COLLECTION
OF
BRITISH AUTHORS
TAUCHNITZ EDITION.
VOL. 1823.
WITHIN THE PRECINCTS BY MRS. OLIPHANT.
COMPLETE
TAUCHNITZ EDITION.
By the same Author,
_The Chronicles of Carlingford_:
THE RECTOR AND THE DOCTOR’S FAMILY 1 vol.
SALEM CHAPEL 2 vols.
THE PERPETUAL CURATE 2 vols.
MISS MARJORIBANKS 2 vols.
PHŒBE, JUNIOR 2 vols.
* * * * *
THE LAST OF THE MORTIMERS 2 vols.
MARGARET MAITLAND 1 vol.
AGNES 2 vols.
MADONNA MARY 2 vols.
THE MINISTER’S WIFE 2 vols.
OMBRA 2 vols.
MEMOIR OF COUNT DE MONTALEMBERT 2 vols.
MAY 2 vols.
INNOCENT 2 vols.
FOR LOVE AND LIFE 2 vols.
A ROSE IN JUNE 1 vol.
THE STORY OF VALENTINE & HIS BROTHER 2 vols.
WHITELADIES 2 vols.
THE CURATE IN CHARGE 1 vol.
MRS. ARTHUR 2 vols.
CARITÀ 2 vols.
YOUNG MUSGRAVE 2 vols.
THE PRIMROSE PATH 2 vols.
WITHIN
THE PRECINCTS
BY
MRS. OLIPHANT,
AUTHOR OF “THE CHRONICLES OF CARLINGFORD,” ETC.
_COPYRIGHT EDITION._
IN THREE VOLUMES.
VOL. I.
LEIPZIG
BERNHARD TAUCHNITZ
1879.
_The Right of Translation is reserved._
CONTENTS
OF VOLUME I.
Page
CHAPTER I. St. Michael’s 7
-- II. The Chevaliers’ Lodges 23
-- III. The Abbey Precincts 40
-- IV. Lady Caroline 62
-- V. At the Deanery 82
-- VI. Law 103
-- VII. A New Light 116
-- VIII. Triumph and Terror 129
-- IX. Visitors 150
-- X. The Minor Canon 171
-- XI. Another Evening at the Deanery 190
-- XII. Brother and Sister 209
-- XIII. Captain Despard 227
-- XIV. The Workroom 242
-- XV. Romance and Reality 261
-- XVI. The Signor’s Household 279
WITHIN THE PRECINCTS.
CHAPTER I.
ST. MICHAEL’S.
The Abbey Church of St. Michael’s stands on a low hill in a flat and
fertile country. The holy places which are sacred to the great archangel
seem to settle naturally upon a mount; and this, one of the noblest
structures consecrated under his name, had all the effect of a very high
elevation--so wide-spreading was the landscape round, so vast the sweep
of plain, fields, and woods, great parks and commons, and gleaming white
villages like ships at sea, which could be seen from its walls and
terraces. Though the settlement was ecclesiastical, the place had been
walled and defensible in the days when danger threatened wealth whatever
form it assumed. Danger, however, had long been far from the thoughts of
the dignified corporation which held its reverend court upon the hill.
The Abbey was as splendid as any cathedral, and possessed a dean and
chapter, though no bishop. It was of Late Gothic, perpendicular and
magnificent; and the walls and towers which still surrounded it, and
even the old houses within the precincts, were older still than the
Abbey, and could have furnished many “bits” to make the heart of a
mediæval architect glad. The very turf which filled the quadrangle and
clothed the slope of the Dean’s Walk was a production of centuries; the
Chapter House was full of historical documents, and the library of rare
books; and there were antiquarian fanatics who protested that the
wealthy livings belonging to the Abbey, and its old endowments, were the
least of its riches. Nor was this establishment on the hill confined to
ecclesiastical interests only. The beautiful church was the chapel of an
order of knighthood, and opposite to it--forming an integral part of the
pile of buildings--was a line of small ancient houses, forming a kind of
screen and inner wall of defence to the sacred citadel, which were the
lodges of a supplementary order of pensioners--Chevaliers of St.
Michael--which at the time of the foundation had given such a balance,
as the Middle Ages loved, of Christian charity and help, to the
splendour and braggadocio of the more glorious knights. Thus the little
community which inhabited this noble old pile of buildings was varied
and composite. The highest official in it was the costly and
aristocratic Dean, the lowest the lay clerks, who were housed humbly in
the shadow of the church in a little cloister of their own, and who
daily filled the Abbey with the noblest music. The Deanery was close to
the Abbey, and embraced in its irregular group of roofs the great
tower, which showed for miles round, with its lighted windows, rising up
into the night. The canons’ houses, if not equally fine, were still
great old houses, standing on the edge of the hill, their walls rising
straight from the green slopes dotted with trees, round the foot of
which a little red-roofed town had gathered; and the Abbey itself stood
between those stately habitations and the humbler lodges of the
Chevaliers, which shut off the lower level of sloping bank on the other
side. The Dean himself was of a great family, and belonged not only to
the nobility, but, higher still, to the most select circles of fashion,
and had a noble wife and such a position in society as many a bishop
envied; and among his canons were men not only of family, but possessed
of some mild links of connection with the worlds of learning and
scholarship,--even it was said that one had writ a book in days when
books were not so common. The minor canons were of humbler degree; they
formed the link between gods and men, so to speak--between the Olympus
of the Chapter and the common secular sphere below. We will not deceive
the reader nor buoy him up with hopes that this history concerns the
lofty fortunes of the members of that sacred and superior class. To no
such distinction can these humble pages aspire; our office is of a
lowlier kind. On Olympus the doings are all splendid, if not, as old
chronicles tell, much wiser than beneath, amid the humbler haunts of
men. All that we can do is to tell how these higher circles looked, to
eyes gazing keenly upon them from the mullioned windows which gave a
subdued light to the little rooms of the Chevaliers’ lodges on the
southern side of St. Michael’s Hill.
These lodges were two storeys in height, with small rooms and very solid
masonry, little gardens in front of them, and a tower at each end. Many
creeping plants clung about the old walls, and especially there were
clouds of Virginia creeper which made them glorious in autumn. It was,
however, on a summer afternoon, at the time this history begins, that
Lottie Despard--the only daughter of Captain Despard, a Chevalier not
very long appointed to that office--sat, with her head out through the
open window, framed between the mullions, watching the broad slope of
the Dean’s Walk which lay between her and the church, and led to the
Deanery and the heights beyond. The Deanery was at this moment the most
important place in the world, not only to Lottie, but to many other
spectators who thronged the slope beneath her window. For this day a
great event had happened in St. Michael’s. The Dean’s only daughter,
Augusta Huntington, had been married that morning with all the pomp
imaginable. It had been like a royal wedding, sumptuous in ritual, in
music, and fine company; and now, after taking a little repose during
the time which the wedding-party spent at breakfast, the Abbey
precincts were beginning to fill again with gazing groups, and all the
people within were coming to their windows to see the bride and
bridegroom go away.
Lottie Despard was beyond all comparison the prettiest, and she was also
the youngest, of all the ladies in the lodges. She was of Irish descent,
and she had the whiteness of skin, the blackness of abundant hair, the
deep blue eyes that so often go with Milesian blood. Such eyelashes had
never been seen at St. Michael’s; indeed, they had never been seen
anywhere “out of Mrs. Jarley’s waxworks!” some ill-natured critics said.
Sometimes, when Lottie was specially pale or weary, they seemed to
overshadow her face; but she was neither weary nor pale at this
particular moment. She was in great excitement, on the contrary, and
flushed with expectation. Though she was only the daughter of a poor
Chevalier, Lottie had advantages which separated her from the rest of
that little company. Her father was of good family, a point on which she
insisted strenuously; and she herself was the possessor of a beautiful
voice. The former particular would not have been of much advantage to
her, for what was the Despards’ old and faded quality to the great
people at St. Michael’s? But a voice is a different matter; and there
had arisen between Miss Huntington and the Chevalier’s daughter a kind
of intimacy very flattering (the neighbours thought) to Lottie. They
had sung together so much and seen so much of each other, that the
lodges expected nothing less than that Lottie would have been asked to
the wedding, or even--greater honour still!--to be a bridesmaid; and
Lottie herself had been wounded and disappointed beyond measure when she
found herself left entirely out. But there was still the possibility
that the bride might show she had not forgotten her humble friend
altogether; and it was for this that Lottie was waiting so anxiously as
the time of departure approached. A word, a sign, a wave of the hand
surely would be vouchsafed to her as the carriage passed. Her heart was
beating loudly as she leant out--a pretty sight to see from without, for
the window was framed in luxuriant wreaths of green, with trailing
tendrils of the young delicate leaves which in autumn flamed like
scarlet flowers against the wall. The people who were gathering on the
road below gave many a look at her. And, though the young ladies from
the shops, who had got half-an-hour’s leave to see how their handiwork
looked in the bride’s travelling-dress, were deeply sensible of the fact
that a poor Chevalier’s daughter was not much richer than themselves,
yet they could not help looking and envying Lottie, if only for the
window at which she could sit in comfort and see everything that went
on, instead of standing in the sun as they had to do. They forgot her,
however, and everything else as the carriage drove up to the Deanery to
take the bridal pair away. The Dean’s daughter was so much the princess
of the community that a compromise had been made between popularity and
decorum; and it was in a carriage partially open, that an admiring
people might behold her as she passed, that she was to drive away. There
was the usual long waiting at the door while the farewells were made,
during which time the outside world looked on respectfully; and then,
with a crowd of “good-byes” thrown after her, and a few--but only a very
few, for the Deanery was nothing if not decorous--white satin slippers,
and a prance and dash of the impatient horses, and a flourish of the
coachman’s whip, and a parting gleam of the wedding favour on his
breast, the bridal pair rolled rapidly past, and all was over. How
quickly they went, everybody said, and how well she looked; and how well
that brown dress looked, though it had been thought rather dowdy for
such an occasion; and the feather in the hat, how well it matched, about
which there had been so much trouble! Some, who had the time, paused to
see the wedding guests disperse, and catch other beatific glimpses of
fine bonnets and gay dresses; but most of the spectators, after this
last and crowning point of the performance, streamed down the slope and
out at the great gateway, and were seen no more.
Lottie drew in her head from the window the moment the carriage passed.
She grew red when other people grew pale, being pale by nature; and her
face was crimson as she withdrew it from the opening, and came in again
to the little room in which most of her life was spent. Her lips were
closed very tight, her soft forehead contracted; the fire in her blue
eyes, gleaming with anger and disappointment, was (most unwillingly)
quenched in tears. She clasped her hands together with a vehement clasp.
“It would have cost so little to give a look!” she cried; then bit her
lips and clenched her hands and stamped her foot upon the floor, in a
forlorn but vigorous effort to restrain her tears.
“What does it matter to you?” said a tall young fellow, sufficiently
like Lottie to prove himself her brother, who had looked out lazily over
her head while the carriage was passing. He had his hands in his pockets
and a slouching gait generally, and looked too big for the little room.
She had almost pushed against him in her rapid movement, for his
movements were never rapid; and he had not had time to take one hand out
of his pocket before she flashed round upon him with two red spots on
her cheeks and fury in her heart.
“What does it matter? Oh, nothing! nothing!” cried Lottie. “Why should
anything matter? It only shows me a little more, a very little more, how
cold the world is, and that nobody has a heart!”
“Few people have very much, I suppose,” said the young man; “at least,
so the governor says. But what good or harm could it do you to have a
parting sign from _her_? I knew she would never give it you. I knew she
would be thinking of nobody but herself----”
“What did you know about it?” cried the girl. “You were never a friend
of hers! you were never begged and prayed to go and sing at the Deanery!
she never came down the Abbey Hill to look for you! But me she has done
all that for; and when I thought just for once she would let everybody
see that Lottie Despard was a friend--Oh, Law, for the love of Heaven,
go and work at something, and don’t stand there staring at me!”
“What am I to work at?” said the young man, with a yawn. “It’s past
working hours; besides, in summer how can anyone work? I can’t make head
nor tail of that Euclid when the sun is shining.”
“But when the sun is not shining, Law?”
“Oh! then,” said the youth, with a smile breaking over his somewhat
cloudy face, “I can make out the head, but not the tail, and the sting
is in the tail, you know! Good-bye, Lottie, and never mind any mother’s
daughter of them. They cannot make us anything but what we are, whatever
they may do.”
“And what are we?” said Lottie to herself, as her brother strolled
lazily out. There was more air to breathe when he was gone, which was
something. She sat down upon the little old faded sofa, and shed a few
more bitter tears of disappointment and mortification. We all like to
think well of ourselves when that is possible; to think well of our
belongings, our people, our position in the world--all that makes up
that external idea of us which we make acquaintance with years before we
know our own real being. No one can tell what the atmosphere of
well-being, of external credit, and public esteem is to a child; and
this Lottie had never known. They had been poor, but poverty is no
hindrance to that feeling of harmony with the world around which is the
higher soul of respectability. But there had not been much about the
Despards to respect. The father had been a good officer in his day, and,
if he had not been without money and interest, and everything that could
help him on, might have been distinguished in his profession. But those
were the days of “purchase,” and Captain Despard had remained Captain
Despard, and had bitterly resented the fact. His wife, too, though she
was Lottie’s mother, had not been of a kind to reclaim for her husband
the failing credit of his life. They had lived as most poor officers on
half pay, with pretensions to gentility and hankerings after pleasure,
do live. They were in debt all round, as need not be said; and Mrs.
Despard’s life would have been rendered miserable by it if she had not
escaped from the contemplation by means of every cheap merry-making or
possible extravagance she could attain to. All had been huggermugger in
Lottie’s early life; a life not destitute of amusements, indeed, but
full of bitterness, small mortifications, snubs, and the cold shoulder
of social contempt. Lottie herself had heard in childish quarrels,
through the frank recriminations of her childish companions, the
frankest statements of what other people thought of her parents; and
this had opened her baby eyes prematurely to the facts of the case. It
must be supposed that there was some respectable grandpapa, some precise
and orderly aunt in the Despard kindred, who had given to Lottie a
nature so different from that of her immediate progenitors. As she grew
older everything about her had looked to Lottie as the fairy splendour
looked in the eyes of the disenchanted human spectator. Her mother’s gay
dresses, which she once thought so pretty, came to look like the
miserable finery they were; her mother’s gaiety had become noise and
excitement. Her father’s grand air grew the poorest false pretension;
for must he not know, Lottie thought, how everybody spoke of him, how
little anyone thought of his assumption? And the house was miserable,
dirty, disorderly, mean, and gaudy, full of riot and waste and want and
poverty--one day a feast, another nothing. Even careless Law--the big
boy who was too much at home, who was scarcely ever at school, and who
often had no clothes to go out in--even Law saw how wretched it was at
home, though he was hopeless as well as careless, and asked his sister
what was the good of minding, what could they do? But Lottie was not of
the kind which can let ill alone, or well either, for that matter. She
did mind; and as she grew older, every week, every day, added to the
flame of impatience in her. Just, however, when ruin seemed coming
beyond the possibility of further staving-off, Mrs. Despard fell ill and
died; and Lottie at sixteen was left alone, miserable, with remorseful
thoughts of having secretly blamed the mother who was now out of reach,
and to whom she could never make amends for those injurious secret
fault-findings; and full of anxieties unspeakable--forlorn wonderings
what she was to do, and eagerness to do something. Her grief, however,
was lightened by the feeling that now she had everything in her hands
and could “make a change,”--even when it was made more heavy by the
thought that she had found fault in her heart with the mother who was
dead. It seemed to the girl that she must be able, by dint of devoting
herself to it, to change everything--to keep the house in order if she
did it with her own hands, to pay the bills, wherever the money came
from. She was overflowing with life and energy and activity, and
disapproved of all the ways of the past. She was like a new king coming
to the throne, a new ministry of idealists bent upon undoing all their
predecessors had done, and doing everything as it ought to be done.
Alas, poor Lottie! the young king with all the stiff precedents of a
hundred years against him, the young ministry confronted by a thousand
problems, and finding their ideal pronounced impracticable on every
side, were nothing to the heaven-born reformer of the household with a
pleasure loving impecunious father to whom debt was second nature, and
who had always preferred fun to respectability. And she dashed at her
reforms too boldly, as was natural to her age, insisting upon brushings
and sweepings till Betty threw up her situation, and asking for money
till her father swore at her. “It is to pay the bills, papa! I want to
pay the bills!” she had said, reduced to plead for that which she
thought she had a right to demand. “D---- the bills!” was all Captain
Despard replied.
And even Law, when Lottie tried to order him off to school, was
unmanageable. He was no reformer like his sister, but on the whole
preferred going just when it suited him and lounging at home between
whiles. To be sure home was less amusing now that poor mammy, as they
called her, was gone. Her laughter and her complaints, and her odd
visitors, and all her slipshod ways, had kept noise and movement, if
nothing more, about the house. The tawdry women and the shabby men who
had been her friends were all afraid of the dulness which naturally
follows a death in the family. Some of these women, indeed, had come to
Lottie all tears and kisses, offering to stay with her, and asking what
they could do; but their sympathy did not comfort the girl, who even in
her deepest grief was all tingling with plans and desires to be doing,
and an eager activity and impatience to make the changes she wished. But
they fluttered away, every one, when the first excitement was over and
the dulness that is inevitable fell upon the house. To do them justice
there was not one among them who would not have come daily to “sit with”
Lottie, to comfort her with all the news that was going, and tell her
that she must not mope. But Lottie wanted none of their consolations,
and did not miss her mother’s friends when they abandoned her. She did
not miss them, but Law did. Yet he would not go to school; he sat and
made faces at her when she ordered and scolded him. “If I didn’t do what
_she_ told me, do you think I will do what you tell me?” said Law; and
then Lottie wept and prayed. “What will become of you, Law? what will
you ever be good for? Papa has no money to leave us, and you will not be
able to do anything.”
“Who said I wanted to do anything?” said Law flippantly; and then, “who
said I should not be able to do anything?” he added, with offence. “I
can pick it up whenever I like.” But Lottie, preternaturally, awfully
wise, feeling the burden of the world upon her shoulders, knew that he
could not pick it up when he pleased. She knew that education had to be
acquired painfully, not sipped a little mouthful at a time. She had
never had any education herself, but yet she knew this, as she knew so
many things, by instinct, by constant critical observation of the habits
which she disapproved. There are few more vigorously successful ways of
finding out what is right, than by living among people whom we feel
indignantly to be wrong.
“You may think what you like,” she said, “Law--but I _know_ that you
cannot learn anything in that way. Three days at home and one at school!
I wonder they let you go at all. I wonder they don’t turn you out. I
wonder they did not turn you out long ago!”
“And that is just what they are always threatening to do,” said Law
laughing; “but they have not the heart of a mouse, the fellows at the
grammar-school. And they’ll never do it, though I shouldn’t mind. I
should be free then, and never have to trouble my head about anything at
all.”
“You’ll have to trouble your head when you have to work and don’t know
how,” said Lottie. “Oh, if I was a boy! It’s no use wishing, I am only a
girl; and you are a great lump, neither one nor the other; but if I were
only a boy, and could get something to do, and a little money to pay
those bills----”
“Oh, dash the bills, as papa says. He doesn’t say ‘dash,’” said Law,
with provoking calm; “but, then, I mustn’t swear.”
“Oh, Law, I should like to beat you!” said Lottie, clenching her little
fists in impotent anger and setting her teeth. But Law only laughed the
more.
“You had better not,” he said, when he had got over his laugh, “for I am
a deal stronger than you.”
And so he was, and so were they all, much stronger than poor Lottie;
even Betty, who would not scrub, but who was too well used to all the
ways of the family and aware of all their troubles, to be sent away. She
fought for a time hard and bitterly, striving with all her might to
clean, and to dust, and to keep things straight, to the infinite
discontent of everybody concerned. But yet perhaps the girl’s struggles
were not utterly without use; for when the next astonishing change came
in their lives, and their little income was suddenly increased by half,
and a removal made necessary, Captain Despard, of his own accord, turned
Lottie’s despair in a moment into hope and joy. He said, “Now, Lottie,
you shall have things your own way. Now you shall see what you can do.
This is a new start for us all. If you can keep us respectable, by Jove,
you shall, and nobody shall stop you. A man ought to be respectable when
he’s made a Chevalier of St. Michael.” Lottie’s heart leaped up, up from
where it lay fathoms deep in unutterable depression and discouragement.
“Oh, papa, papa, do you mean it? Will you keep your word?” she cried,
happy yet dubious; and how he kept it, but with a difference, and how
they set out upon this new chapter in their career, shall be told before
we come back again to Lottie in her proper person, in the little drawing
room in the Chevaliers’ quarters within the Abbey precincts, on Miss
Huntington’s wedding-day.