第58章 THE DUCHESS OF HAMPTONSHIRE(1)

By the Quiet Gentleman Some fifty years ago,the then Duke of Hamptonshire,fifth of that title,was incontestibly the head man in his county,and particularly in the neighbourhood of Batton.He came of the ancient and loyal family of Saxelbye,which,before its ennoblement,had numbered many knightly and ecclesiastical celebrities in its male line.It would have occupied a painstaking county historian a whole afternoon to take rubbings of the numerous effigies and heraldic devices graven to their memory on the brasses,tablets,and altar-tombs in the aisle of the parish-church.The Duke himself,however,was a man little attracted by ancient chronicles in stone and metal,even when they concerned his own beginnings.He allowed his mind to linger by preference on the many graceless and unedifying pleasures which his position placed at his command.He could on occasion close the mouths of his dependents by a good bomb-like oath,and he argued doggedly with the parson on the virtues of cock-fighting and baiting the bull.

This nobleman's personal appearance was somewhat impressive.His complexion was that of the copper-beech tree.His frame was stalwart,though slightly stooping.His mouth was large,and he carried an unpolished sapling as his walking-stick,except when he carried a spud for cutting up any thistle he encountered on his walks.His castle stood in the midst of a park,surrounded by dusky elms,except to the southward;and when the moon shone out,the gleaming stone facade,backed by heavy boughs,was visible from the distant high road as a white spot on the surface of darkness.

Though called a castle,the building was little fortified,and had been erected with greater eye to internal convenience than those crannied places of defence to which the name strictly appertains.

It was a castellated mansion as regular as a chessboard on its ground-plan,ornamented with make-believe bastions and machicolations,behind which were stacks of battlemented chimneys.

On still mornings,at the fire-lighting hour,when ghostly house-maids stalk the corridors,and thin streaks of light through the shutter-chinks lend startling winks and smiles to ancestors on canvas,twelve or fifteen thin stems of blue smoke sprouted upwards from these chimney-tops,and spread into a flat canopy on high.

Around the site stretched ten thousand acres of good,fat,unimpeachable soil,plentiful in glades and lawns wherever visible from the castle-windows,and merging in homely arable where screened from the too curious eye by ingeniously-contrived plantations.

Some way behind the owner of all this came the second man in the parish,the rector,the Honourable and Reverend Mr.Oldbourne,a widower,over stiff and stern for a clergyman,whose severe white neckcloth,well-kept gray hair,and right-lined face betokened none of those sympathetic traits whereon depends so much of a parson's power to do good among his fellow-creatures.The last,far-removed man of the series--altogether the Neptune of these local primaries--was the curate,Mr.Alwyn Hill.He was a handsome young deacon with curly hair,dreamy eyes--so dreamy that to look long into them was like ascending and floating among summer clouds--a complexion as fresh as a flower,and a chin absolutely beardless.Though his age was about twenty-five,he looked not much over nineteen.

The rector had a daughter called Emmeline,of so sweet and simple a nature that her beauty was discovered,measured,and inventoried by almost everybody in that part of the country before it was suspected by herself to exist.She had been bred in comparative solitude;a rencounter with men troubled and confused her.Whenever a strange visitor came to her father's house she slipped into the orchard and remained till he was gone,ridiculing her weakness in apostrophes,but unable to overcome it.Her virtues lay in no resistant force of character,but in a natural inappetency for evil things,which to her were as unmeaning as joints of flesh to a herbivorous creature.

Her charms of person,manner,and mind,had been clear for some time to the Antinous in orders,and no less so to the Duke,who,though scandalously ignorant of dainty phrases,ever showing a clumsy manner towards the gentler sex,and,in short,not at all a lady's man,took fire to a degree that was wellnigh terrible at sudden sight of Emmeline,a short time after she was turned seventeen.

It occurred one afternoon at the corner of a shrubbery between the castle and the rectory,where the Duke was standing to watch the heaving of a mole,when the fair girl brushed past at a distance of a few yards,in the full light of the sun,and without hat or bonnet.The Duke went home like a man who had seen a spirit.He ascended to the picture-gallery of his castle,and there passed some time in staring at the bygone beauties of his line as if he had never before considered what an important part those specimens of womankind had played in the evolution of the Saxelbye race.He dined alone,drank rather freely,and declared to himself that Emmeline Oldbourne must be his.

Meanwhile there had unfortunately arisen between the curate and this girl some sweet and secret understanding.Particulars of the attachment remained unknown then and always,but it was plainly not approved of by her father.His procedure was cold,hard,and inexorable.Soon the curate disappeared from the parish,almost suddenly,after bitter and hard words had been heard to pass between him and the rector one evening in the garden,intermingled with which,like the cries of the dying in the din of battle,were the beseeching sobs of a woman.Not long after this it was announced that a marriage between the Duke and Miss Oldbourne was to be solemnized at a surprisingly early date.