“No, dearest, neither you nor mother must leave the grounds till we go away. I will have no needless risks run by my dear ones.”
Neither mother nor daughter disputed his will upon this point. He was the sole arbiter of their lives. It seemed almost as if they lived only to please him. Both would have liked to go with him; both thought him over-cautious; yet neither attempted to argue the point. Happy household in which there are no arguments upon domestic trifles, no bickerings about the infinitesimals of life!
Enderby Manor was one of those ideal homes which adorn the face of England and sustain its reputation as the native soil of domestic virtues, the country in which good wives and good mothers are indigenous.
There are many such ideal homes in the land as to outward aspect, seen from the high-road, across park or pasture, shrubbery or flower-garden; but only a few of these sustain the idea upon intimate knowledge of the interior.
Here, within as well as without, the atmosphere was peace. Those velvet lawns and brilliant flower-beds were not more perfect than the love between husband and wife, child and parents. No cloud had ever shadowed that serene heaven of domestic peace. George Greswold had married at thirty a girl of eighteen who adored him; and those two had lived for each other and for their only child ever since. All outside the narrow circle of family love counted only as the margin or the framework of life. All the deepest and sweetest elements of life were within the veil. Mildred Greswold could not conceive a fashionable woman’s existence—a life given up to frivolous occupations and futile excitements—a life of empty pleasure faintly flavoured with art, literature, science, philanthropy, and politics, and fancying itself eminently useful and eminently progressive. She had seen such an existence in her childhood, and had wondered that any reasoning creature could so live. She had turned her back upon the modish world when she married George Greswold, and had surrendered most of the delights of society to lead quiet days in her husband’s ancestral home, loving that old house for his sake, as he loved it for the sake of the dead.
They were not in outer darkness, however, as to the movement of the world. They spent a fortnight at Limmers occasionally, when the fancy moved them. They saw all the pictures worth seeing, heard a good deal of the best music, mixed just enough in society to distinguish gold from tinsel, and to make a happy choice of friends.
They occasionally treated themselves to a week in Paris, and their autumn holidays were mostly spent in a shooting-box twenty miles beyond Inverness. They came back to the Manor in time for the pheasant-shooting, and the New Year generally began with a house-party which lasted with variations until the hunting was all over, and the young leaves were green in the neighbouring forest. No lives could have been happier, or fuller of interest; but the interest all centred in home. Farmers and cottagers on the estate were cared for as a part of home; and the estate itself was loved almost as a living thing by husband and wife, and the fair child who had been born to them in the old-fashioned house.
The grave red-brick manor-house had been built when William III. was King; and there were some Dutch innovations in the Old English architecture, notably a turret or pavilion at the end of each wing, and a long bowling-green on the western side of the garden. The walls had that deep glowing red which is only seen in old brickwork, and the black glazed tiles upon the hopper roof glittered in the sunlight with the prismatic hues of antique Rhodian glass. The chief characteristic of the interior was the oak-panelling, which clothed the rooms and corridors as in a garment of sober brown, and would have been suggestive of gloom but for the pictures and porcelain which brightened every wall, and the rich colouring of brocaded curtains and tapestry portières. The chief charm of the house was the aspect of home life, the books and musical instruments, the art treasures, and flowers, and domestic trifles to be seen everywhere; the air which every room and every nook and corner had of being lived in by home-loving and home-keeping people.
The pavilion at the end of the south-west wing was Lola’s special domain, that and the room communicating with it. That pretty sitting-room, with dwarf book-shelves, water-colour pictures, and Wedgwood china, was never called a schoolroom. It was Lola’s study.
“There shall be no suggestion of school in our home,” said George Greswold.