‘Well, Noll,’ said Mrs. Ford, ‘it is better not to go into details. Very likely we should not understand them if you did, though I am no girl, nor is she a baby either, for the matter of that; but whatever you have been or done, the fact is that you are just Oliver Wentworth, when all is said: and as Oliver Wentworth is the man Grace has been fond of almost since she was a child, and who has been my brother since ever he was born--’
‘Strange!’ he cried, with a curious outburst, half laugh, half groan, ‘to think she should have kept thinking of me all this time, while I--’
‘Have been in love with her, and considered her all the time the first woman in the world. You told me so just now.’
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘that’s not a lie, though you may think it so. I did feel that when I thought of--’ and here he paused and gave his sister a guilty look.
‘When you thought of her at all; you needn’t be ashamed, Noll. That’s the man’s way of putting it. We women all know that; but now that she is before your eyes and you cannot help thinking of her--now it has come all right.’
Trix too gave a laugh which was half crying; and then she dried her eyes and came solemnly up to him with a very serious face, and caught him by the arm and looked into his eyes.
‘Oliver, now that all that’s over, and you’re an older man and understand that life can’t go on so; and now that you are going to marry Grace, the woman you have always loved--Oliver, for the love of God, no more of it now.’
He gazed at her for a moment with a flash of something like fury in his eyes, and then flung her arm far from him with fierce indignation. ‘Do you think I am a brute beast without understanding?’ he cried.
For a week or more after their betrothal these two lovers were very happy. To be sure there was a great deal of remark and some remonstrance addressed to Grace about the antecedents of the man she was going to marry. Various people spoke to her, and some even wrote, which is a strong step, asking her if she was aware that Oliver Wentworth had been supposed to be ‘wild’ or ‘gay,’ or something else of the same meaning. It is generally supposed that a village or a small town is the place for gossip, but I think Society is made up of a succession of villages, and that there is no place, not even London itself--that wilderness, that great Babylon--in which people are not talked about by their Christian names, and everything that can be discussed, with perhaps a little more, is not known about them. Ironborough was a very large town, but the Wentworths and the Goodhearts had both been settled there for a generation or two, and they were known to everybody. And not only was it known universally and much talked of that Oliver Wentworth had been ‘wild,’ and that he was poor, and consequently that he must be marrying solely for money; but it also raised a great ferment in the place that he should intend, instead of settling down (‘and thankful for that’) in Grace’s charming house, which her old uncle, a man very learned in the art of making himself comfortable, had made so perfect--to carry off his wife to London with him, and live there for the advantage of his work, forsooth! as if his work could be of any such consequence in the _ménage_, or as if he would ever earn enough to pay the house rent. Oliver was like so many other young men, a barrister with very little to do. He had managed to keep himself going by a few briefs and a little literature, as soon as he had fully convinced himself, by the process of spending everything else that he could lay his hands upon, that a man must live upon what he can make. He was not of so fine a fibre as some heroes, who feel themselves humiliated by their future wife’s fortune, and whom the possible suspicion of interested motives pursues everywhere; but at the same time he was not disposed to be his wife’s dependent, and he knew the world well enough to be aware that with the backing of her wealth he would probably make a great deal more of his profession than it had hitherto been possible for him to do. As for Grace herself, she talked of his profession, and of his work, and of the necessity for living where it would be most convenient to him, as if her entire fortune depended upon that, and Oliver’s work was to be the support of the new household. A girl without a penny, whose marriage was to promote her to the delightful charge of a house of her own, and whose every new bonnet was to come from the earnings of her husband, could not have been more completely absorbed in consideration of all that was necessary for his perfect convenience in his work. She bewildered even Mrs. Ford by the way she took up this idea.