Then he had risen up quickly, and said, "Well, you know all now. We will talk of something else." But she only shook her head and moved away, and, as we have seen, went to bed.
The next morning they met calmly enough. On his side it was done with an effort; on hers without effort, yet with a little trembling fear, which went when she saw his calm, and she poured out tea, and he drank it, and only a rather extraordinary silence told of too much having being said the night before.
Now, why was all this? Why were this man and this young English girl travelling thus to the sweet south coast, and to expecting friends?
While they are travelling on their way, we, you and I, dear reader, will not only get on before them, but also turn back the pages of life's story, and read its secrets.
They were going to a great house in a fine park, where fern waved its tall, mounted feathers of green, and hid the dappled deer from sight-- where great ancestral oaks spread protecting branches; where hawthorn trees, that it had taken three generations of men to make, stood, large, thick, knotted, twisted--strange, dark, stunted looking trees they looked, till spring came, and no green was like their green, and the glory of their flower-wreaths people made pilgrimages to see. The place was called Beremouth.
A mile and a half off was a town; one of those odd little old places which tell of days and fashions past away. A very respectable place. There had lived in Marston the dowager ladies of old country families, in houses which had no pretensions to grandeur as you passed them in the extremely quiet street, but which on the other side broke out into bay windows, garden fronts, charming conservatories, and a [{19}] good many other things which help to make life pleasant. So the inhabitants of Marston were not all mere country-town's people. They knew themselves to be somebodies and they never forgot it.
Now, in this town dwelt a certain widow lady; poor she was, but she had a pedigree and two beautiful daughters. Mary and Lucia Morier were not two commonly, or even uncommonly, pretty girls; they were wonderfully beautiful, people said, and nothing less. So lovers came a courting. One married a Scotchman, a Mr. Erskine. They liked each other quite well enough, Lucia thought, when she made her promises, and received his; and so they did. They lived happily; did good; wished for children but never had any, and so adopted Mr. Erskine's orphan nephew--namely, the very man who behaved with such strange imprudence in the inn at Hull. Mr. Erskine the uncle was twenty years older than Mrs. Erskine the aunt. Mr. Erskine the younger was but a child when they adopted him. But he was their heir, as well as the inheritor of his father's' fortune, and they loved and cared for him.
Mary Morier did differently. She married at twenty, her younger sister having married the month before at eighteen. Mary did differently, for she did imprudently. They had had a brother who was an agent for certain mines thirty miles off; and there he lived; but he came home often enough, and made the house in the old town gay. A year before the sister married, in fact while that sister was away on a visit to friends in Scotland, the brother came home ill. He was ill for six months. It is wonderful how much expense is incurred by a mother in six months for a son who is sick. It made life very difficult. The money to pay for Lucia's journey home had to be thought of. To be sure, she was not there to eat and drink, but then her extra finery had cost something. George had only earned one hundred a year. It had not been more than enough to keep him. He came home ill with ten pounds in his pocket, beside his half-year's rent, which would be due the next month--certainly money at this time was wanted, for our friends were sadly pinched. But the one most exemplary friend and servant Jenifer was paid her wages, and tea and sugar money to the day; and the doctor got so many guineas that he grew desperate and suddenly refused to come--then repented, and made a Christian-like bargain, that he would go on coming on condition that he never saw another piece of any kind of money.
Mary and her mother looked each other in the face one day, and that look told all. There was some plate, and they had watches, and a little fine old-fashioned jewelry--yes, they must go. They were reduced to poverty at last--this was more than "limited means"--hard penury had them with a desperate grasp.
Fortune comes in many shapes, and not often openly, and with a flourish of trumpets--neither did she come in that way now; but shamefacedly, sneakingly, and ringing the door-bell with a meek, not to say tremulous pull; and her shape was that of a broad-built, short, wide-jawed, lanky-haired, pig-eyed, elderly man, with a curious quantity of waistcoat showing, yet, generally, well dressed. "Your mistress at home?" "Yes, Mr. Brewer." "Mr. George better?" "No. Never will be, sir." "Bless me! I beg your pardon!" "Granted before 'tis asked, sir." "Ah! yes; I have a little business to transact with your mistress. Can I see her alone?" Mr. Brewer was shown by Jenifer into the little right-hand parlor. He gravely took out a huge pocket-book, and then a small parchment-covered account-book appeared. I believe he had persuaded himself that he was really going to transact business, and not to perform the neatest piece of deception that a [{20}] respectable gentleman ever attempted. A lady entered the room. "Madam, jour son has been my agent for mines three years--my mine and land agent since Christmas. He takes the additional work at seventy-five pounds a year extra. The half of that is now due to him. I pay that myself. I have brought it" And thirty-seven pounds ten shillings Mr. Brewer put on the table, saying, "I will take your receipt, madam. Don't trouble Georges's head about business; for when you do speak of that you will have, I am sorry to say, to inform him that in both his places I have had to put another man. I have to give George three months' payment at the rate of one hundred and seventy pounds a year, as I gave him no quarter's warning. That is business, do you understand?" asked Mr. Brewer. "It is for my son to discharge himself, sir--since he cannot"--the mother's voice faltered. "Ah--only he didn't, and I did," said Mr. Brewer. "Your receipt? When your son recovers, let him apply to me. I am sorry to end our connexion so abruptly. But it is business. Business, you know"--and there Mr. Brewer stopped, for Mary Morier was in the room, and her beauty filled it, or seemed to do so. And Mr. Brewer departed muttering, as he had muttered before often, "the most beautiful girl in the world." Still, he had an uncomfortable sensation, for he felt he was an underhand sneak, and that Mary had found him out; and so she had. She knew that her brother had been "discharged" only to afford a pretext for giving the quarter's money; and she was sure that his being land agent, at an additional seventy-five pounds a year, was a pure unadulterated fiction.