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 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.