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John Halifax, Gentleman: March

When I was twenty-three and John Halifax twenty we took our first holiday together, lodging at a farm-house in the neighboring hills, where also some cousins of Richard Brithwood, Mr. March and his daughter, Ursula, were making a temporary residence. The father being an invalid, and growing rapidly worse while we were there, John Haifax was able to perform valuable services for the daughter. By the time the father died John and Miss March were in love. The difficulties to their marriage were of a kind only to be solved by overriding them. John Halifax was poor and a nobody; Ursula March was high-born and an heiress. When he would have retired it was she who, with the instincts of a big and noble heart, took matters into her own hands. She did this the more bravely, owing to the fact that Richard Brithwood, her guardian, had the power to withhold her income, which he did for years.

Their marriage was therefore in modest conditions, but none the less happy for that. Their first sorrow may be said to have come when their eldest child, Muriel, proved to have been born blind. Almost the last act of my stern old father was to bless the babe and proclaim her the child of peace. Next to his wife this little blind girl was the object of her father's dearest affections. Three boys, Guy, Edwin, and Walter, were born after her, and lastly another little girl; but to none did the heart of John Halifax go out with the tenderness called forth by the little one who never seemed afflicted, because of her sweet happiness. When at the age of eleven she was taken from them the father's youth forsook him and middle age began to draw on. I now made my home with them, as a brother to the parents and an uncle to the children. The fullness of affection they showed one another was always shared with me. So, too, I shared in all the subsequent years of mingled prosperity and care.

They were the years, following Waterloo, of England's first great industrial expansion. John Halifax became one of the new nobility which then began to so large a degree to supplant the old, the nobility of commerce. His progressive mind was always looking for new outlets to his energies, which were also to include new phases of prosperity to the people roundabout, who more and more looked to him as leader. In addition to the business of which my father's death had made him master, he took over the old cloth-mills at Enderley. Here Lord Luxmore was the proprietor, and to ruin the mills, and so ruin John, he deflected the stream on the pretext of needing the water to supply his own fountains. John Halifax was equal to the occasion. He had already been in touch with Arkwright, who first used steam in the mills at Manchester. Steam was therefore introduced at Enderley, the income of the mill-owner doubling and trebling with each year. From the small house in town John and Ursula Halifax moved to a modest estate in the country, moving from that in the course of time to one of the great houses of the county, exerting with each change a widening influence for good which in the Regent's days was rare. But prosperity brought them no immunity from domestic trouble. Little Muriel's death was the first blow. Other blows followed soon. The boys grew up to be young men. With their love-affairs came the first real discords in the family. They began with the appearance of a governess for little Maud. She gave her name as Miss Silver. Beautiful, mysterious, and self-contained, she repelled Ursula's motherly sympathies by a coldness not explained till she proved to be Louise d'Argent, the daughter of a notorious French Deputy under the Reign of Terror. But by this time the worst mischief was done, since Guy, the eldest son, was in love with her. To accept her as Guy's future wife cost John and Ursula Halifax a struggle. It was a surprise to them, therefore, that Guy should be refused on the ground that Miss Silver was in love with another man. There was no relief in this, however, since the other man proved to be the second son, Edwin, who was also in love with her. Of this difficult situation the animosity between the two brothers was not the least of the trials the parents had to undergo. In a household where love had been the watchword the hatred of brothers was the harder to bear. Before Edwin was married Guy had gone abroad, nominally on business for his father, but really to be away from the sight of Edwin's happiness.