my mother in her troubles – my brother was articled to you – but – ' She paused, remembering that he had not been her brother's best friend.
'I mean the best possible for you. Meantime, you are quite fixed in your own mind: you are set upon this thing. That is clear. There is one other way of looking at it. You yourself seem chiefly desirous, I think, to make the man you love happy. So much the better for him. – Are you quite satisfied that the other party to the agreement, your lover, will remain happy while he sees you slaving for him, while he feels his own helplessness, and while he gets no relief from the grinding poverty of his household – while – lastly – he sees his sons taking their place on a lower level, and his daughters taking a place below the rank of gentlewoman?'
'I reply by another question. – You have had George in your office as articled clerk and managing clerk for eight years. Is he, or is he not, steadfast, clear-headed, one who knows his own mind, and one who can be trusted in all things?'
'Perhaps,' said Mr. Dering, inclining his head. 'How does that advance him?'
'Then, if you trust him, why should not I trust him? I trust George altogether – altogether. If he does not get on, it will be through no fault of his. We shall bear our burden bravely, believe me, Mr. Dering. You will not hear him – or me – complain. Besides, I am full of hope. Oh! it can never be in this country that a man who is a good workman should not be able to get on. Then I can paint a little – not very well, perhaps. But I have thought – you will not laugh at me – that I might paint portraits and get a little money that way.'
'It is quite possible that he may succeed, and that you may increase the family income. Everything is possible. But, remember, you are building on possibilities, and I on facts. Plans very beautiful and easy at the outset often prove most difficult in the carrying out. My experience of marriages is learned by fifty years of work, not imaginative, but practical. I have learned that without adequate means no marriage can be happy. That is to say, I have never come across any case of wedded poverty where the husband or the wife, or both, did not regret the day when they faced poverty together instead of separately. That, I say, is my experience of such marriages. It is so easy to say that hand in hand evils may be met and endured which would be intolerable if one was alone. It isn't only hand in hand, Elsie. The hands are wanted for the baby, and the evils will fall on the children yet unborn.'
Elsie hung her head. Then she replied timidly: 'I have thought even of that. It only means that we go lower down in the social scale.'
'Only? Yet that is everything. People who are well up the ladder too often deride those who are fighting and struggling to get up higher. It is great folly or great ignorance to laugh. Social position, in such a country as ours, means independence, self-respect, dignity, all kinds of valuable things. You will throw these all away – yet your grandfathers won them for you by hard work. You are yourself a gentlewoman – why? Because they made their way up in the world, and placed their sons also in the way to climb. That is how families are made – by three generations at least of steady work uphill.'
Elsie shook her head sadly. 'We can only hope,' she murmured.
'One more word, and I will say no more. Remember, that love or no love, resignation or not, patience or not, physical comfort is the beginning and the foundation of all happiness. If you and your husband can satisfy the demands of physical comfort, you may be happy – or at least resigned. If not – Well, Elsie, that is all. I should not have said so much had I not promised your mother and your sister. I am touched, I confess, by your courage and your resolution.'
'We mean never to regret, never to look back, and always to work and hope,' said Elsie. 'You will remain our friend, Mr. Dering?'
'Surely, surely. – And now – '
'Now' – Elsie rose – 'I will not keep you any longer. You have said what you wished to say very kindly, and I thank you.'
'No. – Sit down again; I haven't done with you yet, child. Sit down again. No more about that young villain – George Austin.' He spoke so good-humouredly, that Elsie complied wondering, but no longer afraid. 'Nothing more about your engagement. Now, listen carefully, because this is most important. Three or four years ago a person wrote to me. That person informed me that he – for convenience we will call the person a man – wished to place a certain sum of money in my hands in trust – for you.'
'For me? Do you mean – in trust? What is Trust?'
'He gave me this sum of money to be given to you on your twenty-first birthday.'
'Oh!' Elsie sat up with open eyes. 'A sum of money? – and to me?'
'With a condition or two. The first condition was, that the interest should be invested as it came in: the next, that I was on no account – mind, on no account at all – to tell you or any one of the existence of the gift or the name of the donor. You are now twenty-one. I have been careful not to afford you the least suspicion of this happy windfall until the time should arrive. Neither your mother, nor your sister, nor your lover, knows or suspects anything about it.'
'Oh!' Elsie said once more. An interjection may be defined as a prolonged monosyllable, generally a vowel, uttered when no words can do justice to the subject.
'And here, my dear young lady' – Elsie cried 'Oh!' once more because – the most curious thing in the world – Mr. Dering's grave face suddenly relaxed and the lines assumed the very benevolence which she had the day before imparted to his portrait, and wished to see upon his face! – 'Here, my dear young lady' – he laid his hand upon a paper – 'is the list of the investments which I have made of that money. You have, in fact, money in Corporation bonds – Newcastle, Nottingham, Wolverhampton. You have water shares – you have gas shares – all good investments, yielding at the price of purchase an average of nearly three and two-thirds per cent.'
'Investments? Why – how much money was it, then? I was thinking when you spoke of a sum of money, of ten pounds, perhaps.'
'No, Elsie, not ten pounds. The money placed in my hands for your use was over twelve thousand pounds. With accumulations, there is now a little under thirteen thousand.'
'Oh!' cried Elsie for the third time and for the same reason. No words could express her astonishment.
'Yes; it will produce about four hundred and eighty pounds a year. Perhaps, as some of the stock has gone up, it might be sold out and placed to better advantage. We may get it up to five hundred pounds.'
'Do you mean, Mr. Dering, that I have actually got five hundred pounds a year – all my own?'
'That is certainly my meaning. You have nearly five hundred pounds a year all your own – entirely your own, without any conditions whatever – your own.'
'Oh!' She sat in silence, her hands locked. Then the tears came into her eyes. 'Oh, George!' she murmured, 'you will not be so very poor after all.'
'That is all I have to say to you at present, Elsie,' said Mr. Dering. 'Now you may run away and leave me. Come to dinner this evening. Your mother and your sister are coming. I shall ask Austin as well. We may perhaps remove some of those objections. Dinner at seven sharp, Elsie. – And now you can leave me.'
'I said last night,' said Elsie, clasping her hands with feminine superstition, 'that something was going to happen. But I thought it was something horrid. Oh, Mr. Dering, if you only knew how happy you have made me! I don't know what to say. I feel stunned. Five hundred pounds a year! Oh! it is wonderful! What shall I say? What shall I say?'
'You will say nothing. Go away now. Come to dinner this evening. – Go away, my young heiress. Go and make plans
