There was a little mystery and a little doubt about her, and while neither the mystery nor the doubt was sufficient to disquiet anyone, it served to keep interest in her alive, and the more prudent and calculating of suitors from love-making. Individually she was popular; but while those who knew her spoke well of her in her absence, the good things said of her always began in superlatives, and, as the conversation went on, diminished to positives, and the talk usually ended with a vague "but" and an unfinished sentence.
Perhaps she was a little odd, they said. Perhaps she had French blood in her veins. Perhaps the strange blood was Spanish. She had a look not wholly English—a look denoting no close kinship with any other people. Her name was Muir, which seemed to indicate that she came of a stock north of the Tweed. Yet she had never been in Scotland, nor her father before her, nor anyone of his side, as far as he could trace back. Her mother had been the daughter of a Truro solicitor, her father a member of the Equity bar of London. Those who had known her father and mother declared that she resembled neither in her face nor her manner. She was dark, low-sized, and odd; they had both been tall, fair, and models of conventional insipidity.
When Henry Walter Grey married Miss Muir she was twenty-four years of age, he twenty-nine. The women judged her to be thirty-four, the men allowed that she might be twenty-seven; but all agreed that young Grey, with his prospects, might have done much better as far as money went.
But among the young and the chivalric of Daneford, young Grey helped forward his nascent popularity by marrying a poor wife and risking his father's displeasure for his sweetheart's sake. The young and chivalric of Daneford were never tired of pointing to the pleasantest and most prosperous man in the city as one who had made his love paramount above all other considerations in the selection of a wife.
From the time he won his wife until he lost her his manner towards her gained him daily increase of respect among the people of the city. Every indulgence and luxury which his position could afford were lavished upon her. Wives who had cause of displeasure or dissatisfaction with their husbands always cited Mr. Grey as a shining contrast to their own too economical or exacting lords. It was not alone that she was never denied anything for which she could reasonably care, but, notwithstanding the clubs and the institutions and the boards of which Mr. Grey was a member, no more domestic man lived in Daneford. He always dined at home, except on occasions of great public interest; and when he had no guests he sat reading or conversing with her, or they both went for a stroll in the fine twilight, or visited the theatre, or any other form of public amusement afforded by the town.
As the years of their married life glided by, and no child came to make an endearing interruption to the smooth course of wedded sweethearts, the attachment between the husband and wife seemed to borrow a greater depth from the soft melancholy arising out of their childless condition. It was, the town said, a thousand pities the rich, amiable, amusing, good-looking Wat Grey had no one to leave his fine business and his vast fortune to.
If a friend alluded to the fact of his childlessness he always put the subject aside with as little humour and as much gentleness as the character of the speaker allowed of. To his wife, who often made tearful allusions to the circumstance, he replied with cheerful hopefulness, and bade her set her grief for him away, as he was quite content and happy with the blessings Heaven had already sent him, chief among which was a wife he loved.
Although Mrs. Grey did not go into society, and had no ladies to dinner, she had a few visiting friends upon whom she called in turn, and who learned from her the uniform kindliness of her husband, and the great gentleness with which he accepted the absence of an heir or heiress.
In fact, the more people heard of Mr. Grey, the more he grew in popular esteem, and behind all this amiability on his part there was a factor which hugely multiplied its value. At first, when he brought his wife home to Daneford, and the people of his set began to know her a little, they all declared that she was pretty, very pretty, and a trifle odd.
Time went on, and although she lost none of her prettiness with her years—hers being the beauty that depends on bone and outline, and not on surface and colour—her peculiarities gained upon her; and whether, the Daneford folk said, it was the foreign blood that darkened her eyes and her hair and her ways, or a slight strain of madness, they could not decide, but she was, beyond all doubt, not in manner like the average English-woman of her class.