It was time now the Squire should know all, and he did. He looked a chastened man when he came out from that interview with his brother and Walton. But he put a right cheery face on matters when he told his wife.
“We’ll have to retrench,” he said. “It’ll be a struggle for a time, but we’ll get over it right enough.”
Present money, however, was wanted, and raised it must be.
And now came the hardest blow the Squire had yet received. It was a staggering one, though he met it boldly. There was then at Burley Old Mansion a long picture gallery. It was a room in an upper story, and extended the whole length of the house—a hall in fact, and one that more than one Squire Broadbent had entertained his friends right royally in. From the walls not only did portraits of ancestors bold and gay, smile or frown down, but there hung there also many a splendid landscape and seascape by old masters.
Most of the latter had to be sold, and the gallery was closed, for the simple reason that Squire Broadbent, courageous though he was, could not look upon its bare and desecrated walls without a feeling of sorrow.
Pictures even from the drawing-room had to go also, and that room too was closed. But the breakfast-room, which opened to the lawn and rose gardens, where the wild birds sang so sweetly in summer, was left intact; so was the dining-room, and that cosy, wee green parlour in which the family delighted to assemble around the fire in the winter’s evenings.
Squire Broadbent had been always a favourite in the county—somewhat of an upstart and iconoclast though he was—so the sympathy he received was universal.
Iconoclast? Yes, he had delighted in shivering the humble idols of others, and now his own were cast down. Nobody, however, deserted him. Farmers and Squires might have said among themselves that they always knew Broadbent was “going the pace,” and that his new-fangled American notions were poorly suited to England, but in his presence they did all they could to cheer him.
When the ploughing time came round they gave him what is called in the far North “a love-darg.” Men with teams of horses came from every farm for miles around and tilled his ground. They had luncheon in a marquee, but they would not hear of stopping to dinner. They were indeed thoughtful and kind.
The parson of the parish and the doctor were particular friends of the Squire. They often dropped in of an evening to talk of old times with the family by the fireside.