you know. Were he to die, Gregory would be in the same position. It would be better that the family should be kept together."
"I would sooner have the devil here. No consideration on earth shall induce me to allow him to put his foot upon this place. No;—not whilst I live." The son said nothing further, and they sat together in silence for some quarter of an hour—after which the elder of the two rose from his chair, and, coming round the table, put his hand on the son's shoulder, and kissed his son's brow. "Father," said the young man, "you think that I am troubled by things which hardly touch me at all." "By God, they touch me close enough!" said the elder. This had taken place some month or two before the date of Sir Thomas's letter;—but any reference to the matter of which they were both no doubt always thinking was very rare between them.
Newton Priory was a place which a father might well wish to leave unimpaired to his son. It lay in the north of Hampshire, where that county is joined to Berkshire; and perhaps in England there is no prettier district, no country in which moorland and woodland and pasture are more daintily thrown together to please the eye, in which there is a sweeter air, or a more thorough seeming of English wealth and English beauty and English comfort. Those who know Eversley and Bramshill and Heckfield and Strathfieldsaye will acknowledge that it is so. But then how few are the Englishmen who travel to see the beauties of their own country! Newton Priory, or Newton Peele as the parish was called, lay somewhat west of these places, but was as charming as any of them. The entire parish belonged to Mr. Newton, as did portions of three or four parishes adjoining. The house itself was neither large nor remarkable for its architecture;—but it was comfortable. The rooms indeed were low, for it had been built in the ungainly days of Queen Anne, with additions in the equally ungainly time of George II., and the passages were long and narrow, and the bedrooms were up and down stairs, as though pains had been taken that no two should be on a level; and the windows were of ugly shape, and the whole mass was uncouth and formless—partaking neither of the Gothic beauty of the Stuart architecture, nor of the palatial grandeur which has sprung up in our days; and it stood low, giving but little view from the windows. But, nevertheless, there was a family comfort and a warm solidity about the house, which endeared it to those who knew it well. There had been a time in which the present Squire had thought of building for himself an entirely new house, on another site—on the rising brow of a hill, some quarter of a mile away from his present residence;—but he had remembered that as he could not leave his estate to his son, it behoved him to spend nothing on the property which duty did not demand from him.
The house stood in a park of some two hundred acres, in which the ground was poor, indeed, but beautifully diversified by rising knolls and little ravines, which seemed to make the space almost unlimited. And then the pines which waved in the Newton woods sighed and moaned with a melody which, in the ears of their owner, was equalled by that of no other fir trees in the world. And the broom was yellower at Newton than elsewhere, and more plentiful; and the heather was sweeter;—and wild thyme on the grass more fragrant. So at least Mr. Newton was always ready to swear. And all this he could not leave behind him to his son;—but must die with the knowledge, that as soon as the breath was out of his body, it would become the property of a young man whom he hated! He might not cut down the pine woods, nor disturb those venerable single trees which were the glory of his park;—but there were moments in which he thought that he could take a delight in ploughing up the furze, and in stripping the hill-sides of the heather. Why should his estate be so beautiful for one who was nothing to him? Would it not be well that he should sell everything that was saleable in order that his own son might be the richer?
On the day after he had written his reply to Sir Thomas he was rambling in the evening with his son through the woods. Nothing could be more beautiful than the park was now;—and Ralph had been speaking of the glory of the place. But something had occurred to make his father revert to the condition of a certain tenant, whose holding on the property was by no means satisfactory either to himself or to his landlord. "You know, sir," said the son, "I told you last year that Darvell would have to go."
"Where's he to go to?"
"He'll go to the workhouse if he stays here. It will be much better for him to be bought out while there is still something left for him to sell. Nothing can be worse than a man sticking on to land without a shilling of capital."
"Of course it's bad. His father did very well there."
"His father did very well there till he took to drink and died of it. You know where the road parts Darvell's farm and Brownriggs? Just look at the difference of the crops. There's a place with wheat on each side of you. I was looking at them before dinner."
"Brownriggs is in a different parish. Brownriggs is in Bostock."
"But the land is of the same quality. Of course Walker is a different sort of man from Darvell. I believe there are nearly four hundred acres in Brownriggs."
"All that," said the father.
"And Darvell has about seventy;—but the land should be made to bear the same produce per acre."
The Squire paused a moment, and then asked a question. "What should you say if I proposed to sell Brownriggs?" Now there were two or three matters which made the proposition to sell Brownriggs a very wonderful proposition to come from the Squire. In the first place he couldn't sell an acre of the property at all—of which fact his son was very well aware; and then, of all the farms on the estate it was, perhaps, the best and most prosperous. Mr. Walker, the tenant, was a man in very good circumstances, who hunted, and was popular, and was just the man of whose tenancy no landlord would be ashamed.
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| "What should you say if I proposed to sell Brownriggs?" Click to ENLARGE |
"Sell Brownriggs!" said the young man. "Well, yes; I should be surprised. Could you sell it?"
"Not at present," said the Squire.
"How could it be sold at all?" They were now standing at a gate leading out of the park into a field held by the Squire in his own hands, and were both leaning on it. "Father," said the son, "I wish you would not trouble yourself about the estate, but let things come and go just as they have been arranged."
"I prefer to arrange them for myself—if I can. It comes to this, that it may be possible to buy the reversion of the property. I could not buy it all;—or if I did, must sell a portion of it to raise the money. I have been thinking it over and making calculations. If we let Walker's farm go, and Ingram's, I think I could manage the rest. Of course it would depend on the value of my own life."
There was a long pause, during which they both were still leaning on the gate. "It is a phantom, sir!" the young man said at last.
"What do you mean by a phantom? I don't see any phantom. A reversion can be bought and sold as well as any other property. And if it be sold in this case, I am as free to buy it as any other man."
"Who says it is to be sold, sir?"
"I say so. That prig of a barrister, Sir Thomas Underwood, has already made overtures to me to do something for that young scoundrel in London. He is a scoundrel, for he is spending money that is not his own. And he is now about to make a marriage that will disgrace his family." The Squire probably did not at the moment think of the disgrace which he had brought upon the family by not marrying. "The fact is, that he will have to sell all that he can sell. Why should I not buy it!"
"If he were to die?" suggested the son.
"I wish he would," said the father.
"Don't say that, sir. But if he were to die, Gregory here, who is as good a fellow as ever lived, would come into his shoes. Ralph could sell no more than his own chance."
"We could get Gregory to join us," said the energetic Squire. "He, also, could sell his right."
"You had better leave it as it is, sir," said the son, after