"Well, we think kindly of you, Gotch," said the Squire. "I hope we think kindly of all the people on the place, and do what we can for their happiness. But we owe you something special, and it's right that we should do something special."
It was not, in fact, anything remarkably self-sacrificing that the Squire intended to do. There was a dearth of cottages at Kencote, as there is on so many otherwise well-managed country estates. Young people who wished to marry were sometimes prevented from doing so for years, and there were cases of overcrowding in existing cottages, which, while not amounting to a scandal, might possibly be worked up into one by hostile critics. A new medical officer of health, residing outside the sphere of the Squire's social influence, and more than suspected of Radical tendencies, had caused notices to be served during the past year; and, worse than that, a London journalist spending his holidays at a farmhouse just outside the manor of Kencote had poked his nose in where he had no business to take it, and written a very one-sided article on the depopulation of rural England, with Kencote and its owner as a text. The Squire had been greatly scandalised, and would have rushed instantly into print had not Dick's cooler head restrained him. Unfair and ill-informed as both of them judged the article to be, there was enough truth in it to give the enemy a handle. There was overcrowding, though not to any serious extent; and there was a dearth of cottage accommodation.
"Much better build a few, and stop their mouths," said Dick.
"It doesn't pay to build cottages," said the Squire. "It can't pay, with these ridiculous bye-laws."
"Can't be helped," said Dick. "We can afford to make this property a model one up to a point, and we'd much better take the bone out of their mouths. It isn't a very big one. It will only cost us a few hundreds to satisfy everybody. And they'll like our doing it less than anything. Besides, we've got to do something. That fellow Moxon has a wife and five children sleeping in two rooms, and that sort of thing simply doesn't do now-a-days."
The Squire looked at him suspiciously. "I think Virginia has been putting some of her American notions into your head," he said. "It did well enough in my grandfather's time, and he was much ahead of his time in that sort of thing. He built model cottages before anybody, almost, and Kencote has always been considered——"
"Oh, well, we needn't go into all that," interrupted Dick. "Moxon has been served with a notice, and if we don't do something for him we shall lose him. Let's be ahead of our time. There hasn't been a brick laid on the place for fifty years or more, except at the home farm and the stables here. It won't do any harm to improve the property in that way, and we've got the money in hand. We might begin with another keeper's cottage. We ought to have somebody in Buckle Wood."
And that was how it all came to fit in so nicely with the reward due to Gotch, turning his cap round in his hands in front of his master.
"Well, sir," said Gotch, "if I was thinking of keeping to what I've been doing—and comfortable enough at it under you and Captain Clinton—for the rest of my life, nothing wouldn't have suited me better, and I take leave to thank you for it. But as you was so good as to say you was going to do something substantial for me, me and 'er talked it over, and we were going to ask you if you'd help us to get over to Canada, to start farming. She's got a brother there what's doing well, and I'd look to do as well as him if I could get a fair start."
The Squire heard him out, but his heavy brows came together, and by the end of the speech had met in a frown of displeasure. One of the points made by the London journalist had been that the best blood and muscle of the countryside was being drafted overseas, because by the selfishness of landowners there was no room for them in rural England; and here was a man for whom room was being made in the most generous manner, who wished to join in the altogether unnecessary stampede.