Montezumas Daughter | Page 8

of a great broad, was a vineyard in Earl
Bigod's days. Long since it has ceased to grow grapes, though the name
of the 'Earl's Vineyard' still clings to all that slope of land which lies
between this house and a certain health-giving spring that bubbles from
the bank the half of a mile away, in the waters of which sick folks come
to bathe even from Norwich and Lowestoft. But sheltered as it is from
the east winds, to this hour the place has the advantage that gardens
planted here are earlier by fourteen days than any others in the country
side, and that a man may sit in them coatless in the bitter month of May,
when on the top of the hill, not two hundred paces hence, he must
shiver in a jacket of otterskins.
The Lodge, for so it has always been named, in its beginnings having
been but a farmhouse, faces to the south-west, and is built so low that it
might well be thought that the damp from the river Waveney, which
runs through the marshes close by, would rise in it. But this is not so,
for though in autumn the roke, as here in Norfolk we name ground fog,
hangs about the house at nightfall, and in seasons of great flood the
water has been known to pour into the stables at the back of it, yet
being built on sand and gravel there is no healthier habitation in the
parish. For the rest the building is of stud-work and red brick, quaint
and mellow looking, with many corners and gables that in summer are
half hidden in roses and other creeping plants, and with its outlook on
the marshes and the common where the lights vary continually with the
seasons and even with the hours of the day, on the red roofs of Bungay
town, and on the wooded bank that stretches round the Earsham lands;
though there are many larger, to my mind there is none pleasanter in
these parts. Here in this house I was born, and here doubtless I shall die,
and having spoken of it at some length, as we are wont to do of spots
which long custom has endeared to us, I will go on to tell of my
parentage.

First, then, I would set out with a certain pride--for who of us does not
love an ancient name when we happen to be born to it?-- that I am
sprung from the family of the Wingfields of Wingfield Castle in
Suffolk, that lies some two hours on horseback from this place. Long
ago the heiress of the Wingfields married a De la Pole, a family famous
in our history, the last of whom, Edmund, Earl of Suffolk, lost his head
for treason when I was young, and the castle passed to the De la Poles
with her. But some offshoots of the old Wingfield stock lingered in the
neighbourhood, perchance there was a bar sinister on their coat of arms,
I know not and do not care to know; at the least my fathers and I are of
this blood. My grandfather was a shrewd man, more of a yeoman than a
squire, though his birth was gentle. He it was who bought this place
with the lands round it, and gathered up some fortune, mostly by
careful marrying and living, for though he had but one son he was
twice married, and also by trading in cattle.
Now my grandfather was godly-minded even to superstition, and
strange as it may seem, having only one son, nothing would satisfy him
but that the boy should be made a priest. But my father had little
leaning towards the priesthood and life in a monastery, though at all
seasons my grandfather strove to reason it into him, sometimes with
words and examples, at others with his thick cudgel of holly, that still
hangs over the ingle in the smaller sitting- room. The end of it was that
the lad was sent to the priory here in Bungay, where his conduct was of
such nature that within a year the prior prayed his parents to take him
back and set him in some way of secular life. Not only, so said the prior,
did my father cause scandal by his actions, breaking out of the priory at
night and visiting drinking houses and other places; but, such was the
sum of his wickedness, he did not scruple to question and make mock
of the very doctrines of the Church, alleging even that there was
nothing sacred in the image of the Virgin Mary which stood in the
chancel, and shut its eyes in prayer before all the congregation when
the priest elevated the Host. 'Therefore,' said the prior,