And my mother, distraught for many days, seemed stricken with terror of the Town and its associations, and took coach and fled away with me to Chelton; all the years since we had had no word of my father and did not know whether he was alive or dead. We had lived quietly in a little cottage on the edge of Chelton—the last dwelling, indeed, of the village ere the street passed into the great highway. My mother was possessed of small means—a legacy, I believed, from a kinsman, though she would tell me nothing either of my father’s family or of her own. She had not sufficient for our needs; she added to our means by fine needlework for the Squire’s lady and her folk; how she found the five guineas a year for which the Rev. Mr. Vining allowed me to share the studies and the discipline of his son Tony I did not know. Yet, though I, lazy and graceless young dog as I was, urged her to let me seek employment in Chelton or in London itself, she would not hear of this. She declared, dear soul, that she would have me first a scholar; even though I had turned seventeen, there was time and to spare for me to choose a calling. So with Tony I had become an equally indifferent scholar, in spite of Mr. Vining’s cane, and as abandoned a rogue and poacher. So I sat now with the parson’s son awaiting Squire Chelton’s summary justice, and most like Tim Kerrick’s execution of it. But Mr. Bradbury—?
Mr. Bradbury sat in a cushioned chair by the fire; Mr. Chelton supported his huge body more or less steadily against the chimney-piece, when at last Tim Kerrick paraded us before them in the library. It was a vast room,—its shelves lined with books, none of which, I fear, Mr. Chelton had ever opened from the day when his father’s death put him into possession of the Hall and its acres. Old Mr. Gilbert Chelton’s portrait looked coldly down from its gilded frame above the chimney-piece on his stout son, flushed from his drink—his red coat, buckskins and high boots all mud-splashed from the cross-country ride of the day. Squire Chelton had not changed his rig to do honour to his guests, who, I took it from the roars of laughter yet sounding in the dining-room, were gentlemen of tastes similar to his own. His iron-grey hair was wind-blown; his blood-shot eyes were as unsteady as his legs. He exuded good humour—natural to him, but stimulated by as liberal an indulgence in the contents of his cellar as he expected from any gentleman of his company. While Mr. Gilbert’s portrait looked its disapproval, the paintings of four other dead and gone Cheltons of a marked resemblance to the Squire seemed to regard him enviously from their old frames.