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
yellow-hammers, who had been regaling themselves among 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 trowsers
with his whip, we will steal a hurried glance toward 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 labeled "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 horse-shoes, &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 teaspoon, 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 heirloom. There were many other curiosities of
congenial nature and equal value--"_quæ nunc 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 was the employment of the study--let us turn to the
recreations in the drawing-room, or rather parlor. 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 parlor
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
moralizing poems which delighted the thanes and ealdermen of old, in
order to see that the Daudlers 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-everythingness
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 organization, 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!"