THE FAMILY IT BELONGED TO.
The Joscelyns were of what is called an old family. Though they were of
no higher degree at present than any other yeomen of the dales, they
were of much greater pretensions. There were no very authentic records
of this supposed historical superiority--a well-sounding name and a bit
of old ruin in a corner of the land which remained to them were as much
as they had to show in support of the tradition. But there were no other
Joscelyns about, so that the family had evidently at one time or other
been an importation from another district, and though nobody knew from
whence the stock came, it was understood in the family that they had
counted kin some time or other with very much finer folk. There were
even old people still alive who remembered the time when the Joscelyns
lived with much greater grandeur than now and gave themselves all the
airs of gentlefolks. These traditions had dazzled Lydia Brotherton, who,
though she was only the daughter of a clergyman, and not rich or
accustomed to anything very fine, was still better bred than Ralph
Joscelyn of the White House, and much more “genteel” and aspiring. The
Brothertons were really “well-connected people,” as everybody knew. They
had a baronet in the family. When there was any specially promising boy
in the parish for whom an opening was wanted, the vicar knew whom to
write to, and had written with such effect that one lad at least from
the district had got an appointment in the custom-house in consequence.
When a man can do that, he proves there is something in his claims of
family. And Miss Brotherton had been brought up by a governess, which
was to the homely people about, a much finer thing than going to school:
and could sing songs in foreign languages, and play upon the piano, both
uncommon acquirements, when she came to the White House. As for Ralph in
those days he had been a very fine young fellow--the tallest, the
strongest, the most bright-eyed and high-coloured young man between
Shap and Carlisle. He was first in all games, nobody venturing to
contend with him in wrestling, or in any other exercise where sheer
strength was an important particular. He was not “book-learned,” but
what did that matter? Lydia had been accustomed all her life to curates
who were book-learned, and her experiences in that kind had made her
less respectful of instruction than might have been desired. She made a
picture to herself of all the chivalrous qualities which “good blood”
ought to confer; and the big limbs and pre-eminent strength of her
lover, seemed to her the plainest evidence that he was a king among men.
Nobody else could throw so far or jump so high. When he was on his big
mare Meg, which was still bigger in proportion than himself, the two
went through thick and thin, fearing nothing. He was a man that might
have led an army; that might have cut down a troop of rebels--there was
no limit to his powers. All the feats of the North-country ballads and
heroes became possible, nay ordinary, to her when Ralph was by. Her own
slim nervous figure, in which there was no muscular strength at all,
made his fine embodiment of force all the more attractive to her. There
were rumours that he was “wild,” which frightened her father and
mother, but Lydia was not alarmed. The curates were prim and correct as
well as book-learned; but she did not like them. And to big Ralph it
seemed natural that there should be overflowings of his strength and
vigour, that life in him which was so much more than the life of other
men. Temper, too--no doubt he had a temper--could such a man be expected
to be patient and velvet-mouthed like the Rev. John or Thomas? “He will
never be ill-tempered to me,” she had said with a confident smile. The
parents thought the same when they looked at their graceful daughter,
and thought what a thing it would be for Ralph Joscelyn to have such a
creature by his side. Of course it would make a man of him. Very likely
if he had married a farmer’s daughter, a nice rosy-cheeked lass, he too
would have dropped into a mere dalesman without a thought beyond the
“beasts” and an athletic meeting. But with Lydia, with so much vigour,
and a little money and the best of blood, what might not be hoped from
him? Lydia would turn his house, which was a little homely in its
appointments, into a gentleman’s house. Her presence alone, along with
the tidies, and footstools, and cushions which her mother was working
for her, would make an instant revolution in the appearance of the
house.
For these and many other equally weighty reasons the contract was
concluded, and true love, as Mrs. Brotherton remarked, carried the
day--though her daughter might, no doubt, have looked higher. Ralph got
a lieutenancy in the Yeomanry, which was a great thing. He was put upon
the Commission of the Peace--a _faux air_ as of a country gentleman was
thrown over him. After all whether a property is large or small it makes
no difference in the principle of the thing, Mrs. Brotherton said. You
would not put a man out of his natural rank and cease to consider him a
squire because he had been obliged to part with a portion of his estate.
This lady was something of an invalid, and a great deal of a casuist--it
was her part in the family to explain everything and give the best of
reasons. She was safe to produce a long list of arguments at ten
minutes’ notice, fully justifying, and that on the highest grounds,
whatever the others had decided to do. And she put forth all her
strength in favour of Ralph Joscelyn, so that he ended by becoming a
very fine gentleman, indeed a patrician of the purest water, a little
subdued by circumstances, but blue in blood and princely in disposition
like the best.
The White House to which Lydia had been brought home, as was the custom
then, on the evening of her wedding day, bore very much the same aspect
at that period as at the time, five-and-thirty years later, at which
this story opens. It was a gray stone house, gray and cold as the fells
against which its square outline showed, roomy and old-fashioned if not
perhaps quite carrying out the family brag. It stood upon one of the
Tower slopes a little elevated above the road. Behind it at some little
distance was a small wood of firs softening down into a fringe of trees
less gloomy, in the little fissure, too small to be called a glen or
even a ravine, nothing more than a cut in the hillside, where a little
brook brawled downwards over its pebbles, on the west side of the house.
Here there were some hawthorn bushes, big and gnarled and old, a few
mountain ash-trees, and birches clinging to the sides of the narrow
opening, some of them stooping across the little thread of water to
which they formed a sort of fringe; and at one spot a very homely little
bridge overshadowed by the birches which clustered together, dangling
their delicate branches over the beck, the only pretty feature in the
scene. Originally the White House had stood upon the bare hill-side,
with its close grayish turf coming up close to the door in front, though
there was a walled kitchen-garden on the east side. But when Mrs.
Joscelyn came home a bride, a little flower-garden had been laid out in
front of the door, which gave something of the air of a suburban villa
to the austere hill-side house. Never was there a more forlorn little
garden. Nothing would grow, and for many years its proprietors had
ceased to solicit anything to grow. The grass-plots had grown gray again
like the natural turf. The flower-beds were overgrown by weeds, and by a
few garden flowers run wild which had lost both size and sweetness, as
flowers so often do when left to nature. An oblong hall, of considerable
dimensions, from which the doors of the sittingrooms opened, and which
was hung with guns and fishing-rods, and with a large stag’s head
adorned by enormous antlers opposite the door, made an imposing entrance
to the house; but the carpets were all worn, the curtains dingy, the
furniture gloomy and old; huge mahogany sideboards, and big tables,
vast square-shouldered chairs; things heavy and costly and ugly fitted
the rooms; nothing for beauty, or even comfort. It seemed hard indeed to
know for what such furniture was made, save for endurance, to wear as
long as possible.
Young Mrs. Joscelyn when she came home had hung her antimacassars over
the chairs, she had put out her “Keepsake” and “Friendship’s Offering”
upon the table, and placed her guitar in the most favourable position;
and then she sat down to be happy. Poor gentle young woman! She had been
the pet at home, the only daughter. She had been considered the most
accomplished of girls. Whatever she said had secured the smiles and
admiration of father and mother; all that she did had been pretty, had
been sweet, not from any quality of its own, but because it was Liddy
who did it. To describe the extraordinary sensation with which she woke
up a few months after her marriage, perhaps not so much, to discover
that Liddy having done it, made nothing attractive or charming, would be
impossible. It took away from her all her little confidence in herself,
all her faith in those around her. Very soon--so soon that it seemed
immediately, the next day--her husband made it very clearly visible
that Liddy was the synonym not for everything that was pleasant, but for
all the awkwardness, the foolishness, the inappropriate words and
inconvenient actions of the house. “It is just like you,” he began to
say to her, long before the first summer was over. For a time she tried
to think it was “Ralph’s way,” but that did not stand her long in stead.
And with her opinion of herself, her confidence in everything else
gradually deserted her. She recognised that the Joscelyns’ blue blood
did very little for them, that old Uncle Harry was often less polite
than Isaac Oliver who was his hind, and more dreadful still, an
admission she never would make to herself, that the very curates whom
she had despised were beside her patrician Ralph like beings of another
world.
Perhaps of all that happened to her in her after-life there was no shock
so terrible as this first disenchantment. She had a large family,
plunging into all the roughnesses of life, its nursery prose and
bread-and-butter, without any interval of repose, without money enough
or leisure enough to put any glow of prettiness upon the rude
circumstances, the band of children--noisy boys who made an end of all
her attempts at neatness, and gobbled their food and tore their clothes,
and were dirty and disorderly as any cottage brood. She struggled on
among them as best she could, always watching every new baby wistfully
to see if perhaps a something like herself, a child who would be her
very own and speak her language and understand her meaning might be born
to her. But alas! they were Joscelyns every one, big-limbed creatures
with light blue eyes, and great red cheeks, who stared at her cynically
out of their very cradles, and seemed to demand what she was making a
fuss about when she sang them to sleep. Poor woman, she was always
hopeful; every new child that came was, she thought, at last the one for
whom she had been pining. Even now she had a lingering notion that
Harry, her youngest boy, was that child--and far more than a notion, a
hopeful certainty that little Liddy at school, the youngest of all, was
exactly what she herself had been at the same age. These two, were in
fact the least like Joscelyns of all her children. Harry was a
broad-shouldered young fellow indeed, but he was less tall, and less
powerful than his brothers; he had taken a little more to books; and
there were traces in him of something less matter-of-fact than the
stolid, steady nature of Will and Tom, and Benjamin and Hartley, all now
established in occupations, and some of them in houses of their own.
Will and Tom were married; they had both descended a single step lower
down than the position of their father, marrying, one of them, the
daughter of a farmer, and the other, the only child of a famous “vet,”
who gave her what was understood to be “a tidy bit of money,” and to
whose business the young man hoped to succeed. It was a coming down in
the world to his mother. But how could she help it? With so many boys to
provide for, the Joscelyn pride had to be put in their pocket. Hartley
was in Colorado, Ben in New Zealand, all struggling along in much the
same kind of occupation which their father pursued at home. As for Harry
he had been rather delicate, a circumstance of which his mother was
almost proud, as showing his affinity to her side of the house. And he
was in an office in Liverpool, an occupation more fit for a delicate
youth than the rough sheep-farming and horse-selling of the Fells. It
was time now that something should be decided about his career. Was he
to have a little money to invest, to get him a small share in the
concern? He had been clerk long enough, Harry thought--long enough for
himself and long enough too for his employer, who wanted a partner, but
no further clerks.
This was the question which at present agitated the house. Each of the
sons as he established himself in life had done so with a quarrel, often
a series of wranglings; but they had all taken it more easily than
Harry. Certainly Harry was the one most like his mother. Her heart
yearned over him. She took a little pride in him too, more than it was
possible to take in Tom and Will and their rough affairs. A merchant in
Liverpool sounded better, and Harry in his black coat looked, his mother
thought, more like a gentleman than any of the others. For the first
time for all these years she had been able to recall to her mind what a
gentleman looked like, and the pride which had been natural to a
well-connected person, a clergyman’s daughter, had begun to dawn
faintly, timidly, once more within her. Supposing that the baronet, who
was the head of her family, should ever inquire into the fortunes of his
humble relation, Harry was the one she had always thought who could be
put forward. “One of her sons is a merchant in Liverpool,” how often had
she taken refuge in this as a thing that might be said to Sir John, if
ever at long and last he should make inquiries after Liddy Brotherton.
The others, alas! were not very presentable; but Harry and Liddy might,
if the inquiry came soon, while they were yet young and amenable, show
themselves with the best. These were the secret thoughts in Mrs.
Joscelyn’s heart. She had not given up yet; she was always ready to
begin again; day by day her hope renewed itself, her disappointments
went out of her mind. And thus she went on daily laying herself open to
fresh disappointments because of these new hopes.
As for her husband, he was no unusual type of his class. He had a great
deal of the rough arrogance which characterises it. When he was among
his neighbours it got him ill-will, but still he could hold his own
among them; domineering over the gentler sort, tyrannical to his
servants, but only altogether unjust and unkind to those who were weak
and in subjection to him. It was his own family who felt this most. For
women he had an absolute contempt, unveiled by any of those polite
pretences with which ordinary men holding this opinion sometimes
consent to conceal it from motives of general expediency. His wife had
been to him a pretty lass, for whom he had a passion _dans le temps_,
and whom he had been rather proud to win, at the moment, as a lady and
full of dainty ways, superior to those of the other pretty lasses in his
sphere. It was right and natural that he, a Joscelyn, should have a lady
for his wife, one who would not have looked at any other yeoman in the
county, and who, indeed, had refused one or two better matches than
himself for his sake. He knew that it was a fine thing to be a Joscelyn,
though he did not know very well in what this consisted. It entitled him
to be called Ralph Joscelyn, Esq., of the White House, when the other
rough Dalesmen had scarcely so much as a Mr. to their names, and it gave
him a general vague sense of superiority and of personal elation, as a
man made of a different stuff from that out of which his neighbours were
shaped. But though he was proud of this, he knew nothing about it. He
was just as capable of investigating into “the old Joscelyns,” and
tracing them to their real origin, as he was of exploring the sources of
the Nile. He did not know, even, what it was which made it such an
advantage to him to belong to those old Joscelyns, but he accepted it as
a benefit which was no doubt to be partially attributed to his own
excellence and high qualities. After the first flush of youth was over,
he considered his wife no longer as a lady whom it was a pride to have
won, but as a creature belonging to him, like one of his dogs, but not
so docile or invariably lovable as his dogs. They all followed and
worshipped him obsequiously, whether he was kind to them or not,
condoning all his contrary actions, and ready to receive a caress with
overflowing gratitude, and forget the kick by which it had been
preceded. Mrs. Joscelyn had not the sense of the dogs; she struggled for
a time to get the place which her imagination had pictured--that of the
poetical mate, the help-meet, the sharer of her husband’s life; and when
sent “to heel” with a kick, she had not taken it as the dogs did, but
allowed the dismay, the disenchantment, the consternation which
overwhelmed her to be seen in her face. Since then Joscelyn had
emancipated himself altogether from any bondage of affection or respect.
He frankly despised the woman he owned; despised her for her weakness,
for the interruptions of illness to which she was subject, for her
tremblings and nervous terrors, in short, for being a woman and his
wife. Their life together had contained scarcely an element of beauty or
happiness of any kind. She had remained with him by force of
circumstances, because it had never occurred to her as possible that she
could do anything else. In these days people did not think of obtaining
relief from the special burdens of their lives, or of throwing them off.
A woman who had a bad or unkind husband endured him, as she would in all
likelihood have endured a constitutional ailment, as a thing to be
concealed from others as much as possible and made the best of, without
seeking after doctors or medicines. It was a cross which had been put
upon her to bear. She had happened badly in the lottery of life, drawn a
bad number, an unhappy lot; but now there was nothing for it but to lie
upon the bed that had been made for her, and to cut her coat according
to her cloth.
And thus life had gone on for five-and-thirty years. The number of
miseries that can be borne in that time is incalculable, as wonderful as
the tenacity with which human nature can support them, and rise every
morning to a consciousness of them, yet go on all the same, scarcely
less vigorous, in some cases more vigorous, than those to whom existence
is happiness. No one in the White House was happy after the age of
childhood, but nobody minded much except the mother, who had this
additional burden to bear that the expectation of at least some future
happiness in her children, never died out of her. Perhaps being no wiser
than her neighbours she missed some legitimate if humble happiness,
which she might have had, by not understanding how much real strength
and support might have been found in the stout and homely affection of
her eldest daughter, who was not in the least like her, and did not
understand her, nor flatter her with any sympathy, yet who stood
steadfastly by her and shielded her, and furthered her wishes when they
could be divined, with a friendly, half compassionate, sometimes
impatient support. But Joan had been critical from her very cradle,
always conscious of the “fuss” which her mother only became conscious of
making when she saw it in the half-mocking question in her children’s
eyes. No, Mrs. Joscelyn would have said to herself, Joan was a good
girl--though it seemed a misnomer to call her a girl, so mature as she
was, in some indefinable way older than her mother--a good girl; but not
one that was like her, or understood her, or knew what she meant.
Perhaps Harry might, if she could get any good of him, if she did not
always live in terror of a deadly quarrel between him and his father
which would drive her last boy from the house; and Liddy, little Liddy
would--no doubt Liddy would when she came back from her school. But all
her other children had been Joscelyns, not one of them like her. She was
even tremblingly conscious that Harry was growing less like her side of
the house every day; but she clung to her little girl as her perfect
representative, a last hope and compensation for the uncomprehended life
she had led all these weary years.