MARIAN'S CHOICE.
At 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 thenceforward 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
hairdressers' 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 and hoped; she was waiting and hoping, calmly and quietly
fulfilling the ordinary duties of her very ordinary life, but never
losing sight of her fixed intent. Then across the path of her life
there came a man who seemed to give promise of eventually fulfilling
the requirements she had planned out for herself. It was but a
promise; there was nothing tangible; but the promise was so good, and
the girl's heart yearned for an occupant, for, with all its hard
teaching and its worldly aspirations, it was but human after all. So
her human heart and her worldly wisdom come to a compromise in the
matter of her acceptance of a lover, and the result of that compromise
was her engagement to Walter Joyce.
When the Helmingham Grammar School was under the misrule of old Dr.
Munch, then at its lowest ebb, and nominations to the foundation were
to be had for the asking, and, indeed, in many cases sent a-begging,
it occurred to the old head master to offer one of the vacancies to
Mr. Joyce, the principal grocer and maltster of the village, whose son
was then just of an age to render him accessible to the benefits of
the education which Sir Ranulph Clinton had devised to the youth of
Helmingham, and which was being so imperfectly supplied to them under
the auspices of Dr. Munch. You must not for an instant imagine that
the offer was made by the old doctor out of pure loving-kindness and
magnanimity; he looked at it, as he did at most things, from a purely
practical point of view: he owed Joyce the grocer so much money, and
if Joyce the grocer would write him a receipt in full for all his
indebtedness in return for a nomination for Joyce junior, at least he,
the doctor, would not have done a bad stroke of business. He would
have wiped out an existing score, the value of which proceeding meant,
in Dr. Munch's eyes, that he would be enabled at once to commence a
fresh one, while the acquisition of young Joyce as a scholar would not
cause one atom of difference in the manner in which the school was
conducted, or rather, left to conduct itself. The offer was worth
making, for the debt was heavy, though the doctor was by no means sure
of its being accepted. Andrew Joyce was not Helmingham-born; he had
come from Spindleton, one of the large inland capitals, and had
purchased the business which he owned. He was not popular among
the Helmingham folk, who were all strict church-people so far as
morning-service attending, tithe-paying, and parson-respecting were
concerned, from the fact that his religious tendencies were suspected
to be what the villagers termed "Methodee." He had his seat in the
village church, it is true, and put in an appearance there on the
Sunday morning; but instead of spending the Sabbath evening in the
orthodox way--which at Helmingham consisted in sitting in the best
parlour with a very dim light, and enjoying the blessings of sound
sleep while Nelson's _Fasts and Festivals_, or some equally proper
work, rested on the sleeper's knee, until it fell off with a crash,
and was only recovered to be held upside down until the grateful
announcement of the arrival of supper--Mr. Joyce was in the habit of
dropping into Salem Chapel, where Mr. Stoker, a shining light from the
pottery district, dealt forth the most uncomfortable doctrine in the
most forcible manner. The Helmingham people declared, too, that Andrew
Joyce was "uncanny" in other ways; he was close-fisted and niggardly,
his name was to be found on no subscription-list; he was litigious; he
declared that Mr. Prickett, the old-fashioned solicitor of the
village, was too slow for him, and he put his law-matters into the
hands of Messrs. Sheen and Nasmyth, attorneys at Brocksopp, who levied
a distress before other people had served a writ, and who were
considered the sharpest practitioners in the county. Old Dr. Munch had
heard of the process of Messrs. Sheen and Nasmyth, and the dread of
any of it being exercised on him originally prompted his offer to
Andrew Joyce. He knew that he might count on an ally in Andrew Joyce's
wife, a superior woman, in very delicate health, who had great
influence with her husband, and who was devoted to her only son. Mrs.
Joyce, when Hester Baines, had been a Bible-class teacher in
Spindleton, and had had herself a fair amount of education--would have
had more, for she was a very earnest woman in her vocation, over
striving to gain more knowledge herself for the mere purpose of
imparting it to others, but from her early youth she had been fighting
with a spinal disease, to which she was gradually succumbing; so that
although sour granite-faced Andrew Joyce was not the exact helpmate
that the girl so full of love and trust could have chosen for herself,
when he offered her his hand and his home, she was glad to avail
herself of the protection thus afforded, and of the temporary peace
which she could thus enjoy until called, as she thought she should be,
very speedily to her eternal rest.
That call did not come nearly as soon as Hester Baines had
anticipated, not, indeed, until nearly a score of years after she gave
up Bible-teaching, and became Andrew Joyce's wife. In the second year
of her marriage a son was born to her, and thenceforward she lived for
him, and for him alone. He was a small, delicate, sallow-faced boy,
with enormous liquid eyes, and rich red lips, and a long throat, and
thin limbs, and long skinny hands. A shy retiring lad, with an
invincible dislike to society of any kind, even that of other boys;
with a hatred of games and fun, and an irrepressible tendency to hide
away somewhere, anywhere, in an old lumber-room amid the disused
trunks, and broken clothes-horses, and general lumber, or under the
wide-spreading branches of a tree, and then, extended, prone on
his stomach, to lie with his head resting on his hands, and a book
flat between his face-supporting arms. He got licked before he had
been a week at the school, because he openly stated he did not like
half-holidays, a doctrine which when first whispered among his
schoolfellows was looked upon as incredible, but which, on proof of
its promulgation, brought down upon its holder severe punishment.
Despite of all Dr. Munch's somnolency and neglect, despite of all his
class fellows' idleness, ridicule, or contumely, young Joyce would
learn, would make progress, would acquire accurate information in a
very extraordinary way. When Mr. Ashurst assumed the reins of
government at Helmingham Grammar School, the proficiency, promise, and
industry of Walter Joyce were the only things that gave the now
dominie the smallest gleam of interest in his fresh avocation. With
the advent of the new head master Walter Joyce entered upon another
career; for the first time in his life he found some one to appreciate
him, some one who could understand his work, praise what he had done,
and encourage him to greater efforts. This had hitherto been wanting
in the young man's life. His father liked to know that the boy "stuck
to his book;" but was at last incapable of understanding what that
sticking to the book produced; and his mother, though conscious that
her son possessed talent such as she had always coveted for him, had
no idea of the real extent of his learning. James Ashurst was the only
one in Helmingham who could rate his scholar's gifts at their proper
value, and the dominie's kind heart yearned with delight at the
prospect of raising such a creditable flower of learning in such
unpromising soil. He busied himself, not merely with the young man's
present but with his future. It was his greatest hope that one of the
scholarships at his old college should be gained by a pupil from
Helmingham, and that that pupil should be Walter Joyce. Mr. Ashurst
had been in communication with the college authorities on the subject;
he had obtained a very unwilling assent--an assent that would have
been a refusal had it not been for Mrs. Joyce's influence--from
Walter's father that he would give his son an adequate sum for his
maintenance at the University, and he was looking forward to a
quick-coming time when a scholarship should be vacant, for which he
was certain Walter had a most excellent chance, when Mrs. Joyce had a
fit and died.
From that time forth Andrew Joyce was a changed man. He had loved his
wife in his grim, sour, puritanical way, loved her sufficiently to
strive against this grimness and puritanism to the extent of his
consenting to live for the most part from the ordinary fashion of
the world. But when that gentle influence was once removed, when the
hard-headed, narrow-minded man had no longer the soft answer to turn
away his wrath, the soft face to look appealingly up against his harsh
judgment, the quick intellect to combat his one-sided dogmatisms, he
fell away at once, and blossomed out as the bitter bigot into which he
had gradually but surely been growing. No college education for his
son then; no assistance from him for a bloated hierarchy, as he
remarked at a public meeting, glancing at Mr. Sifton, the curate, who
had eighty pounds a year and four children; no money of his to be
spent by his son in a dissolute and debauched career at the
University. Mr. Stoker had not been at any university--as, indeed, he
had not, having picked up most of his limited education from a
travelling tinker, who combined pot-mending and knife-grinding with
Bible and tract selling;--and where would you meet with a better
preacher of the Gawspel, a more shining light, or a comelier vessel?
Mr. Stoker was all in all to Andrew Joyce then, and when Andrew Joyce
died, six months afterwards, it was found that, with the exception of
the legacy of a couple of hundred pounds to his son, he had left all
his money to Mr. Stoker, and to the chapel and charities represented
by that erudite divine.
It was a sad blow to Walter Joyce, and almost as sharp a one to James
Ashurst. The two men--Walter was a man now--grieved together over the
overturned hopes and the extinguished ambition. It was impossible for
Walter to attempt to go to college just then. There was no scholarship
vacant, and if there had been, the amount to be won might probably
have been insufficient even for this modest youth. There was no help
for it; he must give up the idea. What, then, was he to do? Mr.
Ashurst answered that in his usual impulsive way. Walter should become
under master in the school. The number of boys had increased
immensely. There was more work than he and Dr. Breitmann could manage;
oh yes, he was sure of it--he had thought so a long time; and Walter
should become third classical master, with a salary of sixty pounds a
year, and board and lodging in Mr. Ashurst's house. It was a rash and
wild suggestion, just likely to emanate from such a man as James
Ashurst. The number of boys had increased, and Mr. Ashurst's energy
had decreased; but there was Dr. Breitmann, a kindly, well-read,
well-educated doctor of philosophy, from Leipzig; a fine classical
scholar, though he pronounced "amo" as "ahmo," and "Dido" as "Taito,"
a gentleman, though his clothes were threadbare, and he only ate meat
once a week, and sometimes not then unless he were asked out, and a
disciplinarian, though he smoked like a limekiln; a habit which in the
Helmingham schoolboys' eyes proclaimed the confirmed debauchee of the
Giovanni or man-about-town type. Welter Joyce had been a favourite
pupil of the doctor's, and was welcomed as a colleague by his old
tutor with the utmost warmth. It was understood that his engagement
was only temporary; he would soon have enough money to enable him,
with a scholarship, to astonish the University, and then---- Meanwhile
Mr. Ashurst and all around repeated that his talents were marvellous,
and his future success indisputable.
That was the reason why Marian Ashurst fell in love with him. As has
before been said, she thought nothing of outward appearance, although
Walter Joyce had grown into a sufficiently comely man, small indeed,
but with fine eyes and an eloquent mouth, and a neatly turned figure;
nor, though a refined and educated girl, did she estimate his talents
save for what they would bring. He was to make a success in his future
life; that was what she thought of--her father said so, and so far, in
matters of cleverness and book-learning, and so on, her father's
opinion was worth something. Walter Joyce was to make money and
position, the two things of which she thought, and dreamed, and hoped
for night and day. There was no one else among her acquaintance with
his power. No farmer within the memory of living generations had done
more to keep up the homestead bequeathed to him whilst attempting to
increase the number or the value of his fields, and even the
gratification of her love of money would have been but a poor
compensation to a girl of Marian's innate good breeding and refinement
for being compelled to pass her life in the society of a boor or a
churl. No! Walter Joyce combined the advantage of education and good
looks with the prospect of attaining wealth and distinction: he was
her father's favourite, and was well thought of by everybody, and--and
she loved him very much, and was delighted to comfort herself with the
thought that in doing so she had not sacrificed any of what she was
pleased to consider the guiding principles of her life.
And he, Walter Joyce, did he reciprocate--was he in love with Marian?
Has it ever been your lot to see an ugly or, better still, what is
called an ordinary man--for ugliness has become fashionable both in
fiction and in society--to see an ordinary-looking man, hitherto
politely ignored, if not snubbed, suddenly taken special notice of by
a handsome woman, a recognised leader of the set, who, for some
special purpose of her own, suddenly discovering that he has brains,
or conversational power, or some peculiar fascination, singles him out
from the surrounding ruck, steeps him in the sunlight of her eyes, and
intoxicates him with the subtle wiles of her address? It does one
good, it acts as a moral shower-bath, to see such a man under such
circumstances. Your fine fellow simpers and purrs for a moment, and
takes it all as real legitimate homage to his beauty; but the ordinary
man cannot, so soon as he has got over his surprise at the sensation,
cannot be too grateful, cannot find ways and means--cumbrous
frequently and ungraceful, but eminently sincere--of showing his
appreciation of his patroness. Thus it was with Walter Joyce. The
knowledge that he was a grocer's son had added immensely to the
original shyness and sensitiveness of his disposition, and the free
manner in which his small and delicate personal appearance had been
made the butt of outspoken "chaff" of the schoolboys 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 Lewin's 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,
not 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 his 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
for 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 missed; 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 arms 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 gage 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 No 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, offering to defer his arrival at the schoolhouse until our own
time. Of course that is impossible, and we go into Mrs. Swainson's
lodgings at once."
"My dearest Marian, my own pet, I hate to think of you in lodgings; I
cannot bear to picture you so!"
"You must make haste to get your position, and take me to share it,
then, Walter!" said the girl, with a half-melancholy smile; "you must
do great things, Walter. Dear papa always said you would, and you must
prove how right he was."
"Dearest, your poor father calculated on my success at college for the
furtherance of my fortune, and now all that chance is over! Whatever I
do now must be----"
"By the aid of your own talent and industry, exactly the same
appliances which you had to rely on if you had gone to the University,
Walter. You don't fear the result? You're not alarmed and desponding
at the turn which affairs have taken? It's impossible you can fail to
attain distinction, and--and money and--and position, Walter--you
must,--don't you feel it?--you must!"
"Yes, dear, I feel it; I hope--I think; perhaps not so strongly, so
enthusiastically as you do. You see,--don't be downcast, Marian, but
it's best to look these things in the face, darling!--all I can try to
get is a tutor's, or an usher's, or a secretary's place, and in any of
these the want of the University stamp is heavily against me. There's
no disguising that, Marian!"
"Oh, indeed; is that so?"
"Yes, child, undoubtedly. The University degree is like the Hall-mark
in silver, and I'm afraid I shall find very few persons willing to
accept me as the genuine article without it."
"And all this risk might have been avoided if your father had
only----"
"Well, yes; but then, Marian darling, if my father had left me money
to go to college immediately on his death I should never have known
you--known you, I mean, as you are, the dearest and sweetest of
women."
He drew her to him as he spoke, and pressed his lips on her forehead.
She received the kiss without any undue emotion, and said--
"Perhaps that had been for the best, Walter."
"Marian, that's rank blasphemy. Fancy my hearing that, especially,
too, on the night of my parting with you! No, my darling, all I want
you to have is hope, hope and courage, and not too much ambition,
dearest. Mine has been comparatively but a lotus-eating existence
hitherto; to-morrow I begin the battle of life."
"But slightly armed for the conflict, my poor Walter."
"I don't allow that, Marian. Youth, health, and energy are not
bad weapons to have on one's side, and with your love in the
background----"
"And the chance of achieving fame and fortune for yourself--keep that
in the foreground!"
"That is to me, in every way, less than the other; but it is, of
course, an additional spur. And now----?"
And then? When two lovers are on the eve of parting, their
conversation is scarcely very interesting to any one else. Marian and
Walter talked the usual pleasant nonsense, and vowed the usual
constancy, took four separate farewells of each other, and parted with
broken accents and lingering hand-clasps, and streaming eyes. But when
Marian Ashurst sat before her toilet-glass that night in the room
which had so long been her own, and which she was so soon to vacate,
she thought of what Walter Joyce had said as to his future, and
wondered whether, after all, she had not miscalculated the strength,
not the courage, of the knight whom she had selected to wear her
colours in his helm in the great contest.