Читать книгу Urith: A Tale of Dartmoor - S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould - Страница 7

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The ill-assorted, discordant party pushed on as fast as possible along a road that, as it neared inhabited country, became rough and uncertain, and under a sky of diminished light, for the heather on this portion of the moor had been burnt early in the day, and hardly any of the embers remained aglow.

No combination was possible that would content all, for every one except the good-humoured Bessie had some private grudge against another, and Bessie herself was depressed by the general dissatisfaction.

Anthony Cleverdon was vexed that he had not been left to convey Urith to her home undisturbed, though he admitted to himself that for her sake the present accidental arrangement was the best. Julian Crymes, still incandescent in her anger and jealousy, was unwilling to speak to Anthony, and unwilling to allow him to leave her side to address a word to, and show attention to, Urith. When she did speak to him, it was in a taunting tone, and his answers were curt, almost to rudeness.

The temper of Fox Crymes, never smooth, was now fretted to considerable asperity; for he was smarting under the sense of rejection. He had asked for the hand of Urith, and had been refused, and he saw, or suspected that he saw, a reason for his rejection—an attachment for Anthony Cleverdon. Fox was vain and conceited, and envious of his namesake, who had superior physical powers, a finer person, and a better fortune than himself. He was not sorry that his half-sister was disappointed, for whatever might distress her, gave pleasure to him. However, the occasion of her distress on this occasion was something that wounded him as well as her.

Fox loved Urith, as far as he was capable of loving, but the jealousy he now felt was no measure of his love; like the famous Serpent's Egg, it was bred of a score of parents. It was the produce of mortified vanity, of envy of Anthony Cleverdon's superior gifts of nature and fortune, of disappointed avarice, quite as much as of rejected love.

Fox Crymes' suit for Urith was not instigated wholly by his admiration for her charms; it sprang quite as much out of his desire to obtain the small patrimony which would fall to her on her mother's decease.

Willsworthy was an ancient manor, never of great importance, and without fertility, yet not despicable in the eyes of a poor gentleman. It lay on the extreme limits of cultivated land, or rather it may be said to have occupied the debateable ground between the waste and culture. It occupied a hill that ran as a spur out of the moorland, between torrents, and seemed to be what, no doubt, it was, a portion of wilderness snatched from savagery, and hedged in. It possessed no good soil, it lay too high for wheat to ripen on it, it was destitute of these pasture meadows by the waterside, where the grass grows knee-deep, and is gold-sprinkled in spring with buttercups; it was dominated by rugged tors, and stood near the entrance of the gorge of the Tavy, where it roared and leaped, and shot as it came down into the lowlands, and with it came down the cold blasts that also roared and whirled, and beat about the lone Manor of Willsworthy.

Mrs. Malvine talked disparagingly of her farm, her brother Solomon Gibbs averred it was an estate on which to starve, and not to live. Urith accepted their verdict as final, she knew the need for money that ever prevailed in her house; and yet Fox Crymes cast greedy eyes upon the estate. He saw that it possessed capabilities that were disregarded by the widow and her brother. The manor owned considerable rights. It had the freedom of the moor, to send out upon it an unlimited number of sheep and cattle and colts; at a time when English wool was fetching a high price, and was exported to the Mediterranean, to Cadiz, to Leghorn, to Palermo, to Marseilles; this was important—it afforded exceptional opportunities of making money. There needed but the initial outlay on the stock, their keep was free. Not only so, but sheep in lowlands were, in wet seasons, afflicted with disease which slew them in great numbers, which sometimes exterminated entire flocks. But sheep on the moor were never known thus to suffer; they enjoyed perfect immunity from the many maladies which attend keeping them on cultivated land.

The climate in the West of England is so mild that it was possible to let the sheep run on the moor through the major portion of the year, only for a few months in the depth of the winter, possibly only when snow lay on the moor, was it needful to provide them with food; and the meadows of Willsworthy, though they did not produce rank grass, yet produced hay that was extraordinary sweet and nutritious, and in sufficient abundance to support a large number of sheep and cattle for the short time during which they were debarred from foraging for themselves. Anthony Crymes saw plainly enough, that if he had the management of the estate of Willsworthy he would make it a mine of gold; and that the reason why it did not now flourish was the lack of capital in the acres, and mismanagement. Anthony Crymes knew that some money would come to him from his father, not indeed much, but just sufficient for his purpose, should he acquire this property—and he was very ambitious of obtaining it.

At present, Mrs. Malvine entrusted the conduct of the farm to her brother Solomon who belied his name; he was a man without any knowledge of farming, and with no interest save in his violin, and who took delight only in good company. The farm was allowed to take its course, which was naturally a retrograde one—a relapse from former culture into pristine wilderness.

At the period of this tale, some two hundred years ago, every squire farmed, if not his entire estate, at all events a portion of it. Men of ancient pedigree, proud of their ancestral properties and mansions, of their arms and their alliances, did not disdain to ride to market and cheapen cattle.

The Civil War ruined most of the squires who had taken up arms for the King, litigation ruined others; then came in the great merchants and bought the old owners out, and established themselves in their room. They understood nothing of farming, and esteemed it despicable and unworthy of their new-fangled gentility to pursue it.

With the gall of envy bitter in his heart did Fox see the other Anthony walk alongside of Urith, and assume towards her an intimacy to which he himself had never attained. The girl had ever avoided him, had treated him with coldness tinged with ill-disguised disdain. She had not made that effort to veil her dislike which will gloss over a repulse. Fox saw another man better favoured than himself, reach at a bound a position he had laboriously tried to mount, and had failed.

Hall, or as the country-folk called it "Yall," was the house of the Cleverdons. It had belonged to the Glanville estates—had been bought by old Judge Glanville, in the reign of Elizabeth, who had founded the family. The Glanvilles had flourished for awhile, and had spread over the country-side, taking up estate after estate, and had collapsed as suddenly as they had risen. The Cleverdons had been farmers, renting Hall, and when that estate was sold old Cleverdon by some means got together sufficient money to purchase it, and since the purchase had laid out considerable sums to transform what had been a modest farmhouse into a pretentious squire's mansion.

Old Anthony was in that transitional state in which, passing from one rank of life to another, he was comfortable in neither. He was sensitive and ambitious—sensitive to slights, and ambitious to push himself and his son into a better social position than that which had been occupied by his ancestors; and, indeed, by himself in early life. The Crymes family had been connected with the Glanvilles by marriage, and now old Anthony schemed on the acquisition of another portion of the Glanville property, through the marriage of his son and heir with Julian Crymes. The old man's success had fostered his ambition. He indulged in a dream of the Cleverdons, by skilful management, assuming eventually the position once maintained by the Glanvilles.

The Civil Wars had produced vast displacement in the social strata. The old gentry were failing, and those who had taken part with neither side, but had waited on their own interests in selfish or indifferent neutrality, were rewarded by emerging, where others were falling into ruin, into ripe prosperity. After that Anthony Cleverdon, the elder, had acquired the freehold of Hall, he had become a widower, and showed no disposition to take to himself another wife. His marriage had not been a happy experience, and none had felt the disagreement in it more than Elizabeth, his eldest daughter, who, after her mother's death, had been called to manage the household. If the opinion of Magdalen Cleverdon were to be taken—the unmarried sister of Anthony, senior—who lived in a small house in Tavistock, the blame of the unhappiness of her brother's married life lay with his wife; but then the judgment of Magdalen was warped and partial. When Anthony brought home his young wife, she—Magdalen—had endeavoured to remain at the head of the house, to interfere where she could not direct, Mrs. Cleverdon had taken a very decided line, and refused all intermeddlement, and Magdalen, after a sharp struggle for supremacy, had left the house routed. Disappointment had embittered her estimate of her sister-in-law.

But there were other and more substantial grounds for her charging her sister-in-law with having rendered the marriage an unhappy one. Mrs. Anthony had been a portionless girl, the daughter of a poor parson; Margaret Penwarne might have been regarded as a suitable match socially, but pecuniarily, she was most unsuitable, especially to an ambitious and money-grasping man.

What her brother could see to admire in Margaret Penwarne, Miss Cleverdon protested she never could see—she entirely forgot that Margaret had been endowed with surpassing beauty.

Others beside Magdalen Cleverdon had marvelled at the choice of Anthony, knowing the character of the man. What could induce a man, whose main features were ambition and greed, to select as his partner one who had not a penny, nor was connected with any of the gentle families of the neighbourhood? Magdalen had not reckoned on the girl's beauty; the others who wondered had not counted on Anthony's ambition, which would exert itself in other directions than they considered. His ambition was deeply tinctured with, if it did not originate in, personal vanity. Vanity is but ambition in a fool's cap, and that of Cleverdon was well hung with bells. Because he considered himself the richest man in the neighbourhood of his class, he esteemed himself also irresistible as a wooer. He had been treated with considerable severity by his father in his early years, for the old man had been a strait Puritan, though not such an one as to risk any money for his cause, or compromise his safety for it in any way. He allowed his son no freedom, consulted his wishes in no particular, and allowed him no pocket-money. When the old man died, Anthony was left with a good deal of hoarded money, and freedom to act as he listed. His fancy was taken by Margaret Penwarne, and his vanity and ambition stimulated by the knowledge that she was already the object of the attentions of Richard Malvine, the son of a neighbouring parson, without profession and without inheritance. Richard Malvine was a handsome man, and Margaret Penwarne certainly was attached to him, but the marriage could not be thought of till Richard had a competence on which to support himself and a wife. Anthony Cleverdon entered the list against the handsomest young man in the district, but he had money and a good farm to set against good looks. He and Richard had been together at the Grammar School, and had been rivals there, Richard ever taking the lead, and on one occasion had thrashed Anthony severely. It was with eagerness that Cleverdon seized the opportunity of gratifying his malice by snatching from Malvine the girl of his heart, and it flattered his vanity to have it said of him that he had won the most beautiful girl of the district over the head of the handsomest man. Margaret struggled for some time between her affection and her ambition; the urgency of her father and mother prevailed, she cast off Malvine and accepted Cleverdon.

Anthony Cleverdon's pride was satisfied. He had gained a triumph, and was wrapped up in the sense of victory for a while, then the gloss of novelty wore off, and he began to regret his precipitancy in taking to him a wife who brought nothing into the family save good looks. The thriftiness of the father now came out in the son. He did not grudge and withhold money where he could make display, but he cut down expenses where no show was made, to the lowest stage of meanness. Margaret's father died. She thought to take her mother to live with her at Hall, but to this her husband would not consent, nor could she wring a silver coin from him wherewith to assist her mother, reduced to great poverty. This occasioned the first outbreak of domestic hostilities. Margaret was a woman of temper, and would not submit tamely to the domination of her husband. His sister Magdalen took sides against her, and fanned the embers of strife when they gave token of expiring. If Margaret had been of a meek and yielding temperament, the marriage might not have been so full of broils; her husband would have crushed her, and then ignored her. But her spirit rose against him, and stirred the discord that was only temporarily allayed. She could not shut her eyes to his infirmities, she would not condescend to flatter him. In her heart she contrasted him with the man she had loved and had betrayed; her heart never warmed to her husband; on the contrary, indifference changed into hatred. She made no scruple about showing him the state of her mind, she pitilessly unmasked his meannesses, and held them up to mockery; she scoffed at his efforts to thrust himself into a position for which he was not born; he found no more penetrating, remorseless critic of all he did, than his own wife.

Anthony Cleverdon believed, and was justified in believing, that his old rival, Richard Malvine, stood between him and domestic peace, as a shadow that blighted and engalled his relations to his wife; that, though he had triumphed formally over his rival, that rival had gained the lasting and substantial success. Anthony Cleverdon might prize himself as high as he pleased, but he could no longer blind himself to the fact, that his money bags which had won his wife for him, were unavailing to buy her affections, and secure to him the fruits of his triumph.

This consciousness stimulated his hatred of Malvine to fresh acridity, and in his meanness, he found a base satisfaction in humiliating his wife by every means in his power, and on every available opportunity.

The birth of Bessie did not serve to unite the pair, for Anthony Cleverdon had set his heart on having a son, and when, after the lapse of a considerable interval of time, the desired son arrived, it was too late to serve as a link of reconciliation. Mrs. Cleverdon died shortly after his birth, her only regret being that she had to leave her daughter, whom she loved with double passion, partly because her desolate heart naturally clung to some object, and had none other to which to attach itself, partly also because little Bessie was totally disregarded by her father.

Richard Malvine consoled himself for his disappointment by marrying Marianne Gibbs, of Willsworthy; he took her for the sake of Willsworthy, as Margaret Penwarne had taken Anthony Cleverdon for the sake of Hall. He was a feckless man, who had lived at home in the parsonage with his father, had hunted, had shot, and had never earned a penny for himself. He died, thrown from his horse, in hunting, a few years after his marriage, leaving an only child, Urith.

The death of the mother produced no alteration in the conduct of Anthony Cleverdon towards her daughter. What love he had in his heart was bestowed on his son—the heir to his name and estate.

In nature all forces are correlated. Indeed it is said that force is a pure and unique factor, and that light, heat, sound, etc., are but various manifestations or aspects of the one primal force. It would be hard to say whether old Anthony's love for his boy might not be considered as another phase of his ambition. He had never himself been a firm-built, handsome man; undersized and of mean appearance, he had felt the slight that this physical defect had entailed on him. But the young Tony was robust of constitution, burly of frame, and had inherited his mother's beauty. At Hall, from the hour of his birth, young Anthony had become a sovereign, and every one was placed beneath his footstool. Every inmate of the house laboured to spoil him, either because he was himself provocative of love, or out of a desire to curry favour with the father. He tyrannised over his sister, he was despotic with his father, he was wayward and exacting with the servants. Nothing that he did was wrong in his father's eyes; he grew up into manhood demanding of the outer world, as a right, that which was accorded to him in his home as a favour.