Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/42

 "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,