Lucilla’s proposition, as it thus unfolded itself, took away Tom Marjoribanks’s breath, for notwithstanding that it came from a (young) lady, and was confused by some slightly unintelligible conditions about doing good to one’s fellow-creatures, it was not a trifling or romantic suggestion. Tom, too, could remember Marchbank, and his uncle’s interest in it, and the careful way in which he explained to the ignorant that this was the correct pronunciation of his own name. While Lucilla made her concluding address, Tom seemed to see himself a little fellow, with his eyes and his ears very wide open, trotting about with small steps after the Doctor, as he went over the redbrick house and neglected gardens at Marchbank: it was only to be let then, and had passed through many hands, and was in miserable case, both lands and house. But neither the lands nor the house were bad of themselves, and Tom was, like Lucilla, perfectly well aware that something might be made of them.
This idea gave a new direction to his thoughts. Though he had been brought up to the bar, he had never been a lover of town, and was in reality, like so many young Englishmen, better qualified to be something in the shape of a country gentleman than for any other profession in the world; and he had left his profession behind, and was in most urgent want of something to do. He did not give in at once with a lover’s abject submission, but thought it over for twenty-four hours at all his spare moments—when he was smoking his evening cigar in the garden, and studying the light in his lady’s window, and when he ought to have been asleep, and again in the morning when he sallied forth, before Miss Marjoribanks’s blinds were drawn up or the house had fairly awoke. He was not a man of brilliant ability, but he had that sure and steady eye for the real secret of a position which must have been revealed to every competent critic by the wonderful clear-sightedness with which he saw, and the wise persistence with which he held to the necessity of an immediate choice between himself and Mr. Ashburton. He had seen that there was but one alternative, and he had suffered no delay nor divergence from the question in hand. And it was this same quality which had helped him to the very pretty addition to his small patrimony which he had meant to settle on Lucilla, and which would now make the acquisition of Marchbank an easy thing enough. And though Tom had looked wise on the subject of investment in land, it was a kind of investment in every way agreeable to him. Thus Lucilla’s arrow went straight to the mark—straighter even than she had expected; for besides all the other and more substantial considerations, there was to Tom’s mind a sweet sense of poetic justice in the thought that, after his poor uncle’s failure, who had never thought him good enough for Lucilla, it should be he and no other who would give this coveted possession to his cousin. Had Marchbank been in the market in Dr. Marjoribanks’s time, it was, as Lucilla herself said, his money that would have bought it; but in such a case, so far as the Doctor was concerned, there would have been little chance for Tom. Now all that was changed, and it was in Tom’s hands that the wealth of the family lay. It was he who was the head, and could alone carry out what Lucilla’s more original genius suggested. If the Doctor could but have seen it, he who had formed plans so very different—but perhaps by that time Dr. Marjoribanks had found out that Providence after all had not been so ill-advised as he once thought in committing to his care such a creative intelligence as that of Lucilla, and withholding from him “the boy.”
As for Miss Marjoribanks, after she had made up her mind and stated her conviction, she gave herself no further trouble on the subject, but took it for granted, with that true wisdom which is unfortunately so rare among women. She did not talk about it overmuch, or display any feverish anxiety about Marchbank, but left her suggestion to work, and had faith in Tom. At the same time, the tranquillising sense of now knowing, to a certain extent, what lay before her came into Lucilla’s mind. It would be a new sphere, but a sphere in which she would find herself at home. Still near enough to Carlingford to keep a watchful eye upon society and give it the benefit of her experience, and yet at the same time translated into a new world, where her influence might be of untold advantage, as Lucilla modestly said, to her fellow-creatures. There was a village not far from the gates at Marchbank, where every kind of village nuisance was to be found. There are people who are very tragical about village nuisances, and there are other people who assail them with loathing, as a duty forced upon their consciences; but Lucilla was neither of the one way of thinking nor of the other. It gave her the liveliest satisfaction to think of all the disorder and disarray of the Marchbank village. Her fingers itched to
