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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
In "The Frobishers," Sabine Baring-Gould masterfully interweaves themes of adventure, human emotion, and the quest for identity, set against the backdrop of the vibrant 19th-century English countryside. Written in a style that combines rich descriptiveness with keen psychological insight, Baring-Gould captures the complexities of familial relationships and societal expectations. This novel also reflects the Victorian era's fascination with both exploration and moral dilemmas, engaging readers through a nuanced narrative that delves into the characters' inner lives while maintaining an overarching sense of intrigue and suspense. Sabine Baring-Gould was a prolific writer, folklorist, and theologian whose diverse experiences lent depth to his literary works. Born in 1834 and raised in a culturally rich environment, Baring-Gould's passion for storytelling and exploration of human nature is evident in this novel. His background in theology and folklore, coupled with his own travels, allowed him to create multifaceted narratives populated by vividly drawn characters, making "The Frobishers" a reflection of both his personal journey and era's cultural landscape. This engaging novel is highly recommended for readers who appreciate richly textured narratives that explore the intricacies of human relationships against historical settings. "The Frobishers" appeals not only to fans of Victorian literature but also to those interested in character-driven stories that blend adventure and psychological depth, ensuring its place in the canon of important literary works. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
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The Frobishers
Table of Contents
Introduction
At its heart, The Frobishers turns on the uneasy balance between personal conscience and the claims of kinship, tracing how the expectations that join people together can also press upon them with a force that reshapes choice, identity, and belonging, and inviting readers to consider how duty, affection, and ambition coexist, collide, and, at crucial moments, determine the course of lives lived within the shifting currents of society.
The Frobishers is a novel by Sabine Baring-Gould, an English author and clergyman active during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a period that prized intricate social observation and moral inquiry in fiction. Written within the broad ambit of the Victorian era, the book belongs to a body of work notable for its interest in character, custom, and the pressures of community. Approached today, it can be read alongside Baring-Gould’s other narratives as a study in the manners and motivations of its time, yet it maintains a narrative integrity that allows it to stand on its own terms.
Without venturing into revelations best discovered in the text, it is enough to say that the novel follows interwoven lives connected by shared ties and obligations, shaping a story attentive to the ripple effects of private decisions in a social world. Readers can expect measured, lucid prose, a steady narrative tempo, and an emphasis on character over spectacle. The mood is contemplative rather than sensational, with tensions accruing through conversation, custom, and circumstance. The experience is that of inhabiting a moral landscape where choices are weighed and tested, and where outcomes feel earned rather than contrived.
Themes familiar to readers of Baring-Gould’s fiction—duty, reputation, moral responsibility, and the subtle workings of influence within households and communities—inform the novel’s atmosphere. The Frobishers engages with questions that remain resonant: What do we owe to those closest to us, and what do we owe to ourselves? How do social pressures clarify or cloud our sense of right action? Rather than offering didactic answers, the book frames such questions through the lived texture of its characters’ routines and reckonings, encouraging reflection on the fragile alignments between principle, affection, and necessity.
Stylistically, the novel favors clarity over ornament, drawing strength from carefully observed detail and an even-handed narrative voice. Description serves character and moral emphasis rather than mere scenic display, and the dialogue carries the weight of competing values without theatrical excess. Baring-Gould’s prose guides the reader with a quiet confidence, allowing tensions to emerge organically from situation and temperament. The result is a work that rewards attentive reading: patterns of behavior, small reversals, and understated turns disclose the story’s design, inviting readers to recognize how incremental choices accumulate into defining events.
Contemporary readers may find the book’s relevance in its probing view of how identity is negotiated under watchful eyes—of family, neighbors, and the broader social circle. The Frobishers does not depend on topical zeitgeist; instead, it derives its force from perennial concerns about loyalty, compromise, and integrity. Its emotional appeal lies in measured empathy: the narrative respects the constraints and convictions of its characters while acknowledging the costs that accompany any decisive course. Intellectually, it offers a lens on a historical moment’s ideals and anxieties, while prompting consideration of how similar dynamics persist in modern life.
Approached as a late-Victorian work of fiction by a seasoned storyteller, The Frobishers offers a thoughtful, spoiler-safe encounter with the moral and social textures of its world. It exemplifies a tradition in which narrative interest arises from character and custom, not contrivance, and in which ethical complexity is neither simplified nor sensationalized. Readers drawn to carefully wrought prose, quiet suspense, and humane scrutiny of motive will find much to admire. As an entry point into Sabine Baring-Gould’s larger oeuvre, it also serves as a reminder that the questions animating his era—about belonging, conscience, and change—remain abidingly our own.
Synopsis
Set in provincial England in the late nineteenth century, The Frobishers follows a well-established family whose name is synonymous with position, property, and persistent effort. The household stands at the center of a community dependent on its leadership in trade and local affairs. From the opening chapters, Sabine Baring-Gould outlines the Frobishers’ routines, obligations, and carefully maintained respectability. The family’s wide circle—workers, neighbors, and relatives—looks to them for employment, patronage, and guidance. This framework introduces the tension between private loyalties and public expectations, preparing the ground for events that test the boundaries of duty, ambition, and the desire to define a life beyond inherited roles.
The novel introduces principal family members across generations: an elder who safeguards tradition, an heir who bears the family’s future on uneasy shoulders, and younger relations with differing temperaments and priorities. Their relationships show warmth, rivalry, and the occasional collision between principle and practicality. Baring-Gould adds figures on the periphery—a trusted adviser, an observant clergyman, and acquaintances whose presence reveals the Frobishers’ influence beyond their gates. Early scenes demonstrate how decisions made at the family table ripple outward, affecting workshops and parish alike. These dynamics anchor the narrative, ensuring that personal choices are never isolated from consequences in commerce, kinship, and community.
An inciting development unsettles this equilibrium: an unexpected shift in prospects forces the Frobishers to re-examine assumptions about security and succession. A document, long overlooked, raises questions about ownership and obligation, while market uncertainties place strain on their principal enterprise. Practical measures quickly follow—restructuring accounts, reconsidering a long-anticipated marriage, and consulting legal counsel—but remedies prove complicated by old promises and competing interests. The crisis is not immediately ruinous, but it is definitive, requiring the family to test the strength of its name against changing circumstances. The stage is set for choices that weigh conscience against expediency and sentiment against survival.
In response, the family pursues parallel strategies. The heir takes a pragmatic course, seeking stability through a calculated alliance and stricter oversight of the business. A younger relation, idealistic and resistant to compromise, gravitates toward a different path, emphasizing personal integrity over prudential bargains. External pressure mounts from creditors, rivals, and opinionated neighbors. Confidences are exchanged, and a private understanding between two individuals subtly reframes loyalties within the house. Baring-Gould contrasts interiors of privilege with landscapes that suggest harder realities, using journeys and visits as occasions for disclosure. The plot advances through measured confrontations that reveal character as much as circumstance.
A secondary thread emerges around a longstanding friendship that begins to blur social boundaries. This relationship becomes a barometer for the family’s stated values, drawing attention to disparities between charitable rhetoric and genuine trust. A respected intermediary—experienced in parish disputes and practical compromise—offers counsel that is heard but not uniformly heeded. Meanwhile, small incidents in the town—whispers about solvency, discreet inquiries at the bank, a craftsman’s grievance—accumulate into a public mood the Frobishers can neither ignore nor fully control. The narrative uses these episodes to widen scope, showing how personal decisions intersect with the marketplace, the vestry, and the court of local opinion.
At the midpoint, a revelation concerning past transactions unsettles the presumed line of inheritance and complicates bonds of gratitude and right. The disclosure is neither sensational nor sudden; rather, it emerges from careful comparison of letters, receipts, and recollections. Its effect is transformative. Tempers cool and harden in equal measure as family members choose whether to protect appearances, pursue a legal remedy, or acknowledge claims they had not anticipated. Advisors caution patience, yet the costs of delay are real. Ties of affection are tested by competing narratives of fairness, and an already delicate alliance becomes vulnerable to misunderstanding and the weight of older resentments.
The consequences arrive in a series of reversals. A negotiation assumes unexpected urgency when a partner exercises leverage at a critical moment. A promised arrangement is deferred under circumstances that appear courteous but carry a sting. Health and fatigue play their part as strain erodes stamina. Baring-Gould keeps the tone controlled, favoring steady pressure over melodrama, letting each setback reshape available choices. A journey undertaken to settle a detail yields more questions than answers. The family’s image, once effortless, now requires careful tending. Yet the narrative preserves footholds for resolution: acts of candor, practical skill, and a willingness to distinguish pride from principle.
The strands converge toward a decisive meeting in which accounts—financial and otherwise—are rendered. Those who have been cautious speak plainly; those who have hesitated accept a necessary clarity. The legalities are addressed without extended courtroom display, and the personal reckoning unfolds with restraint. Relationships are redefined in a manner that acknowledges both feeling and fact. Without detailing outcomes, the pivotal scene balances restitution with forward motion, closing certain avenues while opening others more durable. The emphasis remains on responsibility accepted rather than victory claimed, aligning outcomes with choices that have gradually revealed themselves in the pressures of family and public life.
In its final movement, the novel settles practical matters and traces their human implications. Work continues, altered but intact; promises are kept in form that fits changed conditions. The younger generation steps into roles that reflect lessons learned, tempering ambition with regard for others. The household’s standing, though chastened, rests on firmer ground than reputation alone. The narrative closes on an image of continuity: the Frobishers remain, not untouched by trial, but clearer about the limits and uses of their influence. The book’s central message affirms integrity over posture, and community rooted in earned trust rather than inherited presumption.
Historical Context
The narrative world of The Frobishers is rooted in the late sixteenth century, when Elizabeth I’s England (1558–1603) pursued oceanic ventures and commercial experiments from London’s wharves and West Country harbors to the ice-bound sounds of the Canadian Arctic. The book’s evocations of shipboard life, merchant risk, and crown patronage draw on a milieu defined by the rise of chartered companies, the consolidation of Protestant statecraft, and the hazards of high-latitude exploration. Ports such as London, Plymouth, and Dartmouth, and far-flung regions like the straits of Baffin Island, form a geographically expansive backdrop. This setting allows the work to register how maritime ambition intersected with social order, investment, and imperial rivalry in the Elizabethan era.
The central historical frame is the series of voyages undertaken by the Elizabethan mariner Martin Frobisher in search of a Northwest Passage and mineral wealth. In 1576, backed by London investors, he sailed in the small bark Gabriel (with the Michael turning back) and reached the coast of what is now Baffin Island, naming features such as Queen Elizabeth’s Foreland and what he believed to be Frobisher Strait. He seized a sample of black ore and returned to England with high hopes. In 1577, with the larger Aid and two smaller vessels, he revisited the region, engaged in violent encounters with Inuit communities, and brought back additional ore as well as several Inuit captives who soon died in England. The third expedition in 1578, comprising a flotilla of about fifteen ships, attempted both intensive mining and a projected settlement on Kodlunarn Island in a territory he styled Meta Incognita. Storms, navigational confusion in the broad Hudson Strait, and hostile conditions bedeviled the effort. The enterprise shipped home over a thousand tons of ore, which upon smelting at Dartford under the supervision of German metallurgists proved largely to be iron pyrite, not gold-bearing material. The financial debacle ruined key backers, notably the entrepreneur Michael Lok, and left a notorious heap of slag as a monument to misplaced confidence. The book mirrors these expeditions through its attention to hazardous polar navigation, the speculative fever ignited by supposed Arctic riches, and the moral ambiguity of intercultural contact, using the Frobisher name and milieu to anchor its depiction of ambition, error, and endurance.
The Spanish Armada campaign of 1588 forms a defining political and military context. England, under Lord Charles Howard of Effingham, with commanders such as Francis Drake, John Hawkins, and Martin Frobisher, confronted the fleet of Philip II. After night attacks with fireships off Calais, the English engaged the Armada at Gravelines in late July–early August (Old Style), inflicting serious damage before storms scattered the Spanish on their return. Frobisher distinguished himself and was knighted aboard the Ark Royal for valor. The book connects to this episode by evoking the maritime patriotism and tactical improvisation that the campaign came to symbolize, placing individual fortunes within a national struggle for security and Protestant survival.
The rise of joint-stock enterprise and chartered companies underpins the economic world portrayed. The Muscovy Company (chartered 1555) pioneered regulated trade to the north, while the Company of Cathay, organized around 1577 by Michael Lok and associates, sought a privileged route to Asia via the northwest. Metallurgical capacity drew on the Crown’s earlier grants to the Mines Royal and the Mineral and Battery Works (1568), bringing specialists like Christopher Schutz to smelt imported ore at Dartford. Capital calls, ship provisioning, and risk pooling made such ventures possible; when the ore failed, lawsuits, debt, and imprisonment followed, with Lok famously ruined. The book reflects this milieu by tracing how speculative ventures could reorder families, reputations, and local economies.
The Anglo-Spanish War (1585–1604) and the intertwined Dutch Revolt provide the broader diplomatic and strategic matrix. After the Treaty of Nonsuch (1585), England committed troops to the United Provinces, while licensed privateering against Spanish shipping intensified. West Country ports, notably Plymouth and Dartmouth, outfitted vessels and cultivated seafaring networks linking gentry, mariners, and merchants. Figures like Drake, Hawkins, and Raleigh exemplified a martial-commercial ethos that shaped recruitment, victualing, and naval reform. The book channels this atmosphere by situating its characters within a web of patronage and prize-taking, showing how imperial conflict permeated daily life, from the financing of voyages to the pressure of impressment and the lure of captured cargoes.
Early English-Inuit encounters in the 1570s constitute a crucial social and ethical dimension. Frobisher’s crews seized several Inuit individuals in 1576–1577; transported to England, they were exhibited to curious audiences, treated by physicians, and died of illness soon after arrival. In the Arctic, miscommunication over trade, hostages, and tools escalated into skirmishes, with fatalities on both sides. English accounts misread local customs, while Inuit knowledge of ice, currents, and hunting was discounted. The book engages these facts by representing cultural collision not merely as adventure but as a study in power, fear, and misunderstanding, interrogating the human costs of exploration and the objectification of Indigenous people in metropolitan settings.
Late Tudor social regulation and maritime labor conditions provide additional historical texture. The punitive Poor Laws of 1572 and the comprehensive statutes of 1598–1601 aimed to discipline vagrancy while funding parish relief, as enclosure and price pressures strained rural livelihoods. Naval impressment practices, arrears in sailors’ pay, and the hazards of victualing fleets created chronic unrest. Debt procedures and prisons like the Fleet ensnared failed projectors and investors, as in the case of Michael Lok’s incarcerations in the early 1580s. The book reflects these structures by showing how maritime enterprise redistributed risk downward, entangling sailors, artisans, and small investors in cycles of obligation, while protecting favored patrons with influence at court.
By staging ambition against the frictions of Elizabethan society, the book operates as a critique of imperial capitalism and state power. It exposes how speculative fever and national glory narratives could rationalize dispossession, from the seizure of Inuit captives to the sacrifice of common seamen’s lives and livelihoods. The text interrogates class asymmetries in risk and reward, depicting bankruptcy, impressment, and parish discipline as systemic tools to contain social fallout from elite ventures. It also questions the moral alibis of providence and patriotism that accompanied exploration, ultimately using the Frobisher milieu to challenge triumphalist accounts of the period and to foreground accountability for the era’s inequities.
Chapter 1
- A butterfly out of place
Chapter 2
- Pendabury
Chapter 3
- An orange envelope
Chapter 4
- With the dessert
Chapter 5
- Facing the worst
Chapter 6
- In the Beaudessart arms
Chapter 7
- Julie
Chapter 8
- A change of air
Chapter 9
- Polly Myatt
Chapter 10
- Lead
Chapter 11
- My pal
Chapter 12
- Butter
Chapter 13
- Common and unclean
Chapter 14
- An obstinate woman
Chapter 15
- The blue line
Chapter 16
- Suppressed rheumatism
Chapter 17
- Footings
Chapter 18
- Mr. Mangin
Chapter 19
- Social evenings
Chapter 20
- A hamper of holly
Chapter 21
- A Christmas dinner
Chapter 22
- Theatre tickets
Chapter 23
- Lavender lodge
Chapter 24
- Tom Treddlehoyle
Chapter 25
- In the office
Chapter 26
- A second favour
Chapter 27
- No garden
Chapter 28
- Potters' rot
Chapter 29
- "He went away sorrowful, having great possessions"
Chapter 30
- But returned
Chapter 31
- "Come over and help us!"
Chapter 32
- Two aims
The Frobishers
Chapter 1
A BUTTERFLY OUT OF PLACE
"I thought as much!" said Joan.
She was standing in a road—a byway—through an oak coppice, in her riding habit beside her horse, and had ungirthed him and removed the saddle.
"Poor old boy, I am sorry for you. You must have suffered, and yet you went bravely along, and splendidly over the fence."
Ruby turned his head at his mistress's voice, snuffed his approval of her sympathy, and stood unmoving, save that the skin twitched about an ugly raw on the shoulder.
"It is that tree again," said Joan. "Some saddlers seem never to grasp the law by which a tree is made to fit. I have sent this saddle twice to Oxley, and he has vowed, by all things blue, on each occasion, that he has rectified the defect. Never, old boy, shall you have this side-saddle on your back again."
Once more the patient horse turned his head, looked at his mistress and snuffed, as though accepting the assurance in full confidence. He knew Joan, knew that she pitied him, knew that he would be cared for.
"I beg your pardon—are you in difficulties? and can I be of any assistance?" asked a young man, breaking through the coppice of sere russet leaves, and descending on his hunter to the road that was cut some two feet below the surface of the shrub and tree clothed hillside. He was not in pink, but in a dark serviceable coat, and wore white corduroy breeches, a stiff velvet hunting cap, and top-boots, and was spurred.
"I am at a loss what to do," answered the girl. "I have acted most inconsiderately. I let my sister Sibyll ride on, and take the groom with her. I lagged because I had a suspicion that something was going wrong with Ruby. Of course I ought to have detained the groom, but my sister was eager, and I did not like to spoil her sport. Next piece of want of consideration that I was guilty of was to dismount here in the wood, to lift the saddle and see if the dear old fellow were rubbed. Look! how badly he has been served. I cannot possibly replace the saddle and remount him. So I shall have to walk all the way to Pendabury House in a riding skirt—and only a lady knows how laborious that is."
"To Pendabury!"
"Yes, that is our home."
Joan now looked for the first time with any interest at the gentleman with whom she had been conversing, and at once perceived that he was not one of the usual party that attended a meet and followed the hunt, but was an entire stranger.
"I am Miss Frobisher," she said.
"I must introduce myself," he at once spoke; "my name is Beaudessart."
"Beaudessart!"
It was now her turn to express surprise.
"Then," said she, "I have a sort of notion that some kind of relationship exists between us!"
"For my sins, none," answered the young man; "in place of relation there has been estrangement. My grandfather married a Mrs. Frobisher, a widow, and your father was her son by a former husband. The families have been in contact, brought so by this marriage, but it has produced friction. However, let us not consider that; let the fact of there having been some connection embolden me to ask your permission to transfer your side-saddle to my mare, and to lead your galled Ruby to his stable."
"You are very good."
"There is not a man in the hunt who would not make the same offer."
"I cheerfully admit that our South Staffordshire hunters are ever courteous and ready to assist a damsel in difficulties. Is not that the quality of Chivalry?"
"The same applies to every gentleman in England," said Mr. Beaudessart. "Wherever he sees need, perplexity, distress, thither he flies with eager heart to assist."
He had already dismounted, and without another word proceeded to remove his own saddle, and to adjust that of the lady to the back of his mare.
"One moment," said Joan Frobisher. "I ought to forewarn you that you are running a risk—the tree of my saddle will fit the back of no living horse."
"It will do no harm so long as my Sally is not galloped, Miss Frobisher. I shall have to lay on you the injunction not to fly away. Besides, I am a stranger in this part of the country. It was that which threw me out, and brought me through the coppice. I do not know my way to Pendabury, and shall need your guidance."
He placed his hands in position to receive Joan's foot, and with a spring she was in the saddle. Then he looked up at her.
She was a tall, well-built girl. In her dark green hunting habit, the collar turned up with scarlet, and brightened with the South Staffordshire hunt buttons, her graceful form was shown to good effect.
She had well-moulded features, the jaw had a bold sweep, and the chin was firmly marked. The eyes were large, lustrous, and soft. If the modelling of the lower portion of her face conveyed a suspicion of hardness, this was at once dispelled by the soft light of the kindly eyes.
Mr. Beaudessart now fitted his own saddle on the back of Ruby so as not to incommode the galled beast.
"I was in a difficulty," said Joan, as they began to move forward down the roadway. "I might have been run in by the agents of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals[1], and had to appear at the next Petty Sessions—before papa—think of that, and be fined sixpence, and costs, eight-and-nine; total, nine-and-threepence. It would have made a hole in my pocket-money."
"Do the costs stand in that proportion to the fine? I really know nothing of English magistrates and their courts."
"Oh, the magistrates have nothing to do with costs. These are inexplicable to the uninitiated. The Greek mysteries are nothing to them."
Then they proceeded a little way without talking, as the road became steep.
On reaching ground less precipitous, Joan asked—
"You say that you are a stranger in these parts?"
"Yes—entirely."
"No, not entirely. Your name is familiar to all. Why, our church is full of Beaudessart monuments, and the county history is prodigal in the matter of pedigree of Beaudessart. For the matter of that, we have any number of pictures of them at Pendabury."
"Are you great in pedigree?" asked the young man with a smile.
"Of a horse. I know nothing of my own, and care little. By the way, it is through a Beaudessart that we came by our home; and"—laughing—"we do not intend to surrender it without a siege. We have a portrait in the dining-room of the last of the Beaudessart squires of Pendabury, a choleric, resolute man, to judge by his counterfeit presentment."
The young man looked up at Joan with a flicker in his eyes and a twinkle of a smile on his lips.
Joan perceived it, and was rendered nervous, lest she might have said something in bad taste, something that had touched him and made him wince, and he had disguised the pain with a smile. Did he really think that she suspected him of making a claim to the Pendabury estate? She scrutinised his face to read his mind, but the smile ambiguously twitching the corners of the mouth had passed away, and he strode forwards serene in countenance, with an elastic tread and a toss of the head, as though he had put from him whatever thought had passed through his mind at the provocation of her words. The young man was upright in carriage, broad in back, his head covered with light hair that rippled over his forehead and curled forth behind from under his velvet cap. Surely when a child he must have had natural ringlets of gold. His face was fresh, open, honest, and careless in expression. His eyes were dark grey. He looked like a man of good feeling, and one who was well bred.
"Mr. Beaudessart," said Joan, "you must have formed a very bad opinion of my intelligence, coming on me as you did, in the depth of a wood and far from assistance. I had put myself into a position of great awkwardness; I got off Ruby to examine his shoulder without a thought that, granted he were sound, I could not girth him up tight enough to remount, and that if I found him badly rubbed I should have to walk home. What can you think of me?"
"I think only of the tenderness of your heart[1q], that put all considerations for self on one side, in solicitude for your horse."
"Thank you. I am very fond of Ruby. Nevertheless, I blame myself for lack of foresight." Then, changing her tone as she changed the subject, she asked, "Have you been long in our neighbourhood?"
"We took the cottage at Rosewood—do you chance to know it?"
Joan made a movement of assent.
"We took it at Lady Day last on a term of years. But we, that is my mother and I, spent all the summer in Switzerland, after we had settled our few sticks of furniture in the house. The garden had been neglected and not stocked, so that it was too late in the year when we came into possession to do very much with it. My mother has great ambition to cultivate a garden. We are not notable gardeners in Canada—she is a Canadian, and I was born there. It will be a new experience here, and one to give her great pleasure. She has read about English ladies and the little paradises they create, in which they pass their innocent hours, and she hopes to acquire the same tastes, and reap the same joys, and to spend her declining years in flowery bliss. She is a dear mother to me," he added, in a tone full of tenderness, and Joan liked him for the words.
Thus conversing, they reached the outskirts of the wood, and were on the highway between hedges in pleasant champaign country.
"I have some excuse for being ignorant of the lie of the land," said Mr. Beaudessart. "I was born, as I told you, in Canada. My father lived and died there."
"And your mother will be happy in England?"
"Oh, she knows that I have to be here; it was my father's urgent request. He hungered after the old fatherland."
"Have you sisters?"
"I have a sister, who is now with my mother, but she is with her only now and then. She has taken her own line, and has become a nurse. I suppose Rosewood is some miles from here—how many I have not the faintest notion."
"If you hunt with us, you will don the pink?"
"I do not know about that. It costs about twenty pounds to blaze out a full-blown poppy, and the suit will last but a season. It is rather like advertising oneself as a man of large fortune, and I am not that. I can live, but cannot be lavish."
So they talked, falling into half confidences; and presently many evidences appeared of approach to a gentleman's seat of some importance. The trees stood in clumps. Hedges no longer divided the fields; they were parted by wire fences. Ploughed land gave way to pasturage. Then were heard the sounds of rooks cawing, and a church spire pierced the rounded banks of trees, that had not all lost their foliage, though that foliage was turned to copper.
And presently they came to the gates.
At that moment up trotted Joan's sister Sibyll, with the groom following her. The younger Miss Frobisher was but eighteen; she was a very pretty and graceful girl, with a high colour and dancing eyes. She was now in great spirits, and, riding up to her sister, exclaimed—
"Oh, Joan! give me joy! I am the happiest girl on earth. On this, the first meet of the season, I was in at the death. Look! I have had my cheeks painted; and see! I have the brush, and am promised the mask when it is mounted."
Then she noticed the gentleman leading Ruby, and raised her eyebrows.
"What ails your horse?" she inquired.
"Sibylla—this is Mr. Beaudessart. Sir—my sister. Mr. Beaudessart has been so very kind. My poor Ruby is frightfully rawed; I could not ride him home, so this gentleman has most generously lent me his mount and has led my horse." Then to the young man: "Mr. Beaudessart, you must come into Pendabury and have a cup of tea or a glass of wine. You have eight or nine miles to cover before reaching home, and I have spoiled your day's hunting. Moreover, you positively must see the original Beaudessart Stammburg, as the Germans would term it."
He bowed, and said in reply—
"Are you sure that your father would desire it?"
"Quite so. How could he do other?" Still he hesitated. Joan saw that he was desirous of accepting her invitation, but was unwilling to intrude.
"No!" she said, "I will not take a refusal. A lady's invitation carries all the force of a command. If it be not accepted, she is mortally affronted."
"In that case I have no alternative."
They passed through the great gates into the grounds that unfolded before them as they proceeded, sweeping lawns, park-like, with the house, a Queen Anne mansion, square and stately, standing back against a well-wooded hill, the sun flashing golden in the long windows that looked to the west.
"It is a beautiful spot," said the young man in a grave tone, and a change came over his face.
"Oh, Joan!" exclaimed Sibyll, riding beside her sister, "such fun! I had never been in at the death before. And fancy! when puss was in extremis, fallen on and torn to pieces by the hounds—will you believe me? there was a butterfly flickering above the scene of blood and death-agony unconcernedly. Conceive! a butterfly at this period of the year; so out of season!"
"So out of place," said Joan.
Chapter 2
PENDABURY
Steps led to the front door, that was under a portico composed of Ionic pillars of Bath stone[2], that contrasted, as did the white coigns, with the red sandstone of which the house was built, one of the warmest and best of building materials. The long windows had casements painted creamy white, and the roof of the house was concealed by a balustrade of white stone.
At the steps the ladies dismounted, and the groom and a boy who had run from the stables took the horses.
Then the two girls, gathering up their habits, mounted to the door, and Joan, as she ascended, turned with a slight bow and a smile of encouragement to the young man, feeling at the same time not a little puzzled at the hesitation, even reluctance, that he manifested in accompanying her within.
The butler opened the glass doors, and all then entered the lofty hall, out of which the staircase ascended to the upper apartments. It was a fine hall, rich with plaster work, and hung with full-length portraits.
"Matthews," said Miss Frobisher, "will you kindly inform your master that a gentleman is here—Mr. Beaudessart? Yet stay, we will drink tea in the dining-room. Please to put cold meat and wine on the sideboard."
"Yes, miss."
The man withdrew with a bow.
"Joan," said Sibyll," I am going to rid myself of my boots and shed my habit."
"Have your tea first," urged. the elder. "There is no occasion for such a hurry."
