“And that is the girl I love; and that is the girl I mean to marry,” he said to himself, as he walked briskly along the footpath towards Blackdown.
After such dawdling in Armida’s parlour he would have to walk his fastest to be in time to dress for the eight o’clock dinner.
VI
Why Should He Refrain?
Why should he not marry Colonel Marchant’s daughter? Vansittart asked himself, in the quiet of those night watches which are said to bring counsel.
Why should he not marry Eve Marchant? asked Jack Vansittart of Counsellor Night. He was lord not only of himself but of a handsome income and a desirable estate. He had nobody to please but himself, and—well, yes, he wanted to please his mother, even in a matter so entirely personal as his choice of a wife. She had been so devoted a mother, and they had loved each other so dearly! In all his life he had kept only one secret from her—the secret of that night at Venice. In all his life he had only once told her a lie; when he told her he had not been in Venice during that last Italian tour. He wanted to please her, if it were possible, in this most serious question of his marriage. He knew that she loved him too unselfishly to be sorry that he should marry, albeit marriage must in some wise lessen their companionship as mother and son. The major half of his existence must needs belong to the woman he chose for his wife. His mother was resigned to take her lesser place in his life, she had often told him, provided that the wife were worthy.
“Pure as well as beautiful, sprung from an honourable race, reared by a good mother.”
These were the conditions she had laid upon his choice. What would she think of Colonel Marchant’s daughter, motherless, the child of a disreputable father, a girl reared under every social disadvantage; a girl who had dragged herself up anyhow, according to village gossips; a girl who had neither accomplishments nor education, and who had shown herself an audacious flirt, said the village—for Eve’s frank freedom of speech and manner was the rustic idea of audacity in flirtation? To talk easily with a man under forty was to be an outrageous flirt. The rustic idea of a well-conducted young woman was simpering silence.
What would his mother think of such a choice; his mother, who had been born and bred in just that stratum of English respectability which is narrowest in its sociology and strongest in its prejudices; his mother, who belonged to the county families, those deeply rooted children of the soil to whom the word trade is an abomination; who think that the Church and the Army were established for the maintenance of their younger sons, who consider they make a concession when they send a son to the Bar, and who shudder at the notion of a doctor or a solicitor issuing from their superior circles? What would Mrs. Vansittart think of an alliance with the daughter of a man whose name was dishonoured, who, albeit he too had been born of that elect race, and was indisputably “county,” had made himself a pauper and an outcast by his misconduct, and who had lived for the last nine years in a Bohemian and utterly intolerable manner, spending his time mysteriously in London, letting his daughters run wild, and having to be summoned for his rates and taxes?
The charges against Colonel Marchant, as Vansittart had heard them, were manifold. He had begun life in a marching regiment, without expectations, had married a lovely girl of low birth, or supposed to be of low birth, since her pedigree was unknown to Sussex, and her antecedents and uprising had never been explained or expounded to the curious in the neighbourhood of the Colonel’s present abode. Within two years of this marriage he had succeeded, most unexpectedly, by the death of a young cousin, to a fine estate in Yorkshire, considerably dipped by previous owners, but still a fine estate, and had immediately begun a career of extravagance, horse-racing, betting, and disreputable company, which had ultimately forced him to sell mansion and manor, farms and homesteads, that had belonged to his family since the Commonwealth, when the lands of East Grinley were bestowed by Cromwell on one of his finest soldiers, Major Fear-the-Lord Marchant, an officer who had helped to turn the fortunes of the day at Marston Moor, and who had been left for dead on the field of Dunbar.
Colonel Marchant had kept racehorses, and in his latter and worst days—when ruin was close at hand—had been suspected of shady dealings in the management of his stud, and had been the subject of a Jockey Club inquiry, which, albeit not important enough to become a cause célèbre, had left the Colonel with a tarnished reputation on the Turf, and the dark suspicion of having made a good deal of money by in and out running. He withdrew from the racing world under a cloud, not quite cleaned out, for the money he had won in the previous autumn served to buy the cottage near Fernhurst, and to carry his family from Yorkshire to Sussex. Here he began life anew, a
