CHAPTER III.
Frank looked right ahead, and saw a square house that, in spite of modern
sash windows, was evidently of remote antiquity. A high conical roof; a
stack of tall quaint chimney-pots of red-baked clay (like those at Sutton
Place in Surrey) dominating over isolated vulgar smoke-conductors, of the
ignoble fashion of present times; a dilapidated groin-work, encasing
within a Tudor arch a door of the comfortable date of George III., and
the peculiarly dingy and weather-stained appearance of the small finely-
finished bricks, of which the habitation was built,--all showed the abode
of former generations adapted with tasteless irreverence to the habits of
descendants unenlightened by Pugin, or indifferent to the poetry of the
past. The house had emerged suddenly upon Frank out of the gloomy waste
land, for it was placed in a hollow, and sheltered from sight by a
disorderly group of ragged, dismal, valetudinarian fir-trees, until an
abrupt turn of the road cleared that screen, and left the desolate abode
bare to the discontented eye. Frank dismounted; the man held his pony;
and after smoothing his cravat, the smart Etonian sauntered up to the
door, and startled the solitude of the place with a loud peal from the
modern brass knocker,--a knock which instantly brought forth an
astonished starling who had built under the eaves of the gable roof, and
called up a cloud of sparrows, tomtits, and yellow-hammers, who had been
regaling themselves amongst the litter of a slovenly farmyard that lay in
full sight to the right of the house, fenced off by a primitive paintless
wooden rail. In process of time a sow, accompanied by a thriving and
inquisitive family, strolled up to the gate of the fence, and, leaning
her nose on the lower bar of the gate, contemplated the visitor with much
curiosity and some suspicion.
While Frank is still without, impatiently swingeing his white trousers
with his whip, we will steal a hurried glance towards the respective
members of the family within. Mr. Leslie, the paterfamilias, is in a
little room called his "study," to which he regularly retires every
morning after breakfast, rarely reappearing till one o'clock, which is
his unfashionable hour for dinner. In what mysterious occupations Mr.
Leslie passes those hours no one ever formed a conjecture. At the
present moment he is seated before a little rickety bureau, one leg of
which being shorter than the other is propped up by sundry old letters
and scraps of newspapers; and the bureau is open, and reveals a great
number of pigeonholes and divisions, filled with various odds and ends,
the collection of many years. In some of these compartments are bundles
of letters, very yellow, and tied in packets with faded tape; in another,
all by itself, is a fragment of plum-pudding stone, which Mr. Leslie has
picked up in his walks, and considered a rare mineral. It is neatly
labelled, "Found in Hollow Lane, May 21st, 1804, by Maunder Slugge
Leslie, Esq." The next division holds several bits of iron in the shape
of nails, fragments of horse-shoes, etc., which Mr. Leslie has also met
with in his rambles, and, according to a harmless popular superstition,
deemed it highly unlucky not to pick up, and, once picked up, no less
unlucky to throw away. Item, in the adjoining pigeon-hole, a goodly
collection of pebbles with holes in them, preserved for the same reason,
in company with a crooked sixpence; item, neatly arranged in fanciful
mosaics, several periwinkles, Blackamoor's teeth (I mean the shell so
called), and other specimens of the conchiferous ingenuity of Nature,
partly inherited from some ancestral spinster, partly amassed by Mr.
Leslie himself in a youthful excursion to the seaside. There were the
farm-bailiff's accounts, several files of bills, an old stirrup, three
sets of knee and shoe buckles which had belonged to Mr. Leslie's father,
a few seals tied together by a shoe-string, a shagreen toothpick case, a
tortoise shell magnifying-glass to read with, his eldest son's first
copybooks, his second son's ditto, his daughter's ditto, and a lock of
his wife's hair arranged in a true lover's knot, framed and glazed.
There were also a small mousetrap; a, patent corkscrew too good to be
used in common; fragments of a silver teaspoon, that had, by natural
decay, arrived at a dissolution of its parts; a small brown holland bag,
containing halfpence of various dates, as far back as Queen Anne,
accompanied by two French /sous/ and a German /silber gros/,--the which
miscellany Mr. Leslie magniloquently called "his coins," and had left in
his will as a family heirloom. There were many other curiosities of
congenial nature and equal value--/quae nunc describere longum est/.
Mr. Leslie was engaged at this time in what is termed "putting things to
rights,"--an occupation he performed with exemplary care once a week.
This was his day; and he had just counted his coins, and was slowly tying
them up again in the brown holland bag, when Frank's knock reached his
ears.
Mr. Maunder Slugge Leslie paused, shook his head as if incredulously, and
was about to resume his occupation, when he was seized with a fit of
yawning which prevented the bag being tied for full two minutes.
While such the employment of the study, let us turn to the recreations in
the drawing-room, or rather parlour. A drawing-room there was on the
first floor, with a charming look-out, not on the dreary fir-trees, but
on the romantic undulating forest-land; but the drawing-room had not been
used since the death of the last Mrs. Leslie. It was deemed too good to
sit in, except when there was company: there never being company, it was
never sat in. Indeed, now the paper was falling off the walls with the
damp, and the rats, mice, and moths--those /"edaces rerum"/--had eaten,
between them, most of the chair-bottoms and a considerable part of the
floor. Therefore, the parlour was the sole general sitting-room; and
being breakfasted in, dined, and supped in, and, after supper, smoked in
by Mr. Leslie to the accompaniment of rum-and-water, it is impossible to
deny that it had what is called "a smell,"--a comfortable, wholesome
family smell, speaking of numbers, meals, and miscellaneous social
habitation. There were two windows: one looked full on the fir-trees;
the other on the farmyard, with the pigsty closing the view. Near the
fir-tree window sat Mrs. Leslie; before her, on a high stool, was a
basket of the children's clothes that wanted mending. A work-table of
rosewood inlaid with brass, which had been a wedding-present, and was a
costly thing originally, but in that peculiar taste which is vulgarly
called "Brummagem," stood at hand: the brass had started in several
places, and occasionally made great havoc in the children's fingers and
in Mrs. Leslie's gown; in fact it was the liveliest piece of furniture in
the house, thanks to the petulant brasswork, and could not have been more
mischievous if it had been a monkey. Upon the work-table lay a housewife
and thimble, and scissors, and skeins of worsted and thread, and little
scraps of linen and cloth for patches. But Mrs. Leslie was not actually
working,--she was preparing to work; she had been preparing to work for
the last hour and a half. Upon her lap she supported a novel, by a lady
who wrote much for a former generation, under the name of "Mrs. Bridget
Blue Mantle." She had a small needle in her left hand, and a very thick
piece of thread in her right; occasionally she applied the end of the
said thread to her lips, and then--her eyes fixed on the novel--made a
blind, vacillating attack at the eye of the needle. But a camel would
have gone through it with quite as much ease. Nor did the novel alone
engage Mrs. Leslie's attention, for ever and anon she interrupted herself
to scold the children, to inquire "what o'clock it was;" to observe that
"Sarah would never suit;" and to wonder "why Mr. Leslie would not see
that the work-table was mended." Mrs. Leslie has been rather a pretty
woman. In spite of a dress at once slatternly and economical, she has
still the air of a lady,--rather too much so, the hard duties of her
situation considered. She is proud of the antiquity of her family on
both sides; her mother was of the venerable stock of the Daudlers of
Daudle Place, a race that existed before the Conquest. Indeed, one has
only to read our earliest chronicles, and to glance over some of those
long-winded moralizing poems which delighted the thanes and ealdermen of
old, in order to see that the Daudles must have been a very influential
family before William the First turned the country topsy-turvy. While
the mother's race was thus indubitably Saxon, the father's had not only
the name but the peculiar idiosyncrasy of the Normans, and went far to
establish that crotchet of the brilliant author of "Sybil; or, The Two
Nations," as to the continued distinction between the conquering and
conquered populations. Mrs. Leslie's father boasted the name of
Montfichet,--doubtless of the same kith and kin as those great barons of
Alontfichet, who once owned such broad lands and such turbulent castles.
A high-nosed, thin, nervous, excitable progeny, those same Montfydgets,
as the most troublesome Norman could pretend to be. This fusion of race
was notable to the most ordinary physiognomist in the physique and in the
morale of Mrs. Leslie. She had the speculative blue eye of the Saxon,
and the passionate high nose of the Norman; she had the musing do-
nothingness of the Daudlers, and the reckless have-at-every-thingness of
the Montfydgets. At Mrs. Leslie's feet, a little girl with her hair
about her ears (and beautiful hair it was too) was amusing herself with a
broken-nosed doll. At the far end of the room, before a high desk, sat
Frank's Eton schoolfellow, the eldest son. A minute or two before
Frank's alarum had disturbed the tranquillity of the household, he had
raised his eyes from the books on the desk to glance at a very tattered
copy of the Greek Testament, in which his brother Oliver had found a
difficulty that he came to Randal to solve. As the young Etonian's face
was turned to the light, your first impression on seeing it would have
been melancholy, but respectful, interest,--for the face had already lost
the joyous character of youth; there was a wrinkle between the brows; and
the lines that speak of fatigue were already visible under the eyes and
about the mouth; the complexion was sallow, the lips were pale. Years of
study had already sown in the delicate organization the seeds of many an
infirmity and many a pain; but if your look had rested longer on that
countenance, gradually your compassion might have given place to some
feeling uneasy and sinister,--a feeling akin to fear. There was in the
whole expression so much of cold calm force, that it belied the debility
of the frame. You saw there the evidence of a mind that was cultivated,
and you felt that in that cultivation there was something formidable.
A notable contrast to this countenance, prematurely worn and eminently
intelligent, was the round healthy face of Oliver, with slow blue eyes
fixed hard on the penetrating orbs of his brother, as if trying with
might and main to catch from them a gleam of that knowledge with which
they shone clear and frigid as a star.
At Frank's knock, Oliver's slow blue eyes sparkled into animation, and he
sprang from his brother's side. The little girl flung back the hair from
her face, and stared at her mother with a look which spoke wonder and
fright.
The young student knit his brows, and then turned wearily back to the
books on his desk.
"Dear me," cried Mrs. Leslie, "who can that possibly be? Oliver, come
from the window, sir, this instant: you will be seen! Juliet, run, ring
the bell; no, go to the head of the kitchen stairs, and call out to Jenny
'Not at home.' Not at home, on any account," repeated Mrs. Leslie,
nervously, for the Montfydget blood was now in full flow.
In another minute or so, Frank's loud boyish voice was distinctly heard
at the outer door.
Randal slightly started.
"Frank Hazeldean's voice," said he; "I should like to see him, Mother."
"See him," repeated Mrs. Leslie, in amaze; "see him! and the room in this
state!"
Randal might have replied that the room was in no worse state than usual;
but he said nothing. A slight flush came and went over his pale face;
and then he leaned his check on his hand, and compressed his lips firmly.
The outer door closed with a sullen, inhospitable jar, and a slip-shod
female servant entered with a card between her finger and thumb.
"Who is that for?--give it to me. Jenny," cried Mrs. Leslie.
But Jenny shook her head, laid the card on the desk beside Randal, and
vanished without saying a word.
"Oh, look, Randal, look up," cried Oliver, who had again rushed to the
window; "such a pretty gray pony!"
Randal did look up; nay, he went deliberately to the window, and gazed a
moment on the high-mettled pony and the well-dressed, spirited rider. In
that moment changes passed over Randal's countenance more rapidly than
clouds over the sky in a gusty day. Now envy and discontent, with the
curled lip and the gloomy scowl; now hope and proud self-esteem, with the
clearing brow and the lofty smile; and then again all became cold, firm,
and close, as he walked back to his books, seated himself resolutely, and
said, half aloud,--"Well, KNOWLEDGE IS POWER!"
