Wives and Daughters (60 page)

‘Pray don’t lose your temper, sir. I said I should inquire. You have not seen the men pulling up gorse yourself, or you would have named it. I, surely, may doubt the correctness of your information until I have made some inquiry; at any rate, that is the course I shall pursue, and if it gives you offence I shall be sorry, but I shall do it just the same. When I am convinced that harm has been done to your property, I shall take steps to prevent it for the future, and of course, in my lord’s name, I shall pay you compensation—it may probably amount to half-a-crown.’ He added these words last in a lower tone, as if to himself, with a slight contemptuous smile on his face.

‘Quiet, mare, quiet,’ said the squire, quite unaware that he was the cause of her impatient movements by the way he was perpetually tightening her reins; and also, perhaps, he unconsciously addressed the injunction to himself

Neither of them saw Roger Hamley, who was approaching them with long, steady steps. He had seen his father from the door of old Silas’s cottage, and, as the poor fellow was still asleep, he was coming to speak to his father, and was near enough now to hear the next words.

‘I don’t know who you are, but I’ve known land-agents who were gentlemen, and I’ve known some who were not. You belong to this last set, young man,’ said the squire, ‘that you do. I should like to try my horsewhip on you for your insolence.’

‘Pray, Mr. Hamley,’ replied Mr. Preston, coolly, ‘curb your temper a little, and reflect. I really feel sorry to see a man of your age in such a passion:’—moving a little farther off, however, but really more with a desire to save the irritated man from carrying his threat into execution, out of a dislike to the slander and excitement it would cause, than from any personal dread. Just at this moment Roger Hamley came close up. He was panting a little and his eyes were very stern and dark; but he spoke quietly enough.

‘Mr. Preston, I can hardly understand what you mean by your last words. But remember, my father is a gentleman of age and position, and not accustomed to receive advice as to the management of his temper from young men like you.’

‘I desired him to keep his men off my land,’ said the squire to his son—his wish to stand well in Roger’s opinion restraining his temper a little; but though his words might be a little calmer, there were all other signs of passion present—the discoloured complexion, the trembling hands, the fiery cloud in his eyes. ‘He refused, and doubted my word.’

Mr. Preston turned to Roger, as if appealing from Philip drunk to Philip sober, and spoke in a tone of cool explanation, which, though not insolent in words, was excessively irritating in manner.

‘Your father has misunderstood me—perhaps it is no wonder,’ trying to convey, by a look of intelligence at the son, his opinion that the father was in no state to hear reason. ‘I never refused to do what was just and right. I only required further evidence as to the past wrong-doing; your father took offence at this,’ and then he shrugged his shoulders, and lifted his eyebrows in a manner he had formerly learnt in France.

‘At any rate, sir! I can scarcely reconcile the manner and words to my father, which I heard you use when I first came up, with the deference you ought to have shown to a man of his age and position. As to the fact of the trespass——’

‘They are pulling up all the gorse, Roger—there’ll be no cover whatever for game soon,’ put in the squire.

Roger bowed to his father, but took up his speech at the point it was at before the interruption.

‘I will inquire into it myself at a cooler moment; and if I find that such trespass or damage has been committed, of course I shall expect that you will see it put a stop to. Come, father! I am going to see old Silas—perhaps you don’t know that he is very ill.’ So he endeavoured to wile the squire away to prevent further words. He was not entirely successful.

Mr. Preston was enraged by Roger’s calm and dignified manner, and threw after them this parting shaft, in the shape of a loud soliloquy, —

‘Position, indeed! What are we to think of the position of a man who begins works like these without counting the cost, and comes to a standstill, and has to turn off
^cx
his labourers just at the beginning of winter, leaving———’

They were too far off to hear the rest. The squire was on the point of turning back before this, but Roger took hold of the reins of the old mare, and led her over some of the boggy ground, as if to guide her into sure footing, but, in reality, because he was determined to prevent the renewal of the quarrel. It was well that the cob knew him, and was, indeed, old enough to prefer quietness to dancing ; for Mr. Hamley plucked hard at the reins, and at last broke out with an oath.—‘Damn it, Roger! I’m not a child; I won’t be treated as such. Leave go, I say!’

Roger let go; they were now on firm ground, and he did not wish any watchers to think that he was exercising any constraint over his father; and this quiet obedience to his impatient commands did more to soothe the squire than anything else could have effected just then.

‘I know I turned them off—what could I do? I’d no more money for their weekly wages; it’s a loss to me, as you know. He doesn’t know, no one knows, but I think your mother would, how it cut me to turn ’em off just before winter set in. I lay awake many a night thinking of it, and I gave them what I had—I did, indeed. I hadn’t got money to pay ‘em, but I had three barren cows fattened, and gave every scrap of meat to the men, and I let ’em go into the woods and gather what was fallen, and I winked at their breaking off old branches, and now to have it cast up against me by that cur—that servant. But I’ll go on with the works, by—, I will, if only to spite him. I’ll show him who I am. My position, indeed! A Hamley of Hamley takes a higher position than his master. I’ll go on with the works, see if I don‘t! I’m paying between one and two hundred a year interest on Government money. I’ll raise some more if I go to the Jews; Osborne has shown me the way, and Osborne shall pay for it—he shall. I’ll not put up with insults. You shouldn’t have stopped me, Roger! I wish to heaven I’d horsewhipped the fellow!’

He was lashing himself again into an impotent rage, painful to a son to witness; but just then the little grandchild of old Silas, who had held the squire’s horse during his visit to the sick man, came running up, breathless:

‘Please, sir, please, squire, mammy has sent me; grandfather has wakened up sudden, and mammy says he’s dying, and would you please come; she says he’d take it as a kind compliment, she’s sure.’

So they went to the cottage, the squire speaking never a word, but suddenly feeling as if lifted out of a whirlwind and set down in a still and awful place.

I
t is not to be supposed that such an encounter as Mr. Preston had just had with Roger Hamley sweetened the regards in which the two young men henceforward held each other. They had barely spoken to one another before, and but seldom met; for the land-agent’s employment had hitherto lain at Ashcombe, some sixteen or seventeen miles from Hamley He was older than Roger by several years; but during the time he had lived in the country Osborne and Roger had been at school and at college. Mr. Preston was prepared to dislike the Hamleys for many unreasonable reasons. Cynthia and Molly had both spoken of the brothers with familiar regard, implying considerable intimacy; their flowers had been preferred to his on the occasion of the ball; most people spoke well of them; and Mr. Preston had an animal’s instinctive jealousy and combativeness against all popular young men. Their ‘position’—poor as the Hamleys might be—was far higher than his own in the county; and, moreover, he was agent to the great Whig lord, whose political interests were diametrically opposed to those of the old Tory squire. Not that Lord Cumnor troubled himself much about his political interests. His family had obtained property and title from the Whigs at the time of the Hanoverian succession; and so, traditionally, he was a Whig, and had belonged in his youth to Whig clubs, where he had lost considerable sums of money to Whig gamblers. All this was satisfactory and consistent enough. And if Lord Hollingford had not been returned for the county on the Whig interest—as his father had been before him, until he had succeeded to the title—it is quite probable Lord Cumnor would have considered the British constitution in danger, and the patriotism of his ancestors ungratefully ignored. But, excepting at elections, he had no notion of making Whig and Tory a party cry. He had lived too much in London, and was of too sociable a nature, to exclude any man who jumped with his humour from the hospitality he was always ready to offer, be the agreeable acquaintance Whig, Tory, or Radical. But in the county of which he was lord-lieutenant, the old party distinction was still a shibboleth by which men were tested for their fitness for social intercourse, as well as on the hustings. If by any chance a Whig found himself at a Tory dinner-table—or vice versa—the food was hard of digestion, and wine and viands were criticized rather than enjoyed. A marriage between the young people of the separate parties was almost as unheard-of and prohibited an alliance as that of Romeo and Juliet’s. And of course Mr. Preston was not a man in whose breast such prejudices would die away. They were an excitement to him for one thing, and called out all his talent for intrigue on behalf of the party to which he was allied. Moreover, he considered it as loyalty to his employer to ‘scatter his enemies’ by any means in his power. He had always hated and despised the Tories in general; and after that interview on the marshy common in front of Silas’s cottage, he hated the Hamleys, and Roger especially, with a very choice and particular hatred. ‘That prig,’ as hereafter he always designated Roger—‘he shall pay for it yet,’ he said to himself by way of consolation, after the father and son had left him. ‘What a lout it is!‘—watching the receding figures. ‘The old chap has twice as much spunk,’ as the squire tugged at his bridle reins. ‘The old mare could make her way better without being led, my fine fellow. But I see through your dodge. You’re afraid of your old father turning back and getting into another rage. Position indeed! a beggarly squire—a man who did turn off his men just before winter, to rot or starve, for all he cared—it’s just like a venal old Tory.’ And, under the cover of sympathy with the dismissed labourers, Mr. Preston indulged his own private pique very pleasantly.

Mr. Preston had many causes for rejoicing: he might have forgotten this discomfiture, as he chose to feel it, in the remembrance of an increase of income, and in the popularity he enjoyed in his new abode. All Hollingford came forwards to do the earl’s new agent honour. Mr. Sheepshanks had been a crabbed, crusty old bachelor, frequenting inn-parlours on market days, not unwilling to give dinners to three or four chosen friends and familiars, with whom, in return, he dined from time to time, and with whom, also, he kept up an amicable rivalry in the matter of wines. But he ‘did not appreciate female society,’ as Miss Browning elegantly worded his unwillingness to accept the invitations of the Hollingford ladies. He was unrefined enough to speak of these invitations to his intimate friends aforesaid in the following manner: ‘Those old women’s worrying,’ but, of course, they never heard of this. Litde quarter-of-sheet notes, without any envelopes-that invention was unknown in those days—but sealed in the corners when folded up instead of gummed as they are fastened at present, occasionally passed between Mr. Sheepshanks and the Miss Brownings, Mrs. Goodenough, or others. From the first of these ladies the form ran as follows: —‘Miss Browning and her sister, Miss Phoebe Browning, present their respectful compliments to Mr. Sheepshanks, and beg to inform him that a few friends have kindly consented to favour them with their company at tea on Thursday next. Miss Browning and Miss Phoebe will take it very kindly if Mr. Sheepshanks will join their litde circle.’

Now for Mrs. Goodenough.

‘Mrs. Goodenough’s respects to Mr. Sheepshanks, and hopes he is in good health. She would be very glad if he would favour her with his company to tea on Monday. My daughter, in Combermere, has sent me a couple of guinea-fowls, and Mrs. Goodenough hopes Mr. Sheepshanks will stay and take a bit of supper.’

No need for the dates of the days of the month. The good ladies would have thought that the world was coming to an end if the invitation had been sent out a week before the party therein named. But not even guinea-fowls for supper could tempt Mr. Sheepshanks. He remembered the made-wines he had tasted in former days at Hollingford parties, and shuddered. Bread-and-cheese, with a glass of bitter-beer, or a little brandy-and-water, partaken of in his old clothes (which had worn into shapes of loose comfort, and smelt strongly of tobacco), he liked better than roast guinea-fowl and birch-wine, even without throwing into the balance the stiff uneasy coat, and the tight neck-cloth and tighter shoes. So the ex-agent had been seldom, if ever, seen at the Hollingford tea-parties. He might have had his form of refusal stereotyped, it was so invariably the same.

‘Mr. Sheepshanks’ duty to Miss Browning and her sister’ (to Mrs. Goodenough, or to others, as the case might be). ‘Business of importance prevents him from availing himself of their polite invitation; for which he begs to return his best thanks.’

But now that Mr. Preston had succeeded, and come to live in Hollingford, things were changed.

He accepted every civility right and left, and won golden opinions accordingly. Parties were made in his honour, ‘just as if he had been a bride,’ Miss Phoebe Browning said; and to all of them he went.

‘What’s the man after?’ said Mr. Sheepshanks to himself, when he heard of his successor’s affabihty, and sociability, and amiabihty, and a variety of other agreeable ‘ilities,’ from the friends whom the old steward still retained at Hollingford. ‘Preston’s not a man to put himself out for nothing. He’s deep. He’ll be after something solider than popularity.’

The sagacious old bachelor was right. Mr. Preston was ‘after’ something more than mere popularity. He went wherever he had a chance of meeting Cynthia Kirkpatrick.