"Thank you; I come upon you pretty often, I believe, and make very
little scruple about it; but if you'll allow me to suggest, it is,
that you shouldn't try to make talk when you go into the cottages;
but just talk."
"I don't see the difference," said the vicar, a little querulously;
"but I daresay there is a difference, and I have no doubt what you
say is quite true. I shouldn't make talk, but talk; and as both are
equally difficult to me, you must let me purchase the privilege of
silence by this ten-pound note."
"Thank you. It's not so satisfactory to me; and, I should think, not
to yourself. But probably the Joneses and Greens will prefer it."
Mr. Ashton would look with plaintive inquiry into Mr. Gibson's face
after some such speech, as if asking if a sarcasm was intended. On
the whole, they went on in the most amicable way; only beyond the
gregarious feeling common to most men, they had very little actual
pleasure in each other's society. Perhaps the man of all others
to whom Mr. Gibson took the most kindly--at least, until Lord
Hollingford came into the neighbourhood--was a certain Squire Hamley.
He and his ancestors had been called squire as long back as local
tradition extended. But there was many a greater land-owner in the
county, for Squire Hamley's estate was not more than eight hundred
acres or so. But his family had been in possession of it long before
the Earls of Cumnor had been heard of; before the Hely-Harrisons
had bought Coldstone Park; no one in Hollingford knew the time when
the Hamleys had not lived at Hamley. "Ever since the Heptarchy,"
said the vicar. "Nay," said Miss Browning, "I have heard that there
were Hamleys of Hamley before the Romans." The vicar was preparing
a polite assent, when Mrs. Goodenough came in with a still more
startling assertion. "I have always heerd," said she, with all the
slow authority of an oldest inhabitant, "that there was Hamleys of
Hamley afore the time of the pagans." Mr. Ashton could only bow, and
say, "Possibly, very possibly, madam." But he said it in so courteous
a manner that Mrs. Goodenough looked round in a gratified way, as
much as to say, "The Church confirms my words; who now will dare
dispute them?" At any rate, the Hamleys were a very old family, if
not aborigines. They had not increased their estate for centuries;
they had held their own, if even with an effort, and had not sold
a rood of it for the last hundred years or so. But they were not
an adventurous race. They never traded, or speculated, or tried
agricultural improvements of any kind. They had no capital in any
bank; nor what perhaps would have been more in character, hoards of
gold in any stocking. Their mode of life was simple, and more like
that of yeomen than squires. Indeed Squire Hamley, by continuing the
primitive manners and customs of his forefathers, the squires of the
eighteenth century, did live more as a yeoman, when such a class
existed, than as a squire of this generation. There was a dignity in
this quiet conservatism that gained him an immense amount of respect
both from high and low; and he might have visited at every house
in the county had he so chosen. But he was very indifferent to the
charms of society; and perhaps this was owing to the fact that the
squire, Roger Hamley, who at present lived and reigned at Hamley,
had not received so good an education as he ought to have done.
His father, Squire Stephen, had been plucked at Oxford, and, with
stubborn pride, he had refused to go up again. Nay, more! he had
sworn a great oath, as men did in those days, that none of his
children to come should ever know either university by becoming a
member of it. He had only one child, the present Squire, and he was
brought up according to his father's word; he was sent to a petty
provincial school, where he saw much that he hated, and then turned
loose upon the estate as its heir. Such a bringing up did not do him
all the harm that might have been anticipated. He was imperfectly
educated, and ignorant on many points; but he was aware of his
deficiency, and regretted it in theory. He was awkward and ungainly
in society, and so kept out of it as much as possible; and he was
obstinate, violent-tempered, and dictatorial in his own immediate
circle. On the other side, he was generous, and true as steel; the
very soul of honour, in fact. He had so much natural shrewdness, that
his conversation was always worth listening to, although he was apt
to start by assuming entirely false premises, which he considered
as incontrovertible as if they had been mathematically proved; but,
given the correctness of his premises, nobody could bring more
natural wit and sense to bear upon the arguments based upon them.