An English Squire

Lady Hampton was one of the Ladies Bountiful of Littleton; and Virginia had taught in the schools, made tea at the treats, worked at church decorations, and made herself useful and important in all the ways usual to a clever, warm-hearted girl under such influences. And with the same passionate fervour of nature, and the same necessity to her life of an approving conscience, which had made her mother’s heart beat itself to death against the bars of her unsatisfying home, Virginia’s nature had flowed on in perfect tune with her surroundings; till, when she was nearly twenty, came the great grief of her kind aunt’s death, leaving her heiress to a moderate fortune. By the terms of the will she was to travel under carefully selected guardianship till she was of age, and then to choose whether she would go home to her father, or have a home made for her at Littleton.

Virginia chose promptly, and then, in the delicate, indefinite language of those who fear to do harm by every word, was warned of difficulties. Much would be painful to her, much would be strange; her home was not like anything she had been used to. She listened and looked sad, and understood nothing of what they meant to imply; and thus ready to admire, but with only one type in her mind of what was admirable; full of love, but with none of the blinding softening memories that make love easy, she came to a home where admiration was impossible, and love would demand either ignorant indifference to any high ideal, or a rare and perfect charity, alike unknown to a high-minded intolerant girl.

Chapter Six.

Virginia

“A sense of mystery her spirit daunted.”

The vicar of Elderthwaite was Mr Seyton’s youngest brother. There had been one between them, the father of the Ruth mentioned in the last chapter, but he had married well, and died early, leaving this one girl, who lived with her grandmother, and paid occasional visits to Elderthwaite.

James Seyton had been the wildest of the three, and had taken orders to pay his debts by means of the family living, the revenues of which he had never fully enjoyed. He had never married, and his life – though just kept in bounds by the times in which he lived, so that he did not get tipsy in the Seyton Arms, nor openly scandalise a parish with so low a standard of right as Elderthwaite – was a thoroughly self-indulgent one. He read the service once on Sundays, and administered the Communion three times a year, while the delay and neglect of funerals, marriages, and baptisms were the scandal of every parish round. He rarely visited his flock; and yet the vicar was not wholly an unpopular man. He was good-natured, and though he drank freely and sometimes swore loudly, he had a certain amount of secular intercourse with his parishioners of a not unneighbourly kind.

The pressure of poverty made Mr Seyton a hard landlord, and between oppression and neglect the inhabitants of the picturesque tumbledown village were a bad lot, and neither squire nor parson did much to make them better. But their vicar now and then did put before the worst offenders the consequences of an evil life in language plain enough to reach their understanding; and he had a word and a laugh for most of them.

Mr Lester was frequently heard to inveigh against Parson Seyton’s shortcomings, and seriously, as well he might, regretted the state of Elderthwaite parish; but Mr Seyton doctored all his horses and dogs when they were ill, and was, “after all, an old neighbour and a gentleman.” He taught Cherry to catch rats, and took him out otter-hunting, and there was the oddest friendship between them, which Cherry, when a boy, had once exemplified in the following manner: —

The Bishop had paid an unexpected visit at. Oakby, and Cheriton following in the wake, while his father and Mr Ellesmere were showing off their new schools, heard him express his intention of going on to Elderthwaite; upon which Cherry ran full speed across the fields, found Parson Seyton shooting rabbits, decidedly in shooting-costume, gave him timely warning, and, with his own hands so tidied, dusted, and furbished up the wretched old church, that its vicar, entering into the spirit of the thing, fell to with a will, astonished the lazy blind old sexton, and produced such a result as might pass muster in a necessarily lenient north-country diocese.

Cherry then diffidently produced one of his father’s white ties which he had put in his pocket, “thinking you mightn’t have one clean,” and as the old vicar, with a shout of laughter, arrayed himself in it, he said, —

“Ay, ay, my lad, between this and the glass of port I’ll give his lordship (he won’t better that in any parish), we’ll push through.”

And so they did.

Parson Seyton was a man, if an erring one; but the mischief with his young nephews was that they seemed to have no force or energy even for being naughty, and as they grew up their scrapes were all those of idle self-indulgence, save when the hereditary passion for gambling broke out in Dick, the elder of the two, as had been the case lately, causing his removal from the tutor with whom he had been placed. Like their father, they had not strong health, and they had little taste for field sports, and none for books; they lay in bed half the day, lounged about the stables, and quarrelled with each other. But then their father had nothing to do, read little but the paper, and drank a great deal more wine than was good for him.

Their uncle had conferred on them in his time the inestimable advantage of one or two good thrashings, and had scant patience with a kind of evil to which his burly figure, jolly red face, and hearty reckless temper had never been inclined.

Virginia had thought a good deal about her uncle, and was not unprepared to find him very far removed from the clerical ideal to which she was accustomed. Perhaps the notion of bringing a little enlightenment to so “old-fashioned” a place was neither absent nor unwelcome, as she thought of offering to teach the choir, and wondered who was feminine head of the parish.

“I daresay Uncle James has some nice old housekeeper,” she thought, “who trots after the poor people, and takes them jelly, and perhaps teaches the children sewing. There must be a great many people here who remember mamma. I hope they will like me. It will be a much more real thing trying to be helpful here than at Littleton, where there were six people for each bit of work.”

Virginia, finding that her brothers did not appear, began to revive her childish recollections by going over the house. It was very large and rambling, with long unused passages, with all the rooms shut up. Windows overgrown with interlacing ivy, panels from which the paint dropped at a touch, queer little turret chambers, with rickety staircases leading up to them, seemed hardly objectionable to Virginia, who liked the romance of the old forlorn house, and had not yet tried living in it. Yet it was not romantic, for Elderthwaite was not ruinous, only very dirty and out of repair; and perhaps the untidy housemaid, whom Virginia had encountered, was really more in accordance with its condition than the white lady or armed spectre that she gaily thought ought to walk those lonely passages. Her own young smiling face, and warm ruby-coloured dress, was in more startling contrast than either. So apparently thought her brother Dick as he ran up against her on the stairs.

“Hallo, Virginia!” he exclaimed in astonished accents. “What are you doing up here?”

“Trying to remember my way about. Don’t we keep any ghosts, Dick? I’m sure they would find these dark corners exactly suited to them.”

“Better ask old Kitty; she’ll tell you all about them. Good-bye, I’m off,” and Dick clattered downstairs, rather to Virginia’s disappointment, for she had thought the night before that his delicate, handsome face was more prepossessing than the pale stout one of Harry who now joined her.

“Where is Dick going?” she asked.

“Don’t know, I’m sure,” said Harry. “Do you want to know all the old stories?”

“Yes! can you tell me?”

“Do you see that room there?” said Harry, with eyes that twinkled like his aunt’s; “old grandfather Seyton was an old rip, you know, if ever there was one, and he and his friends used to make such a row you heard them over at Oakby. His brother was parson then, and bless you! Uncle Jem’s a bishop to him. Well, he’d got a dozen men dining here, and they all got as drunk as owls, dead drunk every one of them, and the servants put them to bed up in this gallery. One of them was in the room next grandfather’s, that room there, and he was found dead the next morning. Fact, I assure you.”

“What a horrid story!” said Virginia, looking shocked.

“I’ll tell you another. Grandfather and his brother played awfully high, that’s how the avenue was cut down; and when they could get no one else they played with each other, and one night they quarrelled and seized each other by the throats, and they both would have been strangled, only grandmamma rushed in in her nightgown screaming, and parted them; but the parson had the marks on his throat for ever.”

“Harry! you naughty boy!” exclaimed Virginia, laughing. “You are inventing all these frightful stories. I don’t believe them.”

“They’re as true as gospel,” said Harry, looking at her bright, incredulous eyes. “There’s another about the parson – how he came through the park at sunrise. That’s not a pretty story to tell you, though.”

“I had much rather hear something about the parson, as you call him, nowadays. Come downstairs, it’s so cold here, and answer all my questions.”

“Oh, the parson’s a jolly old card,” said Harry, following her. “He’s just mad with Dick because he won’t hunt. He’s been in at the death at every meet round, and don’t he swear when any one rides over the dogs, that’s all!”

Virginia began to think Elderthwaite must be very old-fashioned indeed.

“Doesn’t Dick like hunting?” she said. “No, Dick takes after the governor. It’s cards that’ll send him to the devil, and the first Seyton he’ll be that’s not worth having, says Uncle James.”

Harry talked in a low, solemn voice, with the same odd twinkle in his eyes, and it was very difficult to say whether it was wicked mischief, or a sort of shameless naïveté, that made him so communicative.

Virginia still strongly suspected him of a desire to astonish her; but his last speech gave her a strange new pang, and she turned away to safer subjects.

“I suppose the Lester boys are friends of yours?”

“Well, that’s as may be. We’re such a bad lot, you see, that Bob’s never allowed to come here. There was a row once, and old Lester, a humbugging chap, just interfered. Jack’s such a confounded prig he wouldn’t touch us with a pair of tongs.”

“And Cheriton, of course, is too old for you.”

“Cherry! oh, he isn’t a bad fellow. I go over to Oakby sometimes when he’s there. But it’s a slow place, and old Lester keeps them very tight. And then he’s always humbugging after his schools and things. Writing to my father about the state of the village. As if it was his affair!” said Harry, in a tone of virtuous indignation.

“Doesn’t papa approve of education?” said Virginia.

“Bless you, he don’t trouble his head about it. Why should he? Teach a lot of poaching vagabonds to read and write!”

“But Uncle James – ”

“Oh, Uncle James,” said Harry, with a spice of mimicry, “he likes his glass of grog and his ferrets too well to put himself out of the way. By Jove, here’s Aunt Julia! I shall be off before I’m asked what has become of Dick.”

Virginia sat still where he had left her. She only half believed him, and strange to say there was something so comical in his manner that she was rather attracted by its cool sauciness. But she was frightened and perplexed. What sort of a world was this into which she had come? Those stories, even if true, happened a long time ago; Harry must be in joke about Dick, and everything was different nowadays.

It was true. The golden age, if such an expression can be permitted, of Seyton wickedness had passed away; and these were smaller times, times of neglect, mismanagement, and low poor living, the dreary dregs of a cup long since drained. Nobody could quote Mr Seyton as a monster of wickedness, because he dawdled away his time over his sherry, and knew no excitement but an occasional game of cards at not very high stakes. There was many another youth in Westmoreland who gambled and played billiards in low company like Dick, and some ladies perhaps who found all their excitement in the memory of other times, and troubled themselves as little over any question of conscience as Miss Seyton.

But it was not all at once that this absence of all that makes life worth living could be apparent, and Virginia found her first confirmation of Harry’s words as she walked through the village on Christmas morning, and noted the wild, untidy look of the people, and the wretched state of their houses, and observed the sullen look of their faces as her father passed. Dick did not appear at all; Harry audibly “supposed the governor was going to church because Virginia was there,” and certainly church-going did not appear to be a fashion of the village.

Neither her childish recollections, nor Harry’s remarks, had prepared her, as they came into the small, ivy-grown church, for broken floors, cracked windows, and damp fustiness; still less for the very scantiest of congregations, and a rustling silence where responses should have been. Her uncle read the service rapidly, with the broad northern accent now strange to her ears. The old clerk trotted about whenever his services were not required, and did a little sweeping. Her uncle paused as he began the Litany, and called to him in a loud and cheerful voice to shut the door.

Virginia peeped out between the faded green-baize curtains that, hanging round the great square pew, represented to her every Church principle she had been taught to condemn; and found her view obstructed by a large cobweb. Harry poked at the spider, and Virginia recalling her own attention from her despairing visions of having no better church than this, perceived that her father was leaning idly back in his corner. All her standards of right and wrong seemed confused and shocked; so much so that, at the moment, she hardly distinguished the pain of finding herself left alone after the sermon, and seeing her father turn away, from her horror at her uncle’s dirty surplice, and the dreary degradation of the whole place. When the parson came after her after service, and loudly told her she was the prettiest lass he’d seen for long enough, kissing her under the church porch, she still felt as if the typical bad parish priest of her imagination had come to life, and behold he was her own uncle!

Since this comprehensible form of evil was so plain to her eyes, what terrible secrets might not lurk behind it! Virginia felt as if she would never be light-hearted again.

Chapter Seven.

Fire and Snow

“A northern Christmas, such as painters love.* * * * *Red sun, blue sky, white snow, and pearled ice,Keen ringing air which sets the blood on fire.”

Christmas is no doubt, theoretically, the right season for relations who have been long parted to meet, and there was an ideal appropriateness in the long absent heir appearing at Oakby for the first time on Christmas Day. But practically it would have been better for Alvar if he had come home at any other time of the year. In the first place the frost continued with unabated severity, and precluded every outdoor amusement but skating, in which Alvar of course had no skill, and which he did not seem at all willing to learn. Besides, the season brought an amount of local and parish business which Mr Lester attended to vigorously in person, but the existence of which Alvar never seemed to realise. His grandmother’s charities he understood, and was rather amused at seeing the old women come to fetch their blankets and cloaks; but what could he have to do with any of these people?

Tenants’ dinners and choir-suppers might form a good opportunity for introducing him to his neighbours; and Cheriton, who was the life and soul of such festivities, tried to put him forward; but he only made magnificent silent bows, and comported himself much as his brother Jack had done, when in an access of gruff shyness and democratic ardour he had called the Christmas feasts “relics of feudalism,” and had shown his advanced notions of the union of classes by never speaking a word to any one.

Between the newcomer and his father there was an impassable distance. Alvar never failed in courtesy; but Cheriton’s quick eyes soon perceived that he resented deeply the long neglect; saw too that the sight of him was a pain and distress to his father, sharpened his temper, and produced constant rubs; though he was careful to do everything that the proper introduction of his son demanded of him. A grand ball was organised in his honour, and also a stiff and ponderous dinner-party at which Alvar was to be introduced to the county magnates.

Special invitations were also sent to him by their various neighbours, and he created quite an excitement in the dull country neighbourhood. Mr Lester only half liked being congratulated on his son’s charming foreign manners; but still, as a novelty, Alvar had great attractions, and in society never seemed shy or at a loss. Mr Lester’s brother-in-law, Judge Cheriton, invited the stranger to pay him a visit when the season had a little advanced, and to let him see a little London society; for which attention Mr Lester, who hated London, was very grateful, as Alvar’s grandfather had Spanish friends there, and it would have been too intolerable for the heir of Oakby to have appeared there under auspices which, however distinguished, Mr Lester thought suitable only to a political refugee or a music master.

He had, when he had ceased to pay for Alvar’s English tutor, made him an allowance which had been magnificent in Spain, and greatly added to Alvar’s consideration there, and he now increased this to what he considered a sufficient sum for his eldest son’s dignity. In short he did everything but overcome his personal distaste to him; he never willingly spoke to him, and the very sight of him was an irritation to him. He got less too than usual of Cheriton’s company; their walks, and talks, and consultations were curtailed by Alvar’s requirements. Indeed Cherry was pulled in many different directions, and he ended by sacrificing all the reading that was to have been got through during the vacation. For the home life was very difficult, and the more they saw of the stranger the less they liked him.

“He’s not of our sort,” said Bob, as if that settled the matter, not perceiving that his slowness to receive impressions, and difficulty in accommodating himself to a new life, might spring as much from his Lester blood as from his Spanish breeding.

“He might try and look like an Englishman,” growled Jack.

“When you go to Spain, we shall see you in a sombrero dancing under the orange-trees to a pair of castanets,” retorted Cheriton. “We should all be so ready at foreign languages and so accommodating, shouldn’t we?”

Alvar’s individuality was not to be ignored, though unfortunately it was very distasteful to his kindred. He was so dignified, so terribly polite they were half afraid of him, and as the awe wore off, they wanted to quarrel with him. He announced that he loved riding, and seemed to know something of horses; he played billiards much too well to be a pleasant opponent to his father, he sang much too quaintly and prettily for his family to appreciate, and he played the guitar! Even Cheriton wished it had been a fiddle. He hated going to walk, smoked incessantly, and was indifferent to every one except Cheriton, to whom he deferred in everything.

Poor Cheriton! “Among the blind, the one-eyed is king,” and his sentiments were amazingly liberal for Oakby; but he was very young and deeply attached to his home and his surroundings, too tender-hearted not to be touched at Alvar’s preference, imaginative enough to realise his position, and yet repelled and put out of countenance by his peculiarities. To be tenderly addressed as “my brother,” “mi caro,” “mi Cheriton,” “Cherito mio,” to be deferred to on all occasions, and even told in the hearing of Jack and Bob “that his eyes when he laughed were the colour of the Mediterranean on a sunny day,” was, as he said, “so out-facing, that it made him feel a perfect fool,” especially when his brothers echoed it at every turn.

Yet he put up with it. It was so hard on the poor fellow if no one was kind to him! So hard, he added to himself, to be an unloved and unloving son.

Perhaps, after all, Alvar’s essential strangeness prevented Cheriton from feeling himself put aside.

Cheriton was very popular at school and at college. He had strong, intellectual ambitions, and though of less powerful mind than Jack, had attained to much graceful scholarship and possessed much command of language. He hoped to take honours, to go to the bar, and distinguish himself there under his uncle, Judge Cheriton’s, auspices. He had too a further and a sweeter hope, hitherto confided to no one.

But it was a certain “genius for loving” that really distinguished him from his fellows – really made him every one’s friend. He did not seek out his poorer neighbours so much from a sense of duty, as because his heart went out to every one belonging to Oakby, nay, every animal, every bit of ground – nothing was a trouble that conduced to the welfare of the place. This loving-kindness was a natural gift; but Cheriton made good use of it. He had high principles, and deep within his soul, struggling with the temptations of this ardent nature, were the pure aspirations and the capability of fervent piety which have made saints – responsibilities with which he was born.

But all this fire and force did not make tolerance easy; he was full of instinctive prejudices, and perhaps his greatest aids in his dealings with his new brother were his joyous unchecked spirits and the keen sense of the ludicrous that enabled him to laugh at himself as well as at other people.

Some little time after Alvar’s arrival there was a deep fall of snow, and while the pond was being swept for skating, the young Lesters, with Harry Seyton and the children from the rectory, who had come up for the purpose, proceeded to erect a snow man of gigantic proportions in front of the house.

“What a fright you have made of him!” said Cheriton, coming up with Alvar as they finished; “he has no nose and no expression.”

“Well, come and do his nose, then; it keeps on coming off,” said Nettie, who was standing on a bench to put the finishing touches.

Cherry was nothing loath, and was soon engaged in moulding the snowy countenance with the skill of long practice, while Alvar, with his great crimson-lined cloak wrapped about him, stood looking on.

“Give him a good lumpy nose, that won’t melt,” said Cherry. “There, he’s lovely! got an old pipe for him?”

As he spoke a great snowball came stinging against his face, and in a moment, to the astonishment of Alvar, the whole party set on Cherry, and a wild bout of snowballing ensued.

“No, no, that’s not fair! I can’t fight you all,” shouted Cherry; “and you’ve got all your snowballs ready made. Give me the girls, and then – Come on.”

“Oh, yes, yes; we’ll be on Cherry’s side,” cried Nettie.

It was a picturesque scene enough – the pale blue sky overhead, the dazzling snow under foot, the little girls in their scarlet cloaks or petticoats, their long hair flying as they darted in and out, the great boys struggling, wrestling, knocking each other about with small mercy. No one threw a snowball at Alvar; perhaps they had forgotten him, as he stood silently watching them as if they were a troop of Berserkers, till the contest terminated in a tremendous struggle between Cheriton and Jack, who were, of course, much the biggest of the party. Cherry was getting decidedly the worst of it, and either tripped in the rough snow or was thrown down into it by Jack, when suddenly Alvar threw off his cloak, stepped forward, and seizing Jack by the shoulders, pulled him back with sudden irresistible force.

“By Jove!” was all that Jack could utter.

“What on earth did you do that for?” ejaculated Cherry as soon as he gained his breath and his feet.

“He might have hurt you, my brother,” said Alvar, who looked flushed, and for once excited. “And besides, I am stronger than either of you. I could struggle with you both.”