The Two Marys

by Mrs. Oliphant

Geoff sat late that night thinking over all that had happened and was going to happen. He had begun to ask himself what he could do to make a little money, and the answer had not been a satisfactory one. It is very common in novels, and even in society, to represent every young man who is without occupation as doing literary work and finding it always ready to his hand. And, naturally, Geoff thought of that among other things. But he did not know what to write about, nor to whom to take his productions if they were written. He knew what he had learned at school and at Oxford, but he did not know very much else. Classics and philosophy are very excellent things, but it is hard to make money of them immediately, save by being a professor or a schoolmaster, which were occupations Geoff did not incline to and was not fitted for. He did not understand much about politics; he was not deeply read in general literature; he had no imagination of the creative sort. In short, like a great many others, though he had all the will in the world to embrace the profession of literature, which seems such an easy one, he did not know how to do it; and to hope to support his mother and her sister upon the few briefs which he was likely to get was ridiculous. As well attempt to support them by sweeping chimneys. He reflected with a doleful smile that even that required, if not special aptitude, at least special training, of which he had none. He was thinking of this drearily enough long after the rest of the household had, as he supposed, gone to bed, and all was still.

Suddenly his door creaked a little, softly opened, and his mother stole in. She was dressed in an old-fashioned dressing-gown, of what was then called a shawl pattern, with a muslin cap on her head tied round with a broad black ribbon. She had been going to bed, but had not been able to go to bed without a little reconciliation and kind good-night to her boy. “Did we quarrel, mother? I did not know it,” he said.

“Oh, quarrel, Geoff! we never quarrelled in our lives. You have always been the best of sons, and I hope I have always appreciated you. I couldn’t go to bed, my darling boy, if there was the least little thing between me and you.”

“But there is nothing, mother,” he said, caressing the hand she had laid upon his.

“Yes, there is something; I could not rest for thinking of it. Oh, is it true, my darling, is it true that you want to be—married? If you had that in your mind I would never stand in your way, you may be sure never, whatever it might cost me. What is my happiness but in seeing yours, my boy? I would never say a word. I would give up and go away; oh, not far, to vex you, only far enough not to be spying upon you and her; to leave you free, if you are sure it is really, really for your happiness, my own boy.”

“Mother!” cried Geoff, staring at her, “I think you must have taken leave of your senses. I—marry? at such a moment as this?”

“Anna thinks it would be the only thing to do. She thinks, Geoff, she says, it is—the youngest of the two.”

Here Geoff, unable to quench entirely the traitor in him, blushed like a girl, growing red up to his hair under his mother’s jealous eyes. “This is mere folly,” he said, trying to laugh. “Why, I have only seen her twice.”

“Sometimes that is enough,” Mrs Underwood said mournfully. “Things look so different at my time of life and yours. I dare say you think it is very fine to fall in love at first sight; but oh, when you think of it—on one side those that have loved you and cherished you all your life, on the other somebody you know nothing about—that you have only seen twice!”

“My dear mother,” the young man said. He made this beginning as if he intended to follow it up with a warm disclaimer and protestation of his own superiority to any such youthful delusion. But when he had said these words he stopped short suddenly and said no more.