If the people lived in their own houses, however humble those houses might be, nothing of the sort would be possible. But they do not live in their own houses. All the efforts of generations after generations of Cornleigh Cornleighs have been directed to compel them to dwell in landowners’ houses, under the thumb of the tenant-farmer and the steward.
It may be said, there is nothing to prevent a man living in his own house; but how can you build a house without land to put it on? How can you get that land if Cornleigh Cornleigh will not sell it to you?
Cornleigh Cornleigh, Esq., had got the land.
Felise glanced at the upright form of Mrs. Cornleigh Cornleigh, and decided not to appeal to her. She drove on to the lodge-gates, and asked there for the justice-room; at that word she was rudely told to go round to the back, and left to find her way to the back as well as she might. A passerby gave her the information—he was a young man, and glad to assist beauty.
They had to go round some distance and approach The House from another quarter up a long lane; but found a high iron gate across the lane, and had to wait till it pleased a woman to open it. Then it was a regulation that no horse or vehicle must pass farther; the pony-carriage had to be left there, just inside the gate, to fare as it might. Felise and her client went down the lane afoot; there was a wall twenty feet high each side.
VII
The old man walked very slowly with two sticks, and paused each step to look about him. He was puzzled; he had not been into the town for years, and the place was so altered he did not know it.
“Why, this lane,” he said presently, speaking in his own dialect which I translate, “used to be a public road, and that side was the park; it was all open then. What, won’t they let nobody go in the park, then? That side there was a row of big elms; they be cut down then, and that there wall builded. Well, to be sure! Where’s the church?” he asked, as they came to a turning. “Be he gone, then?”
He had forgotten that he had heard all about the changes from others. To the very aged, as to children, to hear of a thing is very different to seeing it; they do not realise it till they see it.
The church was gone, sure enough, and nothing left to mark the site; tombs, stones, all moved out of the way. It dated from the twelfth century, and was considered an architectural treasure; it was, too, pleasant to look at, with its ivy, the great elms adjacent, and the rookery in them, where the rooks in springtime caw, caw, and the jackdaws jack, jack, daw—made such a noise to compensate for the silence of the dead under them.
Wood-pigeons came to the elms sometimes; thrushes sang in the ancient gnarled hawthorns, old as the days of matchlocks; they came, too, to the walls of the old church for the ivy-berries. There were grey buttresses propping up the bank of the graveyard, and in these grey buttresses the blue tits had nests deep in the cavities. Old Abner minded taking a tit’s nest there when he was a boy—seventy years ago.
The church was gone; the graveyard clean dug away, buttresses and all; the elms down, and the site occupied by the various “offices” common to the precincts of a mansion.
Letitia did not like the church—that grey antiquity—so near the drawing-room; there were funerals in churches, babies brought to be christened, and bells were rung. Besides, it obstructed that clear sweep which ought to be found round a mansion; in short, it was in the way: there could be no ring-fence while it stood there with the public road leading up to it.
Her shaven advisers hailed the idea of removing it—which entailed building a new one elsewhere—with vast delight. To build a great new church was to them an immense profit—the profit of the personal social influence which repays those who “labour” in these movements. Such is the secret motive in half the church restorations throughout the country—the glorification of the “labourer” who sets all this afoot.
Those who understand human nature will readily perceive that the town subscribed liberally to this work which was to deprive it of its chief feature, to shut up its park, and to close a valuable right of way.
Many a painter had come to look at and sketch the ancient building. Therein reposed the entire history of Maasbury town. The births, the marriages, the deaths of six hundred years were enclosed in it like a casket. All the associations of the old families of the town were bound up in it.
The children for hundreds of years had played in the park, gathering the buttercups, inhaling the fresh sweet air, building up their little frames with store of health.
The open lane gave access to one side of the town—the only access for vehicles without going round a long distance.
To deprive themselves of these advantages the inhabitants subscribed most liberally; they held public meetings to give the necessary sanction to the enterprise; they signed petitions and memorials, and never ceased to agitate till it was accomplished. Nor were they satisfied till the very bones of their ancestors had been shovelled away and stables built on the site of their ancient altar. Such is Public
