Mrs. Toft rubbed her nose. “We’d be willing if that were all,” she said. “She’d come to us sometimes, and there’d be no call for us to go to her.”
Mr. Colet looked at Etruria. “If Etruria will come to me,” he said, “I will be ashamed neither of her nor her parents.”
“Bravely said!” Mary cried.
“But there’s more to it than that,” Mrs. Toft objected. “A deal more. Mr. Colet nor ’Truria can’t live upon air. And it’s my opinion that if his reverence gets a curacy, he’ll lose it as soon as it’s known who his wife is. And he can’t dig and he can’t beg, and where’ll they be with the parsons all sticking to one another as close as wax?”
“He’ll not need them!” replied a new speaker, and that speaker was Toft. He had entered silently, none of them had seen him, and the interruption took them aback. “He’ll not need them,” he repeated, “nor their curacies. He’ll not need to dig nor beg. There’s changes coming. There’s changes coming for more than him, Miss. If Mr. Colet’s willing to take my girl she’ll not go to him empty-handed.”
“I will take her as she stands,” Mr. Colet said, his eyes shining. “She knows that.”
“Well, you’ll take her, sir, asking your pardon, with what I give her,” Toft answered. “And that’ll be five hundred pounds that I have in hand, and five hundred more that I look to get. Put ’em together and they’ll buy what’s all one with a living, and you’ll be your own rector and may snap your fingers at ’em!”
They stared at the man, while Mrs. Toft, in an awestruck tone, cried, “You’re out of your mind, Toft! Five hundred pounds! Whoever heard of the like of us with that much money?”
“Silence, woman,” Toft said. “You know naught about it.”
“But, Toft,” Mary said, “are you in earnest? Do you understand what a large sum of money this is?”