“Boating, my dear Mrs. Bedel, is the dullest of all things; don’t you think so?  Because a boat looks very pretty from the shore, we fancy the shore must look very pretty from a boat; and when we try it, we find we have only got down into a pit and can see nothing rightly.  For my part I hate boating, and I hate the water; and I’d rather have my house, like Haworth, at the edge of a moss, with good wholesome peat to look at, and an open horizon—­savage and stupid and bleak as all that is—­than be suffocated among impassable mountains, or upset in a black lake and drowned like a kitten.  O, there’s luncheon in the next room; won’t you take some?”

CHAPTER V

Mrs. Julaper’s Room

Sir Bale Mardykes being now established in his ancestral house, people had time to form conclusions respecting him.  It must be allowed he was not popular.  There was, perhaps, in his conduct something of the caprice of contempt.  At all events his temper and conduct were uncertain, and his moods sometimes violent and insulting.

With respect to but one person was his conduct uniform, and that was Philip Feltram.  He was a sort of aide-de-camp near Sir Bale’s person, and chargeable with all the commissions and offices which could not be suitably intrusted to a mere servant.  But in many respects he was treated worse than any servant of the Baronet’s.  Sir Bale swore at him, and cursed him; laid the blame of everything that went wrong in house, stable, or field upon his shoulders; railed at him, and used him, as people said, worse than a dog.

Why did Feltram endure this contumelious life?  What could he do but endure it? was the answer.  What was the power that induced strong soldiers to put off their jackets and shirts, and present their hands to be tied up, and tortured for hours, it might be, under the scourge, with an air of ready volition?  The moral coercion of despair; the result of an unconscious calculation of chances which satisfies them that it is ultimately better to do all that, bad as it is, than try the alternative.  These unconscious calculations are going on every day with each of us, and the results embody themselves in our lives; and no one knows that there has been a process and a balance struck, and that what they see, and very likely blame, is by the fiat of an invisible but quite irresistible power.

A man of spirit would rather break stones on the highway than eat that bitter bread, was the burden of every man’s song on Feltram’s bondage.  But he was not so sure that even the stone-breaker’s employment was open to him, or that he could break stones well enough to retain it on a fair trial.  And he had other ideas of providing for himself, and a different alternative in his mind.

Good-natured Mrs. Julaper, the old housekeeper at Mardykes Hall, was kind to Feltram, as to all others who lay in her way and were in affliction.