Richard was willing enough, and it only remained to settle what they
would do with their holiday. Suppressing a chuckle, Simon proposed that
they should have a walk, and a look at Mortgrange: it was a place well
worth seeing! “And then,” he added, giving his grandson a poke, “we can
ask after the mare, and learn how her new shoe fits.” They had known him
there, he said, the last thirty years, and would let them have the run
of the place, for sir Wilton and his lady were from home. Richard had
never--to his knowledge--heard of Mortgrange, for Simon had hitherto
avoided even mentioning the place; but he was ready to go wherever his
grandfather pleased. Jessie would have company of her own, Simon said,
with a nod and a wink: they need not trouble themselves about her!
So the next day, as soon us they had had their breakfast, they set out
to walk the four or five miles that, by the road, lay between them and
Mortgrange. It was a fine frosty morning. Not a few yellow leaves were
still hanging, and the sun was warm and bright. It was one of those days
near the death of the year, that make us wonder why the heart of man
should revive and feel strong, while nature is falling into her dreary
trance. Richard was dressed in a tradesman's Sunday clothes, but
tradesman as he was, and was proud to be, he did not altogether look
one. He was in high spirits--for no reason but that his spirits were
high. He was happy because he was happy--“like any other body!” he would
have said: where was the wonder such a fine day, with a pleasant walk
before him, and his jolly grandfather for company! That he could not
make one hair white or black, one hour blessed or miserable, did not
occur to him. Yet he believed that joy or sorrow determined whether life
was or was not worth living! He had never said to himself, “Here I am,
and cannot help being, and yet can order nothing! Even to-day I am happy
only because I cannot help it!” He had indeed begun to learn that a man
has his duty to mind before his happiness, and that was much; but he
had not yet been tried in the matter of doing his duty when unhappy. How
would he feel then? Would he think duty without happiness worth living
for? He was happy now, and that was enough! The putting forth of their
strength and skill doubtless makes many men feel happy--so long as they
are in health; but how when they come to feel that that health is nowise
in their power? While they have it, it seems a part of their being
inalienable; when they have lost it, a thing irrecoverable. Richard took
the thing that came, asked no questions, returned no thanks. He found
himself here:--whence he came he did not care; whither he went he did
not inquire. The present was enough, for the present was good; when the
present was no longer good, why, then,--!
There are those to whom the present cannot be good save as a mode of
the infinite. In such their divine origin asserts itself. Once known for
what it is, the poorest present is a phial holding the elixir of life.
On their way Simon talked about the place they were going to see, and
said its present owner was an elderly man, not very robust, with a
second wife, who looked as if she had not a drop of warm blood, and yet
as if she might live for ever.
“That was their son that came with the little lady,” he said.
“And the little lady was their daughter, I suppose!” rejoined Richard,
with an odd quiver somewhere near his heart.
“She's an Australian, they say,” answered his grandfather; “--no
relation, I fancy.”
“Is Mortgrange a grand place?” asked Richard.
“It's a fine house and a great estate,” answered Simon. “More might be
made of it, no doubt; and I hope one day more will be made of it.”
“What do you mean by that, grandfather?”
“That I hope the son will make a better landlord than the father.”
They came to a great iron gate, standing open, without any lodge.
“We're in luck!” said the blacksmith. “This will save us a long round!
Somebody must have rode out, and been too lazy to shut it! We'd better
leave it as we find it, though! Or say we bring the two halves together
without snapping the locks! I know the locks; I put 'em both on
myself.--See now what a piece of work that gate is! All done with the
hand! None o' your beastly casting there! Up to _your_ work, that, I'm
thinking, lad!”
“Indeed it is! Those gates are worth reducing, for plates to stamp the
covers of a right precious volume with!”
Simon misunderstood, and was on the point of flaring up, but what
Richard followed with quieted him.
“I could almost give up bookbinding to work a pair of gates like those!”
he said.
“I believe you, my boy!” returned his grandfather. “Come and live with
me, and you shall!”
“But who would buy them when I had worked them?”
“If nobody had the sense, we'd put 'em up before the cottage!”
“Like a door-lock on a prayer-book!”
“No matter! They would be worth the worth of themselves!”
“You would have to make the wall so high, there would be no light in the
house!” persisted Richard.
“Tut, man! did you never hear of a joke? All I say is, that if you'll
come and work with me--I don't need to slave more than I like; I've got
a few pounds in the bank!--if you'll work, I'll teach you. Leave me
to find a fit place for what comes of it! They do most things at the
foundries now, but there's a market yet for hammer-work--if it be good
enough, and not too dear; for them as knows a good thing when they sees
it, ain't generally got much money to buy things. It's my opinion the
only way to learn the worth of a thing, is to have to go without it.”
“Few people fancy iron gates, I fear.”
“More might fancy them if they were to be had good,” returned the old
man.
The gate had admitted them to a long winding road, with clumps of trees
here and there on the borders of it. The road was apparently not much
used, for it was more than sprinkled with grass all over. A ploughed
field was on one side, and a wild heathy expanse, dotted with fir-trees,
on the other. Suddenly on the side of the field, gradually on that of
the heath, the ground changed to the green sward of a park.
“A grand place for thinking!” said Richard to himself.
But in truth Richard had hardly yet begun to think. He only followed the
things that came to him; he never said to things, _Come;_ neither, when
they came, did he keep them, and make them walk up and down before him
till he saw what they were; he did not search out their pedigree, get
them to give an account of themselves, show what they could do, or,
in short, be themselves to him. He had written a few verses--not bad
verses, but with feeling only, not thought in them. For instance, he had
addressed an ode to the allegorical personage called Liberty, in which
he bepraised her until, had she been indeed a woman, she must have been
ashamed: she was the one essential of life! the one glory of existence!
he was no man who would not die for her! But what was the thing he thus
glorified? Liberty to go where you pleased, do what you liked, say what
you chose!--that was all. Of inward liberty, of freedom from mental
or spiritual oppression, from passion, from prejudice, from envy, from
jealousy, from selfishness, from unfairness, from ambition, from false
admiration, from the power of public opinion, from any motive energy
save that of love and truth--a freedom of which outward freedom is
scarce the shadow--of such liberty, for all the good books he had read,
for all the good poems he had admired, Richard had not yet begun to
dream, not to say _think_. Then again, he would write about love, and he
had never been in love in his life! All he knew of love was the pleasure
of imagining himself the object of a tall, dark-eyed, long-haired,
devoted woman's admiration. He had never even thought whether he was
worthy of being loved. He was indeed more worthy of love than many to
whom it is freely given; but he knew no more about it, I say, than a
chicken in the shell knows of the blue sky. The shabby spinster, living
with her cousin the baker in the house opposite, knew a hundred times
better than he what the word _love_ meant: she had a history, he had
none.
I will not describe the house of Mortgrange. It seemed to Richard the
oldest house he had ever seen, and it moved him strangely. He said to
himself the man must be happy who called such a house his own, lived in
it, and did what he liked with it. The road they had taken brought them
to the back of the Hall, as the people on the estate called the house.
The blacksmith went to a side-door, and asked if he and his grandson
might have a look at the place: he had heard the baronet was from home!
The man said he would see; and returning presently, invited them to walk
in.
Knowing his grandson's passion, Simon's main thought in taking him was
to see him in the library, with its ten thousand volumes: it would be
such a joke to watch him pondering, admiring, coveting his own! As soon,
therefore, as they were in the great hall, he asked the servant whether
they might not see the library. The man left them again, once more to
make inquiry.
It was a grand old hall where they stood, fitter for the house of a
great noble than a mere baronet; but then the family was older than any
noble family in the county, and the poor baronetcy, granted to a
foolish ancestor, on carpet considerations, by the needy hand of the
dominie-king, was no great feather in the cap of the Lestranges. The
house itself was older than any baronetcy, for no part of it was later
than the time of Elizabeth. It was of fine stone, and of great size. The
hall was nearly sixty feet in height, with three windows on one side,
and a great one at the end. They were thirty feet from the floor, had
round heads, and looked like church-windows. The other side was blank.
Mid-height along the end opposite the great window ran a gallery.
To the sudden terror of Richard, who stood absorbed in the stateliness
of the place, an organ in the gallery burst out playing. He looked
up trembling, but could see only the tops of the pipes. As the sounds
rolled along the roof, reverberated from the solid walls, and crept
about the corners, it seemed to him that the soul of the place was
throbbing in his ears the words of a poem centuries old, which he had
read a day or two before leaving London:--
“Erthe owte of erthe es wondirly wroghte, Erthe hase getyn one erthe a
dignyte of noghte, Erthe appone erthe hase sett alle his thoghte, How
that erthe appone erthe may be heghe broghte.”
As he listened, his eyes settled upon a suit of armour in position: it
became to him a man benighted, lost, forgotten in the cold; the bones
were all dusted out of him by the wintry winds; only the shell of him
was left.
“Mr. Lestrange is in the library, and will see Mr. Armour,” said the
voice of the servant.
An election was at hand, and at such a time certain persons are more
courteous than usual.