Juxon at once an enemy, an obstacle and a rival; an enemy, for having attempted his life, an obstacle, because while he lived he prevented the squire from marrying Mrs. Goddard and a rival because she had once loved him and for the sake of that love was still willing to sacrifice much for him.  And yet the very fact that she had loved him made it easier to be kind to him; it seemed to the squire that, after all, in taking care of Goddard he was in some measure serving her, too, seeing that she would have done the same thing herself could she have been present.

Yet there was something very generous and large-hearted in the way Charles Juxon did his duty by the sick man.  There are people who seem by nature designed to act heroic parts in life, whose actions habitually take an heroic form, and whose whole character is of another stamp from that of average humanity.  Of such people much is expected, because they seem to offer much; no one is surprised to hear of their making great sacrifices, no one is astonished if they exhibit great personal courage in times of danger.  Very often they are people of large vanity, whose chiefest vanity is not to seem vain; gifted with great powers and always seeking opportunities of using them, holding high ideas upon most subjects but rarely conceiving themselves incapable of attaining to any ideal they select for their admiration; brave in combat partly from real courage, partly, as I have often heard officers say of a dandy soldier in the ranks, because they are too proud to run away; but, on the whole, heroic by temperament and in virtue of a singular compound of pride, strength and virtue, often accomplishing really great things.  They are almost always what are called striking people, for their pride and their strength generally attract attention by their magnitude, and something in their mere appearance distinguishes them from the average mass.

But Charles Juxon did not in any way belong to this type, any more than the other persons who found themselves concerned in the events which culminated in Goddard’s illness.  He was a very simple man whose pride was wholly unconscious, who did not believe himself destined to do anything remarkable, who regarded his own personality as rather uninteresting and who, had he been asked about himself, would have been the first to disclaim any sentiments of the heroic kind.  With very little imagination, he possessed great stability himself and great belief in the stability of things in general, a character of the traditional kind known as “northern,” though it would be much more just to describe it as the “temperate” or “central” type of man.  Wherever there is exaggeration in nature, there is exaggerated imagination in man.  The solid and unimaginative part of the English character is undeniably derived from the Angles or from the Flemish; it is morally the best part, but it is by all odds the least interesting—­it is found in the type of man belonging to the plains in a temperate zone, who differs in every respect from the real northman, his distant cousin and hereditary enemy.  If Charles Juxon was remarkable for anything it was for his modesty and reticence, in a word, for his apparent determination not to be remarkable at all.