A Tale of a Lonely Parish Part 3

The heir had lived abroad, and had lived in such an exceedingly eccentric manner as to give ground for a suit _de lunatico inquirendo_, brought by another heir. With the consistency of judicial purpose which characterises such proceedings the courts appeared to have decided that though the natural possessor, the eccentric individual who lived abroad, was too mad to be left in actual possession, he was not mad enough to justify actual possession in the person of the next of kin. Proceedings continued, fees were paid, a certain legal personage already mentioned came down from time to time and looked over the estate, but the matter was not finally settled until the eccentric individual died, after forty years of eccentricity, to the infinite relief and satisfaction of all parties and especially of his lawful successor Charles James Juxon now, at last, "of Billingsfield Hall, in the county of Ess.e.x, Esquire."

In due time also Mr. Juxon appeared. It was natural that he should come to see the vicar, and as it happened that he called late in the afternoon upon the day when Mrs. G.o.ddard and little Eleanor were accustomed to dine at the vicarage, he at once had an opportunity of making the acquaintance of his tenant; thus, if we except the free-thinking doctor, it will be seen that Mr. Juxon was in the course of five minutes introduced to the whole of the Billingsfield society.

He was a man inclining towards middle age, of an active and vigorous body, of a moderate intelligence and of decidedly prepossessing appearance. His features were of the strong, square type, common to men whose fathers for many generations have lived in the country. His eyes were small, blue and very bright, and to judge from the lines in his sunburned face he was a man who laughed often and heartily. He had an abundance of short brown hair, parted very far upon one side and brushed to a phenomenal smoothness, and he wore a full brown beard, cut rather short and carefully trimmed. He immediately won the heart of Mrs. Ambrose on account of his extremely neat appearance. There was no foreign blood in him, she was sure. He had large clean hands with large and polished nails. He wore very well made clothes, and he spoke like a gentleman.

The vicar, too, was at once prepossessed in his favour, and even little Eleanor, who was generally very shy before strangers, looked at him admiringly and showed little of her usual bashfulness. But Mrs. G.o.ddard seemed ill at ease and tried to keep out of the conversation as much as possible.

"There have been great rejoicings at the prospect of your arrival," said the vicar when the new-comer had been introduced to both the ladies. "I fancy that if you had let it be known that you were coming down to-day the people would have turned out to meet you at the station."

"The truth is, I rather avoid that sort of thing," said the squire, smiling. "I would rather enter upon my dominions as quietly as possible."

"It is much better for the people, too," remarked Mrs. Ambrose. "Their idea of a holiday is to do no work and have too much beer."

"I daresay that would not hurt them much," answered Mr. Juxon cheerfully.

"By the bye, I know nothing about them. I have never been here before.

My man of business wanted to come down and show me over the estate, and introduce me to the farmers and all that, but I thought it would be such a bore that I would not have him."

"There is not much to tell, really," said Mr. Ambrose. "The society of Billingsfield is all here," he added with a smile, "including one of your tenants."

"Are you my tenant?" asked Mr. Juxon pleasantly, and he looked at Mrs.

G.o.ddard.

"Yes," said she, "I have taken the cottage."

"The cottage? Excuse me, but you know I am a stranger here--what is the cottage?"

"Such a pretty place," answered Mrs. Ambrose, "just opposite the park gate. You must have seen it as you came down."

"Oh, is that it?" said the squire. "Yes, I saw it, and I wished I lived there instead of in the Hall. It looks so comfortable and small. The Hall is a perfect wilderness."

Mrs. G.o.ddard felt a sudden fear lest her new landlord should take it into his head to give her notice. She only took the cottage by the year and her present lease ended in October. The arrival of a squire in possession at the Hall was a catastrophe to which she had not looked forward. The idea troubled her. She had accidentally made Mr. Juxon's acquaintance, and she knew enough of the world to understand that in such a place he would regard her as a valuable addition to the society of the vicar and the vicar's wife. She would meet him constantly; there would be visitors at the Hall--she would have to meet them, too. Her dream of solitude was at an end. For a moment she seemed so nervous that Mr. Juxon observed her embarra.s.sment and supposed it was due to his remark about living in the cottage himself.

"Do not be afraid, Mrs. G.o.ddard," he said quickly, "I am not going to do anything so uncivil as to ask you to give up the cottage. Besides, it would be too small, you know."

"Have you any family, Mr. Juxon?" inquired Mrs. Ambrose with a severity which startled the squire. Mrs. Ambrose thought that if there was a Mrs.

Juxon, she had been unpardonably deceived. Of course Mr. Juxon should have said that he was married as soon as he entered the room.

"I have a very large family," answered the squire, and after enjoying for a moment the surprise he saw in Mrs. Ambrose's face, he added with a laugh, "I have a library of ten thousand volumes--a very large family indeed. Otherwise I have no enc.u.mbrances, thank heaven."

"You are a scholar?" asked Mr. Ambrose eagerly.

"A book fancier, only a book fancier," returned the squire modestly. "But I am very fond of the fancy."

"What is a book fancier, mamma?" asked little Eleanor in a whisper. But Mr. Juxon heard the child's question.

"If your mamma will bring you up to the Hall one of these days, Miss G.o.ddard, I will show you. A book fancier is a terrible fellow who has lots of books, and is pursued by a large evil genius telling him he must buy every book he sees, and that he will never by any possibility read half of them before he dies."

Little Eleanor stared for a moment with her great violet eyes, and then turning again to her mother, whispered in her ear.

"Mamma, he called me Miss G.o.ddard!"

"Run out and play in the garden, darling," said her mother with a smile.

But the child would not go and sat down on a stool and stared at the squire, who was immensely delighted.

"So you are going to bring all your library, Mr. Juxon?" asked the vicar returning to the charge.

"Yes--and I beg you will make any use of it you please," answered the visitor. "I have a great fondness for books and I think I have some valuable volumes. But I am no great scholar, as you are, though I read a great deal. I have always noticed that the men who acc.u.mulate great libraries do not know much, and the men who know a great deal have very few books. Now I will wager that you have not a thousand volumes in your house, Mr. Ambrose."

"Five hundred would be nearer the mark," said the vicar.

"The fewer one has the nearer one approaches to Aquinas's _h.o.m.o unius libri_," returned the squire. "You are nine thousand five hundred degrees nearer to ideal wisdom than I am."

Mr. Ambrose laughed.

"Nevertheless," he said, "you may be sure that if you give me leave to use your books, I will take advantage of the permission. It is in writing sermons that one feels the want of a good library."

"I should think it would be an awful bore to write sermons," remarked the squire with such perfect innocence that both the vicar and Mrs. G.o.ddard laughed loudly. But Mrs. Ambrose eyed Mr. Juxon with renewed severity.

"I should fancy it would be a much greater bore, as you call it, to the congregation if my husband never wrote any new ones," she said stiffly.

Whereat the squire looked rather puzzled, and coloured a little. But Mr.

Ambrose came to the rescue.

"Yes, indeed, my wife is quite right. There are no people with such terrible memories as churchwardens. They remember a sermon twenty years old. But as you say, the writing of sermons is not an easy task when a man has been at it for thirty years and more. A man begins by being enthusiastic, then his mind gets into a groove and for some time, if he happens to like the groove, he writes very well. But by and by he has written all there is to be said in the particular line he has chosen and he does not know how to choose another. That is the time when a man needs a library to help him."

"I really don't think you have reached that point, Mr. Ambrose," remarked Mrs. G.o.ddard. She admired the vicar and liked his sermons.

"You are fortunately not in the position of my churchwardens," answered Mr. Ambrose. "You have not been listening to me for thirty years."

"How long have you been my tenant, Mrs. G.o.ddard?" asked the squire.

"Nearly two years," she answered thoughtfully, and her sad eyes rested a moment upon Mr. Juxon's face with an expression he remembered. Indeed he looked at her very often and as he looked his admiration increased, so that when he rose to take his leave the predominant impression of the vicarage which remained in his mind was that of her face. Something of the same fascination took hold of him which had seized upon John Short when he caught sight of Mrs. G.o.ddard through the open door of the study, something of that unexpected interest which in Mrs. Ambrose had at first aroused a half suspicious dislike, now long forgotten.

Before the squire left he invited the whole party to come and dine with him at the Hall on the following Sat.u.r.day. He must have some kind of a house warming, he said, for he was altogether too lonely up there. Mrs.

G.o.ddard would bring Eleanor, of course; they would dine early--it would not be late for the little girl. If they all liked they could call it tea instead of dinner. Of course everything was topsy-turvy in the Hall, but they would excuse that. He hoped to establish friendly relations with his vicar and with his tenant--his fair tenant. Might he call soon and see whether there was anything that could be done to improve the cottage?

Before the day when they were all coming to dine? He would call to-morrow, then. Anything that needed doing should be done, Mrs. G.o.ddard might be sure. When the books arrived he would let Mr. Ambrose know, of course, and they would have a day together.

So he went away, leaving the impression that he was a very good-natured and agreeable man. Even Mrs. Ambrose was mollified. He had shocked her by his remark about sermon writing, but he had of course not meant it, and he appeared to mean to be very civil. It was curious to see how all severity vanished from Mrs. Ambrose's manner so soon as the stranger who aroused it was out of sight and hearing. She appeared as a formidably stern type of the British matron to the chance visitors who came to the vicarage; but they were no sooner gone than her natural temper was restored and she was kindness and geniality itself.

But Mrs. G.o.ddard was very thoughtful. She was not pleased at the fact of an addition to the Billingsfield community, and yet she liked the appearance of the squire. He had declared his intention of calling upon her on the following day, and she would be bound to receive him. She was young, she had been shut off from the world for two years, and the prospect of Mr. Juxon's acquaintance was in itself not unpleasant; but the idea that he was to be permanently established in the Hall frightened her. She had felt since she came to Billingsfield that from the very first she had put herself upon a footing of safety by telling her story to the vicar. But the vicar would, not without her permission repeat that story to Mr. Juxon. Was she herself called upon to do so? She was a very sensitive woman, and her impressionable nature had been strongly affected by what she had suffered. An almost morbid fear of seeming to make false pretences possessed her. She was more than thirty years of age, it is true, but she saw plainly enough in her gla.s.s that she was more than pa.s.sably good-looking still. There were one or two grey threads in her brown waving hair and she took no trouble to remove them; no one ever noticed them. There were one or two lines, very faint lines, in her forehead; no one ever saw them. She could hardly see them herself.

Supposing--why should she not suppose it?--supposing Mr. Juxon were to take a fancy to her, as a lone bachelor of forty and odd might easily take a fancy to a pretty woman who was his tenant and lived at his gate, what should she do? He was an honest man, and she was a conscientious woman; she could not deceive him, if it came to that. She would have to tell him the whole truth. As she thought of it, she turned pale and trembled. And yet she had liked his face, she had told him he might call at the cottage, and her woman's instinct foresaw that she was to see him often. It was not vanity which made her think that the squire might grow to like her too much. She had had experiences in her life and she knew that she was attractive; the very fear she had felt for the last two years lest she should be thrown into the society of men who might be attracted by her, increased her apprehension tenfold. She could not look forward with indifference to the expected visit, for the novelty of seeing any one besides the vicar and his wife was too great; she could not refuse to see the squire, for he would come again and again until she received him; and yet, she could not get rid of the idea that there was danger in seeing him. Call it as one may, that woman's instinct of peril is rarely at fault.

In the late twilight of the June evening Mrs. G.o.ddard and Eleanor waited home together by the broad road which led towards the park gate.

"Don't you think Mr. Juxon is very kind, mamma?" asked the child.

"Yes, darling, I have no doubt he is. It was very good of him to ask you to go to the Hall."

"And he called me Miss G.o.ddard," said Eleanor. "I wonder whether he will always call me Miss G.o.ddard."

"He did not know your name was Nellie," explained her mother.