“And now, my dear, about money,” said Abraham as he rose to prepare himself for the journey. Many things had been settled over that meal,--how he was to get a house ready, and was then to say when she should come to him, and how she should bring the boy with her, and how he would have the banns called in the church, and how they would be married as soon as possible after her arrival in the new country. “And now, my dear, about money?”
She had to take it at last. “Yes,” she said, “it is right that I should have things fit to come to you in. It is right that you shouldn’t be disgraced.”
“I’d marry you in a sack from the poor-house, if it were necessary,” he said with vehemence.
“As it is not necessary, it shall not be so. I will get things;--but they shall belong to you always; and I will not wear them till the day that I also shall belong to you.”
She went with him that night to the station, and kissed him openly as she parted from him on the platform. There was nothing in her love now of which she was ashamed. How, after some necessary interval, she followed him down into Gloucestershire, and how she became his wife standing opposite to him in the bright raiment which his liberality had supplied, and how she became as good a wife as ever blessed a man’s household, need hardly here be told.
That Miss Wilson recovered her health and married the hairdresser may be accepted by all anxious readers as an undoubted fact.
It used to be said in the village of Beetham that nothing ever went wrong with Alice Dugdale,--the meaning of which, perhaps, lay in the fact that she was determined that things should be made to go right. Things as they came were received by her with a gracious welcome, and “things,” whatever they were, seemed to be so well pleased with the treatment afforded to them, that they too for most part made themselves gracious in return.
Nevertheless she had had sorrows, as who has not? But she had kept her tears for herself, and had shown her smiles for the comfort, of those around her. In this little story it shall be told how in a certain period of her life she had suffered much;--how she still smiled, and how at last she got the better of her sorrow.
Her father was the country doctor in the populous and straggling parish of Beetham. Beetham is one of those places so often found in the south of England, half village, half town, for the existence of which there seems to be no special reason. It had no mayor, no municipality, no market, no pavements, and no gas. It was therefore no more than a village;--but it had a doctor, and Alice’s father, Dr. Dugdale, was the man. He had been established at Beetham for more than thirty years, and knew every pulse and every tongue for ten miles round. I do not know that he was very great as a doctor;--but he was a kind-hearted, liberal man, and he enjoyed the confidence of the Beethamites, which is everything. For thirty years he had worked hard and had brought up a large family without want. He was still working hard, though turned sixty, at the time of which we are speaking. He had even in his old age many children dependent on him, and though he had fairly prospered, he had not become a rich man.