In the last decade of the last century, Upfield was a very healthy, pretty, prosperous town in Suffolk. Its centre was a green; undulating, irregular, and from four to five acres in area. Round it were laborers' cottages, a forge, the inn, the veterinary surgeon's house, the doctor's, the vicarage, and the Grey House, each with land proportioned to its character. A little, very little way off, was the church; belonging anciently to a Carthusian monastery, of which some ruins still existed; and beyond that, but within a quarter of a mile of Upfield, was Edward's Hall, the fine baronial residence of the Scharderlowes, who had owned it since the reign of Henry IV., and never forsaken the Catholic faith. Upfield was eloquent about the past, as well as actually charming. The church, early English, was little injured exteriorly. Inside it reminded one of a nun compelled to wear a masquerade dress. The beautiful arches and lofty roof had defied time and the vulgar rage of vicious fanaticism; so had the pavement, rich in slabs imploring humbly prayers for the repose of the dead who lay under it; but devotion and taste mourned over the changed use of the sacred building, and the characteristics thereof; for instance, a singing-gallery in the western end, with the royal arms done in red and gilded plaster, fastened to it; high deal pews for the mass of the congregation, and the squire's praying-made-comfortable one within the carved oak screen in the south transept, where had been the chapel of the Blessed Sacrament.
The Grey House was low, rambling, picturesque; the beau-ideal of a happy, hospitable old English home. It had been built by instalments, at distant intervals; and had derived its name from a Lord Grey, of Codnoure, who had formerly possessed lands in the neighborhood. At the time whence this story starts, it had been for a hundred years or more in the family of the Wickhams, who claimed to be descended collaterally from William of Wykeham—whether they were or not, had never been discussed, and therefore never formally established; nor did any one in the neighborhood, except Mr. Scharderlowe and his family, know that a former Wickham had bartered his religion for a wealthy Protestant wife, and allowed her to bring up their children in her own way. In January, 1790, George Wickham, the head of the family, died at the Grey House, of inflammation of the lungs, in his forty-second year, and no one was ever more regretted. A kinder-hearted man had never breathed. His attachments had been warm and numerous; he had helped every one whom he could help, been peculiarly gentle to the poor and his dependents, hated nothing but wickedness, and believed in that only when it was impossible to be blind to it. "Poor dear Mr. Wickham," said Mrs. Scharderlowe, when her husband told her the news; "I'm heartily sorry. I always thought he would become a Catholic—he was so liberal in all his feelings; only the last time we met, conversation taking that turn—I forget why—he said it was too bad that we could not worship God as we pleased, without suffering for it; and that he was ashamed of Englishmen who forgot that their noblest laws were made, and their most glorious victories won, in Catholic times. What a loss he will be to Upfield and his family!" "Yes," returned her husband, "that poor pretty little widow is about as helpless and ignorant of the world as possible; she never had occasion to think of anything but how to make [{399}] home happy, which I believe she did; they were a particularly united family. I hope he made a will; but I think it is likely he did not; his illness was short and painful, and previously to it no one ever had a fairer prospect of long life than he had."
Mr. Wickham's funeral was talked of in Upfield and the neighborhood many years afterward. Mr. Scharderlowe sent his carriage; the county member, and persons of every class, attended. The clergyman from an adjacent parish, who had been requested to perform the burial-service, because the vicar, Mr. Wickham's nephew, felt unequal to it, burst into tears, and had to pause some minutes to recover himself. The widow fainted; and her eldest son Robert, a youth in his nineteenth year, tried to jump into the vault when his father's coffin was lowered.
There was a will, made during Mr. Wickham's last illness, and the vicar was sole executor and trustee, with a legacy of £500. There was ample provision for the younger children; and Robert was, when of age, to succeed to a brewery, which his father had started many years previously, and which was the most lucrative in the county. He was to learn its management from James Deane, the confidential clerk, whose salary was to be raised, and to whom £100 was left in token of Mr. Wickham's appreciation of his services. The Grey House, and everything in it, with £200 a year, was to be Mrs. Wickham's, and at her disposal at death.
The brewery was half a mile from Upfield; Mr. Wickham had built it where it would not injure the prospect, and Deane had a pretty cottage attached to it, where he, a widower, lived with his sister and only child, a daughter. He was a Catholic, son of a former steward of Mr. Scharderlowe's, and extremely attached to Mr. Wickham, who had taken him when a boy into the brewery, and advanced him steadily. He was a well-principled, intelligent man, who had improved himself by taking lessons in geography, grammar, and algebra, as the opportunities offered; and he was, from his position, well-known in the neighborhood. He told his sister that he feared that Mr. Wickham's death was only the beginning of trouble for his family; for he distrusted Mr. William, the vicar. "It isn't that he's a dishonorable man, Lizzy; but it isn't likely that a crack shot, a bold rider after the hounds, a gentleman who is as fond of a ball as anyone, and who takes no trouble about his own affairs, will do justice to a dead man's, though I don't doubt he means it now."
"But what harm can he do, James?"
"Why, he can ruin the younger children. Everything except the brewery and what is left to Mrs. Wickham is as much in his power as it was in his uncle's. I doubt if the poor dear gentleman wouldn't have arranged differently if he'd had longer time: it's an awful lesson to be always prepared for death; I'm sure I thought Mr. Wickham might live to be a hundred. No doubt pain and sorrow confused his mind, and anyhow it was natural that he should trust his own relations."
"He had better have trusted you, James."
"That was not to be expected, Lizzy, and I mightn't have been fit for it. There's plenty on my hands. It is a large, increasing business, and I have to teach it to Mr. Robert; and one can't tell how he'll take to it; I've been afraid he would be unsteady, but he has taken his father's death to heart uncommonly, and I hope he'll try to be as good a man."
About this time people had begun to remark that Polly Deane, then in her fifteenth year, was growing up a remarkably pretty girl; she was an old established pet of the Wickhams; her mother had been the daughter of a tenant, and so great a favorite that when she married Deane, the wedding was celebrated at the Grey House. When, two years later, she was dying of fever, Mr. and Mrs. Wickham promised to watch over her child. All that [{400}] they undertook they carried out generously, and Polly lived as much with them as with Aunt Lizzie, who did her part toward her well—loving her fondly, keeping her fresh, healthy, and merry, checking her quick temper, teaching her her prayers, and taking her often to Mr. Scharderlowe's, to get his chaplain's—Father Armand's—blessing; and when she was old enough, to mass and the sacraments. The fact of the Wickhams having no daughter increased their tenderness for her, and her father was delighted and flattered by Mrs. Wickham's watchfulness over her dress and manner, and Mr. Wickham's care for her education; it was the best that could be had in Upfield, and good enough to make her as charming as she need be. She did plain sewing extremely well, and some quaint embroidery of hideous designs in wool and floss silks; she had worked a cat in tent-stitch, and a parrot of unknown species in cross; her sampler was believed to be the finest in the county; she could read aloud very pleasantly, spell wonderfully, write a clear, stiff hand, which one might decipher without glasses at eighty; she could not have gone up for honors in grammar, but she talked very prettily; she had never had occasion to write a letter; as to geography, she believed that the world was round, for her father and Mr. Wickham said so, and she had heard that Captain Cook had been round it; but only that she was ashamed, she would have liked to ask some one how it could be, and how it was found out; it was such a contradiction of observation, if only because of the sea; she had never seen the sea, but she believed in it, and could understand water remaining on level ground; there was the horse-pond, for instance, but that thousands of miles of roaring, angry, deep water should hold on to a round world was too much for her. You could not puzzle her in the multiplication table, but she did not take kindly to weights and measures. She had learned no history, her father could not get a Catholic to teach her, and would trust no one else, but she had picked up a few facts and notions; for instance, she had heard of Alfred the Great and his lanterns; of St. Edward the Confessor, and that he made good laws; of King Charles I., and those wicked men—she fancied Guy Fawkes was one of them—had cut his head off; when he lived she was not sure, and she hoped Mr. Wickham would never ask her, for she should not like to say that she did not know, and she was sometimes afraid that he would when he talked of Carlo's being a King Charles spaniel. It was puzzling, because she remembered Carlo a puppy, and she was sure that the king's name had been George ever since she was born. She had an exquisite ear for music, and a voice of great promise. Mr. Wickham was passionately fond of music, and therefore, appreciating peculiarly this talent of Polly's, had engaged a good master from the county-town to teach her to play on the piano. She had profited well by his instructions, and only a few days before Mr. Wickham was taken ill, she had played the accompaniment when he sang "From the white-blossomed thorn my dear Chloe requested," "O lady fair," and "Oh life is a river, and man is the boat;" and he had patted her head and kissed her, and asked her for the "Slow movement in Artaxerxes" and "The harmonious Blacksmith," and—she was so glad—she had played them without one mistake. Of course she danced, and made cakes and pastry, beauty-washes, elder-wine, and various preserves and salves; knitted her father's stockings and her aunt's mittens, and read a romance whenever she could get one, but that was very rarely.