Chapter IV.Marian's Choice.
At a time when it seemed as though the unchildlike qualities which had distinguished the child from her playmates and coevals were intensifying and maturing in the girl growing up, then, to all appearance, hard, calculating, and mercenary, Marian Ashurst fell in love, and thence-forward the whole current of her being was diverted into healthier and more natural channels. Fell in love is the right and the only description of the process, so far as Marian was concerned. Of course she had frequently discussed the great question which racks the hearts of boarding school misses, and helps to fill up the spare time of middle-aged women, with her young companions; had listened with outward calmness and propriety, but with an enormous amount of unshown cynicism, to their simple gushings; and had said sufficient to lead them to believe that she joined in their fervent admiration of and aspiration for young men with black eyes and white hands, straight noses, and curly hair. But all the time Marian was building for herself a castle in the air, the proprietor of which, whose wife she intended to be, was a very different person from the hair-dressers' dummies whose regularity of feature caused the hearts of her companions to palpitate. The personal appearance of her future husband had never given her an instant's care; she had no preference in the colour of his eyes or hair, in his height, style, or even of his age, except she thought she would rather he were old. Being old, he was more likely to be generous, less likely to be selfish, more likely to have amassed riches and to be wealthy. His fortune would be made, not to be made; there would be no struggling, no self-denial, no hope required. Marian's domestic experiences caused her to hate anything in which hope was required; she had been dosed with hope without the smallest improvement, and had lost faith in the treatment. Marriage was the one chance possible for her to carry out the dearest, most deeply implanted, longest cherished aspiration of her heart—the acquisition of money and power. She knew that the possession of the one led to the other, from the time when she had saved her schoolgirl pennies and had noticed the court paid to her by her little friends, to the then moment, when the mere fact of her having a small stock of ready money, even more than her sense and shrewdness, gave her position in that impecunious household, she had recognised the impossibility of achieving even a semblance of happiness in poverty. When she married, it should be for money, and for money alone. In the hard school of life in which she had been trained she had learned that the prize she was aiming at was a great one, and one difficult to be obtained; but that knowledge only made her the more determined in its pursuit. The difficulties around her were immense; in the narrow circle in which she lived she had not any present chances of meeting with any person likely to be able to give her the position which she sought, far less of rendering him subservient to her wishes. But she waited and hoped; she was waiting and hoping, calmly and quietly fulfilling the ordinary duties of her very ordinary life, but never losing sight of her fixed intent. Then across the path of her life there came a man who seemed to give promise of eventually fulfilling the requirements she had planned out for herself. It was but a promise; there was nothing tangible; but the promise was so good, the girl's heart yearned for an occupant, and, with all its hard teaching and its worldly aspirations, it was but human after all. So her human heart and her worldly wisdom came to a compromise in the matter of her acceptance of a lover, and the result of that compromise was her engagement to Walter Joyce.
When the Helmingham Grammar School was under the misrule of old Dr. Munch, then at its lowest ebb, and nominations to the foundation were to be had for the asking, and, indeed, in many cases were sent a-begging, it occurred to the old head master to offer one of the vacancies to Mr. Joyce, the principal grocer and maltster of the village, whose son was then just of an age to render him accessible to the benefits of the education which Sir Ranulph Clinton had demised to the youth of Helmingham, and which was then being so imperfectly supplied to them under the auspices of Dr. Munch. You must not for an instant imagine that the offer was made by the old Doctor out of pure loving-kindness and magnanimity; he looked at it, as he did at most things, from a purely practical point of view; he owed Joyce, the grocer, so much money, and if Joyce, the grocer, would write him a receipt in full for all his indebtedness in return for a nomination for Joyce junior, at least he, the Doctor, would not have done a bad stroke of business. He would have wiped out an existing score, the value of which proceeding meant, in Dr. Munch's eyes, that he would be enabled at once to commence a fresh one, while the acquisition of young Joyce as a scholar would not cause one atom of difference in the manner in which the school was conducted, or rather left to conduct itself. The offer was worth making, for the debt was heavy, though the Doctor was by no means sure of its being accepted. Andrew Joyce was not Helmingham born; he had come from Spindleton, one of the large inland capitals, and had purchased the business which he owned. He was not popular among the Helmingham folk, who were all strict church people, so far as morning service attending, tithe paying, and parson-respecting were concerned, from the fact that his religious tendencies were suspected to be what the villagers termed "methodee." He had his seat in the village church, it is true, and put in an appearance there on the Sunday morning, but instead of spending the Sabbath evening in the orthodox way—which at Helmingham consisted in sitting in the best parlour, with a very dim light, and enjoying the blessings of sound sleep, while Nelson's Fasts and Festivals, or some equally proper work, rested on the sleeper's knee, until it fell off with a crash, and was only recovered to be held upside down until the grateful announcement of the arrival of supper—Mr. Joyce was in the habit of dropping into Salem Chapel, where Mr. Stoker, a shining light from the pottery district, dealt forth the most uncomfortable doctrine in the most forcible manner. The Helmingham people declared, too, that Andrew Joyce was "uncanny" in other ways; he was close-fisted and niggardly, his name was to be found on no subscription list; he was litigious; he declared that Mr. Prickett, the old-fashioned solicitor of the village, was too slow for him, and he put his law matters into the hands of Messrs. Sheen and Nasmyth, attorneys at Brocksopp, who levied a distress before other people had served a writ, and who were considered the sharpest practitioners in the county. Old Dr. Munch had heard of the process of Messrs. Sheen and Nasmyth, and the dread of any of it being exercised on him originally prompted his offer to Andrew Joyce. He knew that he might count on an ally in Andrew Joyce's wife, a superior woman in very delicate health, who had great influence with her husband, and who was devoted to her only son. Mrs. Joyce, when Hester Baines, had been a Bible-class teacher in Spindleton, and had had herself a fair amount of education, would have had more, for she was a very earnest woman in her vocation, ever striving to gain more knowledge herself for the mere purpose of imparting it to others, but from her early youth she had been fighting with a spinal disease, to which she was gradually succumbing, so that although sour granite-faced Andrew Joyce was not the exact helpmate that the girl so full of love and trust would have chosen for herself, when he offered her his hand and his home, she was glad to avail herself of the protection thus afforded, and of the temporary peace which she could thus enjoy, until called, as she thought she should be, very speedily to her eternal rest.
That call did not come nearly as soon as Hester Baines had anticipated; not, indeed, until nearly a score of years after she gave up Bible-teaching, and became Andrew Joyce's wife. In the second year of her marriage a son was born to her, and thence-forward she lived for him, and for him alone. He was a small, delicate, sallow-faced boy, with enormous liquid eyes, and rich red lips, and a long throat, and thin limbs, and long skinny hands. A shy retiring lad, with an invincible dislike to society of any kind, even that of other boys; with a hatred of games, and fun; and an irrepressible tendency to hide away somewhere, anywhere, in an old lumber-room amid the disused trunks and broken clothes-horses, and general lumber, or under the wide-spreading branches of a tree, and then, extended prone on his stomach, to lie, with his head resting on his hands, and a book flat between his face-supporting arms. He got licked before he had been a week at the school, because he openly stated he did not like half-holidays, a doctrine which when first whispered among his schoolfellows was looked upon as incredible, but which, on proof of its promulgation, brought down upon its holder severe punishment. Despite of all Dr. Munch's somnolency and neglect, despite of all his class-fellows' idleness, ridicule, or contumely, young Joyce would learn, would make progress, would acquire accurate information in a very extraordinary way. When Mr. Ashurst assumed the reins of government at Helmingham Grammar School, the proficiency, promise, and industry of Walter Joyce were the only things that gave the new dominie the smallest gleam of interest in his new avocation. With the advent of the new head master Walter Joyce entered upon a new career; for the first time in his life he found some one to appreciate him, some one who could understand his work, praise what he had done, and encourage him to greater efforts. This had hitherto been wanting in the young man's life. His father liked to know that the boy "stuck to his book;" but was at last incapable of understanding what that sticking to the book produced, and his mother, though conscious that her son possessed talent such as she had always coveted for him, had no idea of the real extent of his learning. James Ashurst was the only one in Helmingham who could rate his scholar's gifts at their proper value, and the dominie's kind heart yearned with delight at the prospect of raising such a creditable flower of learning in such unpromising soil. He praised himself, not merely with the young man's present but with his future. It was his greatest hope that one of the scholarships at his old college should be gained by a pupil from Helmingham, and that that pupil should be Walter Joyce. Mr. Ashurst had been in communication with the college authorities on the subject; he had obtained a very unwilling assent—an assent that would have been a refusal had it not been for Mrs. Joyce's influence—from Walter's father that he would give his son an adequate sum for his maintenance at the University, and he was looking forward to a quick coming time when a scholarship should be vacant, for which he was certain Walter had a most excellent chance, when Mrs. Joyce had a fit and died. From that time forth Andrew Joyce was a changed man. He had loved his wife in his grim, sour, puritanical way, loved her sufficiently to strive against this grimness and puritanism to the extent of his consenting to live for the most part in the ordinary fashion of the world. But when that gentle influence was once removed, when the hard-headed, narrow-minded man had no longer the soft answer to turn away his wrath, the soft face to look appealingly up against his harsh judgment, the quick intellect to combat his one-sided dogmatisms, he fell away at once, and blossomed out as the bitter bigot into which he had gradually but surely been growing. No college education for his son then; no assistance for him from a bloated hierarchy, as he remarked at a public meeting, glancing at Mr. Sefton, the curate, who had eighty pounds a year and four children; no money of his to be spent by his son in a dissolute and debauched career at the university. Mr. Stoker had not been at any university—as, indeed, he had not, having picked up most of his limited education from a travelling tinker, who combined pot-mending and knife-grinding with Bible and tract selling—and where would you meet with a better preacher of the Gawspel, a more shining light, or a comelier vessel? Mr. Stoker was all in all to Andrew Joyce then, and when Andrew Joyce died, six months afterwards, it was found that, with the exception of the legacy of a couple of hundred pounds to his son, he had left all his money to Mr. Stoker, and to the chapel and charities represented by that erudite divine.
It was a sad blow to Walter Joyce, and almost as sharp a one to James Ashurst. The two men Walter—was a man now—grieved together over the overturned hopes and the extinguished ambition. It was impossible for Walter to attempt to go to college just then. There was no scholarship vacant, and if there had been, the amount to be won might probably have been insufficient for this modest youth. There was no help for it; he must give up the idea. What, then, was he to do? Mr. Ashurst answered that in his usual impulsive way. Walter should become under-master in the school. The number of boys had increased immensely. There was more work than he and Dr. Breitmann could manage; oh yes, he was sure of it, he had thought so a long time, and Walter should become third classical master, with a salary of sixty pounds a year, and board and lodging in Mr. Ashurst's house. It was a rash and wild suggestion, just likely to emanate from such a man as James Ashurst. The number of boys had increased, and Mr. Ashurst's energy had decreased; but there was Dr. Breitmann; a kindly, well-read, well-educated doctor of philosophy, from Leipzig; a fine classical scholar, though he pronounced "amo" as "ahmo," and "Dido" as "Taito;" a gentleman, though his clothes were threadbare, and he only ate meat once a week, and sometimes not then unless he were asked out; and a disciplinarian, though he smoked like a limekiln; a habit which in the Helmingham school-boys' eyes proclaimed the confirmed debauchee of the Giovanni or man-about-town type. Walter Joyce had been a favourite pupil of the doctor's, and was welcomed as a colleague by his old tutor with the utmost warmth. It was understood that his engagement was only temporary; he would soon have enough money to enable him, with a scholarship, to astonish the university, and then! Meanwhile Mr. Ashurst and all around repeated that his talents were marvellous, and his future success indisputable.
That was the reason why Marian Ashurst fell in love with him. As has before been said, she thought nothing of outward appearance, although Walter Joyce had grown into a sufficiently comely man, small indeed, but with fine eyes and an eloquent mouth, and a neatly turned figure; nor, though a refined and educated girl, did she estimate his talents save for what they would bring. He was to make a success in his future life! that was what she thought of—her father said so, and so far in matters of cleverness and book learning, and so on, her father's opinion was worth something. Walter Joyce was to make money and position, the two things of which she thought, and dreamed, and hoped for, night and day. There was no one else among her acquaintance with his power. No farmer within the memory of living generations had done more than to keep up the homestead bequeathed to him whilst attempting to increase the number or the value of his fields; and even the gratification of her love of money would have been but a poor compensation to a girl of Marian's innate good breeding and refinement for being compelled to pass her life in the society of a boor or a churl. No! Walter Joyce combined the advantage of education and good looks, with the prospect of attaining wealth and distinction; he was her father's favourite, and was well thought of by everybody, and—and she loved him very much, and was delighted to comfort herself with the thought that in doing so she had not sacrificed any of what she was pleased to consider the guiding principles of her life.
And he, Walter Joyce, did he reciprocate, was he in love with Marian? Has it ever been your lot to see an ugly or, better still, what is called an ordinary man—for ugliness has become fashionable both in fiction and in society—to see an ordinary looking man hitherto politely ignored, if not snubbed, suddenly taken special notice of by a handsome woman, a recognised leader of her set, who, for some special purpose of her own, suddenly discovering that he has brains, or conversational power, or some peculiar fascination, singles him out from the surrounding ruck, steeps him in the sunlight of her eyes, and intoxicates him with the subtle wiles of her address? It does one good, it acts as a moral shower-bath, to see such a man under such circumstances. Your fine fellow simpers and purrs for a moment, and takes it all as real legitimate homage to his beauty; but the ordinary man cannot, so soon as he has got over his surprise at the sensation, cannot be too grateful, cannot find ways and means—cumbrous frequently and ungraceful, but eminently sincere—of showing his appreciation of the woman. Thus it was with Walter Joyce. The knowledge that he was a grocer's son had added immensely to the original shyness and sensitiveness of his disposition, and the free manner in which his frank and delicate personal appearance had been made the butt of outspoken "chaff" of the school-boys had made him singularly misogynistic. Since the early days of his youth, when he had been compelled to give a very unwilling attendance twice a week at the dancing academy of Mr. Hardy, where the boys of the Helmingham Grammar School had their manners softened, nor were suffered to become brutal, by the study of the terpsichorean art, in the company of the young ladies from the Misses Lewins' establishment, Walter Joyce had resolutely eschewed any and every charge of mixing in female society. He knew nothing of it, and pretended to despise it; it is needless to say, therefore, that so soon as he was brought into daily communication with a girl like Marian Ashurst, possessed both of beauty and refinement, he fell hopelessly in love with her, and gave up every thought, idea, and hope, save that in which she bore a part. She was his goddess, and he would worship her humbly and at a distance. It would be sufficient for him to touch the hem of her robe, to hear the sound of her voice, to gaze at her with big dilated eyes, which—not that he knew it—were eloquent with love, and tenderness, and worship.
Their love was known to each other, and to but very few else. Mr. Ashurst, looking up from his newspaper in the blessed interval between the departure of the boys to bed, and the modest little supper, the only meal which the family—in which Joyce was included—had in private, may have noticed the figures of his daughter and his usher, erst his favourite pupil, lingering in the deepening twilight round the lawn, or seen "their plighted shadows blended into one" in the soft rays of the moonlight. But, if he thought anything about it, he never made any remark. Life was very hard and very earnest with James Ashurst, and he may have found something softening and pleasing in this little bit of romance, something which he may have wished to leave undisturbed by worldly suggestions or practical hints. Or, he may have had no idea of what was actually going on. A man with an incipient disease beginning to tell upon him, with a sickly wife, and a perpetual striving not merely to make both ends meet, but to prevent them bursting so wide asunder as to leave a gap through which he must inevitably fall into ruin between them, has but little time, or opportunity, or inclination, for observing narrowly the conduct even of those near and dear to him. Mrs. Ashurst, in her invalid state, was only too glad to think that the few hours which Marian took in respite from attendance on her mother were pleasantly employed, to inquire where or in whose society they were passed. Neither Marian's family nor Joyce kept any company by whom their absence would be noticed; and as for the villagers, they had fully made up their minds on the one side that Marian was determined to make a splendid match; on the other, that the mere fact of Walter Joyce's scholarship was so great as to incapacitate him from the pursuit of ordinary human frailties: so that not the ghost of a speculation as to the relative position of the couple had arisen amongst them. And the two young people loved, and hoped, and erected their little castles in the air, which were palatial indeed as hope-depicted by Marian, though less ambitious as limned by Walter Joyce, when Mr. Ashurst's death came upon them like a thunderbolt, and blew their unsubstantial edifices into the air.
See them here on this calm summer evening, pacing round and round the lawn, as they used to do, in the old days already ages ago as it seems, when James Ashurst, newspaper in hand, would throw occasional glances at them from the study window. Marian, instead of letting her fingers lightly touch her companion's wrist, as is her wont, has passed her arm through his, and her fingers are clasped together round it, and she looks up in his face, as they come to a standstill beneath the big outspread branches of the old oak, with an earnest tearful gaze such as she has seldom, if ever, worn before. There must be matter of moment between these two just now, for Joyce's face looks wan and worn; there are deep hollows beneath his large eyes, and he strives ineffectually to conceal, with an occasional movement of his hand, the rapid anxious play of the muscles round his mouth. Marian is the first to speak.
"And so you take Mr. Benthall's decision as final, Walter, and are determined to go to London?"
"Darling, what else can I do? Here is Mr. Benthall's letter, in which he tells me that, without the least wish to disturb me—a mere polite phrase that—he shall bring his own assistant master to Helmingham. He writes, and means kindly, I've no doubt—but here's the fact!"
"Oh, yes, I'm sure he's a gentleman, Walter; his letter to mamma proves that, offering to defer his arrival at the schoolhouse until our own time. Of course that is impossible, and we go into Mr. Swainson's lodgings at once."
"My dearest Marian, my own pet, I hate to think of you in lodgings; I cannot bear to picture you so!"
"You must make haste and get your position, and take me to share it, then, Walter!" said the girl, with a half melancholy smile; "you must do great things, Walter. Dear papa always said you would, and you must prove how right he was!"
"Dearest, your poor father calculated on my success at college for the furtherance of my fortune, and now all that chance is over! Whatever I do now must be"
"By the aid of your own talent and industry, exactly the same appliances which you had to rely on if you had gone to the university, Walter. You don't fear the result? you're not alarmed and desponding at the turn which affairs have taken? It's impossible you can fail to attain distinction, and—and money and—and position, Walter— you must, don't you feel it?—you must!"
"Yes, dear, I feel it; I hope—I think! perhaps not so strongly, so enthusiastically as you do. You see,—don't be downcast, Marian, but it's best to look these things in the face, darling!—all I can try to get is a tutor's, or an usher's, or a secretary's place, and in any of these the want of the university stamp is heavily against me. There's no disguising that, Marian!"
"Oh, indeed; is that so?"
"Yes, child, undoubtedly. The university degree is like the hall mark in silver, and I'm afraid I shall find very few persons willing to accept me as the genuine article without it."
"And all this risk might have been avoided if your father had only"
"Well, yes; but then, Marian darling, if my father had left me money to go to college immediately on his death I should never have known you—known you, I mean, as you are, the dearest and sweetest of women."
He drew her to him as he spoke and pressed his lips on her forehead. She received the kiss without any undue emotion, and said:
"Perhaps that had been for the best, Walter."
"Marian, that's rank blasphemy. Fancy my hearing that, especially, too, on the night of my parting with you! No, my darling, all I want you to have is hope, hope and courage, and not too much ambition, dearest. Mine has been comparatively but a lotus-eating existence hitherto; to-morrow I begin the battle of life."
"But slightly armed for the conflict, my poor Walter!"
"I don't allow that, Marian. Youth, health, and energy are not bad weapons to have on one's side, and with your lore in the background"
"And the chance of achieving fame and fortune for yourself—keep that in the foreground!"
"That is to me, in every way, less than the other, but it is of course an additional spur. And now"
And then? When two lovers are on the eve of parting, their conversation is scarcely very interesting to any one else. Marian and Walter talked the usual pleasant nonsense, and vowed the usual constancy, took four separate farewells of each other, and parted, with broken accents, and lingering hand-clasps, and streaming eyes. But when Marian Ashurst sat before her toilette-glass that night, in the room which had so long been her own, and which she was so soon to vacate, she thought of what Walter Joyce had said as to his future, and wondered whether, after all, she had not miscalculated the strength, not the courage, of the knight whom she had selected to wear her colours in his helm in the great contest.