SIR KENRICK’S ANCESTRAL HOME.
SIR KENRICK CULVERHOUSE had gone to Hampshire to look at the old domain. He had plenty of friends in the neighbourhood of Culverhouse, who would have been glad to give him hospitality, but he preferred the less luxurious accommodation of his own house, which was maintained by a couple of faithful old servants, very much in the style of the Master of Ravenswood’s immortal ménage at Wolf’s Craig. The old butler was not so amusing or so enthusiastic as Caleb Balderstone; but he was every whit as faithful, and preferred his board wages and bacon dumplings, in the halls of the good old race, to those fleshpots of Egypt which he might perchance have found in the service of some mushroom gentleman or commercial magnate newly established in the neighbourhood.
People had told Kenrick that he ought to let Culverhouse Castle, and that he might add considerably to his income by so doing. But Kenrick repudiated the idea of an income so obtained. To allow purse-proud city people to come and criticise those old familiar rooms, and make rude remarks upon the shabbiness of the furniture—to have some newly-made country squire, whose beginnings were on the Stock Exchange, airing his unaccustomed grandeur in the rooms where meek Lady Culverhouse had lived her tranquil unoffending life—no; Kenrick would have starved rather than sanction such a desecration. His mother’s gentle shadow still occupied the rooms she had loved. He would not have that peaceful ghost scared away by horsey young ladies or billiard-playing young men.
At a cost of about a hundred and fifty pounds a year—nearly half his small income—Kenrick contrived to have the place kept decently; the gardens free from weeds and ruin; the empty stables protected from wind and rain; the house preserved from actual decay. And the place was ready to receive him when he was able to come home, were it but for a single night. This, in Kenrick’s mind, was much.
Love of his birthplace, and pride of his race, were the strongest points in Kenrick’s character; and Culverhouse was assuredly a home which a man with any sense of the beautiful might be pardoned for loving to enthusiasm. It had been a fortress in those early days when the Danish invader was marking his conquering course along the south-western coast with the blaze of burning villages. It had been an abbey before the Reformation, and much that belonged to its monastic period still remained. Some portions had been converted to secular uses, other parts had been preserved in what might be called a state of substantial ruin. And this mixture of ecclesiastical ruins and Tudor dwelling-house made a most picturesque and romantic whole. The massive outer wall of the cloistered quadrangle still remained, but where the cloisters had been was now the rose garden—a fair expanse of velvet turf, intersected with alleys of roses. The chapel door stood in all its early English purity of line and moulding, but the chapel had given place to a sunny enclosure, bounded by hedges of honeysuckle and sweet-briar, a garden in which old-fashioned flowers grew luxuriantly in prim box-edged beds.
The house was one of the handsomest in the county. Much too good for a decayed race, old Sir Kenrick had always said; but young Sir Kenrick held it as in no wise too good for him. He would not have sold it for half a million, had he been free to sell it. The situation was perfect. It stood in a fertile green valley, on the bank of a river which, insignificant elsewhere, widened here to a noble reach of water, and curved lovingly round the velvet slopes of the lawn. A long wooden bridge spanned the river just beyond the old Gothic gateway of the castle, and communicated with the village of Culverhouse, in which a population of a hundred and eighty souls fancied itself a world. Kenrick loved the place—castle, village, river—low-lying water meadows—ancient avenues—fair green field where the foundations of the abbey had been marked out with rows of stones—a stone for each pillar in nave and aisles—chancel and apse—he loved all these things with a love that was almost a passion. His heart thrilled within him when he came back to the familiar scene after a year or more of exile. His nature, not too warm elsewhere, warmed to the old goodies and gaffers of Culverhouse village with an unalterable tenderness. Poor as he was, he had always stray sixpences and shillings in his waistcoat pocket to give these ancient rustics, for beer, or tea, or snuff. He could listen to their stories of rheumatics and other afflictions with infinite patience. Their very dialect was dear to him.
If Kenrick had lived in the Middle Ages, and been exposed to visible contact with the powers of darkness, Mephistopheles would have assuredly baited his hook with the Culverhouse estate.
‘Here are the money-bags,’ he would have said; ‘sign me this bond, and Culverhouse is yours, free of the mortgages that now degrade and humiliate your race. For twenty years you may reign securely in the halls of your ancestors—and then——’
Perhaps Kenrick might have had the force of mind to refuse so frankly diabolical a bargain, but when Mephistopheles assumed the amiable countenance of Selina Dulcimer, and whispered in his ear, ‘Marry Beatrix Harefield, and let her fortune revive the glory of your race,’ the young man was sorely tempted.
He had promised his cousin Cyril that he would not attempt to become his rival, but he did not know how far Cyril’s love affair had gone. He had no idea that Beatrix had already made her choice, irrevocably, and was ready to sacrifice fortune and her father’s favour for her lover.
Kenrick was not in love with Beatrix Harefield, in spite of all those hints and innuendos wherewith Mrs. Dulcimer had artfully striven to kindle the fire of passion in his heart. He was not in love with her, but he admired her beyond any woman he had ever met, and he could but remember that her fortune would give him the desire of his heart. He was above the meanness of marrying for money. He would not have sold himself to a woman he disliked or despised, any more than he would have sold himself to Satan. He would have accounted one bargain as base as the other. But he would have been very glad to marry a woman with money, provided he could think her the first of women, and worthy to rule in the halls of his race. That he should love her was a secondary necessity. Sir Kenrick was not a young man who considered loving and being beloved essential to the happiness of life. Nature had made him of colder stuff than his cousin Cyril. He could do very well without love, but existence could hardly be tolerable to him without Culverhouse Castle.
He thought of Beatrix Harefield as he paced the long tapestried saloon on the evening of his arrival. He had ordered a fire to be lighted here, though old Mrs. Mopson, the major-domo’s wife, had strongly recommended him to sit in the library, or his mother’s morning-room.
‘You’ll be a deal snuggerer than in that there big room, Sir Kenrick,’ she urged. ‘I don’t say it’s damp, for I opens the windows every fine morning—but it’s awful chill, and it’d take a’most a stack of logs to warm it.’
‘Never mind the chilliness, Betty,’ said Kenrick, ‘I want to sit in the saloon. It’s a treat to see the dear old room again after three years’ absence.’
‘Ah,’ said Betty, ‘there ain’t another room in Hampshire ekal to it,’ firmly convinced that Hampshire was the world, or at any rate all the world that was civilized and worth living in. Once, when somebody asked Betty Mopson if she had ever been so far as London, she replied, ‘No, thank God, I’m no furriner.’
So Betty lighted a pile of logs on the open hearth, and put a pair of candles on the table near the fire, and wheeled a tapestried arm-chair beside it, and placed Sir Kenrick’s slippers comfortably in front of the fender—so that in spite of its long disuse the room had a homelike aspect when he came to it after his homely dinner. By this dim light the room looked lovely—all its shabbiness hidden—all its beauties of form and colour intensified—the figures in the fine old tapestry standing out in life-like roundness. Theseus and Ariadne—Ariadne deserted—the coming of Bacchus—hymeneal festival—nymphs and satyrs frisking against a background of blue sea.
Kenrick thought of Beatrix Harefield as he walked slowly up and down. How well her stately beauty would become the room! how well the room would become her! She was just the wife for the master of such a place as Culverhouse. It seemed a hard thing that honour forbade his putting himself forward as her suitor.
‘How do I know that she cares for Cyril?’ he asked himself; ‘and if she does not, why should not I have my chance? Cyril is such a close fellow. I don’t know how far things have gone between them. She may not care a straw for him. And I may go back to India, and leave her to be snapped up by some adventurer. I must have the matter placed on a plainer footing when I go back to Little Yafford. If Cyril does not mean to go in and win the prize, I must have my innings. It will be only fair.’