THE Asquiths, though they were so poor, got on very pleasantly at first. Mary had forty-five pounds a year from her thousand, and thought herself a millionaire; and Uncle Hugh gave the curate twenty pounds more in lieu of the lodgings, which were not adapted for a married man. With this twenty pounds they got a very pretty cottage—a little house which Mr. Prescott said was good enough for anybody; where, indeed, the widow of the last rector had lived till her death; and which had a pleasant garden, and was far above the pretensions of people possessing an income which even with these additions only came to a hundred and sixty-five pounds a year. The house was furnished for them, almost entirely by their kind friends—a very large contribution coming from the Hall, where there were many rooms that were never used, and even in the lumber-room many articles that were good to fill up. In this way the new married pair acquired some things that were very good and charming, and some things that were much the reverse. They got some Chippendale chairs, and an old cabinet which was in point of taste enough to make the fortune of any house; but they also got a number of things manufactured in the first half of the present century, of which the least said the better. They did not themselves much mind, and probably, being uninstructed, preferred the style of George IV. to that of Queen Anne.

And thus they lived very happily for two or three years. They lived very happy ever after, might indeed have been said of them, as if they had made love and married in a fairy tale. No words could have described their condition better. Mary, delivered from the small talk of the Horton drawing-room, and living in constant companionship with a man of education, whose tastes were more cultivated and developed than those of the race of squires, which was all she had hitherto known, brightened in intelligence as well as in happiness, and with the quick receptivity of her age grew into, without labour, that atmosphere of culture and understanding which is the fine fleur of education. She did not actually know much more, perhaps, than she had known in her former condition; but she began to understand all kinds of allusions, and to know what people meant when they quoted the poets, or referred to those great characters in fiction who are the most living people under the sun. She no longer required to have things explained to her of this kind. And as for the curate, it was astonishing how he brightened and softened, and became reconciled to the facts of existence; and found beauty and sweetness in those common paths which he had been disposed to look upon with hasty contempt. No two people in the world, perhaps, can live so much together, share everything so entirely, become one another, so to speak, in so complete a way as a country clergyman and his wife. Except the writing of his sermons, there was no part of his work into which Mr. Asquith’s young wife did not enter; and even the sermons, which were all read to her before they were preached, were the better for Mary; for the curate was quick to note when her attention failed, when her eyelids drooped, as they did sometimes, over her eyes. She was far too loyal, and too much an enthusiast, you may be sure, ever to allow in words that those prelections were less than perfect; but Mr. Asquith was clever enough to see that sometimes her attention flagged. Once or twice, before the first year was out, Mary nodded while she listened—a delinquency which she denied almost furiously, with the wrath of a dove; and which was easily explained by the fact that she was at that moment “not very strong:” but which nevertheless Mr. Asquith, as he laughed and kissed her and said, “That was too much for you, Mary,” took to heart. “Too much for me!” she cried; “if you mean far finer and higher than anything I could reach by myself, of course you are quite right, Henry; but only in that sense,” the tears coming into her eyes in the indignation of her protest. The curate did not insist, nor try to prove to her that she had indeed dozed, which some men would have done. He was too delicate and tender for any such brutal ways of proving himself in the right; but, all the same, he laid that involuntary criticism to heart, to the great advantage of his preaching. Thus they did each other mutual good.

And what a beautiful life these two lived! I know a little pair in a little town, with not much more money than the Asquiths, and connections much less important, and surroundings much less pretty—a pair who have only a little house in a street, with unlovely houses of the poor about them, instead of comely cottages, who do very much the same, all honour to them! The Asquiths flung themselves upon that parish, and took the charge of it with a rush, out of the calm elderly hands which had for years managed it so easily. I do not undertake to say that they did no harm, or that they were always wise; nobody is that I have ever come in contact with: but if there is any finer thing in the world than to maintain a brave struggle with all that is evil on account of others, on account of the poor, who so often cannot help themselves, I don’t know what it is. These two laid siege to all the strongholds of ill in the village—and evil, or the Evil One if you please to put it so, has many such strongholds—with all the energies of their being. They fought against wickedness, against disorder, against disease, against waste, and dirt, and drink; against the coarse habits and unlovely speech of the little rural place. They made a chivalrous attempt to turn all those rustics into ladies and gentlemen—into what is better, Christian men and women, into good and pure and thoughtful persons, considering not only their latter end, as the parson had always bidden them to do, but also their present living and all their habits and ways. The curate had been working very steadily, in this sense, since he came to Horton; but when he had, so to speak, Mary’s young enthusiasm, her feminine practicalness, yet scorn of the practical and contempt of all the limits of possibility, poured into him, stimulating his own strength, the result was tremendous. The parish for a moment was taken by surprise, and in its astonishment was ready to consent to anything the young innovators desired. It would sin no more, neither be untidy any more; it would abandon the public-house and wash its babies’ faces three times in the day; it would put something in the savings-bank every Saturday of its life, and open all its windows every morning, and pursue every smell to the death. All this and more it undertook in the consternation caused by that sudden onslaught: and for a little time, with those two active young people in constant circulation among the cottages, giving nobody any peace, scolding, praising, persuading, contrasting, encouraging, helping too in that incomprehensible way in which the poor do help the poor, a great effect was produced. As for going to church, that was the first and easiest point; and here Mary came in with her music, which the curate did not understand, influencing the choice of the hymns, and getting up choir practices, and heaven knows how many other seductions—artful temptations to the young to do well instead of doing ill—sweetnesses and pleasures to make delightful the narrow way.

“You think you are doing an immense deal,” said Uncle Hugh, “but you’ll find it won’t last.”

“Why shouldn’t it last?” cried Mary. “They are so much happier in themselves. Don’t you think a man must feel what a difference it makes when he comes home sober, and finds a nice supper waiting him on Saturday nights; and then to go out to church with all the children, neat and clean, round him, instead of lounging, dirty, at the door with his pipe?”

“Perhaps it is more comfortable,” said the rector, shaking his head. “I should think so, certainly; but it isn’t human nature, my dear. You will find that he will rather have his fling at the public-house, though he feels wretched next morning. He likes to see his children nice; but better still he likes his own pleasure. You’ll find it won’t last.”

“We must be prepared for a few downfalls,” said the curate. “I tell Mary that we must not expect everything to go on velvet. Some of them will fall away; but with patience, and sticking to it, and never giving in——”

“Never giving in!” cried Mary. “Why, uncle, you don’t suppose I am so silly as to think we could build Rome in a day. We quite look for failures now and then,” she said, with her bright face. “We should almost be disappointed if we had no failures; shouldn’t we, Henry? for then it wouldn’t look real; but with patience and time everything can be done.”

The rector only shook his head. He did not say, as he might have done, that it was very presumptuous of these young people to think they could do more in a few months than he had done in his long incumbency. The rector’s wife was very strong on this point, and quite angry with Mary and the curate for their ridiculous hopes; but Mr. Prescott himself felt, perhaps, that his reign had been an indolent one, and that he had not done all he might. But he shook his head; for, after all, though he had been indolent, he knew human nature better than they did. He was not angry with them; but he had seen such crusades before, and had various sad experiences as to the dying out of enthusiasm, and the failure of hope. And the rector, who was a kind man in his heart, knew through the ladies of the family that the time was approaching when Mary would be “not very strong,” and apt to flag in other matters besides that of listening to her husband’s sermon. And he knew, also, that the conditions of life would change for them; that the young wife would find work of her own to do, which could not be put aside for the parish; and that “patience and time,” on which they calculated, were just what they would not have to give: for when babies began to come, and all their expenses were increased, how were they to go on with one hundred and sixty-five pounds a year? The rector said to himself that he would not discourage them, that they should do what they would as long as they could. But he foresaw that the time would come when Mr. Asquith would be compelled to seek another curacy with a little more money, and when Mary, instead of being the good angel of the parish, would have to be nurse and superior servant-of-all-work at home.

“Poor things!” he said to his wife. “It is sad when you have to acknowledge that you are no longer equal to the task you have set for yourself.”

“I don’t call them poor things,” said Mrs. Prescott. “I think them very presuming, Hugh, after you have spent so many years here, to think they can bring in new principles and make a reformation in a single day.”

“We might have done more, my dear. We have taken things very quietly; most likely we could have done more.”

“You are as bad as they are, with your humility!” cried the rector’s wife. “I have no patience with you. What have you left undone that you ought to have done? I am sure you’ve always been at their beck and call, rising up out of your warm bed to go and visit them in the middle of the night, when you have been sent for—more like a country practitioner than a beneficed clergyman! And though I say it that perhaps shouldn’t say it, never one has been sent away, as you know, that came in want to our pantry door. And as for lyings-in, and those sort of things——” cried the country lady.

“We needn’t go into details. As for your part of it, my dear, I know that’s always been well done,” said the politic rector. “Anyhow, don’t let us say anything to discourage the Asquiths. It’s always a good thing to stir a parish up.”

“It’s like those revivalists,” said Mrs. Prescott—“a great fuss, and then everything falling back worse than before.”

“Oh no! not worse than before: somebody is always the better for it. I like a good stirring up.”

All this was very noble of the rector, who, if ever he had stirred up the parish, had ceased to do it long ago. Perhaps he was a little moved by the fervent conviction of the curate and the curate’s wife that in their little day, and with the small means at their command, they could do so much; at all events, he let them have their way and try their best. And a great deal of work was done, with an effect by which they were greatly delighted and elated in the first year.

But then came the time when Mary was “not very strong,” and the choir practices and various other things had to be given up—not entirely given up, for the schoolmaster and his daughter made an attempt to keep them on, which was more trying to the nerves and patience of the invalid than if they had ceased altogether. For jealousies arose, and the different parties thought themselves entitled to carry their grievances to Mrs. Asquith, even when she was very unfit for any disturbance; and everything was very heavy on the curate’s shoulders during that period of inaction which was compulsory on Mary’s part. They had undertaken so much, that when one was withdrawn the other could not but break down with overwork. However, there was presently a re-beginning; and Mary, smiling and happier than ever, prettier than ever, and full of a warmer enthusiasm still, came again to the charge. She understood the poor women, the poor mothers, so much better now, she declared. Even the curate himself was not such an instructor as that little three-weeks-old baby, which did nothing but sleep, and feed, and grow. That was a teacher fresh from heaven; it threw light on so many things, on the very structure of the world, and how it hung together, and the love of God, and the ways of men. Mary thought she had never before so fully understood the prayer which is addressed to Our Father: she had not known all it meant before: and the curate, indescribably softened, touched, melted out of all perception of the hardness, feeling more than ever the sweetness of life, received this ineffable lesson too.

And so the crusade against the powers of evil was taken up again, with all the new life of this little heavenly messenger to stimulate them; but not quite so much of the more vulgar strength, the physical power, the detachedness and freedom. Mary had to be at home with the baby so often and so long. And the curate had so strong a bond drawing him in the same direction, to make sure that all was going well. But still the parish did not suffer in those young and happy years.