As I may not be speaking of him again, I should like to say that, haughty old man as he was, taking the high hand with patients of all grades, he was most attentive to the poor, and never took a fee from them. The tradition is that he never sent an account for attendance to anyone—would not condescend to it (having traditions of his own behind him, along with a pedigree stretching back to the mists of prehistoric time)—but that's as may be; he certainly left a very comfortable fortune, which, like that of the other grandfather, never reached the legatees. A son with whom he had been over-strict had run away from home many years before, and never afterwards been heard of. It was deemed impossible to fulfil the direction of the will to divide the property between the testator's children until the missing one was produced, or irrefragable proof of his death. Through all the period between my childhood and womanhood the newspapers of the world were calling through their agony columns for one or the other, and in vain. It was reported at intervals that his grave had been found, in New Zealand or Kamstchatka, or some equally remote corner of the earth; or that someone had met somebody who knew him or where he was; at which times the lawyers were put upon the trail to hunt the matter down. Each of the producible children had her separate batch of lawyers, and Chancery took charge of the steadily dwindling estate. Many years elapsed before the missing one was officially assumed to be dead, and the dregs of their patrimony allotted to his sisters; and then the portion that would have been ours was gone. How well I understand now little incidents that were devoid of meaning to me when they occurred: mother, in tears, confiding to a bosom friend: "'Do you sign this of your own free will?' he asked me before us both, and what could I say?" Poor mother; who struggled for us so hard! And the Married Woman's Property Act is of very little use to wives like her, who still cling to the old ideals of family life.
So we were always tantalised with "expectations" that never materialised in cash. We children, as we developed the faculty for romancing, beguiled ourselves with a special one of our own. Some day, in some dramatic manner, the vanished uncle—lost long, long before we were born—was to reappear, with his pockets full of gold, to play godfather to his impoverished relatives. We were always looking out for him. A strange step on the gravel, an unexpected knock at the door would instantly suggest to us that the psychological moment had arrived. But no one could ever have been lost more thoroughly than that poor boy, who ran away at night because his father had been too hard on him. From that day to this;—covering something like three-quarters of a century—he has made no sign.
If my grandfather's love of horses caused his death, the working of the same passion in my father's weaker nature was rather more unfortunate. He sacrificed to it and its kindred fascinations the important interests of his life, including those he held in trust for his wife and children. I do not say it to blame him, who was so kind-hearted and well-meaning; he was as he was made—happy-go-lucky, careless, thoughtless, sanguine, a boy to the last—and it was bad for such an one to have the illusion of "money coming to him" to encourage and excuse folly. In the fifties he was not a poor man, but he was too poor for the company he kept, too poor to afford to neglect business and indulge in the expensive pastimes of those who had none. But if he could be at M—— with the beloved "Harry" V., who was so generous with mounts, he would not be at home with uninteresting ploughmen. Norfolk folk who are my contemporaries will not need to have that "Harry" more fully named to them, especially when I add that I heard him spoken of as "The Old Squire" all over the western part of the country, although he had been dead so long. M—— House, his once hospitable home, was quite close to my cousin's Abbey, and, although my father had been there so much, it was the first time I had seen it. I walked around the walls and grounds that were so familiar to him, but did not attempt to enter, the family being in residence. Since my return to Australia I have learned from a mutual friend that they remember his name and the old companionship; so I might have been, and regret that I was not, less modest. The old squire and the golden age of fox-hunting in Norfolk, it seems, passed together, and the one is said to be as likely to return as the other.
But a rather probable reason for this seems to lie in the fact that Norfolk has become such an extensive game preserve. Passing the old estates, whose old owners wore the pink as a winter livery, I noted the little colonies of coops by the gamekeepers' cottages. At Sandringham I saw pheasants sauntering about the royal domain like domestic poultry, and caught the gleam of their bronzy plumage again and again in the twilight of the thick woods. Evidently they are brought up in the lap of luxury as well as in swarms, and are too precious to be scared and scattered by trampling hosts of horses and hounds.
Times have changed for the one sport as for the other. And, thinking of the difference, I am drawn to the conclusion (though it is not for me to have opinions, I know) that the shooting season cannot be to the common run of sportsmen what it used to be to their fathers. They may shoot better, and at more birds—they do, and so they ought—and for rich men, as one can understand, the old system is not comparable to the new; but the sport was more genuinely sport—was it not, my fellow-fogies of sporting blood?—and it must have had more charm for the many, if not for the few, than is the case now. When the stubble was left for partridges, and not ploughed up as soon as cut, and the fields and plantations lay quiet, through all that golden month which I believe is virtually useless to the scientific gunner to-day—when the autumn was still young and lovely and the red leaves on the trees—that must have been a pleasanter surrounding for the sportsman who was a lover of nature than murky skies and naked woods. To have the companionship of dogs, such as dogs used to be, cleverer than the masters with whom they were in such perfect sympathy and partnership—as a dog lover I cannot understand how men can have bettered sport by leaving them out of it. To wander at will over field and along hedgerow, with the muzzle-loader of the period over shoulder, the sufficient game-bag on hip, powder and shot in pocket, and the trusty scout ahead, undisturbed by steam-ploughs or the fear of fluttering preserves, no restriction whatever upon one's liberty and inclinations; this must have been as good a form of recreation as the drilled sharpshooting of to-day, although it may not have been as good business.
At any rate, my father loved it—at such times as he could not be following the hounds.
And so the winter came on, and the whist parties of an evening; and presently the exciting preparations for Christmas. Then Christmas itself—the holly, the mistletoe, the resplendent tree, the feasts and dances and miscellaneous merrymakings. The old year passed with these cheerful obsequies; the birth of the new year was celebrated in loving family conclave and with chimes from the village belfry (we could not have midnight services in a church with no lighting apparatus); another year of the same uneventfulness, which yet was to be as full of interest as ever.