THE DISCLOSURE.
Mr. Prescott spread himself out before the fireplace, standing with his
legs apart, and his coat tails extended. There was, of course, no fire
in the month of June, but an Englishman spreading himself out upon his
own hearthrug, like a cock on his appropriate elevation, is more an
Englishman than at any other moment. The Squire looked benevolently, yet
severely upon the curate, who sat before him, twisting his soft hat in
his hands. This was the only sign of embarrassment Mr. Asquith showed,
but it was very discernible. He sat with his face turned towards his
judge, without any shrinking or quailing, a little pale, very
self-possessed and quiet. It was a very serious moment, and that the
curate well knew.
“My niece!” Mr. Prescott said, and his countenance cleared a little, for
he had thought at first that it must be one of the princesses of his
house that this man was wooing. “Mary! why, Mary is not old enough for
this sort of thing. How old is she? Why, she is only a child!”
“You have got used to considering her a child, Mr. Prescott; but I
believe she is one-and-twenty, if you will inquire.”
Mr. Prescott made a calculation within himself, and after a moment said,
“So she is: I believe she is in her two-and-twentieth year. Who would
have thought it! You must know,” he added, “Mr. Asquith--though I don’t
know what your ideas may be on that subject--that though Mary is my
niece, she has no money, not a penny. My sister was sadly imprudent in
her marriage. Her orphan child, of course, had a home with me, but there
is nothing in the way of fortune, not a sou.”
“So I understood,” said the curate, “otherwise I should never have
ventured to approach her, being myself so poor a man.”
“Ah!” said the Squire, looking at him doubtfully; then he added with
cheerfulness, “You are still on the first step, Mr. Asquith, there is no
telling how far you may go.”
“I am not the stuff of which bishops are made,” said the curate, with a
short laugh.
“Well, there is no telling,” said the other; and then he entered upon
business. “You will understand,” he said, “that I must make certain
inquiries before going any farther. In the matter of family now. We are
not rich people, but in that respect we Prescotts have certain
pretensions----”
“In that respect it is very easy to answer you, Mr. Prescott. So far as
old family goes, mine is old enough. We have been in Cumberland in
direct descent, father and son, settled in the same place, for three
hundred years. But----” Mr. Prescott had been nodding his head in
approval, saying to himself that he knew Asquith was a good name in the
North. He looked up, but only with the faintest shadow on his face, at
the curate’s “but.”
“But,” repeated Mr. Asquith firmly, “though we are an old-established
race, we are not what you would call gentry, Mr. Prescott. My father is
of the old class of statesmen in Cumberland----”
“What is that?” asked the Squire hastily.
“It is, I suppose, what you call yeomen in the South.”
“Oh!” said Mr. Prescott. He recovered from this shock, however, in
shorter time than might have been expected; for a substantial yeoman is
a very respectable personage, and there are often nice little hoards of
money behind them; and then it was only Mary, after all.
“I don’t pretend to say that I should not have been better pleased had
you sprung from a family of gentry, Mr. Asquith; but after all, to have
a family of any kind is something in these days. And you, of course,
have had the education of a gentleman.” The curate winced a little at
this, not liking the idea that he had not always been a gentleman, even
though he had the moment before disowned any such pretensions. But he
did not betray his impatience, and Mr. Prescott continued, “The most
important point is: you propose to marry my niece: what have you to
support her? I have told you she has nothing of her own. Are you in
circumstances to keep her in the position to which she has been
accustomed? Your private means----”
“Mr. Prescott,” said the curate crushing his hat in his tremulous hands,
“that is exactly the question--that is the painful part--I have nothing.
I have no private means; I have no expectations to speak of. My father,
when he dies, will leave me perhaps some trifle--a few hundred pounds;
but the fact is, I have nothing--nothing but my income from my curacy.”
He had not strength enough to meet the Squire’s astonished gaze. His
head drooped forward a little. “I am aware that you must think me
presumptuous to the last degree, even careless of her comfort--for I
have nothing but my poverty to offer--nothing----” for once in his life
Mr. Asquith’s courage fairly failed him, and he would have liked to run
away, and be heard of in Horton no more. Oh, happy Mary, before whom no
such ordeal lay!
“This is a very strange statement, Mr. Asquith,” the Squire said.
The curate assented with a movement of his head; he could not say any
more.
“It is a very strange statement,” Mr. Prescott repeated. “You don’t
expect, I hope, that I--with the many calls upon me----”
Mr. Asquith half got up from his chair; he raised his hand, half
deprecating, half indignant.
“I have a great many claims upon me,” said the Squire reassured; “the
estate does not bring in half it once did. You know as well as I do how
landed property has deteriorated; and my second son is in the army, and
has a great many expenses, and my girls to be provided for--I cannot be
responsible for anything so far as Mary is concerned. I have given her
her education and all that, but as for any allowance----”
“If she had anything of the sort, do you think I could ever have
spoken?” the curate said.
Mr. Prescott was reassured: there was obvious sincerity in this
disclaimer. He stood for a moment silent with a perturbed countenance,
and then he said suddenly, “That’s all very well, Mr. Asquith, but
you’re not like a silly girl who knows nothing--you’ve some acquaintance
with the world. It is quite right of you to express such sentiments. But
if you marry her, how are you to keep her? that is the question for me.”
“Sir,” said the curate, “you have a right to say anything--everything on
that subject. It _is_ the question, I know all the gravity of it. It is
what I cannot answer even to myself.”
“If you would not have spoken in the other case, supposing she had
something of her own--how was it that you spoke now?” said the Squire,
pushing his advantage; “a man ought to be able to deny himself in such
circumstances. Men of your cloth permit themselves freedoms which other
poor men don’t. A parson marries and has a large family, and everybody
is sorry for him, whereas, if it was a poor soldier who did it, or a
clerk in a public office, or----”
The curate did not speak, it was all perfectly true. He had said the
same himself a hundred times. He had said, even to the unfortunate
culprit himself, that a clergyman, because he was a clergyman, had no
right. And now it was brought home to himself, and he had not a word to
say.
“What does my brother Hugh give you?” said the inexorable Squire. “A
hundred a year? I suppose it is as much as he can afford. And how are
you to live with a wife on a hundred a year? How do you live on it
without a wife? Percy, besides his pay, costs me--but that is nothing to
the purpose. I ask you, can you live on it yourself, Asquith, without
any supplement, without anything from home?”
The curate smiled somewhat grimly. Anything from home! He had been
obliged to pay back to his poor father various sums expended on his
education, which was a very different thing from receiving help from
home. He said, “I have been able to manage--without any assistance,” in
a subdued tone. It was not pleasant to be thus cross-examined, but the
Squire had a right to ask all manner of questions. He had put himself in
Mr. Prescott’s power.
“Supposing you have--I think it’s very much to your credit. And there’s
the lodgings, of course, that’s always something. But supposing you
have--how are you to keep a wife? And have you thought of the
consequences, sir?” said the Squire severely. “If it was only a wife
even; but you know what always follows--half-a-dozen children before you
know where you are. How are you to educate them, sir? How are you to
feed them? How are you to set them out in the world? And yet you come
and ask me, a man that has seen such things happen a hundred times, to
give you my niece.”
Mr. Asquith blushed like a girl at this suggestion. Mary herself was
scarcely more modest, more delicate in all such embarrassing questions.
And though he was not a humorous man by nature, a gleam of the ludicrous
made its way into the question through the fierce countenance of the
Squire. “These consequences,” he said, “cannot come all at once. They
will take a few years at least: and I don’t calculate on staying always
at Horton. In a town, in a large parish, curates have better pay.”
“And are worked off their feet, they and all their belongings, their
wives made drudges of, regular parish women, Bible women, or whatever
you call them. I know what goes on in large parishes, in great towns.
And the children grow up on the streets. No, the country’s bad enough,
but at least they can get fresh air and milk in the country, and people
may be kind to them: and there’s always a schoolmaster or someone to
give them a little education.”
“Mr. Prescott,” said the curate mildly, “the children you are so kindly
anxious about are not born yet, and perhaps never will be. Don’t let us
go any farther than is necessary. The question in the meantime concerns
only Mary and myself.”
“And how long will that be the case?” cried the Squire. But presently he
calmed down. “You might get food perhaps,” he said. “I say perhaps--I
don’t see how you are to do it--but allow that you could get food out of
it, and a cottage to live in--where are your clothes to come from? Where
are your shoes to come from? Mary is a lady; she has been brought up to
have servants to wait upon her. Is my niece to be your housemaid, Mr.
Asquith? your cook, and your washerwoman, and everything? You should
marry somebody that is used to that sort of thing. Somebody who has the
strength for it. Somebody in your own class of life!”
The curate rose up with a flush of anger on his face. He could keep his
temper, but yet it stung him, all the more that it was just enough, and
he had already said all this to himself. He said, “I fear it will do no
good to talk of it longer, Mr. Prescott--you drive me to despair. And I
don’t deny that it is all true, everything you say. But I shall not
always be curate at Horton. I shall not always continue a curate even, I
hope. Sometimes, even without much influence, if a man does his work
well, promotion comes.”
“Very seldom,” said the Squire.
“Still it comes sometimes: and if ever man had an inducement to
work--will you think it over and try to look upon it more favourably? I
know what a sacrifice it must be for her. Still, she has a right to
choose too.”
“To choose--at her age--knowing nothing of the world! Whatever you felt,
sir, you should have kept it to yourself--you should not have spoken.
How is a girl to know?”
“I thought so too,” said the poor curate, humbly. “But a man has not
always command of himself.”
“A man ought always to have command of himself when another person’s
comfort is concerned, especially a clergyman, who makes more profession
of virtue than other men,” said the Squire, following him to the door,
and sending that last volley after him. Mr. Asquith went away from the
Hall a miserable man. He had not the heart to ask for Mary, to tell her
how he had failed. As he hurried away, however, down the avenue, his
heart, which had sunk altogether, began to rise a little in indignation.
Why a clergyman more than other men? That a clergyman should be shut out
from that side of life altogether was comprehensible. He might take vows
as in the Church of Rome, there was reason in that. When men were so
poor as he was, instead of tantalising them with the idea of freedom,
and exposing them to all its risks, it might be better if they were
under the protection of vows and forbidden to marry. But as that was not
so, and the English ideal was quite different, why should it be worse in
a clergyman than in other men? A clergyman could not struggle and push
for promotion. He could not compete and shoulder his way through the
crowd. Must he give up also all that made existence sweet? And then the
further question arose, would it have been better for Mary had he held
his tongue and gone away and never told her he loved her? Had he perhaps
closed that chapter to her too? Perhaps she might have forgotten him,
and learned to love a richer man. But then perhaps she might not.
Naturally a man feels that a woman who has learned to love _him_ will
not easily change, or transfer her affections to another. Would it not
have been a wrong to Mary had he kept silence, had he never told her? It
is better even to love and lose, the poet says, than never to love at
all. It is better to have the triumph and delight of knowing that you
are loved, even if that love never comes to any earthly close. Why
should Mary have lost that because they were both poor? Nobody could
take away from them that moment of blessedness, that sense of sweetest
union, even if they might never marry at all--never--
But here a pang which was very acute and poignant like a sword went
through the curate’s heart. Never marry at all! Lose her, leave her, be
parted from her, after what they had said to each other! Oh, what deep
shadows come along with the brightest sunshine of life! What was the
good of living at all, of having known each other, of having recognized
the loveliness and sweetness of existence, if this was what had to be?
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