0^0^^ Se. 'M SURTEES 3uO 6V ''IZISrary cou'^^c^* Presented bv LADY CHAPMAN '/'"> «b ^/?f Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2009 with funding from Duke University Libraries http://www.archive.org/details/underwhichlord01lint Under which Lord ? First Volume NEW NOVELS. HIGH SPH^ITS. crown 8vo. DONNA QUIXOTE. 3 vols, crown 8vo. QUEEN OF THE MEADOW. Gibbon. 3 vols, crown 8vo. A NEW NOVEL. Svo. By James Payn. 3 vols. [Jicady. By Justin McCarthy. By Charles \_Decejnber. "I vols, crown By OuiDA. By Henry CHATTO & WINDUS, Piccadilly, W. CONFIDENCE 2 vols. [Shortly. James, jun. [Shortly. M'fk II' !,&>.. ' Odly the neighbour and the gentleman is recognised in this house' Under which hord ? BY E. LYNN LINTON ATTHOR OF 'tMK WORLD WELL LOST ' ' PATRICL-V KEMBALL' ETC. IN THREE VOLUMES VOL. I. WITH TWELVE ILLUSTRATIONS BY ARTHUR HOPKINS CHATTO & WINDUS, PICCADILLY 1879 All rights reserved Because we have found not yet Any way for the world to folloiu Save only that ancient way ; Whosoever forsake or forget^ Whose faith soever be hollow,, Whose hope soever grow grey Monotones : Songs before Sunrise INSCRIBED TO A. W. B. WITH GRATITUDE FOR HIS KINDNESS AND ADMIRATION FOR HIS LEARNING CONTENTS OF THE FIRST VOLUME. CHAPTER I. Crossholme Abbey II. Measuring the Ground III. The Work to be Done IV. Sister Agnes . V. The First Testimony VI. At the Vicarage . VII. The Thin End VIII. The whole Duty of Man . IX. For the sake of Consistency X. The Harvest Festival . XI. In the Sacristy XII. Defeated .... XIII. The Snare set PAGE I 24 57 74 102 123 144 174 198 219 236 266 299 VOL. I. LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS TO THE FIRST VOLUME. "Only the neighbour and the gentleman is recog- nised IN this house" . . . Frontispiece " Now, I want you to wear this for my sake and theirs" to face page 96 "I'p rather have seen them given to pigs" ,, 200 '« She sank back fainting in her father's arms" ,, 296 UNDER WHICH LORD? CHAPTER I. CROSSHOLME ABBEY, Contrary to all expectation and the father's prophecy, the marriage had turned out a success. It had looked doubtful enough when it was made, having in it almost all the elements which lead from hope to disappointment and bring bitter fruits after fragrant flowers. Unsuitability of worldly position ; that intensity of youthful passion which is so sure to cool down into a maturity of prosaic indifference; parental disapprobation, even when all active opposition was withdrawn — and parental disapprobation always carries a curse with it — yes, it was cenain to turn out ill, said the world, adding up the crooked sum diligently and seeing only sorrow as the result, as it has so often seen the like before. And if nothing else were amiss, they were too young 2 UNDER WHICH LORD? to know their own minds. Indeed this might be taken as the foundation of the whole sorry super-structure. A romantic girl of seventeen and an easy-going young officer of just twenty-one can hardly be expected to understand what is needed for solid happiness or the best development of their own natures ; and, married at that age, the chances were that they would grow apart as they grew older, and that when they came to be real man and woman they would find themselves thinking differently on ever}^ subject under heaven. And without mental sympathy, where is the true joy of home? Why the chances were greater that they should grow apart rather than together, and come to mental discord rather than to hamiony, the prophets of evil did not explain. They only said that it was so, and that the thing was certain ; and assertion to some people is as conclusive as proof. Then, the money was on the wrong side. Richard Spence, though emphatically a gentleman, had only his pay as a lieutenant in the army, while Hermione Fullerton was an heiress entitled to look among the aristocracy for her husband, had she been mse enough to wait and make use of her gifts. Young, exceptionally beautiful, amiable, wealthy — there was no CROSSHOLME ABBEY. 3 State nor place below a throne to which, in her father's estimation of chances, she might not have reasonably aspired. Had she cared to marry a Roman prince she might have chosen among the proudest ; had she been content with an English earl, she might have found one to her mind and many to her hand. Instead of either she fixed her affections on a mere nobody — a handsome, clever, well-conducted, good-tempered nobody if you like — but no more what she had the right to expect than if he had been the blacksmith or the shoemaker. So said her father in his wrath ; and his friends echoed his dis- pleasure. Being however a weak-willed man if an angry, and having always indulged her every wish, Mr. Fullerton suffered the girl to take her own way; and before she had reached her eighteenth birthday the great heiress of Crossholme Abbey was married to her penniless subaltern of nowhere, to the indignation of her other suitors and the general dissatisfaction of the county. Mr. Fullerton did what he could to neutralize the commercial disadvantages of the match by making things safe for his daughter and unpleasant for the man of her choice. Every farthing of her own fortune, inherited from her mother, was settled on herself : and though 4 UNDER WHICH LORD ? Richard had given up his profession, with its Indian appointment and contingent possibiUties, at her instance, and therefore might have reasonably expected a certain provision without being considered a fortune-hunter, yet he had not even a Hfe-interest in any part of the property ; and if his wife died before him all went to her children ; or, failing these, to her next of kin. It was submission to these terms, said Mr. Fullerton grimly, or no wife. He might choose which he would, but he had to choose one or the other. As the young fellow was sincerely in love, money or no money, and felt that his life with all its grand inheritance of thought and feeling would be in vain if Hermione did not share it, he submitted — hard as the terms were ; and gave up his profession and independence as the sacrifice that he too made for love's sake. He was not afraid that Hermione, loving and generous as she was, would ever make him regret his trust by the humili- ation which it would be in her power to inflict. He knew that he was throwing himself as a dependent on her bounty, if she liked to make it so; but he was mag- nanimous enough to rely on the magnanimity of another, and, faithful for his own part, he believed in faithfulness as probable from most— from Hermione as certain.^ CROSSHOLME ABBEY. 5 Fortunately for the young people, Mr. Fullerton died about four years after their marriage. While he lived he made life hard enough for the young fellow whose union with his daughter he never forgave, and whose sonship he never acknowledged ; and it took all Richard's sweet- ness of temper and practical philosophy to bear with patience the petty insults and galhng annoyances to which he was daily subject at the Abbey. But all things come to an end, and the elder man died just as Hermione came of age ; and even she felt, through all her natural sorrow, that the one sole danger to her happiness had been removed. The first clause in his will provided that the young people should take his own name, and be thenceforth Fullerton. He would not recognize the husband even so far as to allow his name the penultimate place. The others made Hermione his heiress, with the same pro- vision for her children or next of kin as in the marriage settlements ; all benefit being denied to Richard, save such as came to him through the fact of his marriage and consequent sharing in his wife's possessions. It was the hardest legal instrument that could be devised, and was like a blow in the young man's face from the dead. But it had just the contrary effect to 6 UNDER WHICH LORD ? that intended. Still so young — the love between them as fresh and fragrant as when they stood in the garden together on that memorable day, and Hermione, like Corisande, gave Richard a rose — the birth of their little daughter Virginia having been but an additional bond of union, and the death of the boy who came after drawing them as close by sorrow as this by joy — Hermione felt less the grateful daughter than the out- raged wife ; less the proud possessor than the reluctant heiress ; and vowed amidst tears and caresses that nothing should ever make her act on the provisions of a will so unjust as this, or accept the undeserved place of superior assigned to her. Richard was her lord, as all husbands should be to loving wives; and what she was in name he should be in fact. She placed everything unreservedly in his hands, and kept nothing for herself Her first act of mistresshood was to give her husband a power of attorney to deal with all as he would. This was the utmost that she could do, according to the will ; but both felt that, poor weak instrument as it was and revocable at pleasure, it was as firm and sure as if it had been an Act of Parliament duly signed by the sovereign. From cheques to leases all was in his hands, and she would not even learn what CROSSHOLME ABBEY. 7 he did with the land and its revenues, nor how he exer- cised the manorial rights and privileges standing in her name. She was a woman without much reasoning faculty and with no sense of property ; but with an overwhelming power of obedience and self-abnegation which made her the docile creature of the man whom she loved. And this sacrifice of her fortune, this transfer of her rights to the husband from whom they had been so jealously guarded, pleased her more than power would have done. Her reward lay in his love. Passion, romance, and mental exaltation were her life ; and in relation to the saying that human nature cannot live at high pressure, and that passion wears down into sober sense by use, she was the exception that proves the rule. She could have lived for ever at high pressure ; and her romance would never have worn itself out by use, if only it might be fed by the daily renewal of vows and caresses — the daily repetition of the sweet follies of the courting-time. What she dreaded most was the prosaic dulness of the common- place — what she most esteemed, perpetual mental ex- citement. If her husband would be always her lover living only for her, and if her marriage might remain an unending courtship, she would ask no more of God or 8 UNDER WHICH LORD? man. But she was not one mth whom duty would ever take the place of emotion, or the quiet security of home stand her in stead of the unrest of romance. If this was a weakness, it was an amiable one ; and for the first four or five years Richard met her more than half-way, and made her life, as she used to say, like one long poem. But as time went on and his love con- solidated by very habit, he became, after the manner of Englishmen in general, less assiduous than content ; less the lover than the friend ; no longer suing for something not bestowed, but holding in such inalienable security that neither doubt was possible nor prayer needed. Besides, after Mr. Fullerton's death and his appointment as his wife's irresponsible agent, he had other things to do than sitting at her feet, or she at his, while he read aloud the last new novel or the latest poem — her cheek against his knee and his hand among her golden curls. Truth to say, like all men who have anything in them, this Armida's garden which in the beginning he had found so satisfactory, so seductive, had somewhat palled on him. He wanted something beside the love without which^ however, he could scarce have lived at all. He loved his wife — no man better ; no man with more faithfulness, more trust, more devotion ; and CROSSHOLME ABBEY. 9. just in proportion to the depth, the reaHty of his affec- tion, seemed to him the value of quiet acceptance and the uselessness of incessant demonstration. The thing was a fact ; and facts when once established have ta be taken for granted. What was the good of always repeating what was so well understood ? The time for love-making had passed, and that for loving in deep and tranquil trust had come. The time too had come for graver duties and deeper studies. He must take his place among men; exercise such moral influence as his mental powers entitled him to exercise ; make up his mind on certain speculative matters which had begun to trouble him and to importune for a settlement ; and when his mind should be made up, then his action would be clear. It was the natural development of youth into manhood ; and he would not have been the fine fellow he was had he not gone through the process. Love is the first heaven of the young man ; but then comes his life as a citizen among citizens ; — passion preceding thought, unrest giving place to calmness, and pleasure lost in work and found in knowledge. But to a certain class of women this gradual develop- ment is never accepted T\ith philosophy. They would lo UNDER WHICH LORD ? keep their men always boys and never let the lover pass into the friend ; and they resent the law of nature which crystalHzes that which was once fluid and transforms into quiet certainty the love which was once so delicious in its unrest. Hermione was one of these women; and though she was too devoted to complain — having indeed nothing tangible of which to complain — she felt the nameless difference that crept by degrees into her life, and suffered as much as she had once been blessed. Where, her husband, suspecting no dissatisfaction and conscious of no want, lived in supreme content and happiness, tranquil, secure, but a little abstracted, a little pre-occupied, she began to silently eat out her heart, and to recognize that her life had a void of which she knew neither the name nor the remedy. Her husband? No woman could have one more tender in all essentials, more devoted, more faithful. If he spent long hours away from her, he had, as he said, his local duties to attend to which must be fulfilled. And she could scarcely grudge him the dry studies to which he had devoted himself, and for which she had no aptitude, though he found them more enthralHng than art or poetry or love. Biological science and eccle- siastical history? — she cared neither for cells nor pro- CROSSHOLME ABBEY. ii toplasm ; neither for the crack-brained subtleties of sectarian doctrines nor for the horrors of the Papal rule \ nor yet for philological accuracy, and whether all the words in the Bible were rightly rendered or no; — in all of which matters Richard had cast his line, hoping to fish up Truth as his reward. No, she could not share his studies ; but she had not therefore the right to interfere with them ; and though she silently resented the time given to them as time stolen from ^her, she was wise enough to keep silence, and not to let him know that she was jealous of his microscope and wished that all his books on science were burnt in the fire. On his side indeed he might argue that she had her child, who was naturally to her what his studies were to him — her little Virginia growing up in docihty and sweetness unsurpassable, and lovely enough to justify even a mother's idealizing admiration. She felt all this, if she did not put it into so many words ; and she used to ask herself— with health, fortune, a faultless husband, a sweet and interesting child, and the faculty of loving and rejoicing as fresh as when she was herself a child — how could she have a void? \\Tiat was it? Why did she feel so lonely, so bereft as she did? — for in what blessing did she fail ? 12 LNDER WHICH LORD ? She could not tell. Nevertheless, there it was ; a fact as true as the rest. She used to sigh when she read those tender bits of poetry, sang those yearning songs which once expressed her own condition, but which now seemed pictures of a land that she had lost, of a home whence she was shut out. Tears were often in her eyes as she looked at the golden sunset, or watched the changing clouds, or wondered at the mystery of the stars. She did not know what ailed her ; but there was so often that aching at her heart, as if her life were empty of some sweetness that it ought to have ! The quiet security of her very happiness oppressed her with a sense of dumbness and sleep. It was all so monotonous and commonplace — all so unexciting ! Days passed one after the other, and all exactly alike. Had she been poor she would have been forced to exert herself; forced to think and contrive and do ; as it was, there was no need for any exertion whatsoever ; and the neigh- bourhood afforded no pleasures of such brilliancy as to make them distracting and enlivening. Everything in her life was sleek and quiet and sleepy. The hours were fixed, their habits punctual. Richard gave all the morning, much of the afternoon, and often the best part of the evening, to his studies and pursuits ; and when CROSSHOLME ABBEY. 13 he wanted to amuse her told her some facts in natural history or the more recondite positive sciences, of which, not having the context, she did not understand the bearing and wondered at the importance which he assigned to them. If it were for things like those that he neglected her, she used to think, she wondered at his taste, and thought him both blind and cold. He was neither, as she knew ; but it pleased her to believe him both, that she might have cause for the small thin thread of bitter- ness which was beginning to weave itself into the golden gannent of her love. And when she looked into the glass and studied what she saw, that thin thread grew broader ; for she knew that, thirty-eight as she now was, she was as beautiful as when she was first married, even if the fashion of her beauty had changed, as needs must, wdth the passage of time. Still, if she were always lovely, Richard was no longer her lover ; and of what use her charms if he had failed to see them .? Sometimes she thought this secret pining of hers came from an unregenerate heart and the want of vital religion. True, she went to church ; but for form's sake and because it was expected of her as the duty owing to her position and to Virginia — not for spiritual need and 14 UNDER WHICH LORD ? less for spiritual comfort. She supposed that some things which she heard there were true ; but she did not realize them, and she more than half doubted the rest. In the state in which she was, religion was rather an irritation than a support, and the Bible perplexed instead of strengthening her. She did not know what in it was true, nor feel what in it was elevating. If there were such a thing as the Divine Life, the present vicar of Cross- holme, sleepy, indolent, " unawakened " old Mr. Aston, could not lead her to its knowledge ; and at home she was even farther from help or guidance. Her husband's studies had led him into the opposite camp, and he had become a pronounced free-thinker — agnostic he called himself; infidel he was called by others. He had placed science in the seat of theolog}^, and his life's endeavour now was to weaken the hold of the Christian faith on the minds of men : — not by reviling the creed and its pro- fessors, but by showing the contradictions which exist between nature and revelation, Genesis and science, by substituting knowledge for superstition, reason for faith, and history for mythology. Not to give umbrage to any one, and especially not to Mr. Aston, whose age demanded consideration if his character was unheroic, by using for his secular lectures, CROSSHOLME ABBEY. 15 with their heterodox tendencies, the schoolroom where missionary meetings and the hke were held, Richard had built just outside the gates of the Abbey park a working- man's reading-room, which he had stocked with a good library, of anti-religious character, and where he himself gave lectures and held classes, chiefly scientific and historical — whence he trusted that his audience would draw conclusions favourable to free-thought and hostile to the domination of the Church. His opposition was always good-tempered and impersonal, even when most unmistakable ; always courteous and founded on ele- mental principles, not on the practice of professors ; the opposition of a gentleman and a fair opponent; but it was as strong as if it had been brutal, and all the more telling because it was so calmly reasoned. As his studies grew in extent and deepened in character, he became more and more confessedly a free- thinker ; more and more convinced, he used to say, that modern Christianity is a string of errors founded on part falsehood, part misapprehension; — the Bible history a conglomerate of myths; — the influence of the Church the consolidation of intellectual darkness ; — that belief without proof is folly, and faith as opposed to reason the superstition of savages and children ; — that the highest i6 UNDER WHICH LORD ?