But, under the shelter of his own trees, what can Squire Dudley need with strength beyond that wherewith nature has provided him? It is for men to have their way to make that bone and muscle, an iron will, a ready wit are needful; and all the fields you have surveyed, all the broad meadows, all the rich pastures came to him, not because of the strength of his own right hand, or because of the capacity of his own brain, but simply because his father had owned Berrie Down Hollow before him, and left it to his eldest son.
“What could any human being desire more?” friend and stranger, looking over the property, were wont mentally to ask themselves; for the world knew that Squire Dudley was a dissatisfied and discontented man.
He had youth, strength, health, a happy home, a devoted wife—what more could any rational being ask of Heaven? What could the skeleton be which walked with Arthur Dudley under the elms, and across the meadows, or beside the brook? This was the question every person, who met the Squire even for the first time, put to those who knew him best. His manifest discontent inspired a certain curiosity in the mind of each individual who looked in his handsome, effeminate face. He had a certain grace of manner and lazy elegance of movement which attracted attention to him, and caused many eyeglasses to be directed towards the good-looking stranger in various assemblies in London to which he had the entrée. He was not a bad man in any relation of life. He was a gentleman by birth, education, and taste; and yet in his own neighbourhood Squire Dudley was not popular. His skeleton was too apparent, and people rather disliked one who had not mental strength enough to shake off the depressing influence of such a companion.
“Have your closets full of bones and bodies at home, if you will,” says society; “but for Heaven’s sake do not carry them about in the sunlight on your back. Weep your tears an’ you like to do so; but get through the ceremony in private. We have, every one of us, our troubles, yet we do not proclaim them aloud from the house-tops. We demand that if, either from choice or necessity, a man fast, he shall not appear in public with a sad countenance, but that he shall ‘anoint his head and wash his face,’ and bear his trouble bravely and with good courage.”
Virtually those were the words his neighbours addressed to Squire Dudley. Not for his skeleton did the world forsake him, but only because he had not courage to turn and grapple with it, and either lay the ghost, or shut it up in one chamber at home.
And, after all, it was such a commonplace ghost! If your curiosity be at all excited about the matter, in the next chapter you shall see its face.
CHAPTER II.
SQUIRE DUDLEY.
Arthur Dudley, Esquire, of Berrie Down Hollow, in the parish of Fifield, Hertfordshire, was in the habit of informing all those whom the intelligence might, and a great number whom it might not concern, that he had, to borrow his own expression, “missed his life.” And, as is usual with men who employ such a phrase, he imagined the miss had been in fortune, not in himself.
He had lost, he felt satisfied, not for want of skill in playing his game, but because the game of life was an unfair one, in which the cards were packed, and all the trumps dealt to one man, while all the low, poor, insignificant, valueless bits of pasteboard were left for another, in which from birth all the odds were against one player, while the stakes were thrust, nolens volens, into his opponent’s hand.
It is a nice, contented, comforting, reassuring creed this for any human being to hold. It makes a man utterly dissatisfied with his lot, while it leaves him only too well satisfied with himself. He is, so he thinks, as competent to take his leaps as the best in the land; and when in succession he misses every one, he still believes it was only the fault of the steed he rode, of the groom who did not girth his horse tight enough, of the saddler who sent him in reins which broke in his fingers, of the nature of the ground, of the labourer who staked the hedge, of the proprietor who wire-fenced the field.