But I see you glancing aside from this figure of heroic piety and peace to that gentle creature at her side. Lovely, modest, retiring Millicent. So rich, and yet nature has heaped all those other riches upon her. Look at that very fair face, at those clear blue eyes, and yet shaded by such long dark eye-lashes, such finely-arched jetty eye-brows and hair. Why it is not an English, but a genuine Eastern beauty. That form and face were evidently made for an Asiatic palace, and they are here, in a Quaker house, and busy in cutting out jackets and petticoats for the squalid brats of the next town. Come away! It is too dangerous here. I must show you Still Lodge, it is just outside the grounds here. There! You see it—a genuine little wrens nest: and in it dwells David Qualm, the brother-in-law of Jasper Heritage, and Dorothy Qualm, his wife. Oh, most peaceable and peace-loving people! You will come again,—don’t linger. Remember when you inquire for the house of Jasper Heritage, it is called Fair-Manor.
One more introduction, and then enough for the present. We must now turn back, pass through the villages of Rockville and Woodburn, give a nod to pleasant Woodburn Grange as we pass, and so on a mile farther, skirting the feet of the sand-cliffs, till we stand on a fine mount with a modern-looking mansion, also of brick; they all are so round about here. This mansion is the seat of Sir Emanuel Clavering, a baronet of an old family. Finely stands the house with its large bay windows looking out on its velvet lawn, from the soft, smooth turf of which spring stately elms and ashes, with that luxury of neatness which only aristocratic trees can wear. Finely sweep the swelling slopes of the hill down to the river, which there takes a superb bend, and across it the eye runs on to distant towers, and masses of woods, and clumps of pine-clad hills high and dark. Near the house stands the picturesque parsonage, half covered with ivy, and here and there a cottage, and that is Cotmanhaye—there is no village. Opposite to the house southward, or south-west, rises a still higher range of hills, and on climbing that, you behold another landscape, vast and varied, villages, farms, and woods.
Sir Emanuel Clavering is a tall gentlemanly man of sixty. All who know him declare him a man of very pleasant manners, extremely well read; fond of poetry, but of the Pope school, which he declares to be the only polished and correct one; and given to astronomical, and it is said abstruse studies. There is a small tower at some distance on the ridge of the hill, which he uses as an observatory. In his youth he was away, no one knows where, for a space of seven years. Those who have seen him often and inspected him closely, assert that the gristle of his nose is bored, as savages bore theirs to insert a feather or a flower. Hence, there is a popular story—an imagination, for Sir Emanuel has never been known to utter a word to his most intimate friends, either of this curious fact, or of the sojourn of those years. The country people talk fluently by their firesides of Sir Emanuel in his wild youth as the head of some wild race, the lord of some dark-eyed, dark-skinned princess. They have romanced out a grand story of his leading the devoted natives to battle, with all the terrors of European arms, and winning great victories and domains for them. They account for his return by the death of his princess, a creature of wondrous beauty, and by the natural longings for one’s native land. Not a syllable of this story has a basis of ascertained fact, not the ground of a single allusion the most distant; all those years are a blank to every one but Sir Emanuel himself. Nothing more is known than that he returned to find his father dead, and his younger brother, the rector, holding the estate for him. He had neither brother nor sister besides Thomas the rector. In a few years, during which he was about a great deal in London, and from which gentlemen of his own tastes sometimes came down and shut themselves up for days with him in his tower, and were seen riding about with him, Sir Emanuel married. Not, however, one of the daughters of any of the neighbouring aristocratic families, but the daughter of the bailiff of his estate. His wife had still fewer relatives than himself, she had no brother or sister. She was a naturally fine woman, and bore her elevation with modesty and good sense. The habits of Sir Emanuel became more secluded than before. The neighbouring families rarely called on him. His life was chiefly spent in prosecuting the studies of his tower, in field sports, in fishing, and in occasional visits to the metropolis.
Such a character was sure to become the object of the most extraordinary rumours in the country round. His astronomical studies, his frequent walks at midnight to his solitary tower, followed by two large black dogs, his being seen by the keepers sometimes wrapped in his cloak, silently pacing along that bleak and elevated ridge in darkness and in the wildest tempests, was enough to add in the popular mind, to his astronomy, other and darker studies. The peasantry universally believed that he dealt in the black art; they asserted that he had been seen at the same hour in two different places thirty miles apart; they said that there was nothing lost anywhere in the neighbourhood but he would say, immediately on hearing of it, where it was, or who had got it; and that he was always right. He always told the farmers what sort of a summer or winter it would be, which was certain to take place; and he had been known on hearing of a wedding, whether in high or low life, to shake his head and say that would not be lucky, and it never was. All these things he probably pronounced from the simple sources of natural sagacity and extended knowledge, perfectly legitimate in its character; but the people far around took another and more mysterious view of it. They observed that though his brother was the clergyman, and the living belonging to the family, he rarely appeared at church; and the peasantry when they saw him felt a secret terror, though he always accosted them most kindly; was always cheerful, and even jocose, and never heard of a case of distress which he did not send to relieve.
Sir Emanuel, contrary to his wont, called on the Degges, and they returned his call, curious to make the acquaintance of a man of so peculiar a reputation. They were greatly struck with the polished friendliness of his manner, his frank cordiality, and his superior intelligence. He assured them that he had great pleasure in the prospect of cultivating their friendship. Lady Clavering had been deceased some years; he had but one son, Henry Clavering, who had been the school-fellow of George Woodburn, at Repton, and who was on terms of great friendship with all the family at Woodburn Grange.
And thus I have presented a few of the leading dramatis personæ; others are waiting in the side-scenes ready to make their appearance.
CHAPTER V.
BETTY TRAPPS COMES TO NOTICE.
The life of Rockville, Woodburn, and their vicinities presented little to chronicle for some time. Simon Degge was angrily commented upon by the neighbouring squirearchy, for having thrown open the game on his estate to the farmers. “This is the way,” they said at their mutual dinners, “with these plebeians. Having no taste for gentlemanly sport themselves, they would like to see it annihilated, and the landed proprietors reduced for amusement to flocking to Castleborough, and winding cotton-balls, or manufacturing stockings.” This idea was very much applauded, and made the ladies of the county very merry. “We must all go to help the gentlemen,” they said, “and seam hose, and help to ‘take in.’” Mr. Markham, the rector of Rockville, though agreeing with his landed friends in the main idea, said he was bound to say that Mr. Degge was rather a keen sportsman, and a prodigious good shot. He had seen him drop his birds right and left in a most masterly way; where he had picked up the skill rather puzzled him. Certainly, it could not come by nature, as Dogberry thought reading and writing did; but it must be admitted that he was a prodigiously clever man. And, in fact, unless he had been, how could he have got on so?
“How do good-looking fellows manage to marry rich heiresses?” asked Sir Benjamin Bullockshed.