Complete Works of R S Surtees

by R S Surtees

  Mr. Jorrocks’s country is full of foxes, many of which he hopes to make cry “Capevi,” and as the ordnance hedge-hashers have made hunting comparatively easy where they have carried on their operations, he anticipates being able to scramble about in tolerable safety. He has begun greening his breeches knees among the hazel bushes, cub hunting, and arranged his meets for the first week in November, of which he has kindly sent us the following card: —

  Hillingdon Hall

  In this sequel to Handley Cross, first published in 1845, Jorrocks becomes the squire of the eponymous Hillingdon Hall. As with the other Jorrocks stories, Surtees continues to portray comic tales of fox hunting and country sports, but adds to these with scenes of social comedy founded on the elevation of the grocer Jorrocks to lord of the manor. Surtees himself had inherited Hamsterley Hall in County Durham when his father died unexpectedly in 1838. The inheritance enabled him to write for his own amusement, rather than to earn a living (albeit anonymously, given his new status as a land-owning gentleman). The descriptions of Hillingdon in the novel strongly resemble Hamsterley and it is very likely that Surtees drew on his own experiences as a new squire in writing the novel.

  Title page of the first edition

  CONTENTS

  PREFACE.

  CHAPTER I.

  CHAPTER II.

  CHAPTER III.

  CHAPTER IV.

  CHAPTER V.

  CHAPTER VI.

  CHAPTER VII.

  CHAPTER VIII.

  CHAPTER IX.

  CHAPTER X.

  CHAPTER XI.

  CHAPTER XII.

  CHAPTER XIII.

  CHAPTER XIV.

  CHAPTER XV.

  CHAPTER XVI.

  CHAPTER XVII.

  CHAPTER XVIII.

  CHAPTER XIX.

  CHAPTER XX.

  CHAPTER XXI.

  CHAPTER XXII.

  CHAPTER XXIII.

  CHAPTER XXIV.

  CHAPTER XXV.

  CHAPTER XXVI.

  CHAPTER XXVII.

  CHAPTER XXVIII.

  CHAPTER XXIX.

  CHAPTER XXX.

  CHAPTER XXXI.

  CHAPTER XXXII.

  CHAPTER XXXIII.

  CHAPTER XXXIV.

  CHAPTER XXXV.

  CHAPTER XXXVI.

  CHAPTER XXXVII.

  CHAPTER XXXVIII.

  CHAPTER XXXIX.

  CHAPTER XL.

  CHAPTER XLI.

  CHAPTER XLII.

  CHAPTER XLIII.

  CHAPTER XLIV.

  CHAPTER XLV.

  CHAPTER XLVI.

  CHAPTER XLVII.

  An illustration for a later Victorian edition of the novel

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE. — This, one of the best of Mr. Surtees’ works, was originally commenced in the New Sporting Magazine, and illustrated by the inimitable artists, Wild rake and Heath, but was not completed in that Magazine. It was afterwards published complete in a Three Volume edition. The Five Illustrations now added are by John Jellicoe, and illustrate the latter portion of the work not done by Wildrake or Heath. All are coloured by hand.

  TO

  THE ROYAL AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY OF ENGLAND,

  THIS VOLUME IS INSCRIBED,

  BY THEIR

  OBEDIENT HUMBLE SERVANT,

  THE AUTHOR.

  PREFACE.

  THE AUTHOR OF this work will not trespass on the indulgence of the reader, in the way of preface, further than to say that the agricultural portion of it is not meant to discourage improvement, but to repress the wild schemes of theoretical men, who attend farmers’ meetings for the pleasure of hearing themselves talk, and do more harm than good by the promulgation of their visionary views. —

  HODDESDON, HERTS,

  October 1844.

  CHAPTER I.

  OH, KNEW HE but his happiness, of men,

  The happiest he who, far from public rage,

  Deep in the vale, with a choice few retired,

  Drinks the pure pleasure of the rural life.”

  HILLINGDON HALL was one of those nice old-fashioned, patchy, up-stairs and down-stairs sort of houses, that either return to their primitive smallness, or are swept away for stately mansions with well-arranged suites of company rooms, leaving perhaps the entrance or a room or two to disfigure the rest, and show what the edifice originally was. This at least is the fate of most of them. As soon as the last addition or improvement is completed, down comes the whole; and a plausible architect so confuses the owner with indispensables — things without which “no house can be perfect” — that when at length the masons and joiners and painters and plasterers and plumbers have taken their departure, he finds himself the master of quite a different sort of house to what he wanted, and begins to think the old patched house would have served his purpose very well, and been much more comfortable.

  Hillingdon Hall was quite a specimen of the old-fashioned manor-house. Driving through the neat little village, with its pretty white-washed, rose-covered cottages, a simple portico projecting a little into the street, was all that denoted a mansion of pretension; but when the door was opened, and the stranger ushered along a wide but low passage, into a fair-sized hall, with a billiard table in the centre, the numerous carved black oak doors and passages branching off, increased its importance as he proceeded. The old rooms, consisting of a dining and drawing room on either side of the entrance, were of fair dimensions, oak-wainscoted, with deep recesses at either end, closed by sliding shutters, but these had long been converted into a housekeeper’s and “master’s room,” and first one and then another had been added, until a handsome dining, drawing room, and library ranged along the new front. Still there was no attempt at architectural symmetry or display. Each room had been added separately and stuck in, as it were, so as not to interfere with its neighbours, and a verandah accommodating itself to the various angles of the house, and encompassing three sides of it, was the only piece of uniformity about the place; all the lower windows opened into this, and under its fragrant shade a tolerable share of exercise might be obtained on a wet day. The view from it was beautiful.

  Beyond an undulating lawn profusely studded with gigantic oaks and ground-sweeping pines, the land stretched away to a high promontory, whose rocky peak was washed by the clear waters of the rapid Dart, which girded the two sides of the angular estate. The fields were large and well divided, and being of that table land frequently found on river margins, showed to the eye as large again as they were. The village with its hall stood about the centre of the angle’s base, and diverging from the road, about a mile on the east, there was a sweet saunter along flowery meads up the river’s course, until the gradually narrowing hills changed into craggy heights — wild and magnificent grandeur — with drooping, dark green yews, and brighter broom, or gayer gorse, or mountain ash, springing from the interstices of the unscaleable rocks and craggy steeps.

  Between these lofty cliffs the rapid river flowed in noisy haste; now foaming and rushing through water-worn chasms in the massive rock, now pouring in regular flood over some breast-high barrier, now dashing and dividing into a hundred channels, against the fragments of a scattered rock, and now gliding noiselessly away into the tranquillity of deeper water.

  From the giddy heights of the crag-head, the eye roved over a vast expanse of mountainous wood-clothed country.

  Following up the water’s course, the rocks and banks again gradually receded; the land drooped towards the river, whose gurgling stream sounded soothingly through the spaces between sweeping spruce, whose lofty and luxuriant forms lined either side of a well-kept grassy ride. Here pheasants fed and loitered in the tameness of tranquil security, squirrels spurted up the trees, wood-pigeons cooed wooingly in the branches, blackbirds and thrushes and nightingales, all the feathered tribe, in short, joined in the minstrelsy of the waters: and as the wanderer pursued his way amid the music of nature and the perfume of wild flowers, a sudden turn brought him again in sight of grass fields
beyond the road on the other side of the angle’s base from whence he had set out.

  This was its out-of-door or walking aspect. From the windows, though the acclivities of the crag were lost, there were two peeps of the silvery water at the extreme sides of the angle where the banks were lowest, and an immense tract of forest scenery, extending from the opposite hill and stretching quite over the mountain-brow, broke the sky line with the spiral tops of pines and larches commingled with grey rocks and pointed cliffs, scattered in irregular confusion over the wild surface. No sign of habitation appeared save the clear white curl of smoke from the woodmen’s cottages, scattered at wide intervals in the deep bosom of the forest. The animation of village life was all behind the Hall.

  This terrestrial paradise had long been the blissful retreat of Mr. Westbury, a man of infinite talent and learning, and about one of the last of the old-fashioned race of country gentlemen who lived all the year round on their estates. The beauty of the spot might indeed plead in excuse for so uncivilized a proceeding, for Mr.

  Westbury had ample means of partaking of London pleasures in the unostentatious style of personal comfort, which, after all, is the truest way of enjoying them. But year after year rolled on, season succeeded season, without the vacuum occurring that required the filling up of London life.

  Happy in the tranquillity of the country, happy in the companionship of a sympathizing wife, happy in the society of congenial friends, happy in the seclusion of the woods that his hands had planted, or in wandering over the fields and meadows that his skill had fertilized, age succeeded youth, —

  “And all his prospects brightening to the last,

  His heaven commenced ere the world was past.”

  He was the patriarch of the district — the man to whom all disputes were referred, all plans submitted — the man by whom all charities were promoted — the petty king in fact. The humble inhabitants of the little village looked up to him, the wealthier neighbours were always anxious to consult him; and when death closed the eyes of the amiable owner of Hillingdon Hall, and his comfortable mansion, with its rich and picturesque domain, its woods and waterfalls, varied and romantic scenery, became the subject of newspaper advertisements, people far and wide regretted the loss, and the inhabitants of the pretty little village felt that the sun of Hillingdon’s glory had set for ever.

  Some time elapsed after the sale before it became known who was the purchaser of the Hillingdon estate; some gave it to one person, some to another; the lawyers, as usual, were “mum.”

  CHAPTER II.

  ... O MOST delicate fiend!

  Who is’t can read a woman?”

  — SHAKSPEARE.

  MRS. FLATHER and Mrs. Trotter, who Lad long battled for the honour of being second to the Hall people, and who had only been restrained from downright acts of hostility by the amiable intervention of Mr and Mrs. Westbury, seemed to have entered into a sort of truce in case the new-corner should require their united opposition.

  Mrs. Flather was a simple, apparently open-hearted, but in reality double-dealing, half-cunning sort of woman, extremely candid and straightforward when it suited her convenience, and extremely stupid and dull of comprehension when the reverse was the case. She was the undespairing widow of a clergyman, an old friend of Mr. Westbury’s, like him then recently gone to his last home.

  Mrs. Flather was a capital figure for a gossip — short and dumpy, with a mild, placid, unmeaning sort of countenance, that banished all fear as to what one might say before her. Moreover, by assuming her late husband’s undisguised detestation of gossip and twaddle, she rather inveigled people into communicativeness. “Oh, don’t tell me any secrets, pray!” she would exclaim — or, “Don’t tell me anything that doesn’t concern myself. I never meddle with other people’s affairs,” and so on; by which means she often got possession of secrets that would otherwise never have been intrusted to her.

  Mrs. Trotter was of the masculine order: a great, tall, stout, upstanding, black-eyed, black-haired woman, with a strong, unturnable resolution; and a poor, little, henpecked, Jerry Sneak of a husband, who was of no more account in the house than if no such being existed. He was a kind, mild-dispositioned man, who might have been a useful and amiable member of society, had not his wife’s magnificent proportions captivated him at the outset of life, and merged his insignificance in herself. Mrs. Trotter was a busy, bustling woman, with such a strong sense of “duty” as frequently caused her to say and do things that most people would have been glad to leave alone.

  If she saw an incipient flirtation, she always thought it her “duty” to caution the parties or their friends; if Mr. Brown called on Mrs. Green oftener than she thought right, she would think it her duty to inform Mrs. Green’s husband; if Doctor Bolus hinted that he thought Miss Martin in a delicate way, she would bundle on her bonnet and shawl, and forthwith assure Miss Martin that she thought it her duty to tell her she was going to die, and advise her to prepare accordingly.

  It would never answer the purpose of any author to allow two such ladies as these to be without the essential requisites of daughters, and we are happy to say that in this instance there is no need of fiction, for Mrs. Flather had her most interesting, well-blown Emma, coming after a couple of sons — one at sea, the other ashore, whom we only introduce to dismiss as perfectly intractable in our hands; while Mrs. Trotter had her Eliza at the head of a graduating scale of little Trotters, ranging from sixteen years to six. Some links had been broken in the chain, but at the time of which we are writing Mrs. Trotter had her six little followers. As, however, there is no occasion to load the reader’s mind with people as an omnibus cad does his vehicle, we may here state that Eliza is the only one of the young ones we mean to deal with.

  Emma Flather was of the middle stature, what would be called a good-sized girl, neither too big nor too little, too fat nor too thin, with well-rounded limbs, and altogether a good armfullish sort of figure. She had a fair, clear, alabaster-like complexion, full, oval face, pale and yet not sickly, with light brown hair, well-pencilled eyebrows, darkly-fringed, blueish-greyish eyes, rosy lips, and regular pearly teeth. Perhaps we have hardly done justice to her eyes. In repose they were mild and passionless, lighting up, however, when animated, into a radiance that imparted life and intelligence to a countenance that at other times some perhaps might not have called pretty. Still Emma was never worked into anything like glow or excitement. As some one said of Talleyrand, that you might kick him behind without his countenance betraying a change, so a man might have kissed Emma Flather for half-an-hour without raising a blush on her cheeks. Indeed, she was a fine piece of animated statuary — and as cold withal. A provoking sort of girl. Not exactly pretty enough to fall in love with for her looks, and yet dangerous with her looks and blandishments combined. She was desperately enthusiastic; could assume raptures at the sight of a daisy, or weep o’er the fate of a fly in a slop-basin. Moreover, she had a smattering of accomplishments, could sing, and play, embroider, work worsteds, murder French and Italian, and had a knack of talking and pretending to a great deal more talent than she possessed. This taste for exaggeration she carried into other matters; she had a fine fertile imagination — frequently fancied herself a great heiress — talked of the beauty of her aunt’s place in Dorsetshire — insinuated that she was to inherit it, with a vast number of other little self-enhancements, plainly showing that her education had not been neglected.

  Emma was a curious mixture of high-mindedness and meanness — of feeling and insensibility. Full of enthusiasm and lofty sentiments — compassionate and tender beyond expression when it suited her purpose — she was, nevertheless, selfish and insensible to the last degree. Cold, calculating, and cunning, she had all the worldly-mindedness of a well-hackneyed woman of fifty — in short, of her mother. As the Frenchman said of his dog, “she was well down to charge,” and thoroughly appreciated the difference between an elder son and a younger. She would dismiss the latter at any moment that her
mother hinted the probability of anything better. All this told in her favour, she acquired the character of a model of propriety, and Emma Flather was held up as a pattern girl for all young ladies to imitate. Of course, old mother Flather was extremely anxious to get her married, but not having fallen in with anything exactly to her mind, she had just flown her at minor game and checked her off under pretence of not being able to part with the dear girl.

  Eliza Trotter was of a different nature. She was warmhearted, but shy and reserved, and so humble-minded as to be always most anxious to give way to any one that would have the kindness to take it of her. And yet she was a beauty — tall, slight, and graceful, with a clear olive complexion, and the brightest black eyes and hair imaginable. Emma Flather was not to be compared to her in point of looks; and yet, by sheer assumption, she always passed for something infinitely superior. Age, perhaps, might have something to do with this, aided by a certain patronising air that the model of propriety invariably indulged in to those whom she condescended to notice. She set up for something out of the common way, and assumption does a great deal!

  We trust the reader comprehends these characters.

  CHAPTER III.

  ECCE ITERUM CRISPINUS.” —

  Here’s old Jorrocks again, as we live!

  — Free Translation. —

  THE sun had sunk behind the distant hills, the whistling ploughman was watering his horses and washing their legs in the pond at the end of the village, and the tired labourers were knocking the clay from their clogs at their rose-entwined porches, preparatory to entering their cottages, when the jingling rattle of a hack-chaise drew all heads to the street. The cobbler dropped his last, the publican his pipe, the basket-maker his willows, and the sempstress her needlework, to look at the destination of so unusual a sound.