Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/131

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CONDUCTED BY ""
 * No. 6..
 * SATURDAY, JANUARY 9, 1869.
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dearly loved her home. To her concentrative and self-contained nature, local associations were peculiarly precious; the place in which she had lived the life so essentially her own was very dear. The shabby old house, though she perfectly understood its shabbiness, and would have prized the power of renovating and adorning it as thoroughly as any petite maîtresse would have prized the power of adorning her bijou residence with all the prettiness of modern upholstery, was a shrine in her eyes. Base and unbeautiful, but sacred, the place in which her father had dutifully and patiently passed his laborious life—had it not been wasted? the proud discontented spirit asked itself many a time, but found no voice to answer "no." She had often pictured to her fancy what the house might have been made, if there had but been money to make it anything with, money to do anything with; if only they had not always been so helpless, so burthened with the especially painful load of genteel poverty. She had exorcised her womanly ingenuity, put forth her womanly tastes, so far as she could, and the house was better than might have been expected under all the circumstances; but ingenuity and taste, which double the effect of money when united to that useful agency, are not of much avail without it, and will not supply curtains and carpet, paint, varnishing, and general upholstery. There was not a superfluous ornament, and there were many in the drawing-rooms at Woolgreaves, very offensive to her instinctively correct taste,—whose price would not have materially altered the aspect of Marian Ashurst's home, as she had recognised with much secret bitterness of spirit, on her first visit to the Creswells. She would have made the old house pretty and pleasant, if she could, especially while he lived, to whom its prettiness and pleasantness might have brought refreshment of spirit, and a little cheerfulness in the surroundings of his toilsome life; but she loved it, notwithstanding its dulness and its frigid shabbiness, and the prospect of being obliged to leave it gave her exquisite pain. Marian was surprised when she discovered that her feelings on this point were keener than those of her mother. She had anticipated, with shrinking and reluctance of whose intensity she felt ashamed, the difficulty she should experience when that last worst necessity must arise, when her mother must leave the home of so many years, and the scene of her tranquil happiness. Mrs. Ashurst had been a very happy woman, notwithstanding her delicate health, and the difficulties it had brought upon the little household. In the first place, she was naturally of a placid temperament. In the second, her husband told her as little as possible of the constantly pressing, hopelessly inextricable, trouble of his life. And lastly, Mrs. Ashurst's inexperience prevented her realising danger in the future, from any source except that one whence it had actually come, fallen in its fullest, most fatal might—the sickness and death of her husband. When that tremendous blow fell upon her, it stunned the widow. She could not grieve, she could not care about anything else. She was not a woman of an imaginative turn of mind; feeling had always been powerful and deep in her, but