CHAPTER III.
BRINGS US TO THE HALL FARM, WHERE THE READER MAKES THE ACQUAINTANCE OF
THE SOMERTONS AND A CERTAIN LANDSCAPE PAINTER.
It lay on the western border of the park, and comprised about eight hundred acres of arable and pasture land.
The buildings were red brick, with white dressed corner stones and facings. There were model cow-houses, cattle-sheds, piggeries, barns, corn-lofts, and poultry pens, that would have satisfied even Mr. Mechi’s critical eye. An agricultural writer of considerable repute had, in truth, written an essay upon these model buildings, and it had been printed in an important agricultural and scientific review; for there were no better arranged buildings in the country.
Mr. Tallant, you know, would have the best of everything, and his bailiff encouraged him in having all the best things at his farm. There were carts from Crosskill, ploughs from Ransomes, threshing-machines from Clayton and Shuttleworth, reapers from America, clod-crushers, drills, rakes, hoes, harrows, and other implements from Banbury, Lincoln, Beverley, Worcester, Yorkshire, and Bristol.
Mr. Tallant had built these model farm-buildings himself. The Hall Farm had been an especial feature of the estate when he purchased it, but the buildings did not come up to his notions, and the result is before us.
Mr. Tallant brought all his commercial experience to bear upon the cultivation and management of the land. His bailiff, Mr. Luke Somerton, had been a Lincolnshire lord’s right hand in the management of a great farm on the Wolds, and he was the very man of all others to enter into Mr. Tallant’s idea of looking upon a farm in the same light as he would a manufactory.
The merchant maintained that good land would, in a very few years, amply repay a man for all he put into it; and Mr. Somerton was a thoroughgoing disciple of high cultivation. He had studied agricultural chemistry under a professor, and Mr. Tallant often said it was quite a treat to chat with him about Liebig’s theories, the value of agricultural statistics, tenant right, and leases. Richard Tallant did not agree with his father, and thought Luke Somerton’s talk a good deal of it “rot:” not that the bailiff cared for Mr. Richard’s opinion, or feared his father’s.
Luke Somerton was quite a gentleman in his way. He was a younger son of a Lincolnshire squire, and had been brought up to agriculture as a profession. He came to the Barton Hall Farm with Mr. Tallant, and he was likely to remain there as long as Mr. Tallant lived; for he was not only a scientific farmer, but he farmed profitably, and Mr. Tallant said that was what few amateur gentlemen farmers could say for their bailiffs in that district.
The farm-house was a substantial, handsome residence, surrounded with a prettily laid out garden, with shrubs and trees all scrupulously dwarfed and pruned. Hard by, and adjacent to the farm-buildings, was the stack-yard, and beyond were fields, mostly grass, with low fences and white gates.
Mr. Somerton was married, and had three children,—two sons and a daughter. His firstborn had left home when he was fifteen as an apprentice on board a merchant ship, which sailed from London for Bombay. The vessel had been spoken once, and had never been heard of afterwards; so Frank had long been mourned as lost, and there remained the bailiff, his daughter Amy, a girl about the age of Miss Tallant, and a son, Paul, three years younger.
Luke Somerton’s married life had not been a happy one. His wife had accepted his hand mainly out of spite, after she had angled unsuccessfully for his eldest brother. She was a proud disappointed woman; but a good housewife nevertheless, and Luke, by dint of perseverance, had successfully combated her overbearing disposition; so that though they could not be said to live happily and affectionately, as man and wife should do, they never had noisy open brawls and quarrels, as some couples have. If they sneered at each other and maintained opposite opinions on almost any given subject, they very rarely had loud disputes, and never passed a day without speaking to each other. They were opposed on principle; but Mrs. Somerton always managed to conclude her bickerings with something like overtures of reconciliation, which Luke accepted for what they were worth, and “tided over with,” until the next fencing bout came on.
Mrs. Somerton had been a handsome woman—a blonde—and might have continued handsome had she cultivated kindness of heart as well as her husband cultivated wheat. Hers was a nice face spoiled by a nasty temper. She was a fine woman, above the middle height, and there were little streaks of red upon her cheeks such as you see on the sunny side of a winter apple. There were lines about her mouth which disappointment and pride had placed there, during eighteen years of sourness and vexation of spirit. She was well mated so far as appearances went.
Her husband looked a thorough son of the soil, a tall, well-built, florid, intelligent, business-like Lincolnshire farmer, such as you will meet in the capacity of judge at country agricultural shows.
Their son Paul was at a boarding-school, and when this story begins, just about commencing life as a clerk in Mr. Tallant’s London offices.
His sister Amy was at home, and spent half her time at the Hall with Miss Tallant, who treated her very much as a sister.
Amy was not at all like the picture of Miranda. She was several shades darker than Miss Tallant, and neither a brunette nor a blonde; but she had a large black piercing eye, which looked at you from beneath gracefully-arched eyebrows. She was not so round as Phœbe; but her figure was supple, and well defined. Her mouth and chin were full of graceful curves, and her hair was bound closely to her head, setting off a pair of small white ears that gave a high character to the face. She was a well-bred, high-spirited girl, and accomplished too; for she had not only been fairly educated at her father’s expense, but she had had the benefit of much of the tuition which Miss Tallant had received, not only from a clever resident governess but from professors who came at intervals to Barton Hall.
Amongst the latter was one Mr. Arthur Phillips, who taught Miss Tallant drawing, and as he will figure rather prominently in this romance, we will introduce him at once, and tell you what he was like and all about him. He was a rising young artist who resided in the county town, though he might have made a successful position in London.
“I wonder you don’t go to town,” many persons would say to him; and his reply would be in effect,
“Why should I? I don’t care for London, and I like the country. I can go to town whenever I think proper, and the dealers will buy my pictures whether I go or not. What I get for them, and the few pupils I have in the county, give me enough for all my requirements, and enable me to study quietly and leisurely.”
But there was another reason why Arthur Phillips preferred the country, and that was a reason, which you may guess, for constant visits to the vale of Berne, beyond his desire to study the foliage of the district, and the lights and shadows of the Berne Hills, and the beautiful skies above.
It is true that many of his best sketches were transcriptions of the varied bits of landscape in this district; and he said he had never thoroughly understood Cuyp, Both and Ruysdael, Salvator Rosa, Wilson and Gainsborough, until he knew Berne valley in storm and sunshine, in spring and summer. He was never tired of painting Berne trees and Berne mosses, and the dealers bought these little sketchy bits almost as readily as they would now buy similar things by Birket Foster.
Mr. Phillips was an earnest lover of art; if he had not been a painter he would have been a poet. There was poetry in all his works, the true poetry of nature; and he was as well up in the principles and beauties of poetry as he was in chiaroscuro and perspective.
Nature had given him a mind worthy of the most perfect exterior, but she had denied him many of those charms of person which mostly delight the eye and captivate the heart of woman. He was under the ordinary height, a thin figure, with long black hair, and dark eyes set deeply in a face notable for sharply cut features. The expression was that of a thinker, and his manner nervous and retiring.
Mrs. Somerton had a great objection to Mr. Phillips.
“I don’t think his continually lurking about here bodes any good to those girls,” she said to her husband, over tea, as Mr. Phillips passed by with his sketch book under his arm.
“Nonsense,” said Mr. Somerton, laughing. “You don’t think either of the girls will fall in love with an undersized whipper-snapper like Mr. Phillips?”
“There’s no knowing what poor silly women will fall in love with,” said Mrs. Somerton, with a sneer.
“No, nor men either, for the matter of that, dame, if you want to argue the point,” Luke replied, defiantly.
Mrs. Somerton, thus challenged, declined to pick up the gauntlet which she had so often before accepted. She was bent upon talking about Mr. Arthur Phillips.
“I don’t think Amy would be fool enough to be led away by his poetry and pictures, and fine speeches and things; but Miss Tallant’s soft enough for anything, and I wonder Mr. Tallant has that fellow continually about the place.”
“God bless us!” said Mr. Somerton, his honest face lighting up with a genial smile of amusement; “why, do you think Miss Tallant, with her beautiful face, and her equally beautiful dowry, is going to throw herself away upon poor little Phillips?”
“Why not? He writes poetry, and paints all sorts of nonsense, and talks like lackadaisical lovers talk in books; and I’m sure that’s the sort of thing that Miss Tallant’s flashy education has taught her to admire. Why didn’t her father let her go into London society? Why doesn’t she go to town for the season, and be a reigning beauty, as she might be? That’s the sort of education she should have had, and then she might have married a duke,” Mrs. Somerton said, with warmth.
“Why, you’re quite excited about it,” said Mr. Somerton; “I’ve not seen your eyes sparkle so since I don’t know when.”
“I hate to see such namby-pambyism,” went on Mrs. Somerton. “When a girl’s got a pretty face, a graceful manner, and plenty of money, she ought to take her place and marry a gentleman, not be buried alive in a stucco palace, with a half-gentleman, half-farmer, half-ironfounder father, a sneaking governess, and an ugly, romantic little painter.”
“Well, well, wife, it is no business of ours, and if it was, I don’t think there’s any foundation for alarm. Besides, your ambition ought to be satisfied if young Hammerton, as you say pays more delicate attentions to Amy than he does to Miss Tallant. But Master Hammerton must mind his eye; I’d break every bone in his body if he offered an insult to Amy.”
“Young Hammerton!” said Mrs. Somerton, with an affected sneer. “Do you think I’m vain and silly enough to think the daughter of a farm-bailiff has any chance of catching the next heir to an earldom, for her husband?”
“A farm-bailiff! Why such emphasis on farm-bailiff, Mistress Somerton? There may be as good blood in the veins of a farm-bailiff as there is in a Hammerton.”
Mrs. Somerton’s lip curled with a pitying, patronising expression, that put her husband into a towering passion; a most unusual circumstance.
“Damn it!” he exclaimed, rising from his seat, “a Somerton is as independent a man any day; there was never one of the race that didn’t always pay twenty shillings in the pound, and but wouldn’t fell a lord if he spoke a light word of any of their women: and, by heaven, I consider myself as good a man as any Hammerton, dead or living.”
“There, there, Luke; now don’t get into a passion,” said Mrs. Somerton, trying to speak soothingly, and like an injured woman, who had not given the slightest cause for passion to anybody in all her life.
“What’s the meaning of all this, Sarah? There’s something at the bottom of it.”
“Only a friendly gossip between man and wife; but that’s such a novelty in this house, is it not?”
“I have had enough experience to tell me that a friendly gossip like this is not meant for nothing, Sarah,” said Luke, thrusting his hands into his pockets, and pacing about the room.
Whether there was anything “at the bottom of it,” or not, did not further transpire at that moment, by reason of the Hon. Lionel Hammerton himself dismounting from his horse at the gate beyond the garden, and walking up to Mr. Somerton’s door.