In the holidays the refractory slave became the hereditary prince. Mr. Timothy Shelley, his father, owned the manor of Field Place in Sussex, a well-built, low, white house surrounded by a park, and extensive woods. There Shelley found his four pretty sisters, a little brother three years old, whom he had taught to say “The devil!” so as to shock the pious, and his beautiful cousin Harriet Grove, who people said resembled him.
The head of the family, Sir Bysshe Shelley, lived in the market-town of Horsham. He was a gentleman of the old school who boasted of being as rich as a duke and of living like a poacher. Six feet high, of commanding presence and a handsome face, Sir Bysshe was of cynical mind and energetic temperament. Unlike the rest of the Shelleys, who all had bright blue eyes, Sir Bysshe’s eyes were brown, inherited presumably from his New Jersey mother, the wealthy widow Plum.
He had sunk eighty thousand pounds in building Castle Goring, but could not finish it because of the expense. So he lived in a cottage close to the Horsham Town Hall, with one man-servant as eccentric as himself. He dressed like a peasant and spent his days in the tap-room of the Swan Inn, talking politics with all and sundry. He had a rough sort of humour that frightened the slow-witted country-folk. He had made his two daughters so unhappy at home that they had run away, which afforded him an excellent pretext for not giving them any dowry.
His one desire was to round off an immense estate and to transmit it intact to innumerable generations of Shelleys. With this in view he had entailed the greater part of it on Percy, to the total exclusion of his other children. Considering his grandson as the necessary upholder of his posthumous ambition, he had a certain affection for him. But for his son, Timothy, who dealt in stilted phrases, he had nothing but contempt.
Timothy Shelley was member of Parliament for the pocket borough of New Shoreham. Like his father, he was tall and well made, fair, handsome and imposing. He had a better heart than Sir Bysshe but less will-power. Sir Bysshe was rather attractive, as avowed egoists and cynics often are. Timothy had good intentions and was insupportable. He admired intellect with the irritating want of tact of the illiterate. He affected a fashionable respect for religion, an aggressive tolerance for new ideas, a pompous philosophy. He liked to call himself liberal in his political and religious opinions, but was careful not to scandalize the people of his set. A friend of the Duke of Norfolk, he spoke with complacency of the emancipation of the Irish Catholics. He was proud of his own boldness and not a little scared by it. He had tears at command, but became ferocious if his vanity was touched. In private life he plumed himself on his urbanity, but tried to combine the mailed fist with the velvet glove. Diplomatic in small things he was boorish in big ones; inoffensive yet exasperating, he was well fitted to try the temper of any young critic; and it was the vexation caused by the silly bibble-babble of his father which had done much to throw Shelley into intellectual isolation. As to Mrs. Shelley, she had been the prettiest girl in the county, she liked a man to be a fighter and a gentleman, and she would watch with disgust her eldest son go off into the woods carrying a book under his arm instead of a gun.