He went aimlessly through the hall into the library. It was there that his uncle had lived; there that he had been found when death came to look for him; among the books which he had been unable to carry away with him at his departure; rare old tomes and first editions, long shelves of dead authors, who, it is to be hoped, continue to write in other worlds for those who read their lives away in this. Old Mr. Dare's interests and affections had all been bound in morocco and vellum. A volume lay open on the table, where the old man had put it down beside the leather arm-chair where he had sat, with his back to the light, summer and winter, winter and summer, for so many years.
No one had moved it since. A wavering pencil-mark had scored the page here and there. Dare shut it up, and replaced it among its brethren. How triste and silent the house seemed! He wondered what the old uncle had been like, and sauntered into the staircase hall, much in need of varnish, where the Dares that had gone before him lived. But these were too ancient to have his predecessor among them. He went into the long oak-panelled dining-room, where above the high carved dado were more Dares. Perhaps that man with the book was his namesake, the departed Alfred Dare. He wondered vaguely how he should look when he also took his place among his relations. Nature had favored him with a better mustache than most men, but he had a premonitory feeling that the very mustache itself, though undeniable in real life, would look out of keeping among these bluff, frank, light-haired people, of whom it seemed he—he who had never been near them before—was the living representative.
A sudden access of pleasurable dignity came over him as he sat on the dining-table, the great mahogany dining-table, which still showed vestiges of a by-gone polish, and was heavily dented by long years of hammered applause. These ancestors of his! He would not disgrace them. A few minutes ago he had been wondering whether Vandon might not be let. Now, with one of the rapid transitions habitual to him, he resolved that he would live at Vandon, that in all things he would be as they had been. He would become that vague, indefinable, to him mythical personage—a "country squire." Fortunately, he had a neat leg for a stocking. It was lost, so to speak, in his present mode of dress; but he felt that it would appear to advantage in the perpetual knickerbockers which he supposed it would be his lot to wear. It would also become his duty and his pleasure to marry. For those who tread in safety the slippery heights of married life he felt a true esteem. It would be a strain, no doubt, a great effort; but at this moment he was capable of anything. The finger of duty was plain. And with that adorable Miss Ruth, with or without a fortune—Alas! he trusted she had a fortune, for, as he came to think thereon, he remembered that he was desperately poor. As far as he could make out from his agent, a grim, silent man, who had taken an evident dislike to him from the first, there was no money anywhere. The rents would come in at Michaelmas; but the interest of heavy mortgages had to be paid, the estate had to be kept up. There was succession duty; there were debts—long outstanding debts—which came pouring in now, which Waters spread before him with an iron smile, and which poor Dare contemplated with his head on one side, and solemn, arched eyebrows. When Dare was not smiling he was always preternaturally solemn. There was no happy medium in his face, or consequently in his mind, which was generally gay, but, if not, was involved in a tragic gloom.
"These bills, my friend," he would say at last, tapping them in deep dejection, and raising his eyebrows into his hair, "how do we pay them?"
But Waters did not know. How should he, Waters, know? Waters only knew that the farmers would want a reduction in these bad times—Mr. Dare might be sure of that. And what with arrears, and one thing and another, he need not expect more than two-thirds of his rents when they did arrive. Mr. Dare might lay his account for that.
The only money which Dare received to carry on with, on his accession to the great honor and dignity of proprietor of Vandon, was brought to him by the old dairywoman of the house, a faithful creature, who produced out of an old stocking the actual coins which she had received for the butter and cheese she had sold, of which she showed Dare an account, chalked up in some dead language on the dairy door.
She was a little doubled-up woman, who had served the family all her life. Dare's ready smile and handsome face had won her heart before he had been many days at Vandon, in spite of "his foreign ways," and he found himself constantly meeting her unexpectedly round corners, where she had been lying in wait for him, each time with a secret revelation to whisper respecting what she called the "goin's on."
"You'll not tell on me, sir, but it's only right you should know as Mrs. Smith" (the house-keeper, of whom Dare stood in mortal terror) "has them fine damask table-cloths out for the house-keeper's room; I see 'em myself; and everything going to rag and ruin in the linen closet!" Or, "Joseph has took in another flitch this very day, sir, as Mrs. Smith sent for, and the old flitch all cut to waste. Do'e go and look at the flitches, sir, and the hams. They're in the room over the stables. And it's always butter, butter, butter, in the kitchen! Not a bit o' dripping used! There's not a pot of dripping in the larder, or so much as a skin of lard. Where does it all go to? You ask Mrs. Smith; and how she sleeps in her bed at night I don't know!"
Dare listened, nodded, made his escape, and did nothing. In the village it was as bad. Time, which had dealt so kindly with Vandon itself, had taken the straggling village in hand too. Nothing could be more picturesque than the crazy black-and-white houses, with lichen on their broken-in thatch, and the plaster peeling off from between the irregular beams of black wood; nothing more picturesque—and nothing more miserable.
When Time puts in his burnt umbers and brown madders with a lavish hand, and introduces his beautiful irregularities of outline, and his artistic disrepair, he does not look to the drainage, and takes no thought for holes in the roof.