Yes! it was hard—very hard, he thought, at the last. There was the garden—old-fashioned, but rich in fruit and flower, with box-borders, clipped yew hedges, alleys of formal shape and pattern; the south wall where the fruit ripened so early, and to which his childish eyes had so often been attracted; the field wherein he had, with the old keeper in strict attendance, been permitted to blaze at a covey of partridges—he remembered now the wild delight with which he marked his first slain bird; the stream in which he had caught his first trout, and whence many a basket had been filled in later days; the village church, under the floor of which so many de Massingers lay buried—the family pew, too large for the church, but against the size and shape of which no innovating incumbent had thought fit to protest.
How well he remembered his mother's loving hand as he walked with her to church—every Sunday, unless illness or unusual weather forbade! That mother, too, so gentle, so saintly sweet, so charitable, so beloved, why should she have died when he was so young? And his father, the pattern squire, who shot and hunted, lived much at home, and was respected throughout the county as a model landlord, who did his duty to the land which had done so much for the men of his race? Why should these things be?
He recalled his mother's dear face, which grew pale, and yet more pale, during her long illness—her last words bidding him, to be a good man, to remember what she taught him, and to comfort his poor father when she was gone. And how he kneeled by her bedside, with her wasted hand in his, praying with her that he might live to carry out her last wishes, and do his duty fearlessly in the face of all men. Then the funeral—the long train of carriages, the burial service, where so many people wept, and he wished—how he wished!—that he could be buried with her. His father's set face, almost stern, yet more sorrowful than any tears. And how he went back to school in his black clothes, miserable and lonely beyond all words to describe.
In the holidays, too—how surprised he had been to find that the squire no longer shot, fished, hunted. He, that was so keen as long as he could remember, but now sat all day reading in the library, where they often used to find him asleep. And how, before the Christmas holidays came round again, he was sent for, to see his father once more before he died.
The squire spoke not—he had for days lost the power of speech—but he placed his hands upon his head and murmured an inarticulate blessing. He did not look pale or wasted like his poor mother, he remembered. The doctors said there was no particular ailment; he had simply lost all interest in life. The old housekeeper summed up the case, which coincided closely with the public feeling.
"It's my opinion," she affirmed, "that if ever a man in this world died of a broken heart, the squire did. He was never the same after the mistress died, God bless her! She's in heaven, if any one is. She was a saint on earth. And the squire, seeing they'd never been parted before—and I never saw two people more bound up in each other—well, he couldn't stay behind."
The new lord of the manor—for Massinger held manorial rights and privileges, which had been tolerably extensive in the days of "merrie England"—lost no time in taking possession.
A week had not elapsed before the Australian gentleman and his family arrived by train at the little railway station, much like any one else, to the manifest disappointment of the residents of the vicinity, who had expected all sorts of foreign appearances and belongings. Certain large trunks—not Saratogas—and portmanteaux were handed out of the brake-van and transferred to the waggonette, which they filled, while three ladies with their maid were escorted to the mail phaeton which had made so many previous journeys to the station with the visitors and friends of the Massinger family. A middle-aged, middle-sized, alert personage, fair-haired, clean-shaved, save for a moustache tinged with grey, mounted the dog-cart, followed by a tall young man who looked with an air of scrutiny at the horses and appointments. He took the reins from the groom, who got up behind, and with one of those imperceptible motions with which a practised whip communicates to well-conditioned horses that they are at liberty to go, started the eager animal along the well-kept road which led to the Court.
"Good goer," he remarked, after steadying the black mare to a medium pace. "If she's sound, she's a bargain at the money; horses seem tremendously dear in England."
"Yes, I should say so," replied his father. "And the phaeton pair are good-looking enough for anything: fair steppers also. I thought the price put on the horses and cattle high, but the agent told me they were above the average in quality. I see he was correct so far."