Edina: A Novel

by Mrs. Henry Wood

APPREHENSIONS

The fine old house, Eagles' Nest, lay buried in snow. It was Christmas-tide, and Christmas weather. All the Raynor family had assembled within its walls: with the exception of Dr. Raynor and his daughter Edina. Charles had come home from keeping his first term at Oxford; Alfred from school; Frank Raynor and his wife had returned from their sojourn abroad.

All these past months, during which we have lost sight of them, Frank and Daisy had been on the Continent. Almost immediately after their departure from Trennach, Frank, through his medical friend, Crisp, was introduced to a lady who was going to Switzerland with her only son; a sickly lad of fifteen, in whom the doctors at home had hardly been able to keep life. This lady, Mrs. Berkeley, proposed to Frank to travel with them as medical attendant on her son, and she had not the least objection to Frank's wife being of the party. So preliminaries were settled, and they started. Frank considered it a most opportune chance to have fallen to him while waiting for the missing money to turn up.

But the engagement did not last long. Hardly had they settled in Switzerland when the lad died, and Mrs. Berkeley returned to England. Frank stayed on where he was. The place and the sojourn were alike pleasant; and, as he remarked to his wife, who knew but he might pick up a practice there, amongst the many English residents of the town, or those who flocked to it as birds of passage? Daisy was just as delighted to remain as he: they had funds in hand, and could afford to throw care to the winds. Even had care declared itself: which it did not. The young are sanguine, rarely gifted with much forethought. Frank and his wife especially lacked it. A few odds and ends of practice did drop into Frank, just a small case or so, at long intervals: and they remained stationary for some time in perfect complacency. But when Christmas approached, and Frank found that his five hundred pounds would not hold out for ever, and that the idea of a practice in the Swiss town was a mere castle in the air, he took his wife home again. By invitation, they went at once to Eagles' Nest.

Christmas-Day passed merrily, and some of the days immediately succeeding to it. On New-Year's Day they were invited to an entertainment at Sir Philip Stane's; Major and Mrs. Raynor, Charles and Alice; a later invitation having come in for Frank and his wife. William Stane was a frequent visitor at Eagles' Nest whenever he was sojourning at his father's; and, though he had not yet spoken, few could doubt that the chief object to draw him there was Alice Raynor.

Yes. Sunshine and merry-making, profusion and reckless expenditure reigned within the doors of Eagles' Nest; but little except poverty, distress and dissatisfaction existed beyond its gates. Mrs. Atkinson had ever been liberal in her care of the estate; the land had been enriched and thoroughly well kept; the small tenants and labourers were cared for. One thing she had not done so thoroughly as she might: and that was, improving the dwellings of the labourers. Repairs she had made from time to time; but the places were really beyond repair. Each tenement wanted one of two things: to be thoroughly renewed and to have an additional sleeping-room added; or else to be entirely rebuilt. During the last year of Mrs. Atkinson's life, she seemed to awaken suddenly to the necessity of doing something. Perhaps with the approach of death—which will often open our eyes to many things they remained closed to before—she saw the supineness she had been guilty of. Street the lawyer was hastily summoned to Eagles' Nest: he was ordered to procure plans and estimates for new dwellings. A long row of cottages, some thirty in number, was hastily begun. Whilst the builders were commencing their work, Mrs. Atkinson died. With nearly her last breath she charged Mr. Street to see that the new houses were completed, and that the old ones were also repaired and made healthy.

Mr. Street could only hand over the charge to the inheritor of the estate, Major Raynor. The reader may remember that the major spoke of it to Edina. The lawyer could not do more than that, or carry out Mrs. Atkinson's wishes in any other way. And the major did nothing. His will might have been good enough to carry out the changes, but he had not the means. So much money was required for his own wants and those of his family, that he had none to spare for other people. The ready-money he came into had chiefly gone in paying back-debts: until these debts stared him in the face in black and white, he had not thought that he owed a tithe of them. It is a very common experience. So the new dwellings were summarily stopped, and remained as they were—so many skeletons: and the tumbledown cottages, wanting space, drainage, whitewash, and everything else that could render them decent and healthy, grew worse day by day, and became an eyesore to spectators and the talk of the neighbourhood.

Not only did they suffer from the major's want of money and foresight; many other necessities were crying out in like manner: these are only given as a specimen. Above all, he was doing no good to the land, spending nothing to enrich it, and sparing necessary and ordinary labour. Perhaps had Major Raynor understood the cultivation and requirements of land, he might have made an effort to improve his own: as it was, it deteriorated day by day.

This state of things had caused a certain antagonism to set in between Eagles' Nest and its dependents. The labourers and their families grumbled; the major, conscious of the state of affairs, and feeling some slight shame in consequence, but knowing at the same time that he was powerless to remedy it, shunned them. When complainers came to the house he would very rarely see them. A warm-hearted man, he could not bear to hear them. Mrs. Raynor and the elder children, understanding matters very imperfectly, naturally espoused the major's cause, and looked upon the small tenants as a barbarous, insubordinate set of wretches, next door to insurgents. When the poor wives or children fell ill, no succour was sent to them from Eagles' Nest. With this estrangement reigning, Mrs. Raynor did not attempt to help: not from coldness of heart, but that she considered they did not deserve help, and, moreover, thought it would be flung back on her if she offered it.

There was where the shoe pinched the poor. The insufficient dwellings they were used to; though indeed with every winter and every summer they grew worse than ever; but they were not accustomed to utter, contemptuous neglect, as they looked upon it, in times of need. Mrs. Atkinson had always been a generous mistress: when sickness or sorrow or distress in times of little work set in, her hand and purse were ever open. Coals in severe weather, Christmas cheer, warm garments for the scantily clad, broth for the sick; she had furnished all: and it was the entire withdrawal of this aid that was so much felt now. The winter was unusually severe: it frequently is so after a very hot summer; labour was scarce, food was dear: and a great deal of illness prevailed. So that you perceive all things were not so flourishing in and about Eagle's Nest as they might have been, and Major Raynor's bed was not entirely one of rose-leaves.