An English Squire. Coleridge Christabel Rose

Seyton had been the wildest of the three, and had taken orders to pay his debts by means of the family living, the revenues of which he had never fully enjoyed. He had never married, and his life – though just kept in bounds by the times in which he lived, so that he did not get tipsy in the Seyton Arms, nor openly scandalise a parish with so low a standard of right as Elderthwaite – was a thoroughly self-indulgent one. He read the service once on Sundays, and administered the Communion three times a year, while the delay and neglect of funerals, marriages, and baptisms were the scandal of every parish round. He rarely visited his flock; and yet the vicar was not wholly an unpopular man. He was good-natured, and though he drank freely and sometimes swore loudly, he had a certain amount of secular intercourse with his parishioners of a not unneighbourly kind.

      The pressure of poverty made Mr Seyton a hard landlord, and between oppression and neglect the inhabitants of the picturesque tumbledown village were a bad lot, and neither squire nor parson did much to make them better. But their vicar now and then did put before the worst offenders the consequences of an evil life in language plain enough to reach their understanding; and he had a word and a laugh for most of them.

      Mr Lester was frequently heard to inveigh against Parson Seyton’s shortcomings, and seriously, as well he might, regretted the state of Elderthwaite parish; but Mr Seyton doctored all his horses and dogs when they were ill, and was, “after all, an old neighbour and a gentleman.” He taught Cherry to catch rats, and took him out otter-hunting, and there was the oddest friendship between them, which Cherry, when a boy, had once exemplified in the following manner: —

      The Bishop had paid an unexpected visit at. Oakby, and Cheriton following in the wake, while his father and Mr Ellesmere were showing off their new schools, heard him express his intention of going on to Elderthwaite; upon which Cherry ran full speed across the fields, found Parson Seyton shooting rabbits, decidedly in shooting-costume, gave him timely warning, and, with his own hands so tidied, dusted, and furbished up the wretched old church, that its vicar, entering into the spirit of the thing, fell to with a will, astonished the lazy blind old sexton, and produced such a result as might pass muster in a necessarily lenient north-country diocese.

      Cherry then diffidently produced one of his father’s white ties which he had put in his pocket, “thinking you mightn’t have one clean,” and as the old vicar, with a shout of laughter, arrayed himself in it, he said, —

      “Ay, ay, my lad, between this and the glass of port I’ll give his lordship (he won’t better that in any parish), we’ll push through.”

      And so they did.

      Parson Seyton was a man, if an erring one; but the mischief with his young nephews was that they seemed to have no force or energy even for being naughty, and as they grew up their scrapes were all those of idle self-indulgence, save when the hereditary passion for gambling broke out in Dick, the elder of the two, as had been the case lately, causing his removal from the tutor with whom he had been placed. Like their father, they had not strong health, and they had little taste for field sports, and none for books; they lay in bed half the day, lounged about the stables, and quarrelled with each other. But then their father had nothing to do, read little but the paper, and drank a great deal more wine than was good for him.

      Their uncle had conferred on them in his time the inestimable advantage of one or two good thrashings, and had scant patience with a kind of evil to which his burly figure, jolly red face, and hearty reckless temper had never been inclined.

      Virginia had thought a good deal about her uncle, and was not unprepared to find him very far removed from the clerical ideal to which she was accustomed. Perhaps the notion of bringing a little enlightenment to so “old-fashioned” a place was neither absent nor unwelcome, as she thought of offering to teach the choir, and wondered who was feminine head of the parish.

      “I daresay Uncle James has some nice old housekeeper,” she thought, “who trots after the poor people, and takes them jelly, and perhaps teaches the children sewing. There must be a great many people here who remember mamma. I hope they will like me. It will be a much more real thing trying to be helpful here than at Littleton, where there were six people for each bit of work.”

      Virginia, finding that her brothers did not appear, began to revive her childish recollections by going over the house. It was very large and rambling, with long unused passages, with all the rooms shut up. Windows overgrown with interlacing ivy, panels from which the paint dropped at a touch, queer little turret chambers, with rickety staircases leading up to them, seemed hardly objectionable to Virginia, who liked the romance of the old forlorn house, and had not yet tried living in it. Yet it was not romantic, for Elderthwaite was not ruinous, only very dirty and out of repair; and perhaps the untidy housemaid, whom Virginia had encountered, was really more in accordance with its condition than the white lady or armed spectre that she gaily thought ought to walk those lonely passages. Her own young smiling face, and warm ruby-coloured dress, was in more startling contrast than either. So apparently thought her brother Dick as he ran up against her on the stairs.

      “Hallo, Virginia!” he exclaimed in astonished accents. “What are you doing up here?”

      “Trying to remember my way about. Don’t we keep any ghosts, Dick? I’m sure they would find these dark corners exactly suited to them.”

      “Better ask old Kitty; she’ll tell you all about them. Good-bye, I’m off,” and Dick clattered downstairs, rather to Virginia’s disappointment, for she had thought the night before that his delicate, handsome face was more prepossessing than the pale stout one of Harry who now joined her.

      “Where is Dick going?” she asked.

      “Don’t know, I’m sure,” said Harry. “Do you want to know all the old stories?”

      “Yes! can you tell me?”

      “Do you see that room there?” said Harry, with eyes that twinkled like his aunt’s; “old grandfather Seyton was an old rip, you know, if ever there was one, and he and his friends used to make such a row you heard them over at Oakby. His brother was parson then, and bless you! Uncle Jem’s a bishop to him. Well, he’d got a dozen men dining here, and they all got as drunk as owls, dead drunk every one of them, and the servants put them to bed up in this gallery. One of them was in the room next grandfather’s, that room there, and he was found dead the next morning. Fact, I assure you.”

      “What a horrid story!” said Virginia, looking shocked.

      “I’ll tell you another. Grandfather and his brother played awfully high, that’s how the avenue was cut down; and when they could get no one else they played with each other, and one night they quarrelled and seized each other by the throats, and they both would have been strangled, only grandmamma rushed in in her nightgown screaming, and parted them; but the parson had the marks on his throat for ever.”

      “Harry! you naughty boy!” exclaimed Virginia, laughing. “You are inventing all these frightful stories. I don’t believe them.”

      “They’re as true as gospel,” said Harry, looking at her bright, incredulous eyes. “There’s another about the parson – how he came through the park at sunrise. That’s not a pretty story to tell you, though.”

      “I had much rather hear something about the parson, as you call him, nowadays. Come downstairs, it’s so cold here, and answer all my questions.”

      “Oh, the parson’s a jolly old card,” said Harry, following her. “He’s just mad with Dick because he won’t hunt. He’s been in at the death at every meet round, and don’t he swear when any one rides over the dogs, that’s all!”

      Virginia began to think Elderthwaite must be very old-fashioned indeed.

      “Doesn’t Dick like hunting?” she said. “No, Dick takes after the governor. It’s cards that’ll send him to the devil, and the first Seyton he’ll be that’s not worth having, says Uncle James.”

      Harry talked in a low, solemn voice, with the same odd twinkle in his eyes, and it was very difficult to say whether it was wicked mischief, or a sort of shameless naïveté, that made him so communicative.

      Virginia