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THE FARRINGDONS
BY ELLEN THORNEYCROFT FOWLER
AUTHOR OF CONCERNING ISABEL CARNABY, A DOUBLE THREAD, ETC.
NEW YORK
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 1900
COPYRIGHT, 1900,
_All rights reserved._
DEDICATION
For all such readers as have chanced to be
Either in Mershire or in Arcady,
I write this book, that each may smile, and say,
"Once on a time I also passed that way."
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I.--THE OSIERFIELD 1
II.--CHRISTOPHER 12
III.--MRS. BATESON'S TEA-PARTY 29
IV.--SCHOOL-DAYS 51
V.--THE MOAT HOUSE 70
VI.--WHIT MONDAY 90
VII.--BROADER VIEWS 114
VIII.--GREATER THAN OUR HEARTS 137
IX.--FELICIA FINDS HAPPINESS 156
X.--CHANGES 187
XI.--MISS FARRINGDON'S WILL 213
XII.--"THE DAUGHTERS OF PHILIP" 232
XIII.--CECIL FARQUHAR 249
XIV.--ON THE RIVER 272
XV.--LITTLE WILLIE 292
XVI.--THIS SIDE OF THE HILLS 306
XVII.--GEORGE FARRINGDON'S SON 325
XVIII.--THE OTHER SIDE OF THE HILLS 346
* * * * *
THE FARRINGDONS
CHAPTER I
THE OSIERFIELD
They herded not with soulless swine,
Nor let strange snares their path environ:
Their only pitfall was a mine--
Their pigs were made of iron.
In the middle of Sedgehill, which is in the middle of Mershire, which is
in the middle of England, there lies a narrow ridge of high table-land,
dividing, as by a straight line, the collieries and ironworks of the
great coal district from the green and pleasant scenery of the western
Midlands. Along the summit of this ridge runs the High Street of the
bleak little town of Sedgehill; so that the houses on the east side of
this street see nothing through their back windows save the huge
slag-mounds and blazing furnaces and tall chimneys of the weird and
terrible, yet withal fascinating, Black Country; while the houses on the
west side of the street have sunny gardens and fruitful orchards,
sloping down toward a fertile land of woods and streams and meadows,
bounded in the far distance by the Clee Hills and the Wrekin, and in the
farthest distance of all by the blue Welsh mountains.
In the dark valley lying to the immediate east of Sedgehill stood the
Osierfield Works, the largest ironworks in Mershire in the good old
days when Mershire made iron for half the world. The owners of these
works were the Farringdons, and had been so for several generations. So
it came to pass that the Farringdons were the royal family of Sedgehill;
and the Osierfield Works was the circle wherein the inhabitants of that
place lived and moved. It was as natural for everybody born in Sedgehill
eventually to work at the Osierfield, as it was for him eventually to
grow into a man and to take unto himself a wife.
The home of the Farringdons was called the Willows, and was separated by
a carriage-drive of half a mile from the town. Its lodge stood in the
High Street, on the western side; and the drive wandered through a fine
old wood, and across an undulating park, till it stopped in front of a
large square house built of gray stone. It was a handsome house inside,
with wonderful oak staircases and Adams chimneypieces; and there was an
air of great stateliness about it, and of very little luxury. For the
Farringdons were a hardy race, whose time was taken up by the making of
iron and the saving of souls; and they regarded sofas and easy-chairs in
very much the same light as they regarded theatres and strong drink,
thereby proving that their spines were as strong as their consciences
were stern.
Moreover, the Farringdons were of "the people called Methodists";
consequently Methodism was the established religion of Sedgehill,
possessing there that prestige which is the inalienable attribute of all
state churches. In the eyes of Sedgehill it was as necessary to
salvation to pray at the chapel as to work at the Osierfield; and the
majority of the inhabitants would as soon have thought of worshipping at
any other sanctuary as of worshipping at the beacon, a pillar which
still marks the highest point of the highest table-land in England.
At the time when this story begins, the joint ownership of the
Osierfield and the Willows was vested in the two Miss Farringdons, the
daughters and co-heiresses of John Farringdon. John Farringdon and his
brother William had been partners, and had arranged between themselves
that William's only child, George, should marry John's eldest daughter,
Maria, and so consolidate the brothers' fortunes and their interest in
the works. But the gods--and George--saw otherwise. George was a
handsome, weak boy, who objected equally to work and to Methodism; and
as his father cared for nothing beyond those sources of interest, and
had no patience for any one who did, the two did not always see eye to
eye. Perhaps if Maria had been more unbending, things might have turned
out differently; but Methodism in its severest aspects was not more
severe than Maria Farringdon. She was a thorough gentlewoman, and
extremely clever; but tenderness was not counted among her excellencies.
George would have been fond of almost any woman who was pretty enough to
be loved and not clever enough to be feared; but his cousin Maria was
beyond even his powers of falling in love, although, to do him justice,
these powers were by no means limited. The end of it was that George
offended his father past forgiveness by running away to Australia rather
than marry Maria, and there disappeared. Years afterward a rumour
reached his people that he had married and died out there, leaving a
widow and an only son; but this rumour had not been verified, as by that
time his father and uncle were dead, and his cousins were reigning in
his stead; and it was hardly to be expected that the proud Miss
Farringdon would take much trouble concerning the woman whom her
weak-kneed kinsman had preferred to herself.
William Farringdon left all his property and his share in the works to
his niece Maria, as some reparation for the insult which his
disinherited son had offered to her; John left his large fortune between
his two daughters, as he never had a son; so Maria and Anne Farringdon
lived at the Willows, and carried on the Osierfield with the help of
Richard Smallwood, who had been the general manager of the collieries
and ironworks belonging to the firm in their father's time, and knew as
much about iron (and most other things) as he did. Maria was a good
woman of business, and she and Richard between them made money as fast
as it had been made in the days of William and John Farringdon. Anne, on
the contrary, was a meek and gentle soul, who had no power of governing
but a perfect genius for obedience, and who was always engaged on the
Herculean task of squaring the sternest dogmas with the most indulgent
practices.
Even in the early days of this history the Miss Farringdons were what is
called "getting on"; but the Willows was, nevertheless, not without a
youthful element in it. Close upon a dozen years ago the two sisters had
adopted the orphaned child of a second cousin, whose young widow had
died in giving birth to a posthumous daughter; and now Elisabeth
Farringdon was the light of the good ladies' eyes, though they would
have considered it harmful to her soul to let her have an inkling of
this fact.
She was not a pretty little girl, which was a source of much sorrow of
heart to her; and she was a distinctly clever little girl, of which she
was utterly unconscious, it being an integral part of Miss Farringdon's
system of education to imbue the young with an overpowering sense of
their own inferiority and unworthiness. During the first decade of her
existence Elisabeth used frequently and earnestly to pray that her hair
might become golden and her eyes brown; but as on this score the heavens
remained as brass, and her hair continued dark brown and her eyes
blue-gray, she changed her tactics, and confined her heroine-worship to
ladies of this particular style of colouring; which showed that, even at
the age of ten, Elisabeth had her full share of adaptability.
One day, when walking with Miss Farringdon to chapel, Elisabeth
exclaimed, _à propos_ of nothing but her own meditations, "Oh! Cousin
Maria, I do wish I was pretty!"
Most people would have been too much afraid of the lady of the Willows
to express so frivolous a desire in her august hearing; but Elisabeth
was never afraid of anybody, and that, perhaps, was one of the reasons
why her severe kinswoman loved her so well.
"That is a vain wish, my child. Favour is deceitful and beauty is vain;
and the Lord looketh on the heart and not on the outward appearance."
"But I wasn't thinking of the Lord," replied Elisabeth: "I was thinking
of other people; and they love you much more if you are pretty than if
you aren't."
"That is not so," said Miss Farringdon--and she believed she was
speaking the truth; "if you serve God and do your duty to your
neighbour, you will find plenty of people ready to love you; and
especially if you carry yourself well and never stoop." Like many
another elect lady, Cousin Maria regarded beauty of face as a vanity,
but beauty of figure as a virtue; and to this doctrine Elisabeth owed
the fact that her back always sloped in the opposite direction to the
backs of the majority of people.
But it would have surprised Miss Farringdon to learn how little real
effect her strict Methodist training had upon Elisabeth; fortunately,
however, few elder people ever do learn how little effect their training
has upon the young committed to their charge; if it were so, life would
be too hard for the generation that has passed the hill-top. Elisabeth's
was one of those happy, pantheistic natures that possess the gift of
finding God everywhere and in everything. She early caught the Methodist
habit of self-analysis and introspection, but in her it did not
develop--as it does in more naturally religious souls--into an almost
morbid conscientiousness and self-depreciation; she merely found an
artistic and intellectual pleasure in taking the machinery of her soul
to pieces and seeing how it worked.
In those days--and, in fact, in all succeeding ones--Elisabeth lived in
a world of imagination. There was not a nook in the garden of the
Willows which was not peopled by creatures of her fancy. At this
particular time she was greatly fascinated by the subject of heathen
mythology, as set forth in Mangnall's Questions, and had devoted herself
to the service of Pallas Athene, having learned that that goddess was
(like herself) not surpassingly beautiful, and was, moreover,
handicapped by the possession of gray eyes. Miss Farringdon would have
been horrified had she known that a portion of the wood was set apart by
Elisabeth as "Athene's Grove," and that the contents of the waste-paper
basket were daily begged from the servants by the devotee, and offered
up, by the aid of real matches, on the shrine of the goddess.
"Have you noticed, sister," Miss Anne remarked on one occasion, "how
much more thoughtful dear Elisabeth is growing?" Miss Anne's life was
one long advertisement of other people's virtues. "She used to be
somewhat careless in letting the fires go out, and so giving the
servants the trouble to relight them; but now she is always going round
the rooms to see if more coal is required, without my ever having to
remind her."
"It is so, and I rejoice. Carelessness in domestic matters is a grave
fault in a young girl, and I am pleased that Elisabeth has outgrown her
habit of wool-gathering, and of letting the fire go out under her very
nose without noticing it. It is a source of thanksgiving to me that the
child is so much more thoughtful and considerate in this matter than she
used to be."
Miss Farringdon's thanksgiving, however, would have been less fervent
had she known that, for the time being, her _protégée_ had assumed the
rôle of a Vestal virgin, and that Elisabeth's care of the fires that
winter was not fulfilment of a duty but part of a game. This, however,
was Elisabeth's way; she frequently received credit for performing a
duty when she was really only taking part in a performance; which merely
meant that she possessed the artist's power of looking at duty through
the haze of idealism, and of seeing that, although it was good, it might
also be made picturesque. Elisabeth was well versed in The Pilgrim's
Progress and The Fairchild Family. The spiritual vicissitudes of Lucy,
Emily, and Henry Fairchild were to her a drama of never-failing
interest; while each besetment of the Crosbie household--which was as
carefully preserved for its particular owner as if sin were a species of
ground game--never failed to thrill her with enjoyable disgust. She
knew a great portion of the Methodist hymn-book by heart, and pondered
long over the interesting preface to that work, wondering much what
"doggerel" and "botches" could be--she inclined to the supposition that
the former were animals and the latter were diseases; but even her vivid
imagination failed to form a satisfactory representation of such queer
kittle-cattle as "feeble expletives." Every Sunday she gloated over the
frontispiece of John Wesley, in his gown and bands and white ringlets,
feeling that, though poor as a picture, it was very superior to the
letterpress; the worst illustrations being better than the best poetry,
as everybody under thirteen must know. But Elisabeth's library was not
confined to the volumes above mentioned; she regularly perused with
interest two little periodicals, called respectively Early Days and The
Juvenile Offering. The former treated of youthful saints at home; and
its white paper cover was adorned by the picture of a shepherd,
comfortably if peculiarly attired in a frock coat and top
hat--presumably to portray that it was Sunday. The latter magazine
devoted itself to histories dealing with youthful saints abroad; and its
cover was decorated with a representation of young black persons
apparently engaged in some religious exercise. In this picture the frock
coats and top hats were conspicuous by their absence.
There were two pictures in the breakfast-room at the Willows which
occupied an important place in Elisabeth's childish imaginings. The
first hung over the mantelpiece, and was called The Centenary Meeting.
It represented a chapel full of men in suffocating cravats, turning
their backs upon the platform and looking at the public instead--a more
effective if less realistic attitude than the ordinary one of sitting
the right way about; because--as Elisabeth reasoned, and reasoned
rightly--if these gentlemen had not happened to be behind before when
their portraits were taken, nobody would ever have known whose portraits
they were. It was a source of great family pride to her that her
grandfather appeared in this galaxy of Methodist worth; but the hero of
the piece, in her eyes, was one gentleman who had managed to swarm up a
pillar and there screw himself "to the sticking-place"; and how he had
done it Elisabeth never could conceive.
The second picture hung over the door, and was a counterfeit presentment
of John Wesley's escape from the burning rectory at Epworth. In those
days Elisabeth was so small and the picture hung so high that she could
not see it very distinctly; but it appeared to her that the boy Wesley
(whom she confused in her own mind with the infant Samuel) was flying
out of an attic window by means of flowing white wings, while a horse
was suspended in mid-air ready to carry him straight to heaven.
Every Sunday she accompanied her cousins to East Lane Chapel, at the
other end of Sedgehill, and here she saw strange visions and dreamed
strange dreams. The distinguishing feature of this sanctuary was a sort
of reredos in oils, in memory of a dead and gone Farringdon, which
depicted a gigantic urn, surrounded by a forest of cypress, through the
shades whereof flitted "young-eyed cherubims" with dirty wings and
bilious complexions, these last mentioned blemishes being, it is but
fair to add, the fault of the atmosphere and not of the artist. For
years Elisabeth firmly believed that this altar-piece was a trustworthy
representation of heaven; and she felt, therefore, a pleasant,
proprietary interest in it, as the view of an estate to which she would
one day succeed.
There was also a stained-glass window in East Lane Chapel, given by the
widow of a leading official. The baptismal name of the deceased had been
Jacob; and the window showed forth Jacob's Dream, as a delicate
compliment to the departed. Elisabeth delighted in this window, it was
so realistic. The patriarch lay asleep, with his head on a little white
tombstone at the foot of a solid oak staircase, which was covered with a
red carpet neatly fastened down by brass rods; while up and down this
staircase strolled fair-haired angels in long white nightgowns and
purple wings.
Not of course then, but in after years, Elisabeth learned to understand
that this window was a type and an explanation of the power of early
Methodism, the strength whereof lay in its marvellous capacity of
adapting religion to the needs and use of everyday life, and of bringing
the infinite into the region of the homely and commonplace. We, with our
added culture and our maturer artistic perceptions, may smile at a
Jacob's Ladder formed according to the domestic architecture of the
first half of the nineteenth century; but the people to whom the other
world was so near and so real that they perceived nothing incongruous in
an ordinary stair-carpet which was being trodden by the feet of angels,
had grasped a truth which on one side touched the divine, even though on
the other it came perilously near to the grotesque. And He, Who taught
them as by parables, never misunderstood--as did certain of His
followers--their reverent irreverence; but, understanding it, saw that
it was good.
The great day in East Lane Chapel was the Sunday School anniversary;
and in Elisabeth's childish eyes this was a feast compared with which
Christmas and Easter sank to the level of black-letter days. On these
festivals the Sunday School scholars sat all together in those parts of
the gallery adjacent to the organ, the girls wearing white frocks and
blue neckerchiefs, and the boys black suits and blue ties. The pews were
strewn with white hymn-sheets, which lay all over the chapel like snow
in Salmon, and which contained special spiritual songs more stirring in
their character than the contents of the Hymn-book; these hymns the
Sunday School children sang by themselves, while the congregation sat
swaying to and fro to the tune. And Elisabeth's soul was uplifted within
her as she listened to the children's voices; for she felt that mystical
hush which--let us hope--comes to us all at some time or other, when we
hide our faces in our mantles and feel that a Presence is passing by,
and is passing by so near to us that we have only to stretch out our
hands in order to touch it. At sundry times and in divers manners does
that wonderful sense of a Personal Touch come to men and to women. It
may be in a wayside Bethel, it may be in one of the fairest fanes of
Christendom, or it may be not in any temple made with hands: according
to the separate natures which God has given to us, so must we choose the
separate ways that will lead us to Him; and as long as there are
different natures there must be various ways. Then let each of us take
the path at the end whereof we see Him standing, always remembering that
wayfaring men, though fools, shall not err therein; and never forgetting
that--come whence and how they may--whosoever shall touch but the hem of
His garment shall be made perfectly whole.