"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 _naivete_, 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.