An English Squire

She was a fair creature enough, a true Seyton, with slender frame and pointed chin, creamy complexion and rich brown hair, but the large, round eyes, tender, intense, and full of life, were her mother’s, though clear and untroubled as the mother’s had never been.

“So you are glad to come home, Virginia?” said her father, rather sadly.

“Yes, papa, I am just delighted. I always made stories about home when I was at Littleton. I was very happy, you know, with dear Aunt Mary and all my friends; but it was so uninteresting not to know more of my very nearest relations.”

“You will find it very different, my dear, from what you are accustomed to. This is a dull place.”

“Oh, papa, I think it is so silly to be dull! I shall be quite ready to like anything you wish,” said Virginia warmly.

“My dear, you shall take your own way. It would be hard at least if I could not give you that,” said Mr Seyton, looking at her as if he did not quite know what to do with this gaily-dressed, frank-spoken daughter. “Now let us come to breakfast.”

“I am afraid I am late,” said Virginia; “but it is never easy to be in time after a journey.”

“You are punctual for this house, my dear; we take such things easy. But your aunt is down, you see, in your honour.” As Mr Seyton spoke they came into the dining-room, a long, low room, with treasures of curious carving round its oak-panels, hardly visible in its imperfect light.

A lady sat pouring out the tea. She had the delicate features and peculiar complexion of her family, but her eyes, instead of being like Mr Seyton’s, vague and sad, were sharp and sarcastic; she had more play of feature, and, though she looked fully her age, had the air of having been a beauty.

Miss Seyton had once been engaged to be married, but her engagement had been broken off in one of the storms of discreditable trouble that had overwhelmed her father and brothers, no one knew exactly how or why. She had never married, and had lived ever since with her brother, not always without scandal and remark. Still her presence had kept Elderthwaite on the visiting-list of the county, and made it possible for her niece to live there.

In spite of her sharp, eager eyes, she had an indescribable laziness and nonchalance of manner, and poured out the tea as if it was an effort beyond her. The boys’ places remained vacant. There was a little talk at breakfast-time, but it did not flow easily. Virginia would have had plenty to say, but she had a sense that what she did say caused her aunt inward surprise or amusement, and she began to feel shy.

When the meal was over, Mr Seyton sauntered away slowly, and Virginia said, “Do we sit in the drawing-room in the morning, Aunt Julia?”

“Yes, as often as not,” said Miss Seyton. “You are welcome to arrange all such matters for yourself. Girls have ways of their own.”

“I don’t want to have any strange or uncomfortable ways, auntie,” said Virginia; “I want to feel quite at home, and to be useful.”

“Useful!” said Miss Seyton. “What’s your notion of being useful?”

She did not speak unkindly, but with a curious sort of inward amusement, as if the notions of the bright-eyed girl were an odd study to her.

“I’m afraid I haven’t very clear notions. I want to make it cheerful for papa – Aunt Mary always said he wasn’t strong or well; and perhaps the boys want things done for them; my friends’ brothers always did,” said Virginia a little pathetically.

“There’s one thing, my dear, I wish you to understand at once. I shall never interfere with you; but I don’t mean to abdicate in your favour. I keep house – whatever house is kept – and you’d better shut your eyes and ears to it. It isn’t work for you.”

“Oh, Aunt Julia!” said Virginia distressed, “I would not think of such a thing. It is your place.”

“No, my dear, it’s not; but I mean to stick to it,” interposed Miss Seyton.

“And I know nothing about housekeeping, I’m afraid. I should be very extravagant.”

“Like a true Seyton. So much for that, then. And now another thing. Don’t you ever give your brothers so much as a half-sovereign secretly. You have money, and they know it, and it’s scarce here. Mind what I say.”

A kind of puzzled sense of something that she did not understand crossed Virginia’s face.

“I would rather give them things than money,” she said. “Of course papa lets them have what is right.”

“Of course,” said Miss Seyton, with the same perplexing expression of indescribable amusement.

A good joke had for years been the solace, a bitter sarcasm the natural outlet, of a life which certainly had been neither prosperous nor happy in itself, nor glorified by any martyrdom of self-denial.

Miss Seyton was full of malice, both in the French and English acceptations of the word. She loved fun, and she could not see without bitterness the young, unworn creature beside her. To astonish Virginia offered an almost irresistible temptation to both these tendencies. Her evident unconsciousness of the life that lay before her, was at once so funny, and such a cruel satire on them all.

“So you built castles in the air about your relations?” she said, with an odd longing to knock some of these castles down.

“Sometimes,” said Virginia; “then Ruth told me about you; and two years ago she and I met Cheriton Lester and his cousin Rupert in London, and I used to talk to them, Cheriton made me wish to come home very much.”

“Why?” said Miss Seyton shortly.

“He used to tell her about the place, and he made me remember much better what it was like.”

“Cheriton will have to play second fiddle. The eldest brother is coming back from Spain.”

“Ah, I remember, he told us how much he wished it. Oh, and he told me Uncle James ‘wasn’t half a bad fellow.’ I suppose that was a boy’s way of saying he was very nice indeed. Perhaps I can help him, too, in the village. I like school-teaching, and I suppose there aren’t many young ladies in Elderthwaite?”

“You little innocent!” exclaimed Miss Seyton. Then, moving away, she said, in the same wicked undertone, “Well, you had better ask him.”

Virginia remained standing by the fire. She felt ruffled, for she knew herself to be laughed at, and not having the clue to her aunt’s meaning, she fancied that her free and easy mention of Cheriton had elicited the remark; and being a young lady of decided opinions and somewhat warm temper, made up her mind silently, but with energy, that she would never like her Aunt Julia, never! She had been taken away from home when only eleven years old, and since then had only occasionally seen her father and her brothers. Her cousin Ruth, who had frequently stayed at Elderthwaite, had never bestowed on her much definite information; and perhaps the season in London and the renewal of her childish acquaintance with Cheriton Lester had done more than anything else to revive old impressions.

She had been most carefully brought up by her aunt, Lady Hampton, with every advantage of education and influence. Companions and books were all carefully chosen, and her aunt hoped to see her married before there was any chance of her returning to Elderthwaite. But such was the dread of the reckless, defiant, Seyton nature, that her very precautions defeated their wishes.

Virginia never was allowed to be intimate with any young man but Cheriton, who at the time of their meeting was a mere boy, and with thoughts turned in another direction; and though Virginia was sufficiently susceptible, with a nature at once impetuous and dependent, she came home at one-and-twenty, never yet having seen her ideal in flesh and blood.

“Duties enough, and little cares,” had filled her girlhood, and delightful girl friendships and girl reverences had occupied her heart; while her time had been filled by her studies, the cheerful gaieties of a lively neighbourhood, and by the innumerable claims of a church and parish completely organised and vigorously worked.

Lady Hampton was one of the Ladies Bountiful of Littleton; and Virginia had taught in the schools, made tea at the treats, worked at church decorations, and made herself useful and important in all the ways usual to a clever, warm-hearted girl under such influences. And with the same passionate fervour of nature, and the same necessity to her life of an approving conscience, which had made her mother’s heart beat itself to death against the bars of her unsatisfying home, Virginia’s nature had flowed on in perfect tune with her surroundings; till, when she was nearly twenty, came the great grief of her kind aunt’s death, leaving her heiress to a moderate fortune. By the terms of the will she was to travel under carefully selected guardianship till she was of age, and then to choose whether she would go home to her father, or have a home made for her at Littleton.

Virginia chose promptly, and then, in the delicate, indefinite language of those who fear to do harm by every word, was warned of difficulties. Much would be painful to her, much would be strange; her home was not like anything she had been used to. She listened and looked sad, and understood nothing of what they meant to imply; and thus ready to admire, but with only one type in her mind of what was admirable; full of love, but with none of the blinding softening memories that make love easy, she came to a home where admiration was impossible, and love would demand either ignorant indifference to any high ideal, or a rare and perfect charity, alike unknown to a high-minded intolerant girl.

Chapter Six.

Virginia

“A sense of mystery her spirit daunted.”

The vicar of Elderthwaite was Mr Seyton’s youngest brother. There had been one between them, the father of the Ruth mentioned in the last chapter, but he had married well, and died early, leaving this one girl, who lived with her grandmother, and paid occasional visits to Elderthwaite.

James Seyton had been the wildest of the three, and had taken orders to pay his debts by means of the family living, the revenues of which he had never fully enjoyed. He had never married, and his life – though just kept in bounds by the times in which he lived, so that he did not get tipsy in the Seyton Arms, nor openly scandalise a parish with so low a standard of right as Elderthwaite – was a thoroughly self-indulgent one. He read the service once on Sundays, and administered the Communion three times a year, while the delay and neglect of funerals, marriages, and baptisms were the scandal of every parish round. He rarely visited his flock; and yet the vicar was not wholly an unpopular man. He was good-natured, and though he drank freely and sometimes swore loudly, he had a certain amount of secular intercourse with his parishioners of a not unneighbourly kind.

The pressure of poverty made Mr Seyton a hard landlord, and between oppression and neglect the inhabitants of the picturesque tumbledown village were a bad lot, and neither squire nor parson did much to make them better. But their vicar now and then did put before the worst offenders the consequences of an evil life in language plain enough to reach their understanding; and he had a word and a laugh for most of them.

Mr Lester was frequently heard to inveigh against Parson Seyton’s shortcomings, and seriously, as well he might, regretted the state of Elderthwaite parish; but Mr Seyton doctored all his horses and dogs when they were ill, and was, “after all, an old neighbour and a gentleman.” He taught Cherry to catch rats, and took him out otter-hunting, and there was the oddest friendship between them, which Cherry, when a boy, had once exemplified in the following manner: —

The Bishop had paid an unexpected visit at. Oakby, and Cheriton following in the wake, while his father and Mr Ellesmere were showing off their new schools, heard him express his intention of going on to Elderthwaite; upon which Cherry ran full speed across the fields, found Parson Seyton shooting rabbits, decidedly in shooting-costume, gave him timely warning, and, with his own hands so tidied, dusted, and furbished up the wretched old church, that its vicar, entering into the spirit of the thing, fell to with a will, astonished the lazy blind old sexton, and produced such a result as might pass muster in a necessarily lenient north-country diocese.

Cherry then diffidently produced one of his father’s white ties which he had put in his pocket, “thinking you mightn’t have one clean,” and as the old vicar, with a shout of laughter, arrayed himself in it, he said, —

“Ay, ay, my lad, between this and the glass of port I’ll give his lordship (he won’t better that in any parish), we’ll push through.”