At the time when this story begins, the joint ownership of the Osierfield and the Willows was vested in the two Miss Farringdons, the daughters and co-heiresses of John Farringdon. John Farringdon and his brother William had been partners, and had arranged between themselves that William's only child, George, should marry John's eldest daughter, Maria, and so consolidate the brothers' fortunes and their interest in the works. But the gods—and George—saw otherwise. George was a handsome, weak boy, who objected equally to work and to Methodism; and as his father cared for nothing beyond those sources of interest, and had no patience for any one who did, the two did not always see eye to eye. Perhaps if Maria had been more unbending, things might have turned out differently; but Methodism in its severest aspects was not more severe than Maria Farringdon. She was a thorough gentlewoman, and extremely clever; but tenderness was not counted among her excellencies. George would have been fond of almost any woman who was pretty enough to be loved and not clever enough to be feared; but his cousin Maria was beyond even his powers of falling in love, although, to do him justice, these powers were by no means limited. The end of it was that George offended his father past forgiveness by running away to Australia rather than marry Maria, and there disappeared. Years afterward a rumour reached his people that he had married and died out there, leaving a widow and an only son; but this rumour had not been verified, as by that time his father and uncle were dead, and his cousins were reigning in his stead; and it was hardly to be expected that the proud Miss Farringdon would take much trouble concerning the woman whom her weak-kneed kinsman had preferred to herself.
William Farringdon left all his property and his share in the works to his niece Maria, as some reparation for the insult which his disinherited son had offered to her; John left his large fortune between his two daughters, as he never had a son; so Maria and Anne Farringdon lived at the Willows, and carried on the Osierfield with the help of Richard Smallwood, who had been the general manager of the collieries and ironworks belonging to the firm in their father's time, and knew as much about iron (and most other things) as he did. Maria was a good woman of business, and she and Richard between them made money as fast as it had been made in the days of William and John Farringdon. Anne, on the contrary, was a meek and gentle soul, who had no power of governing but a perfect genius for obedience, and who was always engaged on the Herculean task of squaring the sternest dogmas with the most indulgent practices.
Even in the early days of this history the Miss Farringdons were what is called "getting on"; but the Willows was, nevertheless, not without a youthful element in it. Close upon a dozen years ago the two sisters had adopted the orphaned child of a second cousin, whose young widow had died in giving birth to a posthumous daughter; and now Elisabeth Farringdon was the light of the good ladies' eyes, though they would have considered it harmful to her soul to let her have an inkling of this fact.
She was not a pretty little girl, which was a source of much sorrow of heart to her; and she was a distinctly clever little girl, of which she was utterly unconscious, it being an integral part of Miss Farringdon's system of education to imbue the young with an overpowering sense of their own inferiority and unworthiness. During the first decade of her existence Elisabeth used frequently and earnestly to pray that her hair might become golden and her eyes brown; but as on this score the heavens remained as brass, and her hair continued dark brown and her eyes blue-gray, she changed her tactics, and confined her heroine-worship to ladies of this particular style of colouring; which showed that, even at the age of ten, Elisabeth had her full share of adaptability.
One day, when walking with Miss Farringdon to chapel, Elisabeth exclaimed, à propos of nothing but her own meditations, "Oh! Cousin Maria, I do wish I was pretty!"
Most people would have been too much afraid of the lady of the Willows to express so frivolous a desire in her august hearing; but Elisabeth was never afraid of anybody, and that, perhaps, was one of the reasons why her severe kinswoman loved her so well.
"That is a vain wish, my child. Favour is deceitful and beauty is vain; and the Lord looketh on the heart and not on the outward appearance."
"But I wasn't thinking of the Lord," replied Elisabeth: "I was thinking of other people; and they love you much more if you are pretty than if you aren't."
"That is not so," said Miss Farringdon—and she believed she was speaking the truth; "if you serve God and do your duty to your neighbour, you will find plenty of people ready to love you; and especially if you carry yourself well and never stoop." Like many another elect lady, Cousin Maria regarded beauty of face as a vanity, but beauty of figure as a virtue; and to this doctrine Elisabeth owed the fact that her back always sloped in the opposite direction to the backs of the majority of people.
But it would have surprised Miss Farringdon to learn how little real effect her strict Methodist training had upon Elisabeth; fortunately, however, few elder people ever do learn how little effect their training has upon the young committed to their charge; if it were so, life would be too hard for the generation that has passed the hill-top. Elisabeth's was one of those happy, pantheistic natures that possess the gift of finding God everywhere and in everything. She early caught the Methodist habit of self-analysis and introspection, but in her it did not develop—as it does in more naturally religious souls—into an almost morbid conscientiousness and self-depreciation; she merely found an artistic and intellectual pleasure in taking the machinery of her soul to pieces and seeing how it worked.