THE WOODBURNS AND THEIR NEIGHBOURS.
Amongst the families which called on the Degges was that of Mr.
Leonard Woodburn, of Woodburn Grange. The Woodburns did not belong to
the so-called great families of the county, but to those of smaller
but independent estate, whose heads were formerly classed under the
name of yeomen. Mr. Woodburn was the possessor of about four hundred
acres of freehold land, beautifully situated about a mile beyond
Rockville, in the vicinity of the Trent, and beautifully cultivated.
The house was one of those old Elizabethan ones with a variety of
projections, pointed gables, and mullioned windows. The chimneys were
of the cross-banded and ornamented kind which are now regarded as
extremely beautiful, and, indeed, they had been thought so a good
while ago, for the father of Sir Thomas Tenterhook, when rebuilding
Tenterhook Hall, had asked the father of the present Mr. Woodburn if
he had any objection to sell them. A proposal, which Mr. Woodburn
had with true yeoman feeling of independence, regarded as so great
an insult, that he turned his back on the baronet as he sat at his
gate on horseback, and in presence of his groom, and closing the gate
pretty sharply, walked into the house without deigning a reply.
The present Mr. Woodburn, who had been the only son, was a man of
a liberal education, fond of classical literature, and more deeply
learned in all the history, both general and family, of the county,
than any other man in it. Nay, there was scarcely a family of any
note in England of which he did not possess a knowledge which
continually surprised you. He had a real love for topography and
family history, which had led him, as it would seem, insensibly
to acquire not only this knowledge of domestic annals, but of the
titles of almost all the estates in the county, many copies of
which, curious and important in their way, he possessed; and this
knowledge made him a great authority in cases of disputed title,
and had led him to decide the issue of several most noted trials.
He had a habit also of noting down all sorts of curious facts which
came to his knowledge either in the course of his reading of books,
or of the newspapers, or which he heard verbally. These _curiosa_
had accumulated into several volumes, which he kept locked up in
his desk, and which he would bring out occasionally as something
of public interest was occurring, or as something in conversation
had suggested the reference. A somewhat odd medley a stranger would
have regarded the contents of these volumes, for amongst public
and important facts, would be found jotted down birth-days, dates
of weddings, and funerals of his family or neighbours; and even
remarkable cases of prolificness of fowls, cattle, and fruit-trees on
his farm. There was an entry of the turkey, or the hen that had laid
away in the copse or the thicket, and came forth unexpectedly with
some fifteen or twenty pouts, or chickens. The tame hawk, which was
reared by George, his son, and suddenly flying away, became not only
wild, but the scourge of his poultry-yard, by making continual visits
to it, till at length shot, stands in immediate succession to the
history of the lawyer of the neighbouring town, who, reared at the
cost of the clergyman of Cotmanhaye, whose shoeblack and errand boy
he had originally been, had grown rich by harassing the poor people
of the country round by all sorts of vexatious suits.
Mr. Woodburn was a quiet gentleman, of somewhat above the middle
stature, now approaching fifty. He would not at that time of day
have been addressed by letter as esquire, though every man who is
not exactly a sweep or a costermonger is so now. He would be written
down, however, Leonard Woodburn of Woodburn, gent., in any public
document, or county summons on judicial service. Mr. Woodburn might
be seen daily riding on a good sturdy horse about his farm, and in
harvest time he did not hesitate to take a hand at raking or forking
in the hay-field, or binding after his reapers in the corn-field;
and on such occasions his children would turn out for a frolic,
rather than for serious work. His harvest done, Leonard Woodburn shot
over his own land, accompanied by his son George, now just come of
age, and who was treading in his father’s steps, being fond of both
agricultural pursuits and of the gun.
Mrs. Woodburn was a fine, large, comely woman, who, though as well
educated as the ladies generally of her day, and fond of hearing
books read in winters’ evenings rather than reading them herself,
had her heart and pride in her house and her dairy. Churning,
cheese-making, looking after her fowls, her eggs, her calves, and
pigs, and pigeons, her ducks, geese, turkeys, guinea-fowls, her
fruit both of garden and orchard, storing it up, or preserving it;
these were the great business of her daily life, and afforded her a
perpetual satisfaction. It was a real delight to see Mrs. Woodburn
amid her daily duties of this kind, with her handsome, sunny, smiling
face, and tall and ample but active figure, directing her maids, or
helping even in an emergency, or, to instruct a novice, kneeling
on a soft bass, leaning over the side of the large brass pan, with
her fair, full, and finely rounded arms bared to near the shoulder,
crushing down the curd in the whey, or crumbling it and pressing it
into the vat. Or you might see her surrounded by a large flock of
glossy pigeons in the farm-yard, who had descended from their tower
surmounting one of the buildings to receive her daily bounty. Not
that Mrs. Woodburn deemed it her express duty to feed any of the
farm-yard creatures; that belonged to the men-folk, who not only
foddered horses and cows, but fed pigs and poultry, and the pigeons
came down quickly and put in for their share with the numerous and
scuffling family of ducks, geese, turkeys, and all the rest of them.
It was the custom of farm-houses, and the custom reigned at Woodburn
Grange, for the mistress of the house to receive the profits on
pigs, calves and poultry, with all their eggs, feathers, or other
appurtenances. These were her perquisites, with the butter, in most
cases, to furnish her wardrobe and for spending money. It was,
therefore, natural that the farmer’s wife should keep a patronising
eye on the creatures within her province, and Mrs. Woodburn thus
frequently made her visit to the farm-yard; saw whether the pigs were
well fed and bedded, and that all the feathered flocks in the yard,
or in the paddock, or on the pond were prosperous. The dairymaid fed
the calves till they were ready for the butcher, or to be turned out
into the orchard, where they at first galloped with cocked tails, to
and fro, with a frantic velocity that made it marvellous that they
did not crack their silly, but joyful skulls against the trees. For
some time after their liberation from the calf-house to daylight and
freedom, they were the dairymaid’s care, and Mrs. Woodburn taking her
rambles through the ample kitchen-garden, could stand and survey the
infant herd with professional and a sort of motherly satisfaction.
Besides their son George, the Woodburns had two daughters, the
elder one, who was really the oldest of the three children,
was the sedate, but kindly Ann. Ann at this epoch was four or
five-and-twenty: of middle stature, an extremely neat figure; of a
very sweet, serious countenance. Quiet, thoughtful, very prudent
in her disposition, but with warm and deep, but not demonstrative
feelings. Ann loved music, and played well on the piano, on which
she was frequently called to charm away the evening hours when the
family was assembled. She was fond of reading, but not of a very
wide range of literature. She had her favourite books of poetry and
piety in her own room, and had the strongest attachment to certain
authors. They were those who touched her heart rather than excited
her imagination, and their thoughts and sentiments were familiar to
her mind as her own thoughts. In the light literature of the day she
took comparatively little interest, though she was ever ready to
read to her mother what she liked. Ann devoted herself to the cares
of the house, but not of the farm. She saw that the meals were all
duly prepared and served: saw that all the rooms were kept in nicest
order; helped often to make a pudding or a pie, and took care, if
guests were expected, that all was in order to receive and entertain
them. Besides these duties, Ann loved the garden, rejoiced in tending
the flowers, and looking after the bees, which had a large shed, and
occupied several shelves in it with their hives towards the lower
and sunniest corner of the garden. Such was Ann, quiet, cheerful,
loving, and busy, but never bustling. Every one relied much on her
clear, good sense and loving interest in them: every one consulted
her in their difficulties, and received from her almost invariably,
the very wisest counsels. Mr. Woodburn said Ann was like many other
still waters, she was deep, and his familiar name for her was, “Old
Sobersides.”
The last of the flock was the lively, laughing Letitia, seldom
called anything but Letty. Sweet Letty was about seventeen; with all
the vivacity, and eager frank life of a schoolgirl. In fact, she
was that till the other day. Now, she was the sunshine, the flying,
quivering sunshine called Jack-a-dandy, sent by reflection from a
basin of water over walls and ceilings in blithest dance. Letty,
like the Jack-a-dandy, was here and there, in the house, in the
garden, full of joy and love of all things around her; with a face
more charming than beautiful, all smiles and frolic, Letty was ready
to lend a helping hand to her mother or sister; full of talk and
question, making every one glad with her own gladness, and ready to
take a stroll or a ride with her father or George, and to astonish
them with the frank, open, genuine expressions of her young and
innocent heart. Everything they told her of the people or the things
amid which they lived interested her, and any relation of cruel
or unkind treatment of any one, fetched up the colour of a most
lovely roseate indignation to her young, pure cheek, and the warmest
expressions of it to her tongue. Such was blithe Letty—simple, yet
shrewd, loving and light-hearted, the happy embodiment of ardent and
out-blossoming womanhood.
But Woodburn Grange was a spot made for a happy home, for substantial
ease and abundance, not for grandeur. There was everything there
which enabled its possessors to enjoy the country. A handsome income;
all the rural luxuries of life; horses, an open, but not a close
carriage, a boat on the charming river below, hearts ready to love
good and intelligent neighbours, and such neighbours to love.
The old house stood in its ample gardens. A low brick wall,
surmounted by a hedge of roses fenced it in from the road, which
ran by from the village to Cotmanhaye, and further up the valley.
A straight walk led up to the handsome, ample porch—you could not
enter the garden in a carriage, but must walk up it,—in summer, amid
a glow and perfume of flowers and a murmur of bees, and a flickering
dance of butterflies, that was delicious. Around and beyond the house
extended the flower-garden with evergreens, and here and there a
fruit-tree. Then down the slope stretched the kitchen-garden, with
its tall south fruit wall, with its trellises of roses and jasmines
bordering beds of raspberries and gooseberries. Its abundant growth
of peas, beans, and all vegetables, its asparagus beds, strawberry
beds, beds of salsify and scorzonera; its quince and medlar and
filbert trees. Then, below still, stretched an old orchard, with
seats here and there under its trees, some of the old trees stooping
one way, some another; and at the bottom ran the Trent, in phrase of
Christopher North, “one of the sincerest streams in England.”
Tolerably elevated stood the house, overlooking undulating fields,
studded with cattle and sheep, or waving with corn, the patrimonial
estate, and beyond them the woods of Cotmanhaye, and across the river
an expanse of level meadows of some miles in width, with the ruddy
walls of the village of Breton bounding them. On the other hand,
southward, rose a range of sand cliffs, at the foot of which ran the
highway from Rockville to Cotmanhaye, and still beyond the cliffs,
and the patches of trees on their brow, rose the country to the large
farming village of Hillmartin.
Leonard Woodburn, of Woodburn Grange, though styled but yeoman, had
a homestead which a king might envy, and when Simon and Mrs. Degge
returned the Woodburns’ call, they could not sufficiently express
their delight at it, and went over the house and the cheese-chamber,
with its growing display of goodly cheeses, over the farm-yard, and
through garden and orchard. They were charmed with the view from the
windows, which were different from their own, and no less with the
kindly intelligence of the Woodburns themselves, free, simple, and at
ease; and inly promised themselves much pleasure in their friendship,
which they resolved to cultivate.
Before rambling farther in our discoveries in this neighbourhood,
we have still a friend of ours to introduce at the Grange, and then
a promenade to make through the village—at least to make a passing
note of it, and say, “Here lives so-and-so, and there lives somebody
else.” Our acquaintance at the Grange is only a servant, however. It
is Betty Trapps, a sort of miscellany of housemaid and cook, in past
days adding something of the nurse to the rest of her duties. Betty
has lived with the Woodburns since she was five-and-twenty, and she
is now—let me see—what? Five-and thirty? Yes—she has lived at least
fifteen years at the Grange, and that makes her—upon my word!—forty!
And yet Betty does not look more than five-and-thirty. She is
middle-sized, middle-bulkish in body, but lithe and active. Never
idle, never weary, never ill, never grumbling, but with a wit and a
will of her own, and always ready to give, as she says, as good as
she gets. In fact, they must be awake that venture on a jest or trick
with Betty. She is the freest of free-spoken women: Mr. Woodburn, who
likes a good-natured nickname, calls her “Meg Merrymouth.” She says
often what she thinks—almost unmercifully; and yet Betty is full of
kindness, and is knowing and shrewd. There is nobody thereabout that
can see half so thoroughly through those she comes into contact with.
But we shall see Betty Trapps again, for she says she means to stay
at the Grange as long as there is a tile on the house, unless Master
should discharge her for chaffing a little, and she does not think he
will. And she has given a good many proofs that she means to keep
her word, for Betty is a Methodist, and is a woman of consequence at
chapel and at the class, and has had a good many offers of marriage
from the brethren, some very well to do; and Betty has so far always
said, “No, thank you.” Civilly, be it understood, and as secretly as
possible, for she does not really, smart as she is sometimes, like to
hurt any one’s feelings. But Betty is shrewdly supposed to have saved
a pretty little stock of money, having lived so long in a good place,
and never indulged in finery, and the brethren may not be always
so easily rebuffed, for this is one of those charms which continue
growing even when others fade. However, the tiles on Woodburn Grange
are extremely good yet, so we shall see.
A little above Woodburn Grange, and nearer to Rockville, lies the
village of Woodburn. It is not very large, and chiefly built round
a spacious green, on which the young men in summer evenings enjoy
their games of cricket, ninepins, bowls, and quoits. At the corner
where the road enters the green from Rockville, and, of course,
from Castleborough, stands the blacksmith’s shop, where frequently
two or three farm-horses stand waiting to be shod; and a number of
ploughs and harrows lie expecting repairs. There the sturdy smith,
Job Latter, is generally found working and perspiring, and conversing
with a number of village-lads and young men hanging about, whom he
contrives to disperse when they incommode him, by rubbing his hot
iron in his heap of sand, and thus sending a storm of burning stars
in every direction, that makes a sudden scamper. Not far thence, a
congregation of dilapidated carts, waggons, and disabled wheels, mark
the shop of Will Spokeshave, the wainwright. In the centre of the
south side of the green, rises a somewhat large old house with porch
and tall gabled roof, which is the village school, frequented, more
particularly in winter, by the farmers’ and labourers’ sons of the
neighbourhood. This school has now for master a worthy half-Welshman,
named Howell Crusoe (after his mother and father), a man noted far
around as “a great scollard”—a very great, long-headed “scollard.”
He has written a book to teach boys good manners, and a genuine
curiosity it is in its way; and his profound acquaintance with the
customs of polite society may be at once discerned by the following
rules in this his “Book of Etiquette for Boys”—a work now become very
rare, yet of which an odd, and it must be admitted, a _very_ odd
copy, may now and then be met with on the shelves of the bookworms of
Castleborough:—“When a gentleman or lady speaks to you”—thus teaches
Howell Crusoe boy-etiquette—“immediately touch your forehead with the
back of your right hand; then place three fingers of the same hand
between the buttons of the centre of your waistcoat, and expect the
observations of your superior in an attitude of easy but respectful
attention. At any remark of the respected lady or gentleman, incline
your head with a graceful dignity, and scrape backward with your left
foot. Whenever you are asked to sit down in company, place one leg
over the other; rest your elbow on the elevated knee, repose your
chin on the hand of the same arm, with two fingers extended upright
between your cheek and your ear. In an attitude at once so easy and
so graceful, await the wisdom which is sure to fall from beauty,
learning, and experience, and hoard up the precious results for the
future occasions of life, as the busy bee hoards up the honey of
spring for the winter of age.”
A company of boys educated by Crusoe, or on Crusoe’s plan, seated
round a room in his most approved attitude, must have been a pleasing
sight!
Crusoe is the oracle of the “Grey Goose,” the public-house opposite;
for he has a number of theories which he there defends against all
comers, and very few comers, it may be supposed, ever go away having
won any sort of advantage over the erudite Howell Crusoe.
Howell has distinguished himself in his determined onslaughts on
bull-baiting, dog-fighting, badger-baiting, cock-fighting, and
the like; and has been supported in these eventually successful
achievements by Jasper Heritage, David Qualm, and Sylvanus Crook,
persons as yet unknown to the reader, but to whom I most probably
shall, by permission, very soon introduce them. Howell does not
find, however, that he can altogether dispense with boy-baiting,
or beating with his cane. He manages to frighten the young ones,
nevertheless, by threatening to “look over their heads to the wall,”
which has something awful in it to their imaginations; and he thinks,
in time, cudgels may be used to drive beasts with, and boys be
ruled by appealing to what Sylvanus Crook calls their “inner man.”
Howell Crusoe is also secretary of both men and women’s clubs, and
is much disgusted with the drunkenness displayed by these members at
Whitsuntide; finds, indeed, he has a rude and uncouth generation to
deal with, and makes but little progress in refining them. In a word,
Howell Crusoe is an out-and-out social reformer.
Not far from the village on the Rockville-road, you see a large pair
of gates, a capacious lodge with flowering plants in the windows,
and under one of them a little wooden trough, very much resembling a
pig-trough. It is, in fact, a trough which Sylvanus Crook, the good
Quaker, who lives at this gentleman’s lodge, has set there for the
refreshment of dogs, having often seen them passing with lolling
tongues, and eyes anxiously cast about for water. Sylvanus soon
had his first trough stolen, but this he has secured by stout iron
fastenings to the wall, and he trusts that he relieves much canine
discomfort. He says, indeed, that he has never had the pleasure of
seeing a dog drink at it; neither has Dorothy, his wife; but he hopes
they do. At least they have the opportunity.
But this lodge is but the entrance to the extensive grounds and house
of Jasper Heritage, the wealthy Quaker banker of Castleborough.
Enter; advance up the well-kept carriage-drive, and very soon you
will see standing on an open, level, extensive lawn, a very large
square brick house. It is one of the country houses so frequently
seen, which are built at no expense of architecture whatever. It
is as simple and as exactly square as any box or square block of
stone that you can see anywhere. Take a good, big deal box, chalk
on it a door in the centre, and two or three rows of windows, and a
parapet-wall at the top, showing no roof, and then you have the exact
representation of some hundreds, or, indeed, thousands of houses
which raise themselves as proudly on the soil of England, as if they
boasted all the architectural graces ever displayed. And truly they
are houses capable of lodging and entertaining a great number of
people in the perfection of comfort. They are ample, convenient, and
opulent abodes of opulent families, though they look so cubical and
featureless outside. This house of Mr. Jasper Heritage, is, moreover,
made somewhat attractive by such ornaments as the very simple taste
of its owner could, or perhaps would, give it. It has an ample
portico on plain Tuscan pillars; a broad flight of easy stone steps
up to it; a very highly-burnished brass-knocker and bell-handle;
and in a row under the windows, a range of splendid orange-trees
in large square tubs, and a fountain in the centre of the lawn,
which plays on particular occasions. Right and left you see broad,
exquisitely rolled gravel walks going off into very tempting-looking
shrubberies and gardens. Ah! it will be a great treat to penetrate
in there, and see all the lawns and alleys, and gardens, ponds, and
conservatories, and snug summer-houses in corners, which give you
from a second storey a prospect over the country round. But we must
come again some day for that. We shall get an invitation. Now it is
enough to say, that in that house is not Jasper Heritage; he is just
now at his bank in Castleborough, whither his coachman, Sylvanus
Crook, also a Friend, and dressed in the plainest drab, with the
most approved cocked-hat and knee-breeches of that society, and that
day, has driven him, and will fetch him back, at four o’clock, in
the handsome, roomy dark-green family carriage, without, I may add,
the slightest vanity of coat-of-arms, crest, or any such badge of a
worldly pride. At home, are—but not to be intruded upon by us at this
moment, for they are busy cutting out a very multitude of clothes
for the Dorcas Society—yes, there are Rebecca Heritage, the wealthy
banker’s wife, and Millicent Heritage, the fair and only child of
this wealthy banker—only think of that! What! you say, is the young
lady handsome? Oh, don’t be so curious! Wait a bit. I will tell you
about the mother first. Mrs. Rebecca Heritage is a lady of apparently
forty-five. She is not very tall, she is not very short, she is not
very thin, nor very stout; but she is fair, very fair, yet with dark
hair neatly laid back from the centre of the forehead under a very
white and very plain Quaker cap. A silk gown she wears—pale very
dovelike silk; a white muslin handkerchief covers her shoulders and
bosom, and she has extremely well-cut features. Her nose is perfect.
Her eyes blue-grey, large, and thoughtful. Her forehead is broad and
ample, and, in a word, she looks like a grave and comely duchess
dressed up for a female Friend in a domestic theatrical. In that
noble face—in that smooth, soft, yet healthy face—where no approach
to a wrinkle, one thinks, would ever dare to come—there is a thought,
a spirit, a fire—yes, a fire—even in the calm that rules all in
that tranquil aspect. Depend upon it, Rebecca Heritage is no common
woman. She is like one of those women Friends, who used to enter
Whitehall, and tell the king-destroyer Cromwell or the laughing,
reckless Charles II., in tones that made them still as children, of
the oppression of the saints which they were perpetrating; of the
foul and hideous dungeons in which they were holding those whose
only crime was a religion of peace. There! if you want the picture
of a mother in Israel—of a brave, self-possessed, yet loving and
large-hearted woman—send for a painter, and let him pourtray Rebecca
Heritage.
But I see you glancing aside from this figure of heroic piety and
peace to that gentle creature at her side. Lovely, modest, retiring
Millicent. So rich, and yet nature has heaped all those other riches
upon her. Look at that very fair face, at those clear blue eyes,
and yet shaded by such long dark eye-lashes, such finely-arched
jetty eye-brows and hair. Why it is not an English, but a genuine
Eastern beauty. That form and face were evidently made for an Asiatic
palace, and they are here, in a Quaker house, and busy in cutting
out jackets and petticoats for the squalid brats of the next town.
Come away! It is too dangerous here. I must show you Still Lodge, it
is just outside the grounds here. There! You see it—a genuine little
wrens nest: and in it dwells David Qualm, the brother-in-law of
Jasper Heritage, and Dorothy Qualm, his wife. Oh, most peaceable and
peace-loving people! You will come again,—don’t linger. Remember when
you inquire for the house of Jasper Heritage, it is called Fair-Manor.
One more introduction, and then enough for the present. We must now
turn back, pass through the villages of Rockville and Woodburn,
give a nod to pleasant Woodburn Grange as we pass, and so on a mile
farther, skirting the feet of the sand-cliffs, till we stand on a
fine mount with a modern-looking mansion, also of brick; they all
are so round about here. This mansion is the seat of Sir Emanuel
Clavering, a baronet of an old family. Finely stands the house with
its large bay windows looking out on its velvet lawn, from the soft,
smooth turf of which spring stately elms and ashes, with that luxury
of neatness which only aristocratic trees can wear. Finely sweep the
swelling slopes of the hill down to the river, which there takes a
superb bend, and across it the eye runs on to distant towers, and
masses of woods, and clumps of pine-clad hills high and dark. Near
the house stands the picturesque parsonage, half covered with ivy,
and here and there a cottage, and that is Cotmanhaye—there is no
village. Opposite to the house southward, or south-west, rises a
still higher range of hills, and on climbing that, you behold another
landscape, vast and varied, villages, farms, and woods.
Sir Emanuel Clavering is a tall gentlemanly man of sixty. All who
know him declare him a man of very pleasant manners, extremely well
read; fond of poetry, but of the Pope school, which he declares to
be the only polished and correct one; and given to astronomical, and
it is said abstruse studies. There is a small tower at some distance
on the ridge of the hill, which he uses as an observatory. In his
youth he was away, no one knows where, for a space of seven years.
Those who have seen him often and inspected him closely, assert
that the gristle of his nose is bored, as savages bore theirs to
insert a feather or a flower. Hence, there is a popular story—an
imagination, for Sir Emanuel has never been known to utter a word to
his most intimate friends, either of this curious fact, or of the
sojourn of those years. The country people talk fluently by their
firesides of Sir Emanuel in his wild youth as the head of some wild
race, the lord of some dark-eyed, dark-skinned princess. They have
romanced out a grand story of his leading the devoted natives to
battle, with all the terrors of European arms, and winning great
victories and domains for them. They account for his return by the
death of his princess, a creature of wondrous beauty, and by the
natural longings for one’s native land. Not a syllable of this story
has a basis of ascertained fact, not the ground of a single allusion
the most distant; all those years are a blank to every one but Sir
Emanuel himself. Nothing more is known than that he returned to find
his father dead, and his younger brother, the rector, holding the
estate for him. He had neither brother nor sister besides Thomas the
rector. In a few years, during which he was about a great deal in
London, and from which gentlemen of his own tastes sometimes came
down and shut themselves up for days with him in his tower, and were
seen riding about with him, Sir Emanuel married. Not, however, one
of the daughters of any of the neighbouring aristocratic families,
but the daughter of the bailiff of his estate. His wife had still
fewer relatives than himself, she had no brother or sister. She was
a naturally fine woman, and bore her elevation with modesty and good
sense. The habits of Sir Emanuel became more secluded than before.
The neighbouring families rarely called on him. His life was chiefly
spent in prosecuting the studies of his tower, in field sports, in
fishing, and in occasional visits to the metropolis.
Such a character was sure to become the object of the most
extraordinary rumours in the country round. His astronomical studies,
his frequent walks at midnight to his solitary tower, followed by
two large black dogs, his being seen by the keepers sometimes
wrapped in his cloak, silently pacing along that bleak and elevated
ridge in darkness and in the wildest tempests, was enough to add in
the popular mind, to his astronomy, other and darker studies. The
peasantry universally believed that he dealt in the black art; they
asserted that he had been seen at the same hour in two different
places thirty miles apart; they said that there was nothing lost
anywhere in the neighbourhood but he would say, immediately on
hearing of it, where it was, or who had got it; and that he was
always right. He always told the farmers what sort of a summer or
winter it would be, which was certain to take place; and he had
been known on hearing of a wedding, whether in high or low life, to
shake his head and say that would not be lucky, and it never was.
All these things he probably pronounced from the simple sources of
natural sagacity and extended knowledge, perfectly legitimate in its
character; but the people far around took another and more mysterious
view of it. They observed that though his brother was the clergyman,
and the living belonging to the family, he rarely appeared at church;
and the peasantry when they saw him felt a secret terror, though
he always accosted them most kindly; was always cheerful, and even
jocose, and never heard of a case of distress which he did not send
to relieve.
Sir Emanuel, contrary to his wont, called on the Degges, and they
returned his call, curious to make the acquaintance of a man of so
peculiar a reputation. They were greatly struck with the polished
friendliness of his manner, his frank cordiality, and his superior
intelligence. He assured them that he had great pleasure in the
prospect of cultivating their friendship. Lady Clavering had been
deceased some years; he had but one son, Henry Clavering, who had
been the school-fellow of George Woodburn, at Repton, and who was on
terms of great friendship with all the family at Woodburn Grange.
And thus I have presented a few of the leading _dramatis personæ_;
others are waiting in the side-scenes ready to make their appearance.