"Yes, sir. I shall go back to my regiment next month, unless we may make up our minds to go out to India."
"What, you and Mary?"
"Yes, I and Mary."
"As man and wife?" said Parson John, with a smile.
"How else should we go?"
"Well, no. If she goes with you, she must go as Mrs. Captain Marrable, of course. But if I were you, I would not think of anything so horrible."
"It would be horrible," said Walter Marrable.
"I should think it would. India may be very well when a man is quite young, and if he can keep himself from beer and wine; but to go back there at your time of life with a wife, and to look forward to a dozen children there, must be an unpleasant prospect, I should say."
Walter Marrable sat silent and black.
"I should give up all idea of India," continued his uncle.
"What the deuce is a man to do?" asked the Captain.
The parson shrugged his shoulders.
"I'll tell you what I've been thinking of," said the Captain. "If I could get a farm of four or five hundred acres--"
"A farm!" exclaimed the parson.
"Why not a farm? I know that a man can do nothing with a farm unless he has capital. He should have 10 or 12 an acre for his land, I suppose. I should have that and some trifle of an income besides if I sold out. I suppose my uncle would let me have a farm under him?"
"He'd see you--further first."
"Why shouldn't I do as well with a farm as another?"
"Why not turn shoemaker? Because you have not learned the business.
Farmer, indeed! You'd never get the farm, and if you did, you would not keep it for three years. You've been in the army too long to be fit for anything else, Walter."
Captain Marrable looked black and angry at being so counselled; but he believed what was said to him, and had no answer to make to it.
"You must stick to the army," continued the old man; "and if you'll take my advice, you'll do so without the impediment of a wife."
"That's quite out of the question."
"Why is it out of the question?"
"How can you ask me, Uncle John? Would you have me go back from an engagement after I have made it?"
"I would have you go back from anything that was silly."
"And tell a girl, after I have asked her to be my wife, that I don't want to have anything more to do with her?"
"I should not tell her that; but I should make her understand, both for her own sake and for mine, that we had been too fast, and that the sooner we gave up our folly the better for both of us. You can't marry her, that's the truth of it."
"You'll see if I can't."
"If you choose to wait ten years, you may."
"I won't wait ten months, nor, if I can have my own way, ten weeks."
What a pity that Mary could not have heard him. "Half the fellows in the army are married without anything beyond their pay; and I'm to be told that we can't get along with 300 a year? At any rate, we'll try."
"Marry in haste, and repent at leisure," said Uncle John.
"According to the doctrines that are going now-a-days," said the Captain, "it will be held soon that a gentleman can't marry unless he has got 3000 a year. It is the most heartless, damnable teaching that ever came up. It spoils the men, and makes women, when they do marry, expect ever so many things that they ought never to want."
"And you mean to teach them better, Walter?"
"I mean to act for myself, and not be frightened out of doing what I think right, because the world says this and that."
As he so spoke, the angry Captain got up to leave the room.
"All the same," rejoined the parson, firing the last shot; "I'd think twice about it, if I were you, before I married Mary Lowther."
"He's more of an ass, and twice as headstrong as I thought him," said Parson John to Miss Marrable the next day; "but still I don't think it will come to anything. As far as I can observe, three of these engagements are broken off for one that goes on. And when he comes to look at things he'll get tired of it. He's going up to London next week, and I shan't press him to come back. If he does come I can't help it. If I were you, I wouldn't ask him up the hill, and I should tell Miss Mary a bit of my mind pretty plainly."
Hitherto, as far as words went, Aunt Sarah had told very little of her mind to Mary Lowther on the subject of her engagement, but she had spoken as yet no word of congratulation; and Mary knew that the manner in which she proposed to bestow herself was not received with favour by any of her relatives at Loring.
CHAPTER XXII.
WHAT THE FENWICKS THOUGHT ABOUT IT.
Bullhampton unfortunately was at the end of the postman's walk, and as the man came all the way from Lavington, letters were seldom received much before eleven o'clock. Now this was a most pernicious arrangement, in respect to which Mr. Fenwick carried on a perpetual feud with the Post-office authorities, having put forward a great postal doctrine that letters ought to be rained from heaven on to everybody's breakfast-table exactly as the hot water is brought in for tea. He, being an energetic man, carried on a long and angry correspondence with the authorities aforesaid; but the old man from Lavington continued to toddle into the village just at eleven o'clock. It was acknowledged that ten was his time; but, as he argued with himself, ten and eleven were pretty much of a muchness. The consequence of this was, that Mary Lowther's letters to Mrs. Fenwick had been read by her two or three hours before she had an opportunity of speaking on the subject to her husband. At last, however, he returned, and she flew at him with the letter in her hand. "Frank,"
she said, "Frank, what do you think has happened?"
"The Bank of England must have stopped, from the look of your face."
"I wish it had, with all my heart, sooner than this. Mary has gone and engaged herself to her cousin, Walter Marrable."
"Mary Lowther!"
"Yes; Mary Lowther! Our Mary! And from what I remember hearing about him, he is anything but nice."
"He had a lot of money left to him the other day."
"It can't have been much, because Mary owns that they will be very poor. Here is her letter. I am so unhappy about it. Don't you remember hearing about that Colonel Marrable who was in a horrible scrape about somebody's wife?"