The Pit Town Coronet Volume Iii Part 4

It was the second of September. Reginald Haggard's usual invitations had been accepted by a select party of his intimates. They had had a great slaughter in the well-stocked Walls End preserves on the day before.

General Pepper, Lord Spunyarn, Colonel Spurbox, the host and the two young men sat down to breakfast, and Georgie Haggard presided at the meal, looking to Spunyarn's mind handsomer than ever in the deep mourning which she still wore for her cousin Lucy. But Mrs. Haggard was not the only lady who graced the breakfast-table at the Castle, for Mrs.

Dodd had arrived to pay a long-promised visit the day before, of course accompanied by her husband. As some men never travel without a hat box, so Mrs. Dodd never left King's Warren without the Rev. John.

"I am so glad to have met you once more, Lord Spunyarn," said the vicar's wife; "isolated as I am at King's Warren, it is so seldom my privilege to meet any man having a purpose in life, and the men with a purpose, you know, are after all the only men worth knowing." Here she gave a benignant and comprehensive glance round the table, and every one felt that he at least was not worth Mrs. Dodd's notice, which was exactly the sensation the vicar's wife intended to produce.

"Awfully good of you, dear Mrs. Dodd, I'm sure, but I'm afraid I can hardly claim the credit of being a man with a purpose. I went to the East End first, you know, merely from curiosity and because the people were excessively amusing, but nowadays 'slumming' is the fas.h.i.+on and a great many smart people I know do as I do, merely for a new sensation."

"Ah, you do good by stealth and blush to find it fame," said the lady.

"I don't know if you can call it doing good. I give very little of my money away, though I certainly do spend a good deal of my time among the abjectly poor. I became a sort of confidential adviser to a good many of them, a kind of honorary amateur solicitor. I drifted into it somehow or other. I acted as a sort of buffer between the East End Lazarus and his landlord. I was instrumental in obtaining for Lazarus certain rights which had been long in abeyance in the East End; either my client didn't know his rights, or he found them difficult to enforce; the landlords would screw the uttermost farthing out of the poor wretches in the shape of rent, and if they didn't pay they were sold up. The _quid pro quo_ they got for their rent was simply a place to rot and die in--no water, no drains, no ventilation, no anything. Then there was the sweating system; women working fifteen or sixteen hours a day for a pittance of ninepence: women doing men's work and getting next to nothing for it; and the attempted redress of a thousand and one nameless grievances and horrors."

"Oh, Lord Spunyarn," cried Mrs. Dodd, "would that I could walk hand in hand with you through those dreadful places, sharing in such work."

"I have no doubt Dodd could exchange and become one of the wise men of the East, if he tried," said Haggard maliciously.

"Ah, dear Mr. Haggard, my husband was never formed for missionary work.

Ever since my girlhood I have tried to rouse his enthusiasm, but in vain. I don't believe he has any enthusiasm," and here the voice of the Reverend John Dodd was heard in an unctuous whisper addressing Colonel Spurbox in commendation of the dish in front of him, to which he helped himself copiously for the second time.

"I'm quite certain, my dear sir, that there is no more successful way of accommodating the freshly-killed partridge than in a _salmi_. I say this advisedly, and after many years' experience. I speak feelingly, colonel. Till the fourth you can't do better than stick to _salmi_; I always do."

"There's no want of enthusiasm in that, anyhow, Dodd," said Spunyarn with a smile, while the two young men laughed aloud.

"Ah," sighed the vicaress in a stage whisper, "forgive his little weakness; he _will_ hanker after the flesh-pots--the flesh-pots of Egypt."

"Be exact, my dear, be exact," cried the vicar; "it was quail, probably roast quail, though that is a succulent dish, that is referred to; certainly not _salmi_ of partridges."

"Don't trifle, John," cried Mrs. Dodd.

"I don't, my dear; I a.s.sure you that I am seriously, profitably and pleasantly employed. Good gracious me, is there anything one need be ashamed of in the admiration of art? And what art can be higher than the culinary art, which must have been necessarily one of the earliest, if not the very earliest of all? Some people are born without an ear for music; I am one of those unfortunates myself, but to make up for it I have been blessed by heaven with an appreciative palate. Would you have me neglect my advantage, would you wish me to bury my one talent in a napkin? Certainly not, Mrs. Dodd. Art I appreciate, especially high art, and I'll trouble you for a little more of the _salmi_, Dr. Wolff."

"And how are things going on in the parish, Mr. Dodd?" said Georgie.

"Are the Dissenters as active as ever?"

"No, my dear madam; just now the Church is far more popular."

"Thanks to organization, thanks to organization," burst in the vicar's wife impetuously. "Our curates' wives are admirable organizers. You remember the Misses Sleek, Mr. Haggard?"

"That I do; uncommonly good-looking girls they were too."

"Well, Mr. Haggard, it was the last thing that I should have expected, but they both went into the Church."

"You mean that they married my curates, my dear," interrupted the vicar.

"No, Mr. Dodd, I said it advisedly, they went into the Church. I suppose that in the old days when high-born ladies became nuns that they went into the Church, and in doing so vowed themselves to a life of self-denial. And in this present time any lady who marries a clergyman, Mr. Dodd, vows herself to a life of self-denial and penance, and certainly enters the Church. I did," she added with a sigh, "and I glory in it. The humble curate may rise to rank and t.i.tle, but in the highly unlikely event of your becoming a bishop, John, I should remain plain Mrs. Dodd still."

"Not plain, my dear--not plain."

But Mrs. Dodd did not condescend to reprove him; she forgave the flippancy of the remark for the sake of the compliment.

"The fact is," said the vicar, "that since that fellow Smiter left King's Warren a great many of the better-disposed of his people have come over to us. The services are more ornate than they were, and consequently more attractive. So are the sermons, I suppose. At all events, they are shorter. Then we've got a Sisterhood and a Young Men's Christian a.s.sociation, who play cricket in summer and football in winter. Then again we use collecting bags, while at Gilgal they still stick to the plates. Of course the collections have dropped off to a mere nothing, but the congregations have increased wonderfully.

Certainly the plates produced a healthy rivalry, but the bags, I take it, are less of a tax, and the congregation a.s.suredly prefers them. It's a mystery to me where they get all the threepenny-pieces, and I am sorry to say that farthings, and even b.u.t.tons, are not uncommon. Still, your father and Justice Sleek--everybody calls him Justice Sleek now--let us have all we want in the shape of money, so I suppose there's nothing to complain of."

"Whatever my husband may say, dear Mrs. Haggard, there has been a great awakening, and though he may not see it, for none are so proverbially blind as those who won't see, I look upon it as princ.i.p.ally due, at all events in my own parish, to the exertions of my own s.e.x. My curates are both highly popular."

"My dear, curates always are highly popular when they are married to wealthy good-looking young women, and their pockets consequently bursting, literally bursting, with half-crowns; I may add that, in my experience, these are the only circ.u.mstances under which married curates _are_ popular."

"You have much to be grateful for, John."

"I know it, my dear--I know it," said the vicar as he finished his coffee. And then the party broke up to commence the real business of the day.

No one would have recognized in the well-appointed and terribly respectable head keeper who touched his hat to the party of gentlemen as they emerged upon the lawn, the former village reprobate--Blogg, the whilom King's Warren poacher. But so it was. By some strange fatality or other your poacher either becomes a confirmed reprobate or blossoms into the very best kind of gamekeeper. Perhaps it's on the principle of set a thief to catch a thief that those estates are best preserved where the head keeper has been poacher in his youth. Just as the man who has risen from the ranks makes the sternest martinet and the strictest disciplinarian, so the reformed poacher is invariably the prince of gamekeepers, when honest.

The vicar of King's Warren was a High Churchman. I believe he would have ridden to hounds with pleasure but for the fact that he found it impossible to find anything up to his weight. But he sternly drew the line at carrying a gun. Though the vicar denied himself this pleasure, he joined the shooting party, for his intense appreciation of the culinary art made violent exercise a necessity of his existence.

As Mrs. Haggard and the vicar's wife sat and chatted over the little details of life at the village of King's Warren, the happy home of the former's girlhood, Mrs. Haggard remarked to her companion that it was strange that they had not heard a shot for at least half an hour. As she uttered the words Lord Spunyarn entered the room, pale and out of breath, and evidently hardly able to control his emotion.

"What! back so soon, Lord Spunyarn? Is anything the matter?" said Mrs.

Dodd.

"Something dreadful has happened."

"Has there been an accident? Has anything happened to George?" cried the mother, and the colour left her lips as she rose excitedly.

At that moment the old lord entered the room.

"George is safe, dear madam," said her husband's old friend, "but I have hurried here as the bearer of bad news, and I must bid you prepare for the worst."

"Gad, sir, don't keep us in suspense," cried old Lord Pit Town, with the irritability of age. "Is Lucius the victim?"

"No, the boys are safe, dear Mrs. Haggard," he continued. "My old friend is badly hurt. In pa.s.sing through a hedge----"

But Mrs. Haggard had fainted in the arms of the vicar's wife.

And then Lord Spunyarn told his tale to the old man, while Mrs. Dodd and the women-servants who, unsummoned, had appeared upon the scene, busied themselves around the fainting woman.

It appeared that in getting through a hedge to pick up a bird that, wounded, had managed to struggle through it, Reginald Haggard's gun had suddenly exploded and lodged a charge of shot in his chest. It was not from carelessness; but Haggard's foot had caught in a rabbit burrow, and as he fell the accident happened. Before their eyes the thing had taken place. There was nothing mysterious about it. It was terribly sudden, that was all.

Hardly had Spunyarn told his tale when Mrs. Haggard came to herself.

Tearless and wan she rose to her feet, and taking the old earl's arm, she said simply but in a broken voice, "Let us go to him--let us go to him at once, Lord Pit Town; there may be hope--there may be hope yet."

The old man looked towards Spunyarn interrogatively, but a shake of the head was the only response.

Mrs. Haggard hadn't to go far to meet her wounded husband, for as they pa.s.sed into the great entrance hall of the Castle a melancholy little procession came in by the main doorway. Four keepers bore a hurdle, upon which lay Lord Pit Town's wounded heir. His face was pale, the lips bloodless, while cold drops stood upon his brow. The four men halted, uncertain where to deposit their burden. Georgie Haggard, quitting the old lord's arm, sprang at once to her husband's side, seized his hand, and attempted to wipe the death drops from his brow.

"Don't touch me, Georgie," he muttered, and the voice sounded unequal and cavernous. "I've suffered untold tortures in being brought here,"

and his pale fingers, whose nails had become livid, vainly fumbled at his collar. The faithful wife tenderly loosened the band, which appeared to almost strangle him. "Georgie," he continued to his wife, "where is Spunyarn? I must speak with him at once."

He who had been his faithful friend from youth to middle age stepped forward and bent his head over the mouth of the dying man, for he was dying. For several seconds Haggard whispered a hurried communication to his friend, while the bystanders, including the old lord and Haggard's wife, stood aside, so as not to interrupt the privacy of the communication. Ever and anon Haggard paused for breath.