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 still strongly suspected him of a desire to astonish her; but his last speech gave her a strange new pang, and she turned away to safer subjects.
“I suppose the Lester boys are friends of yours?”
“Well, that’s as may be. We’re such a bad lot, you see, that Bob’s never allowed to come here. There was a row once, and old Lester, a humbugging chap, just interfered. Jack’s such a confounded prig he wouldn’t touch us with a pair of tongs.”
“And Cheriton, of course, is too old for you.”
“Cherry! oh, he isn’t a bad fellow. I go over to Oakby sometimes when he’s there. But it’s a slow place, and old Lester keeps them very tight. And then he’s always humbugging after his schools and things. Writing to my father about the state of the village. As if it was his affair!” said Harry, in a tone of virtuous indignation.
“Doesn’t papa approve of education?” said Virginia.
“Bless you, he don’t trouble his head about it. Why should he? Teach a lot of poaching vagabonds to read and write!”
“But Uncle James – ”
“Oh, Uncle James,” said Harry, with a spice of mimicry, “he likes his glass of grog and his ferrets too well to put himself out of the way. By Jove, here’s Aunt Julia! I shall be off before I’m asked what has become of Dick.”
Virginia sat still where he had left her. She only half believed him, and strange to say there was something so comical in his manner that she was rather attracted by its cool sauciness. But she was frightened and perplexed. What sort of a world was this into which she had come? Those stories, even if true, happened a long time ago; Harry must be in joke about Dick, and everything was different nowadays.
It was true. The golden age,
