One midnight of a winter month the sleepers in Riversley
Grange were awakened by a ringing of the outer bell
and blows upon the great hall-doors. Squire Beltham
was master there: the other members of the household
were, his daughter Dorothy Beltham; a married daughter
Mrs. Richmond; Benjamin Sewis, an old half-caste butler;
various domestic servants; and a little boy, christened
Harry Lepel Richmond, the squire’s grandson.
Riversley Grange lay in a rich watered hollow of the
Hampshire heath-country; a lonely circle of enclosed
brook and pasture, within view of some of its dependent
farms, but out of hail of them or any dwelling except
the stables and the head-gardener’s cottage.
Traditions of audacious highwaymen, together with
the gloomy surrounding fir-scenery, kept it alive
to fears of solitude and the night; and there was that
in the determined violence of the knocks and repeated
bell-peals which assured all those who had ever listened
in the servants’ hall to prognostications of
a possible night attack, that the robbers had come
at last most awfully. A crowd of maids gathered
along the upper corridor of the main body of the building:
two or three footmen hung lower down, bold in attitude.
Suddenly the noise ended, and soon after the voice
of old Sewis commanded them to scatter away to their
beds; whereupon the footmen took agile leaps to the
post of danger, while the women, in whose bosoms intense
curiosity now supplanted terror, proceeded to a vacant
room overlooking the front entrance, and spied from
the window.
Meanwhile Sewis stood by his master’s bedside.
The squire was a hunter, of the old sort: a hard
rider, deep drinker, and heavy slumberer. Before
venturing to shake his arm Sewis struck a light and
flashed it over the squire’s eyelids to make
the task of rousing him easier. At the first
touch the squire sprang up, swearing by his Lord Harry
he had just dreamed of fire, and muttering of buckets.
‘Sewis! you’re the man, are you:
where has it broken out?’
‘No, sir; no fire,’ said Sewis; ‘you
be cool, sir.’
’Cool, sir! confound it, Sewis, haven’t
I heard a whole town of steeples at work? I don’t
sleep so thick but I can hear, you dog! Fellow
comes here, gives me a start, tells me to be cool;
what the deuce! nobody hurt, then? all right!’
The squire had fallen back on his pillow and was relapsing
to sleep.
Sewis spoke impressively: ’There’s
a gentleman downstairs; a gentleman downstairs, sir.
He has come rather late.’
‘Gentleman downstairs come rather late.’
The squire recapitulated the intelligence to possess
it thoroughly. ’Rather late, eh? Oh!
Shove him into a bed, and give him hot brandy and
water, and be hanged to him!’
Sewis had the office of tempering a severely distasteful
announcement to the squire.
He resumed: ’The gentleman doesn’t
talk of staying. That is not his business.
It ‘s rather late for him to arrive.’
Copyrights
The Adventures Harry Richmond — Complete from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
