Dawn | Page 5

or less unapproachable, since it is but little that we know even of
our immediate ancestors. Occasionally in glancing at the cracking
squares of canvas, many of which cannot even boast a name, but which
alone remain to speak of the real and active life, the joys and griefs, the
sins and virtues that centred in the originals of those hard daubs and of
ourselves, we may light upon a face that about six generations since
was the counterpart of the little boy upon our shoulder, or the daughter
standing at our side. In the same way, too, partly through tradition and
partly by other means, we are sometimes able to trace in ourselves and
in our children the strong development of characteristics that
distinguished the race centuries ago.
If local tradition and such records of their individual lives as remained
are worthy of any faith, it is beyond a doubt that the Caresfoots of
Bratham Abbey had handed down their own hard and peculiar cast of
character from father to son unaffected in the main by the continual
introduction of alien blood on the side of the mother.

The history of the Caresfoot family had nothing remarkable about it.
They had been yeomen at Bratham from time immemorial, perhaps
ever since the village had become a geographical fact; but it was on the
dissolution of the monasteries that they first became of any importance
in the county. Bratham Abbey, which had shared the common fate, was
granted by Henry VIII. to a certain courtier, Sir Charles Varry by name.
For two years the owner never came near his new possession, but one
day he appeared in the village, and riding to the house of Farmer
Caresfoot, which was its most respectable tenement, he begged him to
show him the Abbey house and the lands attached. It was a dark
November afternoon, and by the time the farmer and his wearied guest
had crossed the soaked lands and reached the great grey house, the
damps and shadows of the night had begun to curtain it and to render
its appearance, forsaken as it was, inexpressibly dreary and lonesome.
"Damp here, my friend, is it not?" said Sir Charles with a shudder,
looking towards the lake, into which the rain was splashing.
"You are right, it be."
"And lonely too, now that the old monks have gone."
"Ay, but they do say that the house be mostly full of the spirits of the
dead," and the yeoman sank his voice to an awed whisper.
Sir Charles crossed himself and muttered, "I can well believe it," and
then, addressing his companion--
"You do not know of any man who would buy an abbey with all its
rights and franchises, do you, friend?"
"Not rightly, sir; the land be so poor it hath no heart in it; it doth scarce
repay the tillage, and what the house is you may see. The curse of the
monks is on it. But still, sir, if you have a mind to be rid of the place, I
have a little laid by and a natural love for the land, having been bred on
it, and taken the colour of my mind and my stubby growth therefrom,
and I will give you--" and this astutest of all the Caresfoots whispered a
very small sum into Sir Charles' ear.

"Your price is very small, good friend, it doth almost vanish into
nothing; and methinks the land that reared you cannot be so unkind as
you would have me think. The monks did not love bad land, but yet, if
thou hast it in the gold, I will take it; it will pay off a debt or two, and I
care not for the burden of the land."
And so Farmer Caresfoot became the lawful owner of Bratham Abbey
with its two advowsons, its royal franchises of treasure-trove and
deodand, and more than a thousand acres of the best land in Marlshire.
The same astuteness that had enabled this wise progenitor to acquire
the estate enabled his descendants to stick tightly to it, and though, like
other families, they had at times met with reverses, they never lost their
grip of the Abbey property. During the course of the first half of the
nineteenth century the land increased largely in value, and its acreage
was considerably added to by the father of the present owner, a man of
frugal mind, but with the family mania for the collection of all sorts of
plate strongly developed. But it was Philip's father, "Devil Caresfoot,"
who had, during his fifty years' tenure of the property, raised the family
to its present opulent condition, firstly, by a strict attention to business
and the large accumulations resulting from his practice of always living
upon half his