The manor had been in the possession of the same family from the time of
King James the First, who made a grant of the land to Reginald Berners,
the first Lord of the Manor.
Bertram Berners was the seventh in descent from Reginald. He married
first a lady of high rank, the daughter of the colonial governor of
Virginia. This union, which was neither fruitful nor happy, lasted more
than thirty years, after which the high-born wife died.
Finding himself at the age of sixty a childless widower and the last of
his name, he resolved to marry again in the hope of having heirs. He
chose for his second wife a young lady of good but impoverished family,
the orphan niece of a neighboring planter.
But the new wife only half fulfilled her husband's hopes, when, a year
after their marriage, she presented him with one fair daughter, the
Sybil of our story.
Even this gift cost the delicate mother her life; for although she did
not die immediately, yet from the day of Sybil's birth, she fell into a
long and lingering decline which finally terminated in death.
Old Bertram Berners was nearly seventy years of age, when he laid his
young wife in her early grave. Although he had been grievously
disappointed in his hopes of a male heir, yet he was not mad enough, at
his advanced period of life, to try matrimony again. He wisely
determined to devote the few remaining days of his life to the rearing
of his little daughter, then a child seven years of age.
Old Bertram loved and spoiled the infant as none but an old man can
love or spoil his only child, who is besides the offspring of his age.
He would not part with her to send her to school; but he himself became
her instructor until she was more than ten years old.
After that, as she began to approach womanhood, he engaged a succession
of governesses, each one of whom excessively annoyed him by persistently
trying to marry him for his money, and who consequently got herself
politely dismissed.
Next he tried a succession of tutors, but this second plan worked even
worse than the first; for each one of the tutors in his turn tried to
marry the heiress for the fortune, and, naturally enough, got himself
kicked out of the house.
So the plan of home education prospered badly. Perhaps old Bertram had
been singularly unfortunate in his selection of teachers. It must have
been so indeed, since he had been accustomed to say that "they all were
as bad as they could be; and each one was worse than all the rest."