Page:Once a Week, Series 1, Volume II Dec 1859 to June 1860.pdf/547

534 they were in the year of Grace 1822; but I fear that that most respectable clubbist would stand a poor chance in my regard against sweet Bessie Primrose of Almond Villa, if that old snap-dragon of an  would only allow me to offer to the young lady the assurances of my respectful homage.

Let English mothers and English wives condescend to take a few lessons from these much-abused institutions, and make the Home more pleasant than the Club, a result easily in their power,—and I should be sorry for poor old Copperdam. How he would talk to the waiters! Never mind, Bessie dear; we’ll ask poor C. up occasionally to Almond Villa, and give him something much nicer and less extravagant than a Baker Banquet; and—who knows?—Aunt Jane might “go off” yet. 2em



often fancied that nature meant me for a painter, not because I have a taste for pictures, or the smallest talent in the way of design, but because the chief epochs of my life have always presented themselves to me through a halo of colour. There is, so to speak, a streak of a different shade dashed across each of my reminiscences. As it happens, my calling is that of a conveyancer, and my daily habits have been for five and twenty years moulded by contact with the driest, dustiest, and most prosaic details; but, for all that, the past still continues to present itself to me under the guise of a series of pictures. A quarter of a century of attendant terms, and contingent remainders; of long drawn out titles and undiscoverable fee-simples, has failed to cure me of this apparently dreamy tendency which I have come at last to recognise as an inherent feature of my existence. Everything is colour to me—blue or black or green or azure; and yet I would not have my readers suppose me a spooney follow. I never was in love after the fashion with which men love in books. I am married, and I love my wife; but I wedded her more because she was a desirable than a specially attractive person, and more because I thought she would make me a good helpmeet, than on any score of personal loveliness. My marriage and its concomitant circumstances are about the only part of my life which is to me devoid of colour. I can afford to look back upon them with little of interest. Their results have been so welded into the progress of my daily life, that I care not to dream over them, or at all events I never do. It is widely different with other portions of my experiences. I recall often enough, against my own will, too, the day when Rhoda Gray committed suicide down at Purley, and her midnight funeral in the old churchyard; for there they buried her, though no one read a line or said a prayer, aloud, at least, over her. The cold, dark moaning night, the torches flaring thickly and smokily through the damp mist, and lighting ever and anon some village face; the muffled tread of many—all come back to me through a dark jumble of black and red, and not quite red either, say rather something thick, foggy, and lurid, like the splashes of colour in Rembrandt’s pictures, terribly dark, and yet terribly visible. So again of the day after. It was Christmas time: an iron frost had bound up the earth. The very grass was black; its blades stood stiff and dingy out of the worm~hills. Nature seemed dead. A few murky crows flapped their presence over the fields; but life had to all appearance died out, or was to be found only in the red berries which decorated the tavern windows, or the few straggling children casting pebbles on the ice of the village pond. But I must not dwell on this. Some day perhaps I may have occasion to recount that sad story. Other purpose is before me now. I must say a word about a leaden tableau in my life, a certain slate-coloured chapter of my worldly experiences, which in my memory seems to bring back no sunlight, no gleam at all, but the horizon of a morning portending probable rain, and yet not rain positively: one of those skies which close upon a beholder, and make him fancy that it will never be fine again.

Such a sky seems to hang over my reminiscences of Yssbrooke. I have tried but I cannot call to mind, that during my visits there, though they extended over some few years, the sun ever shone. I was happy there, I believe; but the remains left by them recall no joy and certainly no sunlight. No cloud encumbers their horizon until the time of which I am about to speak: but no light, save that of a doubtful sky illumines them; a polar atmosphere, in short, devoid of a sensation of frost.

My parents were kept by the times in India: I was put to school at Harrow. At sixteen I spent my holidays at Yssbrooke. Yssbrooke belonged to my mother’s brother; at least he occupied it, and his executors at his death disposed of it. There was a story about a trust, but that is neither here nor there. My vacations were, in most cases, passed there. It was a dull, odd, profitless sort of place, with gables of any age, that never seemed to grow older; large unthinned woods, and farmyards that never appeared either to thrive or to fall into decay; cattle grazing with a hopeless aspect on cold looking pasture land, and thin crops of grain, which would have driven a farmer of these go-a-head times to suicide or the bottle. The whole establishment seemed but an abortive display of prosperity, which left its cold shade upon every person and thing brought within its compass; not that we were any of us habitually miserable, that I remember. The society at Yssbrooke was undoubtedly of a grave kind, but I do not think that it was distasteful to me on that account. I carried with me such schoolboy elasticity as was consistent with my temperament. It was not much, perhaps, for I was ordinarily a dreamy boy, and may have been more in my element in my uncle’s domain than would most of my schoolfellows; but, on the whole, I was happy there. For was it not home to me, and at home who is not happy? My uncle had a daughter. She was some six years my senior; which circumstance, combined with a certain native superiority which made me feel myself immeasurably her inferior,