PAGE 6
Fellow-Townsmen
by
She had remained standing till now, when she turned and sat down, facing half away from him.
Barnet watched her moodily. ‘Yes, it is only what I deserve,’ he said. ‘Ambition pricked me on–no, it was not ambition, it was wrongheadedness! Had I but reflected . . . ‘ He broke out vehemently: ‘But always remember this, Lucy: if you had written to me only one little line after that misunderstanding, I declare I should have come back to you. That ruined me!’ he slowly walked as far as the little room would allow him to go, and remained with his eyes on the skirting.
‘But, Mr. Barnet, how could I write to you? There was no opening for my doing so.’
‘Then there ought to have been,’ said Barnet, turning. ‘That was my fault!’
‘Well, I don’t know anything about that; but as there had been nothing said by me which required any explanation by letter, I did not send one. Everything was so indefinite, and feeling your position to be so much wealthier than mine, I fancied I might have mistaken your meaning. And when I heard of the other lady–a woman of whose family even you might be proud–I thought how foolish I had been, and said nothing.’
‘Then I suppose it was destiny–accident–I don’t know what, that separated us, dear Lucy. Anyhow you were the woman I ought to have made my wife–and I let you slip, like the foolish man that I was!’
‘O, Mr. Barnet,’ she said, almost in tears, ‘don’t revive the subject to me; I am the wrong one to console you–think, sir,–you should not be here–it would be so bad for me if it were known!’
‘It would–it would, indeed,’ he said hastily. ‘I am not right in doing this, and I won’t do it again.’
‘It is a very common folly of human nature, you know, to think the course you did not adopt must have been the best,’ she continued, with gentle solicitude, as she followed him to the door of the room. ‘And you don’t know that I should have accepted you, even if you had asked me to be your wife.’ At this his eye met hers, and she dropped her gaze. She knew that her voice belied her. There was a silence till she looked up to add, in a voice of soothing playfulness, ‘My family was so much poorer than yours, even before I lost my dear father, that–perhaps your companions would have made it unpleasant for us on account of my deficiencies.’
‘Your disposition would soon have won them round,’ said Barnet.
She archly expostulated: ‘Now, never mind my disposition; try to make it up with your wife! Those are my commands to you. And now you are to leave me at once.’
‘I will. I must make the best of it all, I suppose,’ he replied, more cheerfully than he had as yet spoken. ‘But I shall never again meet with such a dear girl as you!’ And he suddenly opened the door, and left her alone. When his glance again fell on the lamps that were sparsely ranged along the dreary level road, his eyes were in a state which showed straw- like motes of light radiating from each flame into the surrounding air.
On the other side of the way Barnet observed a man under an umbrella, walking parallel with himself. Presently this man left the footway, and gradually converged on Barnet’s course. The latter then saw that it was Charlson, a surgeon of the town, who owed him money. Charlson was a man not without ability; yet he did not prosper. Sundry circumstances stood in his way as a medical practitioner: he was needy; he was not a coddle; he gossiped with men instead of with women; he had married a stranger instead of one of the town young ladies; and he was given to conversational buffoonery. Moreover, his look was quite erroneous. Those only proper features in the family doctor, the quiet eye, and the thin straight passionless lips which never curl in public either for laughter or for scorn, were not his; he had a full-curved mouth, and a bold black eye that made timid people nervous. His companions were what in old times would have been called boon companions–an expression which, though of irreproachable root, suggests fraternization carried to the point of unscrupulousness. All this was against him in the little town of his adoption.