Gedge wondered. "Do you mean?" More modest than she, he didn't know quite what she meant.
"We're refined. We know how to speak."
"Do we?"he still, suddenly, wondered.
But she was from the first surer of everything than he; so that when a few weeks more had elapsed and the shade of uncertaintythough it was only a shadehad grown almost to sicken him, her triumph was to come with the news that they were fairly named. "We're on poor pay, though we manage"she had at the present juncture contended for her point. "But we're highly cultivated, and for them to get that, don't you see? without getting too much with it in the way of pretensions and demands, must be precisely their dream. We've no social position, but we don't mind that we haven't, do we? a bit; which is because we know the difference between realities and shams. We hold to reality, and that gives us common sense, which the vulgar have less than anything and which yet must be wanted there, after all, as well as anywhere else."
Her companion followed her, but musingly, as if his horizon had within a few moments grown so great that he was almost lost in it and required a new orientation. The shining spaces surrounded him; the association alone gave a nobler arch to the sky. "Allow that we hold also a little to the romance. It seems to me that that's the beauty. We've missed it all our life, and now it's come. We shall be at headquarters for it. We shall have our fill of it."
She looked at his face, at the effect in it of these prospects, and her own lighted as if he had suddenly grown handsome. "Certainlywe shall live as in a fairy-tale. But what I mean is that we shall give, in a wayand so gladlyquite as much as we get. With all the rest of it we're for instance neat." Their letter had come to them at breakfast, and she picked a fly out of the butter-dish. "It's the way we'll keep the place"with which she removed from the sofa to the top of the cottage-piano a tin of biscuits that had refused to squeeze into the cupboard. At Blackport they were in lodgingsof the lowest description, she had been known to declare with a freedom felt by Blackport to be slightly invidious. The Birthplaceand that itself, after such a life, was exaltationwouldn't be lodgings, since a house close beside it was set apart for the warden, a house joining on to it as a sweet old parsonage is often annexed to a quaint old church. It would all together be their home, and such a home as would make a little world that they would never want to leave. She dwelt on the gain, for that matter, to their income; as obviously, though the salary was not a change for the better, the house given them would make all the difference. He assented to this, but absently, and she was almost impatient at the range of his thoughts. It was as if something for himthe very swarm of themveiled the view; and he presently of himself showed what it was.
"What I can't get over is its being such a man!" He almost, from inward emotion, broke down.
"Such a man?"
"Him, him, HIM!" It was too much.
"Grant-Jackson? Yes, it's a surprise, but one sees how he has been meaning, all the while, the right thing by us."
"I mean Him," Gedge returned more coldly; "our becoming familiar and intimatefor that's what it will come to. We shall just live with Him."
"Of courseit is the beauty." And she added quite gaily: "The more we do the more we shall love Him."
"No doubtbut it's rather awful. The more we know Him," Gedge reflected, "the more we shall love Him. We don't as yet, you see, know Him so very tremendously."
"We do so quite as well, I imagine, as the sort of people they've had. And that probably isn'tunless you care, as we doso awfully necessary. For there are the facts."
"Yesthere are the facts."
"I mean the principal ones. They're all that the peoplethe people who comewant."
"Yesthey must be all they want."
"So that they're all that those who've been in charge have needed to know."
"Ah," he said as if it were a question of honour, "we must know everything."
She cheerfully acceded: she had the merit, he felt, of keeping the case within bounds. "Everything. But about him personally," she added, "there isn't, is there? so very very much."
"More, I believe, than there used to be. They've made discoveries."
It was a grand thought. "Perhaps we shall make some!"
"Oh I shall be content to be a little better up in what has been done." And his eyes rested on a shelf of books, half of which, little worn but much faded, were of the florid "gift" order and belonged to the house. Of those among them that were his own most were common specimens of the reference sort, not excluding an old Bradshaw and a catalogue of the town-library. "We've not even a Set of our own. Of the Works," he explained in quick repudiation of the sense, perhaps more obvious, in which she might have taken it.
As a proof of their scant range of possessions this sounded almost abject, till the painful flush with which they met on the admission melted presently into a different glow. It was just for that kind of poorness that their new situation was, by its intrinsic charm, to console them. And Mrs. Gedge had a happy thought. "Wouldn't the Library more or less have them?"
"Oh no, we've nothing of that sort: for what do you take us?" This, however, was but the play of Gedge's high spirits: the form both depression and exhilaration most frequently took with him being a bitterness on the subject of the literary taste of Blackport. No one was so deeply acquainted with it. It acted with him in fact as so lurid a sign of the future that the charm of the thought of removal was sharply enhanced by the prospect of escape from it. The institution he served didn't of course deserve the particular reproach into which his irony had flowered; and indeed if the several Sets in which the Works were present were a trifle dusty, the dust was a little his own fault. To make up for that now he had the vision of immediately giving his time to the study of them; he saw himself indeed, inflamed with a new passion, earnestly commenting and collating. Mrs. Gedge, who had suggested that, till their move should come, they ought to read Him regularly of an eveningcertain as they were to do it still more when in closer quarters with HimMrs. Gedge felt also, in her degree, the spell; so that the very happiest time of their anxious life was perhaps to have been the series of lamplight hours, after supper, in which, alternately taking the book, they declaimed, they almost performed, their beneficent author. He became speedily more than their authortheir personal friend, their universal light, their final authority and divinity. Where in the world, they were already asking themselves, would they have been without Him? By the time their appointment arrived in form their relation to Him had immensely developed. It was amusing to Morris Gedge that he had so lately blushed for his ignorance, and he made this remark to his wife during the last hour they were able to give their study before proceeding, across half the country, to the scene of their romantic future. It was as if, in deep close throbs, in cool after-waves that broke of a sudden and bathed his mind, all possession and comprehension and sympathy, all the truth and the life and the story, had come to him, and come, as the newspapers said, to stay. "It's absurd," he didn't hesitate to say, "to talk of our not 'knowing.' So far as we don't it's because we're dunces. He's in the thing, over His ears, and the more we get into it the more we're with Him. I seem to myself at any rate," he declared, "to see Him in it as if He were painted on the wall."