Frank looked right ahead, and saw a square house that, in spite
of modern sash-windows, was evidently of remote antiquity--a high
conical roof; a stack of tall quaint chimney-pots of red baked clay
(like those at Sutton Place in Surrey) dominating over isolated
vulgar smoke-conductors, of the ignoble fashion of present times;
a dilapidated groin-work, encasing within a Tudor arch a door of
the comfortable date of George III., and the peculiarly dingy and
weather-stained appearance of the small finely finished bricks, of
which the habitation was built,--all showed the abode of former
generations adapted with tasteless irreverence to the habits of
descendants unenlightened by Pugin, or indifferent to the poetry of
the past. The house had emerged suddenly upon Frank out of the gloomy
waste land, for it was placed in a hollow, and sheltered from sight by
a disorderly group of ragged, dismal, valetudinarian fir-trees, until
an abrupt turn of the road cleared that screen, and left the desolate
abode bare to the discontented eye. Frank dismounted; the man held his
pony; and, after smoothing his cravat, the smart Etonian sauntered up
to the door, and startled the solitude of the place with a loud peal
from the modern brass knocker--a knock which instantly brought forth an
astonished starling who had built under the eaves of the gable roof,
and called up a cloud of sparrows, tomtits, and yellowhammers, who had
been regaling themselves amongst the litter of a slovenly farm-yard
that lay in full sight to the right of the house, fenced off by a
primitive, paintless wooden rail. In process of time a sow, accompanied
by a thriving and inquisitive family, strolled up to the gate of the
fence, and, leaning her nose on the lower bar of the gate, contemplated
the visitor with much curiosity and some suspicion.
While Frank is still without, impatiently swingeing his white trousers
with his whip, we will steal a hurried glance towards the respective
members of the family within. Mr Leslie, the _pater familias_, is in
a little room called his 'study,' to which he regularly retires every
morning after breakfast, rarely reappearing till one o'clock, which
is his unfashionable hour for dinner. In what mysterious occupations
Mr Leslie passes those hours no one ever formed a conjecture. At the
present moment he is seated before a little rickety bureau, one leg
of which (being shorter than the other) is propped up by sundry old
letters and scraps of newspapers; and the bureau is open, and reveals
a great number of pigeon-holes and divisions, filled with various odds
and ends, the collection of many years. In some of these compartments
are bundles of letters, very yellow, and tied in packets with faded
tape; in another, all by itself, is a fragment of plum-pudding stone,
which Mr Leslie has picked up in his walks and considered a rare
mineral. It is neatly labelled "Found in Hollow Lane, May 21st, 1824,
by Maunder Slugge Leslie, Esq." The next division holds several bits
of iron in the shape of nails, fragments of horseshoes, &c., which Mr
Leslie had also met with in his rambles, and, according to a harmless
popular superstition, deemed it highly unlucky not to pick up, and,
once picked up, no less unlucky to throw away. _Item_, in the adjoining
pigeon-hole, a goodly collection of pebbles with holes in them,
preserved for the same reason, in company with a crooked sixpence:
_item_, neatly arranged in fanciful mosaics, several periwinkles,
Blackamoor's teeth, (I mean the shell so called,) and other specimens
of the conchiferous ingenuity of Nature, partly inherited from some
ancestral spinster, partly amassed by Mr Leslie himself in a youthful
excursion to the sea-side. There were the farm-bailiff's accounts,
several files of bills, an old stirrup, three sets of knee and shoe
buckles which had belonged to Mr Leslie's father, a few seals tied
together by a shoe-string, a shagreen toothpick case, a tortoiseshell
magnifying glass to read with, his eldest son's first copybooks, his
second son's ditto, his daughter's ditto, and a lock of his wife's hair
arranged in a true-lover's knot, framed and glazed. There were also a
small mousetrap; a patent corkscrew, too good to be used in common;
fragments of a silver tea spoon, that had, by natural decay, arrived
at a dissolution of its parts; a small brown Holland bag, containing
halfpence of various dates, as far back as Queen Anne, accompanied by
two French _sous_, and a German _silber gros_; the which miscellany Mr
Leslie magniloquently called "his coins," and had left in his will as a
family heir-loom. There were many other curiosities of congenial nature
and equal value--"_quænunc describere longum est_." Mr Leslie was
engaged at this time in what is termed "putting things to rights"--an
occupation he performed with exemplary care once a-week. This was his
day; and he had just counted his coins, and was slowly tying them up
again, when Frank's knock reached his ears.
Mr Maunder Slugge Leslie paused, shook his head as if incredulously,
and was about to resume his occupation, when he was seized with a fit
of yawning which prevented the bag being tied for full two minutes.
While such the employment of the study--let us turn to the recreations
in the drawing-room, or rather parlour. A drawing-room there was on the
first floor, with a charming look-out, not on the dreary fir-trees,
but on the romantic undulating forest-land; but the drawing-room had
not been used since the death of the last Mrs Leslie. It was deemed
too good to sit in, except when there was company; there never being
company, it was never sate in. Indeed, now the paper was falling off
the walls with the damp, and the rats, mice, and moths--those "_edaces
rerum_"--had eaten, between them, most of the chair-bottoms and a
considerable part of the floor. Therefore the parlour was the sole
general sitting-room; and being breakfasted in, dined and supped in,
and, after supper, smoked in by Mr Leslie to the accompaniment of rum
and water, it is impossible to deny that it had what is called "a
smell"--a comfortable wholesome family smell--speaking of numbers,
meals, and miscellaneous social habitation. There were two windows:
one looked full on the fir-trees; the other on the farm-yard, with the
pigsty closing the view. Near the fir-tree window sate Mrs Leslie;
before her, on a high stool, was a basket of the children's clothes
that wanted mending. A work-table of rosewood inlaid with brass, which
had been a wedding present, and was a costly thing originally, but in
that peculiar taste which is vulgarly called "Brumagem," stood at hand:
the brass had started in several places, and occasionally made great
havoc on the children's fingers and Mrs Leslie's gown; in fact, it was
the liveliest piece of furniture in the house, thanks to that petulant
brass-work, and could not have been more mischievous if it had been a
monkey. Upon the work-table lay a housewife and thimble, and scissors
and skeins of worsted and thread, and little scraps of linen and cloth
for patches. But Mrs Leslie was not actually working--she was preparing
to work; she had been preparing to work for the last hour and a half.
Upon her lap she supported a novel, by a lady who wrote much for a
former generation, under the name of "Mrs Bridget Blue Mantle." She had
a small needle in her left hand, and a very thick piece of thread in
her right; occasionally she applied the end of the said thread to her
lips, and then--her eyes fixed on the novel--made a blind vacillating
attack at the eye of the needle. But a camel would have gone through it
with quite as much ease. Nor did the novel alone engage Mrs Leslie's
attention, for ever and anon she interrupted herself to scold the
children; to inquire "what o'clock it was;" to observe that "Sarah
would never suit," and to wonder why Mr Leslie would not see that the
work-table was mended. Mrs Leslie had been rather a pretty woman. In
spite of a dress at once slatternly and economical, she has still the
air of a lady--rather too much so, the hard duties of her situation
considered. She is proud of the antiquity of her family on both sides;
her mother was of the venerable stock of the Daudlers of Daudle Place,
a race that existed before the Conquest. Indeed, one has only to read
our earliest chronicles, and to glance over some of those long-winded
moralising poems which delighted the thanes and ealdermen of old,
in order to see that the Daudles must have been a very influential
family before William the First turned the country topsy-turvy. While
the mother's race was thus indubitably Saxon, the father's had not
only the name but the peculiar idiosyncrasy of the Normans, and went
far to establish that crotchet of the brilliant author of _Sybil,
or the Two Nations_, as to the continued distinction between the
conquering and conquered populations. Mrs Leslie's father boasted the
name of Montfydget; doubtless of the same kith and kin as those great
barons Montfichet, who once owned such broad lands and such turbulent
castles. A high-nosed, thin, nervous, excitable progeny, those same
Montfydgets, as the most troublesome Norman could pretend to be. This
fusion of race was notable to the most ordinary physiognomist in the
_physique_ and in the _morale_ of Mrs Leslie. She had the speculative
blue eye of the Saxon, and the passionate high nose of the Norman;
she had the musing do-nothingness of the Daudlers, and the reckless
have-at-every-thingness of the Montfydgets. At Mrs Leslie's feet, a
little girl with her hair about her ears, (and beautiful hair it was
too) was amusing herself with a broken-nosed doll. At the far end of
the room, before a high desk, sate Frank's Eton schoolfellow, the
eldest son. A minute or two before Frank's alarum had disturbed the
tranquillity of the household, he had raised his eyes from the books
on the desk, to glance at a very tattered copy of the Greek Testament,
in which his brother Oliver had found a difficulty that he came to
Randal to solve. As the young Etonian's face was turned to the light,
your first impression, on seeing it, would have been melancholy but
respectful interest--for the face had already lost the joyous character
of youth--there was a wrinkle between the brows; and the lines that
speak of fatigue, were already visible under the eyes and about the
mouth; the complexion was sallow, the lips were pale. Years of study
had already sown, in the delicate organisation, the seeds of many an
infirmity and many a pain; but if your look had rested longer on that
countenance, gradually your compassion might have given place to some
feeling uneasy and sinister, a feeling akin to fear. There was in
the whole expression so much of cold calm force, that it belied the
debility of the frame. You saw there the evidence of a mind that was
cultivated, and you felt that in that cultivation there was something
formidable. A notable contrast to this countenance, prematurely worn
and eminently intelligent, was the round healthy face of Oliver, with
slow blue eyes, fixed hard on the penetrating orbs of his brother,
as if trying with might and main to catch from them a gleam of that
knowledge with which they shone clear and frigid as a star.
At Frank's knock, Oliver's slow blue eyes sparkled into animation, and
he sprang from his brother's side. The little girl flung back the hair
from her face, and stared at her mother with a look which spoke wonder
and fright.
The young student knit his brows, and then turned wearily back to the
books on his desk.
"Dear me," cried Mrs Leslie, "who can that possibly be? Oliver, come
from the window, sir, this instant, you will be seen! Juliet, run--ring
the bell--no, go to the stairs, and say, 'not at home.' Not at home on
any account," repeated Mrs Leslie nervously, for the Montfydget blood
was now in full flow.
In another minute or so, Frank's loud boyish voice was distinctly heard
at the outer door.
Randal slightly started.
"Frank Hazeldean's voice," said he; "I should like to see him, mother."
"See him," repeated Mrs Leslie in amaze, "see him!--and the room in
this state!"
Randal might have replied that the room was in no worse state than
usual; but he said nothing. A slight flush came and went over his pale
face; and then he leant his cheek on his hand, and compressed his lips
firmly.
The outer door closed with a sullen inhospitable jar, and a slip-shod
female servant entered with a card between her finger and thumb.
"Who is that for?--give it to me, Jenny," cried Mrs Leslie.
But Jenny shook her head, laid the card on the desk beside Randal, and
vanished without saying a word.
"Oh look, Randal, look up," cried Oliver, who had again rushed to the
window; "such a pretty gray pony!"
Randal did look up; nay, he went deliberately to the window, and gazed
a moment on the high-mettled pony, and the well-dressed high-spirited
rider. In that moment changes passed over Randal's countenance
more rapidly than clouds over the sky in a gusty day. Now envy and
discontent, with the curled lip and the gloomy scowl; now hope and
proud self-esteem, with the clearing brow, and the lofty smile; and
then all again became cold, firm, and close, as he walked back to his
books, seated himself resolutely, and said half-aloud,--
"Well, KNOWLEDGE IS POWER!"