Wenderholme: A Story of Lancashire and Yorkshire

by Philip Gilbert Hamerton

"I shouldn't recommend you to try that experiment hoftens."

"Well, but you see the advantage of driving tandem. If you've only one horse you know where he is, however dark it is—he's in the shafts, of course, and you know where to find him: but when you've got a leader you never exactly know where he is, unless you can see him."

The Doctor didn't see the advantage.

The reader will have gathered from this specimen of Colonel Stanburne's conversation that he was a pleasant and lively companion; but if he is rather hasty in forming his opinion of people on a first acquaintance, he may also infer that the Colonel was a man of somewhat frivolous character and very moderate intellectual powers. He certainly was not a genius, but he conveyed the impression of being less intelligent and less capable of serious thought than nature had made him. His predominant characteristic was simple good-nature, and he possessed also, notwithstanding a sort of swagger in his manner, an unusual share of genuine intellectual humility, that made him contented to pass for a less able and less informed man than he really was. The Doctor's perception of character was too acute to allow him to judge Colonel Stanburne on the strength of a superficial acquaintance, and he clearly perceived that his friend was in the habit of wearing, as it were, his lighter nature outside. Some ponderous Philistines in Sootythorn, who had been brought into occasional contact with the Colonel, and who confounded gravity of manner with mental capacity, had settled it amongst themselves that he had no brains; but as the most intelligent of quadrupeds is at the same time the most lively, the most playful, the most good-natured, and the most affectionate,—so amongst human beings it does not always follow that a man is empty because he is lively and amusing, and seems merry and careless, and says and does some foolish things.

An hour later they reached Rigton, a little dull village quite out of the manufacturing district, and where it was the Colonel's custom to bait. The remainder of the drive was in summer exceedingly beautiful; but as it passed through a rich agricultural country, whose beauty depended chiefly on luxuriant vegetation, the present time of the year was not favorable to it. All this region had a great reputation for beauty amongst the inhabitants of the manufacturing towns, and no doubt fully deserved it; but it is probable that their faculties of appreciation were greatly sharpened by the stimulus of contrast. To get fairly clear of factory-smoke, to be in the peaceful quiet country, and see no buildings but picturesque farms, was a definite happiness to many an inhabitant of Sootythorn. There were fine bits of scenery in the manufacturing district itself—picturesque glens and gorges, deep ravines with hidden rivulets, and stretches of purple moorland; but all this scenery lacked one quality—amenity. Now the scenery from Rigton to Wenderholme had this quality in a very high degree indeed, and it was instantly felt by every one who came from the manufacturing district, though not so perceptible by travellers from the south of England. The Sootythorn people felt a soothing influence on the nervous system when they drove through this beautiful land; their minds relaxed and were relieved of pressing cares, and they here fell into a state very rare indeed with them—a state of semi-poetical reverie.

The reader is already aware that Wenderholme is situated on the opposite side of the hills which separate Shayton from this favored region, and close to the foot of them. Great alterations have been made in the house since the date at which our story begins, and therefore we will not describe it as it exists at present, but as it existed when the Colonel drove up the avenue with the Doctor at his side, and the faithful Fyser jumped up behind after opening the modest green gate. A large rambling house, begun in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, but grievously modernized under that of King George the Third, it formed three sides of a quadrangle, and, as is usual in that arrangement of a mansion, had a great hall in the middle, and the principal reception rooms on each side on the ground floor. The house was three stories high, and there were great numbers of bedrooms. An arched porch in the centre, preceded by a flight of steps, gave entrance at once to the hall; and over the porch was a projection of the same breadth, continued up to the roof, and terminated in a narrow gable. This had been originally the centre of enrichment, and there had been some good sculpture and curious windows that went all round the projection, and carried it entirely upon their mullions; but the modernizer had been at work and inserted simple sash-windows, which produced a deplorable effect. The same owner, John Stanburne's grandfather, had ruthlessly carried out that piece of Vandalism over the whole front of the mansion, and, except what architects call a string-course (which was still traceable here and there), had effaced every feature that gave expression to the original design of the Elizabethan builder.

The entrance-hall was a fine room fifty feet long, and as high as two of the ordinary stories in the mansion. It had, no doubt, been a splendid specimen of the Elizabethan hall; but the modernizer had been hard at work here also, and had put himself to heavy expense in order to give it the aspect of a thoroughly modern interior. The wainscot which had once adorned the walls, and which had been remarkable for its rich and fanciful carving, the vast and imaginative tapestries, the heraldic blazonries in the flaming oriels, the gallery for the musicians on twisted pillars of sculptured chestnut,—all these glories had been ruthlessly swept away. The tapestries had been used as carpets, and worn out; the wainscot had been made into kitchen cupboards, and painted lead-color; and the magnificent windows had been thrown down on the floor of a garret, where they had been trodden under foot and crushed into a thousand fragments: and in place of these things, which the narrow taste of the eighteenth century had condemned as barbarous, and destroyed without either hesitation or regret, it had substituted—what?—absolute emptiness and negation; for the heraldic oriels, sash-windows of the commonest glass; for the tapestry and carving, a bare wall of yellow-washed plaster; for the carved beams of the roof, a blank area of whitewash.

The Doctor found Lady Helena in the drawing-room; a little woman, who sometimes looked very pretty, and sometimes exceedingly plain, according to the condition of her health and temper, the state of the weather, and a hundred things beside. Hence there were the most various and contradictory opinions about her; the only approach to unanimity being amongst certain elderly ladies who had formed the project of being mother-in-law to John Stanburne, and failed in that design. The Doctor was not much accustomed to ladyships—they did not come often in his way; indeed, if the truth must be told, Lady Helena was the only specimen of the kind he had ever enjoyed the opportunity of studying, and he had been rather surprised, on one or two preceding visits to Wenderholme, to find that she behaved so nicely. But there are ladyships and ladyships, and the Doctor had been fortunate in the example which chance had thrown in his way. For instance, if he had known Lady Eleanor Griffin, who lived about ten miles from Wenderholme, and came there occasionally to spend the day, the Doctor would have formed quite a different opinion of ladyships in general, so much do our impressions of whole classes depend upon the individual members of them who are personally known to us.

Lady Helena asked the Doctor a good many questions about Shayton, which it is quite unnecessary to report here, because the answers to them would convey no information to the reader which he does not already possess. Her ladyship inquired very minutely about the clergyman there, and whether the Doctor "liked" him. Now the verb "to like," when applied to a clergyman, is used in a special sense. Everybody knows that to like a clergyman and to like gooseberry-pie are very different things; for nobody in England eats clergyman, though the natives of New Zealand are said to appreciate cold roast missionary. But there is yet another distinction—there is a distinction between liking a clergyman and liking a layman. If you say you like a clergyman, it is understood that it gives you a peculiar pleasure to hear him preach, and that you experience feelings of gratification when he reads prayers. And in this sense could Dr. Bardly say that he liked the reverend incumbent of his parish? certainly not; so he seemed to hesitate a little—and if he said "yes" he said it as if he meant no, or a sort of vague, neutral answer, neither negative nor affirmative.