Chapter III: Father and Son

It was not a bright or cheerful home to which Oswald Pentreath returned that August evening, after eating his supper at Mr. Haggard’s. Nay, it is possible that if he had not supped with the minister he might have gone supperless to bed, for it was no easy thing to get a meal at the Grange after nine o’clock.

The house stood midway between the hilly high-road from Rockmouth and the edge of the cliff, in grounds that were rather wilderness than park, save immediately in front of the house, so little being done to keep them in order. Beautiful exceedingly were those woods and gardens, nevertheless--lovely in their wildness and neglect: the blue sea shining through every break in the foliage; ferns and wild flowers flourishing abundantly in the wild western climate; and a flush and glow of colour on all things.

The house was large and gloomy, and had been lapsing to decay during the last forty years, in which period there had been scarcely forty pounds expended upon repairs or renovation. Happily the old oak panelling could be kept bright with labour, and that, to the extent of his opportunities, the Squire never spared. The meagrely-furnished rooms were in perfect order. The scanty draperies were free from accumulated dust or flue. The house was as clean as it was comfortless, save in that one sacred chamber, the Squire’s study--a little room next the hall-door, a closet of espial, from which the Squire saw every one who entered or quitted the house. Here reigned dust and disorder; here the spider spun his web, and the moth deposited her eggs; here the half-starved beetle fled for refuge, and the famished mouse nibbled the wainscot. Only at long intervals, and after deliberate preparation, did the Squire permit this study to be cleaned. As a preliminary measure he cleared away and locked up every morsel of paper, every parchment, account or memorandum book. At other times he simply locked the door of the chamber on leaving it, and carried the key in his pocket.

Miserly as the arrangements of the household were, it was kept up with a faint simulation of a gentleman’s establishment. There was an old man who was called the butler, who had an underfed boy, an orphan nephew of his own--no one else would have stayed--for his underling. There was a cook and housekeeper, who sent up fairly eatable dinners--the Squire rather leaning to a good dinner, on condition that he got it cheap. There was a middle-aged housemaid of severe aspect, who spent her days in cleaning the great desolate-looking rooms and rarely-trodden staircases, and who seemed from long habit to have grown fond of cleaning for its own sake, as men are fond of athletics. Out-of-doors there was a handy man, who looked after the horses and poultry, and did a little gardening in that cultivated portion of the grounds immediately surrounding the house, with the occasional assistance of a boy or a day-labourer. Out of this minimum household the Squire got the maximum of work, and perhaps there was no house within fifty miles better kept than the Grange, and no neater garden than the Dutch flower-beds, narrow paths, and quincunxes in front of the Squire’s study. Was not the master’s eye upon the gardener, or the gardener’s help, while he worked--an eye that threatened summary vengeance upon idlers?

The Squire looked out of his study as Nicholas the butler admitted Oswald at the hall-door. There was no gush of affection on the side of father or son, though the life of one of the two had been in mortal peril since they parted. Mr. Pentreath scrutinised his son through his spectacles, perhaps to make sure that he was sober.

‘So you’ve lost your boat?’ he remarked, after the scrutiny.

‘Yes, father.’

‘Unlucky--for you. You don’t expect to get another, I suppose?’

‘I never expect anything.’

‘So much the better for you,’ grunted the Squire. ‘So it was the Methodist parson pulled you out of the water? Canting hound! I daresay he expected to get something by it.’

‘I don’t think he did,’ answered the young man coolly. ‘He knew I belonged to you.’

The father contemplated his son doubtfully for a few moments, but made no reply. He held one of the tall silver candlesticks in his hand as he stood on the threshold of his den. There was no other light in the hall. The oil lamp which hung from the ceiling had been extinguished at ten o’clock.

‘You’ve had your supper, I suppose?’ he inquired with paternal hospitality.

‘Yes, father.’

‘That’s lucky for you. Nicholas cleared the table an hour ago. You’d better get to bed, and take a good night’s rest.’

‘Good-night, father.’

‘Good-night. And don’t stay out so late again, keeping Nicholas up, and wasting candle.’

‘All right, father; it sha’n’t occur again. A man doesn’t escape from drowning every day in the year.’

Oswald took a chamber candle from the side-table in the hall and lighted it from the candle in his father’s hand. Very dissimilar were the faces of the two men as they confronted each other across the flame. The younger face delicately chiselled, with complexion inclining to pallor, dark gray eyes, wavy auburn hair--a face with something of womanly softness in its beauty, with a touch of melancholy too, as if it belonged to one who had little hopefulness. The Squire’s was your true miser’s face, pinched and hard. The eyes small, and set too near each other; the nose hooked and birdy; the thin lips inclining downward at the corners. Exposure to all kinds of weather had dried the Squire’s skin like a russet-apple shrivelled by long keeping. The air which had given softness and delicacy to the son’s complexion had tanned the father’s to the semblance of leather. His lean jaws had a knack of working with a curious muscular motion, as if he were munching something or talking to himself, at odd times. They worked to-night as Oswald lighted his candle. It was a sign of displeasure on the Squire’s part.

‘I think I gave you fifty pounds towards that boat,’ he said presently.

‘We’re neither of us likely to forget the circumstance, for it was the only fifty pounds you ever gave me in your life,’ answered Oswald.

‘Don’t be insolent, sir. Fifty pounds--fifty pounds gone to the bottom of the sea, through your folly and bad seamanship.’

‘You needn’t make yourself unhappy about that. The loss is mine.’

‘No, sir, it is not,’ answered the old man fiercely. ‘The loss is mine. The money was mine--the fruit of my care and economy. The loss is mine. Fifty pounds--one quarter’s rent of Withycomb Farm--gone for ever. Fifty pounds at compound interest--do you know what that would have been fifty years hence?’

‘Haven’t the least idea. As I never have had any principal, I can’t be expected to know much about interest.’

‘You’re a fool!’ exclaimed the Squire, turning on his heel. ‘Go to bed before I lose my temper.’

Oswald went up-stairs without another word, glad to escape any further reproof. He had a bedchamber that was spacious, and to his mind sufficiently comfortable, though it would have seemed bare as a dungeon to the sybarite. The deep-set windows looked seaward; there was a four-post bedstead wide enough for four, with chintz curtains, faded and attenuated by much washing; there was an old bookcase which contained Oswald’s meagre collection--Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, Shelley, an odd volume of Wordsworth, a few of the classics, _Robinson Crusoe_, _Tom Jones_, _Roderick Random_, _The Adventures of a Guinea_, and three or four volumes of the _British Drama_. A carved-oak table at which he wrote, a dozen high-backed chairs more or less rotten, and a clumsy walnut-wood wardrobe made up the catalogue of furniture. Over the high chimneypiece hung the single picture of the room--a half-length portrait of Oswald Pentreath’s mother, dead many years ago. The portrait had been painted before Mrs. Pentreath’s marriage--an innocent girlish face, curiously like Oswald’s in feature and expression; a girlish figure in a scanty white gown, with a lapful of flowers--one of those old-fashioned pictures which feebly recall the style of Reynolds and Gainsborough.

Oswald was tired, but in no humour for sleep. He had slept off his drowsiness in the minister’s tranquil chamber, so he walked up and down the room thinking of the day’s work, and wondering whether his escape from the mighty jaws of the sea was a thing to rejoice about.

‘I suppose life is better than death,’ he said to himself; and then he involuntarily repeated those words which depicture humanity’s abhorrence of death:

‘To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot;
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod.’

‘Yes, I suppose in the abstract life is better. If I only knew what to do with mine! Yet some people would tell me I am a man to be envied, having a father who scrapes and pinches and toils to enrich and extend an estate which in the course of nature must fall to me. Yes; but the course of nature is very slow in some cases. Heaven forbid that I should desire to see the old man’s life shortened by so much as an hour! but it’s a long vista to look at.’

The young man was up betimes next morning, and in the stable. Having lost his yacht, he had now only his horse to care about--a bony, long-legged, long-backed hunter, with ragged hips and an ugly head, but a good jumper, and with plenty of go in him. The brute was not spoiled by over-feeding, but was gratified with a greater variety of food than usually falls to the lot of his species, the Squire expecting his stable to fatten upon the waste of his garden. In the apple season Herne the Hunter ate so many windfalls that he converted himself into a kind of animated cider-press.

He was an affectionate beast--licked his young master’s face when they interchanged greetings, and would have followed him about like a dog, if allowed. Next to a sail in the Dolphin, Oswald loved a scamper across country on Herne the Hunter; up hill and down dale, reckless of the ground he went over, possessed with a conviction that Herne’s experience and pluck would pull him through. There was no clear idea of the animal’s age at the Grange. He had got beyond mark of mouth when the Squire bought him out of a stage-coach, whose proprietor disposed of him cheaply on account of a propensity to bolting, which had exercised a demoralising influence on the rest of the team. Oswald had ridden anything he could get to ride ever since he exchanged petticoats for trousers--from a Flemish plough-horse to a thoroughbred colt; and to Oswald, Herne the Hunter was a most delightful acquisition. He had every vice that a horse can have, linked with one virtue--he was a rusher across country. Oswald hunted him four days a week in winter, and rode or drove him every other day in summer, and the two were devoted to each other.

An ancient white pony, which the Squire drove himself in a shandrydan of the chaise tribe, completed the Pentreath stud; and these two beasts inhabited stables designed for the accommodation of eight hunters and four carriage-horses. Mr. Pentreath had put pigs and oxen into several of the loose-boxes, and had converted one of the fine old coach-houses into a barn. The stable-yard was a stony wilderness, in which the poultry roamed in savage freedom. One small boy took care of the two horses, under the ubiquitous handy-man, and presented a curious picture of man’s dominion over the brute creation when he was seen lugging that huge beast Herne out of the stable by a bridle, which the brat could hardly reach on tiptoe.

‘Good old Herne,’ said Oswald, as the long-legged animal stalked out into the yard, with his well-worn saddle; ‘you’ll have to carry me a little oftener, my steed, now I’ve lost the Dolphin.’

He swung himself lightly into the saddle, and rode out of the yard into the shrubbery on one side of the house--a jungle of laurel, arbutus, and bay, lying beyond that narrow region of Dutch garden, bowling-green, and _pleasaunce_ which the Squire required to be kept in order. A bridle way through the shrubbery led into the park, which was much more like a wood than a park; and a dilapidated fence, with occasional yawning gaps in it, divided the park from the actual woodland, a long straggling stretch of ancient forest, which sheltered the Grange from north-east winds and wintry gales blowing across channel.

There are plenty of pleasant rides round about Combhaven, which settlement lies in a deep cleft between hills as picturesque as the Trossachs, though on a smaller scale than those Scottish mountains. Not having any particular purpose in this before-breakfast ride, Oswald let his horse go his own way, or fancied he did; and Herne’s way was through the hilly High-street, where, at half-past seven o’clock, the business of life was already in full swing.

The first house of any importance on the left hand of the street was Joshua Haggard’s. How bright and fresh the plain square dwelling seemed to Oswald’s eye, after the ruined majesty of the Grange! Every window was opened wide to the sweet morning air, spotless muslin curtains fluttered within, and between those snowy draperies Oswald caught a glimpse of a girl’s dark head, bending over a row of flower-pots. Breakfast was over at Mr. Haggard’s, and that spiritual light, Joshua himself, was to be seen in the orderly shop ministering to the temporal wants of his flock by packing a large parcel of groceries in stout brown paper, and seemingly as careful to make his package secure and compact as if he had been one of those pious Jews who, for pure love of the holy work, strove to reërect Solomon’s Temple. Aunt Judith was busy in her own special department--the drapery business--sorting packets of hooks and pink papers of pins in various little wooden boxes and drawers, her forehead puckered into the frown of absorbed attention.

Oswald drew rein before the shop-door, much to the annoyance of Herne, who was apt to be cross-grained at starting, eager for the refreshment of a stretching gallop.

‘Good-morning, Mr. Haggard,’ cried the young man; ‘none the worse for your wetting yesterday, I trust.’

‘No, sir, thank you. I’m glad to see you abroad so early. You caught no cold, I hope?’

‘Thanks to Miss Haggard’s good nursing, none whatever. O, by the way, I have to thank you for sending round my clothes the first thing this morning. I told our boy to carry back the suit you so kindly lent me; but service at the Grange is rather slow.’

‘There’s no hurry, sir.’

There was a marked difference in manner between the minister of last night, anxious to exhort and even reprove, and the grocer of this morning. Joshua in his shop was the tradesman, deferential to the son of his patron and customer, Squire Pentreath. Not that the Squire was by any means a good customer. There were farmers’ households among the hills and valleys between Combhaven and Rockmouth that consumed three times as much as Mr. Pentreath’s shrunken establishment.

Oswald patted Herne’s long neck, smoothed his disordered mane, and trifled with curb and snaffle for a few minutes, as if inclined to linger, yet hardly knowing what more to say. A nice-looking young fellow on horseback, even Judith was compelled to own; and Judith, dwelling among a Conservative people, was at heart an unconscious Radical. She derived her Radicalism from Jeremiah and Isaiah--by much dwelling upon those denunciatory passages in which the prophets scourge as with a whip of scorpions the sins and follies of earth’s mighty ones--instead of taking the poison from Wilkes or Horne Tooke; but it was rank Radicalism all the same. She regarded the good old families, the patrician order of her neighbourhood, with a grudging mind and jaundiced eye. She had that mistaken and distorted pride which reckons superiority of education or position as an injury, or even an insult, to the more humbly placed. Yet looking askance at Oswald Pentreath this morning, while pretending to be deep in consideration of the little paper packets, Judith confessed to herself that he was of a different breed from the young tradesmen and farmers’ sons of the district. He was not handsomer or better built, healthier or stronger; he had only the superiority of grace and refinement, other looks, other tones and inflexions of voice--another way of holding himself. The difference was indefinable, but it was an all-pervading difference in form and expression.

The dark gray eyes with their auburn lashes, fair skin inclining to pallor, long nose slightly aquiline, thin lips close shaven, auburn whiskers, auburn hair, tall slight figure, might have recalled a portrait of that golden age for wit and beauty--and no other virtue under the sun--the reign of Charles the Second. There was all the grace and all the weakness which characterised the gilded youth of that era in Oswald Pentreath’s appearance. Judith did not look deep enough for this, but she perceived a certain effeminacy which offended her, and she was not slow to express her opinion when Oswald had obliged Herne by proceeding up the street--a progress to which Herne imparted a good deal of unnecessary clattering of hoofs, and a rocking-horse movement across the road highly alarming to the small children playing in the gutter.

‘I hate a fop,’ said Judith decisively, her approval of last night modified by her morning temper, which always inclined to acidity.

‘I don’t think young Pentreath deserves your dislike on that score,’ answered Joshua, calmly pursuing his avocation behind the opposite counter; ‘he doesn’t wear fine clothes, and he has no expensive habits that ever I heard of.’

‘For a good reason--he hasn’t the money for either. But take my word for it, he’ll dress himself out like a peacock, and spend his money like a lord, as soon as ever the old Squire is in his grave. I could see it all in the droop of his eyelids.’

‘You must be a shrewder reader of character than I, Judith, to see so much in so little,’ returned Joshua with his quiet smile--a smile that had a certain loftiness of expression, as if he surveyed Judith’s womanly weaknesses from an altitude, as one looks down on the petty life of a village from the mighty solitude of a mountain-top; ‘for my part I rather take to the young man.’

‘I don’t,’ protested Judith, shutting one of the little drawers with a slam. ‘He’s too pretty for my money. I never could abide a pretty man. I might have been married when I was seven-and-twenty, if I’d cared for prettiness. There was young Chandler, the miller’s son, with a complexion like a girl, and always on the simper, asked me times and often; but I used to come over as if I’d been eating too much treacle at the mere sight of him. His good looks made me bilious. What a life I should have led him, to be sure, if I had gone against my inside so far as to say yes!--a poor pink-and-white thing like that lolloping about the place, and making believe to be a man.’

‘Yet it was a strong-minded woman married him for all that, Judith.’

‘Very lucky for him. If he’d married a weak-minded one they’d have lost themselves and gone to sleep in the woods one day, and the robin redbreasts would have covered ’em up with leaves and made an end of ’em.’