‘That was how I always deceived myself,’ she said. ‘It was so base of me at first; I wanted to marry him because he was rich. And then I thought it was Lucy he liked; she was so young and so pretty—’ Then she made a long pause, and put my hands upon her hot cheeks and covered herself with them. ‘Your hands are so cool,’ she said, ‘and so soft and kind. I am going to marry him now, Mrs. Mulgrave, and he is poor.’
This is a kind of postscript to the story, but still it is so connected with it that it is impossible to tell the one without the other. We were much agitated about this marriage on the Green. If Gerald Gresham had been rich, it would have been a different matter. But a stockbroker’s son, with disgrace in the family, and poor. I don’t know any one who was not sorry for Mrs. Stoke under this unexpected blow. But I was not sorry for Lottie. Gerald, naturally, is not fond of coming to the Green, but I see them sometimes in London, and I think they suit each other. He tells me of poor Ada every time I see him. And I believe old Mr. Gresham is very indignant at Harry’s want of spirit in not beginning again, and at Ada for giving up her settlement, and at Gerald for expending his money to help them—‘A pack of fools,’ says the old man. But of course they will all, even the shipwrecked family in America, get something from him when he dies. As for the mother, I met her once at Lottie’s door, getting into her fine carriage with the bays, and she was very affable to me. In her opinion it was all Ada’s fault. ‘What can a man do with an extravagant wife who spends all his money before it is made?’ she said as she got into her carriage; and I found it a little hard to keep my temper. But the Greshams and their story, and all the brief splendours of Dinglewood are almost forgotten by this time by everybody on the Green.
THE SCIENTIFIC GENTLEMAN
PART I
CHAPTER I
There were a great variety of houses on the Green; some of them handsome and wealthy, some very old-fashioned, some even which might be called tumbledown. The two worst and smallest of these were at the lower end of the Green, not far from the ‘Barleymow.’ It must not be supposed however that they were unpleasantly affected by the neighbourhood of the ‘Barleymow.’ They were withdrawn from contact with it quite as much as we were, who lived at the other end; and though they were small and out of repair, and might even look mouldy and damp to a careless passer-by, they were still houses for gentlefolk, where nobody need have been ashamed to live. They were built partly of wood and partly of whitewashed brick, and each stood in the midst of a very luxuriant garden. At the time Mr. Reinhardt, of whom I am going to speak, came to East Cottage, as it was called, the place had been very much neglected; the trees and bushes grew wildly all over the garden; the flower-beds had gone to ruin; the kitchen-garden was a desert, with only a dreary cabbage or great long straggling onion-plant run to seed showing among the gooseberries and currants, which looked like the copsewood in a forest. It is miserable to see a place go to destruction like this, and I could not but reflect often how many poor people there were without a roof to shelter them, while this house was going to ruin for want of an inhabitant. ‘My dear lady, that is communism, rank communism,’ the Admiral said to me when I ventured to express my sentiments aloud; but I confess I never could see it.
The house belonged to Mr. Falkland, who was a distant relation of Lord Goodwin’s, and lived chiefly in London. He was a young man, and a barrister, living, I suppose, in chambers, as most of them do; but I wondered he did not furnish the place and keep it in order, if it had been only for the pleasure of coming down with his friends from Saturday to Monday, to spend Sunday in the country. When I suggested this, young Robert Lloyd, Mrs. Damerel’s brother, took it upon him to laugh.
‘There is nothing to do here,’ he said. ‘If it were near the river, for boating, it would be a different matter, or even if there was a stream to fish in; but a fellow has nothing to do here, and why should Falkland come to bore himself to death?’ Thus the young man ended with a sigh for himself, though he had begun with a laugh at me.
‘If he is so afraid to be bored himself,’ said I—for I was rather angry to hear our pretty village so lightly spoken of—‘I am sure he must know quantities of people who would not be bored. Young barristers marry sometimes, I suppose, imprudently, like other young people——’
‘Curates, for instance,’ said Robert, who was a saucy boy.