Page:ONCE A WEEK JUL TO DEC 1860.pdf/443

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“‘Ben, you might as well go and ask Esther to live with you, you spend so much of your time there, that people talk about it.’

“‘I wish to God,’ says I—quite red, I know I was—‘that people would mind their own concerns.’

“‘Ah, well!’ says she, ‘they won’t, and never will.’

“That evening I went down to Esther, and I said to her:—

“‘Esther, I can’t live like this much longer—Esther, I’m getting ill, and the river looks too pleasant in the moonlight to make me feel safe. I shall do something desperate: I’m not quite my own master at times. Esther, I want you to be my wife.’

“‘I couldn’t make you happy if I was, Ben—I can never forget poor John.’

“‘Esther,’ says I, ‘if you’ll marry me I shall be happier than I am now. I want a companion, and I’m always up here after you and people talk about it—not men, you know,’ says I, ‘for I’d soon find a way to stop their mouths’”—(Ben’s clenched fist certainly looked at this moment a very effectual remedy for a fast tongue in an unwise head). “‘But it’s the women, Esther, and I can’t stop them saying what they like. They’re so kind always to one of their own sex, too, that’s had a misfortune.’

“‘So they talk, do they, Ben?’

“‘Yes, they do; and it’s better, unless I’m to go to sea, or away again, that we should be married.’

“‘Ben,’ says she, ‘it isn’t every man that would make that offer to a woman like me with no good name, and a baby.’

“‘I do though, Esther.’

“‘Well, then, Ben, I will be your wife. I can’t give you the same kind of love that poor John had, but I’ll do my duty to you as a good wife, and I’m sure you’ll be a father to my boy, Ben, dear.’

(See p. 437.)

“She said this as calm as if I’d asked her to take a walk, or anything else as simple.

“I went down home, and told mother: she seemed glad of it: I suppose she saw it must be anyhow.

“Next night, as I was leaving, Esther put a letter in my hand, ‘Read that when you get home,’ says she; ‘it may alter your mind, Ben, about this.’

“I recollect well the feeling it gave me when I took it.

“When I got home I read it—there it is—leastways, that’s a copy of it.”

I read:—

Dear Ben,—When I was at Manchester, when little Johnny was born, the doctor told me I should never be a mother again. I don’t understand these things, but that’s what he said. I couldn’t tell you this, because it’s not the sort of thing I could talk about to you;