“I suppose he means to take it off his legacy,” said the Squire, pale with emotion; “if you’ve got a thousand pounds to dispose of, you had better look a little nearer home. There’s Percy always drawing upon me, and there’s the house falling to pieces——”
“Or if you want to give it away, give it to your sisters, who have a great deal more to keep up with their little money than ever Mary will have,” Mrs. Prescott said.
John did not say much. “I’ve thpoken to Bateman about the thettlement,” he informed them, looking round dully with those unsteady eyes of his, with an awkward jerk of his head and twist of his face to arrest the fall of the eyeglass. The family, looking at him, were all exceptionally impressed with the dulness of John’s appearance, the queerness of his aspect. Really he did not look as if he were “all there.” But they were perfectly convinced they might move Horton House as soon as John, and that the settlement on Mary, which they all thought so completely unnecessary, was an accomplished thing.
Mary was more affected by it than she had ever been by anything in her life. John!—she said to herself that he had always taken her part, always been kind to her. Like the rest of the family, she had regretted sometimes that the dashing Percy, who was so much nicer to look at, so much more of a personage, so full of spirit and life, had not been the elder brother. But Percy would have kept all his pounds to himself, everybody knew, though he had the air of being far more open-handed than his brother. Percy, however, on this emergency came out too in a very good light. He sent her a set of gold ornaments, a necklace and a bracelet of Indian work, for he was in India at the time, along with a delightful letter, asking how she could answer to herself for marrying first of all, she, who had always been the little one, and who could only be, Percy thought, about fifteen now. “Tell Asquith I think he is a very lucky fellow,” Percy wrote. John never said a word, even at the wedding breakfast, when it was expected he should propose the health of the bride and bridegroom. All that he did was to get up from his seat, looking about him dully with those unsteady eyes, give a gasp like a fish, and then sit down again, his eyeglass rattling against his plate as it fell, which was the only sound he produced. But everybody knew what he meant, which was the great matter. And as for the “thettlement,” the wisest man in England could not have arranged it more securely than John had done.
And so Mary and the curate were married in the late autumn, when the leaves were covering all the country roads, and the November fogs were coming on.
CHAPTER IX.
“HAPPY EVER AFTER.”
THE Asquiths, though they were so poor, got on very pleasantly at first. Mary had forty-five pounds a year from her thousand, and thought herself a millionaire; and Uncle Hugh gave the curate twenty pounds more in lieu of the lodgings, which were not adapted for a married man. With this twenty pounds they got a very pretty cottage—a little house which Mr. Prescott said was good enough for anybody; where, indeed, the widow of the last rector had lived till her death; and which had a pleasant garden, and was far above the pretensions of people possessing an income which even with these additions only came to a hundred and sixty-five pounds a year. The house was furnished for them, almost entirely by their kind friends—a very large contribution coming from the Hall, where there were many rooms that were never used, and even in the lumber-room many articles that were good to fill up. In this way the new married pair acquired some things that were very good and charming, and some things that were much the reverse. They got some Chippendale chairs, and an old cabinet which was in point of taste enough to make the fortune of any house; but they also got a number of things manufactured in the first half of the present century, of which the least said the better. They did not themselves much mind, and probably, being uninstructed, preferred the style of George IV. to that of Queen Anne.
And thus they lived very happily for two or three years. They lived very happy ever after, might indeed have been said of them, as if they had made love and married in a fairy tale. No words could have described their condition better. Mary, delivered from the small talk of the Horton drawing-room, and living in constant companionship with a man of education, whose tastes were more cultivated and developed than those of the race of squires, which was all she had hitherto known, brightened in intelligence as well as in happiness, and with the quick receptivity of her age grew into, without labour, that atmosphere of culture and understanding which is the fine fleur of education. She did not actually know much more, perhaps, than she had known in her former condition; but she began to understand all kinds of allusions, and to know what people meant when they quoted the poets, or referred to those great characters in fiction who are the most living people under the sun. She no longer required to have things explained to her of this kind. And as for the curate, it was astonishing how he brightened and softened, and became reconciled to the facts of existence; and found beauty and sweetness in those common paths which he had been disposed to look upon with hasty contempt. No two people in the world, perhaps, can live so much together, share everything so entirely, become one another, so to speak, in so complete a way as a country clergyman and his wife. Except the writing of his sermons, there was no part of his work into which Mr. Asquith’s young wife did not enter; and even the sermons, which were all read to her before they were preached, were the better for Mary; for the curate was quick to note when her attention failed, when her eyelids drooped, as they did sometimes, over her eyes. She was far too loyal, and too much an enthusiast, you may be sure, ever to allow in words that those prelections were less than perfect; but Mr. Asquith was clever enough to see that sometimes her attention flagged. Once or twice, before the first year was out, Mary nodded while she listened—a delinquency which she denied almost furiously, with the wrath of a dove; and which was easily explained by the fact that she was at that moment “not very strong:” but which nevertheless Mr. Asquith, as he laughed and kissed her and said, “That was too much for you, Mary,” took to heart. “Too much for me!” she cried; “if you mean far finer and higher than anything I could reach by myself, of course you are quite right, Henry; but only in that sense,” the tears coming into her eyes in the indignation of her protest. The curate did not insist, nor try to prove to her that she had indeed dozed, which some men would have done. He was too delicate and tender for any such brutal ways of proving himself in the right; but, all the same, he laid that involuntary criticism to heart, to the great advantage of his preaching. Thus they did each other mutual good.