Son Christopher. Harriet MartineauЧитать онлайн книгу.

      CHAPTER I. PIOUS ORGIES.

      The winter day closed in early on a certain Saturday in February, 1685, when the weather was dreary all round our shores. On the Dorsetshire coast the winds blew shrill; and the mists that they drove inland brought on an earlier night than the almanack told of. In Squire Battiscombe’s mansion, which looked down upon the fishing town of Lyme Regis, as little account was made of the weather as in any house in England, for the family could seldom have gone out of doors at all if they had been afraid of the gales on the bare downs; or the chilling blasts which drove up the ravines from the beach below; or the sea-foam, which, on stormy days, wetted everything within a quarter of a mile of the margin of the tide.

      In Battiscombe House, therefore, the children made no remark on the darkness of the evening except when their attention was drawn to it.

      “You take too much of the fire for such a little one, Joanna,” observed the mother, to a child who was poring over her book by the blaze from the log in the chimney. “How this cheek of yours is scorched, while some of us are chill!”

      “I only wanted the light,” Joanna observed with a sigh, as she at once retired into the twilight behind her mother’s chair. She was called to that chair, and kept warm with an arm round her waist, and soft kisses on the crown of the head. Still she held the book, with a finger between the pages, where she had been stopped.

      “That child is always reading!” the Squire remarked, and nobody gainsayed the observation.

      “These little ones get their own will out of us in a way for which we shall be answerable,” the ​Squire proceeded. “Arabella and Judith are thinking at this moment how strictly they were cut off from vain learning when they were that child’s age.”

      Arabella and Judith looked up with a smile which showed how truly their father had read their thoughts. They were not likely to forget the wrenchings of the heart they had endured, many a time, when some beloved volume was snatched from their hands at the cruellest moment.

      “I have gone to their bedsides,” said their father, “and taken from under their pillows the idol of the moment,—not always a romance or a narrative of a voyage, but some treatise of philosophy, or perhaps the grammar of some foreign tongue. See their smiles now! They not only forgive me, they understand me.”

      The girls looked up cheerfully.

      “My daughters are my friends, and their mother’s friends,” the proud father observed. “They have had other and better teaching than books; and I, for my part, doubt whether the most learned damsels that my grandfather used to extol, could have been safer and truer friends to their fathers than my daughters are to me. I would have this last little daughter please me as well.”

      Joanna here thrust her book behind her mother’s skirt, and the mother did not show that she was aware of the act.

      “But we have not grown up entirely ignorant, sir,” said Judith.

      “You can read the Holy Word,” he replied, “and that is enough.”

      “Except the foreign tongues, in which men read the Holy Word in sympathy,” observed the family tutor, from his seat in the window. “The ladies have no small knowledge of the French and Dutch languages—”

      “I reckon those things as included in their study of the Word,” the Squire replied. He did not wish to discuss a family arrangement by which opulent gentry, under cover of a plan for educating their children, kept up communication with continental Protestants of their own way of thinking.

      At this moment a shout was heard outside, and the tramp of horses’ feet on the shell walk in front of the house. In those days, every unusual sound was supposed (by Nonconformists, at least) to mean misfortune of some kind. The father of the family stood upright; the mother’s lips moved in prayer; and the looks of the daughters waited upon both. Their suspense was short, for Anthony, and David, and little Will, came up to the windows crying out “Christopher! Christopher! Christopher is come!”

      In another minute, Christopher, the heir and the pride of the household, was in the midst of his family, and the tutor had withdrawn. Christopher had never looked so comely; but he was thoughtful. There was no mystery about his appearance. He had come down, with a party of comrades from the Inns of Court, to attend the sessions at Dorchester: and he found he could ride over to Lyme to spend the Lord’s day in his old home. He was aware that the morrow was to be a remarkable Sabbath to his family and friends at Lyme, and he had used great efforts to arrive in time. At one part of the journey he scarcely hoped to accomplish it. The waters were out, so that his brother barristers and himself, and their guides and servants—twenty-three in all—had been compelled to go many miles round; and at dusk yesterday it had seemed an inevitable thing that men and horses would spend the night with no better shelter than a leafless wood. By means of Christopher’s new groom, however, who seemed to know the country better than the guides themselves, the party had been brought round into the Dorchester road, and enabled to divide themselves between two inns before the lights and fires were out: and they had ridden into Dorchester to breakfast.

      “Who is this new groom of yours?” the Squire asked.

      “Reuben? Oh! he is one of the Coads that there are so many of among the fishermen below. I believe his father is the horse-dealer, and that may be the way that Reuben knows the county roads and bridle-paths so well.”

      “I suppose he was trustily recommended to you?” observed the careful mother.

      “As a horse-keeper, he was. As for the rest, I liked his coming straight to a Dorsetshire man, and offering his services on the ground of neighbourhood and our good old country non-conformity. Oh, yes! he is one of us. He would walk twenty miles to hear John Hickes.”

      “You will allow him a good rest this night?” observed Mrs. Battiscombe. “None but trusty old acquaintances should be of our company on this occasion.”

      “As it pleases you, mother. I fear Reuben will be hurt when he learns how near he has been to Hickes’s pulpit without knowing it; but I will observe your pleasure.”

      When Christopher left the room, and the young people followed him all over the beloved old mansion, the Squire observed to his lady that Kit’s arrival was, to his mind, rather perplexing. Had she supposed he would come?

      “I had hardly liked to wish it, or not to wish it,” she replied. “It will be a blessing to us to have all our elder children with us this night; yet, if his suit had been favoured, he would scarcely have left his lady-love at the first moment to hear John Hickes.”

      “I have little fear for his suit,” the Squire observed. “He has had no disappointment. You may see that in his face.”

      “He has secured that strength by which the keenest disappointment—”

      “Yes, yes, my dear. No doubt of that. But his countenance is bright