THE OLD SQUIRE AND ALICE MAYBELL.
Wyvern is a very pretty old house. It is built of a light gray stone,
in the later Tudor style. A portion of it is overgrown with thick ivy.
It stands not far away from the high road, among grand old trees, and
is one of the most interesting features in a richly-wooded landscape,
that rises into little hills, and, breaking into rocky and
forest-darkened glens, and sometimes into dimpling hollows, where the
cattle pasture beside pleasant brooks, presents one of the prettiest
countries to be found in England.
The old squire, Henry Fairfield, has seen his summer and his autumn
days out. It is winter with him now.
He is not a pleasant picture of an English squire, but such,
nevertheless, as the old portraits on the walls of Wyvern here and
there testify, the family of Fairfield have occasionally turned out.
He is not cheery nor kindly. Bleak, dark, and austere as a northern
winter, is the age of that gaunt old man.
He is too proud to grumble, and never asked any one for sympathy. But
it is plain that he parts with his strength and his pleasures
bitterly. Of course, seeing the old churchyard, down in the hollow at
the left, as he stands of an evening on the steps, thoughts will
strike him. He does not acquiesce in death. He resents the order of
things. But he keeps his repinings to himself, and retaliates his
mortification on the people about him.
Though his hair is snowy, and his shoulders stooped, there is that in
his length of bone and his stature that accords with the tradition of
his early prowess and activity.
He has long been a widower--fully thirty years. He has two sons, and
no daughter. Two sons whom he does not much trust--neither of them
young--Charles and Henry.
By no means young are they. The elder, now forty-three, the younger
only a year or two less. Charles has led a wandering life, and tried a
good many things. He had been fond of play, and other expensive
follies. He had sobered, however, people thought, and it might be his
mission, notwithstanding his wild and wasteful young days, to pay off
the debts of the estate.
Henry, the younger son, a shrewd dealer in horses, liked being king of
his company, condescended to strong ale, made love to the bar-maid at
the “George,” in the little town of Wyvern, and affected the
conversation of dog-fanciers, horse-jockeys, wrestlers, and similar
celebrities.
The old Squire was not much considered, and less beloved, by his sons.
The gaunt old man was, however, more feared by these matured scions
than their pride would have easily allowed. The fears of childhood
survive its pleasures. Something of the ghostly terrors of the nursery
haunt us through life, and the tyrant of early days maintains a
strange and unavowed ascendancy over the imagination, long after his
real power to inflict pain or privation has quite come to an end.
As this tall, grim, handsome old man moves about the room, as he
stands, or sits down, or turns eastward at the Creed in church--as he
marches slowly toppling along the terrace, with his gold-headed cane
in his hand, surveying the long familiar scenes which will soon bloom
and brown no more for him--with sullen eyes, thinking his solitary
thoughts--as in the long summer evenings he dozes in the great chair
by the fire, which even in the dog-days smoulders in the drawing-room
grate--looking like a gigantic effigy of winter--a pair of large and
soft gray eyes follow, or steal towards him--removed when
observed--but ever and anon returning. People have remarked this, and
talked it over, and laughed and shook their heads, and built odd
speculations upon it.
Alice Maybell had grown up from orphan childhood under the roof of
Wyvern. The old squire had been, after a fashion, kind to that pretty
waif of humanity, which a chance wave of fortune had thrown at his
door. She was the child of a distant cousin, who had happened, being a
clergyman, to die in occupation of the vicarage of Wyvern. Her young
mother lay, under the branches of the two great trees, in the lonely
corner of the village churchyard; and not two years later the Vicar
died, and was buried beside her.
Melancholy, gentle Vicar! Some good judges, I believe, pronounced his
sermons admirable. Seedily clothed, with kindly patience visiting his
poor; very frugal--his pretty young wife and he were yet happy in the
light and glow of the true love that is eternal. He was to her the
nonpareil of vicars--the loveliest, wisest, wittiest, and best of men.
She to him--what shall I say? The _same_ beautiful first love. Never a
day older. Every summer threw new gold on her rich hair, and a softer
and brighter bloom on her cheeks, and made her dearer and dearer than
he could speak. He could only look and feel his heart swelling with a
vain yearning to tell the love that lighted his face with its glory
and called a mist to his kind eye.
And then came a time when she had a secret to tell her Willie. Full of
a wild fear and delight, in their tiny drawing-room, clasped in each
other’s arms, they wept for joy, and a kind of wonder and some dim
unspoken tremblings of fear, and loved one another, it seemed, as it
were more desperately than ever.
And then, as he read aloud to her in the evenings, her pretty fingers
were busy with a new sort of work, full of wonderful and delightful
interest. A little guest was coming, a little creature with an
immortal soul, that was to be as clever and handsome as Willie.
“And, oh, Willie, darling, don’t you hope I may live to see it? Ah,
Willie, would not it be sad?”
And then the Vicar, smiling through tears, would put his arms round
her, and comfort her, breaking into a rapturous castle-building and a
painting of pictures of this great new happiness and treasure that was
coming.
And so in due time the little caps and frocks and all the tiny
wardrobe were finished; and the day came when the long-pictured
treasure was to come. It was there; but its young mother’s eyes were
dim, and the pretty hands that had made its little dress and longed to
clasp it were laid beside her, never to stir again.
“The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away--blessed be the name of
the Lord.” Yes, blessed be the name of the Lord for that love that
outlives the separation of death--that saddens and glorifies memory
with its melancholy light, and illuminates far futurity with a lamp
whose trembling ray is the thread that draws us toward heaven. Blessed
in giving and in taking--blessed for the yearning remembrances, and
for the agony of hope.
The little baby--the relic--the treasure was there. Poor little
forlorn baby! And with this little mute companion to look at and sit
by, his sorrow was stealing away into a wonderful love; and in this
love a consolation and a living fountain of sympathy with his darling
who was gone.
A trouble of a new kind had come. Squire Fairfield, who wanted money,
raised a claim for rent for the vicarage and its little garden. The
Vicar hated law and feared it, and would no doubt have submitted; but
this was a battle in which the Bishop took command, and insisted on
fighting it out. It was a tedious business.
It had lasted two years nearly, and was still alive and angry, when
the Reverend William Maybell took a cold, which no one thought would
signify. A brother clergyman from Willowford kindly undertook his duty
for one Sunday, and on the next he had died.
The Wyvern doctor said the vis-vitæ was wanting--he had lived quite
too low, and had not stamina, and so sank like a child.
But there was more. When on Sundays, as the sweet bell of Wyvern
trembled in the air, the Vicar had walked alone up to the old gray
porch, and saw the two trees near the ivied nook of the
churchyard-wall, a home-sickness yearned at his heart, and when the
hour came his spirit acquiesced in death.
Old Squire Fairfield knew that it was the Bishop who really, and, as I
believe, rightly opposed him, for to this day the vicarage pays no
rent; but the proud and violent man chose to make the Vicar feel his
resentment. He beheld him with a gloomy and thunderous aspect, never a
word more would he exchange with him; he turned his back upon him; he
forbid him the footpath across the fields of Wyvern, that made the way
to church shorter. He walked out of church grimly when his sermon
began. He turned the Vicar’s cow off the common, and made him every
way feel the weight of his displeasure.
Well, now the Vicar was dead. He had borne it all very gently and
sadly, and it was over, a page in the past, no line erasable, no line
addible for ever.
“So Parson’s dead and buried; serve him right,” said the Squire of
Wyvern. “Thankless rascal. You go down and tell them I must have the
house up on the 24th, and if they don’t go, you bundle ’em out, Thomas
Rooke.”
“There’ll be the Vicar’s little child there; who’s to take it in,
Squire?” asked Tom Rooke, after a hesitation.
“You may, or the Bishop, d---- him.”
“I’m a poor man, and, for the Bishop, he’s not like to----”
“Let ’em try the workhouse,” said the Squire, “where many a better
man’s brat is.”
And he gave Tom Rooke a look that might have knocked him down, and
turned his back on him and walked away.
A week or so after he went down himself to the vicarage with Tom
Rooke. Old Dulcibella Crane went over the lower part of the house with
Tom, and the Squire strode up the stairs, and stooping his tall head
as he entered the door, walked into the first room he met with, in a
surly mood.
The clatter of his boots prevented his hearing, till he had got well
into the room, the low crying of a little child in a cradle. He stayed
his step for a moment. He had quite forgotten that unimportant being,
and he half turned to go out again, but changed his mind. He stooped
over the cradle, and the little child’s crying ceased. It was a very
pretty face and large eyes, still wet with tears, that looked up with
an earnest wondering gaze at him from out the tiny blankets.
[IMAGE: images/img_019.jpg
CAPTION:
“The clatter of his boots prevented his hearing, till he had got well
into the room, the low crying of a little child in a cradle. He stayed
his step for a moment. He had quite forgotten that unimportant being,
and he half turned to go out again, but changed his mind.”]
Old Dulcibella Crane had gone down, and the solitude, no doubt,
affrighted it, and there was consolation even in the presence of the
grim Squire, into whose face those large eyes looked with innocent
trust.
Who would have thought it? Below lay the little image of utter human
weakness; above stooped a statue of inflexibility and power, a strong
statue with a grim contracted eye. There was a heart, steeled against
man’s remonstrance, and a pride that would have burst into fury at a
hint of reproof. Below lay the mere wonder and vagueness of dumb
infancy. Could contest be imagined more hopeless! But “the faithful
Creator,” who loved the poor Vicar, had brought those eyes to meet.
The little child’s crying was hushed; big tears hung in its great
wondering eyes, and the little face looked up pale and forlorn. It was
a gaze that lasted while you might count four or five. But its
mysterious work of love was done. “All things were made by Him, and
without Him was not anything made that was made.”
Squire Fairfield walked round this room, and went out and examined the
others, and went downstairs in silence, and when he was going out at
the hall-door he stopped and looked at old Dulcibella Crane, who stood
courtesying at it in great fear, and said he--
“The child’ll be better at home wi’ me, up at Wyvern, and I’ll send
down for it and you in the afternoon, till--something’s settled.”
And on this invitation little Alice Maybell and her nurse, Dulcibella
Crane, came to Wyvern Manor, and had remained there now for twenty
years.