A smaller gift is praised as the generous one. John suggests that the three thousand pounds be cut in half, and says five hundred pounds would be a very large increase to his sisters' fortunes. Fanny tells him it is beyond anything great. What brother on earth would do half so much, even for real sisters, and these are only half-blood. He has such a generous spirit. John says he would not wish to do anything mean. One had rather do too much than too little. No one, he thinks, can say he has not done enough, and even the sisters can hardly expect more.
They are not in the room to expect anything. Fanny is mistress of Norland now, and Mrs. Dashwood and her daughters are visitors. John has already pressed them to treat the house as their home until she finds one in the neighbourhood, and she has accepted. She hears the kindness. She does not hear this talk. Fanny calls three thousand pounds a robbery of their only child, little Harry, and she calls half-blood no relationship at all. The deathbed request, she says, may have come from a light-headed man. John answers that his father named no particular sum. Something must be done when they leave. The something is being priced without them.
Five hundred pounds each comes next, then a hundred a year for their mother, which the sisters would feel as well. Fanny will not bind him to a yearly payment. People always live for ever when an annuity is to be paid, and Mrs. Dashwood is healthy and hardly forty. A sum every year would mean their fortune was not their own. John agrees that fifty pounds now and then will discharge the promise. Fanny is sure his father meant no money at all. Look for a small comfortable house, help them move, and send fish and game when they are in season. Four women, she says, can live very comfortably on five hundred a year with no carriage, no horses, hardly any servants, and no company. They will be more able to give him something. The china, plate, and linen are already theirs, and the breakfast set is twice as handsome as Norland's, too handsome for any place they can afford. That last point decides him. If his father could, he would have left almost everything to them, so John owes him no particular gratitude. He resolves that more than those neighbourly acts would be unnecessary, even indecent. Mrs. Dashwood is still in the house, trusting a kindness she has not heard priced. Will she ever learn that the promise is now fish and game?
Coming Up in Chapter 3
Mrs. Dashwood stays at Norland for months, impatient to be gone once the first grief eases, and still unable to picture a house far from that place. Edward has no turn for great men or barouches. She tells Marianne that only one circumstance should differ from her own destiny.
