Эдвард Бульвер-Литтон - My Novel — Complete

Mrs. Dale, who, with all her “tempers,” was an excellent woman, and loved her husband with the whole of her quick little heart, was touched. She pressed his hand, and did not call him dear all the way home.

Meanwhile the Italian passed the fields, and came upon the high road about two miles from Hazeldean. On one side stood an old-fashioned solitary inn, such as English inns used to be before they became railway hotels,—square, solid, old-fashioned, looking so hospitable and comfortable, with their great signs swinging from some elm-tree in front, and the long row of stables standing a little back, with a chaise or two in the yard, and the jolly landlord talking of the crops to some stout farmer, whose rough pony halts of itself at the well-known door. Opposite this inn, on the other side of the road, stood the habitation of Dr. Riecabocca.

A few years before the date of these annals, the stage-coach on its way to London from a seaport town stopped at the inn, as was its wont, for a good hour, that its passengers might dine like Christian Englishmen—not gulp down a basin of scalding soup, like everlasting heathen Yankees, with that cursed railway-whistle shrieking like a fiend in their ears! It was the best dining-place on the whole road, for the trout in the neighbouring rill were famous, and so was the mutton which came from Hazeldean Park.

From the outside of the coach had descended two passengers, who, alone insensible to the attractions of mutton and trout, refused to dine,—two melancholy-looking foreigners, of whom one was Signor Riccabocca, much the same as we see him now, only that the black suit was less threadbare, the tall form less meagre, and he did not then wear spectacles; and the other was his servant. “They would walk about while the coach stopped.” Now the Italian’s eye had been caught by a mouldering, dismantled house on the other side the road, which nevertheless was well situated; half-way up a green hill, with its aspect due south, a little cascade falling down artificial rockwork, a terrace with a balustrade, and a few broken urns and statues before its Ionic portico, while on the roadside stood a board, with characters already half effaced, implying that the house was “To be let unfurnished, with or without land.”

The abode that looked so cheerless, and which had so evidently hung long on hand, was the property of Squire Hazeldean. It had been built by his grandfather on the female side,—a country gentleman who had actually been in Italy (a journey rare enough to boast of in those days), and who, on his return home, had attempted a miniature imitation of an Italian villa. He left an only daughter and sole heiress, who married Squire Hazeldean’s father; and since that time, the house, abandoned by its proprietors for the larger residence of the Hazeldeans, had been uninhabited and neglected. Several tenants, indeed, had offered themselves; but your true country squire is slow in admitting upon his own property a rival neighbour. Some wanted shooting. “That,” said the Hazeldeans, who were great sportsmen and strict preservers, “was quite out of the question.” Others were fine folks from London. “London servants,” said the Hazeldeans, who were moral and prudent people, “would corrupt their own, and bring London prices.” Others, again, were retired manufacturers, at whom the Hazeldeans turned up their agricultural noses. In short, some were too grand, and others too vulgar. Some were refused because they were known so well: “Friends were best at a distance,” said the Hazeldeans; others because they were not known at all: “No good comes of strangers,” said the Hazeldeans. And finally, as the house fell more and more into decay, no one would take it unless it was put into thorough repair: “As if one was made of money!” said the Hazeldeans. In short, there stood the house unoccupied and ruinous; and there, on its terrace, stood the two forlorn Italians, surveying it with a smile at each other, as for the first time since they set foot in England, they recognized, in dilapidated pilasters and broken statues, in a weed-grown terrace and the remains of an orangery, something that reminded them of the land they had left behind.

On returning to the inn, Dr. Riccabocca took the occasion to learn from the innkeeper (who was indeed a tenant of the squire) such particulars as he could collect; and a few days afterwards Mr. Hazeldean received a letter from a solicitor of repute in London, stating that a very respectable foreign gentleman had commissioned him to treat for Clump Lodge, otherwise called the “Casino;” that the said gentleman did not shoot, lived in great seclusion, and, having no family, did not care about the repairs of the place, provided only it were made weather-proof,—if the omission of more expensive reparations could render the rent suitable to his finances, which were very limited. The offer came at a fortunate moment, when the steward had just been representing to the squire the necessity of doing something to keep the Casino from falling into positive ruin, and the squire was cursing the fates which had put the Casino into an entail—so that he could not pull it down for the building materials. Mr. Hazeldean therefore caught at the proposal even as a fair lady, who has refused the best offers in the kingdom, catches, at last, at some battered old captain on half-pay, and replied that, as for rent, if the solicitor’s client was a quiet, respectable man, he did not care for that, but that the gentleman might have it for the first year rent-free, on condition of paying the taxes, and putting the place a little in order. If they suited each other, they could then come to terms. Ten days subsequently to this gracious reply, Signor Riccabocca and his servant arrived; and, before the year’s end, the squire was so contented with his tenant that he gave him a running lease of seven, fourteen, or twenty-one years, at a rent merely nominal, on condition that Signor Riccabocca would put and maintain the place in repair, barring the roof and fences, which the squire generously renewed at his own expense. It was astonishing, by little and little, what a pretty place the Italian had made of it, and, what is more astonishing, how little it had cost him. He had, indeed, painted the walls of the hall, staircase, and the rooms appropriated to himself, with his own hands. His servant had done the greater part of the upholstery. The two between them had got the garden into order.

The Italians seemed to have taken a joint love to the place, and to deck it as they would have done some favourite chapel to their Madonna.

It was long before the natives reconciled themselves to the odd ways of the foreign settlers. The first thing that offended them was the exceeding smallness of the household bills. Three days out of the seven, indeed, both man and master dined on nothing else but the vegetables in the garden, and the fishes in the neighbouring rill; when no trout could be caught they fried the minnows (and certainly, even in the best streams, minnows are more frequently caught than trout). The next thing which angered the natives quite as much, especially the female part of the neighbourhood, was the very sparing employment the two he creatures gave to the sex usually deemed so indispensable in household matters. At first, indeed, they had no woman-servant at all. But this created such horror that Parson Dale ventured a hint upon the matter, which Riccabocca took in very good part; and an old woman was forthwith engaged after some bargaining—at three shillings a week—to wash and scrub as much as she liked during the daytime. She always returned to her own cottage to sleep. The man-servant, who was styled in the neighbourhood “Jackeymo,” did all else for his master,—smoothed his room, dusted his papers, prepared his coffee, cooked his dinner, brushed his clothes, and cleaned his pipes, of which Riccabocca had a large collection. But however close a man’s character, it generally creeps out in driblets; and on many little occasions the Italian had shown acts of kindness, and, on some more rare occasions, even of generosity, which had served to silence his calumniators, and by degrees he had established a very fair reputation,—suspected, it is true, of being a little inclined to the Black Art, and of a strange inclination to starve Jackeymo and himself, in other respects harmless enough.