The Heir of Redclyffe

by Charlotte M. Yonge

It gave him spirit enough to undertake what he had long been meditating, but without energy to set about it—an expedition to Stylehurst. Hitherto it had been his first walk on coming to St. Mildred’s, but now the distance across the moor was far beyond his powers; and even that length of ride was a great enterprise. It was much further by the carriage road, and his sister never liked going there. He had never failed to visit his old home till last year, and he felt almost glad that he had not carried his thoughts, at that time, to his father’s grave. It was strange that, with so many more important burdens on his mind, it had been this apparent trivial omission, this slight to Stylehurst, that, in both his illnesses, had been the most frequently recurring idea that had tormented him in his delirium. So deeply, securely fixed is the love of the home of childhood in men of his mould, in whom it is perhaps the most deeply rooted of all affections.

Without telling his sister his intention, he hired a horse, and pursued the familiar moorland tracks. He passed South Moor Farm; it gave him too great a pang to look at it; he rode on across the hills where he used to walk with his sisters, and looked down into narrow valleys where he had often wandered with his fishing-rod, lost in musings on plans for attaining distinction, and seeing himself the greatest man of his day. Little had he then guessed the misery which would place him in the way to the coveted elevation, or how he would loathe it when it lay within his grasp.

There were the trees round the vicarage, the church spire, the cottages, whose old rough aspect, he knew so well, the whole scene, once ‘redolent of joy and youth:’ but how unable to breathe on him a second spring! He put up his horse at the village inn, and went to make his first call on Susan, the old clerk’s wife, and one of the persons in all the world who loved him best. He knocked, opened the door, and saw her, startled from her tea-drinking, looking at him as a stranger.

‘Bless us! It beant never Master Philip!’ she exclaimed, her head shaking very fast, as she recognized his voice. ‘Why, sir, what a turn you give me! How bad you be looking, to be sure!’

He sat down and talked with her, with feelings of comfort. Tidings of Sir Guy’s death had reached the old woman, and she was much grieved for the nice, cheerful-spoken young gentleman, whom she well remembered; for she, like almost every one who had ever had any intercourse with him, had an impression left of him, as of something winning, engaging, brightening, like a sunbeam. It was a refreshment to meet with one who would lament him for his own sake, and had no congratulations for Philip himself; and the ‘Sure, sure, it must have been very bad for you,’ with which old Susan heard of the circumstances, carried more of the comfort of genuine sympathy than all his sister’s attempts at condolence.

She told him how often Sir Guy had been at Stylehurst, how he had talked to her about the archdeacon; and especially she remembered his helping her husband one day when he found him trimming the ash over the archdeacon’s grave. He used to come very often to church there, more in the latter part of his stay; there was one Sunday—it was the one before Michaelmas—he was there all day, walking in the churchyard, and sitting in the porch between services.

‘The Sunday before Michaelmas!’ thought Philip, the very time when he had been most earnest in driving his uncle to persecute, and delighting himself in having triumphed over Guy at last, and obtained tangible demonstration of his own foresight, and his cousin’s vindictive spirit. What had he been throwing away? Where had, in truth, been the hostile spirit?

He took the key of the church, and walked thither alone, standing for several minutes by the three graves, with a sensation as if his father was demanding of him an account of the boy he had watched, and brought to his ancestral home, and cared for through his orphaned childhood. But for the prayer-book, the pledge that there had been peace at the last, how could he have borne it?

Here was the paved path he had trodden in early childhood, holding his mother’s hand, where, at each recurring vacation during his school days, he had walked between his admiring sisters, in the consciousness that he was the pride of his family and of all the parish. Of his family? Did he not remember his return home for the last time before that when he was summoned thither by his father’s death? He had come with a whole freight of prizes, and letters full of praises; and as he stood, in expectation of the expression of delighted satisfaction, his father laid his hand on his trophy, the pile of books, saying, gravely,—’ All this would I give, Philip, for one evidence of humility of mind.’

It had been his father’s one reproof. He had thought it unjust and unreasonable, and turned away impatiently to be caressed and admired by Margaret. His real feelings had been told to her, because she flattered them and shared them, he had been reserved and guarded with the father who would have perceived and repressed that ambition and the self-sufficiency which he himself had never known to exist, nor regarded as aught but sober truth. It had been his bane, that he had been always too sensible to betray outwardly his self-conceit, in any form that could lead to its being noticed.