The Moonstone | Page 6

and said she didn't know which to be most
shocked at--my language or my principles. Some joke tickled her, I
suppose, of the sort that you can't take unless you are a person of
quality. Understanding nothing myself but that I was free to put it next
to Selina, I went and put it accordingly. And what did Selina say? Lord!
how little you must know of women, if you ask that. Of course she said,
Yes.

As my time drew nearer, and there got to be talk of my having a new
coat for the ceremony, my mind began to misgive me. I have compared
notes with other men as to what they felt while they were in my
interesting situation; and they have all acknowledged that, about a
week before it happened, they privately wished themselves out of it. I
went a trifle further than that myself; I actually rose up, as it were, and
tried to get out of it. Not for nothing! I was too just a man to expect she
would let me off for nothing. Compensation to the woman when the
man gets out of it, is one of the laws of England. In obedience to the
laws, and after turning it over carefully in my mind, I offered Selina
Goby a feather-bed and fifty shillings to be off the bargain. You will
hardly believe it, but it is nevertheless true--she was fool enough to
refuse.
After that it was all over with me, of course. I got the new coat as cheap
as I could, and I went through all the rest of it as cheap as I could. We
were not a happy couple, and not a miserable couple. We were six of
one and half-a-dozen of the other. How it was I don't understand, but
we always seemed to be getting, with the best of motives, in one
another's way. When I wanted to go up-stairs, there was my wife
coming down; or when my wife wanted to go down, there was I
coming up. That is married life, according to my experience of it.
After five years of misunderstandings on the stairs, it pleased an
all-wise Providence to relieve us of each other by taking my wife. I was
left with my little girl Penelope, and with no other child. Shortly
afterwards Sir John died, and my lady was left with her little girl, Miss
Rachel, and no other child. I have written to very poor purpose of my
lady, if you require to be told that my little Penelope was taken care of,
under my good mistress's own eye, and was sent to school and taught,
and made a sharp girl, and promoted, when old enough, to be Miss
Rachel's own maid.
As for me, I went on with my business as bailiff year after year up to
Christmas 1847, when there came a change in my life. On that day, my
lady invited herself to a cup of tea alone with me in my cottage. She
remarked that, reckoning from the year when I started as page-boy in

the time of the old lord, I had been more than fifty years in her service,
and she put into my hands a beautiful waistcoat of wool that she had
worked herself, to keep me warm in the bitter winter weather.
I received this magnificent present quite at a loss to find words to thank
my mistress with for the honour she had done me. To my great
astonishment, it turned out, however, that the waistcoat was not an
honour, but a bribe. My lady had discovered that I was getting old
before I had discovered it myself, and she had come to my cottage to
wheedle me (if I may use such an expression) into giving up my hard
out-of-door work as bailiff, and taking my ease for the rest of my days
as steward in the house. I made as good a fight of it against the
indignity of taking my ease as I could. But my mistress knew the weak
side of me; she put it as a favour to herself. The dispute between us
ended, after that, in my wiping my eyes, like an old fool, with my new
woollen waistcoat, and saying I would think about it.
The perturbation in my mind, in regard to thinking about it, being truly
dreadful after my lady had gone away, I applied the remedy which I
have never yet found to fail me in cases of doubt and emergency. I
smoked a pipe and took a turn at ROBINSON CRUSOE. Before I had
occupied myself with that extraordinary book five minutes, I came on a
comforting bit (page one hundred and fifty-eight), as follows: "To-day
we love, what to-morrow we