“You won’t cry though, I warrant; and there’s people enough in Wyvern to send of her messages without troubling you,” said the Squire.
The Captain, however fiercely, had let this unpleasant speech pass unchallenged.
The old Squire was two or three times at the foot of the stairs before church-time, bawling inquiries after Miss Alice’s health, and messages for her private ear, to old Dulcibella.
The Squire never missed church. He was as punctual as his ancestor, old Sir Thomas Fairfield, who was there every Sunday and feast-day, lying on his back praying, in tarnished red, blue, and gold habiliments of the reign of James I., in which he died, and took the form of painted stone, and has looked straight up, with his side to the wall, and his hands joined in supplication ever since. If the old Squire did not trouble himself with reading, nor much with prayer, and thought over such topics as suited him, during divine service—he at least went through the drill of the rubrics decorously, and stood erect, sat down, or kneeled, as if he were the ordained fugleman of his tenantry assembled in the old church.
Captain Fairfield, a handsome fellow, notwithstanding his years, with the keen blue eye of his race—a lazy man, and reserved, but with the hot blood of the Fairfields in his veins, which showed itself dangerously on occasion, occupied a corner of this great oak enclosure, at the remote end from his father. Like him he pursued his private ruminations with little interruption from the liturgy in which he ostensibly joined. These ruminations were, to judge from his countenance, of a saturnine and sulky sort. He was thinking over his father’s inhospitable language, and making up his mind, for though indolent, he was proud and fiery, to take steps upon it, and to turn his back, perhaps for many a day, on Wyvern.
The sweet old organ of Wyvern pealed, and young voices swelled the chorus of love and praise, and still father and son were confronted in dark antipathy. The Vicar read his text from Holy Writ, and preached on the same awful themes; the transitoriness of our days; love, truth, purity, eternal life, death eternal; and still this same unnatural chill and darkness was between them. Moloch sat unseen by the old man’s side, and in the diapason of the organ moaned his thirst for his sacrifices. Evil spirits amused the young man’s brain with pictures of his slights and wrongs, and with their breath heated his vengeful heart. The dreams of both were interrupted by the Vicar’s sonorous blessing, and they shook their ears, and kneeled down, and their dreams came back again.
So it was Sunday—“better day, better deed”—when a smouldering quarrel broke suddenly into fire and thunder in the manor-house of Wyvern.
There is, we know, an estate of £6,000 a year, in a ring fence, round this old house. It owes something alarming, but the parish, village, and manor of Wyvern have belonged, time out of mind, to the Fairfield family.
A very red sunset, ominous of storm, floods the western sky with its wild and sullen glory. The leaves of the great trees from whose recesses the small birds are singing their cheery serenade, flash and glimmer in it, as if a dew of fire had sprinkled them, and a blood-red flush lights up the brown feathers of the little birds.
These Fairfields are a handsome race—showing handsome, proud English faces. Brown haired, sometimes light, sometimes dark, with generally blue eyes, not mild, but fierce and keen.