“How can she do better?”
“Would you have her marry a man who is not a gentleman, whose wife will never be visited by other ladies;—in marrying whom she would go altogether down into another and a lower world?”
This was a matter on which Lady Ushant and her nephew had conversed often, and he thought he knew her to be thoroughly wedded to the privileges which she believed to be attached to her birth. With him the same feeling was almost the stronger because he was so well aware of the blot upon himself caused by the lowness of his own father’s marriage. But a man, he held, could raise a woman to his own rank, whereas a woman must accept the level of her husband.
“Bread and meat and chairs and tables are very serious things, Reg.”
“You would then recommend her to take this man, and pass altogether out of your own sphere?”
“What can I do for her? I am an old woman who will be dead probably before the first five years of her married life have passed over her. And as for recommending, I do not know enough to recommend anything. Does she like the man?”
“I am sure she would feel herself degraded by marrying him.”
“I trust she will never live to feel herself degraded. I do not believe that she could do anything that she thought would degrade her. But I think that you and I had better leave her to herself in this matter.” Further on in the same evening, or rather late in the night—for they had then sat talking together for hours over the fire—she made a direct statement to him. “When I die, Reg, I have but £5,000 to leave behind me, and this I have divided between you and her. I shall not tell her because I might do more harm than good. But you may know.”
“That would make no difference to me,” he said.
“Very likely not, but I wish you to know it. What troubles me is that she will have to pay so much out of it for legacy duty. I might leave it all to you and you could give it her.” An honester or more religious or better woman than old Lady Ushant there was not in Cheltenham, but it never crossed her conscience that it would be wrong to cheat the revenue. It may be doubted whether any woman has ever been brought to such honesty as that.
On the next morning Morton went away without saying another word in private to Mary Masters and she was left to her quiet life with the old lady. To an ordinary visitor nothing could have been less exciting, for Lady Ushant very seldom went out and never entertained company. She was a tall thin old lady with bright eyes and grey hair and a face that was still pretty in spite of sunken eyes and sunken cheeks and wrinkled brow. There was ever present with her an air of melancholy which told a whole tale of the sadness of a long life. Her chief excitement was in her two visits to church on Sunday and in the letter which she wrote every week to her nephew at Dillsborough. Now she had her young friend with her, and that too was an excitement to her—and the more so since she had heard the tidings of Larry Twentyman’s courtship.
She made up her mind that she would not speak on the subject to her young friend unless her young friend should speak to her. In the first three weeks nothing was said; but four or five days before Mary’s departure there came up a conversation about Dillsborough and Bragton. There had been many conversations about Dillsborough and Bragton, but in all of them the name of Lawrence Twentyman had been scrupulously avoided. Each had longed to name him, and yet each had determined not to do so. But at length it was avoided no longer. Lady Ushant had spoken of Chowton Farm and the widow. Then Mary had spoken of the place and its inhabitants. “Mr. Twentyman comes a great deal to our house now,” she said.
“Has he any reason, my dear?”
“He goes with papa once a week to the club; and he sometimes lends my sister Kate a pony. Kate is very fond of riding.”
“There is nothing else?”
“He has got to be intimate and I think mamma likes him.”
“He is a good young man then?”
“Very good;” said Mary with an emphasis.
“And Chowton belongs to him?”
“Oh yes;—it belongs to him.”
“Some young men make such ducks and drakes of their property when they get it.”
“They say that he’s not like that at all. People say that he understands farming very well and that he minds everything himself.”
“What an excellent young man! There is no other reason for his coming to your house, Mary?”
Then the sluice-gates were opened and the whole story was told. Sitting there late into the night Mary told it all as well as she knew how—all of it except in regard to any spark of love which might have fallen upon her in respect of Reginald Morton. Of Reginald Morton in her story of course she did not speak; but all the rest she declared. She did not love the man. She was quite sure of that. Though she thought so well of him there was, she was quite sure, no feeling in her heart akin to love. She had promised to take time because she had thought that she might perhaps be able to bring herself to marry him without loving him—to marry him because her father wished it, and because her going from home would be a relief to her stepmother and sisters, because it would be well for them all that she should be settled out of the way. But since that she had made up her mind—she thought that she had quite made up her mind—that it would be impossible.
“There is nobody else, Mary?”
