The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Westcotes, by Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

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Title: The Westcotes

Author: Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

Release Date: December 30, 2003 [eBook #10548]

Language: English

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WESTCOTES***

E-text prepared by Guus van Baalen

Transcriber's Notes:

1. Words which may seem to be transcriber's typos, or otherwise suspect, but which are reproduced faithfully (archaic spellings, printer's typos—sometimes I couldn't tell):

     Ch. I: befel, undigged
     Ch. III: chaperon
     Ch. IV: babby, mun, valtz
     Ch. V: zounded, dimpsey, after'n, ax'n, ax
     Ch. VI: picquet, damitol
     Ch. XI: alwaies, Desarts, Eternitie

2. Diphthongs, given as single characters in the printed copy, are transcribed as two separate characters.

THE WESTCOTES

by

ARTHUR THOMAS QUILLER-COUCH

DEDICATION

MY DEAR HENRY JAMES,

A spinster, having borrowed a man's hat to decorate her front hall, excused herself on the ground that the house 'wanted a something.' By inscribing your name above this little story I please myself at the risk of helping the reader to discover not only that it wants a something, but precisely what that something is. It wants—to confess and have done with it—all the penetrating subtleties of insight, all the delicacies of interpretation, you would have brought to Dorothea's aid, if for a moment I may suppose her worth your championing. So I invoke your name to stand before my endeavour like a figure outside the brackets in an algebraical sum, to make all the difference by multiplying the meaning contained.

But your consent gives me another opportunity even more warmly desired. And I think that you, too, will take less pleasure in discovering how excellent your genius appears to one who nevertheless finds it a mystery in operation, than in learning that he has not missed to admire, at least, and with a sense almost of personal loyalty, the sustained and sustaining pride in good workmanship by which you have set a common example to all who practise, however diversely, the art in which we acknowledge you a master.

A. T. QUILLER-COUCH

October 25th, 1901

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I THE WESTCOTES OF BAYFIELD

CHAPTER II THE ORANGE ROOM

CHAPTER III A BALL, A SNOWSTORM, AND A SNOWBALL

CHAPTER IV ENCOUNTER BETWEEN A HIGH HORSE AND A HOBBY

CHAPTER V BEGINS WITH ANCIENT HISTORY AND ENDS WITH AN OLD STORY

CHAPTER VI FATE IN A LAURELLED POST-CHAISE

CHAPTER VII LOVE AND AN OLD MAID

CHAPTER VIII CORPORAL ZEALLY INTERVENES

CHAPTER IX DOROTHEA CONFESSES

CHAPTER X DARTMOOR

CHAPTER XI THE NEW DOROTHEA

CHAPTER XII GENERAL ROCHAMBEAU TELLS A STORY; AND THE TING-TANG RINGS FOR THE LAST TIME

CHAPTER I

THE WESTCOTES OF BAYFIELD

A mural tablet in Axcester Parish Church describes Endymion Westcote as "a conspicuous example of that noblest work of God, the English Country Gentleman." Certainly he was a typical one.

In almost every district of England you will find a family which, without distinguishing itself in any particular way, has held fast to the comforts of life and the respect of its neighbours for generation after generation. Its men have never shone in court, camp, or senate; they prefer tenacity to enterprise, look askance upon wit (as a dangerous gift), and are even a little suspicious of eminence. On the other hand they make excellent magistrates, maintain a code of manners most salutary for the poor in whose midst they live and are looked up to; are as a rule satisfied, like the old Athenian, if they leave to their heirs not less but a little more than they themselves inherited, and deserve, as they claim, to be called the backbone of Great Britain. Many of the women have beauty, still more have an elegance which may pass for it, and almost all are pure in thought, truthful, assiduous in deeds of charity, and marry for love of those manly qualities which they have already esteemed in their brothers.

Such a family were the Westcotes of Bayfield, or Bagvil, in 1810. Their "founder" had settled in Axcester towards the middle of the seventeenth century, and prospered—mainly, it was said, by usury. A little before his death, which befel in 1668, he purchased Bayfield House from a decayed Royalist who had lost his only son in the Civil Wars; and to Bayfield and the ancestral business (exalted now into Banking) his descendants continued faithful. One or both of the two brothers who, with their half-sister, represented the family in 1810, rode in on every week-day to their Bank-office in Axcester High Street,—a Georgian house of brick, adorned with a porch of plaster fluted to the shape of a sea-shell, out of which a. Cupid smiled down upon a brass plate and the inscription "WESTCOTE AND WESTCOTE," and on the first floor, with windows as tall as the rooms, so that from the street you could see through one the shapely legs of Mr. Endymion Westcote at his knee-hole table, and through another the legs of Mr. Narcissus. The third and midmost window was a dummy, having been bricked up to avoid the window-tax imposed by Mr. Pitt—in whose statesmanship, however, the brothers had firmly believed. Their somewhat fantastic names were traditional in the Westcote pedigree and dated from, the seventeenth century.

Endymion, the elder, (who took the lead of Narcissus in all, things), was the fine flower of the Westcote stocks, and, out of question, the most influential man in Axcester and for many a mile round justice of the Peace for the county of Somerset and Major of its Yeomanry, he served "our town," (so he called it) as Overseer of the Poor, Governor of the Grammar School, Chairman of Feoffees, Churchwarden, everything in short but Mayor—an office which he left to the tradesmen, while taking care to speak of it always with respect, and indeed to see it properly filled. The part of County Magistrate—to which he had been born—he played to perfection, and with a full sense of its dignified amenity. (It was whispered that the Lord Lieutenant himself stood in some awe of him.) His favourite character, however, was that of plain citizen of his native town. "I'm an Axcester man," he would declare in his public speeches, and in his own way he loved and served the little borough. For its good he held its Parliamentary representation in the hollow of his hand; and, as Overseer of the Poor, had dared public displeasure by revising the Voters' List and defying a mandamus of the Court of King's Bench rather than allow Axcester to fail in its duty of returning two members to support Mr. Percevall's