ALLAN CAREW'S PEOPLE.
Allan Carew spent the best part of the following day at Beechhurst,
better pleased with his inheritance than he would confess even to
himself. The Admiral's Chinese experiences had not been without
tangible result. The hall was decorated with curios whose value
their present possessor could only guess, and if the greater part
of the house was prim and commonplace, there was one room which
was both handsome and original--this was the smoking-room and
library, a spacious apartment which the Admiral had added to the
original structure, and which was built on the model of a Mandarin's
reception-room. Yes, on the whole, Allan was inclined to think his lot
had fallen on a pleasant heritage. He went up to town in good spirits;
spent ten days in looking at hunting studs at Tattersall's, and made
his modest selection with care and prudence, content to start his
stable with four good hunters, a dog-cart horse, a pony to fetch and
carry, two grooms and a stable-help.
The all-important business of the stable concluded, he went back to
Suffolk to spend Easter in the bosom of his family, and to tell his
father what he had done. There was perfect harmony of feeling, and
frankest confidence between father and son, and the son's regard
for the father was all the stronger because, under that quiet and
somewhat languid bearing of the Squire of Fendyke, Allan suspected
hidden depths. Of the history of his father's youth, or the history
of his father's heart, the son knew nothing; yet, fondly as he loved
his mother, the excellent and popular Lady Emily, he had a shrewd
suspicion that she was not the kind of woman to have won his father's
heart in the days when love means romance rather than reason. That
she possessed her husband's warm affection now, he, the son, was
fully assured; but he was equally assured that the alliance had been
passionless, a union of two honourable minds, rather than of two loving
hearts.
There was that in his father's manner of life which to Allan's mind
told of a youth overshadowed by some unhappy experience; and a word
dropped now and then, in the father's talk of his son's prospects and
hopes, a hint, a sigh, had suggested an unfortunate love-affair.
His mother was more communicative, and had told her son frankly that
she was not his father's first love.
"You remember your grandmother, Allan?" she said.
Yes, Allan remembered her distinctly--an elderly woman dressed in some
rich silken fabric, always black, with a silver chatelaine at her side,
on which there hung a curious old enamelled watch that he loved to look
at. A tall slender figure, a thin aquiline countenance, with silvery
hair arrayed in feathery curls under a honiton cap. She had been always
kind to him; but no kindness could dispel the awe which she inspired.
"I used to dream of her," he said. "Had she a frightening voice, do you
think? She was mixed up in most of my childish nightmares."
"Poor Allan!" laughed his mother. "She was an excellent woman, but
she loved to command; and one can't command affection, not even the
affection of a child. It was she who made your father marry me.
He liked me, and I liked him, and we had been playfellows; but we
should never have thought of marrying if your grandmother had not,
in a manner, insisted upon it. She told George that I was deeply in
love with him; and she told me that George was devoted to me; and so
we could not help ourselves. And, after all," she went on, with a
comfortable sigh, "it has answered very well. I don't think we could
possibly be fonder of our home, or of each other, than we are. And
your father has his books, and his shooting and fishing, and I have my
farm and my schools--and," with a sudden gush of tenderness, "we both
have you. You ought to be fond of us, Allan. You are the link that
makes us one in heart and mind."
Allan was fond of them. Both parents had been undeviating in their
indulgence, and he had given them love without stint. But it may be
that he loved the somewhat silent and reserved father with a profounder
affection than he gave to the open-hearted and loquacious mother.
That vague consciousness of a secret in his father's life, of sorrows
unforgotten, but never told, had evoked the son's warmest sympathy. All
that Allan had ever felt of sentiment or romantic feeling hitherto, he
had felt for his father. It is not to be supposed that he had reached
five and twenty without some commerce with Cupid, but his loves had
been only passing fancies, sunbeams glancing on the surface of life's
current, not those deep forces which change the course of the river.
The characters of father and mother were distinctly marked in their
acceptance of Allan's good fortune. Lady Emily saw only the sunny
side of the inheritance. She was delighted that her son should have
ample means and perfect independence in the morning of life. She was
full of matrimonial schemes on his behalf. Decidedly he ought to
marry, well and quickly. An only son, with an estate in possession,
and another--his patrimonial estate--in prospective. It was his duty
to found a family. She marshalled all the young women she knew in a
mental review. There must be good family--a pure race, untarnished by
the taint of commerce, unshadowed by hushed-up disgrace--divorces,
bankruptcies, turf scandals. There should be money, because even the
two estates would not make Allan a rich man, as the world reckons
wealth nowadays; but they would give him a respectable platform from
which to demand the hand of an heiress. He could woo the wealthiest
without fear of being considered a fortune-hunter.
"It is sad to think you will like your own place better than this,"
said Lady Emily in her cheerfullest voice, "and that we shall hardly
see you except at Christmas and Easter; but it is so nice to know that
you are in a position to marry as early as you like without being under
any obligation to your father; for, indeed, dear, what with his library
and my farm, there would have been very little margin for a proper
establishment for you."
"My dearest mother, why harp upon matrimony? I have made up my mind to
follow my uncle's excellent example."
"My poor brother!" sighed Lady Emily. "He was in love with the belle
of the season--a foolish pink and white thing, with one long curl
streaming over her left shoulder, and a frock that you would laugh at,
if you could see her to-day. Of course Allan's chances were hopeless--a
younger son, with a commander's pay, eked out by a pittance from his
father. She used to ride in the Row with a plume in her hat--half a
Spanish fowl--quite the right thing, I assure you, at that time.
Your uncle was twelve years older than I, you know, Allan; and I was
still in short petticoats when he went off to China broken-hearted.
Of course she wouldn't have him, though she said he was the best
waltzer in London. Her people wouldn't let her look at him even, from a
matrimonial point of view."
Allan went to church with his mother on Easter morning--attended two
services in the fine old church, which seemed much too grand and too
big for the tiny town--her loving heart swelling with pride at having
such an admirable son. Her friends had always been fond of him; but now
it seemed to her there was a touch of deference in their kindness. They
had liked him as _her_ son, and the inheritor of Fendyke Hall; but
perhaps they liked him even a little better now that he was his own
master, a man of independent means.
He accompanied Lady Emily in her weekly visit to the schools; he
assisted in dealing out Easter gifts to the school-children, and
distributed half a dozen pounds of the very strongest obtainable
tobacco among his male acquaintance in the village of Fendyke--a
village consisting of a rectory, three picturesque farmhouses, a still
more picturesque water-mill and miller's house, a roomy old barn-like
inn, said to have once given shelter to good Queen Bess, and a good
many decent cottages grouped in threes and fours along the broad, level
road, or scattered in side lanes.
The morning of Easter Monday was given to an inspection of Lady
Emily's white farm--that farm which, next to her son, was the greatest
pride and delight of her innocent and strictly rural life. Here,
all buildings and all creatures were of an almost dazzling purity.
White horses at the plough, a white fox-terrier running beside it,
white birds in the poultry-yard, white cows in the meadow--cows from
Lord Cawdor's old white Pembroke breed, cows from Blickling Park and
Woodbastwick--white cottages for bailiff and farm-labourers, white
palings, white pigs, and white donkeys, a white peacock sunning
himself on the top of the clipped yew-hedge in the bailiff's garden,
white tulips, white hyacinths in the flower-beds. To procure all this
whiteness had cost trouble and money; but there are few home-farms
which give as much delight to their possessors as this white farm gave
to Lady Emily Carew. She had as much pride in its perfection as the
connoisseur who collects only Wedgwood, or only Florentine Majolica,
has in his collection. It is not so much the actual value of the thing
as the fact that the thing is unique, and has cost the possessor years
of patience and labour. Lady Emily would take a long journey to look at
a white cow, or to secure the whitest thing in Brahmas or Cochin Chinas.
It was a harmless, simple, womanly hobby, and although Lady Emily's
farm was a somewhat costly toy, it served to give her status in the
neighbourhood, and it provided labour for a good many people, who
were well housed and well looked after, and whose children astonished
the school-inspectors by the thoroughness of their education. No
incompetent master or mistress could have held on in the schools where
Lady Emily was a power. She cultivated a friendly familiarity with the
man and woman who taught her cottage children; she asked them to quiet,
confidential luncheons three or four times in a quarter; she sounded
their opinions, plucked out the heart of their mystery, lent them
books, stuffed them with her own ideas, and, in a manner, made them her
mouthpiece. Intensely conservative as to her opinions and prejudices,
and with an absolute loathing for all radical and revolutionary
principles; she was yet, by the beneficence of her nature, more liberal
than many a professing demagogue, and would fain have admitted all
her fellow-creatures to an equal share in the good things of this
life. Her warm heart was full of compassion for the hard lives she saw
around her--hard even where the condition of the agricultural labourer
was at its best--and it was her delight to introduce into these hard
lives occasional glimpses of a happier world--a world of pleasure
and gaiety, laughter and frolic. Lady Emily's Christmas and Whitsun
balls for the villagers and servants; Lady Emily's May-day feast for
the children; Lady Emily's midsummer picnic and harvest-home; and Lady
Emily's fairy fir-tree, which reached to the ceiling of the boy's
schoolroom, every branch laden with benefits--these were events which
broke the slow monotony of each laborious year, joys to dream of and
to remember in many a dull week of toil. Second only to these festive
gatherings in helpfulness were Lady Emily's coal and blanket society,
savings bank, and mothers' meeting--the last a friendly, familiar
gathering held in a spacious old building which had been a brewery in
the days when every country gentleman's household brewed its own beer.
Once a week, through the winter season, Lady Emily sat in the old
brewery, with a circle of cottagers' wives sewing industriously, while
she talked and read to them. Tea and bread-and-butter, a roaring wood
fire, and a bright lamp, were the only material comforts provided; but
these and Lady Emily's friendly welcome and pleasant talk, with the
short story chosen out of a magazine, and the familiar chapter of the
New Testament, read far better than vicar or curate read it in church,
sufficed to make the mothers' meeting a cheerful break in the cottage
matron's busy week. She went back to her homely hearth cheered and
encouraged. Lady Emily had told her the latest news of the great busy
world outside Fendyke, had given her a recipe for a new savoury pie of
ox-cheek and twopenny rice, or a new way of making barley broth; or
had given her a "cutting" for her tiny flower-garden, or had cut out
her new Gari_bawl_di. Lady Emily had been to her as a friend and
counsellor.
The village remembered with a shudder that long dreary winter when
the great house was empty, while Mr. Carew and his wife were in
Egypt--ordered there by the doctors, after a serious illness of the
squire's.
Much had been done for the sick and the poor even in that desolate
winter, for the housekeeper had been given a free hand; but no
one could replace Lady Emily, and the gaiety of Fendyke had been
extinguished.