To the management of this grocery business they now 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 loved her husband; and she 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 in the face of realities. Their was of the plainest, but, being by the sea, they grew alert in all such arts and enterprises as were attractive to their age.
The great interest of the Jolliffes’ married life, outside their own household, had lain in the marriage of Emily. By one of those odd chances which lead those that 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 , 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 , and had at last won her reluctant . Two children also were the fruits of this union, and, as they grew and , Emily declared that she had never supposed that she could live to be so happy.
The merchant’s home, one of those large, substantial brick 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 the woman whose place she had out of pure , looking down from her position of comparative wealth upon the shop-window with its dusty sugar-loaves, heaps of , and canisters of tea, over which it was her own lot to preside. The business having so , Joanna was obliged to serve in the shop herself; and it and 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 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 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 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 , Joanna would almost have been better satisfied. It was in the absolute of Emily and Shadrach in the results she herself had that her discontent found .
Shadrach was not endowed with the narrow shrewdness necessary for developing a business in the face of many competitors. Did a customer inquire if the grocer could really recommend the substitute for eggs which a 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 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 .
‘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 , 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 ; 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?’
‘I am sure it lies in no other.’
‘Do you want to go, Shadrach?’
‘Not for the pleasure of it, I can tell ’ee. There’s no such pleasure at sea, Joanna, as I can find in my back parlour here. To speak honest, I have no love for the brine. I never had much. But if it comes to a question of a fortune for you and the lads, it is another thing. That’s the only way to it for one born and bred a seafarer as I.’
‘Would it take long to earn?’
‘Well, that depends; perhaps not.’
The next morning Shadrach pulled from a chest of drawers the nautical jacket he had worn during the first months of his return, brushed out the , donned it, and walked down to the . The port still did a fair business in the Newfoundland trade, though not so much as
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