Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/38

 hearts and scrooin' their pocket-money is unnatural, to say the least of it!" It was unnatural and unpopular in Helmingham. Mrs. Croke put such a screw on the cheese-factor, that in the evening after his dealings with her, that worthy filled the commercial room at the Lion with strange oaths and modern instances of sharp dealing in which Mrs. Croke bore away the palm; but she was highly indignant when Lotty Croke's godmother bought her a savings bank, a grey edifice, with what theatrical people call a practicable chimney down which the intended savings should be deposited. Mrs. Whicher's dairymaid, who, being from Ireland, and a Roman Catholic in faith, was looked upon with suspicion, not to say fear, in the village, and who was regarded by the farmers as in constant, though secret, communication with the Pope of Rome and the Jesuit College generally, declared that her mistress "canthered the life out of her" in the matter of small wages and much work; but Mrs. Whicher's daughter, Emily, had more crimson gowns, and more elegant bonnets, with regular fields of poppies, and perfect harvests of ears of corn growing out of them, than any of her compeers, for which choice articles the heavy bill of Madame Morgan—formerly of Paris, now of Brocksopp—was paid without a murmur. "It's unnatral in a gell like Marian Ashurst to think so much o' money and what it brings," would be a frequent remark at one of those private Helmingham institutions known as "Thick teas." And then Mrs. Croke would say, "And what like will a gell o' that sort look to marry? Why a man maun have poun's and poun's before she'd say, 'yea' and buckle to!"

But that was a matter which Marian had already decided upon.

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