an occasional pane of bottle glass, which winked like an eye rounded by amaze.  Within, the wide fireplaces and ceilings were enriched by delicate mouldings, whose once clean-cut outlines were blurred to a pleasing, uncertain quality by successive coats of whitewash.  The room where Ishmael had been born boasted a domed ceiling, and a band of moulding half-way up the walls culminated over the bed’s head in a representation of the Crucifixion—­the drooping Christ surrounded by a medley of soldiers and horses, curiously intent dogs and swooning women, above whose heads the fluttered angels seemed entangled in the host of pennons flaunting round the cross.  Cloom was a house of neglected glories, of fine things fallen on base uses, like the family itself.  When James Ruan came into his inheritance it was still a gentleman’s estate; when he died it was a mere farm.  A distorted habit of mind and the incredible difficulties of communication in the remote West during the first half of the nineteenth century had gradually caused James Ruan to sink his gentlehood in a wilful boorishness that left him a fierce pride of race and almost feudal powers, but the tastes and habits of his own labourers.  As for the life of his mind, it was concentrated entirely on money-making; and all that he made he invested, till he became the most important landowner for miles, and in a district where no farms were very large his manor lands and cottage property and his nine hundred pounds or so of income made him a figure not to be ignored.

Nevertheless, for all his prosperity, he was a hard master, paying his labourers, who were mostly married men with families, the wage of seven shillings a week, and employing their womenfolk at hoeing or binding for sixpence a day, while for fewer pence still the little children stumbled on uncertain legs after the birds which threatened the new-tilled crops.  By such means—­common to all his neighbours at a time when cultivation was slow and such luxuries as meat, white bread, bedding, and coal were unknown to the poor, and by a shrewdness peculiar to himself—­did James Ruan manage to make his property contribute to his private income, a condition of affairs by no means inevitable in farming, although at that time the hated Corn Law, only repealed soon after Ishmael’s birth, had for thirty years been in force for the benefit of landowners.  If the Squire had known the worth of the old family portraits hanging in what had been the banqueting hall, where apples were now stored, he would doubtless have sold them, but he had cut himself off from civilised beings who might have praised them, and he thought the beruffed, steel-plated men and high-browed, pearl-decked ladies rather a dry-looking lot, though he never suffered Annie to say a disparaging word on the subject.