"Poor Allan!" laughed his mother. "She was an excellent woman, but she loved to command; and one can't command affection, not even the affection of a child. It was she who made your father marry me. He liked me, and I liked him, and we had been playfellows; but we should never have thought of marrying if your grandmother had not, in a manner, insisted upon it. She told George that I was deeply in love with him; and she told me that George was devoted to me; and so we could not help ourselves. And, after all," she went on, with a comfortable sigh, "it has answered very well. I don't think we could possibly be fonder of our home, or of each other, than we are. And your father has his books, and his shooting and fishing, and I have my farm and my schools—and," with a sudden gush of tenderness, "we both have you. You ought to be fond of us, Allan. You are the link that makes us one in heart and mind."
Allan was fond of them. Both parents had been undeviating in their indulgence, and he had given them love without stint. But it may be that he loved the somewhat silent and reserved father with a profounder affection than he gave to the open-hearted and loquacious mother. That vague consciousness of a secret in his father's life, of sorrows unforgotten, but never told, had evoked the son's warmest sympathy. All that Allan had ever felt of sentiment or romantic feeling hitherto, he had felt for his father. It is not to be supposed that he had reached five and twenty without some commerce with Cupid, but his loves had been only passing fancies, sunbeams glancing on the surface of life's current, not those deep forces which change the course of the river.
The characters of father and mother were distinctly marked in their acceptance of Allan's good fortune. Lady Emily saw only the sunny side of the inheritance. She was delighted that her son should have ample means and perfect independence in the morning of life. She was full of matrimonial schemes on his behalf. Decidedly he ought to marry, well and quickly. An only son, with an estate in possession, and another—his patrimonial estate—in prospective. It was his duty to found a family. She marshalled all the young women she knew in a mental review. There must be good family—a pure race, untarnished by the taint of commerce, unshadowed by hushed-up disgrace—divorces, bankruptcies, turf scandals. There should be money, because even the two estates would not make Allan a rich man, as the world reckons wealth nowadays; but they would give him a respectable platform from which to demand the hand of an heiress. He could woo the wealthiest without fear of being considered a fortune-hunter.
"It is sad to think you will like your own place better than this," said Lady Emily in her cheerfullest voice, "and that we shall hardly see you except at Christmas and Easter; but it is so nice to know that you are in a position to marry as early as you like without being under any obligation to your father; for, indeed, dear, what with his library and my farm, there would have been very little margin for a proper establishment for you."
"My dearest mother, why harp upon matrimony? I have made up my mind to follow my uncle's excellent example."
"My poor brother!" sighed Lady Emily. "He was in love with the belle of the season—a foolish pink and white thing, with one long curl streaming over her left shoulder, and a frock that you would laugh at, if you could see her to-day. Of course Allan's chances were hopeless—a younger son, with a commander's pay, eked out by a pittance from his father. She used to ride in the Row with a plume in her hat—half a Spanish fowl—quite the right thing, I assure you, at that time. Your uncle was twelve years older than I, you know, Allan; and I was still in short petticoats when he went off to China broken-hearted. Of course she wouldn't have him, though she said he was the best waltzer in London. Her people wouldn't let her look at him even, from a matrimonial point of view."
Allan went to church with his mother on Easter morning—attended two services in the fine old church, which seemed much too grand and too big for the tiny town—her loving heart swelling with pride at having such an admirable son. Her friends had always been fond of him; but now it seemed to her there was a touch of deference in their kindness. They had liked him as her son, and the inheritor of Fendyke Hall; but perhaps they liked him even a little better now that he was his own master, a man of independent means.
He accompanied Lady Emily in her weekly visit to the schools; he assisted in dealing out Easter gifts to the school-children, and distributed half a dozen pounds of the very strongest obtainable tobacco among his male acquaintance in the village of Fendyke—a village consisting of a rectory, three picturesque farmhouses, a still more picturesque water-mill and miller's house, a roomy old barn-like inn, said to have once given shelter to good Queen Bess, and a good many decent cottages grouped in threes and fours along the broad, level road, or scattered in side lanes.
The morning of Easter Monday was given to an inspection of Lady Emily's white farm—that farm which, next to her son, was the greatest pride and delight of her innocent and strictly rural life. Here, all buildings and all creatures were of an almost dazzling purity. White horses at the plough, a white fox-terrier running beside it, white birds in the poultry-yard, white cows in the meadow—cows from Lord Cawdor's old white Pembroke breed, cows from Blickling Park and Woodbastwick—white cottages for bailiff and farm-labourers, white palings, white pigs, and white donkeys, a white peacock sunning himself on the top of the clipped yew-hedge in the bailiff's garden, white tulips, white hyacinths in the flower-beds. To procure all this whiteness had cost trouble and money; but there are few home-farms which give as much delight to their possessors as this white farm gave to Lady Emily Carew. She had as much pride in its perfection as the connoisseur who collects only Wedgwood, or only Florentine Majolica, has in his collection. It is not so much the actual value of the thing as the fact that the thing is unique, and has cost the possessor years of patience and labour. Lady Emily would take a long journey to look at a white cow, or to secure the whitest thing in Brahmas or Cochin Chinas.
It was a harmless, simple, womanly hobby, and although Lady Emily's farm was a somewhat costly toy, it served to give her status in the neighbourhood, and it provided labour for a good many people, who were well housed and well looked after, and whose children astonished the school-inspectors by the thoroughness of their education. No incompetent master or mistress could have held on in the schools where Lady Emily was a power. She cultivated a friendly familiarity with the man and woman who taught her cottage children; she asked them to quiet, confidential luncheons three or four times in a quarter; she sounded their opinions, plucked out the heart of their mystery, lent them books, stuffed them with her own ideas, and, in a manner, made them her mouthpiece. Intensely conservative as to her opinions and prejudices, and with an absolute loathing for all radical and revolutionary principles; she was yet, by the beneficence of her nature, more liberal than many a professing demagogue, and would fain have admitted all her fellow-creatures to an equal share in the good things of this life. Her warm heart was full of compassion for the hard lives she saw around her—hard even where the condition of the agricultural labourer was at its best—and it was her delight to introduce into these hard lives occasional glimpses of a happier world—a world of pleasure and gaiety, laughter and frolic. Lady Emily's Christmas and Whitsun balls for the villagers and servants; Lady Emily's May-day feast for the children; Lady Emily's midsummer picnic and harvest-home; and Lady Emily's fairy fir-tree, which reached to the ceiling of the boy's schoolroom, every branch laden with benefits—these were events which broke the slow monotony of each laborious year, joys to dream of and to remember in many a dull week of toil. Second only to these festive gatherings in helpfulness were Lady Emily's coal and blanket society, savings bank, and mothers' meeting—the last a friendly, familiar gathering held in a spacious old building which had been a brewery in the days when every country gentleman's household brewed its own beer. Once a week, through the winter season, Lady Emily sat in the old brewery, with a circle of cottagers' wives sewing industriously, while she talked and read to them. Tea and bread-and-butter, a roaring wood fire, and a bright lamp, were the only material comforts provided; but these and Lady Emily's friendly welcome and pleasant talk, with the short story chosen out of a magazine, and the familiar chapter of the New Testament, read far better than vicar or curate read it in church, sufficed to make the mothers' meeting a cheerful break in the cottage matron's busy week. She went back to her homely hearth cheered and encouraged. Lady Emily had told her the latest news of the great busy world outside Fendyke, had given her a recipe for a new savoury pie of ox-cheek and twopenny rice, or a new way of making barley broth; or had given her a "cutting" for her tiny flower-garden, or had cut out her new Garibawldi. Lady Emily had been to her as a friend and counsellor.