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Updated: June 15, 2025
She kept on repeating feebly that it was all like a dream she had not been able to realise the change yet. To Reginald Palliser the inheritance of Wimperfield was only a return to the home of his childhood. To his lowly-born little helpmeet it was the beginning of a new life.
Wendover appeared as junior counsel in some insignificant case, and Lady Palliser, who read the Times and Post, diligently apprised Ida of the fact. 'You see Brian is getting on quite nicely, she said approvingly, 'and by-and-by when he has plenty of work, you will have a small house in town, I suppose somewhere about Belgravia and only come to Wimperfield for your holidays.
The sound of the organ and the fresh rustic voices singing a familiar hymn told Ida that the sermon was over. Lady Palliser was in an agony of anxiety to get Brian away before the congregation came out. She and Ida contrived to beguile him out of the churchyard and away towards Wimperfield Park by a meadow path which was but little frequented.
Brian had come to Wimperfield in the hope that quiet and country air would bring back sleep to his eyelids and steadiness to his nerves; but he had been there a week, and his hand was no steadier, his nights were no less wakeful.
'Then he can't be like the Black Dwarf, said Vernon, who knew almost all Sir Walter's novels, his sister having read Shakespeare, Scott, and Dickens to him for hours on end, during the long winter evenings at Wimperfield. 'Does he live in that cart always? asked Bessie.
He was not given to forecasting the future, and it had seemed to him that life at Wimperfield was to go on for ever in the same groove immutable as the course of the planets; that he was always to have a luxurious home there a fine stable an indulgent father-in-law. He had been really fond of Sir Reginald, after his manner, and his sudden death shocked and grieved him.
Wimperfield with its lighted windows, stone walls, and classic portico, had seemed to her only as a prison-house, a whited sepulchre, fair without and loathsome within. Vernie was full of curiosity about that little scene at the dinner table.
The hawthorns in Wimperfield Park glowed in the distance like patches of crimson flame, and the undulating sweeps of bracken showed golden-brown against the green-sward; while the oaks-symbolic of all that is solid, ponderous, and constant in woodland nature, slow to bloom and slow to die had hardly a faded leaf to murk the coming of winter.
More boxes of peaches and grapes had been sent over from Wimperfield in the absence of Sir Vernon and his brother, who were still in Scotland. Bessie's anniversary was heralded somewhat inauspiciously by a tremendous gale which swept across the Hampshire Downs, after doing no small mischief in the Channel, and wrecking a good many fine old oaks and beeches in the New Forest.
And oh, Ida, what a blessing that everything at Wimperfield is fully insured! The house is completely gutted! Ida could not feel sorry about Wimperfield. The place had been to her of late the abode of horror. If she could be glad of anything in her present frame of mind, it would have been to know that Wimperfield House was razed to the ground.
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