It was a fine afternoon towards the end of June. Abraham Leigh was standing by the gate of the field known as the home meadow looking at the long, ripe grass rippling as the summer breeze swept across it. He was a thoroughly good specimen of the Somersetshire farmer. A big, sturdy man, whose movements were slow and deliberate. His face, if heavy and stolid, not by any means the face of a fool. No doubt, a man of circumscribed views—the world, for him, extending eastwards to Bristol market and westwards to the Bristol Channel. Nevertheless, respected in his little world as a wonderful judge of a beast, a great authority on tillages, and, above all, a man who always had a balance in his favor at the Somersetshire Bank; a type of that extinct race, the prosperous farmer, who looked on all townsmen with contempt, thinking, as all farmers should think, that the owners of broad acres, and those engaged in agriculture were alone worthy of respect.
Yet, to-day, in spite of his advantages and acquirements, Farmer Leigh looked on the fifteen-acre meadow with a puzzled and discontented expression on his honest face; and, moreover, murmurs of dissatisfaction were proceeding from his lips. Farmers—Somersetshire farmers especially—are proverbial grumblers, but it is seldom they grumble without an audience. It is outsiders who get the benefit of their complaints. Besides, one would think that the tenant of Watercress Farm had little at present to complain of. The drop of rain so badly wanted had been long in coming, but it had come just in the nick of time to save the grass, and if the crop outwardly looked a little thin, Mr. Leigh’s experienced eye told him that the undergrowth was thick, and that the quality of the hay would be first-class. Moreover, what corn and roots he had looked promising, so it seems strange that the farmer should be grumbling when he had no one to listen to him, and should lean so disconsolately upon the gate of the field when no one observed him.
“I can’t make him out,” he said. “Good boy he be, too; yet, instead o’ helping me with the land, always going about dreaming or messing with mud. Can’t think where he got his notions from. Suppose it must ’a been from the mother, poor thing! Always fond o’ gimcracks and such like, she were. Gave the lad such an outlandish name I’m ashamed to hear it. Father’s and grandfather’s name ought to be good enough for a Leigh—good boy though he be, too!”
A soft look settled on Abraham Leigh’s face as he repeated the last words; then he went deeper into his slough of despond, where, no doubt, he battled as manfully as a Christian until he reached the other shore and fancied he had found the solution of his difficulties.
His face brightened. “Tell ’ee what,” he said, addressing the waving grass in front of him, “I’ll ask Mr. Herbert. Squire’s a man who have seen the world. I’ll take his advice about the boy. Seems hard like on me, too. Ne’er a Leigh till this one but what were a farmer to the backbone!”
His mind made up, the farmer strode off to make arrangement with mowers. Had he been troubled with twenty unnatural and incompetent sons, the hay must be made while the sun shines.
Although he had settled what to do, it was some time before the weighty resolve was carried into execution. Folks about Coombe-Acton do not move with the celerity of cotton brokers or other men of business. Sure they are, but slow. So it was not until the September rent day that the farmer consulted his landlord about his domestic difficulty—the possession of a son, an only child, of about fifteen, who, instead of making himself useful on the land, did little else save wander about in a dreamy way, looking at all objects in nature, animate or inanimate, or employed himself in the mysterious pursuit which his father described as “messing with mud.” Such conduct was a departure from the respectable bucolic traditions of the Leigh family, so great, that at times the father thought it an infliction laid upon him for some cause or other by an inscrutable Providence.
There are certain Spanish noblemen who, on account of the antiquity of their families and services rendered, are permitted to enter the royal presence with covered heads. It was, perhaps, for somewhat similar reasons, a custom handed down from father to son and established by time, that the tenant of Watercress Farm paid his rent to the landlord in person, not through the medium of an agent. Mr. Herbert being an important man in the West country, the Leigh family valued this privilege as highly as ever hidalgo valued the one above mentioned. Mr. Herbert, a refined, intellectual-looking man of about fifty, received the farmer kindly, and after the rent, without a word as to abatement or reduction, had been paid in notes of the county bank—dark and greasy, but valued in this particular district far above Bank of England promises—landlord and tenant settled down to a few minutes’ conversation on crops and kindred subjects. Then the farmer unburdened his mind.
“I’ve come to ask a favor of your advice, sir, about my boy, Jerry.”
“Yes,” said Mr. Herbert, “I know him—a nice, good-looking boy. I see him at church with you, and about your place when I pass. What of him?”