"And who holds the broad lands and stately house that should be mine—knows well, if the world at large knows it not—through a quibble he is a usurper! Oh, my own Mary!" he exclaimed, while tears glittered in his flashing eyes, and he glanced with angry scorn round the tiny apartment, "when I wooed and won you in the happy past time, you who were reared in the lap of luxury, wealth, and refinement. I little foresaw that I would ever bring you, in the end, to a home so humble as this!"
"But I am with you to share it, Greville, and I do not repine—unless, perhaps, for the child's sake. But why do you tell me these things again and again, darling? Is it," she added, with one of her brightest and most witching smiles, "to lure me into repeating how much and how truly I love you, as if I were a girl again in that second London season, which ended so sweetly for us both?"
She would have thrown her soft arms around him, but a spirit of anger filled his heart, and he paced to and fro the little room like a caged lion; and Mary regarded him anxiously, for she had a dread of her husband's crotchets taking some active and dangerous form, especially if he were again to have that Californian dream; for when one's life, as a writer says, is a constant trial, "the moments of respite seem only to substitute the heaviness of dread for the heaviness of actual suffering;" and Mary was indeed far from strong. There was a greater delicacy in her constitution than Greville was the least aware of, a delicacy that, though it alarmed herself, for his sake and their child's she kept her lips sealed on the subject, lest the knowledge thereof might add to the regret of Greville for the past, and his "worry" for the present.
"If this life cannot be endured, it must be cured—to reverse a vulgar saw, Mary," said he, continuing his short promenade; "if I cannot be rich, Derval shall be so, if any scheme of mine can achieve that end; and as soon as he is old enough, I shall teach him how money can make money, and how to keep it hard and fast—hard and fast—when it is made, and not be a fool like his father."
"Teach not the child thus, Greville, I implore you," said Mary, relinquishing her knitting; "of what avail will it be, if I strive to make him virtuous, kind to the poor, prudent and industrious, if you instil precepts so stern, so cold and selfish into his young mind? If you have affection for me, Greville dearest, abandon such cruel ideas and plans, or I will begin to think you a changed man, and the Greville Hampton of to-day is not Greville that won the love of my girlhood—yea, and of my life," she added with great tenderness.
"I am a changed man—I admit it—a sorely changed man, in all things but my love for you, Mary," he replied, as he stooped and kissed her bright little upturned face, and perhaps thought for a moment—but a moment only—that no man could be unhappy who had the smile and love of such a woman as Mary to brighten the path and lighten the burden of his life.
"Riches are good and a godsend," said she, "if employed aright and not as a means of pleasure only."
"Aright?" repeated Greville, who was thinking of the clubs he once frequented, his whilom team of roans, and Ascot perhaps.
"Pleasure as a means of doing good and protecting the poor, assisting merit and rewarding ingenuity. The rich man who presumes on his wealth, and the poor man who desponds on his poverty are—"
"Oh, don't preach, Mary darling, leave that to our friend Asperges Laud. You are a duck and an angel, but I can't quite agree with you," he added with a sigh as he filled his briar-root with tobacco of a kind he would have disdained to smoke once.