John Caldigate | Page 3

not been received among
building materials when any portion of Folking was erected. But then
neither had modern ideas of comfort become in vogue. Just behind the
kitchen-garden a great cross ditch, called Foul-water Drain, runs, or
rather creeps, down to the Wash, looking on that side as though it had
been made to act as a moat to the house; and on the other side of the
drain there is Twopenny Drove, at the end of which Twopenny Ferry
leads to Twopenny Hall, a farmhouse across the Wash belonging to Mr.
Caldigate. The fields around are all square and all flat, all mostly arable,
and are often so deep in mud that a stranger wonders that a plough
should be able to be dragged through the soil. The farming is, however,
good of its kind, and the ploughing is mostly done by steam.
Such is and has been for some years the house at Folking in which Mr.
Caldigate has lived quite alone. For five years after his wife's death he
had only on rare occasions received visitors there. Twice his brother
had come to Folking, and had brought a son with him. The brother had
been a fellow of a college at Cambridge, and had taken a living, and
married late in life. The living was far away in Dorsetshire, and the son,
at the time of these visits, was being educated at a private school.
Twice they had both been at Folking together, and the uncle had, in his
silent way, liked the boy. The lad had preferred, or had pretended to
prefer, books to rats; had understood or seemed to understand,
something of the advantages of cheap food for the people, and had been
commended by the father for general good conduct. But when they had

last taken their departure from Folking, no one had entertained any idea
of any peculiar relations between the nephew and the uncle. It was not
till a year or two more had run by, that Mr. Daniel Caldigate thought of
making his nephew George the heir to the property.
The property indeed was entailed upon John, as it had been entailed
upon John's father. There were many institutions of his country which
Mr. Caldigate hated with almost an inhuman hatred; but there were
none more odious to him than that of entails, which institution he was
wont to prove by many arguments to be the source of all the ignorance
and all the poverty and all the troubles by which his country was
inflicted. He had got his own property by an entail, and certainly never
would have had an acre had his father been able to consume more than
a life-interest. But he had denied that the property had done him any
good, and was loud in declaring that the entail had done the property
and those who lived on it very much harm. In his hearts of hearts he did
feel a desire that when he was gone the acres should still belong to a
Caldigate. There was so much in him of the leaven of the old English
squirarchic aristocracy as to create a pride in the fact that the Caldigates
had been at Folking for three hundred years, and a wish that they might
remain there; and no doubt he knew that without repeated entails they
would not have remained there. But still he had hated the thing, and as
years rolled on he came to think that the entail now existing would do
an especial evil.
His son on leaving school spent almost the whole four months between
that time and the beginning of his first term at Cambridge with the
Babingtons. This period included the month of September, and
afforded therefore much partridge shooting,--than which nothing was
meaner in the opinion of the Squire of Folking. When a short visit was
made to Folking, the father was sarcastic and disagreeable; and then,
for the first time, John Caldigate showed himself to be possessed of a
power of reply which was peculiarly disagreeable to the old man. This
had the effect of cutting down the intended allowance of L250 to L220
per annum, for which sum the father had been told that his son could
live like a gentleman at the University. This parsimony so disgusted
uncle Babington, who lived on the other side of the county, within the
borders of Suffolk, that he insisted on giving his nephew a hunter, and
an undertaking to bear the expense of the animal as long as John should

remain at the University. No arrangement could have been more foolish.
And that last visit made by John to Babington House for the two days
previous to his Cambridge career was in itself most indiscreet. The
angry father would not take