ABOUT MRS. MORTOMLEY AND OTHERS.
As has been already stated, Mr. Henry Werner assisted at the wedding in the character of best man, and it was to this circumstance that he owed the good fortune of subsequently marrying Miss Trebasson himself.
Had he met that young lady—as he did afterwards meet her, as a mere guest at Homewood—in the unexalted position of Mrs. Mortomley's friend, he would never have thought of asking her to be his wife; but seeing her for the first time with the glamour of Dassell Court upon her, and the glory of her relatives surrounding her, he thought it would be a fine thing for him to win and wed such a woman even if she had not, as he soon found out was the case, a penny of fortune.
More of these matches are made than people generally imagine. It is astonishing to look around and behold the number of well-born women who have married men, that at first sight one might imagine to have been as far distant from the upper ten thousand as earth is from heaven; and it is more astonishing still to find that these women have, one and all—despite their prejudices, their pedigree, their pride, and their delicate sensitiveness—married for money.
It would be useless to deny that Leonora Trebasson did this. She was not a girl of whom such a step could have been predicated, and yet, looking at the affair from a common-sense point of view, it was quite certain—after the event—that if no one for whom she could feel affection possessed of money came to woo, she would marry some person for whom she did not care in the least.
It was necessary for her to marry; she knew it, she had always known it. Her mother's small jointure died with her. Whenever her cousin, the heir of Dassell Court, took a wife—and there was just as great a necessity for him to find an heiress as for her to meet a man possessed of a competence, at all events—she understood she and her mother would have to leave the Court, and settle down in perhaps such another cottage as that tenanted by Miss Gerace.
There had been a tenderness once between herself and Charley—the Honourable Charles Trebasson—but the elders on both sides comprehending how disastrous such a pauper union must prove, speedily nipped that attachment in the bud, and the future Lord went out into the world to look for his heiress, whilst Miss Trebasson stayed at Dassell to await the husband fate might send her.
Of these and such like matters the mother and daughter never spoke openly; but it was clearly understood between them, that curates without private fortune, officers with no income beyond their pay, the younger sons of neighbouring squires, were to be considered as utterly ineligible for husbands.
Mrs. Trebasson herself having made a love-match and suffered for the imprudence every day of her married life, she had educated Leonora to keep her feelings well in hand and on no account to let affection run away with her judgment.
When Archibald Mortomley went down that summer to fish, and recruit his health, Mrs. Trebasson's hopes grew high that love and prudence might, for once, be able to walk hand in hand together.