Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/397

 "Very well, my dear," said the old lady, quietly, "I'll ask you one question, and after that you'll never hear me open my lips on the matter. Do you love Mr. Creswell?"

"Yes, mother!"

"Better than any other man living?"

"Ye—yes, mother!" She hesitated for an instant, but the answer came round and firm at last.

"You swear that to me?"

"Yes, mother!"

"That's enough, my dear! I shall be ready to face your father now." Mrs. Ashurst then removed her arm from her daughter's neck and lay back in her chair. After a minute or two she told Marian she had heard the luncheon gong sound, and that she would prefer being left alone for a little. When Marian came up to kiss her before leaving the room, the little old lady's white face became suffused with a glow of colour, and the voice in which she prayed God bless her child, and keep her happy throughout her life, was broken with emotion, and weaker and fainter than ever.

When she was alone Mrs. Ashurst pondered long and earnestly over what she had just heard. Of course, the question of Marian's future—and to her parents as well as herself the future of every girl means her marriage—had been often thought of by her mother. She and her dead husband had talked of it in the summer evenings after supper and before retiring to rest, the only time which the school-work left for James Ashurst to devote to himself, and even then he was generally rather fatigued with past, or pre-occupied with growing work. It was very general, the talk between them, and principally carried on by Mrs. Ashurst; she had wondered when Marian would marry, and whom; she had gone through the list of eligible young men in the neighbourhood, and had speculated on their incomes and their chances of being thrown with Marian in such little company as they kept. She had wondered how they at home would be able to get on without her; whether she herself would be able to undertake the domestic superintendence as she had done in the old days, before Marian was of an age to be useful; whether Marian would not settle somewhere near where she might still take an interest in her old work, and many other odd and profitless speculations, to which the dominie would give an affirmative or negative grunt or comment, wondering all the while how he was to meet that acceptance which he had given to Barlow, and which became due on the twenty-seventh, or whether his old college chum South, now a flourishing physician in Cheltenham, would lend him the fifty pounds for which he had made so earnest an appeal. But all this seemed years ago to Mrs. Ashurst as she thought of it. For many months before her husband's death the subject had not been mooted between them; the cold, calm, external impassibility, and the firm determination of Marian's character, seemed to her mother to mark her for one of those women destined by nature to be single, and therefore somewhat fitted for the condition. A weak woman herself, and with scarcely any perception of character, believing that nearly all women were made in the same mould, and after the same type, Mrs. Ashurst could not understand the existence of the volcano under the placid surface. Only gushing, giggling, blushing girls fulfilled her idea of loving women, or women lovable by men. Marian was so "odd," and "strange," so determined, so strong-minded, that she never seemed to think of love-making, nor indeed, her mother thought, had she been ever so much that way disposed would she have had any time for it.

And now Marian was going to be married? Years rolled away, and the old lady saw herself in the same condition, but how differently circumstanced. Her James was young, and strong, and handsome. How splendid he looked in his flannel boating-dress, when he came to spend a hurried holiday at her father's river-side cottage! how all the people in the church admired him on their wedding-day! It was impossible that Marian could love this man, who was quite old enough to be her father, love him, that is, in the proper way, in the way that a husband should be loved. She could look up to him, and respect, and reverence him, and so on, but that was not the way in which she had loved her James. She had not the least respect for him, but used to laugh at him for his awkwardness, and great strong clumsy ways, never knowing what to do with his long legs and his great feet, and used to call him "a great goose," she recollected that, and the recollection brought the colour to her face, and made her smile in spite of herself. Marian could never call Mr. Creswell "a great goose," could never think of him so familiarly, no matter how long they might be married. What could have brought it about? She had very good eyes, she thought, and yet she had never suspected