[III
ST. WITHANS]
| Not knowing how to find the openair,But toiling desperately to find it out. | ||
| HENRY VI, Part III. | ||
IF Potsham was somnolent, St. Withans, our parson’s Cornish living, might well have been the home of the Sleeping Beauty. For a time it was a place of enchantment while the charm and novelty of wedded love were upon Francis and his Martha. They were blissfully happy: the county welcomed them, they had a charming house and garden, a carriage, money in plenty, children, and when they were bored with the country they could escape to the gaiety of Plymouth. After they had been married for five years they exchanged duties for a year with the English chaplain at Hâvre-de-Grace in Normandy, and their fourth child, a daughter, was born there. After that it became a habit with them to go over to the Continent every year for a couple of months.
Their sixth child died in infancy, their seventh only lived to be three years old, but the eighth, ninth, and tenth were as healthy and comely as the first five.
It was a year or so after the birth of the tenth, in 1867, that they began to discover that while their family had grown their income had remained stationary. It was at that moment that for the first time they began to think of what they had done and counted up the number of their offspring, and realised that they had brought nine good lives into the world and had to face the responsibility and, somehow or other, establish them.
These were the names of the young Folyats: Serge, Gertrude, Frederic, Mary, Leedham, Minna, Annette, and James.
Serge had early passed out of his parents’ control, though not without expense, for he had been sent into the Navy, from which, at the age of fifteen, he deserted in Labrador and was only saved from court-martial by being bought out of the service, to which end the farm on Dartmoor and a house in Potsham were sold. He was not allowed to come home and, since he refused to stay in America, a situation was found for him in a bank in Kimberley, in South Africa, and his correspondence dwindled and then ceased altogether.
Frederic was at a Lycée in France, and the question of his career was being indefinitely postponed.
The girls were the problem. Gertrude and Mary had suddenly become women and there was no man to ask them in marriage. An occasional Folyat was sent to the Vicarage to be coached for some examination, but they either only flirted or they fell desperately in love with Minna, the beauty of the family, who was only fourteen.