Bullhampton.
I am disposed to believe that no novel
reader in England has seen the little town of Bullhampton,
in Wiltshire, except such novel readers as live there,
and those others, very few in number, who visit it
perhaps four times a year for the purposes of trade,
and who are known as commercial gentlemen. Bullhampton
is seventeen miles from Salisbury, eleven from Marlborough,
nine from Westbury, seven from Haylesbury, and five
from the nearest railroad station, which is called
Bullhampton Road, and lies on the line from Salisbury
to Ycovil. It is not quite on Salisbury Plain,
but probably was so once, when Salisbury Plain was
wider than it is now. Whether it should be called
a small town or a large village I cannot say.
It has no mayor, and no market, but it has a fair.
There rages a feud in Bullhampton touching this want
of a market, as there are certain Bullhamptonites
who aver that the charter giving all rights of a market
to Bullhampton does exist; and that at one period
in its history the market existed also, for
a year or two; but the three bakers and two butchers
are opposed to change; and the patriots of the place,
though they declaim on the matter over their evening
pipes and gin-and-water, have not enough of matutinal
zeal to carry out their purpose. Bullhampton
is situated on a little river, which meanders through
the chalky ground, and has a quiet, slow, dreamy prettiness
of its own. A mile above the town, for
we will call it a town, the stream divides
itself into many streamlets, and there is a district
called the Water Meads, in which bridges are more frequent
than trustworthy, in which there are hundreds of little
sluice-gates for regulating the irrigation, and a
growth of grass which is a source of much anxiety
and considerable trouble to the farmers. There
is a water-mill here, too, very low, with ever a floury,
mealy look, with a pasty look often, as the flour
becomes damp with the spray of the water as it is
thrown by the mill-wheel. It seems to be a tattered,
shattered, ramshackle concern, but it has been in the
same family for many years; and as the family has
not hitherto been in distress, it may be supposed
that the mill still affords a fair means of livelihood.
The Brattles, for Jacob Brattle is the miller’s
name, have ever been known as men who paid
their way, and were able to hold up their heads.
But nevertheless Jacob Brattle is ever at war with
his landlord in regard to repairs wanted for his mill,
and Mr. Gilmore, the landlord in question, declares
that he wishes that the Avon would some night run
so high as to carry off the mill altogether.
Bullhampton is very quiet. There is no special
trade in the place. Its interests are altogether
agricultural. It has no newspaper. Its tendencies
are altogether conservative. It is a good deal
given to religion; and the Primitive Methodists have
a very strong holding there, although in all Wiltshire
there is not a clergyman more popular in his own parish
than the Rev. Frank Fenwick. He himself, in his
inner heart, rather likes his rival, Mr. Puddleham,
the dissenting minister; because Mr. Puddleham is an
earnest man, who, in spite of the intensity of his
ignorance, is efficacious among the poor. But
Mr. Fenwick is bound to keep up the fight; and Mr.
Puddleham considers it to be his duty to put down Mr.
Fenwick and the Church Establishment altogether.
The men of Bullhampton, and the women
also, are aware that the glory has departed from them,
in that Bullhampton was once a borough, and returned
two members to Parliament. No borough more close,
or shall we say more rotten, ever existed. It
was not that the Marquis of Trowbridge had, what has
often delicately been called, an interest in it; but
he held it absolutely in his breeches pocket, to do
with it as he liked; and it had been the liking of
the late Marquis to sell one of the seats at every
election to the highest bidder on his side in politics.
Nevertheless, the people of Bullhampton had gloried
in being a borough, and the shame, or at least the
regret of their downfall, had not yet altogether passed
away when the tidings of a new Reform Bill came upon
them. The people of Bullhampton are notoriously
slow to learn, and slow to forget. It was told
of a farmer of Bullhampton, in old days, that he asked
what had become of Charles I., when told that Charles
II. had been restored. Cromwell had come and
gone, and had not disturbed him at Bullhampton.
At Bullhampton there is no public
building, except the church, which indeed is a very
handsome edifice with a magnificent tower, a thing
to go to see, and almost as worthy of a visit as its
neighbour the cathedral at Salisbury. The body
of the church is somewhat low, but its yellow-gray
colour is perfect, and there is, moreover, a Norman
door, and there are Early English windows in the aisle,
and a perfection of perpendicular architecture in
the chancel, all of which should bring many visitors
to Bullhampton; and there are brasses in the nave,
very curious, and one or two tombs of the Gilmore family,
very rare in their construction, and the churchyard
is large and green, and bowery, with the Avon flowing
close under it, and nooks in it which would make a
man wish to die that he might be buried there.
The church and churchyard of Bullhampton are indeed
perfect, and yet but few people go to see it.
It has not as yet had its own bard to sing its praises.
Properly it is called Bullhampton Monachorum, the
living having belonged to the friars of Chiltern.
The great tithes now go to the Earl of Todmorden,
who has no other interest in the place whatever, and
who never saw it. The benefice belongs to St.
John’s, Oxford, and as the vicarage is not worth
more than L400 a year, it happens that a clergyman
generally accepts it before he has lived for twenty
or thirty years in the common room of his college.
Mr. Fenwick took it on his marriage, when he was about
twenty-seven, and Bullhampton has been lucky.
The bulk of the parish belongs to
the Marquis of Trowbridge, who, however, has no residence
within ten miles of it. The squire of the parish
is Squire Gilmore, Harry Gilmore, and
he possesses every acre in it that is not owned by
the Marquis. With the village, or town as it
may be, Mr. Gilmore has no concern; but he owns a large
tract of the water meads, and again has a farm or two
up on the downs as you go towards Chiltern. But
they lie out of the parish of Bullhampton. Altogether
he is a man of about fifteen hundred a year, and as
he is not as yet married, many a Wiltshire mother’s
eye is turned towards Hampton Privets, as Mr. Gilmore’s
house is, somewhat fantastically, named.
Mr. Gilmore’s character must
be made to develope itself in these pages, if
such developing may be accomplished. He is to
be our hero, or at least one of two.
The author will not, in these early words, declare
that the squire will be his favourite hero, as he
will wish that his readers should form their own opinions
on that matter. At this period he was a man somewhat
over thirty, perhaps thirty-three years
of age, who had done fairly well at Harrow and at
Oxford, but had never done enough to make his friends
regard him as a swan. He still read a good deal;
but he shot and fished more than he read, and had
become, since his residence at the Privets, very fond
of the outside of his books. Nevertheless, he
went on buying books, and was rather proud of his
library. He had travelled a good deal, and was
a politician, somewhat scandalising his
own tenants and other Bullhamptonites by voting for
the liberal candidates for his division of the county.
The Marquis of Trowbridge did not know him, but regarded
him as an objectionable person, who did not understand
the nature of the duties which devolved upon him as
a country gentleman; and the Marquis himself was always
spoken of by Mr. Gilmore as an idiot.
On these various grounds the squire has hitherto regarded
himself as being a little in advance of other squires,
and has, perhaps, given himself more credit than he
has deserved for intellectuality. But he is a
man with a good heart, and a pure mind, generous,
desirous of being just, somewhat sparing of that which
is his own, never desirous of that which is another’s.
He is good-looking, though, perhaps, somewhat ordinary
in appearance; tall, strong, with dark-brown hair,
and dark-brown whiskers, with small, quick grey eyes,
and teeth which are almost too white and too perfect
for a man. Perhaps it is his greatest fault that
he thinks that as a liberal politician and as an English
country gentleman he has combined in his own position
all that is most desirable upon earth. To have
the acres without the acre-laden brains, is, he thinks,
everything.
And now it may be as well told at
once that Mr. Gilmore is over head and ears in love
with a young lady to whom he has offered his hand
and all that can be made to appertain to the future
mistress of Hampton Privets. And the lady is
one who has nothing to give in return but her hand,
and her heart, and herself. The neighbours all
round the country have been saying for the last five
years that Harry Gilmore was looking out for an heiress;
for it has always been told of Harry, especially among
those who have opposed him in politics, that he had
a keen eye for the main chance. But Mary Lowther
has not, and never can have, a penny with which to
make up for any deficiency in her own personal attributes.
But Mary is a lady, and Harry Gilmore thinks her the
sweetest woman on whom his eye ever rested. Whatever
resolutions as to fortune-hunting he may have made, though
probably none were ever made, they have
all now gone to the winds. He is so absolutely
in love that nothing in the world is, to him, at present
worth thinking about except Mary Lowther. I do
not doubt that he would vote for a conservative candidate
if Mary Lowther so ordered him; or consent to go and
live in New York if Mary Lowther would accept him
on no other condition. All Bullhampton parish
is nothing to him at the present moment, except as
far as it is connected with Mary Lowther. Hampton
Privets is dear to him only as far as it can be made
to look attractive in the eyes of Mary Lowther.
The mill is to be repaired, though he knows he will
never get any interest on the outlay, because Mary
Lowther has said that Bullhampton water-meads would
be destroyed if the mill were to tumble down.
He has drawn for himself mental pictures of Mary Lowther
till he has invested her with every charm and grace
and virtue that can adorn a woman. In very truth
he believes her to be perfect. He is actually
and absolutely in love. Mary Lowther has hitherto
neither accepted nor rejected him. In a very
few lines further on we will tell how the matter stands
between them.
It has already been told that the
Rev. Frank Fenwick is Vicar of Bullhampton. Perhaps
he was somewhat guided in his taking of the living
by the fact that Harry Gilmore, the squire of the parish,
had been his very intimate friend at Oxford. Fenwick,
at the period with which we are about to begin our
story, had been six years at Bullhampton, and had
been married about five and a half. Of him something
has already been said, and perhaps it may be only necessary
further to state that he is a tall, fair-haired man,
already becoming somewhat bald on the top of his head,
with bright eyes, and the slightest possible amount
of whiskers, and a look about his nose and mouth which
seems to imply that he could be severe if he were not
so thoroughly good-humoured. He has more of breeding
in his appearance than his friend, a show
of higher blood; though whence comes such show, and
how one discerns that appearance, few of us can tell.
He was a man who read more and thought more than Harry
Gilmore, though given much to athletics and very fond
of field sports. It shall only further be said
of Frank Fenwick that he esteemed both his churchwardens
and his bishop, and was afraid of neither.
His wife had been a Miss Balfour,
from Loring, in Gloucestershire, and had had some
considerable fortune. She was now the mother of
four children, and, as Fenwick used to say, might have
fourteen for anything he knew. But as he also
had possessed some small means of his own, there was
no poverty, or prospect of poverty at the vicarage,
and the babies were made welcome as they came.
Mrs. Fenwick is as good a specimen of an English country
parson’s wife as you shall meet in a county, gay,
good-looking, fond of the society around her, with
a little dash of fun, knowing in blankets and corduroys
and coals and tea; knowing also as to beer and gin
and tobacco; acquainted with every man and woman in
the parish; thinking her husband to be quite as good
as the squire in regard to position, and to be infinitely
superior to the squire, or any other man in the world,
in regard to his personal self; a handsome,
pleasant, well-dressed lady, who has no nonsense about
her. Such a one was, and is, Mrs. Fenwick.
Now the Balfours were considerable
people at Loring, though their property was not county
property; and it was always considered that Janet
Balfour might have done better than she did, in a worldly
point of view. Of that, however, little had been
said at Loring, because it soon became known there
that she and her husband stood rather well in the
country round about Bullhampton; and when she asked
Mary Lowther to come and stay with her for six months,
Mary Lowther’s aunt, Miss Marrable, had nothing
to say against the arrangement, although she herself
was a most particular old lady, and always remembered
that Mary Lowther was third or fourth cousin to some
earl in Scotland. Nothing more shall be said
of Miss Marrable at present, as it is expedient, for
the sake of the story, that the reader should fix his
attention on Bullhampton till he find himself quite
at home there. I would wish him to know his way
among the water meads, to be quite alive to the fact
that the lodge of Hampton Privets is a mile and a
quarter to the north of Bullhampton church, and half
a mile across the fields west from Brattle’s
mill; that Mr. Fenwick’s parsonage adjoins the
churchyard, being thus a little farther from Hampton
Privets than the church; and that there commences Bullhampton
street, with its inn, the Trowbridge Arms,
its four public-houses, its three bakers, and its
two butchers. The bounds of the parsonage run
down to the river, so that the Vicar can catch his
trout from his own bank, though he much
prefers to catch them at distances which admit of
the appurtenances of sport.
Now there must be one word of Mary
Lowther, and then the story shall be commenced.
She had come to the vicarage in May, intending to stay
a month, and it was now August, and she had been already
three months with her friend. Everybody said
that she was staying because she intended to become
the mistress of Hampton Privets. It was a month
since Harry Gilmore had formally made his offer, and
as she had not refused him, and as she still stayed
on, the folk of Bullhampton were justified in their
conclusions. She was a tall girl, with dark brown
hair, which she wore fastened in a knot at the back
of her head, after the simplest fashion. Her
eyes were large and grey, and full of lustre; but
they were not eyes which would make you say that Mary
Lowther was especially a bright-eyed girl. They
were eyes, however, which could make you think, when
they looked at you, that if Mary Lowther would only
like you, how happy your lot would be, that
if she would love you, the world would have nothing
higher or better to offer. If you judged her
face by any rules of beauty, you would say that it
was too thin; but feeling its influence with sympathy,
you could never wish it to be changed. Her nose
and mouth were perfect. How many little noses
there are on young women’s faces which of themselves
cannot be said to be things of beauty, or joys for
ever, although they do very well in their places!
There is the softness and colour of youth, and perhaps
a dash of fun, and the eyes above are bright, and
the lips below alluring. In the midst of such
sweet charms, what does it matter that the nose be
puggish, or even a nose of putty, such
as you think you might improve in the original material
by a squeeze of your thumb and forefinger? But
with Mary Lowther her nose itself was a feature of
exquisite beauty, a feature that could be eloquent
with pity, reverence, or scorn. The curves of
the nostrils, with their almost transparent membranes,
told of the working of the mind within, as every portion
of human face should tell in some degree.
And the mouth was equally expressive, though the lips
were thin. It was a mouth to watch, and listen
to, and read with curious interest, rather than a
mouth to kiss. Not but that the desire to kiss
would come, when there might be a hope to kiss with
favour; but they were lips which no man
would think to ravage in boisterous play. It
might have been said that there was a want of capability
for passion in her face, had it not been for the well-marked
dimple in her little chin, that soft couch
in which one may be always sure, when one sees it,
that some little imp of Love lies hidden.
It has already been said that Mary
Lowther was tall, taller than common.
Her back was as lovely a form of womanhood as man’s
eye ever measured and appreciated. Her movements,
which were never naturally quick, had a grace about
them which touched men and women alike. It was
the very poetry of motion; but its chief beauty consisted
in this, that it was what it was by no effort of her
own. We have all seen those efforts, and it may
be that many of us have liked them when they have
been made on our own behalf. But no man as yet
could ever have felt himself to be so far flattered
by Miss Lowther. Her dress was very plain; as
it became her that it should be, for she was living
on the kindness of an aunt who was herself not a rich
woman. But it may be doubted whether dress could
have added much to her charms.
She was now turned one-and-twenty,
and though, doubtless, there were young men at Loring
who had sighed for her smiles, no young man had sighed
with any efficacy. It must be acknowledged, indeed,
that she was not a girl for whom the most susceptible
of young men would sigh. Young men given to sigh
are generally attracted by some outward and visible
sign of softness which may be taken as an indication
that sighing will produce some result, however small.
At Loring it was said that Mary Lowther was cold and
repellent, and, on that account, one who might very
probably descend to the shades as an old maid in spite
of the beauty of which she was the acknowledged possessor.
No enemy, no friend, had ever accused her of being
a flirt.
Such as she was, Harry Gilmore’s
passion for her much astonished his friends.
Those who knew him best had thought that, as regarded
his fate matrimonial, or non-matrimonial, there
were three chances before him: he might carry
out their presumed intention of marrying money; or
he might become the sudden spoil of the bow and spear
of some red-cheeked lass; or he might walk on as an
old bachelor, too cautious to be caught at all.
But none believed that he would become the victim
of a grand passion for a poor, reticent, high-bred,
high-minded specimen of womanhood. Such, however,
was now his condition.
He had an uncle, a clergyman, living
at Salisbury, a prebendary there, who was a man of
the world, and in whom Harry trusted more than in
any other member of his own family. His mother
had been the sister of the Rev. Henry Fitzackerly
Chamberlaine; and as Mr. Chamberlaine had never married,
much of his solicitude was bestowed upon his nephew.
“Don’t, my dear fellow,”
had been the prebendary’s advice when he was
taken over to see Miss Lowther. “She is
a lady, no doubt; but you would never be your own
master, and you would be a poor man till you died.
An easy temper and a little money are almost as common
in our rank of life as destitution and obstinacy.”
On the day after this advice was given, Harry Gilmore
made his formal offer.