He drove off at speed, leaving Clement seated on his horse in the middle of the road, a prey to feelings that may be imagined. He had made a bad beginning, and his humiliation was complete.
“Young counterskipper!” That rankled—yet in time he might smile at that. But the tone, and the manner, the conviction that under no circumstances could there be anything between them, any relations, any equality—this bit deeper and wounded more permanently. The Squire’s view, that he addressed one of another class and another grade, one with whom he could have no more in common than with the servant behind him, could not have been made more plain if he had known the object of the lad’s application.
If he had known it! Good heavens, if he said so much now, what would he have said in that case? Certainly, the task which love had set this young man was not an easy one. No wonder Josina had been frightened.
He had—he had certainly made a mess of it. His ears burned, as he sat on his horse and recalled the other’s words.
Meanwhile the Squire drove on, and with the air and movement he recovered his temper. As he drew near to the town the market-traffic increased, and sitting high on his seat he swept by many a humble gig and plodding farm-cart, and acknowledged with a flicker of his whip-hand many a bared head and hasty obeisance. He was not loved; men who are bent on getting a pennyworth for their penny are not loved. But he was regardful of his own people, and in all companies he was fearless and could hold his own. Men did not love him, but they trusted him, knowing exactly what they might expect from him. And he was Griffin of Garth, one of the few in whose hands were all county power and all county influence. As he drove down the hill toward the West Bridge, seeing with the eye of memory the airy towers and lofty gateways of the older bridge that had once stood there and for centuries had bridled the wild Welsh, his bodily eyes noted the team of the out-going coach which he had a share in horsing. And the coachman, proudly and with respect, named him to the box-seat.
From the bridge the town, girdled by the shining river, climbs pyramid-wise up the sides of a cleft hill, an ancient castle guarding the one narrow pass by which a man may enter it on foot. The smiling plain, in the midst of which it rises, is itself embraced at a distance by a ring of hills, broken at one point only, which happens to correspond with the guarded isthmus; on which side, and some four miles away, was fought many centuries ago a famous battle. It is a proud town, looking out over a proud county, a county still based on ancient tradition, on old names and great estates, standing solid and four-square against the invasion that even in the Squire’s day threatened it—invasion of new men and new money, of Birmingham and Liverpool and Manchester. The airy streets and crowded shuts run down on all sides from the Market Place to the green meadows and leafy gardens that the river laps: green meadows on which the chapels and quiet cloisters of religious houses once nestled under the shelter of the walls.
The Squire could remember the place when his father and his like had had their town houses in it, and in winter had removed their families to it; when the weekly Assemblies at the Lion had been gay with cards and dancing, and in the cockpit behind the inn mains of cocks had been fought with the Gentlemen of Cheshire or Staffordshire; when fine ladies with long canes and red-heeled shoes had promenaded under the lime trees beside the river, and the town in its season had been a little Bath. Those days, and the lumbering coaches-and-six which had brought in the families, were gone, and the staple of the town, its trade in woollens and Welsh flannels, was also on the decline. But it was still a thriving place, and if the county people no longer filled it in winter, their stately houses survived, and older houses than theirs, of brick and timber, quaint and gabled, that made the streets a joy to antiquaries.
The Squire passed by many a one, with beetling roof and two-storied porch, as he drove up Maerdol. His first and most pressing business was at the bank, and he would not be himself until he had got it off his mind. He would show that d—d Ovington what he thought of him! He would teach him a lesson—luring away that young man and pouching his money. Ay, begad he would!
CHAPTER XII
But as the Squire turned to the left by the Stalls he saw his lawyer, Frederick Welsh—rather above most lawyers were the Welsh brothers, by-blows it was said of a great house—and Welsh stopped him. “You’re wanted at the Bench, Squire, if you please,” he said. “His lordship is there, and they are waiting for you.”