Chapter Twenty-Five
Practical Matters
They told the household together that same evening, finding the General and Prudence sitting over their own quiet dinner, and Jane understood, from the speed with which her uncle rose and the particular warmth of his embrace, that this news, at least, surprised nobody in the room besides perhaps Fitzwilliam himself.
“Well,” said the General, when the first congratulations had properly settled, “I confess I had begun to wonder whether either of you meant to say anything plainly before the war ended of its own accord and settled the matter by attrition.”
“I was working my way to it, sir, in my own time.”
“You were working your way to it at a pace that would have shamed a Portuguese ox cart,” the General said, though his eyes were kind, “and I say that as a man who is delighted to have been proved wrong in his impatience.” He turned to Prudence, and something passed between them that needed no words at all, the satisfaction of two people who have watched a thing unfold slowly and are glad, now, to see it properly arrived.
It was Prudence who raised the practical question, some minutes later, once the first warmth of the news had settled into something steadier.
“You will want to think, both of you, of how Jane is to be provided for,” she said, “since I do not imagine either of you has given the matter a great deal of proper thought, being rather more occupied with other considerations these past months.”
Fitzwilliam’s face, Jane saw, went carefully still, in the way it had gone still once before, on the second afternoon of his recovery, when he had first spoken of his own financial situation.
“I have my pay, and whatever prize money the campaign yields, which is not nothing, though I will not pretend it is a fortune either. I had meant to discuss the matter properly with Jane before either of us said anything further to anyone else.”
“I do not doubt it,” said the General, “but I find I have rather less patience for waiting on proper discussions than I once had, at my age, and I should like to raise something now, if you will permit an old man his impatience a second time this evening.”
He was quiet a moment, and Jane saw something working in his face, a decision being properly settled before it was spoken aloud.
“Prudence and I have no children,” he said.
“I do not say this to distress either of you, nor to seek any particular sympathy for it, for we have made our peace with the fact some years since, and I think we have built, between us, a life a good deal fuller than its want of children might suggest to an outsider looking in. But it has meant, over the years, that I have found myself with rather more means at my disposal than a man with children generally enjoys, and I have thought, for some time now, that I should like to see that means put to some proper use before I am too old to see the using of it.”
“Uncle, you need not—”
“Let me finish, Jane, for I find I have been working up to this for some weeks now, since long before tonight’s news, and I should like to say it properly.
” He looked at her steadily. “I have already settled a small sum on each of your sisters, Jane. Elizabeth, and Mary, and Kitty, and Lydia besides, quietly, through your father’s own solicitor, over these past several years, a modest dowry for each of them, enough to make a difference to their prospects without announcing itself to the whole of Hertfordshire.
I did not tell any of you, because I did not wish it spoken of, nor thanked for, nor turned into any manner of occasion.
I did it because they are my wife’s brother’s daughters, and I have watched from a distance, these many years, the difficulty of five girls and an entailed estate, and I found I could not, in good conscience, do nothing about it simply because doing something required no immediate credit to myself. ”
Jane found her eyes had filled entirely, thinking of Elizabeth, and Mary, and the two youngest, none of them knowing, all these years, that their uncle had been quietly, patiently seeing to their futures without a word of acknowledgment sought or wanted.
“I did not know,” she managed. “None of us knew.”
“I did not wish you to know, until there was some proper occasion for the telling of it, and I find tonight has become that occasion, whether or not I originally intended it to.” He turned to Fitzwilliam.
“Which brings me to the matter at hand. I mean to settle a sum on Jane now, properly, in trust, arranged so that it is hers alone, beyond the reach of any creditor or any family circumstance that might otherwise complicate it. I do not offer this as charity, Major Fitzwilliam, and I will thank you not to receive it as such, for I have watched young men ruin a great deal of proper happiness through misplaced pride on this very subject, and I find I have no patience left, at my age, for watching it happen to two people I have come to care for as my own.”
Fitzwilliam was quiet a long moment, and Jane saw the particular struggle in his face, the pride he had carried since he was a boy warring with something he was only now, she thought, beginning to properly recognise as a lesser consideration than he had always believed it to be.
“I do not know that I can accept it, sir, however generously meant. A man ought to provide for his own wife.”
“A man ought to see his wife properly provided for,” the General said, “by whatever honest means are available to him, and I do not think there is any dishonesty in an uncle’s settlement, freely given, out of nothing more complicated than affection.
I am not diminishing you, Fitzwilliam. I am removing one small worry from a life that I expect will carry a great many larger ones, given the profession you have chosen, and I should like to think you capable of accepting a kindness without turning it, in your own mind, into some slight against your own worth. ”
Fitzwilliam did not answer at once, and it was Jane, watching him, who reached over and took his hand.
“You are asking me to be poor on principle,” she said, quietly, so that the words carried only to him, though she did not much mind, in truth, whether the others heard them too, “so that your own pride may remain untroubled. I have spent my whole life being asked to accept less, so that somebody else’s comfort might stay intact, and I find I have rather recently stopped agreeing to it.
I will not start agreeing to it again on your behalf, however much you love me. ”
Something in his face eased at that, the last of the resistance giving way, not entirely without a struggle, but giving way nonetheless.
“You argue very persuasively, for a woman who claims no particular skill at argument.”
“I have had a great deal of practice this summer,” Jane said, “arguing for things I have decided are right, whatever the cost of the arguing. I find I do not intend to stop now, on a matter that concerns us both so nearly.”
He looked at her a long moment, and then at the General, and inclined his head at last, in the manner of a man conceding a point he had fought honestly and lost honestly, without any shame in the losing of it.
“Then I accept it, sir, with more gratitude than I know how to properly express, and I will endeavour to be worthy of the trust it represents.”
“You already are,” said the General, simply, and the matter, Jane understood, was settled.
?∞?
It was Prudence who found her alone later that evening, once the household had begun to settle for the night, and sat down beside her with the quiet that generally preceded something she meant seriously.
“My husband has wanted to do something of that kind for a very long time,” Prudence said, “and has never before had quite the proper occasion for it. I do not think you fully understand what watching you these past months has meant to him, Jane, nor to me, if I am honest. We have grieved, quietly, the children we did not have, in our own way, across five and twenty years, and I will not pretend to you it has always been an easy grief to carry, however well we have managed, on the whole, to carry it. Watching you become the woman you have become this summer has been, for both of us, nearer to a gift than either of us properly expected to receive, this late in our own lives.”
Jane took her aunt’s hand, and found she had no words adequate to the moment, and Prudence, seeming to understand this, patted her hand once and rose, briskly, in her ordinary manner, as though she had not just said something that would sit in Jane’s heart for the whole of her life to come.
“Now,” Prudence said, “you had better get some sleep, since I expect tomorrow will want a great deal of practical planning, and I have found, over the years, that a wedding planned on too little sleep generally shows it in the details.”