Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/37

 in which the spirit of barter was to be discerned by knowing eyes. But none such took note of Marian's childhood. The illumination of love is rather dazzling than searching in the case of mothers of Mrs. Ashurst's class, and she was dazzled. Marian was perfection in her eyes, and at an age at which the inversion of the relations between mother and daughter, common enough in later life, would have appeared to others unreasonable, preposterous, Mrs. Ashurst surrendered herself wholly, happily, to the guidance and the care of her daughter. The inevitable self-assertion of the stronger mind took place, the inevitable submission of the weaker. In this instance, a gentle, persuasive, unconscious self-assertion, a joyful yielding, without one traversing thought of humiliation or deposition.

Her daughter was so clever, so helpful, so grave, so good, her economy and management—surely they were wonderful in so young a girl, and must have come to her by instinct?—rendered life such a different, so much easier a thing, delicate as she was, and requiring so disproportionate a share of their small means to be expended on her, that it was not surprising Mrs. Ashurst should see no possibility of evil in the origin of such qualities.

As for Marian's father, he was about as likely to discover a comet or a continent as to discern a flaw in his daughter's moral nature. The child, so longed for, so fervently implored, remained always, in her father's sight, Heaven's best gift to him; and he rejoiced exceedingly, and wondered not a little, as she developed into the girl whom we have seen beside his death-bed. He rejoiced because she was so clever, so quick, so ready, had such a masterly mind and happy faculty of acquiring knowledge; knowledge of the kind he prized and reverenced; of the kind which he felt would remain to her, an inheritance for her life. He wondered why she was so strong, for he knew she did not take the peculiar kind of strength of character from him or from her mother.

It was not to be wondered at that these peculiarities of Marian Ashurst were noticed by the inhabitants of the village where she was born, and where her childish days had been passed; but it was remarkable that they were regarded with anything but admiration. For a keen appreciation of money, and an unfailing determination to obtain their money's worth, had long been held to be eminently characteristic of the denizens of Helmingham. The cheese-factor used to declare that the hardest bargains throughout his county connexion were those which Mrs. Croke, and Mrs. Whicher, and, worst of all, old Mrs. M'Shaw (who, though Helmingham born and bred, had married Sandy M'Shaw, a Scotch gardener, imported by old Squire Creswell) drove with him. Not the very best ale to be found in the cellars of the Lion at Brocksopp (and they could give you a good glass of ale, bright, beaming, and mellow, at the Lion, when they chose), not the strongest mahogany-coloured brandy-and-water, mixed in the bar by the fair hands of Miss Parkhurst herself, not even the celebrated rum-punch, the recipe of which, like the songs of the Scandinavian scalds, had never been written out, but had descended orally to old Tilley, the short, stout, rubicund landlord—had ever softened the heart of a Helmingham farmer in the matter of business, or induced him to take a shilling less for a quarter of wheat, or a truss of straw, than he had originally made up his mind to sell it at.

"Canny Helmingham," was its name throughout the county, and its people were proud of it. Mr. Frampton, an earnest clergyman who had succeeded the old rector, had been forewarned of the popular prejudice, and on the second Sunday of his ministry addressed his parishioners in a very powerful and eloquent discourse upon the wickedness of avarice and the folly of heaping up worldly riches; after which, seeing that the only effect his sermon had was to lay him open to palpable rudeness, he wisely concentrated his energies on his translation of Horace's Odes (which has since gained him such great renown, and of which at least forty copies have been sold), and left his parishioners' souls to take care of themselves. But however canny and saving they might be, and however sharply they might battle with the cheese-factor, and look after the dairymaid, as behoved farmers' wives in these awful days of free trade (they had a firm belief in Helmingham that "Cobden," under which generic name they understood it, was a kind of pest, as is the smut in wheat, or the tick in sheep), all the principal dames in the village were greatly shocked at the unnatural love of money which it was impossible to help noticing in Marian Ashurst.

"There was time enow to think o' they things, money and such like fash, when pipple was settled down," as Mrs. Croke said, "but to see children hardenin' their