Margaret Vincent: A Novel

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by Sophia Lucy Clifford (Mrs. W. K. Clifford)

I

Margaret Vincent is the heroine of this story, but there are others who play important parts in it. Her grandfather was old Lord Eastleigh, well known in his day, fascinating and happy-go-lucky, who, when he had spent his patrimony in extravagant living, and disgraced himself as a guinea-pig, discreetly died, leaving his elder son, Cyril Vincent, all his debts and most of his difficulties. Cyril was rather amused by the title, added to the debts to the best of his ability, married a lady from the music-halls, and, finding London impossible, went a-ranching with his wife on the other side of the world. There the life and its isolation absorbed his energies and identification. But that was five-and-twenty years ago—and this, be it said, is a modern story.

Gerald, the younger son and only other survivor of the Eastleigh family, distinguished himself at Oxford, became engaged to the daughter of a bishop, accepted a living from his prospective father-in-law, and within six months changed his opinions, threw up the living, made himself notorious in the days when agnosticism was a crime, by writing some articles that closed the door of every second house in London against him and secured his being promptly jilted by the woman with whom he had been in love. He had just two hundred a year, inherited from his mother. His habits were indolent, his tastes simple. The one desire left him after the crash was to get out of everybody's sight, to think, and to smoke his pipe in peace, and presently perhaps to write a book in which he could freely express the bitterness packed away at the bottom of his heart and soul. He travelled for a few years, and thus lost sight, much to their satisfaction, of all his distant relations (near ones, with the exception of his brother, he had none), dropped his courtesy title of Honorable, and became a fairly contented loafer. He was an excellent walker, which was lucky, seeing that two hundred a year will not go far in travelling expenses, so he trudged over every pass in Switzerland, up Mont Blanc and the Matterhorn, down into Italy over the St. Gothard—there was no rail then, of course—and back by the Corniche road to France; up France by Avignon and Dijon to Paris, and at the end of a few years back to England to realize that he was thoroughly well forgotten.

The streets of London irritated him with their noise, and the people with their hurrying. The pavement tired his feet, the manner of life—that is, the manner of life to be had on so small an income as his—he found irritating and almost impossible. One day he packed a knapsack, filled his pouch, walked through Putney and Wandsworth and onward. He breathed more freely when he reached Wimbledon, which had then an almost rustic railway station and not a building near it, drew a long breath at Surbiton, and, blessing the beautiful county of Surrey, trudged on with a light heart. It was thus that he arrived at Chidhurst and discovered Woodside Farm.

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