Dawn Read online

  CHAPTER III

  Philip was not very fond of taking walks with his father, since hefound that in nine cases out of ten they afforded opportunities forinculcation of facts of the driest description with reference toestate management, or to the narration by his parent of littlehistories of which his conduct upon some recent occasion would adornthe moral. On this particular occasion the prospect was particularlyunpleasant, for his father would, he was well aware, overflow withawful politeness, indeed, after the scene of the morning, it could notbe otherwise. Oh, how much rather would he have spent that lovelyafternoon with Maria Lee! Dear Maria, he would go and see her againthe very next day.

  When he arrived, some ten minutes after time in the antler-hung hallof the Abbey House, he found his father standing, watch in hand,exactly under the big clock, as though he was determined to make anote by double entry of every passing second.

  "When I asked you to walk with me this afternoon, Philip, I, if mymemory does not deceive me, was careful to say that I had no wish tointerfere with any prior engagement. I was aware how little interest,compared to your cousin George, you take in the estate, and I had nowish to impose an uncongenial task. But, as you kindly volunteered toaccompany me, I regret that you did not find it convenient to bepunctual to the time you fixed. I have now waited for you forseventeen minutes, and let me tell you that at my time of life Icannot afford to lose seventeen minutes. May I ask what has delayedyou?"

  This long speech had given Philip the opportunity of recovering thebreath that he had lost in running home. He replied promptly--

  "I have been lunching with Miss Lee."

  "Oh, indeed, then I no longer wonder that you kept me waiting, and Imust say that in this particular I commend your taste. Miss Lee is ayoung lady of good family, good manners, and good means. If her estatewent with this property it would complete as pretty a five thousandacres of mixed soil as there is in the county. Those are beautiful oldmeadows of hers, beautiful. Perhaps----" but here the old man checkedhimself.

  On leaving the house they had passed together down a walk called thetunnel walk, on account of the arching boughs of the lime-trees thatinterlaced themselves overhead. At the end of this avenue, and on theborders of the lake, there stood an enormous but still growing oak,known as Caresfoot's Staff. It was the old squire's favourite tree,and the best topped piece of timber for many miles round.

  "I wonder," said Philip, by way of making a little pleasantconversation, "why that tree was called Caresfoot's Staff."

  "Your ignorance astonishes me, Philip, but I suppose that there aresome people who can live for years in a place and yet imbibe nothingof its traditions. Perhaps you know that the monks were driven out ofthese ruins by Henry VIII. Well, on the spot where that tree nowstands there grew a still greater oak, a giant tree, its trunkmeasured sixteen loads of timber; which had, as tradition said, beenplanted by the first prior of the Abbey when England was still Saxon.The night the monks left a great gale raged over England. It was inOctober, when the trees were full of leaf, and its fiercest gust torethe great oak from its roothold, and flung it into the lake. Look! doyou see that rise in the sand, there, by the edge of the deep pool, inthe eight foot water? That is there it is supposed to lie. Well, thewhole country-side said that it was a sign that the monks had gone forever from Bratham Abbey, and the country-side was right. But when yourancestor, old yeoman Caresfoot, bought this place and came to livehere, in a year when there was a great black frost that set the watersof the lake like one of the new-fangled roads, he asked hisneighbours, ay, and his labouring folk, to come and dine with him anddrink to the success of his purchase. It was a proud day for him, andwhen dinner was done and they were all mellow with strong ale, he badethem step down to the borders of the lake, as he would have them bewitness to a ceremony. When they reached the spot they saw a curioussight, for there on a strong dray, and dragged by Farmer Caresfoot'ssix best horses, was an oak of fifty years' growth coming across theice, earth, roots and all.

  "On that spot where it now stands there had been a great hole, tenfeet deep by fourteen feet square, dug to receive it, and into thathole Caresfoot Staff was tilted and levered off the dray. And when ithad been planted, and the frozen earth well trodden in, yourgrandfather in the ninth degree brought his guests back to the oldbanqueting-hall, and made a speech which, as it was the first and lasthe ever made, was long remembered in the country-side. It was, putinto modern English, something like this:

  "'Neighbours,--Prior's Oak has gone into the water, and folks saidthat it was for a sign that the monks would never come back toBratham, and that it was the Lord's wind that put it there. And,neighbours, as ye know, the broad Bratham lands and the fat marshesdown by the brook passed by king's grant to a man that knew not clayfrom loam, or layer from pasturage, and from him they passed by theLord's will to me, as I have asked you here to-day to celebrate. Andnow, neighbours, I have a mind, and though it seem to you but achildish thing, yet I have a mind, and have set myself to fulfil it.When I was yet a little lad, and drove the swine out to feed on thehill yonder, when the acorns had fallen, afore Farmer Gyrton's fatherhad gracious leave from the feoffees to put up the fence that doth nowso sorely vex us, I found one day a great acorn, as big as a dow'segg, and of a rich and wondrous brown, and this acorn I bore home andplanted in kind earth in the corner of my dad's garden, thinking thatit would grow, and that one day I would hew its growth and use it fora staff. Now that was fifty long years ago, lads, and there where grewPrior's Oak, there, neighbours, I have set my Staff to-day. The monkshave told us how in Israel every man planted his fig and his vine. Forthe fig I know not rightly what that is; but for the vine, I willplant no creeping, clinging vine, but a hearty English oak, that, ifthey do but give it good room to breathe in, and save their heirloomfrom the axe, shall cast shade and grow acorns, and burst into leaf inthe spring and grow naked in the winter, when ten generations of ourchildren, and our children's children, shall have mixed their dustwith ours yonder in the graveyard. And now, neighbours, I have talkedtoo long, though I am better at doing than talking; but ye will evenforgive me, for I will not talk to you again, though on this the greatday of my life I was minded to speak. But I will bid you every manpledge a health to the Caresfoot's Staff, and ask a prayer that, solong as it shall push its leaves, so long may the race of my loins behere to sit beneath its shade, and even mayhap when the corn is ripeand the moon is up, and their hearts grow soft towards the past, totalk with kinsman or with sweetheart of the old man who struck it inthis kindly soil.'"

  The old squire's face grew tender as he told this legend of theforgotten dead, and Philip's young imagination summoned up the strangeold-world scene of the crowd of rustics gathered in the snow and frostround this very tree.

  "Philip," said his father, suddenly, "you will hold the yeoman's Staffone day; be like it of an oaken English heart, and you will defy windand weather as it has done, and as your forbears have done. Come, wemust go on."

  "By the way, Philip," he continued, after a while, "you will rememberwhat I said to you this morning--I hope that you will remember it,though I spoke in anger--never try to deceive me again, or you willregret it. And now I have something to say to you. I wish you to go tocollege and receive an education that will fit you to hold theposition you must in the course of Nature one day fill in the county.The Oxford term begins in a few days, and you have for some years beenentered at Magdalen College. I do not expect you to be a scholar, butI do expect you to brush off your rough ways and your local ideas, andto learn to become such a person both in your conduct and your mind asa gentleman of your station should be."

  "Is George to go to college too?"

  "No; I have spoken to him on the subject, and he does not wish it. Hesays very wisely that, with his small prospects, he would rather spendthe time in learning how to earn his living. So he is going to bearticled to the Roxham lawyers, Foster and Son, or rather Foster andBellamy, for young Bellamy, who is a lawyer by profess
ion, came herethis morning, not to speak about you, but on a message from the firmto say that he is now a junior partner, and that they will be veryhappy to take George as an articled clerk. He is a hard-working,shrewd young man, and it will be a great advantage to George to havehis advice and example before him."

  Philip assented, and went on in silence, reflecting on the curiouschange in his immediate prospects that this walk had brought to light.He was much rejoiced at the prospect of losing sight of George for awhile, and was sufficiently intelligent to appreciate the advantages,social and mental, that the University would offer him; but it struckhim that there were two things which he did not like about the scheme.The first of these was, that whilst he was pursuing his academicalstudies, George would practically be left on the spot--for Roxham wasonly six miles off--to put in motion any schemes he might havedevised; and Philip was sure that he had devised schemes. And thesecond, that Oxford was a long way from Maria Lee. However, he kepthis objections to himself. In due course they reached the buildingsthey had set out to examine, and the old squire, having settled whatwas to be done, and what was to be left undone, with characteristicpromptitude and shrewdness, they turned homewards.

  In passing through the shrubberies, on their way back to the house,they suddenly came upon a stolid-looking lad of about fifteen,emerging from a side-walk with a nest full of young blackbirds in hishand. Now, if there was one thing in this world more calculated thananother to rouse the most objectionable traits of the old squire'scharacter into rapid action, it was the discovery of boys, and moreespecially bird-nesting boys, in his plantations. In the first place,he hated trespassers; and in the second, it was one of his simplepleasures to walk in the early morning and listen to the singing ofthe birds that swarmed around. Accordingly, at the obnoxious sight hestopped suddenly, and, drawing himself up to his full height,addressed the trembling youth in his sweetest voice.

  "Your name is, I believe--Brady--Jim Brady--correct me if I am wrong--and you have come here, you--you--young--villain--to steal my birds."

  The frightened boy walked slowly backwards, followed by the old manwith his fiery eyes fixed upon his face, till at last concussionagainst the trunk of a great tree prevented further retreat. Here hestood for about thirty seconds, writhing under the glance that seemedto pierce him through and through, till at last he could stand it nolonger, but flung himself on the ground, roaring:

  "Oh! don't ee, squire; don't ee now look at me with that 'ere eye.Take and thrash me, squire, but don't ee fix me so! I hayn't had nomore nor twenty this year, and a nest of spinxes, and Tom Smith he'shad fifty-two and a young owl. Oh! oh!"

  Enraged beyond measure at this last piece of information, Mr.Caresfoot took his victim at his word, and, ceasing his ocularexperiments, laid into the less honourable portion of his form withthe gold-headed malacca cane in a way that astonished the prostrateJim, though he was afterwards heard to declare that the squire's cane"warn't not nothing compared with the squire's eye, which wore a hotcoal, it wore, and frizzled your innards as sich."

  When Jim Brady had departed, never to return again, and the old manhad recovered his usual suavity of manner, he remarked to his son:

  "There is some curious property in the human eye; a property that is,I believe, very much developed in my own. Did you observe the effectof my glance upon that boy? I was trying an experiment on him. Iremember it was always the same with your poor mother. She could neverbear me to look at her."

  Philip made no reply, but he thought that, if she had been the objectof experiments of that nature, it was not very wonderful.

  Shortly after their return home he received a note from Miss Lee. Itran thus:

  "My dear Philip,

  "What _do_ you think? Just after you had gone away, I got by the mid-day post, which Jones (the butcher) brought from Roxham, several letters, amongst them one from Grumps and one from Uncle Tom. Grumps has shown a cause. Why? 'It' said she was not an improper person; but, for all that, she is so angry with Uncle Tom that she will not come back, but has accepted an offer to go to Canada as companion to a lady; so farewell Grumps.

  "Now for Uncle Tom. 'It' suggested that I should live with some of my relations till I came of age, and pay them four hundred a year, which I think a good deal. I am sure it can't cost four hundred a year to feed me, though I have such an appetite. I had no idea they were all so fond of me before; they all want me to come and live with them, except Aunt Chambers, who, you know, lives in Jersey. Uncle Tom says in his letter that he shall be glad if his daughters can have the advantage of my example, and of studying my polished manners (just fancy _my_ polished manners; and I know, because little Tom, who is a brick, told me, that only last year he heard his father tell Emily--that's the eldest--that I was a dowdy, snub-nosed, ill-mannered miss, but that she must keep in with me and flatter me up). No, I will not live with Uncle Tom, and I will tell 'it' so. If I must leave my home, I will go to Aunt Chambers at Jersey. Jersey is a beautiful place for flowers, and one learns French there without the trouble of learning it; and I like Aunt Chambers, and she has no children, and nothing but the memory of a dear departed. But I don't like leaving home, and feel very much inclined to cry. _Hang_ the Court of Chancery, and Uncle Tom and his interference too!--_there_. I suppose you can't find time to come over to-morrow morning to see me off? Good-bye, dear Philip,

  "Your affectionate friend, "Maria Lee."

  Philip did manage to find time next morning, and came back lookingvery disconsolate.