Marion was not the person to delay the doing of anything which she had
made up her mind should be done, nor had she the faculty instinctive in
many women, of approaching a critical subject with that deliberate and
delicate touch of preparation which smooths the way for a more open
attack. Whatever was uppermost in her mind was apt to take possession
of her with so great an intensity that she had no longer the mastery of
herself required for this method of handling. She did not trouble
herself to join in the family conversation at luncheon, and when her
father went into his study,--a small room choked with a heterogeneous
collection of books and pamphlets, heaped here and thrown there in utter
carelessness to dust and disorder,--Marion followed him and said
abruptly,--
"Papa, something must be done to improve Marmaduke's position. Will you
write to Mr Tregennas, and point this out?"
"Write to Mr Tregennas!" said Mr Miles sharply, turning round from the
papers on his table.
"What do you mean? Is Marmaduke dismissed? No? Then there cannot be
anything much amiss." He said this with a relieved air, going back to
his papers. "Marion, I wish you'd just see whether that last hospital
report is up stairs. Mannering tells me I've been down on the committee
for a twelvemonth, but I cannot credit it."
"Marmaduke has been at that hateful place for two years," said Marion,
unheeding. "It is quite unfit for him, and some one ought to point it
out to his uncle."
"What is the matter with the place?" Mr Miles asked, still searching.
"Really, your mother must speak to the maids; I cannot allow them to
disturb everything under pretence of tidying. I am confident I left
that report on this table."
Marion was trembling with impatience. "Papa," she said, "you might
think a little more about poor Marmaduke's happiness."
"Happiness? Humph! He is too young to be talking about happiness. Let
him take what comes to him, and be thankful for it--" The Vicar turned
suddenly round with a quick, clumsy movement, "He has not been talking
nonsense to you, has he?"
The girl was standing with her back to the door, so that a clear light
fell upon her. As her father spoke, a soft beautiful change came over
her face, tender brightness shone in the dark eyes, the curve of the
mouth was touched with tremulous joy, a faint glow on her cheek gave an
indescribable look of youth, and her head bent gently with the
perfection of womanly grace.
Mr Miles, who had spoken sharply, could not but be moved by this
strange magic,--this mute answer,--so unlike Marion that it affected him
the more. He did not know what to say; he wished he had not ceased
speaking, had not looked at her, and so become aware of what--in its
contrast to her usual expression--was almost a revelation. Hitherto,
although he had vaguely listened to what they told him, it had been but
a feeble attention he paid, considering that the children must
necessarily pass through certain stages of existence, the boys going to
school, running wild over cricket, coming home to snowballing, having
the whooping-cough, every now and then requiring a thrashing, teasing
Marion, quarrelling with her, and at last by the same law, as he
imagined, falling in love with her. When Miss Philippa solemnly told
him that Marmaduke had confided to her his affection, and Mrs Miles
complained that Marion had lost her appetite, the Vicar half laughed at
himself for so far treating it seriously as to tell Marmaduke that he
was in no position to talk to his daughter of love, and, contenting
himself with this prudent command, dismissed the matter from his
thoughts. He had, indeed, a mind which did not occupy itself freely
with many subjects at once. Those which ceased to interest him he would
lay on the shelf, and forget altogether, until they would sometimes
start from their unwatched seclusion in a form so grown, so changed, so
great with life, that the shock gave him a sudden blow. Such a blow
came now. For, looking at her so standing, with the sweet flush of
girlish triumph vanquishing for the moment all care and fret, and
softening the harsher lines in her face with its happy touch, the
father's awakening brought sharp remorse for his former blindness. It
was not possible for him to reproach her when he felt as though reproach
might so justly fall upon himself, and if she had been thinking of him
at that moment she might have noticed a wistfulness in his eyes, a
faltering change in his voice, as strange perhaps as that other
revelation.
"How long has this been?" he said at last, not that he would have chosen
the words, but that they seemed to force themselves out.
"How long have we cared for each other, do you mean?" she answered
directly. "I think--always."
He shook his head at this. That which was so new to himself in his own
child must, he believed, be new-born.
"Children like you do not know your own minds," he said, but faintly,
and with a want of confidence which Marion was shrewd enough to note.
"Papa," she said, going closer to him, "we are not children. We are not
asking for anything foolish. I would give up all in the world for
Marmaduke. I would bear anything for him. I should feel it my richest
joy to be with him, at his side, however poor and struggling he was.
But of course I understand that could not be. It would not do for him
to be hampered with a wife while he can scarcely make his miserable
means support himself." As she spoke with a growing impetuosity, her
father, who had been holding her hand in his, and looking into her face,
turned slightly away, still holding her hand, and leaned a little
backwards against the writing-table.
"We know all that," she went on. "I have not said a word against it.
But now that I have seen him, and understand how miserable he is,
chained to work utterly distasteful to him, and without even the most
meagre of hopes, I cannot bear it any longer, I cannot, indeed. Why
should we not be engaged?"
Hearing that she paused for a reply, Mr Miles, after pausing also for a
moment, said,--
"You are thinking only of him."
"And of whom should I think?" she asked, vehemently.
"Perhaps I have been in error: I think I have been in error," said Mr
Miles, speaking with a strange humility. "One has no right to live with
one's eyes shut. But, Marion, if this be so, I cannot make wrong more
wrong. Marmaduke has no prospect of being able to marry for a
considerable number of years, unless, indeed, this shadowy hope to which
he clings of Mr Tregennas--"
"It ought not to be shadowy. It is disgraceful that he should not say
more. Papa, you must write and press this upon him."
"I!"
"Yes, indeed! There is no one else."
"This is simply absurd, Marion," said Mr Miles with some anger.
But he had given her an advantage, which she was resolved to use even to
ungenerosity.
"You said you had been unjust to Marmaduke--"
"Not to him, Marion."
"He and I are one in such a matter, papa."
Ah, there was the strangeness of it! His child's life had seemed to him
no more than an undeveloped bud, some day to expand, but as yet folded
securely within its sheath, and suddenly it had shot apart from, was
almost opposed to them all. It was a thing so strange that the father,
looking at the woman, thought only of the child, and took to his own
blindness greater blame than it deserved.
"Well," he said, sighing, "it is possible, as you say, that I have not
acted in the best way for Marmaduke, or indeed for any one."
"And you will write?"
"To tell the man he is to make Marmaduke his heir!"
"O, he has said it already. Tell him that he must be kinder to him,
poor fellow!--that he is thrown away in his present position--"
"I cannot say that," said the Vicar, with a wavering smile at the
childishness of the proposition. And as the idea struck him, he looked
keenly at her again. "Child, is this really what you suppose it? Do
you care so much for Marmaduke that you are prepared to be his wife?
You have been thrown together, you have no experience to guide you, you
have seen nothing of the world. I ought to take you about and show you
other places," he added in grave bewilderment.
Marion, who had been going to the door, turned round and laughed.
"It is too late now, papa."
Too late! And he had been thinking of her life as a smooth, untrodden
meadow!
Outside, in a spot of cool shade under the cedar, Mrs Miles was sitting
and working placidly at some little white squares, which never seemed to
grow nearer their completion. The Vicar, after looking at her for a
moment from his window, went out into the hall, through the porch, and
across the grass-plot to her side. It was very rarely that he carried
any problems to his wife; but it now appeared to him that there were
certain complications, such as the white intricacies lying upon her lap,
which it might be given only to a feminine understanding to disentangle.
He sat down gravely by her side, looking with abstraction at the
sunshine falling pleasantly on the house and the fine old tower beyond,
and listening, perhaps, to the hum of the bees, or the rough rhythm
which came from a saw-pit in the lane. Mrs Miles only looked up and
smiled, and went on with her knitting, believing the Vicar to be
absorbed in the Sunday sermons which she held to be the great events of
Thorpe life. These, although never weak, ran a risk of being considered
by a critic as rather dry and lengthy, but loyal wifehood excited a most
earnest admiration in Mrs Miles. She knitted softly, therefore, lest
the click of her needles should interfere with the roll of his ideas,
and in the hush of the sweet summer afternoon a pleasant drowsiness was
creeping over her, when her husband startled her by asking abruptly,--
"Wife, how old is Marion?"
"Marion, my dear?" said Mrs Miles, with a perplexed conviction that the
Vicar must have meant some other person more nearly connected with his
sermon,--"Marion was twenty last month. Don't you remember we had a
junket on her birthday, and it was the first time Sarah quite succeeded
in it?"
"Twenty!" repeated Mr Miles with a little groan. "I believed her to
have been sixteen."
"My dear! And dining out as she does, and so admired."
"Well, well," said the Vicar in a moment or two, "it is no fault of
yours or hers. But tell me whether you understood that Marmaduke was
serious in his attachment to her?"
"Why not?" asked Mrs Miles, a little motherly indignation making itself
heard in her voice.
"Why not?" repeated her husband, standing up and looking down on her,
impatiently. "They are both children."
"I never could think of Marion as a child at all," said the mother, with
a little sigh. "She has always been so much older than her years. And
as for Marmaduke, poor fellow, I am sure he can't have proper food at
his lodgings. I have told Sarah to make some jelly for him to take away
with him. Of course it is natural that the separation should be a trial
to him, but I dare say it will all come right by and by."
"But--good heavens, what a marriage for Marion!" cried the Vicar,
beginning to walk hastily up and down under, the cedar, and crushing the
daisies that peeped up through the not too carefully trimmed grass.
"My dear," said Mrs Miles, knitting calmly, "Marion is a girl who would
be miserable unless she had her own way. With all his strong will,
Anthony would be more likely to listen to reason."
"Anthony!" exclaimed her husband, stopping before her. "There is
nothing of the sort going on with Anthony?"
"It has not come to the same point, of course, but it is easy to see
that he has a fancy for Winifred. I am sure I should be very glad if
you could persuade him to make up his mind as to what he will be, and
get him out of the place."
"I don't see why," said the Vicar, amazed at his wife's penetration. "I
have never thought of what you have just put before me, but it appears
to me that Anthony would be fortunate to secure so good a girl as
Winifred Chester."
"Fortunate, Mr Miles!" said his wife, laying down her work, and
speaking with unusual irritation. "Why, Anthony, with his good looks,
his cleverness, and his fortune, might marry any girl in the county. I
have never seen any one good enough for him, that is the worst of it;
and as for Winifred, what you can see in her that you should call him
fortunate, I am sure I cannot conceive. She will be a very lucky girl
that gets our Anthony."
The Vicar said, "Pooh, pooh!" but he had a humiliating sense of being
baffled by his women. He went away, without further words, across the
lawn and past the mignonettes and sweet-peas into his study. There he
pulled down the blind to shut out the sun, in a fit of absence tore up a
carefully arranged table of parish accounts which he had just prepared
for Mr Mannering to audit, flung it into the waste-paper basket, and
sat down to write a letter to old Mr Tregennas.