"I shall keep it for the wedding," he said gravely. "And you should know what you are getting. A companion turned off without a character, a rector's daughter with eleven pounds in the world, and a cat that steals."
"I am getting," said the Duke, "the only person in this house who is rich. I have said so already. I have thought it for two years, every morning, at this hour, on this stone." He looked down at the flagstone between them. "Everything I own was handed to me, madam. You are the one thing I shall ever have chosen."
Then neither of them was grave at all, and Gooseberry went on washing, unconsulted, in the sun.
That evening she backed him into the window bay, close enough to count his eyelashes, and set out her conditions one at a time, and he heard each of them out.
"I remain her Grace's companion. As a daughter now, and never again for wages, but I keep the post. She did not lose me to Bath and she shall not lose me to you."
"Granted, and gratefully."
"Second. Nobody in my hearing, in this house, is ever again to be called vermin. Four-footed or otherwise."
"Never again, and I will say so to the household myself."
"Third — the fires. Lit, in every room this house lives in, from Michaelmas to May-day, and I will hear no argument from economy. Economy that starves a house is theft wearing an apron."
"My mother said something very like it in January. Granted. You are aware, madam, that you have yet to ask for anything on your own behalf? Three terms, and every one of them for somebody else. A jointure, pin-money, a carriage — these are the usual articles."
"I am marrying the carriage," said Jacintha. "It comes with a park."
"So it does," he said gravely. "Continue."
"Last. Gooseberry is household, not favour. A china bowl of her own, the morning-room, and the right to sit where she pleases. Including upon dukes."
"Granted," said the Duke, "with amendments. The rent stands. One mouse per quarter, never yet delivered; the arrears to be carried forward in perpetuity, and inspected at breakfast. And the six o'clock on that flagstone stands. I was not asked to the first two years of it, madam, and I do not mean to miss any of the rest."
Then she took his coat in both hands and kissed him, warm and unhurried: the man who had finally come down the stairs. Gooseberry, on the window seat, went on washing.
They were married at Abbotsmead church, where her father had preached for thirty years, on a bright cold morning, in a small stone room holding everyone who mattered and nobody else at all. Jacintha wore deep rose silk, and her face had stopped being careful, and what had been under the carefulness all along was beauty. The Dowager was magnificent in garnet velvet and outshone the bride on purpose, by arrangement between them.
"Fifty years ago I stood where you stand," she told Jacintha at the church door, "and I can report that the institution answers. Mind you make him laugh. It is the entire secret, and I give it to you for a wedding present, having received it myself in 1767."
Mrs. Kedge was correct. Gathercole was not correct at all; he wept straight through the vows with forty years' service shaking in his shoulders, and was mopped up afterwards by the cook.
Winter came properly in December, and stood no chance. There was a fire in the hall, and one in the gallery, and one in the still-room passage, and one behind the open door of the two rooms that had been a garrison and were now merely the Dowager's. A house that had been told for a year to be cold was told otherwise, and obeyed. And through that house, on a snowy evening, walked a sleek and insolent calico, past the roaring hall fire, past the gallery, past the kitchen itself, spoilt now for choice of every warm place in a great house — walking on, tail up, to the morning-room, where a china bowl sat by the fender and a cracked blue-rimmed saucer stood on the mantel, which nobody in the household explained and everybody understood.
Gooseberry stepped over the Duke's boots, ignored the Dowager entire, climbed into the lap of the woman by the fire, turned round twice, and slept. The last warm place, chosen.