Marian cared little for gossip of any kind herself, but it was a godsend to her sometimes, when she had particular reasons for not talking to her mother of the things that were in her mind, and did not find it easy to invent other things to talk to her about.
The object which Marian had in view just now, and which she had had some difficulty in attaining, was the inducing of her mother, who had passed the time since her bereavement in utter seclusion, to accept the invitation of Mr. Creswell, the owner of Woolgreaves, the local grandee par excellence, the person whose absence Marian had so lamented on the occasion of her father's illness, to pass "a long day" with him and his nieces. It was not the first time such an invitation had reached Mrs. Ashurst. Their rich neighbour, the dead schoolmaster's friend, had not been neglectful of the widow and her daughter, but it was the first time Marian had made up her mind that this advance on his part must be met and welcomed. She had as much reluctance to break through the seclusion of their life as her mother, though of a somewhat different stamp; but she had been pondering and calculating, while her mother had been only thinking and suffering, and she had decided that it must be done. She did not doubt that she should suffer more in the acting upon this decision than her mother; but it was made, and must be acted upon. So Marian took her mother to Woolgreaves. Mr. Creswell had offered to send a carriage (he rather liked the use of the indefinite article, which implied the extent of his establishment) to fetch the ladies, but Marian had declined this. The walk would do her mother good, and brace her nerves; she meant to talk to her easily, with seeming carelessness, of the possibilities of the future, on the way. At length Mrs. Ashurst was ready, and her daughter and she set forth, in the direction of the distressingly modern, but really imposing, mansion, which, for the first time, they approached, unsupported by him, in whose presence it had never occurred to them to suffer from any feeling of inferiority of position or means, or to believe that any one could regard them in a slighting manner.
Mr. Creswell, of Woolgreaves, had entertained a sincere regard, built on profound respect, for Mr. Ashurst. He knew the inferiority of his own mind, and his own education, to those of the man who had contentedly and laboriously filled so humble a position—one so unworthy of his talents, as well as he knew the superiority of his own business abilities, the difference which had made him a rich man, and which would, under any circumstances, have kept Mr. Ashurst poor. He was a man possessed of much candour of mind and sound judgment; and though he preferred, quite sincerely, the practical ability which had made him what he was, and heartily enjoyed all the material advantages and pleasures of his life, he was capable of profound admiration for such unattainable things as taste, learning, and the indefinable moral and personal elements which combine to form a scholar and a gentleman. He was a commonplace man in every other respect than this, that he most sincerely despised and detested flattery, and was incapable of being deceived by it. He had not failed to understand that it would have been as impossible to James Ashurst to flatter as to rob him; and for this reason, as well as for the superiority he had so fully recognised, he had felt warm and abiding friendship for him, and lamented his death, as he had not mourned any accident of mortality since the day which had seen his pretty young wife laid in her early grave. Mr. Creswell, a poor man in those days, struggling manfully very far down on the ladder, which he had since climbed with the ease which not unfrequently attends effort, when something has happened to decrease the value of success, had loved his pretty, uneducated, merry little wife very much, and had felt for a while after she died, that he was not sure whether anything was worth working or striving for. But his constitutional activity of mind and body had got the better of that sort of feeling, and he had worked and striven to remarkably good purpose; but he had never asked another woman to share his fortunes. This was not altogether occasioned by lingering regret for his pretty Jenny. He was not of a sentimental turn of mind, and he might even have been brought to acknowledge, reluctantly, that his wife would probably have been much out of place in the fine house, and at the head of the luxurious establishment which his wealth had formed. She was humbly born, like himself, had not been ambitious, except of love and happiness, and had had no better education than enabled her to read and write, not so perfectly as to foster in her a taste for either occupation. If Mr. Creswell had a sorrowful remembrance of her sometimes, it died away with the reflection that she had been happy while she lived, and would not have been so happy
