Chapter I

Will Fortune never come with both hands full,
But write her fair words still in foulest letters?
She either gives a stomach and no food
(Such are the poor in health), or else a feast
And takes away the stomach: such are the rich
That have abundance and enjoy it not.
SHAKSPEARE.

----Your servant and your friend;
One that attends your ladyship’s commands.
IBID.

She was not old, nor young, nor at the years
Which certain people call a certain age,
Which yet the most uncertain age appears.
BYRON.

In that iron age when Frenchmen marched “en masse” from Madrid to Moscow; when Continental travelling was effected by drawing not _bills_, but _swords_; when _cannon_, not _credit_, gave to strangers the comforts of home in foreign lands, then were the locomotive propensities of the peaceable portion of our countrymen necessarily confined within the narrow limits of our sea-girt island. Impatient at being thus temporarily dammed up, the stream of society annually flowed outwards from the metropolis down to the extremest low-water mark of the different bathing-places.

It was during this period, that a large party had assembled, at the conclusion of the London season, at the hospitable mansion of Sir North Saunders. Sir North’s father had been a great contractor in those days when contracts were worth something; and, having realized an immense sum in the course of the American war, he, in gratitude, christened his son and heir after that minister, to whose persevering profusion he owed all to which he would be heir. When the almost unanimous voice of an indignant nation had closed the disastrous struggle, Sir Simon Saunders (as the contractor and first baronet was called) was, after a time, completely puzzled how to act.

During the first rapid succession of short and inconsistent administrations, he stuck by the Treasury, with a tenacity as to place, and versatility as to persons, worthy of that renowned vicar, whose peculiar talents in that line have become proverbial. Yet, as upon the permanent ascendancy of the Pitt party of that day, he found that retrenchment and reform were the watch-words at head-quarters, he, in disgust, threw up the whole concern, laid out some of his previously-acquired spoil in the purchase of Hornscliff Abbey, and retired to that beautiful retreat, thinking that, at any rate, a country gentleman contractor was not a greater contradiction in terms, than a patriot minister.

He was not, however, long condemned to pretend to enjoy a state of existence so uncongenial to all his tastes and habits; and his son and heir, Sir North, not only succeeded in full to all the acquirements of his father’s later years, but also inherited, in all its original freshness, that turn of mind which had in youth raised Sir Simon from nobody.

It was not therefore to be expected that he would long bury himself in the solitudes of Hornscliff Abbey, more especially as, coming of age soon after the breaking out of the revolutionary war, and having a great deal of parliamentary interest, the same minister who had disappointed the expectations of the father, now acting upon a different system, granted upon many occasions the utmost demands of the son.

From this time for nearly twenty years, Sir North continued in heart and soul nothing more nor less than a thorough-paced trading politician; most anxious, nevertheless, to veil that character under the reputation of a _bon vivant_, _bel esprit_, and _connoisseur_. To these pretensions, since the last audit-day had given him a glimpse of his beautiful property at Hornscliff, he had added an eager desire to be thought an enthusiast in the picturesque. He had, in imitation of some of his acquaintance, a service of china painted with views of the romantic environs of his place: the beauties which the plates and dishes thus displayed, were, during the season, the constant theme of his conversation, coupled with pressing invitations to his various acquaintance, that as his boasted property was upon the coast, they would make Hornscliff Abbey their sojourning place during the ensuing summer.

This many of them seemed nothing loth to do, particularly as they ascertained that the other _artiste_, whose labours, in their opinion, no less profitably adorned the plates and dishes, was to continue his successful attempts to eclipse the performance of the painter.

“What a beautiful place it must be!” said Lady Madelina Manfred to her neighbour, young Lord Castleton, as she pensively dropped her beautiful eyes on her plate, and continued in a sentimental tone, “I hope that you are as passionately fond of the sea as I am. How sublime its eternal sameness! How grand its boundless limits! Oh, I could look on it for ever!” she added, as she completely covered the German ocean with half a spoonful of bread sauce. “Shall we adjourn there at the end of the season?” continued the lady, with a peculiar emphasis on that comprehensive monosyllable _we_.

It was, indeed, to establish such an identity of interest between her and young Lord Castleton, as would give her a common property in the use of the first person plural, that she had been labouring all through the season. Lady Madelina Manfred was born a fool, but had through life cultivated that species of cunning which fools so often display in the pursuit of an object, if they have one. The object which she had been--I will not say for how many years, successfully pursuing, was admiration. To be sure, nature had assisted her with a pair of eyes which looked as if they could not but mean something, and a voice, whose seductive tones could give a charm even to folly. Her husband was one of those good, easy men, who seem as if only born to give their wives a name, inasmuch as their own is never by any chance heard after they have once accomplished that purpose. Seasons had rolled on; and if Lady Madelina Manfred’s eye had lost some of its brilliancy, her complexion some of its bloom, and her form some of its freshness, there were still many who were wilfully blind to such changes. As Lord Castleton will, in the course of these pages, have much to say for himself, it is unnecessary to say any more for him at present, than that he was but just nineteen; and whatever opinion might then be entertained of the _liaison_ lately formed between him and Lady Madelina, it was no scandal, when gossips said that there _was a time_ when she had held him in her arms.

To the attractions of the invitation to Hornscliff Abbey, often urged by Sir North, and so sweetly echoed by Lady Madelina, Lord Castleton was not then in a frame of mind to be insensible, particularly as, in addition to all other reasons for accepting it, his guardians were very anxious that he should _not_; and he therefore longed to show he was his own master, by putting himself completely at the disposal of Sir North and Lady Madelina, who had both the most deliberate designs, the one personal, the other political, upon his future independence.

To Hornscliff Abbey, therefore, he transported himself, as soon as he found that the waiters at the clubs monopolized the newspapers, and sauntering hackney-coachmen elbowed him as they lounged along the foot-pavement.

Lord Castleton was not by nature at all that sort of being which the acquired habits of the last few months had made him appear, to all who had never known him before. The parting jolt of his carriage moving off the London pavement, seemed to shake from his nature much of that affectation with which the season had encrusted it; and the first breath of pure country air, as he cleared the last Cockney villa, seemed to revive in their springy freshness, many of those early feelings and tastes, which, however faded for a time, can at nineteen hardly be irrecoverably seared and withered.

As he approached his destination, his spirit seemed to expand with the bolder features of the mountain-scenery by which he found himself surrounded. Though within the immediate limits of Sir North’s domain, the effect was almost ludicrous of the attempts which had evidently been hastily and recently made to cripple and confine the bold and gigantic shapes which nature here displayed, in the scanty and servile livery of a dress place. The contrasts thus produced were quite comical. Rugged rocks were encircled by invisible railings; cast-iron bridges swung across the wildest glens; Chinese pagodas rose out of mountain heather; gilt wire aviaries were dotted about in solitudes, where eagles might have stooped, or black game brooded; and Thames wherries were moored by silken cords along the banks of the shallow, but rapid torrent, which rushed over a rocky bed down to the sea.

At the Abbey itself, these contradictions were more various and more numerous, though perhaps not more striking. It requires nothing else but an unlimited command of money to transport, in an incredibly short space of time, all the contents of a London upholsterer’s shop to the remotest and most uncivilized corner of the kingdom; and due activity had been shown in attending to Sir North’s order, that Hornscliff Abbey should, without delay, be furnished from cellar to attic. The building itself, situated in one of those snugly-sheltered, but romantic glens, where in former times the monks had generally the good taste to fix, remained one of the best preserved and most perfect specimens of the abbey-gothic style of architecture: it was not to be expected that any furniture, thus hastily huddled together, should be in perfect keeping with the walls by which it was surrounded; less care was therefore taken that one part should tally with the rest, and articles of every description were crammed into all the rooms, with the same ill-assorted propinquity in which they stood in the warehouses, whence they had been removed wholesale.

But neither French paper on cedar panels, nor fragile wherries on mountain torrents, seemed so much misplaced, as did some of the company whom Sir North had collected to witness his installation as a country gentleman. Many men, whose utmost previous pedestrian feat had been daily gliding from their offices along the smooth flags of Parliament-street to make a House, and ladies, who thought it an exertion to step from their carriage across a broad _trottoir_ on a morning visit, were now expected to thread tangled brakes, and to climb over rugged rocks, in search of the picturesque.

Sir North was determined, however, to play what is called the whole game; and the very day after the arrival of Lord Castleton, had been fixed on for a distant excursion, to a romantic bay on the coast; the beauties of which had been much vaunted by the Rev. Mr. Turner, the picturesque-loving Rector of the adjoining parish; who, upon these occasions, acted as guide, and wasted a great deal of intelligence, taste, and enthusiasm, upon parties generally both indifferent and ignorant; and took a considerable deal of useless trouble in endeavouring to cultivate a mutual spirit of good-will between the wild scenes he loved, and their present super-refined visitors, by smoothing rugged inhospitalities on one side, and endeavouring to cultivate a feeling of admiration on the other.