Cousin Mary

by Mrs. Oliphant

“Oh, no one can ever tell. Someone with a living to give away might take a fancy to him: clergymen have many ways of ingratiating themselves. Or he might get a curacy in a town, where the pay is better, and where it is important to get a man who can preach. He is a very good preacher, far better than your brother Hugh, who always sends me to sleep. I don’t know why you should reject Mr. Asquith. He has a great many things in his favour, and Mary likes him. Has she told me? Well, without her telling me, I hope I am not so stupid as to be ignorant of what’s in a girl’s mind. She will be very much surprised, and I am not so sure that she will obey.”

“Mary—not obey!—I think you must be dreaming.”

“It is all very easy to speak. Mary is most obedient about everything that is of no consequence: but this is of great consequence, John. And the girl is of age, though we have all got into the habit of treating her like a child. Why should she let her best chance drop, because you don’t like it? I don’t mean to say that it is much of a chance. But still a man like that may always get on, whereas a girl has very little likelihood, by herself, of getting on. And we can’t always be here to look after her.”

“I don’t see why you should be so very determined on that subject,” said the Squire, with a little irritation. “We are not so dreadfully aged, when all is said.”

“No, we are not dreadfully aged, but we can’t last forever. Suppose you were to be taken from us,” said Mrs. Prescott, with placidity, “three girls would be a great responsibility for me: and suppose I were to go first, you would feel it still more. Indeed, I should be very sorry to refuse an offer for Mary. To see her with a husband to take care of her, would be a great comfort to me. Of course all that we can do must be for our own girls—and not too much for them,” the mother said.

The Squire went out for his walk that day full of thought. He was a man who at the bottom of his heart was a kind man, and one with a conscience, a conscience of the kind which sometimes gives its possessor a great deal of trouble. He asked himself what was his duty to his sister’s child? not to plunge her into poverty and the cares of life in order to get rid of the responsibility from his own shoulders. Oh no, that could never be his duty. But, at the same time, on the other hand, to leave her in the care of a good husband was the best thing that could happen to any girl. He knew enough of Mr. Asquith to be sure that he would be a good husband. He was a good man, a man quite superior to the ordinary type; though the curate was not very popular at the Hall, still the Squire had perception enough to know this—that he was above the average, not at all a common man. And he must be very much in love with Mary, knowing that she had no money and no expectations, to have subjected himself to such a cross-examination as Mr. Prescott knew he had inflicted, on her account. Enlightened by his wife’s remarks, the Squire thought the matter all over again from another point of view. The man was very poor, but then Mary was very simple in her tastes, and if the girl really preferred to marry him in a cottage, rather than to live on at the Hall, perhaps it was true that her uncle had no right to cross her. It was not exactly, he said to himself, as if he were her father. She had always been a docile little thing, but his wife seemed to think that there was a possibility that in this matter Mary might not be so docile, that she might take her own way; and if she did so there would be a breach in the family, and he would be compelled to withdraw his protection from her, and her mother’s story might be enacted over again. Mary’s mother’s story had not been happy. She too had been asked in marriage by a poor man, and had been refused by her father. And she had run away with her lover, and had suffered more than Mr. Prescott liked to think of before she died. He said to himself now that perhaps if his father had consented, if they had tried to help Burnet on instead of letting him sink, things might have been different. Anyhow, he would never allow that episode to be repeated. And if Mary would marry Mr. Asquith, she must do it with the consent of her people, and everything that could be done must be done for her husband.

He went across the park to the rectory and consulted his brother Hugh on the subject, who was first amused and then shook his head. “I knew there would be mischief when I saw what kind of a man the fellow was,” the rector said.

“What kind of a man! Why, he is not a lady’s man at all, he plays no tennis, he never comes up in the afternoon, he seems to care nothing for society. Neither John nor the girls can make anything of him.”

“Ah, that’s the dangerous sort,” said the Rev. Hugh, “there’s no flutter in him. He settles on one, and there’s an end of it. He’s a terrible fellow to stick to a thing. Take my word for it, John, you’ll have to give in.”

The Squire liked this view of the subject less than his wife’s view, and went home roused and irritated, vowing that he would not give in. But by that time he found Anna and Sophie discussing Mary’s trousseau, and the whole household astir. “Of course she must have her things nice, and plenty of them, for one never knows whether she will be able to get any more when they’re done,” her cousins said. They were very good-natured. They never doubted the propriety of accepting the curate, and were, indeed, very strong in their mother’s view of the subject—that seeing the uncertainty of life and the possibility any day of “something happening” to papa, to get Mary off the hands of the family and settled for life was a thing in every way to be desired. Mr. Prescott naturally did not contemplate the likelihood of “something happening” to himself with so much philosophy. But as they were all of one accord on the subject, and his own thoughts so much divided, he gave in, of course, as everybody knew he would do.