Captain Winstanley entered upon his new position with a fixed determination to make the best of it, and with a very clear view of its advantages and disadvantages. For seven years he was to be master of everything — or his wife was to be mistress, which, in his mind, was exactly the same. No one could question his use of the entire income arising from Squire Tempest’s estates during that period. When Violet came of age — on her twenty-fifth birthday — the estates were to be passed over to her in toto; but there was not a word in the Squire’s will as to the income arising during her minority. Nor had the Squire made any provision in the event of his daughter’s marriage. If Violet were to marry to-morrow, she would go to her husband penniless. He would not touch a sixpence of her fortune until she was twenty-five. If she were to die during her minority the estate would revert to her mother.
It was a very nice estate, taken as a sample of a country squire’s possessions. Besides the New Forest property, there were farms in Wiltshire and Dorsetshire; the whole yielding an income of between five and six thousand a year. With such a revenue, and the Abbey House and all its belongings rent free, Captain Winstanley felt himself in a land of Canaan. But then there was the edict that seven years hence he was to go forth from this land of milk and honey; or, at any rate, was to find himself living at the Abbey House on a sorely restricted income. Fifteen hundred a year in such a house would mean genteel beggary, he told himself despondently. And even this genteel beggary would be contingent on his wife’s life. Her death would rob him of everything.
He had a mind given to calculation, and he entered upon the closest calculations as to his future. He meant to enjoy life, of course. He had always done that to the best of his ability. But he saw that the chief duty he owed to himself was to save money; and to lay by against the evil inevitable day when Violet Tempest would despoil him of power and wealth. The only way to do this was by the cutting down of present expenses, and an immediate narrowing of the lines on which the Abbey House was being conducted; for the Captain had discovered that his wife, who was the most careless and incompetent of women as regards money matters, had been spending the whole of her income since her husband’s death. If she had not spent her money on society, she had spent it on travelling, on lace, on old china, on dress, on hothouse flowers, on a stable which was three times larger than she could possibly require, on a household in which there were a good many more cats than were wanted to catch mice, on bounties and charities that were given upon no principle, not even from inclination, but only because Squire Tempest’s widow had never been able to say No.
Captain Winstanley’s first retrenchment had been the sale of Bullfinch, for which noble animal Lord Mallow, a young Irish viscount, had given a cheque for three hundred guineas. This money the Captain put on deposit at his banker’s, by way of a nest-egg. He meant his deposit account to grow into something worth investing before those seven fat years were half gone.
He told his wife his views on the financial question one morning when they were breakfasting tête-à-tête in the library, where the Squire and his family had always dined when there was no company. Captain and Mrs. Winstanley generally had the privilege of breakfasting alone, as Violet was up and away before her mother appeared. The Captain also was an early riser, and had done half his day’s work before he sat down to the luxurious nine-o’clock breakfast with his wife.
“I have been thinking of your ponies, pet,” he said, in a pleasant voice, half careless, half caressing, as he helped himself to a salmon cutlet. “Don’t you think it would be a very wise thing to get rid of them?”
“Oh, Conrad!” cried his wife, letting the water from the urn overflow the teapot in her astonishment; “you can’t mean that! Part with my ponies?”
“My dear love, how often do you drive them in a twelvemonth?”
“Not very often, perhaps. I have felt rather nervous driving lately — carts and great waggon-loads of hay come out upon one so suddenly from cross-roads. I don’t think the waggoners would care a bit if one were killed. But I am very fond of my gray ponies. They are so pretty. They have quite Arabian heads. Colonel Carteret says so, and he has been in Arabia.”
“But, my dear Pamela, do you think it worth while keeping a pair of ponies because they are pretty, and because Colonel Carteret, who knows about as much of a horse as I do of a megalosaurus says they have Arabian heads? Have you ever calculated what those ponies cost you?”
“No, Conrad; I should hate myself if I were always calculating the cost of things.”
“Yes, that’s all very well in the abstract. But if you are inclined to waste money, it’s just as well to know how much you are wasting. Those ponies are costing yon at the least one hundred and fifty pounds a year, for you could manage with a man less in the stables if you hadn’t got them.”
“That’s a good deal of money certainly,” said Mrs. Winstanley, who hated driving, and had only driven her ponies because other people in her position drove ponies, and she felt it was a right thing to do.
Still the idea of parting with anything that appertained to her state wounded her deeply.
“I can’t see why we should worry ourselves about the cost of the stables,” she said; “they have gone on in the same way ever since I was married. Why should things be different now?”
“Don’t you see that you have the future to consider, Pamela. This handsome income which you are spending so lavishly ——”
“Edward never accused me of extravagance,” interjected Mrs. Winstanley tearfully, “except in lace. He did hint that I was a little extravagant in lace.”
“This fine income is to be reduced seven years hence to fifteen hundred a year an income upon which — with mine added to it — you could not expect to be able to carry on life decently in such a house as this. So you see, Pamela, unless we contrive between us to put by a considerable sum of money before your daughter’s majority, we shall be obliged to leave the Abbey House, and live in a much smaller way than we are living now.”
“Leave the Abbey House!” cried Mrs. Winstanley with a horrified look. “Conrad, I have lived in this house ever since I was married.”
“Am I not aware of that, my dear love? But, all the same, you would have to let this place, and live in a much smaller house, if you had only fifteen hundred a year to live upon.”
“It would be too humiliating! At the end of one’s life. I should never survive such a degradation.”
“It may be prevented if we exercise reasonable economy during the next seven years.”
“Sell my ponies, then, Conrad; sell them immediately. Why should we allow them to eat us out of house and home. Frisky shies abominably if she is in the least bit fresh, and Peter has gone so far as to lie down in the road when he has had one of his lazy fits.”
“But if they are really a source of pleasure to you, my dear Pamela, I should hate myself for selling them,” said the Captain, seeing he had gained his point.
“They are not a source of pleasure. They have given me some awful frights.”
“Then we’ll send them up to Tattersall’s immediately, with the carriage.”
“Violet uses the carriage with Titmouse.” objected Mrs. Winstanley. “We could hardly spare the carriage.”
“My love, if I part with your ponies from motives of economy, do you suppose I would keep a pony for your daughter?” said the Captain with a grand air. “No; Titmouse must go, of course. That will dispose of a man and a boy in the stables. Violet spends so much of her life on horseback, that she cannot possibly want a pony to drive.”
“She is very fond of Titmouse,” pleaded the mother.
“She has a tendency to lavish her affection on quadrupeds — a weakness which hardly needs fostering. I shall write to Tattersall about the three ponies this morning; and I shall send up that great raking brown horse Bates rides at the same time. Bates can ride one of my hunters. That will bring down the stable to five horses — my two hunters, Arion, and your pair of carriage-horses.”
“Five horses,” sighed Mrs. Winstanley pensively; “I shall hardly know those great stables with only five horses in them. The dear old place used to look so pretty and so full of life when I was first married, and when the Squire used to coax me to go with him on his morning rounds. The horses used to move on one side, and turn their heads so prettily at the sound of his voice — such lovely, sleek, shining creatures, with big intelligent eyes.”
“You would be a richer woman if it had not been for those lovely, sleek, shining creatures,” said Captain Winstanley. “And now, love, let us go round the gardens, and you will see the difference that young able-bodied gardeners are making in the appearance of the place.”
Mrs. Winstanley gave a plaintive little sigh as she rose and rang the bell for Pauline. The good old gray-haired gardeners — the men who had seemed to her as much a part of the gardens as the trees that grew in them — these hoary and faithful servants had been cashiered, to make room for two brawny young Scotchmen, whose dialect was as Greek to the mistress of the Abbey House. It wounded her not a little to see these strangers at work in her grounds. It gave an aspect of strangeness to her very life out of doors. She hardly cared to go into her conservatories, or to loiter on her lawn, with those hard unfamiliar eyes looking at her. And it wrung her heart to think of the Squire’s old servants thrust out in their old age, unp............