Marlden — A Novel
Marlden — Volume the First
Chapter I
Fenniscote had been agreed for many years to be a place where nothing happened, and had been at some pains to keep up the character; for a village which admits to events must afterwards be asked its opinion of them, and there is no knowing where that may end. It had a church, a green, eleven houses of the better sort, and one lady of nine hundred a year; and the last of these was generally found sufficient.
Mrs. Carbery had come into the neighbourhood a bride, had buried her husband at forty, and had governed since. It was not done by any exertion that could be pointed at. She had merely been, for two-and-twenty years, the first person in every room to say what a thing was; and where a woman is always first, and is never contradicted for the first quarter of an hour, she will commonly find at the end of it that she has no need to be contradicted at all. Her opinions were not better than her neighbours’. They were earlier.
Charlotte Denby, of the White House, had grown up under this arrangement and had never examined it, as one does not examine the weather. She was twenty; she had lost her mother at nine; she kept her father’s house, ordered his dinners, read to him in the evenings when his eyes were bad, and was thought by everybody to be a very sensible girl. She thought so herself, with that particular quietness which is the last stage of vanity before it becomes visible.
She had, in fact, a good understanding. It had never been used upon anything harder than a household account. She had been taught what to think of the Loyds, of the Kingsdown road, of Mrs. Grearson’s daughters and of the propriety of gigs; and having found the instruction generally to answer, she had not thought to enquire where it came from.
Old Mrs. Loyd of Marlden died on the eighth of October, in her eighty-fourth year, and the village was obliged to have an event.
She had been dying, comfortably and by degrees, for upwards of three years, and had outlived the interest of it. What she left behind her, however, was found to be of a very different order of attraction. Marlden itself, with the land, went to her nephew Mr. Sherborne, who lived in Wiltshire and had been to see her twice; the plate and the furniture followed the land; there were legacies to servants; and there was, appended to the will and executed in the August before her death, a codicil settling upon Miss Prewitt an annuity of sixty pounds for her life.
Sixty pounds is not a great deal of money. It was, however, sixty pounds a year out of Mr. Sherborne’s income for as long as Miss Prewitt should live; and Miss Prewitt was fifty-one, and walked four miles a day, and had never been ill in her life.
Mr. Sherborne came from Wiltshire for the funeral, stayed nine days, and went away again. He was a mild man with a large family and no leisure for quarrels. What he left behind him was his sister; and his sister had a great deal of leisure.
Chapter II
‘I will say nothing against her,’ said Mrs. Carbery.
She was sitting in the White House parlour on the third morning after the funeral, having called, as she said, merely to know how Mr. Denby did in this melancholy season; and she had been three-quarters of an hour arriving at Miss Prewitt.
‘Nothing whatever. I have known her these nineteen years, and I hope I know what is due to a person in her situation. I only observe — and I would observe it to her face, my dear Charlotte, I am no whisperer — that she was three years in that house, and that at the end of the three years there is a codicil, and that there was no codicil at the beginning of them. I state the dates. I draw no conclusion. Others may draw what they please.’
Charlotte said that she supposed Mrs. Loyd had been very fond of her.
‘She was. She was excessively fond of her. That is precisely the circumstance. An old lady of eighty-three, my love, alone in a great house, her sight going, her nephew in Wiltshire — and one person reading to her four hours a day, and writing her letters for her, and knowing every thought in her head before she had done thinking it. I do not say it was contrived. I say it would have required no contriving. That is a great deal worse, to my mind, than if it had been contrived; for a contrivance may be met, and there is no meeting a thing that grows.’
This was said with so much appearance of candour, and with so evident a wish to be just, that Charlotte was persuaded before she had considered whether she was persuaded. It is a common effect. We are very ready to believe those who make a parade of the difficulty of believing them.
‘And the letter,’ said Mrs. Carbery, rising and drawing on her gloves, ‘we will not speak of the letter. Mr. Padgett will do what is proper. I am sure I hope the whole business may be settled without any unpleasantness, for nothing is so shocking in a small neighbourhood as a dispute about money. Good morning to you, my dear. You will not forget Thursday.’
She was gone before Charlotte had thought to ask what letter.
The particulars, had she assembled them, were these; and every one of them was in her possession that morning.
Miss Prewitt had come to Fenniscote nineteen years before, on the death of her father, with a hundred and twenty pounds and no expectations. In the fourteen months since Charlotte had begun to be much in company, she had heard Miss Prewitt give her opinion of persons perhaps thirty times. She had heard her say, of the elder Miss Grearson, that she would not marry Mr. Hollis, at a time when the whole village had the thing settled; and Miss Grearson had not married Mr. Hollis. She had heard her say of the new curate, when everybody was charmed with him, that he was a young man who would be much liked for two years; and it was now the third year, and he was not much liked. She had heard her decline, twice, to say anything at all about people concerning whom everybody else was fluent, and had thought her dull for it.
In the same fourteen months Mrs. Carbery had been obliged to alter her judgment of the Loyds three times, of the curate twice, and of Mr. Hollis so often that Charlotte had lost the reckoning; and had announced each alteration in the manner of a discovery, and had been thanked for it.
Charlotte knew all this. She had not put any two pieces of it together, because it had never occurred to her that she was in possession of evidence about who was to be believed. One does not weigh what one has not thought to place in the scale. The particulars had passed unnoticed because unsuspected.
What she did instead was to feel a little sorry for Miss Prewitt, in a way that was not disagreeable to her.
Chapter III
Mr. Ashbourne of Hedley Court dined at the White House on the Thursday, with the Grearsons, Mrs. Carbery, and Mrs. Carbery’s son, who had come down from town on the Monday and was expected to stay until he was tired.
Mr. Ashbourne was five-and-thirty, unmarried, a magistrate, and a man of few graces. He had the reputation of being severe, which he had acquired by the simple method of saying what he thought was so and then not saying anything else about it. He liked Charlotte, and had liked her since she was fifteen, and had never given her the smallest reason to know it.
Henry Carbery was three-and-twenty, and had everything his mother wanted for him except application. He was very good-looking, without seeming to know it, which is the most dangerous kind; he talked well; and he had the particular art of making other people feel that they had said the clever thing.
The annuity came up between the soup and the fish, as everybody had known it would.
‘Sixty pounds!’ said Mrs. Grearson. ‘And Mr. Sherborne with seven children.’
‘I have said from the first,’ said Mrs. Carbery, ‘that I will not have a word said against Miss Prewitt in my hearing.’
‘Nor shall you,’ said her son.
‘Only the dates are singular. Three years, and then a codicil.’
‘Very singular,’ said Mrs. Grearson.
‘Though I dare say,’ said Mrs. Carbery, ‘that in her circumstances any of us might — I do not say would — but might.’
There was a pause of the kind that is not silence, in which every person at the table understood the sentence to have been finished.
Charlotte said nothing.
She had it in her mind to say that Miss Prewitt had been three years in the house and had never once, in Charlotte’s hearing, mentioned Mrs. Loyd’s affairs; and she was aware, even as the thought formed, that this was a fact and that the dates were not a fact but an arrangement of two facts with a space left between them for the guest to fill. She did not say it. She was not certain enough. She was, in truth, perfectly certain, and was calling the sensation uncertainty because saying the thing would have required her to be at variance with Mrs. Carbery in Mrs. Carbery’s own manner, before six people, over a woman she did not particularly like.
‘For my part,’ said Henry Carbery, ‘I cannot see that anybody is to blame. Put a poor woman of fifty in a warm house with a rich old lady who dotes on her, and the codicil follows as the pear follows the blossom. She did not do it. It was done. She could no more have prevented it than she could have prevented the winter.’
‘That is very liberal of you, Henry,’ said his mother.
‘It is not liberal at all, ma’am, it is only true. I have the greatest opinion of Miss Prewitt. She would have been a most agreeable woman upon four hundred a year.’
Charlotte laughed. She was ashamed of it before the sound was out, and could not afterwards recover the reason for it.
‘And upon her own hundred and twenty?’ said Mr. Ashbourne.
‘Upon her own hundred and twenty she is what her hundred and twenty has made her, and it would be very hard to reproach her with it.’
‘It would. I do not propose to. I asked what she was.’
‘A little sharp, sir. You will allow her a little sharp.’
‘I have thought so myself,’ said Mr. Ashbourne, ‘these several years,’ and turned the conversation to the Kingsdown road, which wanted mending, and had wanted mending since the spring, and about which he was able to speak for some time without being interesting.
Charlotte was left with an impression, which she did not examine, that Mr. Ashbourne had been rather heavy, and that Mr. Henry Carbery had been very good-natured about a person from whom he had nothing to gain. Both parts of this were mistaken; but it was to be a considerable while before she had any occasion to discover it, and rather longer before she wished to.
Chapter IV
Miss Prewitt was to have been asked to the White House on the twenty-second.
It had been a fixed thing for four years. Mr. Denby’s birthday fell on the twenty-second of October; there were always eight or nine at dinner; and Miss Prewitt had been of the number since the year Charlotte first took the head of the table, because Mr. Denby had once said that she was the only woman in Fenniscote who could tell him anything he did not know, and because it had then been convenient to Mrs. Carbery to be kind to her.
The cards went out on the fifteenth.
Charlotte wrote them at the little table in the morning-room, and she came to Miss Prewitt’s in the natural order, between Mrs. Grearson and the curate; and she did not write it. She meant, at that moment, to write it presently. She had a distinct notion that the question wanted a little thinking of — whether it would be quite comfortable for Miss Prewitt, so soon after the funeral, and with the codicil so much in everybody’s mouth, to sit down at a table with Mrs. Carbery; whether it would not be a real unkindness to expose her to it; whether the delicate thing, the truly considerate thing, might not be to let the twenty-second pass this once, and to call upon her quietly in November instead.
It is worth remarking how much of this was true. It would not have been comfortable. It might very well have been an unkindness. Charlotte was not inventing a reason; she was finding a real one, and the reality of it was the whole of its usefulness to her. A false reason must be maintained. A true reason, if it is not the reason, does its work and asks nothing further.
She put the card aside, and wrote the curate’s, and then Mr. Ashbourne’s, and then the two Miss Grearsons’; and when she had sealed the last of them and given them to William she found that the little heap on the corner of the table had gone with the rest, and that the question of Miss Prewitt had been settled by the simple circumstance of her having done nothing about it for eleven minutes.
She did not send after William.
The twenty-second was very pleasant. Mr. Denby was in great spirits; there was a haunch; Henry Carbery told a story about a bishop and a post-chaise which was thought excellent, and Charlotte was aware of having looked well and talked well and of having managed the table with credit. It was one of the most agreeable evenings she had ever spent, and she was to remember it, afterwards, with a particular and unforgiving clearness — not for anything that was said at it, but because she had gone up to bed at half-past eleven perfectly happy, and had slept without dreaming, and had not once, from the setting of the first dish to the putting out of her candle, thought of Miss Prewitt at all.
Chapter V
The village settled to it as villages do, by not mentioning it.
Nobody said that Miss Prewitt had been left out. Mrs. Grearson observed, on the Sunday, that they had been a very snug party and that a large table was a great mistake; and Mrs. Carbery said that dear Charlotte had exactly the right feeling, and knew when a house in mourning wished to be quiet; and Charlotte, who had said nothing to anybody, discovered that she was in possession of a motive she had not formed, and that it was a creditable one, and that it was now hers whether she wanted it or not.
She wanted it. That was the disagreeable part. She found that she was glad to be thought to have acted from delicacy, and that being thought so made it easier to believe she had; and she went so far, on the Sunday afternoon, as to feel a mild general satisfaction with her own conduct in the whole affair, which lasted until she came out of church on the following Sunday and saw Miss Prewitt standing by the porch.
Miss Prewitt bowed to her, and asked after Mr. Denby, and hoped the birthday had gone off well; and said that she had heard it had been a very cheerful evening; and there was nothing in her face or her voice that a witness could have taken hold of, and she went away up the Marlden road at her usual pace.
Charlotte walked home with her father on her arm and found that she was extremely angry with Miss Prewitt.
This was so remarkable that even she could not entirely pass it over. She had done Miss Prewitt an injury, or a something; Miss Prewitt had reproached her with nothing, had looked nothing, had asked a civil question and gone home; and the effect upon Charlotte was a strong sense of having been used ill. She turned it about for a quarter of a mile without arriving anywhere, and then put it down to the weather, and was very attentive to her father at dinner.
She was not to know it, but that quarter of a mile was the beginning of the whole business.
Marlden — Volume the Second
Chapter I
The business became, in November, what it had not been in October: a matter with papers in it.
Mr. Padgett of Kingsdown, who had been Mrs. Loyd’s attorney for thirty years and was in no hurry to be anybody’s enemy, laid the position before Mr. Sherborne in a letter of four sides, of which the substance was this. The codicil was executed on the eleventh of August and was regular upon its face. It had been drawn from a letter of instruction in Mrs. Loyd’s name, received at Kingsdown some days earlier; and that letter, like every letter which had left Marlden for three years, was in Miss Prewitt’s hand.
Mrs. Loyd had had a seizure upon the Wednesday, the seventh. She had been perfectly clear before it and had never been wholly clear after.
The letter was undated. Mr. Padgett had it still; he had a strong impression of having received it on the Thursday, which would have made the writing of it Tuesday or Wednesday, and would have settled everything; but he had an equally strong impression of having been at Ludlow in that week, and could not make the two agree. He observed, with the mournfulness of a man who has spent his life among other people’s papers, that impressions were of no value whatever, and that the bag books at the receiving-house would have shown the day, if the receiving-house kept them, which it might or might not.
Fenniscote heard the whole of this within a week, in the following form: that the letter was in Miss Prewitt’s writing, and that nobody could say when it was written.
‘And that,’ said Mrs. Carbery, ‘is precisely what I have never said. I have never said one word about the letter, and I shall not begin now.’
Chapter II
Mrs. Vane came to the White House for six weeks at Michaelmas, as she had come for eleven years, and brought with her the two qualities which made her formidable: she was fond of her niece, and she reasoned.
It was on the second evening of her visit that Charlotte, having been silent through the greater part of dinner, was taken into the little parlour and asked what was the matter with her; and being asked kindly, and by somebody who had no interest in the answer, she said more than she had intended.
She said that Jane Grearson had told her something in confidence a fortnight since, which she had not been able to put out of her head. She did not say what it was. She said only that it concerned Jane herself, and that Jane had been given a great deal of encouragement by a gentleman who had, so far as Charlotte could learn, encouraged two other young women in the same eighteen months and married none of them.
‘Then her mother must be told,’ said Mrs. Vane.
‘I cannot tell her mother.’
‘My dear, you must attend to me a moment. Was the confidence given under any promise of secrecy?’
‘No. She only told me.’
‘Then there is no promise to break. Will Jane ever know that you repeated it?’
‘I suppose not. Mrs. Grearson would not tell her from whom it came.’
‘Then no injury is done her feelings. Will good come of it? Mrs. Grearson would then know how to act, and a mother who knows how to act may save her daughter a great deal. And is not the contrary a kind of selfishness — to hug a thing to oneself, and keep one’s own hands clean, and let the girl go on? It goes by the name of honour, Charlotte, and it does more mischief in the world than open malice, for malice at least is watched.’
Charlotte turned it over, and could not answer it, and was not in the least shaken; and being a good deal struck by the last circumstance, she set herself to consider why she was not.
It was not that she had a better argument in reserve. She had none. It was that she was surer of the one thing than of any of the four things her aunt had brought against it. Whether a confidence given without condition may be repeated for a good end, she could not tell; it was a proposition of the sort she had heard all her life and had never had occasion to examine, and she could as easily have been talked into it as out of it. That Jane’s words were not hers to carry out of that room, she had not arrived at by any argument, and could not be dislodged from by one. She knew it as she knew that seven and five made twelve — not more warmly, but more plainly; and a thing known plainly is not to be given up to a thing merely reasoned, however handsomely the reasoning is done.
From which it followed — and Charlotte was a little surprised at her own boldness in following it — that her aunt’s argument had a fault in it somewhere; that she should be very glad to find the fault, and would think about it; and that she was under no obligation to find it before dinner in order to be sure it was there.
‘And what have you to say against it?’ said Mrs. Vane.
‘Nothing at all, ma’am,’ said Charlotte. ‘I am sure something is wrong with it, and I cannot tell you what. But I shall not repeat what Jane told me.’
Mrs. Vane looked at her for a moment with an expression her niece could not read, and said that she was very glad to hear it, and that she had wondered how long it would take.
Chapter III
The Grearsons gave an evening on the fourth of December, and it came on to rain at nine.
It was not a great rain. It was the sort which is nothing to a man in boots and a serious matter to a woman in thin shoes at a mile and a quarter; and there were, when the carriages were called, four places to be had and five ladies wanting them, Mrs. Carbery’s barouche having room for four and the Grearsons’ chaise being gone to Kingsdown with the elder Miss Grearson.
Mrs. Carbery arranged it so prettily that no one in the room observed anything to have been arranged at all.
‘Miss Prewitt, you walk everywhere — you were telling me only last week that you walk four miles a day and are never the worse. Do not you find the evening uncommonly fine?’
The evening was not fine. It was raining upon the windows as she said it. But the words were pitched for the room, and the room had turned to hear them; and Miss Prewitt, who could not in that moment think of any way of disagreeing which would not have obliged her to say aloud, before eleven people, that she had no carriage and could not afford a chair, said that she believed it was clearing.
‘There! I said Miss Prewitt would not thank us for shutting her up. Mrs. Grearson, do get in; my dear Charlotte, you are on the box side.’
It was done in perhaps forty seconds.
Charlotte was upon the steps with her cloak half about her, and she saw the whole of it, and she saw one thing more which she had not been meant to see and which nobody else was placed to see: that Miss Prewitt, having said that she believed it was clearing, looked for a moment at the door, and then at the wet flags, and then put up her chin and said something civil to Mrs. Grearson about the mildness of the season.
The carriage went. Miss Prewitt walked.
She took no harm from it. She was at church the next morning in tolerable spirits and was heard to say that the lanes were not so bad as they had been in November. She told nobody. Nobody enquired. Mrs. Carbery thought no more of it after the Sunday, and would have been very much astonished to learn that she had done anything at all.
Chapter IV
Charlotte could not leave it alone.
She tried, for eight or nine days, in the ordinary ways. She told herself that the rain had stopped within the half-hour, which was true. She told herself that Miss Prewitt had said she believed it was clearing, and that a woman of fifty-one must be allowed to know her own mind, which was true and was worth nothing, and Charlotte knew within a day that it was worth nothing, because she had heard the voice it was said in. She told herself that Mrs. Carbery had meant no harm, and found that she did not know whether Mrs. Carbery had meant any harm, and then found, with some discomfort, that she did not seem to require the answer.
That was the circumstance which held her. She examined the thing with all the coldness she could bring to it. Nothing had followed from it. There had been no illness, no cold, no complaint; no one had been injured in any way that could be named; no one but herself had so much as remarked it; the person concerned had not resented it, and the person who had done it did not know she had done it, and would have been distressed and quite sincere in her distress if it had been put to her. Every quarter from which a wrong commonly draws its weight was empty. And when she had taken all of that away and looked at what was left, she found that what was left had not altered in the smallest degree.
It was the first thing in her life that she had ever proved to herself, and it frightened her a little; for she perceived, sitting over her work in the morning-room with her father asleep by the fire, that if a thing could be wrong with nothing whatever hanging upon it, then a great many matters she had been in the habit of settling by asking who would mind, and how much, had never been settled at all.
And she perceived, some hours later, that among these was a card that had not been written in eleven minutes in October.
Chapter V
She began, from that week, to do a thing she had never done, which was to ask herself what she actually knew.
It was slow, and it was not agreeable, and she went at it in the wrong order, as everybody does. She began with Mrs. Carbery’s account of the codicil, and found that she could not shake it, because she had nothing to set against it; and it was three days before it occurred to her that she had a great deal to set against it, and that what she wanted was not a new fact but the arrangement of old ones.
She then made herself a list, which she afterwards burnt.
On the one side she set down every judgment of Miss Prewitt’s that she could recollect, and what had come of it. There were nineteen; she could recall the issue of fourteen; in thirteen Miss Prewitt had been right, and in the fourteenth she had said she did not know, which Charlotte had at the time thought stupid and now thought otherwise.
On the other side she set down Mrs. Carbery’s. She left off at eleven, not for want of material.
She sat looking at the two columns for a long while. What struck her was not that she had been deceived; she had not been deceived, in any sense that would have allowed her to complain of it. Mrs. Carbery had stated the dates, and had drawn no conclusion, and had said so. What struck her was that she had possessed the whole of the second column for fourteen months and had never once laid it beside the first; and that the reason she had never laid them side by side was not that she was stupid, but that it had never entered her head that the question who is to be believed was a question that had an answer, and that the answer could be looked for.
She was very much ashamed. And then, being an honest girl though a slow one, she caught herself in the middle of the shame arranging a new opinion of Miss Prewitt as much too high as the old one had been too low — discovering in her a saint, a martyr, a woman of the finest feelings — and she put down her pen and observed to herself, drily, that she had known Miss Prewitt for nineteen years and had never yet found her a saint, and that to be right about one’s neighbours thirteen times in fourteen is not sanctity, but a habit of looking; and that if she was to begin manufacturing an angel out of the materials of an injustice, she should be at the same work in a month that she had just spent a fortnight getting out of.
Chapter VI
Mr. Henry Carbery went up to town on the twentieth of January, and it was understood in Fenniscote that he had been obliged to go.
He said so himself, in the hall, with his hat in his hand. His uncle wanted him; the thing had been settled over his head; he was the last man in England to be consulted about his own movements; if it had rested with him he should have stayed until March.
Charlotte, who had by this time acquired the very inconvenient habit of attending to particulars, was able to set out the following.
On the twenty-ninth of December he had told her, laughing, that he should certainly not go to town before Easter. On the fourth of January he had written to his uncle — he had mentioned the letter twice, being pleased with himself for writing it — and had walked to the receiving-house with it himself, in a hard frost, rather than let it wait for the boy. On the eleventh he had refused to stand godfather to the Loyds’ child in March, on the ground that he could not answer for where he might be; which he had said in Charlotte’s hearing, and which she had thought at the time an odd thing to say for a man who was to be at Fenniscote until Easter.
Three mornings, three acts, each of them his own, and each of them the easiest thing in the world to have left undone.
He had also, on the second of January, been asked by Mr. Ashbourne whether he would carry a note to Mr. Padgett at Kingsdown, being to ride that way; and had said he would with the greatest pleasure; and had not; and had explained afterwards, very handsomely, that he could not think how it had gone out of his head, and that a man who is not born methodical will never be made so, and that Ashbourne must blame him but could not reasonably blame him much.
Charlotte perceived, at last, what was consistent in all of it. It was not that he lied; she did not think he lied. It was that in every particular of his life the doing was his and the accounting was somebody else’s — the letter, the refusal, the journey, all performed with a good deal of care, and all reported as things that had happened to him. And she perceived, with a coldness about the heart, that this was the very same gentleman who had explained at her father’s table that Miss Prewitt could not have prevented the codicil any more than she could have prevented the winter; and that she had laughed.
She did not tell Jane Grearson any of it. She was not entitled to; and besides, Jane was not to be saved by hearing it from her. But she went to Mrs. Grearson’s on the Thursday and stayed two hours, and made herself very agreeable to Jane, and got her to say a great deal about the twenty-ninth of December; and by the end of it Jane had made the calculation for herself, and had made it in her own voice, and was very quiet on the way to the door.
Charlotte walked home and could not decide whether she had done a fine thing or a piece of management, and was still undecided when she went to bed; and she recorded, in the little book she had lately begun to keep, that she did not know, which was more than she would have written in October.
Chapter VII
Mr. Ashbourne overtook her in the Marlden lane on the last day of January.
They walked a quarter of a mile upon indifferent subjects, and then he said, without any preparation at all:
‘I have been wrong about Miss Prewitt these seven years, and I find I have no excuse for it.’
Charlotte said nothing, which was the best thing she could have done.
‘I called her sharp at your father’s table in October. I have called her sharp, I should think, a hundred times. She is not sharp. She is exact, and she is poor, and I have been putting the two together for seven years and getting a third thing that is not in either of them. A woman with nine hundred a year who said what Miss Prewitt says would be thought to have a very pleasant plainness about her. I have heard my own mother praised for it.’
‘What made you see it?’
‘Nothing that does me any credit. Padgett showed me the letter. It is a very good letter. It is a better letter than I could write; it states the old lady’s wish in eleven lines and asks nothing for the writer, and there is not a word in it that a person doing what she is accused of would have been able to keep out. And I sat looking at it and thought — well. I thought that I had been quite ready to suppose a thing of her for seven years on no evidence, and that the moment I saw a piece of evidence it went the other way in four minutes.’ He walked a few steps. ‘Which tells me what my seven years were made of. Not evidence.’
‘I did not send her a card for my father’s birthday,’ said Charlotte.
She had not known she was going to say it. It came out flat, without any of the softening she had rehearsed at various times since October, and she heard how it sounded, and did not add anything to it.
‘No,’ said Mr. Ashbourne. ‘I know.’
‘You knew at the time?’
‘I counted the places.’
‘And you said nothing to me.’
‘I very nearly said a great deal to you, and I am glad now that I did not, because you have got there without me and it is worth more.’ He looked straight ahead. ‘I should have said it if you had not. I was giving you until Lady Day.’
They came to the turning. Charlotte said that she intended to call upon Miss Prewitt, and to say what she had done, and to ask to be allowed to be of use in the matter of the codicil, since her father knew Mr. Padgett and might write to him.
‘She may not let you,’ said Mr. Ashbourne.
‘Then I shall have called.’
She called on the second of February. She was received with perfect civility for eleven minutes, and given tea, and asked after her father; and when she came to what she had come to say, Miss Prewitt heard her out without once interrupting, and then said that she was very much obliged to Miss Denby, and that she had settled the matter of her own affairs some time ago, and would not trouble anybody with them; and that the cold weather seemed at last to be going.
And that was all. There was no reproach in it, and no forgiveness in it either, and Charlotte walked back down the Marlden road in a state of mind she had never been in before, having done, for the first time in her life, a right thing which had produced nothing whatever.
Marlden — Volume the Third
Chapter I
She wrote on the ninth of February.
It was a short letter and she was four days over it. She had begun by wishing to explain herself, and had discovered, upon reading the first attempt in the morning, that an explanation is very often only an apology which expects to be argued with; and she had begun again, and got it down at last to eleven lines, which said that she had done a thing in October for which she was sorry, that she did not offer any account of it, and that her father would write to Mr. Padgett upon a word from Miss Prewitt and would think it no trouble.
The answer came on the eleventh. It thanked her, and said that Miss Prewitt had no occasion to give anybody trouble, and hoped Mr. Denby continued better.
Charlotte read it twice and put it in her workbox, and found that what she chiefly felt was a strong wish to write again, at greater length, and be understood; and she perceived that this wish had nothing in it for Miss Prewitt at all, and that its whole object was to be relieved of a sensation she did not like; and she did not write.
Chapter II
In March she tried what could be done another way, and did it badly.
Mr. Denby was very willing to write to Mr. Padgett; he had known Padgett forty years; and Charlotte, who had determined not to trouble Miss Prewitt for leave, obtained her father’s hand to a letter of enquiry and sent it off, and was pleased with herself for the better part of a day.
Mr. Padgett replied with great civility that he was not at liberty to discuss the affairs of the estate with any person not concerned in them, and that he was Mr. Denby’s very humble servant. Mrs. Carbery knew of the letter within the week, from her brother, who had it from Padgett’s clerk; and Mrs. Carbery observed at the Grearsons’, with a great appearance of distress, that poor Charlotte Denby had grown so warm upon the subject that her father was writing to attorneys, and that it was a thousand pities, for nothing did a young woman so little good as to be thought a partisan.
The remark went round Fenniscote in three days and came back to Charlotte in five.
She sat with it a good while. What she had gained by acting was this: Miss Prewitt’s business was no further forward; Mr. Padgett had been made cautious; and Charlotte’s own name was now attached to the affair in a way that must make her a less useful friend to it than she had been in January. She had done harm, and she had done it while meaning well, and she had done it because she had preferred her own activity to the plain fact that she had been refused.
‘I was not asked,’ she said aloud, to nobody. ‘She told me she had settled it, and I did not believe her, because I wished to be doing.’
It was the third time that winter she had been obliged to see that a thing she had felt very warmly about had been chiefly about herself; and she began to suspect that this was not a run of ill luck but the ordinary condition of the human mind, and that the people she had always thought free of it were only the people whose insides she could not see.
Chapter III
Jane Grearson was not married that spring, nor asked.
Mr. Henry Carbery came down in April for a fortnight, was very agreeable to everybody, and went away again without having said anything to anybody that could be taken hold of; which was, in the event, exactly what Jane had come to expect, and she bore it with a composure that surprised her mother and did not surprise Charlotte.
Charlotte had one conversation with him, in the shrubbery, in which he told her that Jane Grearson was a sweet girl and that he had been very much afraid at one time that she had mistaken him; that it was the most awkward thing in the world; that a man cannot help being liked; and that he had done everything a man could do, short of an unkindness that must have made him hateful to himself.
‘You wrote to her in November,’ said Charlotte.
‘A note of six lines about a book.’
‘You wrote to her in November,’ said Charlotte again, ‘and you danced with her twice at Kingsdown in December, and you told her in this shrubbery on the third of January that you did not know how you should get through the spring without her. I have all three from Jane, and she is not a girl who colours things. You need not tell me what you meant. I am telling you what you did.’
He was silent for a moment, and then he laughed, and said that she was grown very severe, and that Ashbourne would make a magistrate of her.
It was so nearly a good-humoured answer, and he was so very handsome saying it, that Charlotte was aware of the whole of her judgment beginning to slide sideways out from under her, as a floor will in a dream. He was pleasant; he was the pleasantest man in the county; she had never spent an hour in his company without being sorry when it ended; and here was that fact, arriving with all its old force and asking, very reasonably, to be admitted as evidence of something.
She held on. It was, she thought afterwards, the hardest single minute of the whole year, harder than the letter or the shame or the walk down the Marlden road; and all she did in it was to keep two things apart which very much wished to run together: that Henry Carbery was the most agreeable man she knew, and that Henry Carbery had used Jane Grearson ill. Neither of these touched the other. She was obliged to say it over to herself twice.
‘I dare say I am severe,’ she said. ‘It is a new thing with me and I am not perfect in it yet.’
Chapter IV
The thing was settled in the end by a clerk of nineteen and a bag book, and nobody in Fenniscote had any hand in it whatever.
Mr. Padgett’s clerk, whose name was Bidwell and who was to be married at Michaelmas and was therefore going through the office cupboards for the pleasure of finding things, came upon the Kingsdown receiving-house books for the previous August, which had been sent up in a parcel three years before in connexion with quite another business and never returned. They were kept, when they were kept at all, by the receiving-house woman’s son. There were four entries for the eighth of August, and the third of them was a letter from Marlden Hall to Mr. Padgett, prepaid, taken in at eleven in the morning.
The eighth was the Thursday. Mrs. Loyd’s seizure had been upon the Wednesday evening, the seventh; but a letter taken in at Kingsdown at eleven on the Thursday must have left Marlden on the Wednesday by the carrier, who went at four and was never known to go later; and the carrier’s own book, which Bidwell had the sense to go and look at, showed the Marlden bag taken up on the Wednesday at ten minutes past four.
Mrs. Loyd had been struck down at half-past eight that night.
The letter had therefore been written, sealed and sent while she was in her ordinary health, four hours before there was anything the matter with her; and Miss Prewitt had written it at her dictation, and had said so from the first, and had been asked to prove it and had not been able to, for seven months.
Mr. Sherborne, when it was laid before him, gave way at once and with a very good grace, and desired that the arrears be paid from the eighth of October with interest, and wrote Miss Prewitt a letter which she was afterwards known to have kept. He also wrote to his sister, and what was in that letter was never learnt in Fenniscote; but Mrs. Carbery went to Bath in June for her health, and stayed until the following spring, and when she returned she had a great deal to say about the waters and nothing at all to say about Marlden.
Chapter V
Charlotte heard it from her father, who had it from Padgett, three days after everybody else.
Her first sensation was pure gladness, and lasted perhaps a minute. Her second was a strong wish to go up the Marlden road immediately and be glad in company; and she was tying her bonnet before she stopped and asked herself what she was going for.
She was going, she found, to be told that it had come right. And there was no earthly reason why Miss Prewitt should tell her so, because Charlotte had not brought it about. She had written one letter which was declined, and one which did harm; and the annuity had been saved by a clerk of nineteen who had never heard her name, out of a book that had been in a cupboard for three years, on an errand that had nothing to do with the case.
She untied the bonnet and sat down.
What was left to her, when she had taken away the outcome, was of a kind she had never had to examine before, because she had never before done anything of consequence that had failed. She had not sent the card in October, and that was hers. She had seen what was done on the steps in December, and had refused for a fortnight to explain it away, and that was hers. She had written the eleven lines in February and had not written the second letter, and both of those were hers. She had held two things apart in the shrubbery in April, and that was hers, and had cost her more than the rest together. Not one of these had produced the smallest effect upon Miss Prewitt’s sixty pounds.
And she found — sitting quite still, with the bonnet in her lap and the fire going out — that they were nevertheless the whole of what she had, and that they would have been exactly the same had Bidwell never opened the cupboard and the annuity been lost; and that if any person had been able to see into her upon those four occasions, there was nothing in them that she would have wished otherwise.
It was not a comfortable discovery. It was a great deal steadier than comfort.
Chapter VI
She met Miss Prewitt by the church wall on the last Sunday in June, and neither of them said anything about the codicil.
They spoke of the hay, and of Mr. Denby’s eyes, and of a book Miss Prewitt had lent the curate and not got back; and at the end of it Miss Prewitt said, in exactly the voice she had used about the mildness of the season:
‘You will be at your father’s birthday in October, I suppose.’
‘I hope you will be at it,’ said Charlotte.
‘Thank you. I believe I shall.’
And that was the whole of the reconciliation, and it was a great deal more than Charlotte had expected, and rather less than she could have borne to ask for.
She understood, walking home, that she had not been forgiven in the sense of the thing being cancelled; that Miss Prewitt was a woman who kept an exact account and would keep this one; and that what had been offered her was not the erasure of October but a place at a table in spite of it. She found she preferred it so. An October that could be rubbed out by a civil sentence in June would have been a very small October, and she had not the least wish, now, to have done a small thing.
Chapter VII
Mr. Ashbourne asked her on the fourteenth of August, in the Marlden lane, within fifty yards of where he had told her about the seven years.
He did it very badly, having no practice, and began by saying that he was aware of being thirty-six and dull; and Charlotte, who had known for some months what she would answer and had not known she knew it until that moment, stopped him at the second sentence.
Afterwards he said: ‘I want to be clear about one thing, because you are grown particular and I had rather be exact with you than pleasing. I did not fall in love with you this winter. I have been in love with you since you were nineteen, which was before you were worth it.’
‘That is a very handsome speech.’
‘It is not meant to be. What I mean is that I am not rewarding you. If you had gone on as you were, I should have gone on as I was, and been sorry all my life, and said nothing. You have not earned me by improving.’ He considered. ‘I should not like you to be able to think, in ten years, that the way to be loved is to conduct oneself well. Sometimes it answers. It did not answer with Miss Prewitt, and you did not stop.’
‘No,’ said Charlotte. ‘I did not stop.’
They were married in November. Mr. Denby gave up the White House and came to Hedley Court, where he was very comfortable and complained a great deal about the draughts; Jane Grearson married a physician at Kingsdown two years afterwards and was thought by everybody to have done extremely well, which for once everybody was right about; and Miss Prewitt, who lived to be eighty-one and received her sixty pounds every Lady Day and Michaelmas for thirty years, dined at Hedley Court on the twenty-second of October every year that she was able to come.
She was asked the first year in a note of three lines, written without any consideration whatever, in something under eleven minutes.
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