Читать книгу Wrecked in Port - Edmund Yates - Страница 7

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.