CHAPTER IIMAGDALEN—AND THE NEIGHBOURHOOD
Otho’s arrival had been in the early part of October. The intimacy between him and Gilbert gradually increased, and the visits of the friends were not by any means confined to one party of the alliance. Otho was found as often seated in an old arm-chair in some one of the now faded and shabby rooms of the Red Gables, as Gilbert was in the statelier and better preserved apartments of Thorsgarth. Gilbert and his father lived alone together. They had so lived ever since Michael, having finished his medical studies, had come back and been made Dr. Rowntree’s assistant. Mr. Langstroth was one of those men who undoubtedly exist, who, by some means not to be accounted for by any personal charm or fascination, always have either a devoted wife or a friend who seems willing, nay, eager to give of his strength in order to make up for their weaknesses. So long as his wife had been living, Mr. Langstroth had had a prop. After her death, her place, as prop, had been taken by Dr. Rowntree, an old ‘friend of the family,’ whose yellow-washed house, with its green door and brass knocker, stood almost opposite the Red Gables, on the other side of the broad old square which formed the west end of Bradstane town. Dr. Rowntree had indeedbeen one of those friends who stick closer than a brother, who get little and give much, and who seem quite satisfied so long as they may go on giving, and get an occasional word significative of trust or appreciation. Sometimes it seems as if they could exist without even so much aliment for their regard. It was at his instigation and by his advice that Michael had adopted the medical profession as his calling in life. Something had to be done; their fortunes no longer permitted idleness on the part even of the eldest son of the house. Michael was utterly disinclined for the church, and his father for the expense of preparing him to enter it. For ‘doctoring,’ as they roughly and ignorantly called the healing art, he had always shown a liking; and, as most of his spare time had always been spent at the little Quaker doctor’s house, it was considered that he had had ample opportunities of judging whether this calling would suit him or not. He had elected to follow it, greatly to the jubilation of his old friend, and, having finished his student life, it had been decided that it would be to the comfort and advantage of all if he were to take up his quarters with Dr. Rowntree, instead of remaining at home.
‘You won’t really be separated from them, youknow,’know,’said the doctor; ‘and, being on the premises, you’ll get so much better broken in to it.’
Mr. Langstroth agreed. In his heart he despised the doctor’s calling, and was angry and ashamed that a son of his should have to live by it; but, like many another before him, he took the benefits that he hated, and was satisfied so long as they were not put before him too prominently. He would have been best pleased if Michael could have followed his ‘trade,’ as the elder man contemptuouslycalled it, away from Bradstane and his nobility; but the advantages of the present arrangement were too great and too obvious to be thrown away; there were no premiums to pay, no struggle to make. So Michael lived with Dr. Rowntree, and began to make himself acquainted with the far from easy life of a country doctor. His temper was sweet, and his spirit beyond all idea of shame in his position, or complaint at having to work. He said little, but went to work with a will.
Gilbert had all along, and as it were by a sort of tacit consent of all parties, remained at home with his father, who was now a querulous invalid with a heart-complaint. Incidentally, too, as has been said, he devoted a good deal of his time and mind to the contemplation and manipulation of their affairs, family and financial. While Michael had been studying in London, letters had now and then come to him from Gilbert, suggesting that it was advisable to sell this or that farm, this or that lot of timber in the woods which still belonged to them. To do so would lessen their debts by so much, would ease their father’s mind, and increase their income by diminishing the amount they annually had to pay away in interest. To all and each of which propositions, Michael had been in the habit of yielding unqualified assent, saying that he thought it very good of Gilbert to sit boring his eyes out over accounts, in the days of his youth. He might as well have congratulated an old spider on weaving webs so skilfully, or complimented a shark on his kindness in following that which he best loved—prey, namely, or, in short, have thanked any person warmly for being so disinterested as to find pleasure in following his natural bent. Michael was very young, and hated all such tasks as those in which Gilbert passed his time. He mighthave had Gilbert’s office, and Gilbert his, had he so chosen; the option had been given him; but he did not so choose, and it always seemed to him that his best thanks were due to his brother for industriously doing that which he would have so hated to do himself. Interested in his studies, and seeing a good deal of society, in which he was popular, by reason of his good looks, good birth, and entire absence of selfishness or self-consciousness, Michael often thought what a good old man Gilbert was, and what thanks he, Michael, would owe him, for thus sacrificing the days of his youth to an invalid father and a complicated account-book, in a quiet little country town at the world’s end.
It certainly was a very quiet little town, as it is now, and probably always has been.
‘Castle Bradstane,’ says an old chronicler, ‘standeth stately upon Tese.’ At the time of which he wrote, he probably literally meant the castle, the grim brown pile which stood on the Durham side of the stream, cunningly planted just at an outward sweep of one of its many curves. Gradually it had fallen into decay; other houses and a small town had gathered about its feet. Ivy and other creepers and climbers now clung about its fierce old towers. Wallflowers, ragwort, and the ivy-leaved snapdragon peeped and nodded in at the narrow little slits of windows; kindly Nature did all in her power to beautify what had been so cruel and so hideous, till now the grim old fastness sat harmless aloft, and the river rushed and murmured far below, as of yore.
Any one who chooses, may learn how Walter Scott, with the seer’s eye of genius, pictured Bradstane Castle, and the prospects which from its ‘watch-tower highgleamed gradual on the warder’s eye;’ and to this day, the prospect upon which it looks is little changed. Though the stream sweeps by beneath it, laden with the tale of several centuries more, their woe and bloodshed, grief and tragic story, yet the outlines of the land itself, the woods, the hills, must be similar to what they were when old Leland, looking upon it, recorded, ‘Castle Bradstane standeth stately upon Tese.’ The inhabitants, who gradually built houses, and clustered about the old pile and beyond it, to the east, had been, taken all in all, a wild race of people, a border race. To this day they are bold, sturdy, and independent. Strange tales are sometimes told of the old families of the vicinity, gentle and simple—tales in which both gentleness and simpleness are conspicuous by their absence. Great cities have their great sins, their great faults, wrongs, and iniquities; and we are very much in the habit of speaking in condemnatory terms of them, and of lauding the beauties of the country, and the simpleness and gentleness, and, above all, the naturalness and absence of pretension in the life there. And, certainly, city life, carried to excess, has in it a morbid feverishness and unrest which is no true life. But in country life, when it is lived in out-of-the-way spots—moorland farms, secluded dales, places far from railways and traffic—there is often a certain morbidness, as well as in the life of a town. The very solitude and loneliness tend to foster and bring out any peculiarities, any morbid characteristics, and to confirm and strengthen eccentricities and idiosyncrasies. One of the good things that much-abused progress will do in time, will be to sweep away some of these ugly old country habits of indolence and cloddishness, and selfish, soulless sensuality, which still exist, and that sometimesamidst the sweetest and most exquisite natural surroundings.
At this later time of which I write, Bradstane was more the abode of confirmed Philistinism than of anything else. There were a few wealthy and well-born families, who possessed seats in the neighbourhood—Halls, Parks, Courts, Houses—and who shut themselves up in them, and led their own lives, on no evil terms with the shopkeepers and dissenters of the village itself, but quite apart and distinct from them. The only one of these houses which stood within the precincts of the town was the Red Gables, Mr. Langstroth’s dwelling-place. It was a large old house, rising straight out of the street. The land that belonged to it consisted chiefly of farms in the vicinity, and some woods, more distant still.
Farther out, at a fine old place higher up the river, situated like Thorsgarth, on one of its many ‘reaches,’ and called Balder Hall, lived an old maiden lady, Miss Martha Strangforth, at whose death, which, said wise report, could not be very far off, seeing that she was older than the century, and a martyr to rheumatic gout, her estate and fortune would pass to a nephew of the same name. Four years ago had come to live with her an orphan grand-niece, one Magdalen Wynter by name; a cold, handsome, self-contained girl of eighteen, who made no friends, and was seldom seen walking outside her aunt’s grounds, but who sometimes passed through Bradstane town, driving in one of the Balder Hall carriages, dressed with a perfection of simple elegance which the Philistine inhabitants called ‘plainness,’ and looking as if, for aught they could say to the contrary, all the world belonged to her. Sometimes she stopped at one of the shops, and then she was treated with respect,as the niece of rich old Miss Strangforth. On these occasions, she was wont to give very clear, concise orders, in a very clear, decided voice, low and gentle, but too monotonous to be called musical. Her beautiful young face was seldom, if ever, seen to smile; and yet, one could hardly have said that she looked unhappy, though she might have been accused of appearing indifferent.
Once, some few weeks after her arrival, stopping at the stationer’s and bookseller’s shop kept by Mr. Dixon, in the main street of the town, the footman opened the door, and she got out and went into the shop. Mrs. Dixon came forward to attend to her wants, and was followed by a pretty little girl of some ten years old, a child with a delicate skin, small, oval face, straight little nose, brown hair and eyes—all very neat and clear, and clean and pretty. She hid rather shyly behind her mother.
‘Is that your child?’ asked Miss Wynter, pointing with her parasol at the girl.
‘Yes, miss, this is Ada, our only one.’
‘Oh, indeed! How old is she?’
‘Ten, was a month last Sunday.’
‘Ah, she is a pretty little creature. Does she go to school?’
‘Yes, miss; but it’s her holiday-time now.’
‘I wish you’d let her come home with me, and I’ll show her some pretty things. I am very lonely.’
The last words were spoken in the quiet, uninterested tone in which one says, ‘What a dull day it is!’ as if they hardly referred to herself, but to something outside her.
‘Oh yes, miss, she may go. I’m sure it’s very good of you. But I fear she’ll be a trouble to you.’
‘Not at all, or I should not have asked her. Wouldyou like to come with me, little Ada?’ asked Miss Wynter, turning to the child neither coldly nor unkindly, but with no change of expression at all—no lighting up of her soft, dark, quiet eyes; not the ghost of a smile upon her tranquil sculptured lips.
At first, Ada hung back; and her mother began to expostulate with her, saying how good it was of the lady to invite her to go with her.
The lady, in the same soft and gentle tone, remarked presently—
‘Oh, she won’t understand that, of course. If you will come with me, Ada, I will give you a pretty necklace, and a ribbon.’
At this prospect, all hesitation fled. Ada submitted at once to be made ready, Mrs. Dixon remarking admiringly—
‘Eh, but you have found the right road to her heart, miss, and that cleverly.’
‘I will sit here, and wait till she is ready. Don’t put on her best frock, or anything of that kind, you know. She will do just as she is.’
Miss Wynter furthermore promised to restore Ada to her home and friends later in the evening, but Mrs. Dixon said she had to send her servant to the Balder Hall farm for butter, and she should call for the little girl and bring her back. Ada was perched in the carriage beside Miss Wynter, in which position she was seen of sundry comrades as she drove away.
They called to her; asked her where she was going, and cried—
‘Eh, but, Ada, what a grand lady you are, to be sure!’
Ada took no manner of notice of them, but looked straight before her.
‘Why do you not kiss your hand to your friends, and say good-bye to them?’ asked Magdalen, turning indifferently, as she lay back, also indifferently, and looked with languid curiosity at the little flushed face and small figure, bristling with importance, beside her.
‘’Cause I’m a young lady, and they are little common village girls,’ was the reply, so unexpected, that even Miss Wynter’s eyes were opened wide, and her eyebrows were raised, as she heard it.
‘Indeed?’ she said. ‘And do you think you are really a young lady?’
‘Not like you, yet,’ was the reply, ‘because I’m not old enough; but I shall be some time. Mamma says I’m so pretty I shall be sure to marry a gentleman; and I’m going to learn French and music.’
‘Oh, indeed!’ drawled Magdalen. ‘You are going to marry a gentleman. What is a gentleman? Did your mother tell you that, too?’
‘She didn’t tell me, but I know,’ replied Ada.
‘Well, suppose you tell me. Then I shall know, too.’
‘A gentleman is rich, and has a large house, and——’
‘Does a gentleman keep a shop?’
‘No.’
‘Then what is your father?’
‘Oh, I don’t know.’
Magdalen proceeded, in a languid, indifferent way, to draw her out. In a very short time she had gauged the depths, or rather the shallows, of Ada Dixon’s mind. It contained nothing but shallows then; it was destined never to contain anything else, henceforth and for evermore.
From that day she was more or less Miss Wynter’sprotegéeand plaything. Sometimes the connection flagged;sometimes when the winter weather was bitter, or the summer heats overpowering, when Miss Wynter was indolent, and when Ada was promoted to a boarding-school, there were gaps in the intercourse; but the acquaintance was never broken off, and it was not without its influence in both lives, and on more destinies than theirs alone.
The Dixons were well-to-do, prosperous, conventional tradespeople, more retail than wholesale in every sense of the words. He had grown fat by charging sixpence where other people charged fivepence, by a consistent practice of telling many lies during the week, and diligently repenting him of his transgressions and bewailing his sins twice every Sunday in the parish church. That is, he bewailed his sins with his mouth, and whenever bewailing happened to be printed in the Prayer-book; but he knew much better than the Prayer-book what was the way in which to get on in the world, and perhaps, if he had spoken out his whole mind, cleanly and honestly, would have said that since the Lord, by putting so much competition into the world, had made it such a hard business for folk to hold their heads above water, He must even excuse them from doing it in the best way they could.
Mrs. Dixon, like a faithful and loyal wife, had aided and abetted him in his praiseworthy efforts to get on in the world. They had succeeded in their aim, and were respected and looked up to by all who knew them. He was vicar’s warden, an overseer of the poor, one of the best-known men in public and parochial affairs in all the district. He could afford to send his daughter to school, to keep her out of the shop; to dress her ‘stylishly,’ as they called it; to give her a piano, and buy pieces of music for her to play upon it; and all these things hedid with a good grace, and looked to Ada to form an alliance which should be to the credit of the family and her own glory.
There were other well-to-do tradesmen in Bradstane, and many who were but ill-to-do. There was the lawyer, Mr. Coningsby, who lived not far away from the Langstroths; there was Dr. Rowntree; there was the vicar, Mr. Johnson, with Mrs. Johnson, his wife, and their numerous progeny. They lived in an old brown house, in a kind of close, near the church, with a walled garden containing apricot and plum trees. Other religious bodies were represented by two dissenting ministers and their flocks, and by a Friends’ Meeting, the head and front of which was Dr. Rowntree.
These denominations, of course, had churches and chapels in which they worshipped. There were some curious old houses in the main street, and there was a long and unlovely thoroughfare called Bridge Street, more like a slum than anything else, where the women were pale, and the children stunted, and the inhabitants of which, taken all in all, did not enjoy the best of reputations. One side of this street was built to the river-bank overhanging the stream; and in the spring and autumn, or when thunderstorms prevailed, the lower rooms of those houses would be flooded. Going along Bridge Street, one did not guess how near the river one was, till one came upon an opening here and there—a gully, or a tunnel, or a narrow, dark passage—and looking down it, one could see the rushing brown waters flowing ceaselessly on, without haste and without rest, from the fastnesses whence they had sprung—
‘Where Tees in tumult leaves his source,Thundering o’er Cauldron and High Force.’
‘Where Tees in tumult leaves his source,Thundering o’er Cauldron and High Force.’
‘Where Tees in tumult leaves his source,Thundering o’er Cauldron and High Force.’
‘Where Tees in tumult leaves his source,
Thundering o’er Cauldron and High Force.’
Such was, superficially, the outward aspect of Bradstane town, when Otho Askam and the two Langstroths met after their many years’ separation; such it had been for years back. It is not what is called ‘a growing town,’ and whatever drama might be played within its precincts, its exterior, objective side, was not likely to change very much.