Cheriton village had been on tiptoe with expectancy ever since four o’clock, although common sense ought to have informed the villagers that a bride and bridegroom who were to be married at two o’clock in Westminster Abbey were not very likely to appear at Cheriton early in the afternoon. But the village having made up its mind to a half-holiday was glad to begin early. A little knot of gipsies from the last race-meeting in the neighbourhood had improved the occasion and set up the friendly and familiar image of Aunt Sally on the green in front of the Eagle Inn; while a rival establishment had started a pictorial shooting-gallery, with a rubicund giant’s face and wide-open mouth, grinning at the populace across a barrel of Barcelona nuts. There are some people who might think Cheriton village and Cheriton Chase too remote from the busy world and its traffic to be subject to strong emotions of any kind. Yet even in this region of Purbeck, cut off from the rest of England by a winding river, and ostentatiously calling itself an island, there were eager interests and warm feelings, and many a link with the great world of men and women on the other side of the stream.
Cheriton Chase was one of the finest places in the county of Dorset. It lay south of Wareham, between Corfe Castle and Branksea Island, and in the midst of scenery which has a peculiar charm of its own, a curious blending of level pasture and steep hillside, barren heath and fertile water-meadow; here a Dutch landscape, grazing cattle, and winding stream; there a suggestion of some lonely Scottish deer-walk; an endless variety of outline; and yonder on the steep hilltop the grim stone walls and mouldering bastions of Corfe Castle, standing dark and stern against the blue fair-weather sky or boldly confronting the force of the tempest.
Cheriton House was almost as old as Corfe in the estimation of some of the country people. Its history went back into the night of ages. But while the Castle had suffered siege and battery by Cromwell’s ruthless cannon, and had been left to stand as that arch-destroyer left it, until only the outer walls of the mighty fabric remained, with a tower or two, and the mullions of one great window standing up above the rest, the mere skeleton of the gigantic pile, Cheriton House had been cared for and added to century after century, so that it presented now a picturesque blending of old and new, in which almost every corridor and every room was a surprise to the stranger.
Never had Cheriton been better cared for than by its present owner, nor had Cheriton village owned a more beneficent lord of the manor. And yet Lord Cheriton was an alien and a stranger to the soil, and that kind of person whom rustics mostly are inclined to look down upon—a self-made man.
The present master of Cheriton was a man who owed wealth and distinction to his own talents. He had been raised to the peerage about fifteen years before this day of clashing joy-bells and village rejoicings. He had been owner of the Cheriton estate for more than twenty years, having bought the property on the death of the last squire, and at a time of unusual depression. He was popularly supposed to have got the estate for an old song; but the old song meant something between seventy and eighty thousand pounds, and represented the bulk of his wife’s fortune. He had not been afraid so to swamp his wife’s dowry, for he was at this time one of the most popular silk gowns at the equity Bar. He was making four or five thousand a year, and he was strong in the belief in his power to rise higher.
The purchase, prompted by ambition, and a desire to take his place among the landed gentry, had turned out a very lucky one from a financial point of view, for a stone quarry that had been unworked for more than a century was speedily developed by the new owner of the soil, and became a source of income which enabled him to improve mansion-house and farms without embarrassment.
Under Mr. Dalbrook’s improving hand, the Cheriton estate, which had been gradually sinking to decay in the occupation of an exhausted race, became as perfect as human ingenuity, combined with judicious outlay, can make any estate. The falcon eye of the master was on all things. The famous advocate’s only idea of a holiday was to work his hardest in the supervision of his Dorsetshire property. He thought of Cheriton many a time in the law courts, as Fox used to think of St. Anne’s and his turnips amidst the debauchery of a long night’s card-playing, or in the whirl of a stormy debate. Purbeck might have been the motto and password of his life. He was born at Dorchester, the son of humble shopkeeping parents, and was educated at the quaint old stone grammar school in that good old town. All his happiest hours of boyhood had been spent in the Isle of Purbeck. Those watery meadows and breezy commons and break-neck hills had been his playground; and when he went back to them as a hard-headed, overworked man of the world, made arrogant from the magnitude of a success which had never known check or retrogression, the fountains of his heart were unlocked by the very atmosphere of that fertile land where the salt breath of the sea came tempered by the balmy perfume of the heather, the odour of hedgerow flowers, rosemary, and thyme.
At Cheriton James Dalbrook unbent, forgot that he was a great man, and remembered only that his lot was cast in a pleasant place, and that he had the most lovable of wives and the loveliest of daughters.
His daughter had been born at Cheriton, had known no other country home, and had never considered the first-floor flat in Victoria Street where her father and mother spent the London season, and where her father had his pied-à-terre all the year round, in the light of a home. His daughter, Juanita, was the eldest of three children born in the old manor house. The two younger, both sons, died in infancy; and it seemed to James Dalbrook that there was a blight upon his offspring, such a blight as that which withered the male children of Henry of England and Catherine of Arragon. Much had been given to him. He had been allowed to make name and fortune, he whose sole heritage was a little crockery shop in a second-rate street of Dorchester. He had enjoyed the lordship of broad acres, the honours and position of a rural squire; but he was not to be allowed that crowning glory for which strong men yearn. He was not to be the first of a long line of Barons Cheriton of Cheriton.
After the grief and disappointment of those two deaths—first of an infant of a few weeks old, and afterwards of a lovely child of two years—James Dalbrook hardened his heart for a little while against the fair young sister who survived them. She could not perpetuate that barony which was the crown of his greatness; or if by special grace her father’s title might be in after-days bestowed upon the husband of her choice—which in the event of her marrying judiciously and marrying wealth, might not be impracticable—it would be an alien to his race who would bear the title which he, James Dalbrook, had created. He had so longed for a son, and behold two had been given to him, and upon both the blight had fallen. When people praised his daughter’s childish loveliness he shook his head despondently, thinking that she too would be taken, like her brothers, before ever the bud became a flower.