With that he turned back into the belvidere; but he could not resume his studies. He remained some minutes gazing on the prospect, till the prospect reminded him of the fields which Jackeymo was bent on his hiring, and the fields reminded him of Lenny Fairfield. He returned to the house, and in a few moments re-emerged in his out-of-door trim, with cloak and umbrella, re-lighted his pipe, and strolled towards Hazeldean village.
Meanwhile Frank, after cantering on for some distance, stopped at a cottage, and there learned that there was a short cut across the fields to Rood Hall, by which he could save nearly three miles. Frank, however, missed the short cut, and came out into the high road; a turnpike-keeper, after first taking his toll, put him back again into the short cut; and finally, he got into some green lanes, where a dilapidated finger-post directed him to Rood. Late at noon, having ridden fifteen miles in the desire to reduce ten to seven, he came suddenly upon a wild and primitive piece of ground, that seemed half chase, half common, with crazy tumbledown cottages of villanous aspect scattered about in odd nooks and corners. Idle, dirty children were making mud-pies on the road; slovenly-looking women were plaiting straw at the threshold; a large but forlorn and decayed church, that seemed to say that the generation which saw it built was more pious than the generation which now resorted to it, stood boldly and nakedly out by the roadside.
“Is this the village of Rood?” asked Frank of a stout young man breaking stones on the road—sad sign that no better labour could be found for him!
The man sullenly nodded, and continued his work. “And where’s the Hall—Mr. Leslie’s?”
The man looked up in stolid surprise, and this time touched his hat.
“Be you going there?”
“Yes, if I can find out where it is.”
“I’ll show your honour,” said the boor, alertly.
Frank reined in the pony, and the man walked by his side. Frank was much of his father’s son, despite the difference of age, and that more fastidious change of manner which characterizes each succeeding race in the progress of civilization. Despite all his Eton finery, he was familiar with peasants, and had the quick eye of one country-born as to country matters.
“You don’t seem very well off in this village, my man?” said he, knowingly.
“Noa; there be a deal of distress here in the winter time, and summer too, for that matter; and the parish ben’t much help to a single man.”
“But surely the farmers want work here as well as elsewhere?”
“‘Deed, and there ben’t much farming work here,—most o’ the parish be all wild ground loike.”
“The poor have a right of common, I suppose,” said Frank, surveying a large assortment of vagabond birds and quadrupeds.
“Yes; neighbour Timmins keeps his geese on the common, and some has a cow, and them be neighbour Jowlas’s pigs. I don’t know if there’s a right, loike; but the folks at the Hall does all they can to help us, and that ben’t much: they ben’t as rich as some folks; but,” added the peasant, proudly, “they be as good blood as any in the shire.”
“I ‘m glad to see you like them, at all events.”
“Oh, yes, I likes them well eno’; mayhap you are at school with the young gentleman?”
“Yes,” said Frank.
“Ah, I heard the clergyman say as how Master Randal was a mighty clever lad, and would get rich some day. I ‘se sure I wish he would, for a poor squire makes a poor parish. There’s the Hall, sir.”
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