The Green, studded here and there with tall poplars and other trees, was fenced round with quite an army of stumpy wooden posts some six feet apart, connected by squared iron rods, a barrier against cattle only. A long, slightly serpentine lake spread its shining waters from end to end within the soft circlet of green; and this grassy belt served as a promenade for the fashionable inhabitants. And there must have been such in that village of Ardwick early in the century, as now, for the one bell in the tiny turret of St. Thomas’s small plain red-brick chapel, rang a fashionable congregation into its neat pews, to listen to the well-toned organ and the devoutly-toned voice of the perpetual curate, the Reverend R. Tweddle, if we may credit an historian of the time.
Red-brick church, red-brick houses, hard and cold outside, solid and roomy and comfortable within as Georgian architecture ever was, overlooked green and pond, but, luckily, overlooked them from a reasonable distance, and, moreover, did not elbow each other too closely, but were individually set in masses of foliage, which toned down the staring brickwork, Time and smoke have done so more effectually since.
One of the best, and best-looking, of these houses, near the church, was the one in which the delicate Mrs. Aspinall had presided for a few brief years. An iron palisade, enclosing a few shrubs and evergreens, separated it from the wide roadway, but behind the screen of brick ran a formal but extensive garden and orchard, well-kept and well stocked, with a fish-pond as formal in the midst.
Fish-ponds encourage damp, and damp encourages frogs, efts, and their kin. Here they abounded, and Master Laurence had a sort of instinctive belief that they were created solely for his sport and amusement. Mr. Aspinall, his father, immersed in business during the day, and occupied with friends at home or abroad until late hours at night, saw very little of his son, who was thus consigned to servants during those hours not spent, or supposed to be spent, at a preparatory school close at hand.
The boy was quick and intelligent, had his mother’s amber curls and azure eyes, her delicate skin and brilliant colour, but the handsome face had more of the father therein, and was too unformed to brook description here.
What he might have been with other training is not to be told, but under the supposition that he inherited his mother’s fragile constitution, he had been woefully spoiled and pampered. Opposition to his will was forbidden.
“Bear with him, Kitty, for my sake, and do not thwart him, or you will break his fine spirit,” had been Mrs. Aspinall’s dying charge to her old nurse; and as every demonstration of temper was ascribed by both parents to this same “fine spirit,” what wonder that he grew up masterful—and worse?
His imperious disposition early ingratiated him into the favour of Bob, his father’s groom; and this man, thinking no evil, ignorantly sowed the seeds of cruelty in his young heart.
When the horses were singed, the boy was allowed to be a spectator; if a whelp had his ears cropped, or the end of its tail bitten off, he was treated to a sight. If a brood of kittens or a litter of puppies had to be drowned, Master Laurence was sure to be in at the death. He was taken to surreptitious cock-fights and rat-hunts; and though, when too late, Mr. Aspinall turned the man away for inclining his son to “low pursuits,” nothing was said or done to counteract these lessons of cruelty! No wonder, then, that to him the sight of pain inflicted brought pleasure, or that inhumanity went hand-in-hand with self-will.
One incident—a real one—will suffice to show what Laurence Aspinall was, when Jabez Clegg shed tears over the snake he had killed perforce.