The driver cracks his whip, and begins to do the honours of Pebblesthwaite as the horse clatters over the stones. 'Do ye ken t' shambles?' he says, pointing to an old arched building overtopped by a great crag.
'I know it as well as you do,' says Frank, smiling.
Can it be seven years since he left? Raban looks about: every stone and every pane of glass seems familiar. The town was all busy and awake. The farmers, sturdy, crop-headed, with baskets on their arms, were chattering and selling, standing in groups, or coming in and out of shops and doorways, careful as any housewives over their purchases. There were strange stores—shoes, old iron, fish, all heaped together; seven years older than when the last market-day Frank was there, but none the worse for that. There was the old auctioneer, in his tall, battered hat, disposing of his treasures. He was holding up a horse's yoke to competition. 'Three shillin'! four shillin'!' says he. The people crowd and gape round. One fellow, in a crimson waistcoat, driving past in a donkey-cart, stops short and stares hard at the trap and at Raban. Frank knew him, and nodded with a smile. Two more stumpy leather-gaiters, greeting each other, looked up as he drove by, and grinned. He remembered them too. There was the old Quaker, in his white neckcloth, standing at the door of his handsome old shop; and Squire Anley, walking along to the bank, all dressed from head to foot in loose grey clothes, with his bull-terrier at his heels. And then they drove out into the straight country roads, under the bridge between stone hedges, beyond which the late flames of summer green were still gleaming,—the meadows still shone with spangling autumn flowers. Far away in the hollow hung the smoke of the factory, with its many windows; a couple of tall chimneys spouted blackness; a train was speeding northward; close at hand a stream was dashing; the great trees seemed full of birds. It was a different world from that in which he had been basking. Frank already felt years younger as he drove along the road,—the old boyish impulses seemed waiting at every turn. 'Why, there goes old Brand,' he cried, leaning forward eagerly to look after an old keeper, with a couple of dogs, walking off with a gun towards the hills.
Frank called after the keeper, but the wind carried away his voice. As he drove along by each stile and corner that seemed to have awaited his coming, he suddenly thought of his talk with Dorothea. She had been cruelly hard to him, but he was glad to think now that he had followed her advice about forgiveness of injuries, and made an advance to the poor old people who were now gone. It would have been absurd to pretend to any great sorrow for their death. They had lived their life and shown him little kindness while it lasted. It was a chance now that brought him back to Ravensrick again.
He had written an answer to his grandfather's letter and accepted his offer, but the only answer which ever came to this was the telegram summoning him to Harrogate. It had been delayed on the way; and as he went down in the train, the first thing he saw was a paragraph in The Times,—'At the Mitre Hotel, Harrogate, on the 28th instant, John Raban, Esq., of Ravensrick, Pebblesthwaite, aged 86; and on the following day, Antonia, widow of the above John Raban, Esq., aged 75.' The old squire had gone to Harrogate for the benefit of his health, but he had died quite suddenly; and the poor lady to whom he had left everything, notwithstanding his injunctions and elaborate directions as to her future disposal of it, sank the night after his death, unable to struggle through the dark hours.
And then came confusion, undertakers, lawyers, and agents, in the midst of which some one thought of sending for Frank. He was the old couple's one grandson, and the old lady had left no will. So the tutor came in for the savings of their long lives—the comfortable old house, the money in the bank, the money in the funds, the ox and the ass, and the man-servant and the maid-servant, who had had their own way for so many years past, and preyed upon the old couple with much fidelity. They all attended the funeral in new suits of mourning ordered by the agent. Frank recognised many of them. There was the old housekeeper who used to box his ears as a little boy; the butler who used to complain of him. He was oppressed by all these yards of black cloth and these dozens of white pocket-handkerchiefs; and he let them return alone to Ravensrick, and followed in the course of a day or two.
There are harsh words and unkind judgments in life, but what a might of nature, of oblivion and distraction is arrayed in battle against them; daylight, lamplight, sounds of birds and animals come in between, and turn the slander, the ill-spoken sentence and its fierce retort from its path. What do harsh words matter that were spoken a week ago? Seven days' sunshine have brightened since then. While I am railing at false friends and harsh interpretations, the clematis' flowers have starred the wavering curtain of green that shades my window from the light; the old Norman steeple has clanged the blue hours, the distant flow of the sea has reached me, with a sound of the twitter of birds in accompaniment. Is it six months ago since A. judged B. unkindly? A. and B., walking by the opal light of the distant horizon, are thinking no more of coldness and unkindness, but of the fresh sweetness of the autumnal sea.
As Frank comes driving along the well-known road, and the fresh blustering winds blow into his face, past unkindness matters little, every gust sends it farther away. He thinks, with a vague sense of pity, of a poor little ghost that used to run hiding and shrinking away in dark corners, a little fatalist doomed to break windows, slam doors, and leave gates ajar, through which accusing geese, sheep, ponies would straggle to convict him. He used to think they were all in one league against him. Twice a week on an average he was led up into his grandfather's study to be cross-examined and to criminate himself hopelessly before that inexorable old judge:—a handsome old man with flowing white locks and a grand manner and opinion upon every subject. If old Mrs. Raban generally supplied the opinions, the language was the Squire's own. Mrs. Raban had been a spoiled old beauty, rouged and frizzed and rustling; she disliked every one who interfered with her own importance. She adored her husband, and was jealous of him to the last. Some chance speech had set her against the poor little 'heir' as some one called him, and she had decreed that he was a naughty and stupid little boy and was to be kept in his place. There rises Frank's little doppelgänger before him, hanging his head, convicted of having broken the carriage-window, or some such offence; there sits the old judge in his arm-chair by the library-table, dignified, stately, uttering magnificent platitudes, to which the ancestor in the cauliflower wig is listening with deep attention. Frank seems to hear the echo of his voice and the rustle of his grandmother's dress as she leaves the room: but the horse starts, a partridge scuffles across the road, and he comes back to the present again.
'Yan goes,' says the driver, excitedly, standing up on his box. Then they pass a little tumble-down village, and there at a turn of the road rise the chimneys of Ravensrick, and Pen-y-ghent rearing its huge back behind them, and the iron gates, and the old avenue, and the crows flying, whirling, dancing, sliding in twos and threes and twenties—how often the little doppelgänger had watched their mystic dance. Had it been going on for seven years?
'There's t' Court,' said Frank's companion—a good-humoured, talkative man. 'T' owd Squire, he were respectit, but he let things go.' As he spoke they were passing by a cottage with a broken roof and a generally dilapidated, half-patched look; a ragged woman was standing at the door, two wild-looking children were rolling in the dust; at the same time a man on horseback, coming the contrary way, rode past them on the road. The driver touched his cap, the woman disappeared into the house.