It is perhaps time that the reader should know a little of the ancient
house and loyalty where many of the personages of whose history these
pages treat, lived and moved and had their being.
The Abbey House, so called, was in reality that part of the monastery
which had been devoted to the use of successive generations of priors.
It was, like the ruins that lay to its rear, entirely built of grey
masonry, rendered greyer still by the lichens that fed upon its walls,
which were of exceeding strength and thickness. It was a long,
irregular building, and roofed with old and narrow tiles, which from
red had, in the course of ages, faded to sober russet. The banqueting-
hall was a separate building at its northern end, and connected with
the main dwelling by a covered way. The aspect of the house was
westerly, and the front windows looked on to an expanse of park-like
land, heavily timbered with oaks of large size, some of them pollards
that might have pushed their first leaves in the time of William the
Conqueror. In spring their vivid green was diversified by the reddish
brown of a double line of noble walnut-trees, a full half mile in
length, marking the track of the carriage-drive that led to the Roxham
high-road.
Behind the house lay the walled garden, celebrated in the time of the
monks as being a fortnight earlier than any other in the neighbourhood.
Skirting the southern wall of this garden, which was a little less than
a hundred paces long, the visitor reached the scattered ruins of the
old monastery that had for generations served as a stone quarry to the
surrounding villages, but of which enough was left, including a
magnificent gateway, to show how great had been its former extent.
Passing on through these, he would come to an enclosure that marked the
boundaries of the old graveyard, now turned to agricultural uses, and
then to the church itself, a building with a very fine tower, but
possessing no particular interest, if we except some exceedingly good
brasses and a colossal figure of a monk cut out of the solid heart of
an oak, and supposed to be the effigy of a prior of the abbey who died
in the time of Edward I. Below the church again, and about one hundred
and fifty paces from it, was the vicarage, a comparatively modern
building, possessing no architectural attraction, and evidently reared
out of the remains of the monastery.
At the south end of the Abbey House itself lay a small grass plot and
pleasure-garden fringed with shrubberies, and adorned with two fine
cedar-trees. One of these trees was at its further extremity, and under
it there ran a path cut through the dense shrubbery. This path, which
was edged with limes and called the “Tunnel Walk,” led to the lake, and
debouched in the little glade where stood Caresfoot’s Staff. The lake
itself was a fine piece of water, partly natural and partly constructed
by the monks, measuring a full mile round, and from fifty to two
hundred yards in width. It was in the shape of a man’s shoe, the heel
facing west like the house, but projecting beyond it, the narrow part
representing the hollow of the instep, being exactly opposite to it,
and the sole swelling out in an easterly direction.
Bratham Abbey was altogether a fine old place, but the most remarkable
thing about it was its air of antiquity and the solemnity of its peace.
It did not, indeed, strike the spirit with that religious awe which is
apt to fall upon us as we gaze along the vaulted aisles of great
cathedrals, but it appealed perhaps with equal strength to the softer
and more reflective side of our nature. For generation after generation
that house had been the home of men like ourselves; they had passed and
were forgotten, but it remained, the sole witness of the stories of
their lives. Hands of which the very bones had long since crumbled into
dust had planted those old oaks and walnuts, that still donned their
green robes in summer, and shed them in the autumn, to stand great
skeletons through the winter months, awaiting the resurrection of the
spring.
There lay upon the place and its surroundings a burden of dead lives,
intangible, but none the less real. The air was thick with memories, as
suggestive as the grey dust in a vault. Even in the summer, in the full
burst of nature revelling in her strength, the place was sad. But in
the winter, when the wind came howling through the groaning trees, and
drove the grey scud across an ashy sky, when the birds were dumb, and
there were no cattle on the sodden lawn, its isolated melancholy was a
palpable thing.
That hoary house might have been a gateway of the dim land we call the
Past, looking down in stony sorrow on the follies of those who so soon
must cross its portals, and, to the wise who could hear the lesson,
pregnant with echoes of the warning voices of many generations.
Here it was that Angela grew up to womanhood.
Some nine and a half years had passed from the date of the events
described in the foregoing pages, when one evening Mr. Fraser bethought
him that he had been indoors all day, and proposed reading till late
that night, and that therefore he had better take some exercise.
A tall and somewhat nervous-looking man, with dark eyes, a sensitive
mouth, and that peculiar stoop and pallor of complexion which those
devoted to much study almost invariably acquire, he had “student”
written on his face. His history was a sufficiently common one. He
possessed academical abilities of a very high order, and had in his
youth distinguished himself greatly at college, both as a classical and
a mathematical scholar. When quite young, he was appointed, through the
influence of a relation, to his present living, where the income was
good and the population very small indeed. Freed from all necessity for
exertion, he shut himself up with his books, having his little round of
parish work for relaxation, and never sought to emerge from the quiet
of his aimless studies to struggle for fame and place in the laborious
world. Mr. Fraser was what people call an able man thrown away. If they
had known his shy, sensitive nature a little better, they would have
understood that he was infinitely more suited for the solitary and
peaceful lot in life which he had chosen, than to become a unit in the
turbulent and greedy crowd that is struggling through all the ages up
the slippery slopes of the temple of that greatest of our gods—Success.
There are many such men, probably you, my reader, know one or two. With
infinite labour they store up honey from the fields of knowledge,
collect endless data from the statistics of science, pile up their
calculations against the very stars; and all to no end. As a rule, they
do not write books; they gather the learning for the learning’s sake,
and for the very love of it rejoice to count their labour lost. And
thus they go on from year to year, until the golden bowl is broken and
the pitcher broken at the fountain, and the gathered knowledge sinks,
or appears to sink, back to whence it came. Alas, that one generation
cannot hand on its wisdom and experience—more especially its
experience—to another in its perfect form! If it could, we men should
soon become as gods.
It was a mild evening in the latter end of October when Mr. Fraser
started on his walk. The moon was up in the heavens as he, an hour
later, made his way from the side of the lake, where he had been
wandering, back to the churchyard through which he had to pass to reach
the vicarage. Just before he came to the gate, however, he was
surprised, in such a solitary spot, to see a slight figure leaning
against the wall opposite the place where lay the mortal remains of the
old squire and his daughter-in-law, Hilda. He stood still and watched;
the figure appeared to be gazing steadily at the graves. Presently it
turned and saw him, and he recognized the great grey eyes and golden
hair of little Angela Caresfoot.
“Angela, my dear, what are you doing here at this time of night?” he
asked, in some surprise.
She blushed a little as she shook hands rather awkwardly with him.
“Don’t be angry with me,” she said in a deprecatory voice; “but I was
so lonely this evening that I came here for company.”
“Came here for company! What do you mean?”
She hung her head.
“Come,” he said, “tell me what you mean.”
“I don’t quite know myself. How can I tell you?”
He looked more puzzled than ever, and she observed it and went on:
“I will try to tell you, but you must not be cross like Pigott when she
cannot understand me. Sometimes I feel ever so much alone, as though I
was looking for something and could not find it, and then I come and
stand here and look at my mother’s grave, and I get company and am not
lonely any more. That is all I know; I cannot tell you any more. Do you
think me silly? Pigott does.”
“I think you are a very strange child. Are you not afraid to come here
alone at night?”
“Afraid—oh, no! Nobody comes here; the people in the village dare not
come here after dark, because they say that the ruins are full of
spirits. Jakes told me that. But I must be stupid; I cannot see them,
and I want so very much to see them. I hope it is not wrong, but I told
my father so the other day, and he turned white and was angry with
Pigott for giving me such ideas; but you know Pigott did not give them
to me at all. I am not afraid to come; I like it, it is so quiet, and,
if one listens enough in the quiet, I always think one may hear
something that other people do not hear.”
“Do you hear anything, then?”
“Yes, I hear things, but I cannot understand them. Listen to the wind
in the branches of that tree, the chestnut, off which the leaf is
falling now. It says something, if only I could catch it.”
“Yes, child, yes, you are right in a way; all Nature tells the same
eternal tale, if our ears were not stopped to its voices,” he answered,
with a sigh; indeed, the child’s talk had struck a vein of thought
familiar to his own mind, and, what is more, it deeply interested him;
there was a quaint, far-off wisdom in it.
“It is pleasant to-night, is it not, Mr. Fraser?” said the little maid,
“though everything is dying. The things die softly without any pain
this year; last year they were all killed in the rain and wind. Look at
that cloud floating across the moon, is it not beautiful? I wonder what
it is the shadow of; I think all the clouds are shadows of something up
in heaven.”
“And when there are no clouds?”
“Oh! then heaven is quite still and happy.”
“But heaven is always happy.”
“Is it? I don’t understand how it can be always happy if _we_ go there.
There must be so many to be sorry for.”
Mr. Fraser mused a little; that last remark was difficult to answer. He
looked at the fleecy cloud, and, falling into her humour, said—
“I think your cloud is the shadow of an eagle carrying a lamb to its
little ones.”
“And I think,” she answered confidently, “that it is the shadow of an
angel carrying a baby home.”
Again he was silenced; the idea was infinitely more poetical than his
own.
“This,” he reflected, “is a child of a curious mental calibre.”
Before he could pursue the thought further, she broke in upon it in
quite a different strain.
“Have you seen Jack and Jill? They _are_ jolly.”
“Who are Jack and Jill?”
“Why, my ravens, of course. I got them out of the old tree with a hole
in it at the end of the lake.”
“The tree at the end of the lake! Why, the hole where the ravens nest
is fifty feet up. Who got them for you?”
“I got them myself. Sam—you know Sam—was afraid to go up. He said he
should fall, and that the old birds would peck his eyes. So I went by
myself one morning quite early, with a bag tied round my neck, and got
up. It was hard work, and I nearly tumbled once; but I got on the bough
beneath the hole at last. It shook very much; it is so rotten, you have
no idea. There were three little ones in the nest, all with great
mouths. I took two, and left one for the old birds. When I was nearly
down again, the old birds found me out, and flew at me, and beat my
head with their wings, and pecked—oh, they did peck! Look here,” and
she showed him a scar on her hand; “that’s where they pecked. But I
stuck to my bag, and got down at last, and I’m glad I did, for we are
great friends now; and I am sure the cross old birds would be quite
pleased if they knew how nicely I am educating their young ones, and
how their manners have improved. But I say, Mr. Fraser, don’t tell
Pigott; she cannot climb trees, and does not like to see me do it. She
does not know I went after them myself.”
Mr. Fraser laughed.
“I won’t tell her, Angela, my dear; but you must be careful—you might
tumble and kill yourself.”
“I don’t think I shall, Mr. Fraser, unless I am meant to. God looks
after me as much when I am up a tree as when I am upon the ground.”
Once more he had nothing to say; he could not venture to disturb her
faith.
“I will walk home with you, my dear. Tell me. Angela, would you like to
learn?”
“Learn!—learn what?”
“Books, and the languages that other nations, nations that have passed
away, used to talk, and how to calculate numbers and distances.”
“Yes, I should like to learn very much; but who will teach me? I have
learnt all Pigott knows two years ago, and since then I have been
trying to learn about the trees and flowers and stars; but I look and
watch, and can’t understand.”
“Ah! my dear, contact with Nature is the highest education; but the
mind that would appreciate her wonders must have a foundation of
knowledge to work upon. The uneducated man is rarely sensitive to the
thousand beauties and marvels of the fields around him, and the skies
above him. But, if you like, I will teach you, Angela. I am practically
an idle man, and it will give me great pleasure; but you must promise
to work and do what I tell you.”
“Oh, how good you are! Of course I will work. When am I to begin?”
“I don’t know—to-morrow, if you like; but I must speak to your father
first.”
Her face fell a little at the mention of her father’s name, but
presently she said, quietly—
“My father, he will not care if I learn or not. I hardly ever see my
father; he does not like me. I see nobody but Pigott and you and old
Jakes, and Sam sometimes. You need not ask my father; he will never
miss me whilst I am learning. Ask Pigott.”
At that moment Pigott herself hove into view, in a great flurry.
“Oh, here you are, Miss Angela! Where have you been to, you naughty
girl? At some of your star-gazing tricks again, I’ll be bound,
frightening the life out of a body. It’s just too bad of you, Miss
Angela.”
The little girl looked at her with a peculiarly winning smile, and took
her very solid hand between her own tiny palms.
“Don’t be cross, Pigott, dear,” she said. “I didn’t mean to frighten
you. I couldn’t help going—I couldn’t indeed; and then I stopped
talking to Mr. Fraser.”
“There, there, I should just like to know who can be cross with you
when you put on those ways. Are your feet wet? Ah! I thought so. Run on
in and take them off.”
“Won’t that be just a little difficult?” and she was gone with a merry
laugh.
“There, sir, that’s just like her, catching a body up like and twisting
what she says, till you don’t know which is head and which is heels.
I’ll be bound you found her down yonder;” and she nodded towards the
churchyard.
“Yes.”
Pigott drew a little nearer, and spoke in a low voice.
“‘Tis my belief, sir, that that child sees _things_; she is just the
oddest child I ever saw. There’s nothing she likes better than to slip
out of a night, and to go to that there beastly churchyard, saving your
presence, for ‘company,’ as she calls it—nice sort of company, indeed.
And it is just the same way with storms. You remember that dreadful
gale a month ago, the one that took down the North Grove and blew the
spire off Rewtham Church. Well, just when it was at its worst, and I
was a-sitting and praying that the roof might keep over our heads, I
look round for Angela, and can’t see her. ‘Some of your tricks again,’
thinks I to myself; and just then up comes Mrs. Jakes to say that Sam
had seen little missy creeping down the tunnel walk. I was that scared
that I ran down, got hold of Sam, for Jakes said he wouldn’t go out
with all them trees a-flying about in the air like straws—no, not for a
thousand pounds, and off we set after her.” Here Pigott paused to groan
at the recollection of that walk.
“Well,” said Mr. Fraser, who was rather interested—everything about
this queer child interested him; “where did you find her?”
“Well, sir, you know where the old wall runs out into the water, before
Caresfoot’s Staff there? Well, at the end of it there’s a post sunk in,
with a ring in it to tie boats to. Now, would you believe it? out there
at the end of the wall, and tied to the ring by a scarf passed round
her middle, was that dreadful child. She was standing there, her back
against the post, right in the teeth of the gale, with the spray
dashing over her, her arms stretched out before her, her hat gone, her
long hair standing out behind straight as an iron bar, and her eyes
flashing as though they were on fire, and all the while there were the
great trees crashing down all round in a way enough to make a body sick
with fright. We got her back safe, thank God; but how long we shall
keep her, I’m sure I don’t know. Now she is drowning herself in the
lake, for she takes to the water like a duck, and now breaking her neck
off trees, and now going to ghosts in the churchyard for company. It’s
wearing me to the bone—that’s what it is.”
Mr. Fraser smiled, for, to tell the truth, Pigott’s bones were pretty
comfortably covered.
“Come,” he said, “you would not part with her for all her wicked deeds,
would you?”
“Part with her,” answered Pigott, in hot indignation, “part with my
little beauty? I would rather part with my head. The love, there never
was another like her, nor never will be, with her sweet ways; and, if I
know anything about girls, she’ll be the beauty of England, she will.
She’s made for a beautiful woman; and look at them eyes and forehead
and hair—where did you ever see the like? And, as for her queer ways,
what can you expect from a child as has got a great empty mind and
nothing to put in it, and no one to talk to but a common woman like me,
and a father”—here she dropped her voice—“as is a miser, and hates the
sight of his own flesh and blood?”
“Hush! you should not say such things, Pigott! Now I will tell you
something; I am going on to ask your master to allow me to educate
Angela.”
“I’m right glad to hear it, sir. She’s sharp enough to learn anything,
and it’s kind of you to teach her. If you can make her mind like what
her body will be if she lives, somebody will be a lucky man one of
these days. Good-night, sir, and many thanks for bringing missy home.”
Next day Angela began her education.