A Marriage in Fact

The entry off Hatter Street was too narrow for two people abreast, so that Ralph went up the stairs before her with his hat in his hand, and Arabella came after him with one glove off, and the whole of the ground floor smelt of size and new leather and that particular sourness which is oak bark and is not disagreeable once a person has decided not to mind it. A saddler worked below. He had worked below, she understood, since before she was born, and he was at something with a small hammer now, four blows and a pause and four blows, so that Mr Pargeter's two rooms had a pulse in the floor.

The clerk showed them in and took Ralph's hat as though it were an object he had handled before and thought little of. There were papers on the long table in bundles, tied with green ribbon and endorsed across the back in a clean clerk's hand, and the uppermost of them said Marchhurst and a date, and Arabella read it without meaning to and looked away, because one did not, and because there was much else in the room to be looked at.

Mr Pargeter rose. He was sixty-odd and comfortably made and entirely in black, which in that spring signified nothing whatever about him, the King having died in January and the whole kingdom being in mourning for a man the greater part of it had never seen. Arabella was in black also. Her bombazine had been her mother's and had been let out at the seams by a woman at Hessett who charged three shillings and was worth five, and her hair had taken three quarters of an hour that morning and was the only article in the room got up to its best.

Mr Wyard was standing at the window.

He had been standing at the window when the door opened, and he turned, and he did not come forward and say anything agreeable about the roads. He bowed. She curtseyed. In the second and a half available to her she priced him, because she could not help it and had never in her life been able to help it, and had long ago stopped pretending to herself that it was a fault. The coat was black and good and four years old and had been brushed that morning by somebody who took trouble over it; the linen was plain and very white; the boots had been made for him and mended twice and would be mended again. Nothing about him was new except the mourning band on the hat he had put on the sill, and that, she thought, had been bought in Bury within the week, because a man who farms his own land does not keep crape by him against the death of a king.

He was four-and-forty and looked it, and was middling-tall and built heavily through the shoulder, and was burnt brick-red from the collar-line up with a white line above where the hat sat, and had a white seam through the left eyebrow that had been got somehow and had not been got in a drawing-room. His hair was near black and cropped short. His eyes were grey. His hands, when he took them off the sill, were broad and short in the finger and cracked across the backs, and he stood perfectly still with them, which she noticed, because Ralph never in his life stood still with his.

"Miss Felsham," said Mr Pargeter. "You will sit here, if you please, where you can see the instrument. Mr Felsham. Mr Wyard."

The chairs were arranged already. That was the thing she would remember about the room afterwards, more than the ribbon or the smell or the hammer below: that the chairs had been set out before any of them arrived, and that hers had been put where she could see the paper, which was a courtesy, and which was also the most exact description of her position that anybody had yet offered her.

"The articles are engrossed," Mr Pargeter said, sitting, and drawing the sheets toward him without haste. "I shall read them over. Any person who wishes me to stop may stop me. It is not a form; I mean it."

He read them over.

He read as a man reads a thing he has written, without emphasis and without apology, and he did not once soften a figure or look up to see how a figure had been taken, and Arabella sat with her spine off the chair-back and her hands folded in her lap and her chin at the angle her mother had taught her when she was eleven, and listened to herself being priced.

It began with the debts. That was the first covenant: that the said Daniel Wyard should, within one month of the solemnisation, pay and satisfy the several debts of the said Ralph Felsham set forth in the schedule hereto — and here Mr Pargeter turned the sheet and read the schedule, which was a column of names and a column of sums, and the names were all of them names she had heard at her father's table or seen on the outside of a folded paper on the hall chest at Hessett. Mayhew, tailor, Bury, two hundred and fourteen pounds nine shillings. Stebbing, bootmaker, sixty-one pounds. Larter, wine merchant, three hundred and two pounds and some odd shillings, and Arabella did not hear the shillings because she was thinking that three hundred and two pounds of wine is a great quantity of wine for a young man of seven-and-twenty living in lodgings. The livery stable at the Six Bells. A jeweller. A person at Newmarket described only as Mr Havers, on account, which meant a horse or meant something worse than a horse.

Eleven hundred and fifty pounds, four shillings and twopence.

Beside her Ralph had crossed one long leg over the other and was looking at the window with an expression of grave attention, as though the sums were a piece of weather that had come on unexpectedly and would pass. He was wearing a coat that had been cut for him in December by a man who had not been paid for the last one and who was, she observed, not in the schedule. He was sandy where she was flaxen and had their mother's dark eyes in a longer face and was, by a considerable distance, the handsomest person in the room. He was also, she thought, the only one of the four of them who was not at that moment doing arithmetic.

"The second article," said Mr Pargeter.

The second article was the eight hundred pounds. Eight hundred pounds of three per cent Consolidated Annuities, standing in the name of Ralph Felsham, being the residue of his late father's personal estate after payment of debts and funeral expenses — being, though the instrument did not say so and did not need to, the last property her brother had in the world — to be assigned by him into the hands of the trustees therein named, upon trust for the separate use of Arabella Felsham, spinster, afterwards the wife of the said Daniel Wyard, free from the debts, control and engagements of her husband.

One of the trustees therein named was Mr Pargeter himself. The other was a gentleman of Stowmarket whose name meant nothing to her and would, she supposed, mean a great deal to her by and by.

Free from the debts, control and engagements of her husband. She turned the phrase over while the reading went on, the way one turns a coin found in a pocket. It was the kindest sentence anybody had ever caused to be written about her, and it had been put there not out of kindness but because it was the form, and the form existed because a great many women had discovered what happened where it was omitted.

Twenty-four pounds a year. Eight hundred at three per cent: twenty-four pounds a year, payable half-yearly, less the office's charges. She had it before Mr Pargeter's finger had come down the page to the third article, and she had it without moving her hands or her face, because she had been doing sums in company since before she was out and had learnt young that a woman who is quick at figures aloud is a woman who is never asked to sing.

"The third article," said Mr Pargeter. "Pin-money. The said Daniel Wyard covenants to pay to the said Arabella, for her own sole and separate use, during the coverture, the yearly sum of forty pounds, by four quarterly payments, the first to be made at Midsummer next."

And there it was.

Forty pounds. Twenty-four from the funds, and sixteen from somewhere else, four times a year, for as long as she lived or he did. Sixteen pounds a year that was not in the funds and could not come out of them, and must therefore come off a hundred and forty acres of light land in the parish of Rattlesden, in whatever condition that land happened to be in when the quarter-day came round.

She had been appraised aloud all her life. Her aunt had done it in a carriage between Bury and Ixworth when she was seventeen, itemising her hair, her arms, her figure, her four hundred pounds that were not in fact four hundred pounds, and her want of any connection worth naming, and had done it kindly, and had been perfectly correct in every particular. Arabella had not wept then and had never afterwards seen the object of weeping. One does not weep at a true statement. What was new this morning, what was entirely new and had a taste to it she had not expected, was the seeing of it written down — engrossed, ruled, totalled, carrying a stamp — so that a clerk who had never met her could take it from the bundle in ten years' time and know to the shilling what she had been worth on the tenth of March, 1820.

Mr Pargeter finished the third article and drew breath for the fourth.

"Mr Pargeter," she said. "Forgive me. May I ask one thing?"

The room moved very slightly. Ralph uncrossed his leg.

"You may ask a great many things, Miss Felsham," said Mr Pargeter. "That is what I am for this morning."

"The pin-money is forty pounds. The stock settled on me will produce four-and-twenty. The difference is sixteen pounds a year, and it is not in the funds." She kept her hands where they were. Her colour had begun to come up her throat — it always came up her throat, and never obligingly into her cheeks, and she had known since she was fifteen that she could not govern it and that the best she could do was to hold quite still and let it pass. "So it comes off the farm. I should like to know who pays it in a bad year."

Nobody spoke for the space of two breaths, which in a room of four people is a great while.

"That is a very proper question," Mr Pargeter began, "and the instrument provides for it in the fifth article, where the covenant is charged upon—"

"I do," said Mr Wyard.

He had not raised his voice at all. He had turned in his chair to face her, which nobody else had troubled to do since she came up the stairs, and he was looking at her, straight, the way a man looks at another man who has asked him the price of something.

"Whether it is a bad year or a good one," he said. "It is forty pounds and it comes at Midsummer, Michaelmas, Christmas and Lady Day, and if the wheat is down and the fold is short and I have sold beasts I did not mean to sell, it is still forty pounds and it still comes. I would not covenant for a sum I could only pay in a good year. There is no sense in it and no honesty in it." He paused. "I have had eleven bad years out of twenty. I know what one costs."

"Thank you," said Arabella.

"You are welcome to ask me anything else," he said. "Now, or afterwards."

Afterwards. She looked down at her glove.

Mr Pargeter read the fourth article, and the fifth, which charged the pin-money upon the lands and premises called Barwell in the parish of Rattlesden, and Arabella heard the words charged upon and understood that the sixteen pounds had a grip on the land and that Mr Wyard had permitted it to be put there.

Then Mr Pargeter laid the sheets flat and put his hand on them.

"I shall now say two things, and I shall keep them apart," he said, "because they are not the same thing and are very often confused.

"The first is the legal position. This instrument is good. It is drawn as such instruments are drawn; the covenants are enforceable; the settled stock is out of your husband's reach and out of your brother's, and if Mr Wyard were to die tomorrow you would have four-and-twenty pounds a year of your own and a claim for your pin-money against his estate. In that respect you will be better provided for on the twenty-fifth of this month than you are today. You will also be better provided for than you were at any time in your father's house. That is the whole of what I can tell you as an attorney, and it is not nothing.

"The second is not law. You have heard yourself and your brother's tradesmen read out of the same schedule. Nobody in this room supposes you did not notice it. I do not tell my clients what they ought to feel about an instrument, and I have no opinion to give you upon this gentleman, of whom I know only that his title to his land is clear and that he has not once, in seven weeks of correspondence, tried to get anything out of me that he had not first put in writing. But the signing is yours, Miss Felsham. It is not your brother's and it is not mine. If you tell me this morning that you will not sign, I shall put the papers in that drawer and we shall all go down the stairs, and I will undertake that no person in Bury hears of it from this office."

"Bella—" said Ralph.

"Be quiet, Ralph," she said, quite pleasantly.

The hammer went below: four blows, a pause, four blows. She thought about Hessett, which was let, and about her aunt at Ixworth, who had a spare room and a particular way of mentioning it. She thought about the word afterwards. She found she had no intention whatever of going down those stairs.

"The pen, if you please," she said.

Mr Pargeter turned the sheet and set the pen in her hand, and she signed in a hand her governess had spent two years upon — Arabella Felsham, and the flourish under it that she had used since she was fourteen and would now have some fifteen days' more use of. The clerk came in and witnessed. Ralph signed the assignment of the stock with a flourish considerably larger than hers and a quantity of relief in it. Mr Wyard signed last, slowly, in a plain upright hand with no flourish at all, and shook the sand over it and did not blot it.

Going down, the stairs being too narrow for two, he went first and turned at the bottom and put up his hand, and she came down the last three steps with her fingers in his — both of them gloved, and a saddler's boy going by in the entry with a collar over his shoulder, and not one thing in it that any person could have objected to — and his hand was quite steady and did not close, and let go the moment her foot was on the flags.

"Lady Day, then," he said. "It is a Saturday. Mr Pargeter has the licence in hand; he tells me the surrogate is very quick."

"Lady Day," said Arabella.

He put his hat on with the new crape round it and walked away up the entry toward the noise of the street, and she stood where she was for a moment, being for the first time in her life in possession of a figure she had not had before: eleven hundred and fifty pounds, four shillings and twopence, and eight hundred in the three per cents, and forty pounds a year charged upon a hundred and forty acres.

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

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