town Hall to her door, with her hand in his arm, she said:

‘It is all the same as before between us, isn’t it, Shadrach? Your letter was sent in mistake?’

‘It is all the same as before,’ he answered, ‘if you say it must be.’

‘I wish it to be,’ she murmured, with hard lineaments, as she thought of Emily.

Shadrach was a religious and scrupulous man, who respected his word as his life. Shortly afterwards the wedding took place, Jolliffe having conveyed to Emily as gently as possible the error he had fallen into when estimating Joanna’s mood as one of indifference.

CHAPTER II

A month after the marriage Joanna’s mother died, and the couple were obliged to turn their attention to very practical matters. Now that she was left without a parent, Joanna could not bear the notion of her husband going to sea again, but the question was, What could he do at home? They finally decided to take on a grocer’s shop in High Street, the goodwill and stock of which were waiting to be disposed of at that time. Shadrach knew nothing of shopkeeping, and Joanna very little, but they hoped to learn.

To the management of this grocery business they now devoted all their energies, and continued to conduct it for many succeeding years, without great success. Two sons were born to them, whom their mother loved to idolatry, although she had never passionately loved her husband; and she lavished upon them all her forethought and care. But the shop did not thrive, and the large dreams she had entertained of her sons’ education and career became attenuated in the face of realities. Their schooling was of the plainest, but, being by the sea, they grew alert in all such nautical arts and enterprises as were attractive to their age.

The great interest of the Jolliffes’ married life, outside their own immediate household, had lain in the marriage of Emily. By one of those odd chances which lead those that lurk in unexpected corners to be discovered, while the obvious are passed by, the gentle girl had been seen and loved by a thriving merchant of the town, a widower, some years older than herself, though still in the prime of life. At first Emily had declared that she never, never could marry any one; but Mr. Lester had quietly persevered, and had at last won her reluctant assent. Two children also were the fruits of this union, and, as they grew and prospered, Emily declared that she had never supposed that she could live to be so happy.

The worthy merchant’s home, one of those large, substantial brick mansions frequently jammed up in old-fashioned towns, faced directly on the High Street, nearly opposite to the grocery shop of the Jolliffes, and it now became the pain of Joanna to behold the woman whose place she had usurped out of pure covetousness, looking down from her position of comparative wealth upon the humble shop-window with its dusty sugar-loaves, heaps of raisins, and canisters of tea, over which it was her own lot to preside. The business having so dwindled, Joanna was obliged to serve in the shop herself; and it galled and mortified her that Emily Lester, sitting in her large drawing-room over the way, could witness her own dancings up and down behind the counter at the beck and call of wretched twopenny customers, whose patronage she was driven to welcome gladly: persons to whom she was compelled to be civil in the street, while Emily was bounding along with her children and her governess, and conversing with the genteelest people of the town and neighbourhood. This was what she had gained by not letting Shadrach Jolliffe, whom she had so faintly loved, carry his affection elsewhere.

Shadrach was a good and honest man, and he had been faithful to her in heart and in deed. Time had clipped the wings of his love for Emily in his devotion to the mother of his boys: he had quite lived down that impulsive earlier fancy, and Emily had become in his regard nothing more than a friend. It was the same with Emily’s feelings for him. Possibly, had she found the least cause for jealousy, Joanna would almost have been better satisfied. It was in the absolute acquiescence of Emily and Shadrach in the results she herself had contrived that her discontent found nourishment.

Shadrach was not endowed with the narrow shrewdness necessary for developing a retail business in the face of many competitors. Did a customer inquire if the grocer could really recommend the wondrous substitute for eggs which a persevering bagman had forced into his stock, he would answer that ‘when you did not put eggs into a pudding it was difficult to taste them there’; and when he was asked if his ‘real Mocha coffee’ was real Mocha, he would say grimly, ‘as understood in small shops.’

One summer day, when the big brick house opposite was reflecting the oppressive sun’s heat into the shop, and nobody was present but husband and wife, Joanna looked across at Emily’s door, where a wealthy visitor’s carriage had drawn up. Traces of patronage had been visible in Emily’s manner of late.

‘Shadrach, the truth is, you are not a business-man,’ his wife sadly murmured. ‘You were not brought up to shopkeeping, and it is impossible for a man to make a fortune at an occupation he has jumped into, as you did into this.’

Jolliffe agreed with her, in this as in everything else.

‘Not that I care a rope’s end about making a fortune,’ he said cheerfully. ‘I am happy enough, and we can rub on somehow.’

She looked again at the great house through the screen of bottled pickles.

‘Rub on – yes,’ she said bitterly. ‘But see how well off Emmy Lester is, who used to be so poor! Her boys will go to College, no doubt; and think of yours – obliged to go to the Parish School!’

Shadrach’s thoughts had flown to Emily.

‘Nobody,’ he said good-humouredly, ‘ever did Emily a better turn than you did, Joanna, when you warned her off me and put an end to that little simpering nonsense between us, so as to leave it in her power to say “Aye” to Lester when he came along.’ This almost maddened her.

‘Don’t speak of bygones!’ she implored, in stern sadness. ‘But think, for the boys’ and my sake, if not for your own, what are we to do to get richer?’

‘Well,’ he said, becoming serious, ‘to tell the truth, I have always felt myself unfit for this business, though I’ve never liked to say so. I seem to want more room for sprawling; a more open space to strike out in than here among friends and neighbours. I could get rich as well as any man, if I tried my own way.’

‘I wish you would! What is your way?’

‘To go to sea again.’

She had been the very one to keep him at home, hating the semi-widowed existence of sailors’ wives. But her ambition checked her instincts now, and she said: ‘Do you think success really lies that way?’