I.
The earl of Birndale was the magnate of the district. He was a tall, strong, coarse-looking man: had he chanced to have been born in the position of a coal-heaver, no one would have been surprised if he had been hauled up before a magistrate for beating his wife or for squaring his fists at any time and at any person as the humor seized him; or if he had been a wharf-porter, he would have heaved a load on his shoulders and carried it in a way to make puny specimens of the race sick with envy. But he was born the son of an earl, and the coal-heaver propensities had been trained and trimmed in patrician fashion. An earl on occasion may fly into a passion, but he may not beat his wife: the earl of Birndale did the one, and didn't do the other, nor was he in the least conscious of the undeveloped coal-heaver he carried about with him. On the contrary, his pride of birth and rank was enormous. His physical strength not having been exercised in carrying loads, it had brought him to his sixtieth year younger and more erect than many men of forty, and even yet he employed it in felling trees: a high civilization goes back for its amusement to what was the toil of primeval times. And he never walked about his property without a hammer and nails, so that if he came to any fence broken or breaking down, he could mend it, as was very right and proper; but when people hear of an earl, they connect the title with something lofty in the way of employment, and it is certain that the village joiner would have mended the fences better than the earl. But no doubt it was an innocent amusement, and noblesse did not oblige the earls of Birndale: every man of them had always done what was right in his own eyes. Why, the brother whom this earl had succeeded passed a good deal of his time knitting, but he was the only one of his race that had taken to that peaceful, aged-woman-looking employment: the rest had not knitted anything except their brows, and all of them had been pretty good at that.
There had been statesmen of the race, and there had been blackguards, and there had been some of them who combined both characters in their own persons. This earl had been in Parliament, for a short time even in the cabinet, and for several years he had been governor in one of the colonies; and in each of these positions he had made a respectable figure. Every one has heard of the Swedish chancellor's remark to his son: "Go, my son, and see with how little wisdom the world is governed." If the earl had not great wisdom, he had a strong will; and a strong will, backed by rank and wealth, will go a very long way even when accompanied by a small modicum of intellect. He was a Tory of the Tories—not of course, however, for the family had never stuck to one line of politics—and he held that most men need to be governed, and that only a few are fit to govern the rest, of which few he himself was an illustrious example. But since his return from abroad he had not taken, or desired to take, a lead in political matters: he preferred living quietly on his estates, and for the greater part of the year at Birns Castle, as the seat of the Birndale family was called, the village in its neighborhood being known as "The Birns."
Birns Castle was an ambitious building, and really had accomplished its design of looking "lordly," as the guidebooks say. When you entered it by the main entrance, you stepped into a large hall lighted from the roof, and looking up to such a height was very grand: all round this hall there ran a gallery, and when high carnival was held at the castle, in this gallery servants, retainers and other privileged persons were stationed to see the nobility and gentry dancing below; and it was all "mighty fine," as Pepys would have said. It was even more than mighty fine on the occasion of the marriage of Lady Mary, the earl's eldest daughter, to an English duke, the duke of Dover. From her father down to the poorest and farthest-off relations of the Birndale family this marriage had made the nerves of every one tingle with delight. But, alas! grand as the marriage was, it had not turned out a happy one: there had been no violent outbreak nor any public scandal, but the duke and duchess saw as little of each other as possible: they both visited now and then at Birns Castle, but never together. The duke appeared to enjoy himself, and so, for that matter, did the duchess, but each went his and her way. Besides the duchess of Dover, the earl had two daughters, Ladies Helen and Louisa: he had no son, and his wife had been dead some years.
When there happened to be no company at the castle the young ladies felt it decidedly dull. It was true they had no end of china, old and new, foreign and of home manufacture; they had a gallery of paintings worth—it is better not to say how much—but the work of old masters and new, besides ancestors looking at them from every wall; they had drawing-rooms swarming with every unnecessary of life; they had the spacious and lofty hall with armor and swords and spears and shields, "all useful," as an auctioneer would say—"all useful, gentlemen, for decorative purposes"—with trophies of the chase in its milder home forms and as carried on in African or Bengal jungles; they had a library filled from floor to ceiling with books containing, it is to be presumed, the life-blood of master spirits, but they did not often tap the vessels. The earl himself valued his library, but he was not a reading man either. In short, they were in the unhappy position of living in Birns Castle and having nothing to be astonished at.