Wrecked in Port: A Novel

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WRECKED IN PORT.

EDMUND YATES'S NOVELS.

In boards, 2s. each; in cloth, 2s. 6d. each.

RUNNING THE GAUNTLET.
KISSING THE ROD.
ROCK AHEAD.
BLACK SHEEP.
RIGHTED WRONG.
YELLOW FLAG.
IMPENDING SWORD.
A WAITING RACE.
BROKEN TO HARNESS.
TWO BY TRICKS.
A SILENT WITNESS.
DR. WAINWRIGHT'S PATIENTS.
NOBODY'S FORTUNE.
WRECKED IN PORT.
THE BUSINESS OF PLEASURE.

WRECKED IN PORT.

A Novel.

BY

EDMUND YATES,

AUTHOR OF "THE ROCK AHEAD," "BLACK SHEEP," "LAND AT LAST," ETC.

"All things that are
Are more with spirit chased than enjoyed."

SHAKESPEARE.

LONDON:
GEORGE ROUTLEDGE AND SONS,
BROADWAY, LUDGATE HILL.
NEW YORK: 416, BROOME STREET.
1879.

TO

FRANK IVES SCUDAMORE

This Book

IS VERY CORDIALLY INSCRIBED.

WRECKED IN PORT.

[CHAPTER I.]

MORIBUND.

"I say! Old Ashurst's going to die."

"No! How do you know? Who told you?"

"I heard Dr. Osborne say so to Miss Winter."

"Ah! so likely Dr. Osborne would tell that old beast! Why was its name throughout doctors are the silentest fellows in the world. My uncle Robert is a doctor, and I know all about it."

"Well, I'll take my dick I heard old Osborne say so! I say, Hawkes, if Ashurst does die, we shall break up at once, sha'n't we?"

"I should think so! Stunning!"

"And we sha'n't come back till there's a new head master?"

"Of course not, you young ass! That don't matter much to me; I'm going to leave this term."

"Don't I wish I was, that's all! I say, Hawkes, do you think the governors will give old Ashurst's place to Joyce?"

"Joyce?--that snob! Not they, indeed! They'll get a swell from Oxford, or somewhere, to be head master; and I should think he'll give Master Joyce the sack. Baker, lend me twopence!"

"No--I say, Hawkes, you owe me----"

"I know all about that, you young beggar--pay you on Saturday. Hand out now, or I'll fetch you a lick on the head."

Under the pressure of this awful threat, little Sam Baker produced the required sum from his trousers-pocket, and gave the coins to big Alfred Hawkes, who threw them into the air, caught them over-handed, and walked off, whistling. Little Sam Baker, left to himself, turned out the pocket of his trousers, which he had not yet explored, found a half-melted acidulated drop sticking in one corner, removed it, placed it in his mouth, and enjoyed it with great relish. This refection finished, he leaned his little arms over the park-paling of the cricket-field, where the above-described colloquy had taken place, and surveyed the landscape. Immediately beneath him was a large meadow, from which the hay had been just removed, and which, looking brown and bare and closely shorn as the chin of some retired Indian civilian, remained yet fragrant from its recent treasure. The meadow sloped down to a broad sluggishly-flowing stream, unnavigated and unnavigable, where the tall green flags, standing breast-high, bent and nodded gracefully, under the influence of the gentle summer breeze, to the broad-leaved water-lilies couchant below them. A notion of scuttling across the meadow and having "a bathe" in a sequestered part of the stream which he well knew, faded out of little Sam Baker's mind before it was half formed. Though a determined larker and leader in mischief among his coevals, he was too chivalrous to take advantage of the opportunity which their chief's illness gave him over his natural enemies, the masters. Their chief's illness! And little Sam Baker's eyes were lifted from the river and fixed themselves on a house about a quarter of a mile further on--a low-roofed, one-storeyed, red-brick house, with a thatched roof and little mullioned windows, from one of which a white blind was fluttering in the evening breeze. "That's his room," said little Sam Baker to himself. "Poor old Ashurst! He wasn't half a bad old chap; he often let me off a hundred lines he--poor old Ashurst!" And two large tears burst from the small boy's eyes and rolled down his cheeks.

The boy was right. Where the white blind fluttered was the dominie's bedroom, and there the dominie lay dying. A gaunt, square, ugly 'room with panelled walls, on which the paint had cracked and rubbed and blistered, with such furniture as it possessed old-fashioned, lumbering, and mean, with evidence of poverty everywhere--evidence of poverty which a woman's hand had evidently tried to screen and soften without much effect. The bed, its well-worn red-moreen curtains, with a dirty yellow border, having been tightly bound round each sculptured post for the admittance of air, stood near the window, on which its occupant frequently turned his glazed and sunken eyes. The sun had gone to rest, the invalid had marked its sinking, and so had those who watched him, and the same thought had occurred to all, but not a word had been spoken; but the roseate flush which it leaves behind still lingered in the heavens, and, as if in mockery, lent momentarily to the dying man's cheek a bright healthy hue such as it was not destined to wear in life again. The flush grew fainter, and faded away, and then a glance at the face, robbed of its artificial glory, must have been conclusive as to the inevitable result. For the cheeks were hollow and sunken, yellowish-white in colour, and cold and clammy to the touch; the eyes, with scarcely any fire left in them, seemed set in large bistre rings; the nose was thin and pinched, and the bloodless lips were tightly compressed with an expression of acute pain.

The Rev. James Ashurst was dying. Every one in Helmingham knew that, and nearly every one had a word of kindness and commiseration for the stricken man, and for his wife and daughter. Dr. Osborne had carried the news up to the Park several days previously, and Sir Thomas had hemmed and coughed; and said, "Dear me!" and Lady Churchill had shaken her head piteously on hearing it. "And nothing much to leave in the way of--eh, my dear doctor?" It was the doctor's turn to shake his head then, and he solaced himself with a large pinch of snuff, taken in a flourishing and sonorous manner, before he replied that he believed matters in that way were much worse than people thought; that he did not believe there was a single penny--not a single penny: indeed, it was a thing not to be generally talked of, but he might mention it in the strictest confidence to Sir Thomas and my lady, who had always proved themselves such good friends to the Ashursts--that was, he had mentioned to Mrs. Ashurst that there was one faint hope of saving her husband's life, if he would submit to a certain operation which only one man in England, Godby of St. Vitus's Hospital in London, could perform. But when he had mentioned Godby's probable fee--and you could not expect these eminent men to leave their regular work, and come down such a long distance under a large sum--he saw at once how the land lay, and that it was impossible for them to raise the money. Miss Ashurst--curious girl that, so determined and all that kind of thing--had indeed pressed him so hard that he had sent his man over to the telegraph-office at Brocksopp with a message inquiring what would be Godby's exact charge for running down--it was a mere question of distance with these men, so much a mile, and so much for the operation--but he knew the sum he had named was not far out.

From the Park, Dr. Osborne had driven his very decorous little four-wheeler to Woolgreaves, the residence of the Creswells, his other great patients, and there he had given a modified version of his story, with a very much modified result. For old Mr. Creswell was away in France, and neither of the two young ladies was of an age to feel much sympathy, unless with their intimate relations, and they had been educated abroad, and seen but little of the Helmingham folk; and as for Tom Creswell, he was the imp of the school, having all Sam Baker's love of mischief without any of his good heart, and would not have oared who was ill or who died, provided illness or death afforded occasion for slacking work and making holiday. Every one else in the parish was grieved at the news. The rector--bland, polished, and well endowed with worldly goods--had been most actively compassionate towards his less fortunate brother; the farmers, who looked upon "Master Ashurst" as a marvel of book-learning, the labourers, who had consented to the removal of the village sports, held from time immemorial on the village green, to a remote meadow, whence the noise could not penetrate to the sick man's room, and who had considerately lowered the matter as well as the manner of their singing as they passed the schoolhouse at night in jovial chorus--all these people pitied the old man dying, and the old wife whom he would leave behind. They did not say much about the daughter; when they referred to her it was generally to the effect that she would manage tolerably well for herself, for "she were a right plucked un, Miss Marian were."

They were right. It needed little skill in physiognomy to trace, even under the influence of the special circumstances surrounding her, the pluck and spirit and determination in every feature of Marian Ashurst's face. They were patent to the most ordinary beholder; patent in the brown eye, round rather than elongated, small yet bright as a beryl; in the short sharply curved nose, in the delicately rounded chin, which relieved the jaw of a certain fulness, sufficiently characteristic, but scarcely pretty. Variety of expression was Marian's great charm; her mobile features acting under every impulse of her mind, and giving expression to her every thought. Those who had seen her seldom, or only in one mood, would scarcely have recognised her in another. To the old man, lying stretched on his death-bed, she had been a fairy to be worshipped, a plaything to be for ever prized. In his presence the brown eyes were always bright, the small, sharp, white teeth gleamed between the ripe red lips, and one could scarcely have traced the jaw, that occasionally rose rigid and hard as iron, in the soft expanse of the downy cheek. Had he been able to raise his eyes, he would have seen a very different look in her face as, after bending over the bed and ascertaining that her father slept, she turned to the other occupant of the room, and said, more in the tone of one pondering over and repeating something previously heard than of a direct question----

"A hundred and thirty guineas, mother!"

For a minute Mrs. Ashurst made her no reply. Her thoughts were far away. She could scarcely realise the scene passing round her, though she had pictured it to herself a hundred times in a hundred different phases. Years ago--how many years ago it seemed!--she was delicate and fragile, and thought she should die before her husband, and she would lie awake for hours in the night, rehearsing her own death-bed, and thinking how she should tell James not to grieve after her, but to marry again, anybody except that Eleanor Shaw, the organist's daughter, and she should be sorry to think of that flighty minx going through the linen and china after she was gone. And now the time had really come, and he was going to be taken from her; he, her James, with his big brown eyes and long silky hair, and strong lithe figure, as she first remembered him--going to be taken from her now, and leave her an old woman, poor and lone and forlorn--and Mrs. Ashurst tried to stop the tears which rolled down her face, and to reply to her daughter's strange remark.

"A hundred and thirty guineas! yes, my dear, you're thinking of Mr.---- I forget his name--the surgeon. That was the sum he named."

"You're sure of it, mother?"

"Certain sure, my dear! Mr. Casserly, Dr. Osborne's assistant, a very pleasant-spoken young man, showed me the telegraph message, and I read it for myself. It gave me such a turn that I thought I should have dropped, and Mr. Casserly offered me some sal volatile or peppermint--I mean of his own accord, and never intended to charge for it, I am sure."

"A hundred and thirty guineas! and the one chance of saving his life is to be lost because we cannot command that sum! Good God! to think of our losing him for want of---- Is there no one, mother, from whom we could get it? Think, think! It's of no use sitting crying there! Think, is there no one who could help us in this strait?"

The feeling of dignity which Mrs. Ashurst knew she ought to have assumed was scared by her daughter's earnestness, so the old lady merely fell to smoothing her dress, and, after a minute's pause, said in a tremulous voice--

"I fear there is no one, my dear! The rector, I dare say, would do something, but I'm afraid your father has already borrowed money of him, and I know he has of Mr. King, the chairman of the governors of the school. I don't know whether Mr. Casserly----"

"Mr. Casserly, mother, a parish doctor's drudge! Is it likely that he would be able to assist us?"

"Well, I don't know, my dear, about being able, I'm sure he would be willing! He was so kind about that sal volatile that I am sure he would do what---- Lord! we never thought of Mr. Creswell!"

Set and hard as Marian's face had been throughout the dialogue, it grew even more rigid as she heard these words. Her lips tightened, and her brow clouded as she said, "Do you think that I should have overlooked that chance, mother? Do you not know that Mr. Creswell is away in France? He is the very first person to whom I should have thought of applying."

Under any other circumstances, Mrs. Ashurst would have been excessively delighted at this announcement. As it was, she merely said, "The young ladies are at Woolgreaves, I think."

"The young ladies!" repeated Marian, bitterly--"the young ladies! The young dolls--dolts--dummies to try dresses on! What are Maude and Gertrude Creswell to us, mother? What kindness, courtesy even, have they ever shown us? To get at their uncle's purse is what we most need----"

"Oh, Marian, Marian!" interrupted Mrs. Ashurst, "what are you saying?"

"Saying?" replied Marian calmly--"Saying? The truth! What should I say when I know that if we had the command of Mr. Creswell's purse, father's life might--from what I gather from Dr. Osborne, most probably would--be saved! Are these circumstances under which one should be meek and mild and thankful for one's lot in life! Is this a time to talk of gratitude and---- He's moving! Yes, darling father, Marian is here!"

Two hours afterwards, Marian and Dr. Osborne stood in the porch. There were tears in the eyes of the garrulous but kindly old man; but the girl's eyes were dry, and her face was set harder and more rigid than ever. The doctor was the first to speak.

"Good night, my dear child," said he; "and may God comfort you in your affliction. I have given your poor mother a composing draught, and trust to find her better in the morning. Fortunately, you require nothing of that kind. God bless you, dear! It will be a consolation to you, as it is to me, to know that your father, my dear old friend, went off perfectly placid and peacefully."

"It is a consolation, doctor--more especially as I believe such an ending is rare with people suffering under his disease."

"His disease, child? Why, what do you think your father died of?"

"Think, doctor? I know! Of the want of a hundred and thirty guineas!"

[CHAPTER II.]

RETROSPECTIVE.

The Reverend James Ashurst had been head master of the Helmingham Grammar School for nearly a quarter of a century. Many old people in the village had a vivid recollection of him as a young man, with his bright brown hair curling over his coat-collar, his frank fearless glances, his rapid jerky walk. They recollected how he was by no means particularly well received by the powers that then were, how he was spoken of as "one of the new school"--a term in itself supposed to convey the highest degree of opprobrium--and how the elders had shaken their heads and prophesied that no good would come of the change, and that it would have been better to have held on to old Dr. Munch, after all. Old Dr. Munch, who had been Mr. Ashurst's immediate predecessor, was as bad a specimen of the old-fashioned, nothing-doing, sinecure-seeking pedagogue as could well be imagined; a rotund, red-faced, gouty-footed divine, with a thick layer of limp white cravat loosely tied round his short neck, and his suit of clerical sables splashed with a culinary spray; a man whose originally small stock of classical learning had gradually faded away, and whose originally large stock of idleness and self-gratification had simultaneously increased. Forty male children, born in lawful wedlock in the parish of Helmingham, and properly presented on the foundation, might have enjoyed the advantages of a free classical and mathematical education at the Grammar School under the will of old Sir Ranulph Clinton, the founder; but, under the lax rule of Dr. Munch, the forty gradually dwindled to twenty, and of these twenty but few attended school in the afternoon, knowing perfectly that for the first few minutes after coming in from dinner the doctor paid but little attention as to which members of the class might be present, and that in a very few minutes he fell into a state of pleasant and unbroken slumber.

This state of affairs was terrible, and, worst of all, it was getting buzzed abroad. The two or three conscientious boys who really wanted to learn shook their heads in despair, and appealed to their parents to "let them leave;" the score of lads who enjoyed the existing state of affairs were, lad-like, unable to keep it to themselves, and went about calling on their neighbours to rejoice with them; so, speedily, every one knew the state of affairs in Helmingham Grammar School. The trustees of the charity, or "governors," as they were called, had not the least notion how to proceed. They were, for the most part, respectable tradesmen of the place, who had vague ideas about "college" as of a sequestered spot where young men walked about in stuff gowns and trencher caps, and were, by some unexplained circumstance, rendered fit and ready for the bishop to convert into clergymen. There must, they thought, probably be in this "college" some one fit to take the place of old Dr. Munch, who must be got rid of, come what may. At first, the resident "governors"--the tradesmen of Helmingham--thought it best to write to two of their colleagues, who were non-resident, and not by any manner of means tradesmen, being, in fact, two distinguished peers of the realm, who, holding property in the neighbourhood, had, for political reasons, thought fit to cause themselves to be elected governors of old Sir Ranulph Clinton's foundation. The letters explaining the state of affairs and asking for advice were duly written; but matters political were at a standstill just then; there was not the remotest chance of an election for years; and so the two private secretaries of the two noble lords pitched their respective letters into their respective wastebaskets, with mutual grins of pity and contempt for the writers. Thrown back on their own resources, the resident governors determined on applying to the rector; acting under the feeling that he, as a clergyman, must have been to this "college," and would doubtless be able to put them in the way of securing such a man as they required. And they were right. The then rector, though an old man, still kept up occasional epistolary intercourse with such of his coevals as remained at the university in the enjoyment of dignities of fellowships; and, being himself both literate and conscientious, was by no means sorry to lend a hand towards the removal of Dr. Munch, whom he looked upon as a scandal to the cloth. A correspondence entered into between the rector of Helmingham and the Principal of St. Beowulph's College, Oxford, resulted in the enforced resignation of Dr. Munch as the head master of Helmingham Grammar School, and the appointment of the Reverend James Ashurst as his successor. The old doctor took his fate very calmly; he knew that for a long time he had been doing nothing, and had been sufficiently well paid for it. He settled down in a pleasant village in Kent, where an old crony of his held the position of warden to a City Company's charity, and this history knows him no more.

When James Ashurst received his appointment he was about eight-and-twenty, had taken a double second class, had been scholar and tutor of his college, and stood well for a fellowship. By nature silent and reserved, and having found it necessary for the achievement of his position to renounce nearly all society--for he was by no means a brilliant man, and his successes had been gained by plodding industry, and constant application rather than by the exercise of any natural talent--James Ashurst had but few acquaintances, and to them he never talked of his private affairs. They wondered when they heard that he had renounced certain prospects, notably those of a fellowship, for so poor a preferment as two hundred pounds a year and a free house: for they did not know that the odd, shy, silent man had found time in the intervals of his reading to win the heart of a pretty trusting girl, and that the great hope of his life, that of being able to marry her and take her to a decent home of which she would be mistress, was about to be accomplished.

On a dreary, dull day, in the beginning of a bitter January, Mr. Ashurst arrived at Helmingham. He found the schoolhouse dirty, dingy, and uncomfortable, bearing traces everywhere of the negligence and squalor of its previous occupant; but the chairman of the governors, who met him on his arrival, told him that it should be thoroughly cleaned and renovated during the Easter holidays, and the mention of those holidays caused James Ashurst's heart to leap and throb with an intensity with which house-painting could not possibly have anything to do. In the Easter holidays he was to make Mary Bridger his wife, and that thought sustained him splendidly during the three dreary intervening months, and helped him to make head against a sea of troubles raging round him. For the task on which he had entered was no easy one. Such boys as had remained in the school under the easy rule of Dr. Munch were of a class much lower than that for which the benefits of the foundation had been contemplated by the benevolent old knight, and having been unaccustomed to any discipline, had arrived at a pitch of lawlessness which required all the new master's energy to combat. This necessary strictness made him unpopular with the boys, and at first with their parents, who made loud complaints of their children being "put upon," and in some cases where bodily punishment had been inflicted had threatened retribution. Then the chief tradespeople and the farmers, among whom Dr. Munch had been a daily and nightly guest, drinking his mug of ale or his tumbler of brandy-and-water, smoking his long clay pipe, taking his hand at whist, and listening, if not with pleasure, at any rate without remonstrance, to language and stories more than sufficiently broad and indecorous, found that Mr. Ashurst civilly, but persistently, refused their proffered hospitality, and in consequence pronounced him "stuck-up." No man was more free from class prejudices, but he had been bred in old Somerset country society, where the squirearchy maintained an almost feudal dignity, and his career in college had not taught him the policy of being on terms of familiarity with those whom Fortune had made his inferiors.

So James Ashurst struggled on during the first three months of his novitiate at Helmingham, earnestly and energetically striving to do his duty, with, it must be confessed, but poor result. The governors of the school had been so impressed by the rector's recommendation, and by the testimonials which the new master had submitted to them, that they expected to find the regeneration of the establishment would commence immediately upon James Ashurst's appearance upon the scene, and were rather disappointed when they found that, while the number of scholars remained much the same as at the time of Dr. Munch's retirement, the general dissatisfaction in the village was much greater than it had ever been during the reign of that summarily-treated pedagogue. The rector, to be sure, remained true to the choice he had recommended, and maintained everywhere that Mr. Ashurst had done very well in the face of the greatest difficulties, and would yet bring Helmingham into notice. But, notwithstanding constant ocular proof to the contrary, the farmers held that in the clerical profession, as in freemasonry, there was a certain occult something beyond the ordinary ken, which bound members of "the cloth" together, and induced them to support each other to the utmost stretch of their consciences--a proceeding which, in the opinion of freethinking Helmingham, allowed for a considerable amount of elasticity.

At length the long-looked-for Easter tide arrived, and James Ashurst hurried away from the dull gray old midland country village to the bright little Thames-bordered town where lived his love. A wedding with the church approach one brilliant pathway of spring flowers, a honeymoon of such happiness as one knows but once in a lifetime, passed in the lovely Lake country, and then Helmingham again. But with a different aspect. The old schoolhouse itself brave in fresh paint and new plaster, its renovated diamond windows, its cleaned slab so classically eloquent on the merits fundatoris nostri let in over the porch, its newly stuccoed fives' wall and fresh-gravelled playground; all this was strange but intelligible. But James Ashurst could not understand yet the change that had come over his inner life. To return after a hard day's grinding in a mill of boys to his own rooms was, during the first three months of his career at Helmingham, merely to exchange active purpose for passive existence. Now, his life did but begin when the labours of the day were over, and he and his wife passed the evenings together, in planning to combat with the present, in delightful anticipations of the future. Mr. Ashurst unwittingly, and without the least intending it, had made a very lucky hit in his selection of a wife, so far as the Helmingham people were concerned. He was "that bumptious" as they expressed it, or as we will more charitably say, he was sufficiently independent, not to care one rap what the Helmingham people thought of anything he did, provided he had, as indeed at that time he always had--for he was conscientious in the highest degree--the knowledge that he was acting rightly according to his light. In a very few weeks the actual sweetness, the quiet frankness, the most enthusiastic charm of Mrs. Ashurst's demeanour had neutralised all the ill-effects of her husband's three months' previous career. She was a small-boned, small-featured, delicate-looking little woman, and as such excited a certain amount of compassion and kindness amid the midland-county ladies, who, as their husbands said of them, "ran big." It was a positive relief to one to hear her soft little treble voice after the booming diapason of the Helmingham ladies, or to see her pretty little fat dimpled hands flashing here and there in some coquetry of needlework after being accustomed to looking on at the steady play of particularly bony and knuckly members in the unremitting torture of eminently utilitarian employment. High and low, gentle and simple, rich and poor, still felt equally kindly disposed towards Mrs. Ashurst. Mrs. Peacock, wife of Squire Peacock, a tremendous magnate and squire of the neighbouring parish, fell so much in love with her that she made her husband send their only son, a magnificent youth destined eventually for Eton, Oxford, Parliament, and a partnership in a brewery, to be introduced to the Muses as a parlour-boarder in Mr. Ashurst's house; and Hiram Brooks, the blacksmith and minister of the Independent Chapel, who was at never-ending war with all the members of the Establishment, made a special exception in Mrs. Ashurst's favour, and doffed his greasy leathern cap to her as she passed the forge.

And his pretty little wife brought him good fortune, as well as domestic happiness? James Ashurst delighted to think so. His popularity in the village, and in the surrounding country, was on the increase; the number of scholars on the foundership had reached its authorised limit (a source of great gratification, though of no pecuniary profit to the head master); and Master Peacock had now two or three fellow-boarders, each of whom paid a fine annual sum. The governors thought better of their head master now, and the old rector had lived long enough to see his recommendation thoroughly accepted, and his prophecy, as regards the improved status of the school, duly fulfilled. Popular, successful in his little way, and happy in his domestic relations, James Ashurst had but one want. His wife was childless, and this was to him a source of discomfort, always felt and occasionally expressed. He was just the man who would have doated on a child, would have suffered himself to have been pleasantly befooled by its gambols, and have worshipped it in every phase of its tyranny. But it was not to be, he supposed; that was to be the one black drop in his draught of happiness: and then, after he had been married for five or six years, Mrs. Ashurst brought him a little daughter. His hopes were accomplished, but he nearly lost his wife in their accomplishment; while he dandled the newly born treasure in his arms, Mrs. Ashurst's life was despaired of; and when the chubby baby had grown up into a strong child, and from that sphere of life had softened down into a peaceful girl, her mother, always slight and delicate, had become a constant invalid, whose ill-health caused her husband the greatest anxiety, and almost did away with the delight he had in anticipating every wish of his darling little Marian.

James Ashurst had longed for a child, and he loved his little daughter dearly when she came; but even then his wife held the deepest and most sacred place in his heart, and as he marked her faded cheek and lustreless eye, he felt a pang of remorse, and accused himself of having set himself up against the just judgment of Providence, and having now received the due reward of his repining. For one who thought his darling must be restored to health, no sacrifice could be too great to accomplish that result; and the Helmingham people, who loved Mrs. Ashurst dearly, but who in their direst straits were never accustomed to look for any other advice than that which could be afforded them by Dr. Osborne, or his village opponent, Mr. Sharood, were struck with admiration when Dr. Langton, the great county physician, the oracle of Brocksopp, was called into consultation. Dr. Langton was a very little man, noted almost as much for his reticence as his skill. He never wasted a word. After a careful examination of Mrs. Ashurst he pronounced it to be a tiresome case, and prescribed a four months' residence at the baths of Ems as the likely treatment to effect a mitigation, if not a cure. Dr. Osborne, after the great man's departure, laughed aloud in his bluff way at the idea of a country schoolmaster sending his wife to Ems.

"Langton is so much in the habit of going about among the country families, and these novi homines of manufacturers who stink of brass, as they say in these parts, that he forgets there is such a thing as having to look carefully at ways and means, my dear Ashurst, and make both dovetail. Baths of Ems, indeed! I'm afraid you've thrown away your ten guineas, my good friend, if that's all you've got out of Langton!"

But Dr. Osborne's smile was suddenly checked when Mr. Ashurst said very quietly that as his wife's health was dearer to him than anything on earth, and that there was no sacrifice which he would not make to accomplish its restoration, he should find means of sending her to Germany, and keeping her there until it was seen what effect the change had on her.

And he did it! For two successive summers Mrs. Ashurst went to Ems with the old nurse who had brought her up, and accompanied her from her pretty river-side home to Helmingham; and at the end of the second season she returned comparatively well and strong. But she needed all her strength and health when she looked at her husband, who came to meet her in London, and found him thin, changed, round-shouldered, and hollow-eyed, the very shadow of his former self. James Ashurst had carried through his plans as regarded his wife at enormous sacrifice. He had no ready money to meet the sudden call upon his purse which such an expedition rendered necessary, and he had recourse to money-lenders to raise the first loans required, then to friends to pay the interest on and obtain renewals of these loans, then to other moneylenders to replace the original sums, and to other friends to repay a portion of the first friendly loans, until by the time his wife returned from the second visit to the Continent he found himself so inextricably involved that he dare not face his position, dare not think of it himself, much less have taken her into his confidence, and so went blindly on, paying interest on interest, and hoping ever with a vague hope for some relief from his troubles.

That relief never came to James Ashurst in his lifetime. He struggled on in the same hopeless, helpless, hand-to-mouth fashion for about eight years more, always impecunious in the highest degree, always intending to retrieve his fallen fortune, always slowly but surely breaking and becoming less and less of a man under the harass of pecuniary troubles, when the illness which for some time had threatened him set in, and, as we have seen, he died.

[CHAPTER III.]

MARIAN.

The little child who was so long prayed for, and who came at last in answer to James Ashurst's fervent prayers, had nothing during her childhood to distinguish her from ordinary children. It is scarcely worthy of record that her mother had a hundred anecdotes illustrative of her precocity, of her difference from other infants, of certain peculiarities never before noticed in a child of tender years. All mothers say these things whether they believe them or not, and Mrs. Ashurst, stretched on her sick-couch, did believe them, and found in watching what she believed to be the abnormal gambols of her child, a certain relief from the constant, dreary, wearing pain which sapped her strength, and rendered her life void and colourless and unsatisfactory. James Ashurst believed them fervently; even if they had required a greater amount of credulity than that which he was blessed with, he, knowing it gave the greatest pleasure to his wife, would have stuck to the text that Marian was a wonderful, "really, he might say, a very wonderful child." But he had never seen anything of childhood since his own, which he had forgotten, and the awakening of the commonest faculties in his daughter came upon him as extraordinary revelations of subtle character, which, when their possessor had arrived at years of maturity, would astonish the world. The Helmingham people did not subscribe to these opinions. Most of them had children of their own, who, they considered, were quite as eccentric, and odd, and peculiar as Marian Ashurst. "Not that I'm for 'lowin that to be pert and sassy one minute, and sittin' mumchance wi'out sa much as a word to throw at a dog the next, is quite manners," they would say among themselves; "but what's ye to expect? Poor Mrs. Ashurst layin' on the brode of her back, and little enough of that, poor thing, and that poor feckless creature, the schoolmaster, buzzed i' his 'ed wi' book larnin' and that! A pretty pair to bring up such a tyke as Miss Madge!"

That was in the very early days of her life. As the "tyke" grew up she dropped all outward signs of tykishness, and seemed to be endeavouring to prove that eccentricity was the very last thing to be ascribed to her. The Misses Lewin, whose finishing-school was renowned throughout the county, declared they had never had so quick or so hardworking a pupil as Miss Ashurst, or one who had done them so much credit in so short a time. The new rector of Helmingham declared that he should not have known how to get through his class and parish work had it not been for the assistance which he had received from Miss Ashurst at times when--when really--well, other young ladies would, without the slightest harm to themselves, be it said, have been enjoying themselves in the croquet-ground. When the wardrobe woman retired from the school to enter into the bonds of wedlock with the drill-sergeant (whose expansive chest and manly figure, when going through the "exercise without clubs," might have softened Medusa herself), Marian Ashurst at once took upon herself the vacant situation, and resolutely refused to allow any one else to fill it. These may have been put down as eccentricities; they were evidences of odd character certainly not usually found in girls of Marian's age, but they were proofs of a spirit far above tykishness. All her best friends, except, of course, the members of her family whose views regarding her were naturally extremely circumscribed, noticed in the girl an exceedingly great desire for the acquisition of knowledge, a power of industry and application quite unusual, an extraordinary devotion to anything she undertook, which suffered itself to be turned away by no temptation, to be wearied by no fatigue. Always eager to help in any scheme, always bright-eyed and clear-headed and keen-witted, never unduly asserting herself, but always having her own way while persuading her interlocutors that she was following their dictates, the odd shy child grew up into a girl less shy, indeed, but scarcely less odd. And certainly not lovable: those who fought her battles most strongly--and even in that secluded village there were social and domestic battles, strong internecine warfare, carried on with as much rancour as in the great city itself--were compelled to admit there was "a something" in her which they disliked, and which occasionally was eminently repulsive.

This something had developed itself strongly in the character of the child, before she emerged into girlhood; and though it remained vague as to definition, while distinct as to impression in the minds of others, Marian herself understood it perfectly, and could have told any one, had she chosen, what it was that made her unlike the other children, apart from her being brighter and smarter than they, a difference which she also perfectly understood. She would have said, "I am very fond of money, and the others are not; they are content to have food and clothes, but I like to see the money that is paid for them, and to have some of it, all for myself, and to heap it up and look at it, and I am not satisfied as they are, when they have what they want--I want better things, nicer food, and smarter clothes, and more than them, the money. I don't say so, because I know papa hasn't got it, and so he cannot give it to me; but I wish he could. There is no use talking and grumbling about things we cannot have; people laugh at you, and are glad you are so foolish when you do that, so I say nothing about it, but I wish I was rich."

Marian would have made some such answer to any one who should have endeavoured to get at her mind to find out what that was lurking there, never clearly seen, but always plainly felt, which made her "old fashioned," in other than the pathetic and interesting sense in which that expression has come to be used with reference to children, before she had entered upon her teens.

A clever mother would have found out this grave and ominous component of the child's character--would have interpreted the absence of the thoughtless extravagance, so charming, if sometimes so trying, of childhood--would have been quick to have noticed that Marian asked, "What will it cost?" and gravely entered into mental calculation on occasions when other children would have demanded the purchase of a coveted article clamorously, and shrieked if it were refused. But Mrs. Ashurst was not a clever mother--she was only a loving, indulgent, rather helpless one; and the little Marian's careful ways were such a practical comfort to her, while the child was young, that it never occurred to her to investigate their origin, to ask whether such a very desirable and fortunate effect could by possibility have a reprehensible, dangerous, insidious cause. Marian never wasted her pennies, Marian never spoiled her frocks, Marian never lost or broke anything; all these exceptional virtues Mrs. Ashurst carefully noted and treasured in the storehouse of her memory. What she did not notice was, that Marian never gave anything away, never voluntarily shared any of her little possessions with her playfellows, and, when directed to do so, complied with a reluctance which all her pride, all her brave dread of the appearance of being coerced, hardly enabled her to subdue, and suffered afterwards in an unchildlike way. What she did not observe was, that Marian was not to be taken in by glitter and show; that she preferred, from the early days in which her power of exhibiting her preference was limited by the extent of the choice which the toy-merchant---who combined hardbake and hairdressing with ministering to the pleasures of infancy--afforded within the sum of sixpence. If Marian took any one into her confidence, or asked advice on such solemn occasions--generally ensuing on a protracted hoarding of the coin in question--it would not be by the questions, "Is it the prettiest?" "Is it the nicest?" but, "Do you think it is worth sixpence?" and the child would look from the toy to the money, held closely in the shut palm of her chubby hand, with a perturbed countenance, in which the pleasure of the acquisition was almost neutralised by the pain of the payment--a countenance in which the spirit of barter was to be discerned by knowing eyes. But none such took note of Marian's childhood. The illumination of love is rather dazzling than searching in the case of mothers of Mrs. Ashurst's class, and she was dazzled. Marian was perfection in her eyes, and at an age at wthe inversion of the relations between mother and daughter, common enough in later life, would have appeared to others unreasonable, preposterous, Mrs. Ashurst surrendered herself wholly, happily, to the guidance and the care of her daughter. The inevitable self-assertion of the stronger mind took place, the inevitable submission of the weaker. In this instance, a gentle, persuasive, unconscious self-assertion, a joyful yielding, without one traversing thought of humiliation or deposition.

Her daughter was so clever, so helpful, so grave, so good; her economy and management--surely they were wonderful in so young a girl, and must have come to her by instinct?--rendered life such a different, so much easier a thing, delicate as she was, and requiring so disproportionate a share of their small means to be expended on her, that it was not surprising Mrs. Ashurst should see no possibility of evil in the origin of such qualities.

As for Marian's father, he was about as likely to discover a comet or a continent as to discern a flaw in his daughter's moral nature. The child, so longed for, so fervently implored, remained always, in her father's sight, Heaven's best gift to him; and he rejoiced exceedingly, and wondered not a little, as she developed into the girl whom we have seen beside his death-bed. He rejoiced because she was so clever, so quick, so ready, had such a masterly mind and happy faculty of acquiring knowledge; knowledge of the kind he prized and reverenced; of the kind which he felt would remain to her, an inheritance for her life. He wondered why she was so strong, for he knew she did not take the peculiar kind of strength of character from him or from her mother.

It was not to be wondered at that these peculiarities of Marian Ashurst were noticed by the inhabitants of the village where she was born, and where her childish days had been passed; but it was remarkable that they were regarded with anything but admiration. For a keen appreciation of money, and an unfailing determination to obtain their money's worth, had long been held to be eminently characteristic of the denizens of Helmingham. The cheesefactor used to declare that the hardest bargains throughout his county connection were those which Mrs. Croke, and Mrs. Whicher, and, worst of all, old Mrs. M'Shaw (who, though Helmingham born and bred, had married Sandy M'Shaw, a Scotch gardener, imported by old Squire Creswell) drove with him. Not the very best ale to be found in the cellars of the Lion at Brocksopp (and they could give you a good glass of ale, bright, beaming, and mellow, at the Lion, when they choose), not the strongest mahogany-coloured brandy-and-water, mixed in the bar by the fair hands of Miss Parkhurst herself, not even the celebrated rum-punch, the recipe of which, like the songs of the Scandinavian scalds, had never been written out, but had descended orally to old Tilley, the short, stout, rubicund landlord--had ever softened the heart of a Helmingham farmer in the matter of business, or induced him to take a shilling less on a quarter of wheat, or a truss of straw, than he had originally made up his mind to sell it at.

"Canny Helmingham" was its name throughout the county, and its people were proud of it. Mr. Chambré, an earnest clergyman who had succeeded the old rector, had been forewarned of the popular prejudice, and on the second Sunday of his ministry addressed his parishioners in a very powerful and eloquent discourse upon the wickedness of avarice and the folly of heaping up worldly riches; after which, seeing that the only effect his sermon had was to lay him open to palpable rudeness, he wisely concentrated his energies on his translation of Horace's Odes (which has since gained him such great renown, and of which at least forty copies have been sold), and left his parishioners' souls to take care of themselves. But however canny and saving they might be, and however, sharply they might battle with the cheesefactor and look after the dairymaid, as behoved farmers' wives in these awful days of free trade (they had a firm belief in Helmingham that "Cobden," under which generic name they understood it, was a kind of pest, as is the smut in wheat, or the tick in sheep), all the principal dames in the village were greatly shocked at the unnatural love of money which it was impossible to help noticing in Marian Ashurst.

"There was time enow to think o' they things, money and such-like fash, when pipple was settled down," as Mrs. Croke said; "but to see children hardenin' their hearts and scrooin' their pocket-money is unnatural, to say the least of it!" It was unnatural and unpopular in Helmingham. Mrs. Croke put such a screw on the cheesefactor, that in the evening after his dealings with her, that worthy filled the commercial room at the Lion with strange oaths and modern instances of sharp dealing in which Mrs. Croke bore away the palm; but she was highly indignant when Lotty Croke's godmother bought her a savings-bank, a gray edifice, with what theatrical people call a practicable chimney, down which the intended savings should be deposited. Mrs. Whicher's dairymaid, who, being from Ireland, and a Roman Catholic in faith, was looked upon with suspicion, not to say fear, in the village, and who was regarded by the farmers as in constant though secret communication with the Pope of Rome and the Jesuit College generally, declared that her mistress "canthered the life out of her" in the matter of small wages and much work; but Mrs. Whicher's daughter, Emily, had more crimson gowns, and more elegant bonnets, with regular fields of poppies, and perfect harvests of ears of corn growing out of them, than any of her compeers, for which choice articles the heavy bill of Madame Morgan--formerly of Paris, now of Brocksopp--was paid without a murmur. "It's unnat'ral in a gell like Marian Ashurst to think so much o' money and what it brings," would be a frequent remark at one of those private Helmingham institutions known as "thick teas." And then Mrs. Croke would say, "And what like will a gell o' that sort look to marry? Why, a man maun have poun's and poun's before she'd say 'yea' and buckle to!"

But that was a matter which Marian had already decided upon.

[CHAPTER IV.]

MARIAN'S CHOICE.

At a time when it seemed as though the unchildlike qualities which had distinguished the child from her playmates and coevals were intensifying and maturing in the girl growing up, then, to all appearance, hard, calculating, and mercenary, Marian Ashurst fell in love, and thenceforward the whole current of her being was diverted into healthier and more natural channels. Fell in love is the right and the only description of the process so far as Marian was concerned. Of course she had frequently discussed the great question which racks the hearts of boarding-school misses, and helps to fill up the spare time of middle-aged women, with her young companions, had listened with outward calmness and propriety, but with an enormous amount of unshown cynicism, to their simple gushings, and had said sufficient to lead them to believe that she joined in their fervent admiration of and aspiration for young men with black eyes and white hands, straight noses and curly hair. But all the time Marian was building for herself a castle in the air, the proprietor of which, whose wife she intended to be, was a very different person from the hairdressers' dummies whose regularity of feature caused the hearts of her companions to palpitate. The personal appearance of her future husband had never given her an instant's care; she had no preference in the colour of his eyes or hair, in his height, style, or even of his age, except she thought she would rather he were old. Being old, he was more likely to be generous, less likely to be selfish, more likely to have amassed riches and to be wealthy. His fortune would be made, not to be made; there would be no struggling, no self-denial, no hope required. Marian's domestic experiences caused her to hate anything in which hope was required; she had been dosed with hope without the smallest improvement, and had lost faith in the treatment. Marriage was the one chance possible for her to carry out the dearest, most deeply implanted, longest-cherished aspiration of her heart--the acquisition of money and power. She knew that the possession of the one led to the other; from the time when she had saved her schoolgirl pennies and had noticed the court paid to her by her little friends, to the then moment when the mere fact of her having a small stock of ready money, even more than her sense and shrewdness, gave her position in that impecunious household, she had recognised the impossibility of achieving even a semblance of happiness in poverty. When she married, it should be for money, and for money alone. In the hard school of life in which she had been trained she had learned that the prize she was aiming at was a great one, and one difficult to be obtained; but that knowledge only made her the more determined in its pursuit. The difficulties around her were immense; in the narrow circle in which she lived she had not any present chances of meeting with any person likely to be able to give her the position which she sought, far less of rendering him subservient to her wishes. But she waited and hoped; she was waiting and hoping, calmly and quietly fulfilling the ordinary duties of her very ordinary life, but never losing sight of her fixed intent. Then across the path of her life there came a man who seemed to give promise of eventually fulfilling the requirements she had planned out for herself. It was but a promise; there was nothing tangible; but the promise was so good, and the girl's heart yearned for an occupant, for, with all its hard teaching and its worldly aspirations, it was but human after all. So her human heart and her worldly wisdom come to a compromise in the matter of her acceptance of a lover, and the result of that compromise was her engagement to Walter Joyce.

When the Helmingham Grammar School was under the misrule of old Dr. Munch, then at its lowest ebb, and nominations to the foundation were to be had for the asking, and, indeed, in many cases sent a-begging, it occurred to the old head master to offer one of the vacancies to Mr. Joyce, the principal grocer and maltster of the village, whose son was then just of an age to render him accessible to the benefits of the education which Sir Ranulph Clinton had devised to the youth of Helmingham, and which was being so imperfectly supplied to them under the auspices of Dr. Munch. You must not for an instant imagine that the offer was made by the old doctor out of pure loving-kindness and magnanimity; he looked at it, as he did at most things, from a purely practical point of view: he owed Joyce the grocer so much money, and if Joyce the grocer would write him a receipt in full for all his indebtedness in return for a nomination for Joyce junior, at least he, the doctor, would not have done a bad stroke of business. He would have wiped out an existing score, the value of which proceeding meant, in Dr. Munch's eyes, that he would be enabled at once to commence a fresh one, while the acquisition of young Joyce as a scholar would not cause one atom of difference in the manner in which the school was conducted, or rather, left to conduct itself. The offer was worth making, for the debt was heavy, though the doctor was by no means sure of its being accepted. Andrew Joyce was not Helmingham-born; he had come from Spindleton, one of the large inland capitals, and had purchased the business which he owned. He was not popular among the Helmingham folk, who were all strict church-people so far as morning-service attending, tithe-paying, and parson-respecting were concerned, from the fact that his religious tendencies were suspected to be what the villagers termed "Methodee." He had his seat in the village church, it is true, and put in an appearance there on the Sunday morning; but instead of spending the Sabbath evening in the orthodox way--which at Helmingham consisted in sitting in the best parlour with a very dim light, and enjoying the blessings of sound sleep while Nelson's Fasts and Festivals,or some equally proper work, rested on the sleeper's knee, until it fell off with a crash, and was only recovered to be held upside down until the grateful announcement of the arrival of supper--Mr. Joyce was in the habit of dropping into Salem Chapel, where Mr. Stoker, a shining light from the pottery district, dealt forth the most uncomfortable doctrine in the most forcible manner. The Helmingham people declared, too, that Andrew Joyce was "uncanny" in other ways; he was close-fisted and niggardly, his name was to be found on no subscription-list; he was litigious; he declared that Mr. Prickett, the old-fashioned solicitor of the village, was too slow for him, and he put his law-matters into the hands of Messrs. Sheen and Nasmyth, attorneys at Brocksopp, who levied a distress before other people had served a writ, and who were considered the sharpest practitioners in the county. Old Dr. Munch had heard of the process of Messrs. Sheen and Nasmyth, and the dread of any of it being exercised on him originally prompted his offer to Andrew Joyce. He knew that he might count on an ally in Andrew Joyce's wife, a superior woman, in very delicate health, who had great influence with her husband, and who was devoted to her only son. Mrs. Joyce, when Hester Baines, had been a Bible-class teacher in Spindleton, and had had herself a fair amount of education--would have had more, for she was a very earnest woman in her vocation, over striving to gain more knowledge herself for the mere purpose of imparting it to others, but from her early youth she had been fighting with a spinal disease, to which she was gradually succumbing; so that although sour granite-faced Andrew Joyce was not the exact helpmate that the girl so full of love and trust could have chosen for herself, when he offered her his hand and his home, she was glad to avail herself of the protection thus afforded, and of the temporary peace which she could thus enjoy until called, as she thought she should be, very speedily to her eternal rest.

That call did not come nearly as soon as Hester Baines had anticipated, not, indeed, until nearly a score of years after she gave up Bible-teaching, and became Andrew Joyce's wife. In the second year of her marriage a son was born to her, and thenceforward she lived for him, and for him alone. He was a small, delicate, sallow-faced boy, with enormous liquid eyes, and rich red lips, and a long throat, and thin limbs, and long skinny hands. A shy retiring lad, with an invincible dislike to society of any kind, even that of other boys; with a hatred of games and fun, and an irrepressible tendency to hide away somewhere, anywhere, in an old lumber-room amid the disused trunks, and broken clothes-horses, and general lumber, or under the wide-spreading branches of a tree, and then, extended, prone on his stomach, to lie with his head resting on his hands, and a book flat between his face-supporting arms. He got licked before he had been a week at the school, because he openly stated he did not like half-holidays, a doctrine which when first whispered among his schoolfellows was looked upon as incredible, but which, on proof of its promulgation, brought down upon its holder severe punishment.

Despite of all Dr. Munch's somnolency and neglect, despite of all his class fellows' idleness, ridicule, or contumely, young Joyce would learn, would make progress, would acquire accurate information in a very extraordinary way. When Mr. Ashurst assumed the reins of government at Helmingham Grammar School, the proficiency, promise, and industry of Walter Joyce were the only things that gave the now dominie the smallest gleam of interest in his fresh avocation. With the advent of the new head master Walter Joyce entered upon another career; for the first time in his life he found some one to appreciate him, some one who could understand his work, praise what he had done, and encourage him to greater efforts. This had hitherto been wanting in the young man's life. His father liked to know that the boy "stuck to his book;" but was at last incapable of understanding what that sticking to the book produced; and his mother, though conscious that her son possessed talent such as she had always coveted for him, had no idea of the real extent of his learning. James Ashurst was the only one in Helmingham who could rate his scholar's gifts at their proper value, and the dominie's kind heart yearned with delight at the prospect of raising such a creditable flower of learning in such unpromising soil. He busied himself, not merely with the young man's present but with his future. It was his greatest hope that one of the scholarships at his old college should be gained by a pupil from Helmingham, and that that pupil should be Walter Joyce. Mr. Ashurst had been in communication with the college authorities on the subject; he had obtained a very unwilling assent--an assent that would have been a refusal had it not been for Mrs. Joyce's influence--from Walter's father that he would give his son an adequate sum for his maintenance at the University, and he was looking forward to a quick-coming time when a scholarship should be vacant, for which he was certain Walter had a most excellent chance, when Mrs. Joyce had a fit and died.

From that time forth Andrew Joyce was a changed man. He had loved his wife in his grim, sour, puritanical way, loved her sufficiently to strive against this grimness and puritanism to the extent of his consenting to live for the most part from the ordinary fashion of the world. But when that gentle influence was once removed, when the hard-headed, narrow-minded man had no longer the soft answer to turn away his wrath, the soft face to look appealingly up against his harsh judgment, the quick intellect to combat his one-sided dogmatisms, he fell away at once, and blossomed out as the bitter bigot into which he had gradually but surely been growing. No college education for his son then; no assistance from him for a bloated hierarchy, as he remarked at a public meeting, glancing at Mr. Sifton, the curate, who had eighty pounds a year and four children; no money of his to be spent by his son in a dissolute and debauched career at the University. Mr. Stoker had not been at any university--as, indeed, he had not, having picked up most of his limited education from a travelling tinker, who combined pot-mending and knife-grinding with Bible and tract selling;--and where would you meet with a better preacher of the Gawspel, a more shining light, or a comelier vessel? Mr. Stoker was all in all to Andrew Joyce then, and when Andrew Joyce died, six months afterwards, it was found that, with the exception of the legacy of a couple of hundred pounds to his son, he had left all his money to Mr. Stoker, and to the chapel and charities represented by that erudite divine.

It was a sad blow to Walter Joyce, and almost as sharp a one to James Ashurst. The two men--Walter was a man now--grieved together over the overturned hopes and the extinguished ambition. It was impossible for Walter to attempt to go to college just then. There was no scholarship vacant, and if there had been, the amount to be won might probably have been insufficient even for this modest youth. There was no help for it; he must give up the idea. What, then, was he to do? Mr. Ashurst answered that in his usual impulsive way. Walter should become under master in the school. The number of boys had increased immensely. There was more work than he and Dr. Breitmann could manage; oh yes, he was sure of it--he had thought so a long time; and Walter should become third classical master, with a salary of sixty pounds a year, and board and lodging in Mr. Ashurst's house. It was a rash and wild suggestion, just likely to emanate from such a man as James Ashurst. The number of boys had increased, and Mr. Ashurst's energy had decreased; but there was Dr. Breitmann, a kindly, well-read, well-educated doctor of philosophy, from Leipzig; a fine classical scholar, though he pronounced "amo" as "ahmo," and "Dido" as "Taito," a gentleman, though his clothes were threadbare, and he only ate meat once a week, and sometimes not then unless he were asked out, and a disciplinarian, though he smoked like a limekiln; a habit which in the Helmingham schoolboys' eyes proclaimed the confirmed debauchee of the Giovanni or man-about-town type. Welter Joyce had been a favourite pupil of the doctor's, and was welcomed as a colleague by his old tutor with the utmost warmth. It was understood that his engagement was only temporary; he would soon have enough money to enable him, with a scholarship, to astonish the University, and then---- Meanwhile Mr. Ashurst and all around repeated that his talents were marvellous, and his future success indisputable.

That was the reason why Marian Ashurst fell in love with him. As has before been said, she thought nothing of outward appearance, although Walter Joyce had grown into a sufficiently comely man, small indeed, but with fine eyes and an eloquent mouth, and a neatly turned figure; nor, though a refined and educated girl, did she estimate his talents save for what they would bring. He was to make a success in his future life; that was what she thought of--her father said so, and so far, in matters of cleverness and book-learning, and so on, her father's opinion was worth something. Walter Joyce was to make money and position, the two things of which she thought, and dreamed, and hoped for night and day. There was no one else among her acquaintance with his power. No farmer within the memory of living generations had done more to keep up the homestead bequeathed to him whilst attempting to increase the number or the value of his fields, and even the gratification of her love of money would have been but a poor compensation to a girl of Marian's innate good breeding and refinement for being compelled to pass her life in the society of a boor or a churl. No! Walter Joyce combined the advantage of education and good looks with the prospect of attaining wealth and distinction: he was her father's favourite, and was well thought of by everybody, and--and she loved him very much, and was delighted to comfort herself with the thought that in doing so she had not sacrificed any of what she was pleased to consider the guiding principles of her life.

And he, Walter Joyce, did he reciprocate--was he in love with Marian? Has it ever been your lot to see an ugly or, better still, what is called an ordinary man--for ugliness has become fashionable both in fiction and in society--to see an ordinary-looking man, hitherto politely ignored, if not snubbed, suddenly taken special notice of by a handsome woman, a recognised leader of the set, who, for some special purpose of her own, suddenly discovering that he has brains, or conversational power, or some peculiar fascination, singles him out from the surrounding ruck, steeps him in the sunlight of her eyes, and intoxicates him with the subtle wiles of her address? It does one good, it acts as a moral shower-bath, to see such a man under such circumstances. Your fine fellow simpers and purrs for a moment, and takes it all as real legitimate homage to his beauty; but the ordinary man cannot, so soon as he has got over his surprise at the sensation, cannot be too grateful, cannot find ways and means--cumbrous frequently and ungraceful, but eminently sincere--of showing his appreciation of his patroness. Thus it was with Walter Joyce. The knowledge that he was a grocer's son had added immensely to the original shyness and sensitiveness of his disposition, and the free manner in which his small and delicate personal appearance had been made the butt of outspoken "chaff" of the schoolboys had made him singularly misogynistic. Since the early days of his youth, when he had been compelled to give a very unwilling attendance twice a week at the dancing academy of Mr. Hardy, where the boys of the Helmingham Grammar School had their manners softened, nor were suffered to become brutal, by the study of the Terpsichorean art, in the company of the young ladies from the Misses Lewin's establishment, Walter Joyce had resolutely eschewed any and every charge of mixing in female society. He knew nothing of it, and pretended to despise it. It is needless to say, therefore, that so soon as he was brought into daily communication with a girl like Marian Ashurst, possessed both of beauty and refinement, he fell hopelessly in love with her, and gave up every thought, idea, and hope, save that in which she bore a part. She was his goddess, and he would worship her humbly and at a distance. It would be sufficient for him to touch the hem of her robe, to hear the sound of her voice, to gaze at her with big dilated eyes, which--not that he knew it--were eloquent with love, and tenderness, and worship.

Their love was known to each other, and to but very few else. Mr. Ashurst, looking up from his newspaper in the blessed interval between the departure of the boys to bed and the modest little supper, the only meal which the family--in which Joyce was included--had in private, may have noticed the figures of his daughter and his usher, not his favourite pupil, lingering in the deepening twilight round the lawn, or seen "their plighted shadows blended into one" in the soft rays of the moonlight. But if he thought anything about it, he never made any remark. Life was very hard and very earnest with James Ashurst, and he may have found something softening and pleasing in this little bit of romance, something which he may have wished to leave undisturbed by worldly suggestions or practical hints. Or, he may have had his idea of what was actually going on. A man with an incipient disease beginning to tell upon him, with a sickly wife, and a perpetual striving not merely to make both ends meet, but to prevent them bursting so wide asunder as to leave a gap through which he must inevitably fall into ruin between them, has but little time, or opportunity, or inclination, for observing narrowly the conduct even of those near and dear to him. Mrs. Ashurst, in her invalid state, was only too glad to think that the few hours which Marian took in respite for attendance on her mother were pleasantly employed, to inquire where or in whose society they were passed--neither Marian's family nor Joyce kept any company by whom their absence would be missed; and as for the villagers, they had fully made up their minds on the one side that Marian was determined to make a splendid match; on the other, that the mere fact of Walter Joyce's scholarship was so great as to incapacitate him from the pursuit of ordinary human frailties: so that not the ghost of a speculation as to the relative position of the couple had arisen amongst them. And the two young people loved, and hoped, and erected their little castles in the air, which were palatial indeed as hope-depicted by Marian, though less ambitious as limned by Walter Joyce, when Mr. Ashurst's death came upon them like a thunderbolt, and blew their unsubstantial edifices into the air.

See them here on, this calm summer evening, pacing round and round the lawn, as they used to do, in the old days already ages ago as it seems, when, James Ashurst, newspaper in hand, would throw occasional glances at them from the study window. Marian, instead of letting her fingers lightly touch her companion's wrist, as is her wont, has passed her arms through his, and her fingers are clasped together round it, and she looks up in his face, as they come to a standstill beneath the big outspread branches of the old, oak, with an earnest tearful gage such as she has seldom, if ever, worn before. There must be matter of moment between these two just now, for Joyce's face looks wan and worn; there are deep hollows beneath his large eyes, and he strives ineffectually to conceal, with an occasional movement of his hand, the rapid anxious play of the muscles round his mouth. Marian is the first to speak.

"And so you take Mr. Benthall's decision No final, Walter, and are determined to go to London?"

"Darling, what else can I do? Here is Mr. Benthall's letter, in which he tells me that, without the least wish to disturb me--a mere polite phrase that--he shall bring his own assistant master to Helmingham. He writes and means kindly, I've no doubt--but here's the fact!"

"Oh yes, I'm sure he's a gentleman, Walter; his letter to mamma proves that, offering to defer his arrival at the schoolhouse until our own time. Of course that is impossible, and we go into Mrs. Swainson's lodgings at once."

"My dearest Marian, my own pet, I hate to think of you in lodgings; I cannot bear to picture you so!"

"You must make haste to get your position, and take me to share it, then, Walter!" said the girl, with a half-melancholy smile; "you must do great things, Walter. Dear papa always said you would, and you must prove how right he was."

"Dearest, your poor father calculated on my success at college for the furtherance of my fortune, and now all that chance is over! Whatever I do now must be----"

"By the aid of your own talent and industry, exactly the same appliances which you had to rely on if you had gone to the University, Walter. You don't fear the result? You're not alarmed and desponding at the turn which affairs have taken? It's impossible you can fail to attain distinction, and--and money and--and position, Walter--you must,--don't you feel it?--you must!"

"Yes, dear, I feel it; I hope--I think; perhaps not so strongly, so enthusiastically as you do. You see,--don't be downcast, Marian, but it's best to look these things in the face, darling!--all I can try to get is a tutor's, or an usher's, or a secretary's place, and in any of these the want of the University stamp is heavily against me. There's no disguising that, Marian!"

"Oh, indeed; is that so?"

"Yes, child, undoubtedly. The University degree is like the Hall-mark in silver, and I'm afraid I shall find very few persons willing to accept me as the genuine article without it."

"And all this risk might have been avoided if your father had only----"

"Well, yes; but then, Marian darling, if my father had left me money to go to college immediately on his death I should never have known you--known you, I mean, as you are, the dearest and sweetest of women."

He drew her to him as he spoke, and pressed his lips on her forehead. She received the kiss without any undue emotion, and said--

"Perhaps that had been for the best, Walter."

"Marian, that's rank blasphemy. Fancy my hearing that, especially, too, on the night of my parting with you! No, my darling, all I want you to have is hope, hope and courage, and not too much ambition, dearest. Mine has been comparatively but a lotus-eating existence hitherto; to-morrow I begin the battle of life."

"But slightly armed for the conflict, my poor Walter."

"I don't allow that, Marian. Youth, health, and energy are not bad weapons to have on one's side, and with your love in the background----"

"And the chance of achieving fame and fortune for yourself--keep that in the foreground!"

"That is to me, in every way, less than the other; but it is, of course, an additional spur. And now----?"

And then? When two lovers are on the eve of parting, their conversation is scarcely very interesting to any one else. Marian and Walter talked the usual pleasant nonsense, and vowed the usual constancy, took four separate farewells of each other, and parted with broken accents and lingering hand-clasps, and streaming eyes. But when Marian Ashurst sat before her toilet-glass that night in the room which had so long been her own, and which she was so soon to vacate, she thought of what Walter Joyce had said as to his future, and wondered whether, after all, she had not miscalculated the strength, not the courage, of the knight whom she had selected to wear her colours in his helm in the great contest.

[CHAPTER V.]

WOOLGREAVES.

"You will be better when you have made the effort, mother," said Marian Ashurst to the widow, one day, when the beauty of the summer was at its height, and death and grief seemed very hard to bear, in the face of the unsympathising sunshine. "Don't think I underrate the effort, for indeed I don't, but you will be better when you have made it."

"Perhaps so, my dear," said Mrs. Ashurst, with reluctant submissiveness. "You are right; I am sure you always are right; but it is so little use to go to any place where one can't enjoy one's self, and where everybody must see that it is impossible; and you have--you know----" Her lips trembled, her voice broke. Her little hands, still soft and pretty, twined themselves together, with an expression of pain. Then she said no more.

Marian had been standing by the open window, looking out, the side of her head turned to her mother, who was glancing at her timidly. Now she crossed the room, with a quick steady step, and knelt down by Mrs. Ashurst's chair, clasping her hands upon the arm.

"Listen to me, dear," she said, with her clear eyes fixed on her mother's face, and her voice, though softened to a tone of the utmost tenderness, firm and decided. "You must never forget that I know exactly what and how much you feel, and that I share it all" (there was a forlornness in the girl's face which bore ample testimony to the truth of what she said) "when I tell you, in my practical way, what we must do. You remember, once, then, you spoke to me about the Creswells, and I made light of them and their importance and influence. I would not admit it; I did not understand it. I had not fully thought about it then; but I admit it now. I understand it now, and it is my turn to tell you, my dearest mother, that we must be civil to them; we must take, or seem to take, their offers of kindness, of protection, of intimacy, as they are made. We cannot afford to do otherwise, and they are just the sort of people to be offended with us irreparably, if we did not allow them to extend their hospitality to us. It is rather officious, rather ostentatious; it has all the bitterness of making us remember more keenly what they might have done for us, but it is hospitality, and we need it; it is the promise of further services which we shall require urgently. You must rouse yourself, mother; this must be your share of helpfulness to me in the burden of our life. And, after all, what does it matter? What real difference does it make? My father is as much present to you and to me in one place as in another. Nothing can alter, or modify, or soften; nothing can deepen or embitter that truth. Come with me--the effort will repay itself."

Mrs. Ashurst had begun to look more resolved, before her daughter, who had spoken with more than her usual earnestness and decision, had come to an end of her argument. She put her arm round the girl's neck, and gave her a timid squeeze, and then half rose, as though she were ready to go with her, anywhere she chose, that very minute. Then Marian, without asking another word on the subject, busied herself about her mother's dress, arranging the widow's heavy sombre drapery with a deft hand, and talking about the weather, the pleasantness of their projected walk, and the daily dole of Helmingham gossip. Marian cared little for gossip of any kind herself, but it was a godsend to her sometimes, when she had particular reasons for not talking to her mother of the things that were in her mind, and did not find it easy to invent other things to talk to her about.

The object which Marian had in view just now, and which she had had some difficulty in attaining, was the inducing of her mother, who had passed the time since her bereavement in utter seclusion, to accept the invitation of Mr. Creswell, the owner of Woolgreaves, the local grandee par excellence,the person whose absence Marian had so lamented on the occasion of her father's illness, to pass "a long day" with him and his nieces. It was not the first time such an invitation had reached Mrs. Ashurst. Their rich neighbour, the dead schoolmaster's friend, had not been neglectful of the widow and her daughter, but it was the first time Marian had made up her mind that this advance on his part must be met and welcomed. She had as much reluctance to break through the seclusion of their life as her mother, though of a somewhat different stamp; but she had been pondering and calculating, while her mother had been only thinking and suffering, and she had decided that it must be done. She did not doubt that she should suffer more in the acting upon this decision than her mother; but it was made, and must be acted upon. So Marian took her mother to Woolgreaves. Mr. Creswell had offered to send a carriage (he rather liked the use of the indefinite article, which implied the extent of his establishment) to fetch the ladies, but Marian had declined this. The walk would do her mother good, and brace her nerves; she meant to talk to her easily, with seeming carelessness, of the possibilities of the future, on the way. At length Mrs. Ashurst was ready, and her daughter and she set forth, in the direction of the distressingly modern, but really imposing, mansion, which, for the first time, they approached, unsupported by him, in whose presence it had never occurred to them to suffer from any feeling of inferiority of position or means, or to believe that any one could regard them in a slighting manner.

Mr. Creswell, of Woolgreaves, had entertained a sincere regard, built on profound respect, for Mr. Ashurst. He knew the inferiority of his own mind, and his own education, to those of the man who had contentedly and laboriously filled so humble a position--one so unworthy of his talents, as well as he knew the superiority of his own business abilities, the difference which had made him a rich man, and which would, under any circumstances, have kept Mr. Ashurst poor. He was a man possessed of much candour of mind and sound judgment; and though he preferred, quite sincerely, the practical ability which had made him what he was, and heartily enjoyed all the material advantages and pleasures of his life, he was capable of profound admiration for such unattainable things as taste, learning, and the indefinable moral and personal elements which combine to form a scholar and a gentleman. He was a commonplace man in every other respect than this, that he most sincerely despised and detested flattery, and was incapable of being deceived by it. He had not failed to understand that it would have been as impossible to James Ashurst to flatter as to rob him; and for this reason, as well as for the superiority he had so fully recognised, he had felt warm and abiding friendship for him, and lamented his death, as he had not mourned any accident of mortality since the day which had seen his pretty young wife laid in her early grave. Mr. Creswell, a poor man in those days, struggling manfully very far down on the ladder, which he had since climbed with the ease which not unfrequently attends effort, when something has happened to decrease the value of success, had loved his pretty, uneducated, merry little wife very much, and had felt for a while after she died, that he was not sure whether anything was worth working or striving for. But his constitutional activity of mind and body had got the better of that sort of feeling, and he had worked and striven to remarkably good purpose; but he had never asked another woman to share his fortunes.

This was not altogether occasioned by lingering regret for his pretty Jenny. He was not of a sentimental turn of mind, and he might even have been brought to acknowledge, reluctantly, that his wife would probably have been much out of place in the fine house, and at the head of the luxurious establishment which his wealth had formed. She was humbly born, like himself, had not been ambitious, except of love and happiness, and had had no better education than enabled her to read and write, not so perfectly as to foster in her a taste for either occupation. If Mr. Creswell had a sorrowful remembrance of her sometimes, it died away with the reflection that she had been happy while she lived, and would not have been so happy now. His continued bachelor estate was occasioned rather by his close and engrossing attention to the interests of his business, and, perhaps, also to the narrow social circle in which he lived. Pretty, uneducated, simple young country women will retain their power of pleasing men who have acquired education, and made money, and so elevated themselves far above their original station; but the influence of education and wealth upon the tastes of men of this sort is inimical to the chances of the young women of the classes in society among which they habitually find their associates. The women of the "well-to-do" world are unattractive to those men, who have not been born in it. Such men either retain the predilections of their youth for women like those whose girlhood they remember, or cherish ambitious aspirations towards the inimitable, not to be borrowed or imported, refinement of the women of social spheres far above them.

The former was Mr. Creswell's case, in as far as anything except business can be said to have been active in his affairs. The "ladies" in the Helmingham district were utterly uninteresting to him, and he had made that fact so evident long ago that they had accepted it; of course regarding him as an "oddity," and much to be pitied; and since his nieces had taken up their abode, on the death of their father, Mr. Creswell's only brother, at Woolgreaves, a matrimonial development in Mr. Creswell's career had been regarded as an impossibility. The owner of Woolgreaves was voted by general feminine consent "a dear old thing," and a very good neighbour, and the ladies only hoped he might not have trouble before him with "that pickle, young Tom," and were glad to think no poor woman had been induced to put herself in for such a life as that of Tom's step-mother would have been.

Mr. Creswell's only brother had belonged, not to the "well-to-do" community, but, on the contrary, to that of the "neer-do-weels," and he had died without a shilling, heavily in debt, and leaving two helpless girls--sufficiently delicately nurtured to feel their destitution with keenness amounting to despair, and sufficiently "fashionably," i.e. ill, educated to be wholly incapable of helping themselves--to the mercy of the world. The contemplation of this contingency, for which he had plenty of leisure, for he died of a lingering illness, did not appear to have distressed Tom Creswell. He had believed in "luck" all his life, with the touching devotion of a selfish man who defines "luck" as the making of things comfortable for himself, and is not troubled with visions of, after him, the modern version of the deluge, which takes the squalid form of the pawnbroker's and the poor-house; and "luck" had lasted his time. It had even survived him, so far as his children were concerned, for his brother, who had quarrelled with him, more from policy and of deliberate interest, regarding him as a hopeless spendthrift, the helping of whom was a useless extravagance, than from anger or disgust, came to the aid of the widow and her children, when he found that things were very much worse than he had supposed they would prove to be.

Mrs. Tom Creswell afforded a living example of her husband's "luck." She was a mild, gentle, very silly, very self-denying, estimable woman, who laved the "ne'er-do-weal" so literally with all her heart that when he died she had not enough of that organ left to go on living with. She did not see why she should try, and she did not try, but quietly died in a few months, to the astonishment of rational people, who declared that Tom Creswell was a "good loss," and had never been of the least use either to himself or any other human being. What on earth was the woman about? Was she such an idiot as not to see his faults? Did she not know what a selfish, idle, extravagant, worthless fellow he was, and that he had left her to either pauperism or dependence on any one who would support her, quite complacently? If such a husband as he was--what she had seen in him beyond his handsome face and his pleasant manner, they could not tell--was to be honoured in this way, gone quite daft about, in fact, they really could not perceive the advantage to men in being active, industrious, saving, prudent, and domestic. Nothing could be more true, more reasonable, more unanswerable, or more ineffectual. Mrs. Tom Creswell did not dispute it; she patiently endured much bullying by strong-minded, tract-dropping females of the spinster persuasion; she was quite satisfied to be told she had proved herself unworthy of a better husband. She did not murmur as it was proved to her, in the fiercest forms of accurate arithmetic, that her Tom had squandered sums which might have provided for her and her children decently, and had not even practised the poor self-denial of paying for an insurance on his life. She contradicted no one, she rebuked no one, she asked forbearance and pity from no one; she merely wept and said she was sure her brother-in-law would be kind to the girls, and that she would not like to be a trouble to Mr. Creswell herself, and was sure her Tom would not have liked her to be a trouble to Mr. Creswell.

On this point the brother of the "departed saint," as the widow called the amiable idler of whose presence she considered the world unworthy, by no means agreed with her. Mr. Creswell was of opinion that so long as trouble kept clear of Tom, Tom would have been perfectly indifferent as to where it lighted. But he did not say so. He had not much respect for his sister-in-law's intellect, but he pitied her, and he was not only generous to her distress, but also merciful to her weakness. He offered her a home at Woolgreaves, and it was arranged that she should "try" to go there, after a while. But she never tried, and she never went; she "did not see the good of" anything; and in six months after Tom Creswell's death his daughters were settled at Woolgreaves, and it is doubtful whether the state of orphanhood was ever in any case a more tempered, modified misfortune than in theirs.

Thus the family party at the handsome house, which Mrs. Ashurst and her daughter were about to visit, was composed of Mr. Creswell, his son Tom, a specimen of the schoolboy class, of whom this history has already afforded a glimpse, and the Misses Creswell, the Maude and Gertrude of whom Marian had, in her grief, spoken in terms of sharp and contemptuous disparagement which, though not entirely censurable, judged from her point of view, were certainly not altogether deserved.

Mr. Creswell earnestly desired to befriend the visitor and her daughter. Gertrude Creswell thought it would be very "nice" to be "great friends" with that clever Miss Ashurst, and had, with all the impulsiveness of generous girlhood, exulted in the idea of being, in her turn, able to extend kindness to people in need of it, even as she and her sister had been. But Maude, who, though her actual experience of life had been identical with her sister's, had more natural intuition and caution, checked the enthusiasm with which Gertrude drew this picture.

"We must be very careful, Gerty dear," she said; "I fancy this clever Miss Ashurst is very proud. People say you never find out the nature of any one until trouble brings it to the light. It would never do to let her think one had any notion of doing her services, you know. She might not like it from us; uncle's kindness to them is a different thing; but we must remember that we are, in reality, no better off than she is."

Gertrude reddened. She had not spoken with the remotest idea of patronage of Miss Ashurst in her mind, and her sister's warning pained her. Gertrude had a dash of her father's insouciance in her, though in him it had been selfish joviality, and in her it as only happy thoughtlessness. It had occurred to Gertrude, more than once before to-day, to think she should like to be married to some one whom she could love very much indeed, and away from this fine place, which did not belong to them, though her uncle was very kind, in a home of her awn. Maude had a habit of saying and looking things which made Gertrude entertain such notions; and now she had, with the best intentions, injured her pleasure in the anticipation of the visit of Mrs. Ashurst and Marian.

It was probably this little incident which lent the slight touch of coldness and restraint to the manner of Gertrude Creswell which Marian instantly felt, and which she erroneously interpreted. When they had met formerly, there had been none of this hesitating formality.

"These girls don't want us here?" said Marian to herself; "they grudge us their uncle's friendship, lest it should take a form which would deprive them of any of his money."

Perhaps Marian was not aware of the resolve, lurking in her heart even then, that such was precisely the form which that friendship should be made to take. The evil warp in her otherwise frank and noble mind told in this. Gertrude Creswell, to whom in particular she imputed mercenary feeling, and the forethought of a calculating jealousy, was entirely incapable of anything of the kind, and was actuated wholly by her dread that Marian should misinterpret any premature advance towards intimacy on her part as an impertinence. Thus the foundation of a misunderstanding between the two was laid.

Marian's thoughts had been busy with the history of the sisters, as she and her mother approached Woolgreaves. She had heard her father describe Tom Creswell and his wife, and dwell upon the fortunate destiny which had transferred Maude and Gertrude to their uncle's care. She thought of all that now with bitterness. The contrast between her father's character, life, and fate, and the character, life, and fate of Tom Creswell, was a problem difficult to solve, hard to endure. Why had the measure been so differently--she would, she must say so unjustly--meted to these two men? Her fancy dwelt on every point in that terrible difference, lingered around the two deathbeds, pictured the happy, sheltered, luxurious, unearned security of those whom the spendthrift had left uncared for, and the harsh, gloomy future before her mother and herself, in which only two things, hard work and scanty means, were certain, which had been the vision her father must have seen of the fate of those he loved, when he, so fitted to adorn an honoured and conspicuous position, had died, worn out in the long vain strife with poverty. Here were the children of the man who had lived utterly for self, and the widow and child of the "righteous," who had done his duty manfully from first to last. Hard and bitter were Marian's reflections on this contrast, and earnestly did she wish that some speedy means of accelerating by efforts of her own the fulfilment of those promises of Providence, in which she felt sometimes tempted to put little faith, might arise.

"I suppose he was not exactly 'forsaken,'" said the girl in her mind as she approached the grand gates of Woolgreaves, whose ironmongery displayed itself in the utmost profusion, allied with artistic designs more sumptuous than elegant, "and that no one will see us 'begging our bread;' but there is only meagre consolation to me in this, since he had not what might--or all their service is a pretence, all their 'opinions' are lies--have saved him, and I see little to rejoice in in being just above the begging of bread."

"They have done a great deal to the place since we were here, Marian," said Mrs. Ashurst, looking round admiringly upon the skilful gardening and rich display of shrubs and flowers and outdoor decorations of all kinds. "It must take a great many hands to keep this in order. Not so much as a leaf or a pebble out of its place."

"They say there are four gardeners always employed," said Marian. "I wish we had the money it costs; we needn't wish Midsummer-day further off then. But here is Mr. Creswell, coming to meet us."

Marian Ashurst was much more attractive in her early womanhood than she had promised to be as a very young girl, and the style of her face and figure was of the kind which is assisted in its effect by a somewhat severe order of costume. She was not beautiful, not even positively handsome, and it is possible she might have looked commonplace in the ordinary dress of young women of limited means, where cheap material and coarse colouring must necessarily be used. In her plain attire of deep mourning, with no ornament save one or two trinkets of jet which had been her mother's, Marian Ashurst looked far from commonplace, and remarkably ladylike. The strongly defined character in her face, the composure of her manner, the quietness of her movements, were not the charms which are usually associated with youth, but they were charms, and her host was a person to whom they were calculated to prove especially charming. Except in his generally benevolent way of entertaining a kindly regard for his friend's daughter, Mr. Creswell had never noted nor taken any particular notice of Marian Ashurst; but she had not been an hour in his house before she impressed herself upon him as being very different from all the other girls of his acquaintance, and much more interesting than his nieces.

Mr. Creswell felt rather annoyed with his nieces. They were civil, certainly; but they did not seem to understand the art of making the young lady who was visiting them happy and "at home." There was none of the freemasonry of "the young person" about them. After a while, Mr. Creswell found that the order of things he had been prepared for--what he certainly would have taken to be the natural order of things--was altered, set aside, he did not know how, and that he was walking along the trim garden-paths, after luncheon, with Miss Ashurst, while Maude and Gertrude took charge of the visitor to whom he had meant to devote himself, and were making themselves as amiable and pleasant to her as they had failed to make themselves to Marian. Perhaps the fault or the reason was as much on Miss Ashurst's side as on theirs. Before he had conducted his visitor over all the "show" portions of the grounds and gardens, Mr. Creswell had arrived at the conclusion that Marian was a remarkable young woman, with strong powers of observation, and a decided aptitude for solid and sensible conversation, which probably explained the coldness towards her of Maude and Gertrude, who were not remarkable, except for fine complexions, and hair to correspond, and whose talk was of the most vapid description, so far as he had had the opportunity of observing.

There was not much of importance in appearance to relate about the occurrences of a day which was destined to be remembered as very important by all who passed its hours at Woolgreaves. It had the usual features of a "long day," spasmodic attacks of animation and lapses of weariness, a great deal of good eating and drinking, much looking at pictures and parade-books, some real gratification, and not a little imperfectly disguised fatigue. It differed in one respect, however, from the usual history of a "long day." There was one person who was not glad when it came to an end. That person was Mr. Creswell.

Poor Mrs. Ashurst had found her visit to Woolgreaves much more endurable than she expected. She had indeed found it almost pleasurable. She had been amused--the time had passed, the young ladies had been kind to her. She praised them to Marian.

"They are nice creatures," she said; "really tender-hearted and sincere. Of course, they are not clever like you, my dear; but then all girls cannot be expected to be that."

"They are very fortunate," said Marian, moodily. "Just think of the safe and happy life they lead. Living like that is living; we only exist. They have no want for the present; no anxiety for the future. Everything they see and touch, all the food they eat, everything they wear means money."

"Yes," said Mrs. Ashurst; "and after all, money is a great thing. Not, indeed," she added, with tears in her eyes, "that I could care much for it now, for it could not, if we had it, restore what we have lost."

"No," said Marian, frowning, "but it could have saved us from losing it; it could have preserved love and care, home, position, and happiness to us. True, mother, money is a great thing."

But Marian's mother was not listening to her. Her mind had returned to its familiar train of thought again.

Something had been said that day about Mrs. Ashurst's paying Woolgreaves a longer visit, going for a week or two, of course accompanied by Marian. Mrs. Ashurst had not decidedly accepted or negatived the proposition. She felt rather nervous about it herself, and uncertain as to Marian's sentiments, and her daughter had not aided her by word or look. Nor did Marian recur to the subject when she found themselves at home again in the evening. But she remembered it, and discussed it with herself in the night. Would it be well that her mother should be habituated to the comforts, the luxuries of such a house, so unattainable to her at home, so desirable in her state of broken health and spirits? This was the great difficulty which beset Marian, and she felt she could not decide it then.

Her long waking reverie of that night did not concern itself with the people she had been with. It was fully occupied with the place. Her mind mounted from floor to floor of the handsome house, which represented so much money, reviewing and appraising the furniture, speculating on the separate and collective value of the plate, the mirrors, the hangings, the decorations. Thousands and thousands of pounds, she thought, hundreds and hundreds of times more money than she had ever seen, and nothing to do for it all. Those girls who lived among it, what had they done that they should have all of it? Why had she, whose mother needed it so much, who could so well appreciate it, none of it? Marian's last thought 'before she fell asleep that night was, not only that money was a great thing, but that almost anything would be worth doing to get money.

[CHAPTER VI.]

BREAD-SEEKING.

There are few streets in London better known to that large army of martyrs, the genteelly poor, than those which run northward from the Strand, and are lost in the two vast tracts of brick known under the name of Covent Garden and Drury Lane. Lodging-house keepers do not affect these streets, preferring the narrow no-thoroughfares on the other side of the Strand, abutting on the river, streets eternally ringing with the hoarse voice of the costermonger, who descends on one side and ascends on the other, eternally echoing to the grinding of the organ-man, who gets through his entire répertoire twice over during his progress to the railing overlooking the Embankment, and his return to the pickle-shop at the top, eternally haunted by the beer-boy and the newspaper-boy, by postmen infuriated with wrongly addressed letters, and by luggage-laden cabs. In the streets bearing northward no costermonger screams and no organ is found; the denizens are business-people, and would very soon put a stop to any such attempt.

Business, and nothing but business, in that drab-coloured house with the high wire-blinds in the window, over which you can just catch a glimpse of the top of a hanging white robe. Cope and Son are the owners of the drab-coloured house, and Cope and Son are the largest retailers of clerical millinery in London. All day long members of "the cloth," sleek, pale, emaciated, high-church curates, stout, fresh-coloured, huge-whiskered, broad-church rectors, fat, pasty-faced, straight-haired evangelical ministers, are pouring into Cope and Son's for clothes, for hoods, for surplices, for stoles, for every variety of ecclesiastical garment. Cope and Son supply all, in every variety, for every sect; the M.B. waistcoat and stiff-collared coat reaching to his heels in which the Honourable and Reverend Cyril Genuflex looks so imposing, as he, before the assembled vestry, defies the scrutiny of his evangelical churchwarden; the pepper-and-salt cutaway in which the Reverend Pytchley Quorn follows the hounds; the black-stuff gown in which the Reverend Locock Congreve perspires and groans as he deals out denunciations of those sitting under him; and the purple bed gown, turned up with yellow satin, and worked all over with crosses and vagaries, in which poor Tom Phoole, such a kind-hearted and such a soft-headed vessel, goes through his ritualistic tricks,--all these come from the establishment of Cope and Son's, in Rutland Street, Strand.

The next house on the right is handy for the high-church clergymen, though the evangelicals shut their eyes and turn away their heads as they pass by it. Here Herr Tubelkahn, from Elberfeld, the cunning worker in metals, the artificer of brass and steel and iron, and sometimes of gold and silver, the great ecclesiastical upholsterer, has set up his Lares and Penates, and here he deals in the loveliest of mediaevalisms and the choicest of renaissance wares. The sleek long-coated gentry who come to make purchases can scarcely thread their way through the heterogeneous contents of Herr Tubelkahn's shop. All massed together without order; black oaken chairs, bought up by Tubelkahn's agents from occupants of tumbledown old cottages in midland districts, crosiers and crucifixes, ornate and plain, from Elberfeld, sceptres and wands from Solingen, lecterns in the shape of enormous brazen eagles with outstretched wings from Birmingham, enormous candelabra and gaseliers of Gothic pattern from Liège, and sculptured pulpits and carved altar-rails from the Curtain Road, Shoreditch. Altar-cloths hang from the tables, and altar-carpets, none of your common loom-woven stuff, but hand-worked and--as Herr Tubelkahn gives you to understand--by the fairest fingers, are spread about to show their patterns to the best advantage, while there is so much stained glass about ready for immediate transfer to the oriel windows of country churches, that when the sun shines, Herr Tubelkahn's customers seem to be suddenly invested with Joseph's garment of many colours, and the whole shop lights up like a kaleidoscope.

Many of the customers, both of Messrs. Cope and Tubelkahn, were customers, or, more euphuistically, clients, of Messrs. Camoxon, who kept the celebrated Clerical and Educational Registry higher up the street; but these customers and clients invariably crossed and recrossed the road, in proceeding from the one to the other of these establishments, in order to avoid a certain door which lay midway between them. A shabby swing-door, sun-blistered, and with its bottom panel scored with heel and toe kicks from impatient entrance-seeking feet; a door flanked by two flaming bills, and surrounded by a host of close-shaven, sallow-faced men, in shabby clothes and shiny hats, and red noses and swinging canes, noble Romans, roistering cavaliers, clamorous citizens, fashionable guests, virtuous peasants--all at a shilling a night; for the door was, in fact, the stage-door of the Cracksideum Theatre. The shabby men in threadbare jauntiness smiled furtively, and grinned at each other as they saw the sleek gentlemen in shining broad-cloth step out of their path; but the said gentlemen felt the proximity of the Thespian temple very acutely, and did not scruple to say so to Messrs. Camoxon, who, as in duty bound, shrugged their shoulders deprecatingly, and--changed the conversation. They were very sorry, but--and they shrugged their shoulders. When men shrug their shoulders to their customers it is time that they should retire from business. It was time that the Messrs. Camoxon so retired, for the old gentleman now seldom appeared in Rutland Street, but remained at home at Wimbledon, enacting his favourite character of the British squire, and actually dressing the part in a blue coat and gilt buttons, gray knee-breeches, and Hessian boots; while young George Camoxon hunted with the Queen's hounds, had dined twice at the Life Guards' mess at Windsor, and had serious thoughts of standing for the county.

But the business was far too good to give up; every one who had a presentation or an advowson to sell took it to Camoxons'; the head clerk could tell you off-hand the net value of every valuable living in England, the age of the incumbent, and the state of his health. Every rector who wanted assistance, every curate who wanted a change, in servants' phrase, "to better himself," every layman who wanted a title for orders, every vicar who, oddly enough, wanted to change a dull, bleak living in the north for a pleasant social sphere of duty in a cheerful neighbourhood in the south of England; parents on the lookout for tutors, tutors in search of pupils--all inscribed their names on Camoxon's books, and looked to him for assistance in their extremity. There was a substantial, respectable, orthodox appearance about Camoxons', in the ground-glass windows, with the device of the Bible and Sceptre duly inscribed thereon; in the chaste internal fittings of polished mahogany and plain horsehair stools, with the Churchman's Almanack on the wall in mediaeval type, very illegible, and in a highly mediaeval frame, all bosses and clamps; in the big ledgers and address-books, and in the Post-office Directory, which here shed its truculent red cover, and was scarcely recognisable in a meek sad-coloured calf binding; and, above all, in the grave, solemn, sable-clad clerks, who moved noiselessly about, and who looked like clergymen playing at business.

Up and down Rutland Street had Walter Joyce paced full a thousand times since his arrival in London. The name of the street and of its principal inhabitants was familiar to him through the advertisements in the clerical newspaper which used to be sent to Mr. Ashurst at Helmingham; and no sooner was he settled down in his little lodging in Winchester Street than he crossed the mighty artery of the Strand, and sought out the street and the shops of which he had already heard so much. He saw them, peered in at Copes', and at Tubelkahn's, and looked earnestly at Camoxons' ground-glass window, and half thought of going in to see whether they had anything which might suit him on their books. But he refrained until he had received the answers to a certain advertisement which he had inserted in the newspaper, setting forth that a young man with excellent testimonials--he knew he could get them from the rector of Helmingham--was desirous of giving instruction in the classics and mathematics. Advertising, he thought, was a better and more gentlemanly medium than causing a detailed list of his accomplishments to be inscribed in the books of the Ecclesiastical Registry, as a horse's pedigree and performances are entered in the horsedealer's list; but when, after hunting for half an hour through the columns of the newspaper's supplement, he found his advertisement amongst a score of others, all of them from men with college honours, or promising greater advantages than he could hold forth, he began to doubt the wisdom of his proceeding. However, he would wait and see the result. He did so wait for three days, but not a single line addressed, as requested, to W.J. found its way to Winchester Street. Then he sent for the newspaper again, and began to reply to the advertisements which he thought might suit him. He had no high thoughts or hopes, no notions of regenerating the living generation, or of placing tuition on a new footing, or rendering it easy by some hitherto unexplained process. He had been an usher in a school; for the place of an usher in a school he had advertised; and if he could have obtained that position he would have been contented. But when the few answers to his advertisement arrived, he saw that it was impossible to accept any of the offers they contained. One man wanted him to teach French with a guaranteed Parisian accent, to devote his whole time out of school-hours to the boys, to supervise them in the Indian-sceptre athletic exercises, and to rule over a dormitory of thirteen, "where, in consequence of the lax supervision of the last didaskolos, severe measures would be required," for twenty pounds a year. Another gentleman, whose notepaper was ornamented with a highly florid Maltese cross, and who dated his letter "Eve of S. Boanerges," wished to know his opinion of the impostor-firebrand M. Luther, and whether he (the advertiser) had any connections in the florist or decorative line, with whom an arrangement in the mutual-accommodation way could be entered into; while a third, evidently a grave sententious man, with a keen eye to business, expressed, on old-fashioned Bath-post, gilt-edged letter-paper, his desire to know "what sum W.J. would be willing to contribute for the permission to state, after a year's residence, that he had been one of Dr. Sumph's most trusted helpmates and assistants."

No good to be got that way, then, and a visit to Camoxons' imminent, for the money was running very, very short, and the conventional upturning of stones, by no means leaving one in its normal position, must be proceeded with. Visit to Camoxon's paid, after much staring through the ground-glass window (opaque generally, but transparent in the Bible and Sceptre artistic bits), much ascent and descent of two steps cogitatively, final rush up top step wildly, and hurried, not to say pantomimic, entrance through the ground-glass door, to be confronted by the oldest and most composed of the sable-clad clerks. Bows exchanged; name and address required; name and address given in a low and serious whisper, and repeated aloud in a clear high treble, each word as it was uttered being transcribed in a hand which was the very essence of copperplate into an enormous book. Position required? Second or third mastership in a classical school, private tutorship, as secretary or librarian to a nobleman or gentleman. So glibly ran the old gentleman's steel pen over these items that Walter Joyce began to fancy that applicants for one post were generally ready and willing to take all or any, as indeed they were. "Which University, what college?" The old gentleman scratched his head with the end of his steel penholder, and looked across at Walter, with a benevolent expression which seemed to convey that he would rather the young man would say Christchurch than St. Mary's, and Trinity in preference to Clare Hall. Walter Joyce grew hot to his ear-tips, and his tongue felt too large for his mouth, as he stammered out, "I have not been to either University--I----" but the remainder of the sentence was lost in the loud bang with which the old gentleman clapped-to the heavy sides of the big book, clasped it with its brazen clasp, and hoisted it on to a shelf behind him with the dexterity of a juggler.

"My good young friend," said the old clerk blandly, "you might have saved yourself a vast amount of vexation, and me a certain amount of trouble, if you had made that announcement earlier! Good morning!"

"But do you mean to say----"

"I mean to say that in that book at the present moment are the names of sixty gentlemen seeking just the employment which you have named, all of whom are not merely members of colleges, but members who have taken rank--prizemen, first-class men, wranglers, senior optimes; they are on our books, and they may remain there for months before we get them off. You may judge, then, what chance you would have. At most agencies they would have taken your money and given you hope. But we don't do that here--it isn't our way. Good morning!"

"Then you think I have no chance----"

"I'm sure of it--through us, at least. Good morning!"

Joyce would have made another effort, but the old gentleman had already turned on his heel, and feigned to be busy with some letters on a desk before him, so Walter turned round too, and silently left the registry-office.

Silently, and with an aching heart. The old clerk had said but little, but Walter felt that his dictum was correct, and that all hopes of getting a situation as a tutor were at an end. Oh, if his father had only left him money enough to go to college, he would have had a future before him which---- But then, Marian? He would never have known that pure, faithful, earnest love, failing which, life in its brightest and best form would have been dull and distasteful to him. He had that love still, thank Heaven, and in that thought there were the elements of hope, and the promptings to bestir himself yet once more in his hard, self-appointed task of bread-winning.

Money running very short, and time running rapidly on. Not the shortest step in advance since he had first set foot in London, and the bottom of his purse growing painfully visible. He had taken to frequenting a small coffee-house in the neighbourhood of Covent Garden, where, as he munched the roll and drank the tea which now too often served him as a dinner, he could read the newspapers, and scan the advertisements to see if there were anything likely to suit him among the myriad columns. It was a quiet and secluded little place, where but few strangers entered; he saw the same faces night after night, as he noticed--and where he could have his letters addressed to him under his initials, which was a great comfort, as he had noticed lately that his landlady in his riverside lodging-house had demurred to the receipt of so much initialed correspondence, ascribing it, as Walter afterwards learned from the "slavey," or maid-of-all-work, either to "castin' 'orryscopes, tellin' charickters by 'andwritin', or rejen'rative bolsum for the 'air!"--things utterly at variance with the respectability of her establishment.

A quiet, secluded little place, sand-floored and spittoon-decorated, with a cosy clock, and a cosy red-faced fire, singing with steaming kettles, and cooking chops, and frizzling bacon, with a sleepy cat, a pet of the customers, dozing before the hearth, and taking occasional quarter-of-an-hour turns round the room, to be back-rubbed and whisker-scratched, and tit-bit fed, with tea and coffee and cocoa, in thick blue china half-pint mugs, and with bacon in which the edge was by no means to be cut off and thrown away, but was thick, and crisp, and delicious as the rest of it, on willow-pattern plates, with little yellow pats of country butter, looking as if the cow whose impressed form they bore had only fed upon buttercups, as different from the ordinary petrified cold cream which in London passes current for butter as chalk from cheese. "Bliffkins's"--the house was supposed to have been leased to Bliffkins as the Elephant, and appeared under that title in the Directories; but no one knew it but as Bliffkins's--was a Somersetshire house, and kept a neat placard framed and glazed in its front window to the effect that the Somerset County Gazette was taken in. So that among the thin, pale London folk who "used" the house you occasionally came upon stalwart giants, big-chested, horny-handed, deep-voiced, with z's sticking out all over their pronunciation, jolly Zummerzetshire men, who brought Bliffkins the latest gossip from his old native place of Bruton and its neighbourhood, and who, during their stay--and notably at cattle-show period--were kings of the house. At ordinary times, however, the frequenters of the house never varied--indeed, it was understood that Bliffkins's was a "connection," and did not in the least depend upon chance custom. Certain people sat in certain places, ordered certain refreshment, and went away at certain hours, never varying in the slightest particular. Mr. Byrne, a wizened old man, who invariably bore on his coat and on his hair traces of fur and fluff and wool, who was known to be a bird-stuffer by trade, and an extreme Radical in politics, and who was reputed to be the writer of some of those spirit-stirring letters in the weekly press signed "Lucius Junius Brutus" and "Scrutator," sat in the right-hand corner box nearest the door, where he was out of the draught, and had the readiest chance of pouncing upon the boy who brought in the evening papers, and securing them before his rival, Mr. Wickwar, could effect a seizure. Mr. Wickwar, who was a retired tailor, and had plenty of means, the sole bane of his life being the danger to the Constitution from the recklessly advanced feeling of the times, sat at the other end of the room, being gouty and immobile, contented himself with glaring at his democratic enemy, and occasionally withering him with choice extracts from the Magna Charta weekly journal. The box between them was usually devoted of an evening to Messrs. O'Shane and Begson, gentlemen attached to the press, capital company, full of anecdote and repartee, though liable to be suddenly called away in the exigence of their literary pursuits. The top of the policeman's helmet or the flat cap of the fireman on duty just protruded through the swing-door in this direction acted as tocsins to these indefatigable public servants, cut them off in the midst of a story, and sent them flying on the back of an engine, or at the tail of a crowd, to witness scenes which, portrayed by their graphic pencils, afforded an additional relish to the morning muffin at thousands of respectable breakfast-tables. Between these gentlemen and a Mr. Shimmer, a youngish man, with bright eyes, hectic colour, and a general sense of nervous irritation, there was a certain spirit of camaraderie which the other frequenters of Bliffkins's could not understand. Mr. Shimmer invariably sat alone, and during his meal habitually buried himself in one of the choice volumes of Bliffkins's library, consisting of old volumes of Blackwood's, Bentley's, and Tait's magazines, from which he would occasionally make extracts in a very small hand in a very small note-book. It was probably from the fact of a printer's boy having called at Bliffkins's with what was understood to be a "proof," that a rumour arose and was received throughout the Bliffkins's connection that Mr. Shimmer edited the Times newspaper. Be that as it might, there was no doubt, both from external circumstances and from the undefined deference paid to him by the other gentlemen of the press, that Mr. Shimmer was a literary man of position, and that Bliffkins held him in respect, and, what was more practical for him, gave him credit on that account. An ex-parish clerk, who took snuff and sleep in alternate pinches; a potato salesmen in Covent Garden, who drank coffee to keep himself awake, and who went briskly off to business when the other customers dropped off wearily to bed; a "professional" at an adjoining bowling-alley, who would have been a pleasant fellow had it not been for his biceps, which got into his head and into his mouth, and pervaded his conversation; and a seedsman, a terrific republican, who named his innocent bulbs and hyacinths after the most sanguinary heroes of the French revolution,--filled up the list of Bliffkins's "regulars."

Among these quiet people Walter Joyce took up his place night after night, until he began to be looked upon as of and belonging to them. They were intolerant of strangers at Bliffkins's, of strangers, that is to say, who, tempted by the comforts of the place, renewed their visits, and threatened to make them habitual. These were for the most part received at about their third appearance, when they came in with a pleasant smile and thought they had made an impression, with a strong stare and a dead silence, under the influences of which they ordered refreshment which they did not want, had to pay for, and went away without eating, amid the contemptuous grins of the regulars. But Walter Joyce was so quiet and unobtrusive, so evidently a gentleman desirous of peace and shelter and refuge at a cheap-rate, that the great heart of Bliffkins's softened to him at once; they themselves had known the feelings under which he sought the asylum of that Long-Acre Patmos, and they respected him. No one spoke to him, there was no acknowledgment of his presence among them; they knew well enough that any such manifestation would have been out of place; but when, after finishing his very simple evening meal, he would take a few sheets of paper from his pocket, draw to him the Times supplement, and, constantly referring to it, commence writing a series of letters, they knew what all that portended, and all of them, including old Wickwar, the ex-tailor and great Conservative, silently wished him Godspeed.

Ah, those letters, dated from Bliffkins's coffee-house, and written in Walter Joyce's roundest hand, in reply to the hundred of chances which each day's newspaper-sheet offered to every enterprising bread-seeker, chances so promising at the first glance, so barren and so full of rottenness when they came to be tested! Clerkships? clerkships in galore! legal, mercantile, general clerks were wanted everywhere, only apply to A.B. or Y.Z., and take them! But when A. B. or Y. Z. replied, Walter Joyce found that the legal clerks must write the regular engrossing hand, must sweep out the office ready for the other clerks by nine a.m., and must remain there occasionally till nine p.m., with a little outdoor work in the service of writs and notices of ejectment. The duties required of the mercantile clerk were but little better, and those of the general clerks were worst of all, while throughout a net income of eighteen shillings a week appeared to be the average remuneration. "A secretary wanted?" certainly, four secretaries wanted nearly every day, to public companies which were about to bring forth an article in universal demand, but of which the supply had hitherto been limited, and which could not fail to meet with an enormous success and return a large dividend. In all cases the secretary must be a man of education and of gentlemanly manners, so said the advertisements; but the reply to Walter Joyce's application said in addition that he must be able to advance the sum of three hundred pounds, to be invested in the shares of the company, which would bear interest at the rate of twenty-five per cent, per annum. The Press? through the medium of their London fraternity the provincial press was clamorous for educated men who could write leading articles, general articles, and reviews; but on inquiry the press required the same educated men to be able to combine shorthand reporting with editorial writing, and in many cases suggested the advisability of the editorial writer being able to set up his own leaders in type at case. The literary institutions throughout the country were languishing for lecturers; but when Walter Joyce wrote to them, offering them a choice of certain subjects which he had studied, and on which he thought himself competent of conveying real information, he received answers from the secretaries, that only men of name were paid by the institutions, but that the committee would be happy to set apart a night for him if he chose to lecture gratis, or that if he felt inclined to address the inhabitants of Knuckleborough on his own account, the charge for the great hall was three pounds, for the smaller hall thirty shillings a night, in both cases exclusive of gas, while the secretary, who kept the principal stationer's shop and library in the town, would be happy to become his agent, and sell his tickets at the usual charge of ten per cent. Four pounds a week, guaranteed! Not a bad income for a penniless man! to be earned, too, in the discharge of a light and gentlemanly occupation, to be acquired by the outlay of three shillings' worth of postage stamps. Walter Joyce sent the postage stamps, and received in return a lithographic circular, vary dirty about the folded edges, instructing him in the easiest method of modelling wax flowers!

That was the final straw. On the receipt of that letter, or rather on the reading of it--he had taken it from the stately old looking-glass over the fireplace to the box where of late he usually sat--Walter Joyce gave a deep groan, and buried his face in his hands. A minute after he felt his hair slightly touched, and looking up, saw old Jack Byrne bending over him.

"What ails ye, lad?" asked the old man tenderly.

"Misery--despair--starvation!"

"I thought so!" said the old man calmly. Then taking a small battered flask from his breast and emptying its contents into a clean cup before him--"Here, drink this, and come outside. We can't talk here!"

Walter swallowed the contents of the cup mechanically, and followed his new friend into the street.

CHAPTER [VII.]

A NEW FRIEND.

When they stood in the street, with the fresh night-wind blowing upon them, the old man stopped, and, peering anxiously into his companion's face, said abruptly--

"Better?"

"Much better, thank you; quite well, in fact. There's no occasion for me to trouble you any more; I----"

"What? All gaff, eh? Old Jack Byrne sold, eh? Swallowed his brandy, and want to cut--is that the caper?"

"I beg your pardon, I don't quite clearly understand you, I'm sorry to say"--for Walter knew by the tone of his voice that the old man was annoyed--"I'm very weak and rather stupid--I mean to say, in--in the ways and the talk of London--and I don't clearly follow what you said to me just now; only you were so kind to me at first, that----"

"Provinces!" muttered the old man to himself. "Just like me; treating him to my pavement patter, and thinking he understood it! All right, I think, as far as one can judge, though God knows that's often wrong enough!" Then, aloud, "Kind! nonsense! I'm an odd old skittle, and talk an odd language; but I've seen the ups and downs of life, my lad, and can give you good advice if I can't give anything else. Have you anything to do to-night? Nothing? Sure I'm not keeping you from the Opera, or any swell party in Park Lane? No! Then come home with me and have a bit o' pickled salmon and a glass of cold gin-and-water, and let's talk matters out."

Before he had concluded his sentence, the old man had slipped Joyce's arm through his own, and was making off at a great rate, and also with an extraordinary shamble, in which his shoulder appeared to act as a kind of cutwater, while his legs followed considerably in the rear. Walter held on to him as best he could, and in this fashion they made their way through the back streets, across St. Martin's Lane, and so into Leicester Square. Then, as they arrived in front of a brilliantly lighted establishment, at the door of which cabs laden with fashionably dressed men and gaudily dressed women were continually disgorging their loads, while a never-ceasing stream of pedestrians poured in from the street, Jack Byrne came to a sudden halt, and said to his companion----

"Now I'm going to enjoy myself!"

Walter Joyce had noticed the style of people pouring in through the turnstiles and paying their admission money at the brilliantly lit boxes; and as he heard these words he unconsciously drew back. You see, he was but a country-bred young man, and had not yet been initiated into the classical enjoyments of London life. Jack Byrne felt the tug at his arm, and looked at him curiously.

"What is it?" said he. "You thought I was going in there? I? Oh, my dear young friend, you'll have to learn a great deal yet; but you're on the suspicious lay, and that's a chalk to you! You thought I'd hocussed the brandy I gave you at Bliffkins's; you thought I was going to take you into this devil's crib, did you? Not I, my dear boy; I'd as soon take you in as myself, and that's saying a good deal. No; I told you I was going to enjoy myself--so I am. My enjoyment is in watching that door, and marking those who go through it, not in speculating on what's going on inside, but in waiting for the end, my young friend--in waiting for the end! Oh yes, jump out of your brougham, my Lord Tomnoddy; but don't split your lavender gloves in attempting to close the door behind you--the cad will do that, of course! Beautiful linen, white as snow, and hair all stuck close to his head, look. But mark his forehead--what's your name--Joyce? Mark his forehead, Joyce; see how it slopes straight away back. Look at that noble space between his nose and his upper lip--the ape type, my friend--the ape type! That's one of your hereditary rulers, Joyce, my boy! That fellow sits and votes for you and me, bless him! He's gone in now to improve his mind with the literature of comic songs, and the legs of the ballet, and the fascinations of painted Jezebels, and to clear his brain with drinks of turpentine and logwood shavings! And that's one of our hereditary legislators! Oh, Lord, how much longer--how much longer!"

The policeman on duty at the door, whose mission it was to keep the pathway clear, now sallied forth from the portico and promenaded in the little crowd, gently pushing his way amongst them with a monotonous cry of "Move on, there, please--move on!" Joyce noticed that his companion regarded this policeman with a half-defiant, half-pitying air, and the old man said to him, as they resumed their walk--

"That's another of the effects of our blessed civilization! That gawk in blucher boots and a felt helmet--that machine in a shoddy great-coat, who can scarcely tell B from a bull's foot, and yet has the power to tell you and me and other men, who pay for the paving-rate--ay, and for the support of such scum as he is, for the matter of that--to move on! Suppose you think I'm a rum un, eh?" said Mr. Byrne, suddenly changing his voice of disgust into a bantering tone. "Not seen many like me before; don't want to see any more, perhaps?"

"I don't say that," said Joyce, with a half smile; "but I confess the sentiments are new to me, and----"

"Brought up in the country; my lord or the squire, eh? So pleased to receive notice coming out of church, 'plucks the slavish hat from the villager's head,' and all that! Sorry I've not a manorial hall to ask you into, but such as it is you're welcome. Hold hard, here."

The old man stopped before a private door in a small street of very small shops running between Leicester Square and the Haymarket, took out a key, and stood back for his companion to pass before him into a dark and narrow passage. When the door was closed behind him, Mr. Byrne struck a light, and commenced making his way up the narrow staircase. Joyce followed him flight after flight, and past landing after landing, until at length the top story was reached. Then Mr. Byrne took out another key, and, unlocking the door immediately in front of him, entered the room and bade his companion follow him.

Walter Joyce found himself in a long low room, with a truckle bed in one corner, bookshelves ranged round three sides, and in the middle, over which the curtains were now drawn, a large square table, with an array of knives and scissors upon it, a heap of wool in one corner, and an open case of needles of various kinds, polished bright and shining. On one end of the mantelpiece stood a glass case containing a short-horned white owl, stuffed, and looking wonderfully sagacious; on the other a cock, with full crop and beady eye, and open bill, with one leg advanced, full of self-sufficiency and conceit. Over the mantlepiece, in a long low case, was an admirably carried out bit of Byrne's art, representing the death-struggles of a heron struck by a hawk. Both birds were stuffed, of course, but the characteristics of each had been excellently preserved; the delicate heron lay completely at the mercy of his active little antagonist, whose "pounce" had evidently just been made, and who with beak and talons was settling his prey.

While Joyce was looking round at these things, the old man had lit a lamp suspended from the ceiling, and another standing on the square work-table; had opened a cupboard, and from it had produced a black bottle, two tumblers, and a decanter of water; had filled and lit a mighty pipe, and had motioned his companion to make free with the liquor and with the contents of an ancient-looking tobacco-jar, which he pushed towards him.

"Smoke, man!" said he, puffing out a thin line of vapour through his almost closed lips, and fanning it away lazily with his hand--"smoke!--that's one thing they can't keep from us, though they'd like. My lord should puff at his havannah while the commonalty, the plebs, the profanum vulgus,who are hated and driven away, should 'exhale mundungus, ill-perfuming weed!' Thank God we've altered all that since poor John Philips's day; he'd get better change for his Splendid Shilling now than ever he did in his time, eh? Talking Greek to you, am I? or worse than Greek, for that you'd understand, I dare say, and you'll never understand my old mutterings and quotations. You can read Greek?"

"Yes," Joyce said; "I am reckoned a tolerable Grecian."

"Indeed!" said the old man, with a grin; "ah! no doubt you were an honour to your college."

"Unfortunately," said Walter, "I have never been to college."

"Then your state is the more gracious! By George! I thought I'd picked up with a sucking don, all trencher-cap, and second aorist, and Conservative principles, Church and State, a big Bible with a sceptre stretched across it, and a fear of the 'swart mechanics' bloody thumbs' printed off on my lord's furniture, as provided by Messrs. Jackson and Graham! You don't follow me, young fellow? Like enough, like enough. I think myself I'm a little enigmatical when I get on my hobby, and it requires a good steady stare of honest wonderment, such as I see on your face now, to bring me up short. I'm brought up short now, and can attend to more sublunary matters, such as yours. Tell me about yourself."

"What shall I tell you?" asked Joyce. "I can tell nothing beyond what you already know, or can guess. I'm without friends, without work; I've lost hope----"

"No, no, my boy not lost, only mislaid it. We never lose hope so long as we're good for anything! Sometimes, when I've been most depressed and down, about the only thing in life that has any interest for me now--and you've no idea what that is, have you, Joyce, eh?"

"No, indeed; unless, perhaps, your children!"

"Children! Thank God, I never had a wife or a child to give me a care. No; the People's cause, my boy, the People's cause! That's what I live for, and sometimes, as I've been saying, I've been downhearted about that. I've seen the blood beating us down on the one side, and the money beating us down on the other, and I've thought that it was useless kicking against the pricks, and that we had better cave in and give up!"

"But you say you never lost hope?"

"Never, entirely. When I've been at my lowest ebb, when I've come home here with the blood in my veins tingling from aristocratic insult, and with worse than that, contempt for my own fellow working-men surging up in my heart, I've looked up at that case there over the mantelshelf, and my pluck's revived. That's a fine bit of work, that is, done by an old pupil of mine, who worked his soul out in the People's cause in '48, and died in a deep decline soon after. But what a fancy the lad had! Look at that heron! Is not it for all the world like one of your long, limp, yaw-yaw, nothing-knowing, nothing-doing young swells? Don't you read 'used-up' in his delicate plumage, drooping wings, lack-lustre eye? And remark how the jolly little hawk has got him! No breed about him; keen of sight, swift of wing, active with beak and talon--that's all he can boast of; but he's got the swell in his grip, mind you! And he's only a prototype of what's to come!"

The old man rose as he spoke, and taking the lamp from the table, raised it towards the glass case. As he set it down again he looked earnestly at Joyce, and said--

"You think I'm off my head, perhaps--and I'm not sure that I'm not when I get upon this topic--and you're thinking that at the first convenient opportunity you'll slip away, with a 'Thank ye!' and leave the old lunatic to his democratic ravings? But, like many other lunatics, I'm only mad on one subject, and when that isn't mentioned I can converse tolerably rationally, can perhaps even be of some use in advising one friendless and destitute. And you, you say, are both."

"I am, indeed; but I scarcely think you can help me, Mr. Byrne, though I don't for an instant doubt your friendship or your wish to be of service. But it happens that the only people from whom I can hope to get anything in the way of employment, employment that brings money, belong to that class against which you have such violent antipathies, the--the 'swells,' as you call them."

"My dear young fellow, you mistake me. If you do as I should like you, as an honest Englishman with a freeman's birthright, to do; if you do as I myself--old Jack Byrne, one of the prisoners of '48; 'Bitter Byrne,' as they call me at the club--if you do as I do, you'll hate the swells with all your heart, but you'll use 'em. When I was a young man, young and foolish, blind and headstrong, as all young men are, I wouldn't take off my cap to a swell, wouldn't take a swell's orders, wouldn't touch a swell's money! Lord bless you, I saw the folly of that years ago! I should have been starved long since if I hadn't. My business is bird-stuffing, as you may have heard or guessed; and where should I have been if I'd had to live upon all the orders for bird-stuffing I got from the labouring classes? They can't stuff themselves enough, let alone their birds! The swells want owls, and hawks, and pheasants, and what not, stuffed with outspread wings for fire-screens, but the poor people want the fire itself, and want it so badly that they never holloa for screens, and wouldn't use 'em if they had 'em. No, no; hate the swells, my boy, but use 'em. What have you been?"

"An usher in a school."

"Of course! I guessed it would be some of those delightful occupations for which the supply is unlimited and the demand nothing, but I scarcely thought it could be so bad as that! Usher in a school! hewer in a coal-pit, stone-breaker on a country road, horse in a mill, anything better than that!"

"What could I do?"

"What could you do? Sell your books, pawn your watch, take a steerage passage and go out to Australia. Black boots, tend sheep, be cad to an omnibus, or shopwalker to a store out there; every one of 'em better than dragging on in the conventional torture of this played-out staggering old country! That's gassy a little, you'll think, and so it is; but I mean better than that. I've long-standing and intimate connections with the Zoological Acclimatisation Society in Melbourne, and if you can pay your passage out, I'll guarantee that, in the introductions I give you, they'll find you something to do. If you can't find the money for your passage out, perhaps it can be found for you!"

Not since James Ashurst's death, not for some weeks before that event, indeed, when the stricken man had taken leave of his old pupil and friend, had Walter Joyce heard the words of friendship and kindness from any man. Perhaps, a little unmanned by the disappointment and humiliation he had undergone since his arrival in London, he was a little unmanned at this speech from his newly found friend; at all events, the tears stood in his eyes, and his voice was husky as he replied--

"I ought to be very much obliged to you, and indeed, indeed I am; but I fear you'll think me an ungrateful cub when I tell you that I can't possibly go away from England. Possibly is a strong word, but I mean, that I can't think of it until I've exhausted every means, every chance of obtaining the barest livelihood here!"

The old man eyed him from under his bent brows earnestly for a moment, and then said abruptly, "Ties, eh? father?"

"No!" said Joyce, with a half blush--very young, you see, and country bred--"as both my mother and father are dead, but--but there is----"

"Oh, Lord!" grunted Mr. Byrne, "of course there is; there always is in such cases! Blind old bat I was not to see it at first! Ah, she was left lamenting, and all the rest of it; quite knocks the Australian idea on the head? Now let me think what can be done for you here! There's Buncombe and Co., the publishers, want a smart young man, smart and cheap they said in their letter, to contribute to their new Encyclopaedia, the Naturalist. That'll be one job for you, though it won't be much."

"But, Mr. Byrne," said Joyce, "I have no knowledge, or very little, of natural history. Certainly not enough to----"

"Not too much to prevent your being too proud to take a hint or two from Goldsmith's Animated Nature,my boy, as he took several from those who preceded him. That, and a German book or two you'll find on the shelves--you understand German? that's right--will help you to all the knowledge Buncombe will require of you, or all they ought to expect, for the matter of that, at ten-and-six the column. You can come here of a morning--you won't interfere with me--and grind away until dark, when we'll have a walk and a talk; you shall tell me all about yourself, and we'll see what more can be done, and then we'll have some food at Bliffkins's and learn all that's going on!"

"I don't know how to thank you," commenced Joyce.

"Then don't attempt to learn!" said the old man. "Does it suit you, as a beginning only, mind! do you agree to try it--we shall do better things yet, I hope; but will you try it?"

"I will indeed! If you only knew----"

"I do: good night! I got up at daybreak, and ought to have been in bed long since. Good night!"

Not since he had been in London, had Walter Joyce been so light of heart as when he closed Mr. Byrne's door behind him. Something to do at last! He felt inclined to cry out for joy; he longed for some one to whom he could impart his good fortune.

His good fortune! As he sat upon his wretched bed in his tiny lodging, luxurious words rang in his ears. "And the chance of achieving fame and fortune, keep that in the foreground!" Fame and fortune! And he had been overjoyed because he had obtained a chance of earning a few shillings as a bookseller's hack, a chance for which he was indebted to a handicraftsman. But a poor first step towards fame and fortune, Marian would think! He understood how utter had been her inexperience and his own; he had learned the wide distance between the fulfilment of such hopes as theirs, and the best of the bare possibilities which the future held for them, and the pain which this knowledge brought him, more for the sake of his own share in it, was doubly keen for hers. It was very hard for Walter Joyce to have to suffer the terrible disappointment and disenchantment of experience; but it was far harder for him to have to cause her to share them. Marian would indeed think it a "poor first step." He little knew how much more decisive a one she was about to take herself.

[CHAPTER VIII.]

FLITTING.

Marian Ashurst dearly loved her home. To her concentrative and self-contained nature local associations were peculiarly precious; the place in which she had lived the life so essentially her own was very dear. The shabby old house, though she perfectly understood its shabbiness, and would have prized the power of renovating and adorning it as thoroughly as any petite maîtresse would have prized the power of adorning her bijou residence with all the prettiness of modern upholstery, was a shrine in her eyes. Base and unbeautiful, but sacred, the place in which her father had dutifully and patiently passed his laborious life--had it not been wasted? the proud discontented spirit asked itself many a time, but found no voice to answer "no."

She had often pictured to her fancy what the house might have been made, if there had but been money to make it anything with, money to do anything with; if only they had not always been so helpless, so burdened with the especially painful load of genteel poverty. She had exercised her womanly ingenuity, put forth her womanly tastes, so far as she could, and the house was better than might have been expected under all the circumstances; but ingenuity and taste, which double the effect of money when united to that useful agency, are not of much avail without it, and will not supply curtains and carpet, paint, varnishing, and general upholstery. There was not a superfluous ornament, and there were many in the drawing-rooms at Woolgreaves very offensive to her instinctively correct taste,--whose price would not have materially altered the aspect of Marian Ashurst's home, as she had recognised with much secret bitterness of spirit, on her first visit to the Creswells. She would have made the old house pretty and pleasant, if she could, especially while he lived, to whom its prettiness and pleasantness might have brought refreshment of spirit, and a little cheerfulness in the surroundings of his toilsome life; but she loved it, notwithstanding its dulness and its frigid shabbiness, and the prospect of being obliged to leave it gave her exquisite pain. Marian was surprised when she discovered that her feelings on this point were keener than those of her mother. She had anticipated, with shrinking and reluctance of whose intensity she felt ashamed, the difficulty she should experience when that last worst necessity must arise, when her mother must leave the home of so many years, and the scene of her tranquil happiness. Mrs. Ashurst had been a very happy woman, notwithstanding her delicate health, and the difficulties it had brought upon the little household. In the first place, she was naturally of a placid temperament. In the second, her husband told her as little as possible of the constantly pressing, hopelessly inextricable trouble of his life. And lastly, Mrs. Ashurst's inexperience prevented her realising danger in the future from any source except that one whence it had actually come, fallen in its fullest, fatalmost might--the sickness and death of her husband.

When that tremendous blow fell upon her, it stunned the widow. She could not grieve, she could not care about anything else. She was not a woman of an imaginative turn of mind; feeling had always been powerful and deep in her; but fancy had ever been active, so that when the one awful and overwhelming fact existed, it was quite enough for her, it swamped everything else, it needed not to bring up any reinforcements to her discomfiture. She was ready to go anywhere with Marian, to do anything which Marian advised or directed. The old house was to be left, a new home was to be sought for. A stranger was coming to be the master where her husband's firm but gentle rule had made itself loved, respected, and obeyed for so long; a stranger was to sit in her husband's seat, and move about the house where his step and his voice were heard no more, listened for no longer, not even now, in the first confused moments of waking after the blessed oblivion of sleep.

And in that awful fact all was included. Poor Mrs. Ashurst cared little for the linen and the china now. Whether they should be packed up and removed to the humble lodgings which were to be the next home of herself and her daughter, or whether Mr. Ashurst's successor should be asked to take them at a valuation, were points which she left to Marian's decision. She had not any interest in anything of the kind now. It was time that Marian's mind should be made up on these and other matters; and the girl, notwithstanding her premature gravity and her habit of decision, found her task difficult in fact and sentiment. Her mother was painfully quiescent, hopelessly resigned. In every word and look she expressed plainly that life had come to a standstill for her, that she could no longer feel any interest or take any active part in its conduct; and thus she depressed Marian very much, who had her own sense of impending disappointment and imperative effort, in addition to their common sorrow, to struggle against.

Mrs. Ashurst and her daughter had seen a good deal of the family at Woolgreaves since the day on which Marian's cherished belief in the value and delight of wealth had been strengthened by that visit to the splendid dwelling of her father's old friend. The young ladies had quite "taken to" Mrs. Ashurst, and Mrs. Ashurst had almost "taken to" them. They came into Helmingham frequently, and never without bringing welcome contributions from the large and lavishly kept gardens at Woolgreaves. They tried, in many girlish and unskilful ways, to be intimate with Marian; but they felt they did not succeed, and only their perception of their uncle's wishes prevented their giving up the effort. Marian was very civil, very much obliged for their kindness and attention; but uncordial, "un-getatable," Maude Creswell aptly described it.

The condition of Mr. Ashurst's affairs had not proved to be quite so deplorable as had been supposed. There was a small insurance on his life; there were a few trifling sums due to him, which the debtors made haste to pay, owing, indeed, to the immediate application made to them by Mr. Creswell, who interfered as actively as unostentatiously on behalf of the bereaved woman; altogether a little sum remained, which would keep them above want, or the almost equally painful effort of immediate exertion to earn their own living, with management. Yes, that was the qualification which Marian understood thoroughly, understood to mean daily and hourly self-denial, watchfulness, and calculation, and more and worse than that--the termination on her part of the hope of preventing her mother's missing the material comforts which had been procured and preserved for her by a struggle whose weariness she had never been permitted to comprehend.

The old house had been shabby and poor, but it had been comfortable. It had given them space and cleanliness, and there was no vulgarity in its meagreness. But the only order of lodgings to which her mother and she could venture to aspire was that which invariably combines the absence of space and of cleanliness with the presence of tawdriness and discomfort. And this must last until Walter should be able to rescue them from it. She could not suffice to that rescue herself, but he would. He must succeed! Had he not every quality, every facility, and the strongest of motives? She felt this--that, in her case, the strongest motive would have been the desire for success, per se;but in his the strongest was his love of her. She recognised this, she knew this, she admired it in an odd abstract kind of way; when her heart was sufficiently disengaged from pressing care to find a moment for any kind of joy, she rejoiced in it; but she knew she could not imitate it--that was not in her. She had not much experience of herself yet, and the process of self-analysis was not habitual to her; but she felt instinctively that the more selfish instincts of love were hers, its noble influences, its profounder motives her lover's.

It was, then, to him she had to look, in him she had to trust, for the rescue that was to come in time. In how much time? in how little? Ah, there was the ever-present, ever-pressing question, and Marian brought to its perpetual repetition all the importance, all the unreasonable measurement of time, all the ignorance of its exceeding brevity and insignificance inseparable from her youth.

She had nearly completed the preparations for departure from the old home; the few possessions left her and her mother were ready for removal; a lodging in the village had been engaged, and the last few days were dragging themselves heavily over the heads of Mrs. Ashurst and Marian, when Mr. Creswell, having returned to Woolgreaves after a short absence, came to see them.

Mrs. Ashurst was walking in the neglected garden, and had reached the far end of the little extent when Mr. Creswell arrived at the open door of the house. A woman-servant, stolid and sturdy, was passing through the red-tiled square hall.

"Is Mrs. Ashurst in?" asked the visitor. "Mrs. Ashurst is in the garden, I see--don't disturb her."

Marian, who had heard the voice, answered Mr. Creswell's question by appearing on the threshold of the room which had been her father's study, and which, since his death, her mother and she had made their sitting-room. She looked weary; the too bright colour which fatigue brings to some faces was on hers, and her eyelids were red and heavy; her black dress, which had the limp, ungraceful, lustreless look of mourning attire too long unrenewed, hung on her fine upright figure after a fashion which told how little the girl cared how she looked; and the hand she first held out to Mr. Creswell, and then drew back with a faint smile, was covered with dust.

"I can't shake hands," she said; "I have been tying up the last bundles of books and papers, and my hands are disgraceful. Come in here, Mr. Creswell; I believe there is one unoccupied chair."

He followed her into the study, and took the seat she pointed out, while she placed herself on a pile of folios which lay on the floor in front of the low wide window. Marian laid her arm upon the window-sill, and leaned her head back against one of the scanty frayed curtains. Her eyes closed for a moment, and a slight shudder passed over her.

"You are very tired, Miss Ashurst, quite worn out," said Mr. Creswell; "you have been doing too much--packing all those books, I suppose."

"Yes," said Marian, "I looked to that myself, and, indeed, there was nobody else to do it. But it is tiring work, and dirty,"--she struck her hands together, and shook her dress, so that a shower of dust fell from it--"and sad work besides. You know, Mr. Creswell"--here her face softened suddenly, and her voice fell--"how much my father loved his books. It is not easy to say good-bye to them; it is like a faint echo, strong enough to pain one, though, of the good-bye to himself."

"But why are you obliged to say good-bye to them?" asked Mr. Creswell, with genuine anxiety and compassion.

"What could we do with them?" said Marian; "there's no place to keep them. We must have taken another room specially for them if we took them to our lodgings, and there is no one to buy them here, so we are going to send them to London to be sold. I suppose they will bring a very small sum indeed--nothing, perhaps, when the expenses are paid. But it is our only means of disposing of them; so I have been dusting and sorting and arranging them all day, and I am tired and dusty and sick--sick at heart."

Marian leaned her head on the arm which lay on the window-sill, and looked very forlorn. She also looked very pretty, and Mr. Creswell thought so. This softened mood, so unusual to her, became her, and the little touch of confidence in her manner, equally unusual, flattered him. He felt an odd sort of difficulty in speaking to her--to this young girl, his old friend's orphan child, one to whom he intended so kindly, towards whom his position was so entirely one of patronage, not in any offensive sense, of course, but still of patronage.

"I--I never thought of this," he said hesitatingly; "I ought to have remembered it, of course; no doubt the books must be a difficulty to you--a difficulty to keep and a harder one to part with. But bless me, my dear Miss Ashurst, you say there is no one here to buy them--you did not remember me? Why did you not remember me? Of course I will buy them. I shall be only too delighted to buy them, to have the books my good friend loved so much--of course I shall."

"I had seen your library at Woolgreaves," said Marian, replying to Mr. Creswell's first impetuous question, "and I could not suppose you wanted more books, or such shabby ones as these."

"You judge of books like a lady, then, though you were your father's companion as well as his pet," said Mr. Creswell, smiling. "Those shabby books are, many of them, much more valuable than my well-dressed shelf-fillers. And even if they were not, I should prize them for the same reason that you do, and almost as much--yes, Miss Ashurst, almost as much. Men are awkward about saying such things, but I may tell his daughter that but for James Ashurst I never should have known the value of books--in other than a commercial sense, I mean."

"I don't know what they are worth," said Marian, "but if you will find out, and buy them, my mother and I will be very thankful. I know it will be a great relief to her to think of them at Woolgreaves, and all together. She has fretted more about my father's books being dispersed, and going into the hands of strangers, than about any other secondary cause of sorrow. The other things she takes quietly enough."

The widow could be seen from the window by them both as she pursued her monotonous walk in the garden, with her head bowed down and her figure so expressive of feebleness.

"Does she?" said Mr. Creswell. "I am very glad to hear that. Then"--and here Mr. Creswell gave a little sigh of relief--"we will look upon the matter of the books as arranged, and to-morrow I will send for them. Give yourself no further trouble about them. Fletcher shall settle it all."

"You will have them valued?" Marian asked with business-like seriousness.

"Certainly," returned Mr. Creswell. "And now tell me what your plans are, and where these lodgings are to which you alluded just now. Maude and Gertrude have not seen you, they tell me, since you took them?"

"No," said Marian, without the least tone of regret in her voice; "we have not met since your visit to Manchester. Miss Creswell's cold has kept her at home, and I have been much too busy to get so far as Woolgreaves."

"Your mother has seen my nieces?"

"Yes; Miss Gertrude Creswell called, and took her for a drive, and she remained to lunch at Woolgreaves. But that was one day when I was lodging-hunting--nothing had then been settled."

"The girls are very fond of Mrs. Ashurst."

"They are very kind," said Marian absently. The Misses Creswell were absolutely uninteresting to her, and as yet Marian Ashurst had never pretended to entertain a feeling she did not experience. The threshold of that particular school of life in which the art of feigning is learned lay very near her feet now, but they had not yet crossed it.

Marian and Mr. Creswell remained a long time together before Mrs. Ashurst came in. The girl spoke to the old gentleman with more freedom and with more feeling than on any previous occasion of their meeting; and Mr. Creswell began to think how interesting she was, in comparison with Maude and Gertrude, for instance; how much sense she had, how little frivolity. How very good-looking she was also; he had no idea she ever would have been so handsome--yes, positively handsome--he used the word in his thoughts--she certainly had not possessed anything like it when he had seen her formerly--a dark, prim, old-fashioned kind of girl, going about her father's study with an air of quiet appreciative sharpness and shrewdness which he did not altogether like. But she really had become quite handsome then, in her poor dress, with her grieved, tired face, her hair carelessly pushed off it any way, and her hands rough and soiled; she had made him recognise and feel that she had the gift of beauty also.

Mr. Creswell thought about this when he had taken leave of Mrs. Ashurst and Marian, having secured their promise to come to Woolgreaves on the day but one after, when he hoped Marian would assist him in assigning places to the books, which she felt almost reconciled to part with under these new conditions. He thought about them a good deal, and tried to make out, among the dregs of his memory, who it was who had said within his hearing, when Marian was a child, "Yes, she's a smart little girl, sure enough, and a dead hand at a bargain."

Marian Ashurst thought about Mr. Creswell after he left her and her mother. Mrs. Ashurst was very much relieved and gratified by his kindness about the books, as was Marian also. But the mother and daughter regarded the incident from different points of view. Mrs. Ashurst dwelt on the kindness of heart which dictated the purchase of the dead friend's books as at once a tribute to the old friendship and a true and delicate kindness to the survivors. Marian saw all that, but she dwelt rather on the felicitous condition which rendered it easy to indulge such impulses. Here was another instance, and in her favour, of the value of money.

"It has made more than one difference to me," she thought that night, when she was alone, and looked round the dismantled study; "it has made me like old Mr. Creswell, and hitherto I have only envied him."

"Do be persuaded, dear Mrs. Ashurst," said Maude Creswell, in a tone of sincere and earnest entreaty. She had made her appearance at the widow's house early on the day which succeeded her uncle's visit, and had presented, in her own and in her sister's name, as well as in that of Mr. Creswell, a petition, which she was now backing up with much energy. "Do come and stay with us. We are not going to have any company; there shall be nothing that you can possibly dislike. And Gerty and I will not tease you or Miss Ashurst; and you shall not be worried by Tom or anything. Do come, dear, dear Mrs. Ashurst; never mind the nasty lodgings; they can go on getting properly aired, and cleaned, and so on, until you are tired of Woolgreaves, and then you can go to them at any time. But not from your own house, where you have been so long, into that little place, in a street, too. Say you will come, now do."

Mrs. Ashurst was surprised and pleased. She recognised the girl's frank affection for her; she knew the generous kindness of heart which made her so eager to do her uncle's bidding, and secure to those desolate women a long visit to the splendid home he had given his nieces. Nothing but a base mean order of pride could have revolted against the offer so made and so pressed. Mrs. Ashurst yielded, and Maude Creswell returned to her uncle in high delight to announce that she had been successful in the object of her embassy.

"How delightful it will be to have the dear old lady here, Gerty!" said Maude to her sister. "The more I see of her the better I like her; and I mean to be so kind and attentive to her. I think Miss Ashurst is too grave, and she always seems so busy and preoccupied: I don't think she can rouse her mother's spirits much."

"No, I think not," said Gertrude. "I like the old lady very much too; but I don't quite know about Miss Ashurst; I think the more I see of her, the less I seem to know her. You must not leave her altogether to me, Maude. I wonder why one feels so strange with her? Heigh-ho!" said the girl, with a comical look, and a shake of her pretty head, "I suppose it's because she's so superior."

On the following day, Mrs. Ashurst and Marian took leave of their old home, and were conveyed in one of Mr. Creswell's carriages to Woolgreaves.

[CHAPTER IX.]

THE TENTH EARL.

Hetherington House stands in Beaufort Square, forming one side of that confessedly aristocratic quarter. The house stands back in melancholy "grounds" of dirty gravel, brown turf, and smutted trees, while the dwarf wall which forms the side of the square, and is indeed a sufficiently huge brick screen, fences off the commonalty, and prevents them from ever catching so much as a glimpse of the paradise within, save when the great gates are flung open for the entrance or exit of vehicles, or when the porter, so gorgeous and yet so simple, is sunning himself in the calm evening air at the small postern-door. The Countess of Hetherington likes this brick screen, and looks upon it as a necessary appanage of her rank. When visitors, having exhausted every topic of conversation possible to their great minds--a feat which is easily performed in the space of five minutes--and, beginning to fear the immediate advent of brain-softening if not of idiotcy, suddenly become possessed with a fresh idea after a lengthened contemplation of the wall in front of them, and with an air of desperation ask whether it does not make the house dull, Lady Hetherington says that, on the contrary, it is the only thing that renders the house habitable. She confesses that, during the time she is compelled to be in London, the sight of hack cabs, and policemen on their beat, and those kind of things, are not absolutely necessary to her existence, and as Sir Charles Dumfunk insists on her rooms facing the west, she is glad that the wall is there to act as a screen. Oh yes, she is perfectly aware that Lord Letterkenney had the screen of Purcell House pulled down and an open Italian façade erected in its place, the picture of which was in the illustrated papers; but as Lady Letterkenney until her marriage had lived in Ireland, and had probably never seen anything human except priests and pigs, the sight of civilised beings was doubtless an agreeable novelty to her. The same circumstances did not exist in her, Lady Hetherington's, case, and she decidedly liked the screen.

The Earl likes the screen also, but he never says anything about it, chiefly because no one over asks his opinion on any subject. He likes it because it is his, the Earl of Hetherington's, and he likes looking at it as he likes looking at the coronet on his plate, on his carriage-panels, and his horses' harness, at his family history as set forth by Burke and Debrett, and at the marginal illustrations of his coat-of-arms as given in those charming volumes, at his genealogical tree--a mysterious work of art which hangs in the library, looking something like an enlarged "sampler" worked by a school-girl, and from the contemplation of which he derives intense delight. It does not take a great deal to fill Lord Hetherington's soul with rapture. Down in Norfolk villages, in the neighbourhood of his ancestral home, and far away in scattered cottages on the side of green Welsh mountains, where the cross-tree rears its inopportune head in the midst of the lovely landscape, and where smoke and coal-dust permeate the soft delicious air, his lordship, as landlord and mine-holder, is spoken of with bated breath by tenants and workmen, and regarded as one of the hardest-headed, tightest-fisted men of business by stewards and agents. They do not see much, scarcely anything, of him, they say, and they don't need to, if he's to be judged by the letters he writes and the orders he sends. To screw up the rents and to lengthen the hours of labour was the purport of these letters, while their style was modelled on that used by the Saxon Franklin to his hog-hind, curt, overbearing, and offensive. Agents and stewards, recipients of these missives, say bitter words about Lord Hetherington in private, and tenants and workmen curse him secretly as they bow to his decree. To them he is a haughty, selfish, grinding aristocrat, without a thought for any one but himself; whereas in reality he is a chuckle-headed nobleman, with an inordinate idea of his position certainly, but kindly hearted, a slave to his wife, and with one great desire in life, a desire to distinguish himself somehow, no matter how.

He had tried politics. When a young man he had sat as Lord West for his county, and the first Conservative ministry which came into office after he had succeeded to his title, remembering the service which Lord West had done them in roaring, hooting, and yar-yaring in the House of Commons, repaid the obligation by appointing the newly fledged Earl of Hetherington to be the head of one of the inferior departments. Immensely delighted was his lordship at first; went down to the office daily, to the intense astonishment of the departmental private secretary, whose official labours had hitherto been confined to writing about four letters a day, took upon himself to question some of the suggestions which were made for his approval, carped at the handwriting of the clerks, and for at least a week thought he had at length found his proper place in the world, and had made an impression. But it did not last. The permanent heads of the department soon found him out, scratched through the external cuticle of pride and pomposity, and discovered the true obstinate dullard underneath. And then they humoured him, and led him by the nose as they had led many a better man before him, and he subsided into a nonentity, and then his party went out of office, and when they came in again they declined to reappoint Lord Hetherington, though he clamoured ever so loudly.

Social science was the field in which his lordship next disported himself, and prolix, pragmatical, and eccentric as are its professors generally, he managed to excel them all. Lord Hetherington had his theories on the utilisation of sewage and the treatment of criminals, on strikes and trades unions--the first of which he thought should be suppressed by the military, the second put down by Act of Parliament--and on the proper position of women; on which subject be certainly spoke with more than his usual spirit and fluency. But he was a bore upon all; and at length the social-science audiences, so tolerant of boredom, felt that they could stand him no longer, and coughed him down gently but firmly when he attempted to address them. Lord Hetherington then gave up social science in disgust, and let his noble mind lie fallow for a few months, during which time he employed himself in cutting his noble fingers with a turning-lathe which he caused to be erected in his mansion, and which amused him very much: until it suddenly occurred to him that the art of bookbinding was one in which his taste and talent might find a vent. So the room in which the now deserted turning-lathe stood was soon littered with scraps of leather and floating fragments of gilt-leaf; and there his lordship spent hours every day looking on at two men very hard at work in their shirt-sleeves, and occasionally handing them the tools they asked for: and thus he practised the art of book-binding. Every one said it was an odd thing for a man to take to, but every one knew that Lord Hetherington was an odd man; consequently no one was astonished, after the bound volumes had been duly exhibited to dining or calling friends, and had elicited the various outbursts of "Jove!" "Ah!" "Charming!" "Quite too nice!" and "Can't think how he does it, eh?" which politeness demanded--no one was astonished to hear that his lordship, panting for something fresh in which to distinguish himself, had found it in taxidermy, which was now absorbing all the energies of his noble mind. The receipt of a packet of humming-birds, presented by a poor relation in the navy, first turned Lord Hetherington's thoughts to this new pursuit; and he acted with such promptitude, that before the end of a week Mr. Byrne--small, shrunken, and high-shouldered--had taken the place at the bench erst occupied by the stalwart men in shirt-sleeves; but the smell of paste and gum had been supplanted by that of pungent chemicals, the floor was strewn with feathers and wool instead of leather and gilt-leaf, and his lordship, still looking on and handing tools to his companion, was stuffing birds very much in the same way as he had bound books.

It was a fine sight to see old Jack Byrne, "Bitter Byrne," the ultra-radical, the sourest-tongued orator of the Spartan Club, the ex-Chartist prisoner, waited on by gorgeous footmen in plush and silk stockings, fed on French dishes and dry sherry, and accepting it all as if he had been born to the situation.

"Why should I quarrel with my bread and butter, or what's a devilish deal better than bread and butter," he asked in the course of a long evening's ramble with Walter Joyce, "because it comes from a representative of the class I hate? I earn it, I work honestly and hard for my wage, and suppose I am to act up to the sham self-denial preached in some of the prints which batten on the great cause without understanding or caring for it--suppose I were to refuse the meal which my lord's politeness sends me, as some of your self-styled Gracchi or Patriots would wish, how much further should we have developed the plans, or by what the more should we have dealt a blow at the institution we are labouring to destroy? Not one jot My maxim, as I have told you before, is, use these people! Hate them if you will, despise them as you must, but use them!"

The old man's vehemence had a certain weight with Joyce, who, nevertheless, was not wholly convinced as to the propriety of his friend's position, and said, "You justify your conduct by Lord Hetherington's, then? You use each other?"

"Exactly! My Lord Hetherington in Parliament says, or would say if he were allowed the chance, but they know him too well for that, so he can only show by his votes and his proxies--proxies, by the Lord! isn't that a happy state of things when a minister can swamp any measure that he chooses by pulling from his pocket a few papers sent to him by a few brother peers, who care so little about the question in hand that they won't even leave their dinner-tables to come down and hear it discussed?--says that he loathes what he is pleased to call the lower classes, and considers them unworthy of being represented in the legislature. But then he wants to stuff birds, or rather to be known as a bird-stuffer of taste, and none of the House of Peers can help him there. So he makes inquiries, and is referred to me, and engages me, and we work together--neither abrogating our own sentiments. He uses my skill, I take his money, each has his quid pro quo;and if the time were ever to come,--as it may come, Walter, mark my words--as it must come, for everything is tending towards it,--when the battle of the poor against the rich, the bees against the drones, is fought in this country, fought out, I mean, practically and not theoretically, we shall each of us, my Lord Hetherington and I, be found on our respective sides, without the slightest obligation from one to the other!"

Joyce had come to look forward to those evening walks with the old man as the pleasantest portion of the day. From nine till six he laboured conscientiously at the natural-history work which Mr. Byrne had procured for him, dull uninteresting work enough, but sufficiently fairly rewarded. Then he met his old friend at Bliffkins's, and after their frugal meal they set out for a long ramble through the streets. Byrne was full of information, which, in his worldly wise fashion, he imparted, tinged with social philosophy or dashed with an undercurrent of his own peculiar views. Of which an example. Walter Joyce had been standing for five minutes, silent, rapt in delight at his first view of the Parliament Houses as seen from Westminster Bridge. A bright moonlight night, soft, dreamy, even here, with a big yellow harvest moon coming up from the back, throwing the delicate tracery into splendid relief, and sending out the shadows thick and black; the old man looking on calmly, quietly chuckling at the irrepressible enthusiasm mantling over his young friend's cheeks and gleaming in his eyes.

"A fine place, lad?"

"Fine! splendid, superb!"

"Well, not to put too fine a point upon it, we'll say fine. Ah, they may blackguard Barry as much as they like--and when it comes to calling names and flinging mud in print, mind you, I don't know anybody to beat your architect or your architect's friend--but there's not another man among 'em could have done anything like that! That's a proper dignified house for the Parliament of the People to sit in--when it comes!"

"But it does sit there, doesn't it!"

"It? What? The Parliament of the People? No, sir; that sits, if you would believe certain organs of the press, up a court in Fleet Street, where it discusses the affairs of the nation over screws of shag tobacco and pots of fourpenny ale. What sits there before us is the Croesus Club, a select assemblage of between six and seven hundred members, who drop down here to levy taxes and job generally in the interval between dinner and bed."

"Are they--are they there now?" asked Joyce eagerly, peering with outstretched neck at the building before him.

"Now? No, of course not, man! They're away at their own devices, nine-tenths of them breaking the laws which they helped to make, and all enjoying themselves, and wondering what the devil people find to grumble at!"

"One of the governors of the old school, down, down at Helmingham"--a large knot swelled in Joyce's throat as he said the word, and nearly choked him; never before had he felt the place so far away or the days spent there so long removed from his then life--"was a member of Parliament, I think. Lord Beachcroft. Did you ever hear of him?"

The old man smiled sardonically.

"Hear of him, man? There's not one of them that has made his mark, or that is likely to make his mark in any way, that I don't know by sight, or that I haven't heard speak. I know Lord Beachcroft well enough; he's a philanthropist, wants camphorated chalk tooth-powder for the paupers, and horse-exercise for the convicts. Registered among the noodles, ranks A1, weakly built, leaden-headed, and wants an experienced keeper!"

"That doctrine would have been taken as heresy at Helmingham! I know he came there once on our speech-day to deliver the prizes, and the boys all cheered him to the echo!"

"The boys! of course they did! The child is father to the man! I forgot, people don't read Wordsworth nowadays, but that's what he says, and he and Tennyson are the only poet-philosophers that have risen amongst us for many years; and boys shout, as men would, at the mere sight, at the mere taste of a lord! How they like to roll your 'lordship' round their mouths, and fear lest they should lose the slightest atom of its flavour! Not that the boys did wrong in cheering Lord Beachcroft! He's harmless enough, and well-meaning, I'm sure, and stands well up among the noodles. And it's better to stand anywhere amongst them than to be affiliated to the other party!"

"The other party? Who are they, Mr. Byrne?"

"The rogues, lad, the rogues! Rogues and noodles make up the blessed lot of senators sitting in your gimcrack palace, who vote away your birthright and mine, tax the sweat of millions, bow to Gold Stick and kiss Black Rod's coat-tails, send our fleets to defend Von Sourkraut's honour, or our soldiers to sicken of jungle fever in pursuit of the rebel Lollum Dha's adversaries! Parliament? Representatives of the people? Very much! My gallant friend, all pipeclay and padded breast, who won't hear of the army estimates being reduced; my learned friend, who brings all his forensic skill and all his power of tongue-fence, first learned in three-guinea briefs at the Old Bailey, and now educated up into such silvery eloquence, into play for the chance of a judgeship and a knighthood; the volatile Irish member, who subsides finally into the consulate of Zanzibar; the honourable member, who, having in his early youth swept out a shop at Loughboro', and arrived in London with eightpence, has accumulated millions, and is, of course, a strong Tory, with but two desires in life--to keep down 'the people,' and to obtain a card for his wife for the Premier's Saturday evenings--these are the representatives of the people for you! Rogues and noodles, noodles and rogues. Don't you like the picture?"

"I should hate it, if I believed in it, Mr. Byrne!" said Joyce, moving away, "but I don't! You won't think me rude or unkind, but--but I've been brought up in so widely different a faith. I've been taught to hold in such reverence all that I hear you deny, that----"

"Stick to it, lad! hold to it while you can!" said the old man kindly, laying his hand on his companion's arm. "My doctrines are strong meat for babes--too strong, I dare say--and you're but a toothless infant yet in these things, anyhow! So much the better for you. I recollect a story of some man who said he was never happy or well after he was told he had a liver! Go on as long as you can in pleasant ignorance of the fact that you have a political liver. Some day it will become torpid and sluggish, and then--then come and talk to old Dr. Byrne. Till then, he won't attempt to alarm you, depend upon it!"

Not very long to be deferred was the day in which the political patient was to come to the political physician for advice and for treatment.