“I have a great many claims upon me,” said the Squire reassured; “the estate does not bring in half it once did. You know as well as I do how landed property has deteriorated; and my second son is in the army, and has a great many expenses, and my girls to be provided for—I cannot be responsible for anything so far as Mary is concerned. I have given her her education and all that, but as for any allowance——”
“If she had anything of the sort, do you think I could ever have spoken?” the curate said.
Mr. Prescott was reassured: there was obvious sincerity in this disclaimer. He stood for a moment silent with a perturbed countenance, and then he said suddenly, “That’s all very well, Mr. Asquith, but you’re not like a silly girl who knows nothing—you’ve some acquaintance with the world. It is quite right of you to express such sentiments. But if you marry her, how are you to keep her? that is the question for me.”
“Sir,” said the curate, “you have a right to say anything—everything on that subject. It is the question, I know all the gravity of it. It is what I cannot answer even to myself.”
“If you would not have spoken in the other case, supposing she had something of her own—how was it that you spoke now?” said the Squire, pushing his advantage; “a man ought to be able to deny himself in such circumstances. Men of your cloth permit themselves freedoms which other poor men don’t. A parson marries and has a large family, and everybody is sorry for him, whereas, if it was a poor soldier who did it, or a clerk in a public office, or——”
The curate did not speak, it was all perfectly true. He had said the same himself a hundred times. He had said, even to the unfortunate culprit himself, that a clergyman, because he was a clergyman, had no right. And now it was brought home to himself, and he had not a word to say.
“What does my brother Hugh give you?” said the inexorable Squire. “A hundred a year? I suppose it is as much as he can afford. And how are you to live with a wife on a hundred a year? How do you live on it without a wife? Percy, besides his pay, costs me—but that is nothing to the purpose. I ask you, can you live on it yourself, Asquith, without any supplement, without anything from home?”
The curate smiled somewhat grimly. Anything from home! He had been obliged to pay back to his poor father various sums expended on his education, which was a very different thing from receiving help from home. He said, “I have been able to manage—without any assistance,” in a subdued tone. It was not pleasant to be thus cross-examined, but the Squire had a right to ask all manner of questions. He had put himself in Mr. Prescott’s power.
“Supposing you have—I think it’s very much to your credit. And there’s the lodgings, of course, that’s always something. But supposing you have—how are you to keep a wife? And have you thought of the consequences, sir?” said the Squire severely. “If it was only a wife even; but you know what always follows—half-a-dozen children before you know where you are. How are you to educate them, sir? How are you to feed them? How are you to set them out in the world? And yet you come and ask me, a man that has seen such things happen a hundred times, to give you my niece.”
Mr. Asquith blushed like a girl at this suggestion. Mary herself was scarcely more modest, more delicate in all such embarrassing questions. And though he was not a humorous man by nature, a gleam of the ludicrous made its way into the question through the fierce countenance of the Squire. “These consequences,” he said, “cannot come all at once. They will take a few years at least: and I don’t calculate on staying always at Horton. In a town, in a large parish, curates have better pay.”