Francis was so relieved at having disposed of Frederic that at first he made light of it and said nothing to his wife. He supposed his difficulties would solve themselves, and this to all appearances they did.
Willie Folyat, the possible heir afore-mentioned, an undergraduate at Oxford, a very worthy and high-souled son of a pious and very poor father, spent two long vacations at the St. Withans Vicarage. Gertrude fell in love with him first, as by prescriptive right, and then, as she seemed to make no progress, Mary considered herself free to lose her heart. To their amazement and dismay, Willie sought an interview with their father and proposed for the hand of the chit, Minna, not yet out of short frocks. He was besottedly in love and prepared for all sacrifices; however, he was refused on the score of Minna’s youth, but given to understand that in two years or three he might return with every hope of success. Meanwhile there could be no objection to his writing to Minna if he were discreet.
He vowed eternal constancy with all youth’s fervent and curious belief in its possibility, and, by way of proving the breach of his heart, accepted an appointment in a school in Bombay. Then by every mail he addressed the most excellently turned love-letters to Minna, who skimmed through them—being already engaged upon another conquest—and handed them over to her mother, who wept over them, read them to father, and saw herself as the beloved mother-in-law of the Earl of Leedham—the title to which Willie had the remotest possible claim.
All this was very exciting and disturbing, and it set the thoughts of Gertrude and Mary in that direction from which there is no turning back. Gertrude, then Mary, made a long stay in Plymouth, and they returned with new costumes, new accents, new thoughts, and all their talk was of the superiority of town-life over the country. They spent a great deal of money, and the problem of income and expenditure occupied their father’s mind to the exclusion of everything else. In Plymouth Gertrude and Mary had met the most delightful young man, a friend of Frederic’s, named Herbert Fry. On their entreaty he was invited to stay for a holiday. He came and saw and was conquered—by Minna. He was caught kissing her in the shrubbery, his stay came to an end, and the name given him by the nurse—“a reg’lar Apollyon, my dear”—was found to be appropriate. Minna was furious, and in a gust of spite wrote a most offensive letter to Willie Folyat in Bombay. She told her mother what she had done and robbed her of her most cherished dream. She was found to be conducting a clandestine correspondence with “Apollyon,” and Martha let loose the thought which for some time had been lurking at the back of her head, namely, that they must make a change and, if possible, seek life in some city. She skirmished about with it, never suspecting that much the same thought might be in her husband’s mind also, and she led him to it by easy stages. Really the girls were getting beyond her; they had said things to her which she would never have dared to say to her aunt when she was a girl; and the country certainly was dull for young people, and they had the children to think of, and, of course, parents must make some sacrifices.
Francis looked at her with anxious eyes and muttered something about his duty to his parishioners. He was popular with them, and he liked the peace of the country and the simplicity (also the low cunning) of country people. He liked the figure he cut, with his knee-breeches and black shoes with silver buckles, and silk stockings and tall hat. He had grown used to himself in a back-water and shrank from the prospect of city life. Even Plymouth he found bewildering on his rare visits. On the other hand, there was the perpetual leakage in his finances—Frederic in no way to earn his living for at least four years, and his daughters, like the horse-leech’s, crying “Give! give!” and no man apparently desirous of marrying them; and beyond them the long tail of his family, all of whom might grow up and develop minds which thought along lines different from his own. He was not in the least resentful about it, that was not in his nature; but he hated his own helplessness, the impossibility of doing anything to relieve the growing strain. He loathed quarrelling, and his daughters were always quarrelling with each other and their mother, and that, in a house which should have been a model to the country-side, made him profoundly ashamed. He had begun once more to think in an extra-professional way, to see things in a humorous light which by all tradition were sacred. A curious desire to tease had taken possession of him, and he fought it with all his might. Further, if he was to continue the war with circumstances in this place he must admit his wife to his inmost thoughts. He tried, but his new failure was the most bitter of all to bear; but yet he would not admit that she was stupid. Still he clung to old memories, and he told himself that he loved her. He did love her—he loved everything and everybody; but he was not and had not been for many years in love with her. She had never understood love, and she had bullied him. When he argued with her she wept; when he agreed with her she wept also, and protested that he was an angel and far, far too good for her.
He came as directly to the point as she would let him, and one night, after a protracted curtain lecture, he proposed that he should consult his bishop and negotiate an exchange of livings with some clergyman desirous of a country life. His only stipulation was that the new parish should be among the poor, and this, unhappily, broke in upon Martha’s dreams of a brilliant social life among rich and more or less “gentle” parishioners. She had mapped out marriages for all her daughters and careers for all her sons, and was drowsing off into a golden slumber when the word “poor” punched into her pillow.
“My dear Frank!” she said.
“I must work,” said Francis.
“But, my dear Frank, the poor!”
“It is easier for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven than for a camel to pass through . . .”