Anthony Trollope: The Belton Estate

20. CHAPTER XX: WILLIAM BELTON DOES NOT GO OUT HUNTING (continued)

'I shall not say a word on the subject to anybody; that is, not to anybody there. I am going to look after her, and not the estate.' Then he stooped down and kissed his sister, and in another minute was turning the corner out of the farm-yard on to the road at a quick pace, not losing a foot of ground in the turn, in that fashion of rapidity which the horses at Plaistow Hall soon learned from their master. The horse is a closely sympathetic beast, and will make his turns, and do his trottings, and comport himself generally in strict unison with the pulsation of his master's heart. When a horse won't jump it is generally the case that the inner man is declining to jump also, let the outer man seem ever so anxious to accomplish the feat.

Belton, who was generally very communicative with his servants, always talking to any man he might have beside him in his dog-cart about the fields and cattle and tillage around him, said not a word to the boy who accompanied him on this occasion. He had a good many things to settle in his mind before he got to London, and he began upon the work as soon as he had turned the corner out of the farm-yard. As regarded this Belton estate, which was now altogether his own, he had always bad doubts and qualms qualms of feeling rather than of conscience; and he had, also, always entertained a strong family ambition. His people, ever so far back, had been Beltons of Belton. They told him that his family could be traced back to very early days before the Plantagenets, as he believed, though on this point of the subject he was very hazy in his information and he liked the idea of being the man by whom the family should be reconstructed in its glory. Worldly circumstances had been so kind to him, that he could take up the Belton estate with more of the prestige of wealth than had belonged to any of the owners of the place for many years past. Should it come to pass that living there would be desirable, he could rebuild the old house, and make new gardens, and fit himself out with all the pleasant braveries of a well-to-do English squire. There need be no pinching and scraping, no question whether a carriage would be possible, no doubt as to the prudence of preserving game. All this had given much that was delightful to his prospects. And he had, too, been instigated by a somewhat weak desire to emerge from that farmer's rank into which he knew that many connected with him had supposed him to have sunk. It was true that he farmed land that was half his own and that, even at Plaistow, he was a wealthy man; but Plaistow Hall, with all its comforts, was a farm-house; and the ambition to be more than a farmer had been strong upon him.