STANITHBURN PEEL.
"Helena!" said Colonel Stanburne one morning when he came down to breakfast, "I've determined on a bold stroke. I'm going to take the tandem this morning to Stanithburn Peel, to see young Philip Stanburne and get him to accept a captaincy in the new regiment."
Her ladyship did not see why this should be called a bold stroke, so she asked if the road were particularly dangerous to drive upon, and suggested that, if it were, one horse would be safer than two.
"That's not it. The sort of courage wanted on the present occasion, my dear Helena, is moral courage and not physical courage, don't you see? Did you never hear the history of the Stanburnes of Stanithburn? Surely female ignorance does not go so far as to leave you uninformed about such a distinguished family as ours?"
"I know the history of its present representative, or at least as much of it as he chooses to tell me."
"Error added to ignorance! I am not the representative of the family. We of Wenderholme are only a younger branch. The real representative is Philip Stanburne, of Stanithburn Peel."
"I scarcely ever heard of him before. I had some vague notion that such a person existed. Why does he never come here?"
"It's a long story, but you will find it all in the county histories. In Henry the Eighth's time Sir Philip Stanburne was a rebel and got beheaded, some people say hanged, for treason, so his estates were confiscated. Wenderholme and Stanithburn Tower were given back to the family in the next generation, but the elder branch had only Stanithburn, which is a much smaller estate than this. Since then they married heiresses, but always regularly spent their fortunes, and now young Philip Stanburne has nothing but the tower with a small estate of bad land which brings him in four or five hundred a-year."
"Not much certainly; but why does he never come here?"
"My father used to say that there had been no intercourse between Stanithburn and Wenderholme for three hundred years. Most likely the separation was a religious quarrel, to begin with. The elder branch always remained strictly Roman Catholic; but the Wenderholme branch was more prudent, and turned Protestant in Queen Elizabeth's time."
"All this is quite a romantic story, but those county histories are so full of archæology that one does not venture to look into them. Would it not be better to write to Mr. Philip Stanburne? There is no knowing how he may receive you."
The Colonel thought it better to go personally. "I'm not clever, Helena, at persuading people with a pen; but I can generally talk them round, when I have a chance of seeing them myself."
The distance from Wenderholme to Stanithburn Peel was exactly twenty-five miles; but the Colonel liked a long drive, and the tandem was soon on its way through the narrow but well-kept lanes that traversed the stretch of fertile country which separated the two houses. The Colonel lunched and baited his horses at a little inn not often visited by such a stylish equipage, and it was nearly three o'clock in the afternoon when he began to enter the hilly country near the Peel. The roads here were not so good as those in the plain, and instead of being divided from the fields by hedges they passed between gray stone walls. The scenery became more and more desolate as the horses advanced. There was little sylvan beauty left in it except that of the alders near a rapid stream in the valley, and the hills showed the bare limestone in many places through a scanty covering of grass. At length a turn of the road brought the Colonel in sight of the Tower or Peel of Stanithburn itself, an edifice which had little pretension to architectural beauty, and lacked altogether that easily achieved sublimity which in so many Continental buildings of a similar character is due to the overhanging of machicoulis and tourelles. It possessed, however, the distinguishing feature of a battlement, which, still in perfect preservation, entirely surrounded the leads of the flat roof. Beyond this the old Tower retained no warlike character, but resembled an ordinary modern house, with an additional story on the top of it. There were, alas! some modern sash-windows, which went far to destroy the character of the edifice; yet whatever injury the Philistinism of the eighteenth century might have inflicted upon the building itself, it had not been able to destroy the romantic beauty of its site. The hill that separates Shayton from Wenderholme is of sandstone; and though behind Twistle Farm and elsewhere there are groups of rocks of more or less picturesque interest, they are not comparable to the far grander limestone region about the Tower of Stanithburn. The Tower itself is situated on a bleak eminence, half surrounded by a curve of the stream already mentioned; but a mile below the Tower the stream passes through a ravine of immense depth, and in a series of cascades reaches the level of the plain below. Above Stanithburn Peel, on the other hand, the stream comes from a region of unimaginable desolation—where the fantastic forms of the pale stone lift themselves, rain-worn, like a council of rude colossi, and no sound is heard but the wind and the stream, and the wild cry of the plover.
A very simple gateway led from the public to a private road, which climbed the hill till it ended in a sort of farm-yard between the Peel and its out-buildings. When the Colonel arrived here, he was received by a farm-servant, who showed the way to the stable, and said that his master was out fishing. By following the stream, the Colonel would be sure to find him.
John Stanburne set off on foot, not without some secret apprehension. "Perhaps Helena was right," he thought; "perhaps I ought to have written. They say he is a strange, eccentric sort of fellow, and there is no telling how he may receive me."
Philip Stanburne, of the Peel, was in fact reputed to be morbid and misanthropic, with as much justice as there usually is in such reports. After his father's death he had been left alone with his mother, and the few years that he lived in this way with her had been the sweetest and happiest of his life. When he lost her, his existence became one of almost absolute solitude, broken only by a weekly visit to a great house ten miles from Stanithburn, where a chaplain was kept, and he could hear mass—or by the occasional visits of the doctor, and one or two by no means intimate neighbors. In country places a difference of religion is a great impediment to intercourse; and though people thought it quite right that Philip Stanburne should be a Catholic, they never could get over a feeling of what they called "queerness" in the presence of a man who believed in transubstantiation, and said prayers to the Virgin Mary. Like many other recluses, he was credited with a dislike to society far different from his real feeling, and much less creditable to his good sense. Habit had made solitude endurable to him, and there was something agreeable, no doubt, in the sense of his independence, but there was not the slightest taint of misanthropy in his whole nature. He naturally shrank from the society of Sootythorn because it was so strongly Protestant; and there were no families of his own creed in his immediate neighborhood. His way of living was too simple for the entertainment of guests. Having no profession by which money might be earned, he was reduced to mere economy, which got him a reputation for being stingy and unsociable.
The Colonel walked a mile along the stream without perceiving anybody, but at length he saw Philip Stanburne, very much occupied with his fly-book, and accompanied only by a dog, which began to bark vigorously as soon as he perceived the presence of a stranger. A quarter of an hour afterwards the two new acquaintances were talking easily enough, and the recluse of the Tower began to feel inclined to join the militia, though he had asked for time to consider.
"I have heard," said the Colonel, "that the name which your house still keeps, and from which our own name comes, is due to some stone in your stream—stone in the burn, or stane i' th' burn, and so to Stanithburn and Stanburne. Is there any particular stone here likely to give a ground for the theory, or is it only a tradition?"
"I have no doubt," said Philip Stanburne, "of the accuracy of tradition in this instance. Come and look at the stone itself."
He turned aside from the direct path to the Tower, and they came again to the brink of the stream, which had here worn for itself two channels deep in the limestone. Between these channels rose an islanded rock about thirty feet above the present level of the water. A fragment of ruined building was discernible on its narrow summit.
As the two men looked together on the stone from which their race had taken its name centuries ago, both fell under the influence of that mysterious sentiment, so different from the pride of station or the vanity of precedence, which binds us to the past. Neither of them spoke, but it is not an exaggeration to say that both felt their relationship then. Had not the time been when Stanburne of the Peel and Stanburne of Wenderholme were brothers? A fraternal feeling began to unite these two by subtle, invisible threads.