The stabling and gardens were of proportionately modest dimensions. The house stood in a park of about fifty acres, and, being on a slight eminence, commanded a charming view of field and woodland stretching away to a line of green downs to the southward. The estate consisted of about three thousand acres, but it was not all good land, and there was always a farm or two lying unlet. The former possessor had been a careful man, but although times were better in his day, he had found it all he could do to steer clear of serious embarrassment. The present one found it hardly less difficult, but he had two things in his favour. He was a man of simple and inexpensive tastes, and, with the exception of one son, he was childless. His liability was, therefore, a strictly limited one.
Sir Francis Orlebar stood in his library window, thinking. It was a bright summer morning—bright and cheerful enough to have exercised a corresponding effect upon the spirits. Yet in this instance it did not seem to.
He was a slight, well-proportioned man of medium height, but his slight build and erect carriage made him seem taller than he really was. There was a look of almost ultra-refinement in his face, and he was still strikingly handsome. His hair and moustache were grey, but his eyes looked almost young. Not in their light-hearted expression, however, for there was a tinge of melancholy never wholly absent from them, but in their wonderful penetrating clearness. It was a most contradictory face, and withal, to the student of physiognomy, a most provoking one, for as a set-off to the high forehead and straight, clear eyes there was a shade of weakness, of over-sensitiveness in the set of the lower jaw. But it was the face of a many-generation-descended gentleman.
As we have said, there was nothing in this bright, mellow summer morning to conduce to depression. Yet the cloud upon the thinker’s face deepened.
It would be safe to hazard a conjecture that the cause of his melancholy was purely subjective. His was just the temperament which delights in retrospect, which is given to tormenting its owner with speculative musings upon what might have been—to raising the ghosts of dead and buried events.
He looked back upon his life and derived no pleasure from the process. With his opportunities—always with the best intentions—what a poor affair he seemed to have made of it! Better indeed for him had those intentions been less free from alloy, since nothing which borders on perfection has the slightest chance in this world of snares, and pitfalls, and rank growths. Best intentions, indeed, had been his undoing all along the line. His own inclinations were rather against the profession of arms, but he had sacrificed them and accepted a commission, in accordance with his father’s strongly expressed wish. He had married his first wife from motives of chivalry rather than affection—out of pity for the life of toil and grinding poverty otherwise mapped out for her. Then had followed disillusion, unappreciativeness, ingratitude, misery, till her early death freed him from the ill-assorted and blighting tie. Caught at the rebound, his too soft heart and aesthetic nature had led him into an intrigue which proved disastrous to all concerned—but, there, he did not care to dwell upon that. Again, in a fit of disgust and sensitiveness, brought about by the éclat and scandal, he had sold out—always with the best intentions—where another would simply have shown a bold front until the nine days’ wonder had abated, and was left early in life without a profession. He had embarked in literature, always of a delicate, not to say dilettante nature; had dabbled in art, and a little in a science or two, but had never got his head above the level of the swaying, striving, pushing—shall we say cringing?—multitude of heads, all fighting for that proud and lucrative pre-eminence. But he had always the interests and occupations of a country gentleman to fall back upon, and perhaps, on the whole, these suited him as well as anything else. And then, after about twenty years wherein to reflect on the scant advantages which he had reaped from his former matrimonial venture, he had suffered himself to be again bound with the iron chain, and his second partner—as is curiously enough not unfrequently the case under the circumstances, presumably through some ironical freak of Nature which decrees that when a man of an age and experience to know better does make a fool of himself he shall do it thoroughly—possessed neither attractions, nor wealth, nor suitability of temperament to recommend her. And having arrived at this stage of his retrospection, poor Sir Francis could not but own to himself—we fear, not for the first time—that in taking this step to counteract the growing loneliness of advancing age he had performed the metaphorical and saltatory feat popularly known as “jumping out of the frying-pan into the fire.”
But there was one bright influence shining in upon the shaded events of his anything but cheerful introspection, and its name was Philip. The baronet’s heart glowed with pride at the thought of his fine, open-hearted, handsome son, upon whom he lavished an almost feminine affection. Here again came in that fatal motor, “best intentions.” Better, perchance, had a little more steel and a little less velvet gloved the hand which had had the bringing up of that sunny-natured youth. But Sir Francis was the last person to whom this was likely to occur, and now, as he thought that the time for his idolised son’s return could not be very far distant, there stole over his features an unconscious smile of pleasurable anticipation.
Immersed in such congenial musing, he hardly heard the subdued knock at the door, the almost noiseless footsteps of the well-trained butler. The latter bore some letters on a salver.
“Put them on the table, Karslake,” said the baronet, unwilling to be disturbed in his pleasant reverie.
“Beg pardon, Sir Francis,” said the man, who was of long standing and privileged—“beg pardon, Sir Francis, but I think one of ’em’s from Mr Philip.”