“In a fortnight!” exclaimed Mrs. Hale, “I do think this is very strange—not at all right. I call it very unfeeling,” said she, beginning to take relief in tears. “He has doubts you say, and gives up his living, and all without consulting me. I dare say, if he had told me his doubts at the first I could have nipped them in the bud.”
Mistaken as Margaret felt her father’s conduct to have been, she could not bear to hear it blamed by her mother. She knew that his very reserve had originated in a tenderness for her, which might be cowardly, but was not unfeeling.
“I almost hoped you might be glad to leave Helstone, mamma,” said she, after a pause. “You have never been well in this air, you know.”
“You can’t think the smoky air of a manufacturing town, all chimneys and dirt like Milton-Northern, would be better than this air, which is pure and sweet, if it is too soft and relaxing. Fancy living in the middle of factories, and factory people! Though, of course, if your father leaves the Church, we shall not be admitted into society anywhere. It will be such a disgrace to us! Poor dear Sir John! It is well he is not alive to see what your father has come to! Every day after dinner, when I was a girl, living with your Aunt Shaw, at Beresford Court, Sir John used to give for the first toast—‘Church and King, and down with the Rump.’”
Margaret was glad that her mother’s thoughts were turned away from the fact of her husband’s silence to her on the point which must have been so near his heart. Next to the serious vital anxiety as to the nature of her father’s doubts, this was the one circumstance of the case that gave Margaret the most pain.
“You know, we have very little society here, mamma. The Gormans, who are our nearest neighbours (to call society—and we hardly ever see them), have been in trade just as much as these Milton-Northern people.”
“Yes,” says Mrs. Hale, almost indignantly, “but at any rate, the Gormans made carriages for half the gentlemen of the county, and were brought into some kind of intercourse with them; but these factory people, who on earth wears cotton that can afford linen?”
“Well, mamma, I give up the cotton-spinners; I am not standing up for them, any more than for any other trades-people. Only we shall have little enough to do with them.”
“Why on earth has your father fixed on Milton-Northern to live in?”
“Partly,” said Margaret, sighing, “because it is so very different from Helstone—partly because Mr. Bell says there is an opening there for a private tutor.”