"All, indeed! It is sufficient to show me that these unthinking people will follow you to the polling-booth like sheep! However, to return to what I was about to say when I thought of these farmers; is your belief in your attachment to these principles so strong as to allow them to influence your actions at what may be an important period of your life? I know the Helmingham school-salary, Mr. Benthall; I know the life--Heaven knows I ought, after all the years of its weariness and its drudgery which I witnessed. You are scarcely in your proper place, I think! I can picture you to myself in a pleasant rectory in a southern or western county, with a charming wife by your side!"
"A most delightful idea, Mrs. Creswell, but one impossible of realisation in my case, I am afraid!"
"By no means so impossible as you seem to imagine. I have only to say one word to my husband, and----"
"My dear Mrs. Creswell," said Mr. Benthall, rising, and laying his hand lightly on her arm, "pray excuse my interrupting you; but I am sure you don't know what you are saying or doing! Ladies have no idea of this kind of thing; they don't understand it, and we cannot explain. I can only say that if any man had--well, I should not have hesitated a moment in knocking him down!" And Mr. Benthall, whose manner was disturbed, whose voice trembled, and whose face was very much flushed, was making rapidly to the door, when Marian called him back.
"I am sorry," she said, very calmly, "that our last interview should have been so disagreeable. You will understand that, under present circumstances, your visits here, and your acquaintance with any of the inmates of this house, must cease."
Mr. Benthall looked as though about to speak, but he merely bowed and left the room. When the door closed behind him, Marian sank down into her chair, and burst into a flood of bitter tears. It was the second repulse she had met with that day, and she had not been accustomed to repulses, of late.
[CHAPTER XXXI.]
AN INCOMPLETE VICTORY.
Mr. Benthall's neat cob was not standing in a loose box in the Woolgreaves stable, as was its usual wont when its master had paid a visit to that hospitable mansion. On this occasion the schoolmaster had walked over from Helmingham, and, though by nature an indolent man, Mr. Benthall was exceedingly pleased at the prospect of the walk before him on emerging from Woolgreaves after his interview in the library with Mrs. Creswell. He felt that he required a vent for the excitement under which he was labouring, a vent which could only be found in sharp and prolonged exercise. The truth was that he was very much excited and very angry indeed. "It is a very charitable way of looking at it--a more than charitable way," he muttered to himself as he strode over the ground, "to fancy that Mrs. Creswell was ignorant of what she was doing; did not know that she was offering me a bribe to vote for her husband, and to influence the farmers on this estate to do the same. She knew it well enough; she is by far too clever a woman not to understand all about it. And if she would try that game on with us, who hold a comparatively superior position, what won't she do with those lower on the electoral roll? Clever woman too, thorough woman of the world. I wonder at her forgetting herself, and showing her hand so completely. How admirably she emphasised the 'any of the inmates' in that sentence when she gave me my congé! it was really remarkably well done! When I tell Gertrude this, it will show her the real facts at once. She has had a firm impression that, up to the present time, 'madam,' as she calls Mrs. Creswell, has had no idea as to the state of the case between us; but I don't think even incredulous Gertrude would have much doubt of it if she had been present, and caught the expression of Mrs. Creswell's face as she forbade my communication with 'any' of the inmates of her house. Neither look nor tone admitted of the smallest ambiguity, and I took care to appreciate both. Something must be done to circumvent our young friend the hostess of Woolgreaves."
Thus soliloquised the Reverend George Benthall as he strode across the bleak barren fields, chopping away with his stick at the thin naked hedges as he passed them, pushing his hat back from his brow, and uttering many sounds which were at least impatient, not to say unclerical, as he progressed. After his dinner, feeling that this was an exceptional kind of evening, and one which must be exceptionally treated, he went down to his cellar, brought therefrom a bottle of excellent Burgundy, lit up, his favourite pipe, placed his feet on the fender, and prepared himself for a careful review of the occurrences of the day. On the whole, he was satisfied. It may seem strange that a man, indolent, uncaring about most things, and certainly desirous of the opportunity for the acquisition of worldly goods, should have refused the chance of such a position as Marian hinted he might aspire to--a position which her own keen natural instinct and worldly knowledge suggested to her as the very one which he would most covet--but it must be remembered that Mr. Benthall was a man of birth and family, bound to indorse the family politics in his own person, and likely to shrink from the merest suggestion of a bribe as the highest insult and, indignity that could possibly be offered him. One of Marian's hints went home; when she told him that all acquaintance between him and any member of the Woolgreaves household must cease, the bolt penetrated. The easy attention which Mr. Benthall had just paid to the rather odd, but decidedly amusing, niece of rich Squire Creswell had developed into a great liking, which had grown into a passion deeper and stronger than this calm, placid--well, not to disguise the fact, selfish--clergyman had ever imagined he could have experienced; and although in his homeward walk he was pleased to smile in his complimentary fashion at Mrs. Creswell's skill in aiming the arrow, when he turned the whole matter over in his mind after dinner, he was compelled to allow that it was exceedingly unpleasant, and that he did not see how affairs between himself and Gertrude were to be carried out to a happy issue without bringing matters to a crisis. For this crisis long-headed and calculating Mr. Benthall had been for some time prepared--that is to say, he had long entertained the idea that after a time Mrs. Creswell, getting tired of the alternations in the state of armed neutrality or actual warfare, in one or other of which she always lived with the young ladies, and feeling towards them as Haman felt towards Mordecai, with the aggravation of their all being women, would certainly do her best towards getting them removed from Woolgreaves; and doing her best meant, when Mr. Creswell was the person to be acted upon, the accomplishment of her designs. But Mr. Benthall felt tolerably certain, from his knowledge of Mr. Creswell, and the conversation in some degree bearing on the subject which they had had together, that though the old gentleman would not be able to withstand, nor indeed would for a moment attempt to fight against the pressure which would be put upon him by his wife for the accomplishment of her purpose, even though that preference were to the disadvantage of his blood relations, that result once achieved, he would do everything in his power to insure the girls' future comfort, and would not abate one jot of the liberal pecuniary allowance which he had always intended for them on the occasion of their marriage. It was very comforting to Mr. Benthall, after due deliberation, to come to this conclusion; for though he was very much attached to Gertrude Creswell, and though of late he had begun to think she was so indispensable to his future happiness that he could almost have married her without any dowry, yet it was pleasant to think that--well, that she would not only make him a charming wife, but bring a very handsome increase to his income--when the storm arrived.