These remarks were not very palatable to Martial; besides, he was aware that his cousins sympathized with Rosa, that they visited her, condoled with her, and regarded his conduct as cruel in the extreme.
Just at this time a curious event occurred: Rosa (who was rich already) received a legacy of four thousand pounds, so devised as to be entirely at her own disposal. It is a very different thing to be rich through another person, as Rosa was in the existence of her father, and to be rich one’s self. By this legacy Rosa’s position became exalted beyond all competition In Maasbury. Being of age, she could do exactly what she chose with the money. Such is the irony of life—to those who have, more comes; yet, as in Rosa’s case, it often happens that they cannot enjoy it.
Rosa, poor girl, felt this legacy as the bitterest blow she had yet received. It mocked her. The day she saw Felise pass and recognised her as “the other woman,” she fancied she found some consolation in the thought of her money, which gave her a sense of injured righteousness. That had faded, and now this announcement struck her heavily.
Four thousand pounds, entirely her own, absolutely at her fingers’-ends; four thousand pounds, and not one moment of happiness! Though the legacy could not be paid over till the usual period, still, as the daughter of a commercial man, she well knew she could obtain a large portion of it as an advance. But with all that money she could not buy one moment’s peace of heart.
She reflected that if she had possessed this money but a short time ago, she need not have consented to a postponement of her engagement with Martial. It would have been enough to have freed his farm from every embarrassment; and if her father had objected, he could not have prevented her from doing as she chose. In her misery Rosa was not so dutiful in her ideas as she had been in her days of moderate happiness. She would have defied her father now.
Too late. The money had come too late; her character had strengthened too late—it was a bitter irony.
Since this had happened, of course the Misses Barnard (or the younger and more practical of them) still more earnestly desired the renewal of Martial’s engagement with Rosa, and would have done anything feminine spite could devise to have destroyed his increasing admiration of Felise. Martial heard much in an indirect way of Rosa’s sufferings, of her improved personal appearance, of the forwardness of women who relied upon their assurance, and so forth, till it was with the utmost difficulty he restrained his inclination to order the backbiters out of his house.
But he had other matters to trouble him; he had made no secret to Felise, nor indeed to Mr. Goring, of his financial difficulties. Ever since so large a sum had been borrowed for the purchase of the houses for the Misses Barnard—a piece of unpractical generosity on his part—things had gone from bad to worse. The harvest, beautiful to look at, was worth so little in the market that it scarcely repaid the cost of cultivation. Heavy tithes—the curse of agriculture—had to be deducted from it.
The deduction allowed from the rent was too small to be of practical value, just enough to enable the landlord to pose as a benevolent friend of the farmers. When land itself has fallen from 25 to 50 percent in value, the return of 10 or 15 percent of the rent is evidently far below the true proportion. To correspond with the fall in freehold value, it ought not to be less than twice as much. Disease was among the cattle and sheep, and those that were healthy could scarcely be sold because the markets were closed.
Martial was at the end of his resources, and had not cash to pay the reapers labouring in the wheat, while Love and Time were idle, the sun glowed, and the distant thunder rolled in from the sea.
Felise counselled him to sell his horse again, and he was obliged to do it. Little did he imagine that he was selling her present. Ruy returned to Robert Godwin, and the reapers were paid.
These influences were not without effect; they rendered Martial more sensitive than usual. He felt that he ought not to go into the society of a beautiful woman whom he could not marry, and of whom he said to himself, “I do not love her,” merely because he worshipped her beauty. Yet he went.
After the delirium of exquisite pleasure that lovely morning under the shade of the beech, when ideal beauty came to him unsought, when the dream of his life descended to him in actual reality, as the Immortals descended in the early days of Greece to favoured man, he forcibly woke himself up with a strong wrench.
He would not see her, he would not enter into the circle of her power; he would resist it and retain his freedom, that freedom so dearly bought before with loss of self-respect. By sheer strength of will he resolved to retain his individuality—to stand clear of dreams and ideals—to be himself alone.
For some days, with severe self-restraint, he continued in this resolution; but at last, so deeply ingrained in his nature was his worship of the beautiful, he was compelled to own to himself that he must look upon the Picture. He would not go near it or speak to it, but he must look at it.
Wednesday evening he knew was the time when Mary Shaw could generally be found in the rickyard (it was her
