And for a time he was successful; but during it he was induced to take a very fatal step. He was young, handsome, a clergyman, and unmarried. Now a young unmarried minister is pre-eminently one of sorrows and acquainted with grief. For that large body of well-meaning people who are by nature incapacitated from attending to their own business take him in hand without mercy. Innumerable are the ways in which he is informed that he ought to be married. Subtle and past finding out are the plots laid by all the old ladies and match-makers of his church to promote that desired event. He is told that he can never succeed in the ministry till he is married. The praises of Matilda Jane Tompkins or Lucinda Brown are sounded in his ears till he almost wishes that both were in a better world,--a world more worthy their virtues. At length, wearily capitulating, he marries some wooden-faced or angular saint, and is unhappy for life.
Now there was in Mr. Grey's church a good, gentle girl, narrow but not wooden-faced, famous for her neatness and her housekeeping abilities, who was supposed to be the pattern for a minister's wife. In time gone by she had set her heart on a graceless sailor lad who was drowned at sea, much to the relief of her parents. Ruth Anderson had mourned for him quietly, shutting up her sorrow in her own breast and going about her work as before; for hers was one of those subdued, practical natures that seek relief from trouble in hard work.
She seemed in the judgment of all the old women in the church the "very one" for Mr. Grey; and it likewise seemed that Mr. Grey was the "very one" for her. So divers hints were dropped and divers things were said, until each began to wonder if marriage were not a duty. The Reverend Cecil Grey began to take unusual pains with his toilet, and wended his way up the hill to Mr. Anderson's with very much the aspect of a man who is going to be hanged. And his attempts at conversation with the maiden were not at all what might have been expected from the young minister whose graceful presence and fluent eloquence had been the boast of Magdalen. On her part the embarrassment was equally great. At length they were married,--a marriage based on a false idea of duty on each side. But no idea of duty, however strong or however false, could blind the eyes of this married pair to the terrible fact that not only love but mental sympathy was wanting. Day by day Cecil felt that his wife did not love him, that her thoughts were not for him, that it was an effort for her to act the part of a wife toward him. Day by day she felt that his interests lay beyond her reach, and that all the tenderness in his manner toward her came from a sense of duty, not from love.