Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877. Vol XX - No. 118

Chapter III

Mr. Thorne of Brackenhill was a miserable man, who went through the world with a morbidly sensitive spot in his nature. A touch on it was torture, and unfortunately the circumstances of his daily life continually chafed it.

It was only a common form of selfishness carried to excess. "I don't want much," he would have said—truly enough, for Godfrey Thorne had never been grasping—"but let it be my own." He could not enjoy anything unless he knew that he might waste it if he liked. The highest good, fettered by any condition, was in his eyes no good at all. Brackenhill was dear to him because he could leave it to whom he would. He was seventy-six, and had spent his life in improving his estate, but he prized nothing about it so much as his right to give the result of his life's work to the first beggar he might chance to meet. It would have made him still happier if he could have had the power of destroying Brackenhill utterly, of wiping it off the face of the earth, in case he could not find an heir who pleased him, for it troubled him to think that some man must have the land after him, whether he wished it or not.

Godfrey Hammond had declared that no one could conceive the exquisite torments Mr. Thorne would endure if he owned an estate with a magnificent ruin on it, some unique and priceless relic of bygone days. "He should be able to see it from his window," said Hammond, "and it should be his, as far as law could make it, while he should be continually conscious that in the eyes of all cultivated men he was merely its guardian. People should write to the newspapers asserting boldly that the public had a right of free access to it, and old gentlemen with antiquarian tastes should find a little gap in a fence, and pen indignant appeals to the editor demanding to be immediately informed whether a monument of national, nay, of world-wide interest, ought not, for the sake of the public, to be more carefully protected from injury. Local archæological societies should come and read papers in it. Clergymen, wishing to combine a little instruction with the pleasures of a school-feast, should arrive with van-loads of cheering boys and girls, a troop of ardent teachers, many calico flags and a brass band. Artists, keen-eyed and picturesque, each with his good-humored air of possessing the place so much more truly than any mere country gentleman ever could, should come to gaze and sketch. Meanwhile, Thorne should remark about twice a week that of course he could pull the whole thing down if he liked; to which every one should smile assent, recognizing an evident but utterly unimportant fact. And then," said Hammond solemnly, "when all the archæologists were eating and drinking, enjoying their own theories and picking holes in their neighbors' discoveries, the bolt should fall in the shape of an announcement that Mr. Thorne had sold the stones as building materials, and that the workmen had already removed the most ancient and interesting part. After which he would go slowly to his grave, dying of his triumph and a broken heart."

It was all quite true, though Godfrey Hammond might have added that all the execrations of the antiquarians would hardly have added to the burden of shame and remorse of which Mr. Thorne would have felt the weight before the last cart carried away its load from the trampled sward; that he would have regretted his decision every hour of his life; and if by a miracle he could have found himself once more with the fatal deed undone, he would have rejoiced for a moment, suffered his old torment for a little while, and then proceeded to do it again.

For a great part of Mr. Thorne's life the boast of his power over Brackenhill had been on his lips more frequently than the twice a week of which Hammond talked. Of late years it had not been so. He had used his power to assure himself that he possessed it, and gradually awoke to the consciousness that he had lost it by thus using it.

He had had three sons—Maurice, a fine, high-spirited young fellow; Alfred, good-looking and good-tempered, but indolent; James, a slim, sickly lad, who inherited from his mother a fatal tendency to decline. She died while he was a baby, and he was petted from that time forward. Godfrey Thorne was well satisfied with Maurice, but was always at war with his second son, who would not take orders and hold the family living. They argued the matter till it was too late for Alfred to go into the army, the only career for which he had expressed any desire; and then Mr. Thorne found himself face to face with a gentle and lazy resistance which threatened to be a match for his own hard obstinacy. Alfred didn't mind being a farmer. But his father was troubled about the necessary capital, and doubted his son's success: "You will go on after a fashion for a few years, and then all the money will have slipped through your fingers. You know nothing of farming."—"That's true," said Alfred.—"And you are much too lazy to learn."—"That's very likely," said the young man. So Mr. Thorne looked about him for some more eligible opening for his troublesome son; and Alfred meanwhile, with his handsome face and honest smile, was busy making love to Sarah Percival, the rector's daughter.

The little idyl was the talk of the villagers before it came to the squire's ears. When he questioned Alfred the young man confessed it readily enough. He loved Miss Percival, and she didn't mind waiting. Mr. Thorne was not altogether displeased, for, though his intercourse with the rector was rather stormy and uncertain, they happened to be on tolerable terms just then. Sarah was an only child, and would have a little money at Mr. Percival's death, and Alfred was much more submissive and anxious to please his father under these altered circumstances. The young people were not to consider themselves engaged, Miss Percival being only eighteen and Alfred one-and-twenty. But if they were of the same mind later, when the latter should be in a position to marry, it was understood that neither his father nor Mr. Percival would oppose it.

Unluckily, a parochial question arose near Christmas-time, and the squire and the clergyman took different views of it. Mr. Thorne went about the house with brows like a thunder-cloud, and never opened his lips to Alfred except to abuse the rector. "You'll have to choose between old Percival and me one of these days," he said more than once. "You'd better be making up your mind: it will save time." Alfred was silent. When the strife was at its height Maurice was drowned while skating.

The poor fellow was hardly in his grave before the storm burst on Alfred's head. If Mr. Thorne had barely tolerated the idea of his son's marriage before, he found it utterly intolerable now; and the decree went forth that this boyish folly about Miss Percival must be forgotten. "I can do as I like with Brackenhill," said Mr. Thorne: "remember that." Alfred did remember it. He had heard it often enough, and his father's angry eyes gave it an added emphasis. "I can make an eldest son of James if I like, and I will if you defy me." But nothing could shake Alfred. He had given his word to Miss Percival, and they loved each other, and he meant to keep to it. "You don't believe me," his father thundered: "you think I may talk, but that I sha'n't do it. Take care!" There was no trace of any conflict on Alfred's face: he looked a little dull and heavy under the bitter storm, but that was all. "I can't help it, sir," he said, tracing the pattern of the carpet with the toe of his boot as he stood: "you will do as you please, I suppose."—"I suppose I shall," said Mr. Thorne.

So Alfred was disinherited. "As well for this as anything else," he said: "we couldn't have got on long." He had an allowance from his father, who declined to take any further interest in his plans. He went abroad for a couple of years—a test which Mr. Percival imposed upon him that nothing might be done in haste—and came back, faithful as he went, to ask for the consent which could no longer be denied. Mr. Percival had been presented to a living at some distance from Brackenhill, and, as there was a good deal of glebe-land attached to it, Alfred was able to try his hand at farming. He did so, with a little loss if no gain, and they made one household at the rectory.

He never seemed to regret Brackenhill. Sarah—dark, ardent, intense, a strange contrast to his own fair, handsome face and placid indolence—absorbed all his love. Her eager nature could not rouse him to battle with the world, but it woke a passionate devotion in his heart: they were everything to each other, and were content. When their boy was born the rector would have named him Godfrey: at any rate, he urged them to call him by one of the old family names which had been borne by bygone generations of Thornes. But the young husband was resolved that the child should be Percival, and Percival only. "Why prejudice his grandfather against him for a mere name?" the rector persisted. But Alfred shook his head. "Percival means all the happiness of my life," he said. So the child received his name, and the fact was announced to Mr. Thorne in a letter brief and to the point like a challenge.

Communications with Brackenhill were few and far between. From the local papers Alfred heard of the rejoicings when James came of age, quickly followed by the announcement that he had gone abroad for the winter. Then he was at home again, and going to marry Miss Harriet Benham; whereat Alfred smiled a little. "The governor must have put his pride in his pocket: old Benham made his money out of composite candles, then retired, and has gas all over the house for fear they should be mentioned. Harry, as we used to call her, is the youngest of them—she must be eight or nine and twenty; fine girl, hunts—tried it on with poor Maurice ages ago. I should think she was about half as big again as Jim. Well, yes, perhaps I am exaggerating a little. How charmed my father must be!—only, of course, anything to please Jim, and it's a fine thing to have him married and settled."

Alfred read his father's feelings correctly enough, but Mr. Thorne was almost repaid for all he had endured when, in his turn, he was able to write and announce the birth of a boy for whom the bells had been set ringing as the heir of Brackenhill. Jim, with his sick fancies and querulous conceit, Mrs. James Thorne, with her coarsely-colored splendor and imperious ways, faded into the background now that Horace's little star had risen.

The rest may be briefly told. Horace had a little sister who died, and he himself could hardly remember his father. His time was divided between his mother's house at Brighton and Brackenhill. He grew slim and tall and handsome—a Thorne, and not a Benham, as his grandfather did not fail to note. He was delicate. "But he will outgrow that," said Mrs. Middleton, and loved him the better for the care she had to take of him. It was principally for his sake that she was there. She was a widow and had no children of her own, but when, at her brother's request, she came to Brackenhill to make more of a home for the school-boy, she brought with her a tiny girl, little Sissy Langton, a great-niece of her husband's.

Meanwhile, the other boy grew up in his quiet home, but death came there as well as to Brackenhill, and seemed to take the mainspring of the household in taking Sarah Thorne. Her father pined for her, and had no pleasure in life except in her child. Even when the old man was growing feeble, and it was manifest to all but the boy that he would not long be parted from his daughter, it was a sombre but not an unhappy home for the child. Something in the shadow which overhung it, in his grandfather's weakness and his father's silence, made him grave and reserved, but he always felt that he was loved. No playful home-name was ever bestowed on the little lad, but it did not matter, for when spoken by Alfred Thorne no name could be so tender as Percival.

The rector's death when the boy was fifteen broke up the only real home he was destined to know, for Alfred was unable to settle down in any place for any length of time. While his wife and her father were alive their influence over him was supreme: he was like the needle drawn aside by a powerful attraction. But now that they were gone his thoughts oscillated a while, and then reverted to Brackenhill. For himself he was content—he had made his choice long ago—but little by little the idea grew up in his mind that Percival was wronged, for he, at least, was guiltless. He secretly regretted the defiant fashion in which his boy had been christened, and made a feeble attempt to prove that, after all, Percy was an old family name. He succeeded in establishing that a "P. Thorne" had once existed, who of course might have been Percy, as he might have been Peter or Paul; and he tried to call his son Percy in memory of this doubtful namesake. But the three syllables were as dear to the boy as the white flag to a Bourbon. They identified him with the mother he dimly remembered, and proclaimed to all the world (that is, to his grandfather) that for her sake he counted Brackenhill well lost. He triumphed, and his father was proud to be defeated. To this day he invariably writes himself "Percival Thorne."

Alfred, however, had his way on a more important point, and educated his son for no profession, because the head of the house needed none. Percival acquiesced willingly enough, without a thought of the implied protest. He was indolent, and had little or no ambition. Since daily bread—and, luckily, rather more than daily bread, for he was no ascetic—was secured to him, since books were many and the world was wide, he asked nothing better than to study them. He grew up grave, dreamy and somewhat solitary in his ways. He seemed to have inherited something of the rector's self-possessed and rather formal courtesy, and at twenty he looked older than his age, though his face was as smooth as a girl's.

He was not twenty-one, when his father died suddenly of fever. When the news reached Brackenhill the old squire was singularly affected by it. He had been accustomed to contrast Alfred's vigorous prime with his own advanced age, Percival's unbroken health with Horace's ailing boyhood, and to think mournfully of the probability that the old manor-house must go to a stranger unless he could humble himself to the son who had defied him. But, old as he was, he had outlived his son, and he was dismayed at his isolation. A whole generation was dead and gone, and the two lads, who were all that remained of the Thornes of Brackenhill, stood far away, as though he stretched his trembling hands to them across their fathers' graves. He expressly requested that Percival should come and see him, and the young man presented himself in his deep mourning. Sissy, just sixteen, looked upon him as a sombre hero of romance, and within two days of his coming Mrs. Middleton announced that her brother was "perfectly infatuated about that boy."

The evening of his arrival he stood with his grandfather on the terrace looking at the wide prospect which lay at their feet—ample fields and meadows, and the silvery flash of water through the willows. Then he turned, folded his arms and coolly surveyed Brackenhill itself from end to end. Mr. Thorne watched him, expecting some word, but when none came, and Percival's eyes wandered upward to the soft evening sky, where a glimmering star hung like a lamp above the old gray manor-house, he said, with some amusement, "Well, and what is your opinion?"

Percival came down to earth with the greatest promptitude: "It's a beautiful place. I'm glad to see it. I like looking over old houses."

"Like looking over old houses? As if it were merely a show! Isn't Brackenhill more to you than any other old house?" demanded Mr. Thorne.

"Oh, well, perhaps," Percival allowed: "I have heard my father talk of it of course."

"Come, come! You are not such an outsider as all that," said his grandfather.

The young man smiled a little, but did not speak.

"You don't forget you are a Thorne, I hope?" the other went on. "There are none too many of us."

"No," said Percival. "I like the old house, and I can assure you, sir, that I am proud of both my names."

"Well, well! very good names. But shouldn't you call a man a lucky fellow if he owned a place like this?"

"My opinion wouldn't be half as well worth having as yours," was the reply. "What do you call yourself, sir?"

"Do you think I own this place?" Mr. Thorne inquired.

"Why, yes—I always supposed so. Don't you?"

"No, I don't!" The answer was almost a snarl. "I'm bailiff, overlooker, anything you like to call it. My master is at Oxford, at Christ Church. He won't read, and he can't row, so he is devoting his time to learning how to get rid of the money I am to save up for him. I own Brackenhill?" He faced abruptly round. "All that timber is mine, they say; and if I cut down a stick your aunt Middleton is at me: 'Think of Horace.' The place was mortgaged when I came into it. I pinched and saved—I freed it—for Horace. Why shouldn't I mortgage it again if I please—raise money and live royally till my time comes, eh? They'd all be at me, dinning 'Horace! Horace!' and my duty to those who come after me, into my ears. Look at the drawing-room furniture!"

"The prettiest old room I ever saw," said Percival.

"Ah! you're right there. But my sister doesn't think so. It's shabby, she would tell you. But does she ask me to furnish it for her? No, no, it isn't worth while: mine is such a short lease. When Horace marries and comes into his inheritance, of course it must be done up. It would be a pity to waste money about it now, especially as there's a bit of land lies between two farms of mine, and if I don't go spending a lot in follies, I can buy it. Think of that! I can buy it—for Horace!"

Percival was guarded in his replies to this and similar outbursts; and Mrs. Middleton, seeing that he showed no disposition to toady his grandfather or to depreciate Horace, told Godfrey Hammond that, though her brother was so absurd about him, she thought he seemed a good sort of young man, after all. "Time will show," was the answer. Now, this was depressing, for Godfrey had established a reputation for great sagacity.

Abbeys And Castles

It is a frequent reflection with the stranger in England that the beauty and interest of the country are private property, and that to get access to them a key is always needed. The key may be large or it may be small, but it must be something that will turn a lock. Of the things that charm an American observer in the land of parks and castles, I can think of very few that do not come under this definition of private property. When I have mentioned the hedgerows and the churches I have almost exhausted the list. You can enjoy a hedgerow from the public road, and I suppose that even if you are a Dissenter you may enjoy a Norman abbey from the street. If, therefore, one talks of anything beautiful in England, the presumption will be that it is private; and indeed such is my admiration of this delightful country that I feel inclined to say that if one talks of anything private, the presumption will be that it is beautiful. Here is something of a dilemma. If the observer permits himself to commemorate charming impressions, he is in danger of giving to the world the fruits of friendship and hospitality. If, on the other hand, he withholds his impression, he lets something admirable slip away without having marked its passage, without having done it proper honor. He ends by mingling discretion with enthusiasm, and he says to himself that it is not treating a country ill to talk of its treasures when the mention of each connotes, as the metaphysicians say, an act of private courtesy.

The impressions I have in mind in writing these lines were gathered in a part of England of which I had not before had even a traveller's glimpse; but as to which, after a day or two, I found myself quite ready to agree with a friend who lived there, and who knew and loved it well, when he said very frankly, "I do believe it is the loveliest corner of the world!" This was not a dictum to quarrel about, and while I was in the neighborhood I was quite of his mind. I felt that it would not take a great deal to make me care for it very much as he cared for it: I had a glimpse of the peculiar tenderness with which such a country may be loved. It is a capital example of the great characteristic of English scenery—of what I should call density of feature. There are no waste details; everything in the landscape is something particular—has a history, has played a part, has a value to the imagination. It is a country of hills and blue undulations, and, though none of the hills are high, all of them are interesting—interesting as such things are interesting in an old, small country, by a kind of exquisite modulation, something suggesting that outline and coloring have been retouched and refined, as it were, by the hand of Time. Independently of its castles and abbeys, the definite relics of the ages, such a landscape seems historic. It has human relations, and it is intimately conscious of them. That little speech about the loveliness of his county, or of his own part of his county, was made to me by my companion as we walked up the grassy slope of a hill, or "edge," as it is called there, from the crests of which we seemed in an instant to look away over half of England. Certainly I should have grown fond of such a view as that. The "edge" plunged down suddenly, as if the corresponding slope on the other side had been excavated, and one might follow the long ridge for the space of an afternoon's walk with this vast, charming prospect before one's eyes. Looking across an English county into the next but one is a very pretty entertainment, the county seeming by no means so small as might be supposed. How can a county seem small in which, from such a vantage-point as the one I speak of, you see, as a darker patch across the lighter green, the twelve thousand acres of Lord So-and-So's woods? Beyond these are blue undulations of varying tone, and then another bosky-looking spot, which you learn to be about the same amount of manorial umbrage belonging to Lord Some-One-Else. And to right and left of these, in shaded stretches, lie other estates of equal consequence. It was therefore not the smallness but the vastness of the country that struck me, and I was not at all in the mood of a certain American who once, in my hearing, burst out laughing at an English answer to my inquiry as to whether my interlocutor often saw Mr. B——. "Oh no," the answer had been, "we never see him: he lives away off in the West." It was the western part of his county our friend meant, and my American humorist found matter for infinite jest in his meaning. "I should as soon think," he declared, "of saying my western hand and my eastern."

I do not think, even, that my disposition to form a sentimental attachment for this delightful region—for its hillside prospect of old red farmhouses lighting up the dark-green bottoms, of gables and chimney-tops of great houses peeping above miles of woodland, and, in the vague places of the horizon, of far-away towns and sites that one had always heard of—was conditioned upon having "property" in the neighborhood, so that the little girls in the town should suddenly drop courtesies to me in the street; though that too would certainly have been pleasant. At the same time, having a little property would without doubt have made the sentiment stronger. People who wander about the world without money have their dreams—dreams of what they would buy if their pockets were lined. These dreams are very apt to have relation to a good estate in any neighborhood in which the wanderer happens to find himself. For myself, I have never been in a country so unattractive that it did not seem a peculiar felicity to be able to purchase the most considerable house it contained. In New England and other portions of the United States I have coveted the large mansion with Greek columns and a pediment of white-painted timber: in Italy I should have made proposals for the yellow-walled villa with statues on the roof. In England I have rarely gone so far as to fancy myself in treaty for the best house, but, short of this, I have never failed to feel that ideal comfort for the time would be to call one's self owner of what is denominated here a "good" place. Is it that English country life seems to possess such irresistible charms? I have not always thought so: I have sometimes suspected that it is dull; I have remembered that there is a whole literature devoted to exposing it (that of the English novel "of manners"), and that its recorded occupations and conversations occasionally strike one as lacking a certain desirable salt. But, for all that, when, in the region to which I allude, my companion spoke of this and that place being likely sooner or later to come to the hammer, it seemed as if nothing could be more delightful than to see the hammer fall upon an offer made by one's self. And this in spite of the fact that the owners of the places in question would part with them because they could no longer afford to keep them up. I found it interesting to learn, in so far as was possible, what sort of income was implied by the possession of country-seats such as are not in America a concomitant of even the largest fortunes; and if in these interrogations I sometimes heard of a very long rent-roll, on the other hand I was frequently surprised at the slenderness of the resources attributed to people living in the depths of an oak-studded park. Then, certainly, English country life seemed to me the most advantageous thing in the world: on these terms one would gladly put up with a little dulness. When I reflected that there were thousands of people dwelling in brownstone houses in numbered streets in New York who were at as great a cost to make a reputable appearance in those harsh conditions as some of the occupants of the grassy estates of which I had a glimpse, the privileges of the latter class appeared delightfully cheap.