COUSIN MARY

BY
Mrs. OLIPHANT
AUTHOR OF “CHRONICLES OF CARLINGFORD,” ETC.
THIRD EDITION
London
S. W. PARTRIDGE & CO.
8 & 9, PATERNOSTER ROW

COUSIN MARY

“BY-AND-BY IT CAME TO PASS THAT THESE TWO MET... IN THE COTTAGES” (p. 36).

CONTENTS.

COUSIN MARY.

CHAPTER I.
ONLY MARY.

THE Prescotts of Horton had been a powerful family in their day. Their house still was more in accordance with their past greatness than with the mediocrity of their fortune at the period of their history which has first to be indicated to the reader. They were no longer in the first rank in their county, but had settled down by degrees without any great fall, into the position of ordinary squires: that is to say, their fall had happened a hundred and fifty years before, in the time of that unhappy attempt to subvert the government established by the Revolution, which is known as the “Fifteen.” The Prescott of that period had joined the rebellion, if rebellion it could be called, and had escaped with his life at its disastrous conclusion. His son had secured a portion of the family belongings, but never had been able to regain the wealth or the position of his forefathers; and since then the family had remained humble but proud, thinking a great deal of themselves, but not thought quite so much of by their neighbours—a family not clever, nor any way distinguished, yet furnishing its quota of stout soldiers and respectable clergymen, with now and then a lawyer or two, to the service of the state.

The elder brother, the Squire, had been generally a dullish, goodish sort of man, doing his duty fairly well, fairly kind to his younger brothers and sisters, keeping up the ancestral house as well as he could on means not great enough for any splendour, and giving more or less a home to the scattered members of his family. The great advantage of those much abused laws of primogeniture, entail, or whatever else they may be which fix the succession in one member of a family, is this—that they are far more apt to keep up a central point, a family home, than any other arrangement yet discovered. When all share alike, no one has any particular claim upon the others, and ancestral homes, like all other primitive regulations for preserving the sacred nucleus of the family, cease to be.

The younger Prescott brothers went off to seek their fortunes in every generation; the elder always kept up the house. It depended upon his character, and perhaps still more on that of his wife, whether this home was or was not a kindly one, but still it was always there; a possible shelter in all circumstances, a perpetual court of appeal against the injustices of the world.

I have not space enough here to describe the old house, which was much too great for the income and pretensions of the present occupant. It was a great house, partly Elizabethan, with additions in later days, with two great wings, in one of which was a fine portrait gallery, while the other contained the show apartments of the house, a suite of rooms which were quite worthy to have been occupied by a king, though fact compels us to add that royalty had made but a very slight use of them. King Charles, in one of his hasty rides in the midst of his troubled career, had paused to eat a morsel in the hall, and to wash his royal hands in a dressing-room. This was all, but it was something, and the rooms were beautiful with their faded furniture and heavy old hangings and tapestries, and chairs covered with embroidered work. All this was very much faded, and kept with difficulty from falling to pieces; but it was very imposing, and strangers came from all quarters to see the house. The pictures in the gallery were all portraits now, though it was a tradition that there had once been several old Masters which were sold in the troubles, but of which the frames still remained, blankly filled up by pieces of old brocade, in themselves a sight to see. Some even of the portraits, especially those which had been painted by famous masters, had disappeared too, so that the importance of the gallery in point of art was small.

These remains of glory past were separate from the living part of the house. They were kept in order, and shown to strangers, a point of family pride which every Prescott held to be essential. But the existing Prescotts lived in the centre part of the house, which was too large for them, with its great hall and the other beautiful rooms, so airy and spacious, which were the creation of a generation which did not fear expense and loved space. The fine wainscoted room which was used as the dining-room in modern days, accommodated thirty people easily at dinner, whereas the Prescotts numbered but six, and seldom had company. The drawing-room was still larger, with noble broad bay windows, each as big as a modern room. To furnish all this, it may be supposed, was no trifle; and the furniture was shabby; what was old, faded; what was new, not half good enough for the natural splendour of the place. Nevertheless, new and old together harmonised somehow by mere use and wont, and the general appearance was that of a mingled humility and pride, like the character of the family, which thought such great things of itself and yet was able to do only little things and occupy a small position in the world.

This family consisted of six persons, as has been said—the Squire and his wife; the eldest son, who was very far from clever, who was, indeed, sometimes considered to be “not all there,” a mild, long young man, with an elongated, melancholy visage, not unlike that of the tragic monarch whose passing visit had given a historical association to the house. His name was not a romantic one; it was plain John, according to the habit of the house. He was very mild in all his tastes; good so far as a person, so neutral-tinted could be called good; kind, disturbing nobody, ready to do almost anything that was asked of him, so long as it was asked with due regard to his dignity—but as thoroughly aware of his importance as a Prescott, and the eldest son, as if he had possessed all the brains of the house. Then there were two sisters, no longer very young, but who had not yet renounced the rôle of youth, and who were always called “the girls,” according to general family usage.

Last of all was Percival, the soldier, the youngest, the prodigal, the spendthrift, the clever one, the beloved of the house. All these names do not mean that there was anything bad about Percy—quite the reverse. His gaiety made the house bright, his laugh rang through all the great rooms and woke cheerful echoes. Money trickled through his fingers he could not tell how, but he did no particular harm with it. The worst was that he was generally away from home with his regiment, and when he came home, though it was a delight to look forward to, and did everybody good, Mr. Prescott was always awfully conscious that for this happiness there would certainly be a good deal to pay. “That is all very well, my dear,” he would say to his wife, “so long as I live: but when John is master poor Percy will find out the difference.” “Ah, John!” Mrs. Prescott would answer, with a sigh, wondering in her heart who John’s wife would be, thinking what a good thing it would be if he were not to marry, feeling sure that whoever married him would be the future ruler of Horton. That was the danger that lay in her gallant Percy’s way.

This accounts for five people, and I have said there were six. The last was only Mary. The other members of the family would have thought it quite unnecessary to give any further description of her. She was the one who did all manner of little errands in the house, and little offices. She arranged the flowers; if Anna wanted something upstairs it was Mary who ran to fetch it; if Sophie left anything in the garden, or on one of the tables in the hall, Mary always knew where to find it. She fetched Mr. Prescott the newspaper he had left about, and found her aunt’s spectacles, and got John his hat, which he always forgot when he was going out. When Percy was at home she did all sorts of commissions for him; even the old housekeeper gave her messages and things to carry. “Just put this in the drawing-room, Miss Mary, my dear,” or, “Will you take these books to Miss Anna?” was what Mrs. Beesly said half-a-dozen times a day. They meant no harm whatever, and did not oppress her, or ill-use her, or neglect her, or do any of the things which are supposed to be done to a little dependent orphan in her uncle’s house. Perhaps they may have been said to have neglected her, but not of any evil intent.

They meant no harm; she was only Mary: there was no particular reason that anybody knew of for thinking of her, or putting anybody out of their way on her account. She was a child in the opinion of all the others, even of “the girls.” She was not included in that term. She was not even advanced to the rank of one of the girls. She was only Mary. She had never been whipped, or scolded, or put in dark closets, or set to hard tasks all her life. It is true that Anna’s and Sophie’s old dresses were very often “made down” for her: but that would have happened all the same had she been Anna’s and Sophie’s sister. Her life was happy enough; she had a share of everything that was going; and it never had occurred to her that she should be made of any particular account.

In her own mind, as well as in the conviction of the whole household, she was only Mary. She was a quiet little thing, but always cheerful, ready to talk when any one wanted to talk, or to play her little pieces when asked for them, or to be silent like a little mouse when there was no need for such vanities. She took herself as easily as the others took her, making no sort of pretension. Nor did she feel wronged, or offended, or slighted, as some might have done. She was only Mary, not Miss Prescott of Horton, as both the girls were. She was not even a Prescott, only a sister’s daughter, an unconsidered trifle in the feminine line. Her whole life was pitched in this minor key, but it was not at all an unhappy little life at her age, for she was barely twenty. It had not yet begun to matter very much that she was a first object to nobody. As a matter of fact, everything was perfectly natural about her, and she had never found that things might be brighter, or that she really had any aspiration after a more individual life.

She had an uncle at the Rectory as well as at the Hall, but there were no young people in the clerical house. This was how things stood with the Prescotts and Mary Burnet, when the new curate arrived, of whom Uncle Hugh at the Rectory had heard so very good an account. Uncle Hugh was a very conscientious clergyman. He liked to keep the parish in thoroughly good working order, but if truth must be told he preferred that some one else should do the work for him. He had the very best recommendations with the new curate. He was hard-working, he was moderate, not too much of a ritualist, and yet a very good Churchman, and a man who socially took nothing upon him; a retiring, modest young man. The Rector was most fortunate in getting a curate like Mr. Asquith, everybody said.

CHAPTER II.
ONLY THE CURATE.

A CURATE is a very useful member of the Church militant. He is the stuff out of which all its more dignified functionaries are made; and he does a great deal of the hard work, with a very limited proportion of the pay. But notwithstanding all this, he has a great deal to put up with in the way of snubs from his superiors, and indifference from the public, who accept his services often without prizing them very much. He has compensation in his youth, which makes him acceptable to the younger and fairer portion of the flock, and in his hopes of better things, as well as, no doubt, to leave pleasantry apart, in the satisfaction of performing important duties, and doing the sacred work to which he has dedicated himself.

Mr. Asquith, the new curate at Horton, had, however, but few of the compensations. There was a very small number of young ladies in the parish, and he was a young man who did not give himself to croquet or archery, or any of the gentle games then in vogue; for the period of which I speak was before the invention of lawn tennis. To none of these things did he incline. He was ready to tramp along the country roads in dust or in mud to carry consolation to any poor sick-bed. He was never tired with examining schools, catechizing children, conducting little cottage services; for those were the days when a high ritual was unusual, and daily prayers were rare in the churches. He would even interest himself in the village cricket, if need was, though awkwardly, and not in a way which impressed the rustic eleven. As for the minor organisations of the parish, the savings-banks, the clothing clubs, the lending library, they had no existence until he came.

The Rector frankly thought them quiet unnecessary; and Mrs. Prescott was of opinion that to set them a-going was a dangerous thing, and might put such a burden upon the next curate who should succeed Mr. Asquith as that problematical individual might not care to bear; and of course, she added, nobody could expect the Rector himself to be charged with the fatigue of keeping all these new-fangled institutions up.

Mr. Asquith paid little attention to these remonstrances. So long as he had permission to do what he thought right, even if it were only a formal permission, he was satisfied: and he went on working among his poor people, with the greatest indifference to any of those solaces, in the way of society and the making of friends, which are generally supposed to sweeten the lot of his class. He said “Bother!” when he was told that he was expected to be on certain occasions a guest at the Rectory; and he said “What a bore!” when he was invited to dine at the Hall. None of these delights tempted him. When John Prescott called on him, as in duty bound, he found the curate busy among calculations, planning out one of those village charities which were wanting in Horton, and rather abstracted and preoccupied—dull, John said, who was himself the dullest of men.

“I said we might perhaps let him have a day’s thooting now and again,” said John, who lisped a little.

“And what did he say to that?” said Anna; for indeed the girls were rather interested, and wanted to know what sort of person the new curate was.

“He thook his head,” said John; “and so he did when I asked if he was fond of croquet. And then I thaid, was he musical?”

“I hope he is musical,” said Sophie, “a violin would be such an addition. What did he say when you asked him that?”

“He thook his head again,” answered John.

“Oh, what a horrid man!”

“No, he’s not a horrid man; he’s a good fellow; but he’th dull—he’th dull,” said John, with emphasis; it was when he wanted to be emphatic that he lisped most. And as John was very dull himself, the sisters concluded, not unreasonably, that the man in whom he discovered that quality must be dull indeed.

Mary, who was in the room, listened with some curiosity, too, though she took no part in the conversation; and she was much amused to think that in the world, and even in the parish, there could thus be a duller man than John. Not that she was contemptuous of John for his dulness. She liked him almost the best of the family. He was tiresome, to be sure; if you were thrown upon him for society, it would not be cheerful society; but then you were never thrown upon John—there was always somebody else to talk, and show a little interest. And that he was tiresome was the worst that could be said of him. He never forced his dulness upon any one, as some do. He never wanted to be talked to, or amused, or taken any notice of. His temper was as even, and the grey atmosphere about him as tranquil as heart could desire. He was not clever, but he never gave any trouble, and he could even be very kind when it came into his head.

“Ah, well,” said Sophie, “it cannot be helped. A new man might have been an acquisition. He might have taught us some of the new rules for croquet, or he might have played a new instrument, or he might have sung. But it’s clear, from what John says, that he’s only the curate, and there’s nothing more to say.”

“I suppose,” said Anna, “he must be asked to dinner all the same.”

But though they did this only as a matter of duty, they would all have been extremely astonished, not to say offended, had they known that he said “What a bore!” on receiving the invitation. He was at that moment very much occupied about all the new things that he was setting up, altogether indifferent to the consideration that the next curate might not be of his way of thinking and might feel it a burden. Mr. Asquith, however, never spoke of the possibility of a change, but seemed to think that there never would be any other curate. He looked as though he meant to go on forever bringing all his schemes to perfection. The Rector could only afford to give him £100 a year and the use of the cottage in which the curates always lived, with the very barest furniture—merely what was necessary. But Mr. Asquith did not seem to think either of the small stipend or the bare lodgings; he seemed only to think of the work which he made so unnecessarily hard for himself. And presently he was so absorbed in this work, and found so many things to do, and set so many things going which nobody but himself took any interest in, that he fell almost out of the knowledge of the more important persons in the parish. They went their way, which was the old-established, correct way for gentlefolks in a country parish to go, in which they had gone long before he appeared, and would most likely go long after he had disappeared; and he went his, which was novel and new-fangled, and on the whole not a way approved of by the best people. And though the parish was quite small, and you would have supposed that all the educated persons belonging to the upper classes in it must have jostled each other every day, the fact was that they went on in parallel lines, as it were, without ever seeing each other.

He went to the Rectory now and then, of course, as in duty bound, but otherwise, when he was seen passing any of the chief houses in the place, and a chance visitor asked who he was, “Oh, it is only the curate,” was always the answer in Horton. This was really almost all that any one knew of him.

As a matter of fact, the Rector knew more, and all the world might have known what his antecedents were. He was a man from the North, the son of one of those sturdy small proprietors who are called statesmen in Cumberland, or were called so in former times—born upon his own paternal acres in a house which had belonged to his family for generations, and thus possessing many of the advantages of ancient lineage, though his was not what is called gentle blood. He had won a scholarship at Oxford, and had made his way through the university without, however, gaining any of those social advantages which, in the eyes of many people, are the chief recommendations of these homes of learning. He had not “made friends.” He had settled himself to his work there with the same gravity as at Horton, and thought the finest “wines” and the best company a bore. His talents did not lie in that way. He had no genius for acquaintance, and though he liked the river very well for relaxation, he never could be persuaded to make a business of it, as the boating men did, or, indeed, to “go in” for anything except his work. And even in his work he was not brilliant. His college set no high hopes on his head. He made his way quite quietly, unobserved, very much as he did at Horton, through those groves of Academe, generally to be found out of the crowd, in paths not much frequented, busy always, caring very little for pleasures by the way. As he got on, he became a little better known as having “coached” very effectually, but with little demonstration, several dunces for their smalls, and one or two better men for special subjects, especially theology: and so came through that part of his life with little fame, but such as it was, very good. Such a man leaves an impression, faint but lasting, and which is not dependent upon known and proved facts. This, indeed, is what almost everybody does one way or other. We don’t know any harm that the good-for-nothing may have done, but we become aware by something in the air that he is a good-for-nothing; and we may have no act of virtue to set against a man’s name, yet know that he is a good man by instinct, by an atmosphere about him, something like a moral taste of which we cannot explain the cause.

Mr. Asquith had this kind of reputation, if it can be called a reputation. He was poor; he had very little, if anything, more than the £100 a year which Mr. Prescott, the Rector, gave him. He was accustomed to spare living, and liked it, being unreasonably, and indeed wrongly, indifferent to what he ate and drank, and quite unworthy of the good cooking at the Rectory or the more pretentious efforts at the Hall. He liked his own chop at home quite as well, even when he had, as was sometimes necessary, to scrape off the cinders which it brought along with it from the gridiron, before he ate it. Mr. Asquith thought this was a very natural accident, and did not complain.

Such a man is the only man altogether independent in our complicated social system. He never remarked the ugly Kidderminster under his feet, or wished for a Persian rug in its place. He did not mind in the least when his clerical coat got shabby. What did it matter? Everybody knew him on the one hand—nobody knew him on the other. In either case he was indifferent, and consequently independent. If there was anything he was a little particular over, it was his washing, his landlady said. The landlady was an old servant at the Rectory, who had been provided for in this curate’s house, and who knew the ways of the kind. But she had never met with any like Mr. Asquith—no one who gave so little trouble, or was so easily satisfied.

But he was only the curate. Such qualities as his make little show. And after a while the Prescotts almost forgot that there was such a person in their neighbourhood. They said “How do you do, Mr. Asquith?” when they met him at the Rectory or on the road; but after they had done their duty by him, and asked him twice (which was really a superfluity of attention), he dropped into his own sphere, and save at Uncle Hugh’s, or in church, by accident, was seen of them no more.

CHAPTER III.
THE TWO TOGETHER.

THE dinners at the Hall had not, however, been entirely without fruit in the lives of the two inconsiderable people who first met there. Mary, it may be supposed, had regarded with a little interest the appearance of the stranger, who was quite a new thing in her life. Few strangers came at Horton even when Percy was at home, and Percy had not been at home since Mary had finally developed into a young woman, and been permitted to wear a long frock and put up her hair; so that she had no acquaintance with new faces, and the appearance of an individual unknown, even though he was only the curate, aroused the liveliest interest and curiosity in her. He was not a handsome man, but he had the air of having a will and meaning of his own which is always attractive to a woman, even though he did not sing, nor play upon any instrument, nor know any games to speak of. These deficiencies did not affect Mary, who only played a little upon the piano, and though she was constantly called upon to make up her uncle’s rubber, and had in consequence a very fair proficiency in whist, was not fond of games. Thus the remarks which were made upon Mr. Asquith afterwards were, Mary thought, so unjust so far beyond the measure of his delinquencies, even if he were a delinquent, that in her thoughts she immediately constituted herself his champion. In her thoughts, and a little in words too; she ventured to say: “I don’t think he looks stupid at all,” when Anna and Sophie, after the second entertainment to which he had been invited, broke forth simultaneously into the outcry, “Oh, what a stupid man!” The sound of this small voice, so unexpected, confounded the girls. They looked at her in amazement, and then they laughed.

“‘HERE IS MARY SETTING UP TO HAVE AN OPINION’” (p. 35).

“Why, here is a Daniel come to judgment,” cried Sophie, and “Here is Mary setting up to have an opinion,” said Anna. It was the most amusing thing that had happened for a long time.

“Well, why shouldn’t Mary have an opinion?” said her uncle, “and about the curate, too, which is a subject young ladies are always supposed to understand.”

“Mary must not trouble her head about curates,” said Mrs. Prescott. “She is a great deal too young for any nonsense of that kind.”

“Fancy calling Mr. Asquith nonsense!” cried both the girls again, with a burst of laughter. They were not in the least interested, so that Mary’s interference only amused them. If she had made herself the champion of a more eligible visitor, Sophie and Anna might not perhaps have taken it nearly so well.

“He doesn’t look stupid, and there is no nonsense about him, and I think he is very nice,” said Mary, but she was at that moment putting away her work, and spoke very low, almost to herself, and nobody paid any attention. She felt, however, a little excited at having thus, as it were, taken up her position and declared her sentiments. She felt like the champion of an injured but noble man—the defender of the unfortunate. This gives a sense of generosity, of fine elation to the mind. It seemed to Mary as if she were herself less insignificant in being thus the champion of another. And it gave her an interest in Mr. Asquith, which was entirely disinterested, but yet was akin, perhaps, to a sentiment more warm, of which as yet Mary had never thought even in her most romantic dreams.

And by-and-by it came to pass that these two met not unfrequently upon the roads, and sometimes in the cottages where Mary was often a visitor. She went there sometimes on charitable errands, and sometimes from mere kindness and liking for the good people, whom she had known all her life. The charity was not Mary’s charity, it need hardly be said, for she had nothing of her own to give. Mrs. Prescott was not rich nor very interesting, nor a woman who talked much on any subject, especially upon that of the poor and their claims: but she had a kind heart. When there was a very nice pudding at luncheon, she almost always remembered that poor Sally Williams, who was in “a deep decline,” and had no appetite, might be tempted by a bit of it, or if the chicken was very tender, she felt sure that old John Price, who had lost his teeth, or Mrs. Sims at the almshouses, would like it. “I will just put this nice little piece in a dish, and you will run down to the village with it, Mary,” she would say, “as soon as you have finished, my dear.”

“But why should Mary go?” some one remarked, at least three days out of five.

“She never has time to finish her luncheon,” said Mr. Prescott, who loved a good meal.

“And why can’t you send Pierce, mamma? I am sure she has always plenty of time for her dinner, and never hurries for any one.”

“Oh, my dears,” said kind Mrs. Prescott, “it tastes so much better when one of the young ladies takes it. Pierce would only go because she was obliged to go, and perhaps she would think it a bore, and fling it at them, so to speak.”

“I darethay Mary findth it a bore, too,” said John.

“Oh, never!” Mary would say. She was not one who cared to spend a great deal of time at table; and as soon as her aunt rose she was ready with her basket. She went so lightly skimming down the long shady avenue, like a bird or a fawn—but no—like nothing in the world, but a nice little happy-hearted, light-footed girl, conscious of going on an errand that would give pleasure, which is one of the sweetest, pleasantest, and fairest of sights to be seen in the world. She liked the errand dearly; she liked the little start of agreeable anticipation with which she was received (though her appearance could scarcely be said to be unexpected, it was so frequent), and the smile with which the invalid would greet her, and that delightful consciousness that it tasted sweeter from her kind little friendly hands than if Pierce had bounced in and thumped the basket down on the table, and taken no pains about it. Pierce did not always do this, but was kind, too, in her way. But nobody is quite just in their estimate of others, and this was what Mary thought.

And as often as not, Mr. Asquith would meet her on the way—sometimes as she was going, sometimes coming; sometimes in the cottages, sometimes as she came out smiling, with her empty basket. Of course Mr. Asquith gave all the credit of what was in reality Mrs. Prescott’s kindness to her little niece. He thought this practical little girl, with her basket, acted on her own impulse, and that it was altogether out of the tenderness of her own heart that she remembered the little fancies of the sick. Most likely he thought that these little delicacies were saved from her own share of the good things at the Hall, and never made account of Mrs. Prescott at all in the matter; for nobody is quite just, as has been said, and Mrs. Prescott was stout and entirely uninteresting, and her under lip projected a little, so that people sometimes thought her cross and sometimes sulky. But Mary was as bright as the day, and the village people were all fond of her. “Oh, come in, sir,” they said at first, when he lingered at the door, seeing a lady in the room. “I will come again another day, Mrs. Williams, for I see you have a visitor already.” “Oh, bless you, sir, come in, come in; why it’s only Miss Mary,” the good woman would say, laughing with amused surprise at the thought that on such a consideration the curate should be shy and hold back.

And in this way many meetings came about without either of the two being aware that they were becoming used to seeing each other, and that a little anticipation of this personal pleasure began to mingle with the kindness of their original motives.

When Mr. Asquith made the discovery that it was so, great discouragement fell upon his mind, such as had never moved it before. For nothing of the kind had ever before come in his hard-working way. What was Miss Mary to him, or Miss anything? He was a poor man, far too poor to marry. It had never occurred to him to think of his poverty before. Indeed, he was not poor, for he had few wants, and could always do very well with what he had; and he had never intended to marry, or thought of marrying. He might even, indeed—it was very likely, have said some things in his day about the iniquity of marrying when you have no means of supporting a wife, much less children, and when in all likelihood you are betraying some foolish girl who knows nothing of the world into lifelong penury, labour, and privation.

When he came to think of it, he felt sure that he had said many such things: and was it possible that he was so lost to every sense of duty, so forgetful of principle as to let himself fall into temptation in this way, and probably, possibly—a thought which made his grave face glow—lead another, another!—a young creature born to better fortune, almost a child—into the same snare? To describe the state of agitation into which the young man was brought by this sudden flash of perception is not easy—the sweetness of it, the misery of it, the keen, poignant, sharply-stinging delight. For though it was pain, it was delight, too. To be able to make her love him, that sweet little girl, Mary!

The world is hard, and it is bitter to give up, and to put a stop to that rising current of new life is enough to tax all a man’s powers. But when you have said everything that can be said in that respect, there still remains the fact that the curate had, in one flash of consciousness, a moment of delight which nobody could take from him. He had tasted the sweetness, though the cup might not be for him; and then he fell headlong into the bitter depths below.

There must be no more of it, he said to himself, no more! And the first thing he did was to shut himself up, to take to his books, to give up his visiting; he would not even walk out for exercise save in the evening, when he was sure he could not meet her? Sacrifice her because he loved her? Oh no, never; such a thing could not be; but to sacrifice himself, that was not so hard; he thought he could do that. Therefore he departed from all his good ways as a parish priest, saying to himself that it was only for a time, and praying God to pardon that temporary neglect of duty because of the other more urgent duty which he must, he must carry out, at whatever cost that might be.

And Mary meantime had her own little thoughts, which nobody made much account of, and which at the present moment nobody suspected. But what those thoughts were wants a longer space than the end of this chapter to say.

CHAPTER IV.
MARY’S LITTLE THOUGHTS.

MARY’S mind was supposed to be very youthful and unformed. She had been kept longer a child than is usual, and yet, by reason of a sort of solitude in which she lived in the midst of a family which was, yet was not, absolutely her own family, her thoughts had exercised themselves silently on many subjects not commonly considered by children; but all in a shy and voiceless way, so that nobody round her had any conception of many reasonings which had gone on in her mind. When Mr. Asquith came to Horton she had been very curious about him, and when he failed to interest the rest, he became still more a curiosity and interest to Mary.

Among the subjects which occupied her silent thoughts there had been many little questions about the clergymen and their ways. As a matter of fact clergymen were more frequent visitors at Horton than any other class of men, and Mary had secretly been a critic of them all her life. Her Uncle Hugh was a clergyman whom she saw perpetually. He was a parish priest, with not very much to do, and one who was fully convinced that he did his duty. But Mary was not equally convinced. There was a good deal in his life which did not seem to that little critic to be much in harmony with what she read in her New Testament. To be sure, she knew well enough that every man who is in the Church can’t go wandering about the world like St. Paul, teaching and preaching to the heathen.

Mary was aware that the change of times must be taken into account, and that the steady work of a parish has to be considered as well as the romance of missionary devotion. But she could not quite reconcile Uncle Hugh to the standard in which she believed, even after everything was taken into account. He was too comfortable, too much at his ease, had more spare time than he ought to have had, and, indeed, altogether was too like Uncle John, who was the merely secular head of the family, than satisfied the rigorous ideal of youth. There was indeed very little difference between Uncle Hugh and Uncle John. The elder brother sat in a little room which was called his business-room, whereas the special retirement of the other was spoken of as the study: and the parson wore a white tie instead of the cosy checked one which generally enveloped the throat of the Squire, and a black coat instead of a shooting-jacket; but during the week these were the chief differences between them. Mary, all silent in the background, not considered by anybody to have an opinion at all, arraigned these two before her private tribunal, and was not satisfied, and concluded that there should have been a great deal more difference. To be sure, on Sunday there was difference enough. Uncle Hugh in his surplice was a commanding figure, and he preached while Uncle John yawned and listened. He was not a very good preacher.

None of these things are hid from the inexorable little judges from seven to seventeen, who give us all our due. In her heart, though she was fond of him, she was not satisfied with Uncle Hugh as a clergyman. His bishop was very well satisfied, but not Mary. And the curates were still less satisfactory. The High Church development was only in its beginning in those days, and curates made little or no pretensions to sacerdotal superiority, but were just young men in the Church, as their brothers were young men in the army. They were very good-natured young fellows most of them, very willing to give a shilling or even half-a-crown to poor old Hodge—not quite so willing to administer spiritual consolation or pray by his bedside—yet, by the aid of the service for the visitation of the sick, getting manfully through that too, and then, with a sigh of relief, coming up to croquet at the Hall. They had always time for croquet, and took enormously long walks, and had a considerable difficulty in getting through the long days in a dull little place where, as they would sometimes complain, there was nothing to do. Most of the young men who had been curates to Mr. Prescott of Horton Rectory, left him with the best of recommendations; but little Mary, that little Rhadamantha, had them all up at the bar before her, and judged them severely, though she never said a word.

But Mr. Asquith was something altogether new, and of a different order of being. When John said he was dull, and the girls that there was nothing in him, Mary demurred, as has been seen. She said to herself that Mr. Asquith was nice, and she liked the looks of him; and having thus, as it were, given herself from the first a brief in his defence, it was not so easy to put on the judge’s cap and pronounce the verdict. Something, perhaps, from the beginning softened that judgment. She expected, to start with, that he would be different: and he was different. The dinners at the Hall bored him, which was a pity; and he would have none of the croquet, and instead of complaining that there was nothing to do, his excuse was that he had not time enough for the amusements which the young people of the parish set such store by. He had not time. The other curates had not known what to do with their time. Certainly he was different.

And then Mary had begun to meet him about in all the cottages where there were sick people, where there was special need of kindness and help. He did not give away shillings, except rarely, for he had very few to give. He was not a young man on his promotion, waiting till the family living should be vacant, or till somebody should give him a benefice, but had thrown himself into his work as if he never meant to go away. Mary made some small investigations on this point in the most innocent and natural way. She said to the Rector, “Uncle Hugh, I suppose Mr. Asquith is going to stay longer than the other curates,” at a moment when Mr. Prescott was unoccupied, and had time to answer the question.

“Eh?” cried the Rector, “Asquith stay longer? What makes you think so?”

“He talks as if he were always to be here,” said Mary.

“Oh, do you think so? This little girl is not such a fool as she looks,” said his reverence. “I’ve noticed that too.”

“Don’t speak to Mary so,” said Mrs. Hugh Prescott, who was somewhat matter of fact. “She is not a fool at all, oh no; she has a great deal of observation. But Mr. Asquith had better not deceive himself, Hugh, for you know you have always liked a change of curates. Perhaps I had better say a word——”

The Rector’s wife was fond of saying a word, which generally made the person addressed very angry, though she had no such meaning. Her husband stopped her with a movement of his hand. “Don’t, my dear,” he said. “It is not that he thinks too much of himself. He has not the prospects of the other young men. He is not serving his apprenticeship here with the hope of soon setting up for himself.”

“You speak of the Church as if it were a trade, Hugh.”

“Do I, my dear? Well, perhaps it is something the same after all, if you think of it—for most people are looking out for something better. I should not mind being a canon or a prebendary myself, or even a dean.”

“And is not Mr. Asquith looking out for something better?” said Mary. She was more interested in this question than in any other that could at the moment be presented to her.

“Poor fellow! I don’t know that he has anything better to look for,” said the Rector. “He has few friends, and nobody to push him. I should not wonder if he remained a curate all his life.”

“Nobody does that nowadays,” said Mrs. Hugh Prescott. “Something always turns up. A poor clergyman, so far as I can see, has just as many chances as one that is well off. He is kind to somebody’s child, or attends somebody’s mother on her deathbed, or something of that sort. There is a special providence for poor curates, I think.”

Mary took in all this with quick ears, and asked herself, whether, in reality, a special providence was all that Mr. Asquith had to look to. “There is none other that fighteth for us, but only Thou, O God,” we say in church day by day: but even that pious sentiment seems to convey a veiled opinion that other aid would be desirable: but when it is said of a man that a special providence is wanted for his promotion, that man’s hopes do not, to most of the world, seem particularly well founded. Mary felt with a curious swelling of her heart that she was glad this was the case with Mr. Asquith. She was proud of it, if pride is possible in such a matter. When she tested him by the first great commission which sent men out to preach without even bread in their scrip, much less money in their purse—that test which no one had borne as yet—she felt that at last here was one who could bear it; and this gave Mary a degree of pleasure quite incommensurate with his stay in the parish, or of any possible knowledge he could have of her, or she of him. After all she had nothing at all to do with it; and what were his principles of action, or how he was moved by the absence of all means of advancing himself, she had not the least way of knowing. It might be this that made him what John called dull. Mary could not tell. But she felt in her heart, though she was so ignorant, that the real clergyman for whom she had been looking had appeared at last—the only one who could bear the test which had not succeeded at all with the rest of the curates, nor even Uncle Hugh.

And this was the conclusion which had been formed in her mind even before she began to meet Mr. Asquith in the cottages. She was keenly alive to his demeanour there. It was as if she had gone to collect evidence upon this subject. When she was giving poor Sally Williams her pudding, she was at the same moment mentally weighing the curate and his manners to poor Mrs. Williams, and making him out. Perhaps Mary was not quite an impartial judge, being biassed, as has been said, by the other pieces of evidence which she had already put together, and even by something more subtle still, by her own foregone conclusion, and certain weakening prepossessions that had stolen into her heart. But about the time when Mr. Asquith took fright and began to shut himself up and relinquish his visits to the cottages, Mary had completed all her investigations, or had forgotten them, or had come to think them the most unnecessary, the most impertinent of inquiries, having somehow suddenly and unconsciously been led to the conclusion that there was nobody like Mr. Asquith, and that whatever he did became, from the fact of his doing it, right. It gave all the more weight to her opinion in this respect that she was not, as has been seen, a girl who naturally believed in curates, or took the excellence of that class for granted, as some young women do. It was, however, a somewhat severe test of Mary’s faith that almost simultaneously with her full conviction of it, this perfect man should suddenly begin to conduct himself in so strange a way. For she could not help being struck by the fact that she met him no longer, even had the poor people been silent on the subject, which they were not. They poured out their complaints to her, sometimes quite simply, sometimes with a little mischievous meaning. “Mr. Asquith? We haven’t seen Mr. Asquith, no—not for ten days; him as used to come in and give my poor Sally a comfor’able word ’most every day. I don’t know what’s the cause. I only hope, Miss Mary, as we’ve done nothing to offend him. It ain’t with our will if we has, for a kinder gentleman never come inside my door.”

“Oh, no, Mrs. Williams, I am sure he would not take offence. Perhaps he is very busy; you know a clergyman—has to study a great deal,” said Mary, pausing to pick up the first excuse that came handy.

Mrs. Williams shook her head. “If it had been most clergymen,” she said, “I shouldn’t have wondered, for they soon tires—but Mr. Asquith! oh, he did seem another sort, he did!” the poor woman cried.

And then old Mrs. Sims at the almshouses had her little word to put in: “I can’t think what’s come over Mr. Asquith, that was such a kind gentleman. He’s not come no more since the last time as he met you here, Miss Mary. It couldn’t be as a fine, tall gentleman like ’im was afraid of you.”

“Why should anyone be afraid of me?” Mary cried, with a laugh. But she was glad to get outside that keen-sighted old woman’s cottage, for she felt the heat of a coming blush which swept all over her, up to the very roots of her hair, a blush which sent all her blood coursing through her veins, and made her feel disposed to laugh again, and then to cry. Afraid of her! Why should any one, much less the curate, be afraid of her, a little person who was only Mary, and whom nobody made any account of? But as she asked herself that question, Mary knew that it was so. She knew with a sudden flash of discovery, which was very wonderful and sweet, that Mr. Asquith was afraid of her, of loving her, and of betraying he loved her; and that he was making a stand against his heart and trying to avoid her, and put her out of his life. It was a tremendous, overpowering discovery; but after she had got accustomed to the thought, Mary once more laughed in her heart; for she knew by instinct, though she had never had any experience, that these tactics were never successful, and that in this endeavour Mr. Asquith would fail.

CHAPTER V.
SELF-BETRAYED.

OF course Mary proved right. In such a small parish as Horton it was quite impossible that two people could live for many weeks without meeting each other. The curate might shut himself up for a few days. He might say he was busy with his sermon; he might say he had a headache; he might acknowledge that his activity in the parish and all the institutions he had set up had thrown him into arrears with his reading, and such intellectual work as is necessary for a man who has to write two sermons every week. But this could not last for ever. Mary, who was so simple and so sweet, was not like those powers of darkness whom we must resist till they flee from us; indeed, Mary was so far different that when she was resisted she did not flee. She was so clever that she divined at once that in resisting the charm of her mild society poor Mr. Asquith had made a confession of his weakness, and it gave her a great and, it is to be feared, a mischievous amusement to watch how long he would keep to that. Alas! he could not keep to it very long. He was obliged to go to the rectory to communicate with his chief, and he could not help meeting Mary there. He had even to walk with her as far as the lodge, to carry something that was too heavy for her, and then Mary behaved very badly to the poor curate. She put on an air of sympathy to conceal her amusement, and she said, “I am afraid you have not been well lately, Mr. Asquith. I have not seen you anywhere about.”

“No,” said the curate, with his heart sinking, “I have been—not very well.”

“I am so sorry,” said the little hypocrite. “I hope you don’t find that Horton does not suit you: and just when you have got so well into the work.”

“Oh, it is not that it doesn’t suit me,” the curate said, “quite the reverse. The air is very pure and sweet.” He gave a side glance at her as he spoke, and it is to be feared that it was Mary and not the air he was thinking of when he used these words.

“Poor Sally Williams is longing to see you,” said Mary. “I go often, but I am not the same good. She likes her pudding, but I can’t talk to her as you do, Mr. Asquith; and they say,” continued the girl, with a soft shade of awe coming over her face, “that she has not very long to live.”

“You teach me my duty,” cried the curate, quite overwhelmed. “I have been very neglectful. I shall certainly not miss another day.”

“And old Mrs. Sims thinks you have forgotten the old people at the almshouses. She shakes her head and says, ‘Ah, I never thought as he’d keep it up like that: they never does,’ Mrs. Sims says.”

“Thank you so much for telling me,” said Mr. Asquith; “indeed it was not inadvertence. I knew that I was neglecting one duty: but I thought, perhaps, it might be excusable on account of another.”

“Oh, Mr. Asquith!” cried Mary, “I never meant to say you neglected anything, you must not think so. But ought a person to neglect one duty on account of another? You said the other day in your sermon——”

“Oh! don’t talk to me about my sermon. It was a poor performance off the book, when I had no experience; but you are right, we have no warrant to forget one duty for the sake of another. The part of a true man is to do all, and not to flinch. The spirit is willing, but oh! the flesh is very weak.”

I hope the reader will not think badly of Mary if I allow that the agitation of the curate filled her with a sort of elation and mischievous triumph for the moment. She had nearly laughed in the face of his gravity, and if she had done what was in her heart she would have cried out, “All this bother about a little girl like me!” But she did not say anything; she did not laugh; and when she looked up into his face for a moment at the lodge-gate, when he gave the books he was carrying for her to Mrs. Martingale, the coachman’s wife, to be sent up to the house, Mary was filled with sudden compunctions, and felt disposed rather to cry. She waved her hand to him as she went up the avenue with an April sort of face, half smiling, half weeping, which gave him a great deal of thought as he turned sadly upon his own way. He did not know what it meant, poor young man! It looked as if she were sorry for him, but why should she be sorry for him? Did she see, did she understand, the cause of his trouble? did she mean to support him with her sympathy, or to mock him, or to show him how far, far he was out of her sphere? He thought a great deal more about this than was at all consistent with the many other things he had to think of, and, alas! got the books of the lending library entirely into disorder, and forgot how much money he had received that week from the penny-bank and the clothing-club. He put down twice as much as they had paid to each subscriber’s name, and had to make it up from his own poor little purse; fortunately the entire amount was not considerable, but it was a great deal too much to be taken out of his poor pocket by Mary’s little regretful, sympathetic, yet mischievous look.

To tell the truth, Mary’s heart was bounding along the avenue like a bird, though her feet went soberly enough. It was so light, there was no keeping it still; it sang little trills of pleasure along the way, and mounted up towards heaven, and found a new brightness over all the earth. To think that she who was only Mary should suddenly have become the princess of a kingdom all her own—to think that she should be all at once of consequence enough to make a man abandon all his duties! It was indeed very wrong of a man in Mr. Asquith’s position to abandon any of his duties for the sake of this little girl: but Mary did not see it in that light. As she walked by herself up the avenue she laughed loud out, and then felt dreadfully ashamed of herself, and dried her eyes, which were full of tears. How foolish it was of him! To say even to herself that this man, who was the best man she had ever met, was foolish, was a sort of delightful little sin to Mary, a piece of profanity—a small wickedness. How dared she say he was foolish? and yet—oh! how foolish he was. How nice of him to be so silly! Perhaps he was afraid that she did not care for him, would not have him if he asked her? No doubt that was what he was afraid of. To think that he knew Latin and Greek and theology, and all manner of things, and could read German, yet could not read what was in Mary’s eyes! She sat down by the roadside, before the house was in sight, not daring to see anybody, glad to be alone, to have time to think over again what he said and how he looked, and to say to herself how silly it was!

All this time, as will be seen, Mary had not the faintest enlightenment as to what it was that Mr. Asquith feared. She never thought of his poverty, of what it is to be a poor curate or a poor curate’s wife, without hope of advancement, or money enough to keep the wolf from the door. She thought only of him, and how glad she would be to do everything for him—to live in a cottage, and look after her own little housekeeping, and make him comfortable, more comfortable than ever he had been in his life, and to help him and work with him. She thought that to be the first in all the world to one who was the first in all the world to her, was the fairest fate that earth could give. She had no doubt on the subject, or fear—for how could she tell, who had never had above a few shillings in her life, how much two people require to live upon? or how could she take into consideration other consequences, which were more serious still?

Mr. Asquith went to see Sally Williams that day, and for many days after, as long as the poor girl lived, but never again did he meet Mary there. He did not see her at the almshouses, he encountered her nowhere—which indeed was a little instinctive coquetry mingled with modesty on Mary’s part: for she would not, after having exerted herself to bring him back, allow him to find her in his way, as if that had been what she wanted. And now it was the curate’s turn to be astonished, and to feel himself injured. Though he had retired from his daily duties in order to avoid Mary, he felt himself sadly aggrieved, now that he had returned to them, to find that Mary avoided him. Instead of congratulating himself that they were both of accord, and that in this way his purpose would be the better accomplished, this inconsistent young man felt sadly disappointed, taken in, cheated, and ill-used. Why had she spoken to him so, if she had meant to conclude their intercourse in this way? Mr. Asquith’s annoyance was all the greater from the fact that Mary did not neglect her little offices of charity in order to avoid him as he had done in order to avoid her. She was cleverer than he was, so far as this went, and had her faculties more free. He was always hearing wherever he went that Miss Mary had just gone. “It is not five minutes since Miss Mary went. She is that good,” said poor Mrs. Williams, “now that my poor girl is sinking, she never misses a day.” “You’re kindly welcome, Mr. Asquith, sir,” said the old woman at the almshouse. “Take that chair, sir. It’s one as was set for Miss Mary. She was scarce gone when I see you coming.” Mr. Asquith was fretted beyond description by these perpetual missings. He could not get them or her out of his head. Sometimes he was more angry than words can say. He thought she did it on purpose (which was not far from the truth), in order to show him how presumptuous he was, and how impossible that she could ever care for him (which was not the truth at all). And at last the poor curate was wrought to such a point of exasperation that he made up his mind, when he did meet her, that he would tell her what she had done, and how cruelly she had treated him, and then leave the parish altogether. But he would not go without letting her know. She should be made aware that what was sport to her was death to him. To have wrung a man’s heart and spoiled his life might appear to her a small matter, but the curate was resolved that so far he would have his revenge, since he could have nothing else, and that she should know what she had done.

They met at last quite accidentally, in the quietest road, where their interview was certain not to be disturbed by any intruder. At least, it can scarcely be said that they met; he was jogging wearily, determinedly along, thinking how he never saw her, and how he must see her, once at least, before the end of all things, when suddenly the grey frock he knew so well appeared round the corner of a cross road, and Mary, not seeing him, went on before him, tranquilly, on her way home. The curate’s heart stood still. Should he, now that the matter was in his own hands, put off the crisis? Should he have it out now once for all? After standing still for that one moment, his heart bounded up into his throat, wildly beating, and in a long stride or two Mr. Asquith was at Mary’s side.

And now for the vials of wrath that were to be poured out, the passion of love and reproach that was to end all their intercourse, and with it that glimpse of a sweeter life which had come suddenly to the curate in Horton! But when he came up with her he was breathless, partly from haste, partly from agitation, and it was Mary who said the first word. She looked up into his face surprised and smiling, with a sweetness that went to his very heart. There was no guilty consciousness in her eyes. She did not look at him as one who had sinned against him, as one who felt that he had something to reproach her with, but with a look of pleasure, as if she were quite happy in this unexpected meeting. “Oh, Mr. Asquith, is it you? What a long time it is since I have seen you!” she said, in her pleasant voice.

“It is a long time,” said the curate, panting: and then he added, “I fear I have made you change your hours and your habits, which is more than I am worth.”

“Change my hours and my——. I haven’t got any hours or habits,” cried Mary, “and indeed I don’t know what you mean.”

“Oh, Miss Mary!” he cried. I don’t think he knew her surname at all, or if he once knew it he had forgotten it, for Mary was the only name he ever heard given to her. “Oh, Miss Mary!” he cried, “I never meet you now in any of the cottages wherever I go: and I know how that is. I know that you have seen what was going on in my presumptuous mind: but there was no presumption in it, if you only knew. I know very well I am poor—as poor as—as poor as a church mouse, as people say,—too poor to ask any woman to share my miserable fortunes. Don’t, don’t for heaven’s sake be afraid of me! If I can’t help thinking of you, at least I can help saying it. I gave up my visiting when I saw what was coming: but you spoke to me yourself on that subject. You said, had a man a right to neglect his duty for the sake of—for the sake of—— And I knew that what you said was just. From that day I made up my mind to go on with all my usual visiting, and to go on seeing you, which was always sweet though cruel; to go on as if it did not matter, only never to say a word——”

“And what has made you change your resolution, Mr. Asquith?” said Mary, very demurely, without raising her eyes.

“Change? I have not changed at all,” he said. And then he stopped short, with a look of misery and confusion. “What have I done?” he said. “What have I done? though I did not intend it—it has been too much for me—I have betrayed myself after all!”

And for a moment he turned his back upon her, as if he would have fled.

“Don’t run away,” said Mary, softly touching his arm with her hand. “Why shouldn’t you tell me—whatever you wanted to tell me?—if you did really want to tell me anything,” she said.

“Oh, Mary!” cried the curate, and paused; for the words came so fast upon him that he did not know which to say first.

“Yes?” said Mary softly, giving him one little sidelong glance: and then her face crimsoned over, and she drooped her head, but still with a modest note of interrogation in the turn of her fine little pink ear.

CHAPTER VI.
PARADISE LANE.

“WE must tell them all directly,” Mary said.

“Tell them!” cried the curate. For one brief half hour he had forgotten everything, and given himself up to that delight which once in his life every man has a right to—or so at least we think when we are young—the delight of loving and being loved. The bare country road had turned into Paradise, into Elysium for both of them; it was more beautiful and sweet than anything out of heaven. The green boughs waved softly between them and the celestial blue above, making a chequer-work of sun and shade that flickered and danced, and made the very dust under their feet happy; and as for the flowers in the hedgerows, no roses were ever so sweet. They walked upon enchanted ground, and all nature sang soft hymns of praise over their happiness, which was sweeter than the roses, or anything that earth, our homely foster-mother, can give. She was wistfully glad of it, that brown and faithful nurse, that mother earth, who could strew flowers at their feet, but could not bestow such blessedness. But when Mary said those simple words, the world, which had nothing to do with that hour, suddenly rolled its great shadow round, coming between the curate and the sunshine of heaven. “Tell them!” he said, and his countenance fell. Oh yes, he knew very well they must be told: but he had been able to forget it for that moment of delight.

“Yes, tell them. You meant that?” said Mary, looking up somewhat alarmed in his face.

“Oh yes, I meant that,” he said with a groan—“at least, I didn’t mean anything. I never meant to tell you, let alone them.”

“So you said,” Mary remarked, in her demure way; “you told me you had made up your mind not to tell me——” and she laughed in the pleasure of her maiden power.

“Oh, my darling!” the curate said, “it would have been better if I had not told you. It would have been better if I had gone away, and smothered my heart or myself, if necessary, rather than have brought this trouble on you.”

“Trouble!” she cried, and laughed. Mary was not a bit afraid. She was as ignorant as the bird who was singing little saucy songs and melodious gibes at them overhead, calling on all his bird neighbours to make fun of the lovers, who had waited for June and full summer, instead of building their nests like prudent folk in the early spring. Mary knew about as much as the thrush did on the subject of ways and means—and she was not afraid.

“They will not hear me speak,” he said; “they will ask me how I could dare to think of dragging you down into my poverty? I know that is what they will do—and they will be right,” he added with a great sigh.

Mary paused a little in surprise, and then she asked, “I wonder what you think I am? Do you think I am rich?”

“No,” he said, pressing her hand close to his side. “Thank heaven! I know you are not rich.”

“I see very little to thank heaven about,” said Mary, “on that score: perhaps you think that I have great prospects, or that somebody is going to leave me a great deal of money, or—something. Why, I have not a penny in the world! And my aunt is always shaking her head and saying, ‘If anything happens to your uncle!’ Do you know what I should have to do then? I should have to go out as a governess, if anybody would have me to teach their children—or perhaps as a maid in the nursery.”

“Oh, hush!” he cried. “You a maid in the nursery! But, Mary darling, you would be almost better as a governess than you will be with me. Do you know how much I have a year? A hundred pounds and my lodging, and I don’t know where I am to get any more.”

“A hundred pounds! I never had a hundred shillings of my own. It seems quite a great sum,” said Mary. “I should think we could do very well upon that. We must have a cottage of our own though. I have often thought a cottage might be made very pretty if one were to take a little trouble. I should like it so much better than a big house.”

“Oh, Mary, you little angel! You have just come astray out of heaven, and you know nothing about this hard world,” he cried.

“Oh, don’t I?” said Mary, with a laugh of superior wisdom,—“much more than you do, I am sure, though you are so much cleverer than I. We could not have many servants, that’s true. But what is the good of them—except to get in each other’s way, and make aunt cross? I’ll tell you what I shall have. I’ll have a nice strong big girl out of the schools, and train her myself: and you’ll see, after a while, all the ladies will be contending to get one of the girls whom Mrs. ——”

Here Mary paused, and blushed redder than ever, and with a cough turned her head away.

“Finish your sentence,” said the happy curate, too happy for the moment to remember how foolish it was. “Mrs. ——? Finish what you were going to say.”

“You know well enough,” said Mary, who in the delightful fervour of settling everything had thus been carried away so much farther than she intended. She added after a moment in a lower tone, “You know it is a very funny name.”

“I think now it is the sweetest name in the world. Mary Asquith,” he said—“Mrs. Asquith—I prefer it to any in the world.”

“Well,” said Mary, considering, “it has this for it, that it is not just like anybody’s name. It has a great deal of character in it. You don’t forget it as soon as you have heard it, like Smith or Brown.”

“It is an old name,” he said, with a little pride, “and one very well known in Cumberland, and known only for good, Mary. But,” he added suddenly, after this outburst, “you are not to suppose that I am claiming to belong to a great family. Oh no, we are only yeomen; we are not equal to the Prescotts. We have an old house, which will be my brother’s, but not like Horton—a homely old place, no better than a farmhouse. That is another thing that will be against me,” he said, his voice sinking out of its happiness and pride into subdued tones.

“There cannot be anything against you,” said Mary, giving a little pressure to his arm. “Do you think I am such a prize? They will be glad, I shouldn’t wonder, to get me off their hands; my poor aunt will not have to say any more, ‘Mary, if anything happens to your uncle!’ I shall have my own—person,” she said, pausing for a word, and laughing over it, “my own—person to take care of me—and what more does any girl require?”

Mr. Asquith was cheered, and yet not quite cheered, by these encouragements. He was very happy, and yet quite miserable. Nothing could take away from him the delight and glory which had fallen upon him out of heaven in that homely green lane of Paradise. But—his mind made a leap forward, or backward rather, to the things he had seen, to the facts of life which he knew, to the hard, hard existence of poverty. Had any man a right to drag down a woman, a girl so gently bred as Mary, into that gulf? had any man a right to bring children into the world with no bread to give them? He had held very distinct views upon this subject, and had sworn to himself that he never would so sin against the innocent, against the unborn. How often had he seen what followed in other poor clerical houses! He had seen the pretty young bride, all unthinking, all unfearing, pleased with her little house, and her married dignity, dragged down into a careworn troubled woman, a hard-working woman, with rough hands and a burdened mind, manual labour, and mental care, her strength and her heart both failing as the heavy years went on. To think of Mary, so young and sweet, so thoughtless and lighthearted, so ignorant, bless her! of all these horrible realities, sinking, sinking year by year into such a woman—and by his means! The curate shrank within himself, his heart seemed to contract with a great pang. By his means! all because he could not contain himself, could not keep silent; could not love her without betraying his love. Oh, what a thing it was, that highest of human sentiments, that it could not curb a man’s tongue, or restrain his impulses! That a man should love and yet not be able to keep silent, to spare the object of his love! He might have loved her all his life, and his love would have been a sweetness and a strength to him; but he ought to have respected her innocence and her youth, and never have told it, locked it up in his own bosom. If he had never spoken, God bless her! that would have given her a pang: but had he gone away, in a little time she would have forgotten him. But now, there could be no forgetting—now there was no going back—and she herself would insist upon the consummation of this sacrifice, upon giving him the solace of her sweet companionship, making him happy, making herself a servant, enduring toil, and privation, and care for his sake. For the curate knew that, whatever any one might say, it was the woman that had the worst of it. He would have to submit that she should be his servant, executing even menial offices, with those hands which he might kiss and reverence, but whose work he could not do. The woman had the worst of it: and he knew so many cases,—some where she had sunk altogether into a half cook, half nurse—a careworn creature spoiled with toil; and some in which she had developed into a patient angel, sacred and consecrated in her labours and sufferings. Mary would be that, the lover thought; and yet, who could tell that she would be that? and who could dare to open to a woman’s feet that path of tears and bid her tread it, whatever might await her at the end? He went home to his lodgings with his heart bleeding, although his brain was giddy with happiness, and with the desire to believe that in his case there might be a difference, and that, for once, for once, all precedents notwithstanding, things might go well.

As for Mary, there never was a lighter heart than that with which she ran up the avenue, in too great a flutter and ferment to walk steadily, too happy to keep still. She felt as if she had wings, as if she trod upon air, and burst out singing, as she ran along under the trees, from pure joy. She had got her little promotion, the only promotion of which her life was capable. She had got her own world, her own life, her own share of the universe of God. To be sure she had been happy enough all her life, but how colourless that life looked amid the light and sunshine that streamed upon this! “Only Mary” in a house full of people was more important, and Mrs. Asquith in her own house, the dispenser of happiness, the little monarch of all she surveyed! What a difference! What a difference! These were the secondary matters, the first beyond all comparison being him, the man out of all the world whom God had chosen for Mary. It seemed to her that a whole long chain of special providences had brought them together. That he should have come here, of all places in the world—he for whom every parish in England would have competed had they but known. That he should have come to the Hall, and yet not fallen in with the ways of the Hall, or fallen in love with Anna or Sophie, which would have been so much more likely. That he should have met her, and liked her, Mary, the little one who was of no account, best! Could such things have happened had not the heavens specially interested themselves, and taken unusual trouble to bring it all about? Even the meeting this morning was providential, for she was to have gone off on a visit the very next day, and in the meantime a hundred things might have happened to close his mouth. And to think that he should have been so frightened to speak. Oh, how foolish men were sometimes, though they were also so clever! What great prospects did he suppose she could have to make him not good enough for her? Not good enough for her! It was almost with a little shriek of happiness, and scorn, and admiration that Mary commented to herself upon his intentions and his self-reproaches. The foolish fellow! the darling! the noble, humble, good!—everybody but himself knowing how much too good for her he was.

Women have a great deal to bear in this world. Their lot is in many respects harder than that of men, and neither higher education, nor the suffrage, nor anything else can mend it. But there is one moment at least in which a girl has always the best of it, and that is when she has just accepted her lover. At that blissful epoch she has all the pleasure, with little or nothing of the care. It is he who has to encounter the anxious father or careful trustee. He has to meet the scoff with which those personages receive the trembling announcement of a small, a very small income. He has to think where the money is to come from to set up the new household. She has the best of it for once in her life. Afterwards the tables are turned. Not always, perhaps, but very often; and always, I am inclined to think, when poverty is the lot.

But Mary thought of none of all these things; with her it was all sunshine. She could scarcely keep from bursting out with her great news to everyone she met. To sit down at lunch and eat as if nothing had happened was almost an impossibility. If they only knew! They might have known, indeed, had they looked at her, that something had happened. But nobody took any notice. A slight accident had happened to John, of which he was discoursing at great length. “I thlipped,” he said, “on the grass; there was nothing to make me thlip that I could see. It was thlippery with the rain, or because Morton had mowed it this morning. It was the strangest thing I ever thaw. On the grass—the thimplest thing! But I might have thprained my ankle. Yes, I might. I can’t think how I didn’t thprain my ankle,” said John.

“But you didn’t, you see, so it doesn’t matter,” said his father.

“He might have, though; and what a thing that would have been!” Mrs. Prescott remarked, who was more sympathetic, and had a great leaning to her eldest son.

“Yes, it would have been a very bad busineth,” said John.

And that was the sort of talk that was going on while Mary sat beaming, and nobody found her little secret out.

CHAPTER VII.
THE DISCLOSURE.

MR. PRESCOTT spread himself out before the fireplace, standing with his legs apart, and his coat tails extended. There was, of course, no fire in the month of June, but an Englishman spreading himself out upon his own hearthrug, like a cock on his appropriate elevation, is more an Englishman than at any other moment. The Squire looked benevolently, yet severely upon the curate, who sat before him, twisting his soft hat in his hands. This was the only sign of embarrassment Mr. Asquith showed, but it was very discernible. He sat with his face turned towards his judge, without any shrinking or quailing, a little pale, very self-possessed and quiet. It was a very serious moment, and that the curate well knew.

“My niece!” Mr. Prescott said, and his countenance cleared a little, for he had thought at first that it must be one of the princesses of his house that this man was wooing. “Mary! why, Mary is not old enough for this sort of thing. How old is she? Why, she is only a child!”

“You have got used to considering her a child, Mr. Prescott; but I believe she is one-and-twenty, if you will inquire.”

Mr. Prescott made a calculation within himself, and after a moment said, “So she is: I believe she is in her two-and-twentieth year. Who would have thought it! You must know,” he added, “Mr. Asquith—though I don’t know what your ideas may be on that subject—that though Mary is my niece, she has no money, not a penny. My sister was sadly imprudent in her marriage. Her orphan child, of course, had a home with me, but there is nothing in the way of fortune, not a sou.”

“So I understood,” said the curate, “otherwise I should never have ventured to approach her, being myself so poor a man.”

“Ah!” said the Squire, looking at him doubtfully; then he added with cheerfulness, “You are still on the first step, Mr. Asquith, there is no telling how far you may go.”

“I am not the stuff of which bishops are made,” said the curate, with a short laugh.

“Well, there is no telling,” said the other; and then he entered upon business. “You will understand,” he said, “that I must make certain inquiries before going any farther. In the matter of family now. We are not rich people, but in that respect we Prescotts have certain pretensions——”

“In that respect it is very easy to answer you, Mr. Prescott. So far as old family goes, mine is old enough. We have been in Cumberland in direct descent, father and son, settled in the same place, for three hundred years. But——” Mr. Prescott had been nodding his head in approval, saying to himself that he knew Asquith was a good name in the North. He looked up, but only with the faintest shadow on his face, at the curate’s “but.”

“But,” repeated Mr. Asquith firmly, “though we are an old-established race, we are not what you would call gentry, Mr. Prescott. My father is of the old class of statesmen in Cumberland——”

“What is that?” asked the Squire hastily.

“It is, I suppose, what you call yeomen in the South.”

“Oh!” said Mr. Prescott. He recovered from this shock, however, in shorter time than might have been expected; for a substantial yeoman is a very respectable personage, and there are often nice little hoards of money behind them; and then it was only Mary, after all.

“I don’t pretend to say that I should not have been better pleased had you sprung from a family of gentry, Mr. Asquith; but after all, to have a family of any kind is something in these days. And you, of course, have had the education of a gentleman.” The curate winced a little at this, not liking the idea that he had not always been a gentleman, even though he had the moment before disowned any such pretensions. But he did not betray his impatience, and Mr. Prescott continued, “The most important point is: you propose to marry my niece: what have you to support her? I have told you she has nothing of her own. Are you in circumstances to keep her in the position to which she has been accustomed? Your private means——”

“Mr. Prescott,” said the curate crushing his hat in his tremulous hands, “that is exactly the question—that is the painful part—I have nothing. I have no private means; I have no expectations to speak of. My father, when he dies, will leave me perhaps some trifle—a few hundred pounds; but the fact is, I have nothing—nothing but my income from my curacy.” He had not strength enough to meet the Squire’s astonished gaze. His head drooped forward a little. “I am aware that you must think me presumptuous to the last degree, even careless of her comfort—for I have nothing but my poverty to offer—nothing——” for once in his life Mr. Asquith’s courage fairly failed him, and he would have liked to run away, and be heard of in Horton no more. Oh, happy Mary, before whom no such ordeal lay!

“This is a very strange statement, Mr. Asquith,” the Squire said.

The curate assented with a movement of his head; he could not say any more.

“It is a very strange statement,” Mr. Prescott repeated. “You don’t expect, I hope, that I—with the many calls upon me——”

Mr. Asquith half got up from his chair; he raised his hand, half deprecating, half indignant.

“I have a great many claims upon me,” said the Squire reassured; “the estate does not bring in half it once did. You know as well as I do how landed property has deteriorated; and my second son is in the army, and has a great many expenses, and my girls to be provided for—I cannot be responsible for anything so far as Mary is concerned. I have given her her education and all that, but as for any allowance——”

“If she had anything of the sort, do you think I could ever have spoken?” the curate said.

Mr. Prescott was reassured: there was obvious sincerity in this disclaimer. He stood for a moment silent with a perturbed countenance, and then he said suddenly, “That’s all very well, Mr. Asquith, but you’re not like a silly girl who knows nothing—you’ve some acquaintance with the world. It is quite right of you to express such sentiments. But if you marry her, how are you to keep her? that is the question for me.”

“Sir,” said the curate, “you have a right to say anything—everything on that subject. It is the question, I know all the gravity of it. It is what I cannot answer even to myself.”

“If you would not have spoken in the other case, supposing she had something of her own—how was it that you spoke now?” said the Squire, pushing his advantage; “a man ought to be able to deny himself in such circumstances. Men of your cloth permit themselves freedoms which other poor men don’t. A parson marries and has a large family, and everybody is sorry for him, whereas, if it was a poor soldier who did it, or a clerk in a public office, or——”

The curate did not speak, it was all perfectly true. He had said the same himself a hundred times. He had said, even to the unfortunate culprit himself, that a clergyman, because he was a clergyman, had no right. And now it was brought home to himself, and he had not a word to say.

“What does my brother Hugh give you?” said the inexorable Squire. “A hundred a year? I suppose it is as much as he can afford. And how are you to live with a wife on a hundred a year? How do you live on it without a wife? Percy, besides his pay, costs me—but that is nothing to the purpose. I ask you, can you live on it yourself, Asquith, without any supplement, without anything from home?”

The curate smiled somewhat grimly. Anything from home! He had been obliged to pay back to his poor father various sums expended on his education, which was a very different thing from receiving help from home. He said, “I have been able to manage—without any assistance,” in a subdued tone. It was not pleasant to be thus cross-examined, but the Squire had a right to ask all manner of questions. He had put himself in Mr. Prescott’s power.

“Supposing you have—I think it’s very much to your credit. And there’s the lodgings, of course, that’s always something. But supposing you have—how are you to keep a wife? And have you thought of the consequences, sir?” said the Squire severely. “If it was only a wife even; but you know what always follows—half-a-dozen children before you know where you are. How are you to educate them, sir? How are you to feed them? How are you to set them out in the world? And yet you come and ask me, a man that has seen such things happen a hundred times, to give you my niece.”

Mr. Asquith blushed like a girl at this suggestion. Mary herself was scarcely more modest, more delicate in all such embarrassing questions. And though he was not a humorous man by nature, a gleam of the ludicrous made its way into the question through the fierce countenance of the Squire. “These consequences,” he said, “cannot come all at once. They will take a few years at least: and I don’t calculate on staying always at Horton. In a town, in a large parish, curates have better pay.”

“And are worked off their feet, they and all their belongings, their wives made drudges of, regular parish women, Bible women, or whatever you call them. I know what goes on in large parishes, in great towns. And the children grow up on the streets. No, the country’s bad enough, but at least they can get fresh air and milk in the country, and people may be kind to them: and there’s always a schoolmaster or someone to give them a little education.”

“Mr. Prescott,” said the curate mildly, “the children you are so kindly anxious about are not born yet, and perhaps never will be. Don’t let us go any farther than is necessary. The question in the meantime concerns only Mary and myself.”

“And how long will that be the case?” cried the Squire. But presently he calmed down. “You might get food perhaps,” he said. “I say perhaps—I don’t see how you are to do it—but allow that you could get food out of it, and a cottage to live in—where are your clothes to come from? Where are your shoes to come from? Mary is a lady; she has been brought up to have servants to wait upon her. Is my niece to be your housemaid, Mr. Asquith? your cook, and your washerwoman, and everything? You should marry somebody that is used to that sort of thing. Somebody who has the strength for it. Somebody in your own class of life!”

The curate rose up with a flush of anger on his face. He could keep his temper, but yet it stung him, all the more that it was just enough, and he had already said all this to himself. He said, “I fear it will do no good to talk of it longer, Mr. Prescott—you drive me to despair. And I don’t deny that it is all true, everything you say. But I shall not always be curate at Horton. I shall not always continue a curate even, I hope. Sometimes, even without much influence, if a man does his work well, promotion comes.”

“Very seldom,” said the Squire.

“Still it comes sometimes: and if ever man had an inducement to work—will you think it over and try to look upon it more favourably? I know what a sacrifice it must be for her. Still, she has a right to choose too.”

“To choose—at her age—knowing nothing of the world! Whatever you felt, sir, you should have kept it to yourself—you should not have spoken. How is a girl to know?”

“I thought so too,” said the poor curate, humbly. “But a man has not always command of himself.”

“A man ought always to have command of himself when another person’s comfort is concerned, especially a clergyman, who makes more profession of virtue than other men,” said the Squire, following him to the door, and sending that last volley after him. Mr. Asquith went away from the Hall a miserable man. He had not the heart to ask for Mary, to tell her how he had failed. As he hurried away, however, down the avenue, his heart, which had sunk altogether, began to rise a little in indignation. Why a clergyman more than other men? That a clergyman should be shut out from that side of life altogether was comprehensible. He might take vows as in the Church of Rome, there was reason in that. When men were so poor as he was, instead of tantalising them with the idea of freedom, and exposing them to all its risks, it might be better if they were under the protection of vows and forbidden to marry. But as that was not so, and the English ideal was quite different, why should it be worse in a clergyman than in other men? A clergyman could not struggle and push for promotion. He could not compete and shoulder his way through the crowd. Must he give up also all that made existence sweet? And then the further question arose, would it have been better for Mary had he held his tongue and gone away and never told her he loved her? Had he perhaps closed that chapter to her too? Perhaps she might have forgotten him, and learned to love a richer man. But then perhaps she might not. Naturally a man feels that a woman who has learned to love him will not easily change, or transfer her affections to another. Would it not have been a wrong to Mary had he kept silence, had he never told her? It is better even to love and lose, the poet says, than never to love at all. It is better to have the triumph and delight of knowing that you are loved, even if that love never comes to any earthly close. Why should Mary have lost that because they were both poor? Nobody could take away from them that moment of blessedness, that sense of sweetest union, even if they might never marry at all—never—

But here a pang which was very acute and poignant like a sword went through the curate’s heart. Never marry at all! Lose her, leave her, be parted from her, after what they had said to each other! Oh, what deep shadows come along with the brightest sunshine of life! What was the good of living at all, of having known each other, of having recognized the loveliness and sweetness of existence, if this was what had to be?

CHAPTER VIII.
NEVERTHELESS.

THE reader who is experienced, and knows how things go in this world, especially in questions of love and marriage, will not be surprised to hear that notwithstanding this troublous passage and several more, Mary was married to the curate in the autumn of that same year. When two people have set their hearts on this conclusion, it is astonishing how very seldom they are foiled, or disappointed in it. One or the other must break down in resolution: there must be a faint heart somewhere before parents or guardians or trustees or any authorities whatsoever can resist them. In the present case the authorities were weaker than usual, for they were not agreed. Mr. Prescott, to his astonishment, found that even his wife was not at one with him on this important question. He hurried to the morning room in which she was sitting to tell her, still in all the excitement of the discussion with the curate; but his fervour was chilled by the very first words she said. “I let him know very clearly what my opinion was. I told him that this sort of thing was doubly culpable in a clergyman. Between ourselves, it is only clergymen who do it. They believe in some sort of miracle, I suppose—feeding by the ravens, or that sort of thing: or else they expect to be maintained by the girl’s family; but I soon let him see that nothing of the kind was to be looked for here.”

“I hope, however, you didn’t send him away for good, John?” said Mrs. Prescott, with a serious look.

“Send him away for good! I daresay he did not see much good in it: but I gave him a very decided answer, if that is what you mean.”

“Well,” said Mrs. Prescott, “I don’t mean to say that it would be a good marriage for Mary: but very few men come to Horton at all, and we can’t expect to live for ever, and it would be better that she should have somebody to take care of her. I am not a matchmaker, you know. I have been so too little, for there are Sophie and Anna still. But I do think that in certain circumstances you ought to be very careful how you reject an offer. If anything were to happen to us, what would become of your niece? The girls might not care to have her always with them, and it would not be at all suitable to have her here with John. She would be in a very embarrassing position, poor child—one trying for all of them. But if she had a husband to take care of her——”

“A husband who could not give her bread, much less butter to her bread.”

“Oh, no one can ever tell. Someone with a living to give away might take a fancy to him: clergymen have many ways of ingratiating themselves. Or he might get a curacy in a town, where the pay is better, and where it is important to get a man who can preach. He is a very good preacher, far better than your brother Hugh, who always sends me to sleep. I don’t know why you should reject Mr. Asquith. He has a great many things in his favour, and Mary likes him. Has she told me? Well, without her telling me, I hope I am not so stupid as to be ignorant of what’s in a girl’s mind. She will be very much surprised, and I am not so sure that she will obey.”

“Mary—not obey!—I think you must be dreaming.”

“It is all very easy to speak. Mary is most obedient about everything that is of no consequence: but this is of great consequence, John. And the girl is of age, though we have all got into the habit of treating her like a child. Why should she let her best chance drop, because you don’t like it? I don’t mean to say that it is much of a chance. But still a man like that may always get on, whereas a girl has very little likelihood, by herself, of getting on. And we can’t always be here to look after her.”

“I don’t see why you should be so very determined on that subject,” said the Squire, with a little irritation. “We are not so dreadfully aged, when all is said.”

“No, we are not dreadfully aged, but we can’t last forever. Suppose you were to be taken from us,” said Mrs. Prescott, with placidity, “three girls would be a great responsibility for me: and suppose I were to go first, you would feel it still more. Indeed, I should be very sorry to refuse an offer for Mary. To see her with a husband to take care of her, would be a great comfort to me. Of course all that we can do must be for our own girls—and not too much for them,” the mother said.

The Squire went out for his walk that day full of thought. He was a man who at the bottom of his heart was a kind man, and one with a conscience, a conscience of the kind which sometimes gives its possessor a great deal of trouble. He asked himself what was his duty to his sister’s child? not to plunge her into poverty and the cares of life in order to get rid of the responsibility from his own shoulders. Oh no, that could never be his duty. But, at the same time, on the other hand, to leave her in the care of a good husband was the best thing that could happen to any girl. He knew enough of Mr. Asquith to be sure that he would be a good husband. He was a good man, a man quite superior to the ordinary type; though the curate was not very popular at the Hall, still the Squire had perception enough to know this—that he was above the average, not at all a common man. And he must be very much in love with Mary, knowing that she had no money and no expectations, to have subjected himself to such a cross-examination as Mr. Prescott knew he had inflicted, on her account. Enlightened by his wife’s remarks, the Squire thought the matter all over again from another point of view. The man was very poor, but then Mary was very simple in her tastes, and if the girl really preferred to marry him in a cottage, rather than to live on at the Hall, perhaps it was true that her uncle had no right to cross her. It was not exactly, he said to himself, as if he were her father. She had always been a docile little thing, but his wife seemed to think that there was a possibility that in this matter Mary might not be so docile, that she might take her own way; and if she did so there would be a breach in the family, and he would be compelled to withdraw his protection from her, and her mother’s story might be enacted over again. Mary’s mother’s story had not been happy. She too had been asked in marriage by a poor man, and had been refused by her father. And she had run away with her lover, and had suffered more than Mr. Prescott liked to think of before she died. He said to himself now that perhaps if his father had consented, if they had tried to help Burnet on instead of letting him sink, things might have been different. Anyhow, he would never allow that episode to be repeated. And if Mary would marry Mr. Asquith, she must do it with the consent of her people, and everything that could be done must be done for her husband.

He went across the park to the rectory and consulted his brother Hugh on the subject, who was first amused and then shook his head. “I knew there would be mischief when I saw what kind of a man the fellow was,” the rector said.

“What kind of a man! Why, he is not a lady’s man at all, he plays no tennis, he never comes up in the afternoon, he seems to care nothing for society. Neither John nor the girls can make anything of him.”

“Ah, that’s the dangerous sort,” said the Rev. Hugh, “there’s no flutter in him. He settles on one, and there’s an end of it. He’s a terrible fellow to stick to a thing. Take my word for it, John, you’ll have to give in.”

The Squire liked this view of the subject less than his wife’s view, and went home roused and irritated, vowing that he would not give in. But by that time he found Anna and Sophie discussing Mary’s trousseau, and the whole household astir. “Of course she must have her things nice, and plenty of them, for one never knows whether she will be able to get any more when they’re done,” her cousins said. They were very good-natured. They never doubted the propriety of accepting the curate, and were, indeed, very strong in their mother’s view of the subject—that seeing the uncertainty of life and the possibility any day of “something happening” to papa, to get Mary off the hands of the family and settled for life was a thing in every way to be desired. Mr. Prescott naturally did not contemplate the likelihood of “something happening” to himself with so much philosophy. But as they were all of one accord on the subject, and his own thoughts so much divided, he gave in, of course, as everybody knew he would do.

And the fact of Mr. Asquith’s extreme poverty had its share, too, in quickening the marriage. A very rich man and a very poor man have nothing to wait for; they are alike in that—the rich, because his means are assured; the poor because he has no means to assure. There is nothing to wait for in either case. The rector gave Mr. Asquith privately to understand that he would be on the outlook for something better for him; and recommended the curate to do the same thing for himself. “For this may do to begin with, but it is poor pickings for two—and still less for three or four,” Mr. Hugh Prescott said. And thus everything was arranged. John Prescott was the only one who took any unexpected part in the matter. He astonished them all one day by announcing suddenly that Mary must have a “thettlement.” “A settlement?” said his father. “Poor child, there is nothing to settle either on one side or the other.”

The conversation took place at luncheon one day, when Mary was at the rectory.

“That’s just why there must be a thettlement,” repeated John, with an obstinate air which he could put on when he chose, and of which they were all a little afraid.

“What nonsense!” said Mrs. Prescott; “her clothes are all there will be to settle, and they couldn’t be taken from her, whatever might happen.”

“I know what I’m thaying,” said John. “She wants thomething to fall back upon, it he dies; for he may die, as well as another.”

“That’s very true,” said Mr. Prescott, with some energy. He was relieved to feel that there was someone else to whom “something might happen,” as well as himself.

“She must have a thouthand poundth,” John said.

And then there arose a cry in the room, a sort of concerted yet unconcerted and unharmonious union of voices. The Squire made his exclamation in a deep growling bass. Mrs. Prescott came in with a sort of alto, and the girls gave a short shrill shriek. A thousand pounds! thousands of pounds were not plentiful in Horton. Anna and Sophie themselves knew that very few would fall to their share, and neither of them had so much as a curate to make a living for her. They had been very willing to be liberal about the trousseau, but a thousand pounds! that was a different matter altogether. They all gazed with horror at the revolutionary who proposed this. John was not clever, as everybody knew; he looked still less clever than he was. He had pale blue eyes of a wandering sort, which did not look as if they were very secure in their sockets, and a long fair moustache drooping over the corners of his mouth. And he had a habit of sticking a glass in one eye, which fell out every minute or two and made a break in his conversation. Many people about Horton were of opinion that he was “not all there,” but his family did not generally think so. At this moment, however, with one accord it occurred to them all that there was something not quite sane about John.

“Thir,” said John to his father, “you needn’t trouble if you’ve any objection. I mean to do it mythelf.”

“Do it yourself! you must be out of your senses,” cried his mother. “Where will you get a thousand pounds? I never heard such madness in all my life.”

“I suppose he means to take it off his legacy,” said the Squire, pale with emotion; “if you’ve got a thousand pounds to dispose of, you had better look a little nearer home. There’s Percy always drawing upon me, and there’s the house falling to pieces——”

“Or if you want to give it away, give it to your sisters, who have a great deal more to keep up with their little money than ever Mary will have,” Mrs. Prescott said.

John did not say much. “I’ve thpoken to Bateman about the thettlement,” he informed them, looking round dully with those unsteady eyes of his, with an awkward jerk of his head and twist of his face to arrest the fall of the eyeglass. The family, looking at him, were all exceptionally impressed with the dulness of John’s appearance, the queerness of his aspect. Really he did not look as if he were “all there.” But they were perfectly convinced they might move Horton House as soon as John, and that the settlement on Mary, which they all thought so completely unnecessary, was an accomplished thing.

Mary was more affected by it than she had ever been by anything in her life. John!—she said to herself that he had always taken her part, always been kind to her. Like the rest of the family, she had regretted sometimes that the dashing Percy, who was so much nicer to look at, so much more of a personage, so full of spirit and life, had not been the elder brother. But Percy would have kept all his pounds to himself, everybody knew, though he had the air of being far more open-handed than his brother. Percy, however, on this emergency came out too in a very good light. He sent her a set of gold ornaments, a necklace and a bracelet of Indian work, for he was in India at the time, along with a delightful letter, asking how she could answer to herself for marrying first of all, she, who had always been the little one, and who could only be, Percy thought, about fifteen now. “Tell Asquith I think he is a very lucky fellow,” Percy wrote. John never said a word, even at the wedding breakfast, when it was expected he should propose the health of the bride and bridegroom. All that he did was to get up from his seat, looking about him dully with those unsteady eyes, give a gasp like a fish, and then sit down again, his eyeglass rattling against his plate as it fell, which was the only sound he produced. But everybody knew what he meant, which was the great matter. And as for the “thettlement,” the wisest man in England could not have arranged it more securely than John had done.

And so Mary and the curate were married in the late autumn, when the leaves were covering all the country roads, and the November fogs were coming on.

CHAPTER IX.
“HAPPY EVER AFTER.”

THE Asquiths, though they were so poor, got on very pleasantly at first. Mary had forty-five pounds a year from her thousand, and thought herself a millionaire; and Uncle Hugh gave the curate twenty pounds more in lieu of the lodgings, which were not adapted for a married man. With this twenty pounds they got a very pretty cottage—a little house which Mr. Prescott said was good enough for anybody; where, indeed, the widow of the last rector had lived till her death; and which had a pleasant garden, and was far above the pretensions of people possessing an income which even with these additions only came to a hundred and sixty-five pounds a year. The house was furnished for them, almost entirely by their kind friends—a very large contribution coming from the Hall, where there were many rooms that were never used, and even in the lumber-room many articles that were good to fill up. In this way the new married pair acquired some things that were very good and charming, and some things that were much the reverse. They got some Chippendale chairs, and an old cabinet which was in point of taste enough to make the fortune of any house; but they also got a number of things manufactured in the first half of the present century, of which the least said the better. They did not themselves much mind, and probably, being uninstructed, preferred the style of George IV. to that of Queen Anne.

And thus they lived very happily for two or three years. They lived very happy ever after, might indeed have been said of them, as if they had made love and married in a fairy tale. No words could have described their condition better. Mary, delivered from the small talk of the Horton drawing-room, and living in constant companionship with a man of education, whose tastes were more cultivated and developed than those of the race of squires, which was all she had hitherto known, brightened in intelligence as well as in happiness, and with the quick receptivity of her age grew into, without labour, that atmosphere of culture and understanding which is the fine fleur of education. She did not actually know much more, perhaps, than she had known in her former condition; but she began to understand all kinds of allusions, and to know what people meant when they quoted the poets, or referred to those great characters in fiction who are the most living people under the sun. She no longer required to have things explained to her of this kind. And as for the curate, it was astonishing how he brightened and softened, and became reconciled to the facts of existence; and found beauty and sweetness in those common paths which he had been disposed to look upon with hasty contempt. No two people in the world, perhaps, can live so much together, share everything so entirely, become one another, so to speak, in so complete a way as a country clergyman and his wife. Except the writing of his sermons, there was no part of his work into which Mr. Asquith’s young wife did not enter; and even the sermons, which were all read to her before they were preached, were the better for Mary; for the curate was quick to note when her attention failed, when her eyelids drooped, as they did sometimes, over her eyes. She was far too loyal, and too much an enthusiast, you may be sure, ever to allow in words that those prelections were less than perfect; but Mr. Asquith was clever enough to see that sometimes her attention flagged. Once or twice, before the first year was out, Mary nodded while she listened—a delinquency which she denied almost furiously, with the wrath of a dove; and which was easily explained by the fact that she was at that moment “not very strong:” but which nevertheless Mr. Asquith, as he laughed and kissed her and said, “That was too much for you, Mary,” took to heart. “Too much for me!” she cried; “if you mean far finer and higher than anything I could reach by myself, of course you are quite right, Henry; but only in that sense,” the tears coming into her eyes in the indignation of her protest. The curate did not insist, nor try to prove to her that she had indeed dozed, which some men would have done. He was too delicate and tender for any such brutal ways of proving himself in the right; but, all the same, he laid that involuntary criticism to heart, to the great advantage of his preaching. Thus they did each other mutual good.

And what a beautiful life these two lived! I know a little pair in a little town, with not much more money than the Asquiths, and connections much less important, and surroundings much less pretty—a pair who have only a little house in a street, with unlovely houses of the poor about them, instead of comely cottages, who do very much the same, all honour to them! The Asquiths flung themselves upon that parish, and took the charge of it with a rush, out of the calm elderly hands which had for years managed it so easily. I do not undertake to say that they did no harm, or that they were always wise; nobody is that I have ever come in contact with: but if there is any finer thing in the world than to maintain a brave struggle with all that is evil on account of others, on account of the poor, who so often cannot help themselves, I don’t know what it is. These two laid siege to all the strongholds of ill in the village—and evil, or the Evil One if you please to put it so, has many such strongholds—with all the energies of their being. They fought against wickedness, against disorder, against disease, against waste, and dirt, and drink; against the coarse habits and unlovely speech of the little rural place. They made a chivalrous attempt to turn all those rustics into ladies and gentlemen—into what is better, Christian men and women, into good and pure and thoughtful persons, considering not only their latter end, as the parson had always bidden them to do, but also their present living and all their habits and ways. The curate had been working very steadily, in this sense, since he came to Horton; but when he had, so to speak, Mary’s young enthusiasm, her feminine practicalness, yet scorn of the practical and contempt of all the limits of possibility, poured into him, stimulating his own strength, the result was tremendous. The parish for a moment was taken by surprise, and in its astonishment was ready to consent to anything the young innovators desired. It would sin no more, neither be untidy any more; it would abandon the public-house and wash its babies’ faces three times in the day; it would put something in the savings-bank every Saturday of its life, and open all its windows every morning, and pursue every smell to the death. All this and more it undertook in the consternation caused by that sudden onslaught: and for a little time, with those two active young people in constant circulation among the cottages, giving nobody any peace, scolding, praising, persuading, contrasting, encouraging, helping too in that incomprehensible way in which the poor do help the poor, a great effect was produced. As for going to church, that was the first and easiest point; and here Mary came in with her music, which the curate did not understand, influencing the choice of the hymns, and getting up choir practices, and heaven knows how many other seductions—artful temptations to the young to do well instead of doing ill—sweetnesses and pleasures to make delightful the narrow way.

“You think you are doing an immense deal,” said Uncle Hugh, “but you’ll find it won’t last.”

“Why shouldn’t it last?” cried Mary. “They are so much happier in themselves. Don’t you think a man must feel what a difference it makes when he comes home sober, and finds a nice supper waiting him on Saturday nights; and then to go out to church with all the children, neat and clean, round him, instead of lounging, dirty, at the door with his pipe?”

“Perhaps it is more comfortable,” said the rector, shaking his head. “I should think so, certainly; but it isn’t human nature, my dear. You will find that he will rather have his fling at the public-house, though he feels wretched next morning. He likes to see his children nice; but better still he likes his own pleasure. You’ll find it won’t last.”

“We must be prepared for a few downfalls,” said the curate. “I tell Mary that we must not expect everything to go on velvet. Some of them will fall away; but with patience, and sticking to it, and never giving in——”

“Never giving in!” cried Mary. “Why, uncle, you don’t suppose I am so silly as to think we could build Rome in a day. We quite look for failures now and then,” she said, with her bright face. “We should almost be disappointed if we had no failures; shouldn’t we, Henry? for then it wouldn’t look real; but with patience and time everything can be done.”

The rector only shook his head. He did not say, as he might have done, that it was very presumptuous of these young people to think they could do more in a few months than he had done in his long incumbency. The rector’s wife was very strong on this point, and quite angry with Mary and the curate for their ridiculous hopes; but Mr. Prescott himself felt, perhaps, that his reign had been an indolent one, and that he had not done all he might. But he shook his head; for, after all, though he had been indolent, he knew human nature better than they did. He was not angry with them; but he had seen such crusades before, and had various sad experiences as to the dying out of enthusiasm, and the failure of hope. And the rector, who was a kind man in his heart, knew through the ladies of the family that the time was approaching when Mary would be “not very strong,” and apt to flag in other matters besides that of listening to her husband’s sermon. And he knew, also, that the conditions of life would change for them; that the young wife would find work of her own to do, which could not be put aside for the parish; and that “patience and time,” on which they calculated, were just what they would not have to give: for when babies began to come, and all their expenses were increased, how were they to go on with one hundred and sixty-five pounds a year? The rector said to himself that he would not discourage them, that they should do what they would as long as they could. But he foresaw that the time would come when Mr. Asquith would be compelled to seek another curacy with a little more money, and when Mary, instead of being the good angel of the parish, would have to be nurse and superior servant-of-all-work at home.

“Poor things!” he said to his wife. “It is sad when you have to acknowledge that you are no longer equal to the task you have set for yourself.”

“I don’t call them poor things,” said Mrs. Prescott. “I think them very presuming, Hugh, after you have spent so many years here, to think they can bring in new principles and make a reformation in a single day.”

“We might have done more, my dear. We have taken things very quietly; most likely we could have done more.”

“You are as bad as they are, with your humility!” cried the rector’s wife. “I have no patience with you. What have you left undone that you ought to have done? I am sure you’ve always been at their beck and call, rising up out of your warm bed to go and visit them in the middle of the night, when you have been sent for—more like a country practitioner than a beneficed clergyman! And though I say it that perhaps shouldn’t say it, never one has been sent away, as you know, that came in want to our pantry door. And as for lyings-in, and those sort of things——” cried the country lady.

“We needn’t go into details. As for your part of it, my dear, I know that’s always been well done,” said the politic rector. “Anyhow, don’t let us say anything to discourage the Asquiths. It’s always a good thing to stir a parish up.”

“It’s like those revivalists,” said Mrs. Prescott—“a great fuss, and then everything falling back worse than before.”

“Oh no! not worse than before: somebody is always the better for it. I like a good stirring up.”

All this was very noble of the rector, who, if ever he had stirred up the parish, had ceased to do it long ago. Perhaps he was a little moved by the fervent conviction of the curate and the curate’s wife that in their little day, and with the small means at their command, they could do so much; at all events, he let them have their way and try their best. And a great deal of work was done, with an effect by which they were greatly delighted and elated in the first year.

But then came the time when Mary was “not very strong,” and the choir practices and various other things had to be given up—not entirely given up, for the schoolmaster and his daughter made an attempt to keep them on, which was more trying to the nerves and patience of the invalid than if they had ceased altogether. For jealousies arose, and the different parties thought themselves entitled to carry their grievances to Mrs. Asquith, even when she was very unfit for any disturbance; and everything was very heavy on the curate’s shoulders during that period of inaction which was compulsory on Mary’s part. They had undertaken so much, that when one was withdrawn the other could not but break down with overwork. However, there was presently a re-beginning; and Mary, smiling and happier than ever, prettier than ever, and full of a warmer enthusiasm still, came again to the charge. She understood the poor women, the poor mothers, so much better now, she declared. Even the curate himself was not such an instructor as that little three-weeks-old baby, which did nothing but sleep, and feed, and grow. That was a teacher fresh from heaven; it threw light on so many things, on the very structure of the world, and how it hung together, and the love of God, and the ways of men. Mary thought she had never before so fully understood the prayer which is addressed to Our Father: she had not known all it meant before: and the curate, indescribably softened, touched, melted out of all perception of the hardness, feeling more than ever the sweetness of life, received this ineffable lesson too.

And so the crusade against the powers of evil was taken up again, with all the new life of this little heavenly messenger to stimulate them; but not quite so much of the more vulgar strength, the physical power, the detachedness and freedom. Mary had to be at home with the baby so often and so long. And the curate had so strong a bond drawing him in the same direction, to make sure that all was going well. But still the parish did not suffer in those young and happy years.

CHAPTER X.
THE LIGHT OF COMMON DAY.

EVEN in the quietest lives the first few years of married life are apt to bring changes: the ideal dies off, with its fairy colours; the realities of ordinary existence come with a leap upon the surprised young people, to whom everything has been enveloped in the glory and the brightness of a dream. That plunge into the matter-of-fact is often more trying to the husband—who rarely sees the bride of his visions drop into the occupations of the housewife and the mother without a certain pang—than to the young woman herself, who in the pride and delight of maternity finds a still higher promotion, and to whom the commonest cares, the most material offices, which she would have shrunk from a little while before, become half divine. But when the house is very poor to begin with, and there is no margin left for enlargements, this inevitable change is more deeply felt. By the time the third child arrived, the Asquiths had changed their ideas about many things. Mary’s help in the parish was now very fitful. She still accomplished what was a great deal “for her:” but there had been no conditions or limits to her labours in those early days, when she had worked like a second curate, bearing her full share of everything. These were the days in which so many things had been undertaken, more than any merely mortal curate could keep up; and in the meantime there had been a great many disappointments in the parish. Even before Mary’s powers failed, the influence of the new impulse was over. The people had got accustomed to all the many things that were being done for them: they were no longer taken by surprise. The ancient vis inertia—that desire to be let alone which is so strong in the English character—came uppermost once more. “Oh, here’s this botherin’ practice again!” the boys and girls began to say; or, “It’s club night, but I ain’t a-going. Them as gets the good of the money can come and fetch it!”—for the village people by this time had got it well into their heads that the custody of their pennies and sixpences was in some occult way to the curate’s advantage. And so in one way after another, ground was lost. Mr. Asquith got fagged and worn out in his efforts to do more than one man could do, without the help which had borne him up so triumphantly at first; he was deeply discouraged by the defection of so many; and he felt to the bottom of his soul the triumph in the eyes of Mrs. Prescott, at the rectory, who had always said nothing would come of it. The rector, for his part, would not show any triumph. He had behaved very well throughout; he had not resented the curate’s attempts to improve upon all his own ways, and do more than ever had been done before in Horton. And now when the fervour of these first reformations began to fail, he did not say, “I told you so,” as so many would have done. He was very moderate, very temperate, rather consoling than aggravating the disappointment. “Human nature is always the same,” he said. “Even when you get it stirred up for a time, it reclaims its right to do wrong—and yet all good work tells in the long run,” Mr. Prescott said, which was very good-natured of him, and was indeed straining a point; for he was by no means so sure that in the long run these Quixotic exertions did tell. But Mrs. Prescott was not so forbearing. “You might have known from the beginning this was how it would be,” she said to Mary. “You young people think you are the only people who have ever attempted anything; but it isn’t so—it’s quite the contrary. We have all tried what we could do, and we’ve all been disappointed. I could have told you so from the first, if you had shown any inclination to be guided by me!”

“Oh, Aunt Jane!” cried Mary, “it all went on beautifully at first. It is my fault, that have not kept up as I ought to have done. If I hadn’t been such a poor creature, everything would have gone well.”

“There is something in that,” said Mrs. Prescott, who had never had any babies. “It is always a sad thing when a young woman has so many children——”

“Aunt Jane!” cried Mary, almost with a scream. She gathered the little new baby to her bosom, and over its downy little head glared at her childless aunt. “As if they were not the most precious things in life—as if they were not God’s best gift! as if we could do without any one of them!”

“Perhaps not, my dear, now they are here,” said Mrs. Prescott; “but you may let your friends say that it would have been much better for you if they had not come so fast.”

To this Mary could not make any reply, though her indignation was scarcely diminished. She was, indeed, very indignant on this point. All of these ladies—her aunt at the Hall and the girls, as well as her aunt at the rectory—spoke and looked as if Mary was no better than a victim, helplessly overwhelmed with children; whereas she was a proud and happy mother, thinking none of them fit to be compared with her in her glory. That they should venture to pity her, and say poor Mary! she, who was in full possession of all that is most excellent in life, was almost more than the curate’s wife could bear. Her two little boys and her little girl were her jewels as they were those of the Roman woman whom Mary had heard of, but whom she would have thought it too high-flown to quote. She felt, all the same, very much like that classical matron. Anna and Sophie were very proud of their diamond pins, which even for diamonds were poor things; and they had the impertinence to pity her and her three children! Mary fumed all the time they paid her their visits, which had the air of being visits of condolence rather than of congratulation; and in her weakness cried with vexation and indignation after they had left. The curate came in before those angry tears were dried, and her agitated feelings burst forth. “They come to me and pity me,” she cried, “till I don’t know how to endure them! Oh, Harry, I wish we were not so near my relations! Strangers daren’t be so nasty to you as your relations!” Mary sobbed, with the long-pent-up feeling, which in that moment of feebleness she could not restrain.

“My dearest, never mind them,” he said soothingly. And then, after a pause, with some hesitation,—“Mary, this gives me courage to say what I never liked to say before. Don’t you find, even with your own little income, dear, which I was so anxious should not be touched, and with all the advantages here, that it is very difficult to make both ends meet?”

“Oh, Harry! I have been trying to keep it from you. I didn’t want to burden you with that too. Difficult! it is impossible! I must give Betsy warning. I have been making up my mind to it. After all, it is only pride, you know, for she is very little good. I have had most of the work to do myself all the time. I must give her warning as soon as I am well—or rather, we must try to find her a place, which is the best way.”

“What?” cried the curate. “Betsy, the only creature you have to do anything for you! No, no. I cannot allow that.”

“The housekeeping is my share,” said Mary, with a smile; “now that I can do so little in the parish, I may at least be of use at home. And if you only knew how little good she is! She can’t even amuse little Hetty, and Jack won’t go to her!” These frightful details Mary gave with the temerity they deserved. “I’ll tell you what I am going to do. There are the Woods, who have always been so nice, so regular at school, and attentive about the club. I mean to have Rosie, the eldest, to come in for an hour or two in the morning to look after the children while I get things tidy; and then Mrs. Wood herself will come on Saturdays and give everything a good clean up: and you will see we shall get on beautifully,” Mary said, smiling upon him with her dewy eyes, which were still wet. But the irritation had all died away, and in the pallor of her recent pangs, and the sacredness of her motherhood, no queen of a poet’s imagination could have looked more sweet.

“Oh, Mary, my darling!” cried the poor curate in his love and compunction. “To think I should have brought you to this!”

“To what?” said Mary radiant, “to the greatest happiness in life, to do everything for one’s own? Oh! Harry, I am afraid I have not the self-devotion a clergyman’s wife ought to have. I was happy to work in the parish—but, dear, if you won’t despise me very much—I think I am happier to work for the children and you.”

What could the poor man do? He kissed her and went away humiliated, yet happy. That he should have to consent to be served by her in the homeliest practical ways—she, who was his love and his lady—had something excruciating in it; and to think that his love should have brought her to this, and that he should have foreseen it, and yet done it in the weakness of his soul! But when he went back to that, the curate could not be sorry either that he had loved Mary, or that he had told her his love, or married her. She was not sorry—God bless her!—but radiant and happy as the day, and more sweet, and more sacred, and more beautiful than she had been even in her girlhood. What could he say? He would not even disturb that exquisite moment by telling her of the change that he was beginning to contemplate. Things could wait at least for a few days.

But when she told him that she had given Betsy warning, the curate did speak. “I have done it,” she said, partly by way of excuse for bringing in the tea herself, which she did, panting a little, but smiling over the tray. “We shall be so much better off with Mrs. Wood coming in one day in the week. Then we shall really have the satisfaction of knowing that everything is clean for once, and no little spy in the house to report to everybody what we have for dinner; but we must try and get her another place, Harry; for though the children don’t like her, and I should never recommend her for a nursery, there are some things that she can do.”

“Some things you have taught her to do,” Mr. Asquith said.

“So much the more credit to me,” said Mary, laughing, “for she is not very easy to teach.”

It was evening, and the children were in bed and all quiet. The little creature last born lay all covered up in the sitting-room beside them, in a cradle, which the ladies at the Hall, notwithstanding their indignation at his appearance, had trimmed with muslin and lace and made very ornamental: and Mary was glad to put herself in the rocking-chair which her cousin John had given her, and lie back a little and rest. “One never knows,” she said, “how pleasant it is to rock, till one knows what work is. But, Harry, you are over-tired, you don’t care for your tea.”

“I care a great deal more for seeing you tired,” he said. “Mary, I want to speak to you about something very serious. Would it break your heart, my dearest, if we were to go away from Horton? That is the question I didn’t venture to ask the other day.”

“Break my heart! when the children are well, and you? What a question to ask! Nothing could break my heart,” cried Mary, with a delightful laugh, “so long as all is right with you.”

And then he told her that another curacy had been offered him, a curacy in a large town. It would be very different from Horton. He would be under the orders of a very well-known clergyman, a great organiser, a man who was very absolute in his parish, instead of being free to do almost anything he pleased, as under Uncle Hugh’s mild sway. And he would have a great deal of work, but within bounds and limits, so that he would know what was expected from him, without having the general responsibility of everything. And though he would be under the rector, yet he would be over several younger curates, and in his way a sort of vice-bishop too. “But you must remember,” he said, “that we shall have to live in a street without any garden, with very little fresh air. It will be quite town, not even like a suburb—nothing but stone walls all round you.”