Abington Abbey: A Novel

by Archibald Marshall

"B darling," expostulated the Dragon again. "I don't think you should set out by making fun of people. You will want to make friends of your neighbours, not fun of them."

"We can do both," said Beatrix. "Will you be the Squire, dear? I should like you to be a little Squire. You'd do it awfully well, better than Uncle Jim."

Sir James Grafton was George's elder brother, and head of the bank. He was a good banker, but a better chemist. He had fitted himself up a laboratory in his country house, and spent as much of his time in it as possible, somewhat to the detriment of his duties as a landowner.

"It will be great fun being Squire's daughters," said Caroline. "I'm glad we are going to have a house of our very own. When you only take them for a month or two you feel like a Londoner all the time. B, you and I will become dewy English girls. I believe it will suit us."

"I don't want to become a dewy English girl just yet," said Beatrix. "It's all very well for you. You've had two seasons. Still, I shan't mind living in the country a good part of the year. There's always plenty to do there. But I do hope there'll be a nice lot of people about. Is it what they call a good residential neighbourhood, Daddy? They always make such a lot of that."

"I don't know much about Meadshire," said Grafton. "I think it's a trifle stuffy. People one never sees, who give themselves airs. Still, if we don't like them we needn't bother ourselves about them. We can get our own friends down."

"I'm not sure that's the right spirit," said Caroline. "I want to do the thing thoroughly. The church is very near the house, isn't it? I hope we're not right in the middle of the village too. You want to be a little by yourself in the country."

The photographs, indeed, showed the church—a fine square-towered Early English structure—directly opposite the front door of the house, the main part, of which was late Jacobean. The cloisters and the old rambling mediæval buildings of the Abbey were around the corner, and other photographs showed them delightfully irregular and convincing. But the gardens and the park enclosed it all. The village was a quarter of a mile away, just outside one of the Lodge gates. "I asked all about that," said Grafton, explaining it to them.

They gathered round the tea-table in their comfortable luxurious room,—a happy affectionate family party. Their talk was all of the new departure that was at last to be made, for all of them took it for granted that they really had found the very house at last, and the preliminary visit and enquiries and negotiations were not likely to reveal any objections or difficulties.

George Grafton had been looking for a country house in a leisurely kind of way for the past ten years, and with rather more determination for about two. He belonged to the class of business man to whom it is as natural to have a country house as to have a London house, not only for convenience in respect of his work, but also for his social pleasures. He had been brought up chiefly in the country, at Frayne, in the opulent Sevenoaks region, which his brother now inhabited. He had usually taken a country house furnished during some part of the year, sometimes on the river for the summer months, sometimes for the winter, with a shoot attached to it. His pleasures were largely country pleasures. And his children liked what they had had of country life, of which they had skimmed the cream, in the periods they had spent in the houses that he had taken, and in frequent short visits to those of friends and relations. In the dead times of the year they had come back to London, to their occupations and amusements there. One would have said that they had had the best of both. If they had been pure Londoners by birth and descent no doubt they would have had, and been well content. But it was in their blood on both sides to want that mental hold over a country home, which houses hired for a few months at a time cannot give. None of the houses their father had taken could be regarded as their home. Nor could a house in London, however spacious and homelike.