My Novel Part 8

This last question seemed a settler, and the wisdom of Gaffer Solomons went down fifty per cent in the public opinion of Hazeldean.

"Maw be," said the gaffer--this time with a thrilling effect, which restored his reputation,--"maw be some o' ye ha' been getting drunk, and making beestises o' yoursel's!"

There was a dead pause, for this suggestion applied too generally to be met with a solitary response. At last one of the women said, with a meaning glance at her husband,

"G.o.d bless the squire; he'll make some on us happy women if that's all!"

There then arose an almost unanimous murmur of approbation among the female part of the audience; and the men looked at each other, and then at the phenomenon, with a very hang-dog expression of countenance.

"Or, maw be," resumed Gaffer Solomons, encouraged to a fourth suggestion by the success of its predecessor,--"maw be some o' the misseses ha'

been making a rumpus, and scolding their good men. I heard say in my granfeyther's time, arter old Mother Bang nigh died o' the ducking-stool, them 'ere stocks were first made for the women, out o'

compa.s.sion like! And every one knows the squire is a koind-hearted man, G.o.d bless 'un!"

"G.o.d bless 'un!" cried the men, heartily; and they gathered lovingly round the phenomenon, like heathens of old round a tutelary temple. But then there rose one shrill clamour among the females as they retreated with involuntary steps towards the verge of the green, whence they glared at Solomons and the phenomenon with eyes so sparkling, and pointed at both with gestures so menacing, that Heaven only knows if a morsel of either would have remained much longer to offend the eyes of the justly-enraged matronage of Hazeldean, if fortunately Master Stirn, the squire's right-hand man, had not come up in the nick of time.

Master Stirn was a formidable personage,--more formidable than the squire himself,--as, indeed, a squire's right hand is generally more formidable than the head can pretend to be. He inspired the greater awe, because, like the stocks of which he was deputed guardian, his powers were undefined and obscure, and he had no particular place in the out-of-door establishment. He was not the steward, yet he did much of what ought to be the steward's work; he was not the farm-bailiff, for the squire called himself his own farm-bailiff; nevertheless, Mr.

Hazeldean sowed and ploughed, cropped and stocked, bought and sold, very much as Mr. Stirn condescended to advise. He was not the park-keeper, for he neither shot the deer nor superintended the preserves; but it was he who always found out who had broken a park pale or snared a rabbit.

In short, what may be called all the harsher duties of a large landed proprietor devolved, by custom and choice, upon Mr. Stirn. If a labourer was to be discharged or a rent enforced, and the squire knew that he should be talked over, and that the steward would be as soft as himself, Mr. Stirn was sure to be the avenging messenger, to p.r.o.nounce the words of fate; so that he appeared to the inhabitants of Hazeldean like the poet's Saeva Necessitas, a vague incarnation of remorseless power, armed with whips, nails, and wedges. The very brute creation stood in awe of Mr. Stirn. The calves knew that it was he who singled out which should be sold to the butcher, and huddled up into a corner with beating hearts at his grim footstep; the sow grunted, the duck quacked, the hen bristled her feathers and called to her chicks when Mr. Stirn drew near.

Nature had set her stamp upon him. Indeed, it may be questioned whether the great M. de Chambray himself, surnamed the brave, had an aspect so awe-inspiring as that of Mr. Stirn; albeit the face of that hero was so terrible, that a man who had been his lackey, seeing his portrait after he had been dead twenty years, fell a trembling all over like a leaf!

"And what the plague are you doing here?" said Mr. Stirn, as he waved and smacked a great cart-whip which he held in his hand, "making such a hullabaloo, you women, you! that I suspect the squire will be sending out to know if the village is on fire. Go home, will ye? High time indeed to have the stocks ready, when you get squalling and conspiring under the very nose of a justice of the peace, just as the French revolutioners did afore they cut off their king's head! My hair stands on end to look at ye." But already, before half this address was delivered, the crowd had dispersed in all directions,--the women still keeping together, and the men sneaking off towards the ale-house. Such was the beneficent effect of the fatal stocks on the first day of their resuscitation. However, in the break up of every crowd there must always be one who gets off the last; and it so happened that our friend Lenny Fairfield, who had mechanically approached close to the stocks, the better to hear the oracular opinions of Gaffer Solomons, had no less mechanically, on the abrupt appearance of Mr. Stirn, crept, as he hoped, out of sight behind the trunk of the elm-tree which partially shaded the stocks; and there now, as if fascinated, he still cowered, not daring to emerge in full view of Mr. Stirn, and in immediate reach of the cartwhip, when the quick eye of the right-hand man detected his retreat.

"Hallo, sir--what the deuce, laying a mine to blow up the stocks! just like Guy Fox and the Gunpowder Plot, I declares! What ha' you got in your willanous little fist there?"

"Nothing, sir," said Lenny, opening his palm. "Nothing--um!" said Mr.

Stirn, much dissatisfied; and then, as he gazed more deliberately, recognizing the pattern boy of the village, a cloud yet darker gathered over his brow; for Mr. Stirn, who valued himself much on his learning, and who, indeed, by dint of more knowledge as well as more wit than his neighbours, had attained his present eminent station of life, was extremely anxious that his only son should also be a scholar. That wish--

"The G.o.ds dispersed in empty air."

Master Stirn was a notable dunce at the parson's school, while Lenny Fairfield was the pride and boast of it; therefore Mr. Stirn was naturally, and almost justifiably, ill-disposed towards Lenny Fairfield, who had appropriated to himself the praises which Mr. Stirn had designed for his son.

"Um!" said the right-hand man, glowering on Lenny malignantly, "you are the pattern boy of the village, are you? Very well, sir! then I put these here stocks under your care, and you'll keep off the other boys from sitting on 'em, and picking off the paint, and playing three-holes and chuck-farthing, as I declare they've been a doing, just in front of the elewation. Now, you knows your 'sponsibilities, little boy,--and a great honour they are too, for the like o' you.

"If any damage be done, it is to you I shall look; d' ye understand?--and that's what the squire says to me. So you sees what it is to be a pattern boy, Master Lenny!" With that Mr. Stirn gave a loud crack of the cart-whip, by way of military honours, over the head of the vicegerent he had thus created, and strode off to pay a visit to two young unsuspecting pups, whose ears and tails he had graciously promised their proprietors to crop that evening. Nor, albeit few charges could be more obnoxious than that of deputy-governor or charge-d'affaires extraordinaires to the parish stocks, nor one more likely to render Lenny Fairfield odious to his contemporaries, ought he to have been insensible to the signal advantage of his condition over that of the two sufferers, against whose ears and tails Mr. Stirn had no special motives of resentment. To every bad there is a worse; and fortunately for little boys, and even for grown men, whom the Stirns of the world regard malignly, the majesty and law protect their ears, and the merciful forethought of nature deprived their remote ancestors of the privilege of entailing tails upon them. Had it been otherwise--considering what handles tails would have given to the oppressor, how many traps envy would have laid for them, how often they must have been scratched and mutilated by the briars of life, how many good excuses would have been found for lopping, docking, and tr.i.m.m.i.n.g them--I fear that only the lap-dogs of Fortune would have gone to the grave tail-whole.

CHAPTER XII.

The card-table was set out in the drawing-room at Hazeldean Hall; though the little party were still lingering in the deep recess of the large bay window, which (in itself of dimensions that would have swallowed up a moderate-sized London parlour) held the great round tea-table, with all appliances and means to boot,--for the beautiful summer moon shed on the sward so silvery a l.u.s.tre, and the trees cast so quiet a shadow, and the flowers and new-mown hay sent up so grateful a perfume, that to close the windows, draw the curtains, and call for other lights than those of heaven would have been an abuse of the prose of life which even Captain Barnabas, who regarded whist as the business of town and the holiday of the country, shrank from suggesting. Without, the scene, beheld by the clear moonlight, had the beauty peculiar to the garden-ground round those old-fas.h.i.+oned country residences which, though a little modernized, still preserve their original character,--the velvet lawn, studded with large plots of flowers, shaded and scented, here to the left by lilacs, laburnums, and rich syringas; there, to the right, giving glimpses, over low clipped yews, of a green bowling-alley, with the white columns of a summer-house built after the Dutch taste, in the reign of William III.; and in front stealing away under covert of those still cedars, into the wilder landscape of the well-wooded undulating park. Within, viewed by the placid glimmer of the moon, the scene was no less characteristic of the abodes of that race which has no parallel in other lands, and which, alas! is somewhat losing its native idiosyncrasies in this,--the stout country gentleman, not the fine gentleman of the country; the country gentleman somewhat softened and civilized from the mere sportsman or farmer, but still plain and homely; relinquis.h.i.+ng the old hall for the drawing-room, and with books not three months old on his table, instead of Fox's "Martyrs" and Baker's "Chronicle," yet still retaining many a sacred old prejudice, that, like the knots in his native oak, rather adds to the ornament of the grain than takes from the strength of the tree. Opposite to the window, the high chimneypiece rose to the heavy cornice of the ceiling, with dark panels glistening against the moonlight. The broad and rather clumsy chintz sofas and settees of the reign of George III. contrasted at intervals with the tall-backed chairs of a far more distant generation, when ladies in fardingales and gentlemen in trunk-hose seem never to have indulged in horizontal positions. The walls, of s.h.i.+ning wainscot, were thickly covered, chiefly with family pictures; though now and then some Dutch fair or battle-piece showed that a former proprietor had been less exclusive in his taste for the arts. The pianoforte stood open near the fireplace; a long dwarf bookcase at the far end added its sober smile to the room. That bookcase contained what was called "The Lady's Library,"--a collection commenced by the squire's grandmother, of pious memory, and completed by his mother, who had more taste for the lighter letters, with but little addition from the bibliomaniac tendencies of the present Mrs. Hazeldean, who, being no great reader, contented herself with subscribing to the Book Club. In this feminine Bodleian, the sermons collected by Mrs. Hazeldean, the grandmother, stood cheek-by-jowl beside the novels purchased by Mrs. Hazeldean, the mother,--

"Mixtaque ridenti colocasia fundet acantho!"

But, to be sure, the novels, in spite of very inflammatory t.i.tles, such as "Fatal Sensibility," "Errors of the Heart," etc., were so harmless that I doubt if the sermons could have had much to say against their next-door neighbours,--and that is all that can be expected by the best of us.

A parrot dozing on his perch; some goldfish fast asleep in their gla.s.s bowl; two or three dogs on the rug, and Flimsey, Miss Jemima's spaniel, curled into a ball on the softest sofa; Mrs. Hazeldean's work-table rather in disorder, as if it had been lately used; the "St. James's Chronicle" dangling down from a little tripod near the squire's armchair; a high screen of gilt and stamped leather fencing off the card-table,--all these, dispersed about a room large enough to hold them all and not seem crowded, offered many a pleasant resting-place for the eye, when it turned from the world of nature to the home of man.

But see, Captain Barnabas, fortified by his fourth cup of tea, has at length summoned courage to whisper to Mrs. Hazeldean, "Don't you think the parson will be impatient for his rubber?" Mrs. Hazeldean glanced at the parson and smiled; but she gave the signal to the captain, and the bell was rung, lights were brought in, the curtains let down; in a few moments more, the group had collected round the cardtable. The best of us are but human--that is not a new truth, I confess, but yet people forget it every day of their lives--and I dare say there are many who are charitably thinking at this very moment that my parson ought not to be playing at whist. All I can say to those rigid disciplinarians is, "Every man has his favourite sin: whist was Parson Dale's!--ladies and gentlemen, what is yours?" In truth, I must not set up my poor parson, nowadays, as a pattern parson,--it is enough to have one pattern in a village no bigger than Hazeldean, and we all know that Lenny Fairfield has bespoken that place, and got the patronage of the stocks for his emoluments! Parson Dale was ordained, not indeed so very long ago, but still at a time when Churchmen took it a great deal more easily than they do now. The elderly parson of that day played his rubber as a matter of course, the middle-aged parson was sometimes seen riding to cover (I knew a schoolmaster, a doctor of divinity, and an excellent man, whose pupils were chiefly taken from the highest families in England, who hunted regularly three times a week during the season), and the young parson would often sing a capital song--not composed by David--and join in those rotatory dances, which certainly David never danced before the ark.

Does it need so long an exordium to excuse thee, poor Parson Dale, for turning up that ace of spades with so triumphant a smile at thy partner?

I must own that nothing which could well add to the parson's offence was wanting. In the first place, he did not play charitably, and merely to oblige other people. He delighted in the game, he rejoiced in the game, his whole heart was in the game,--neither was he indifferent to the mammon of the thing, as a Christian pastor ought to have been. He looked very sad when he took his s.h.i.+llings out of his purse, and exceedingly pleased when he put the s.h.i.+llings that had just before belonged to other people into it. Finally, by one of those arrangements common with married people who play at the same table, 'Mr. and--Mrs. Hazeldean were invariably partners, and no two people could play worse; while Captain Barnabas, who had played at Graham's with honour and profit, necessarily became partner to Parson Dale, who himself played a good steady parsonic game. So that, in strict truth, it was hardly fair play; it was almost swindling,--the combination of these two great dons against that innocent married couple! Mr. Dale, it is true, was aware of this disproportion of force, and had often proposed either to change partners or to give odds,--propositions always scornfully scouted by the squire and his lady, so that the parson was obliged to pocket his conscience, together with the ten points which made his average winnings.

The strangest thing in the world is the different way in which whist affects the temper. It is no test of temper, as some pretend,--not at all! The best-tempered people in the world grow snappish at whist; and I have seen the most testy and peevish in the ordinary affairs of life bear their losses with the stoicism of Epictetus. This was notably manifested in the contrast between the present adversaries of the Hall and the Rectory. The squire, who was esteemed as choleric a gentleman as most in the county, was the best-humoured fellow you could imagine when you set him down to whist opposite the sunny face of his wife. You never heard one of those incorrigible blunderers scold each other; on the contrary, they only laughed when they threw away the game, with four by honours in their hands. The utmost that was ever said was a "Well, Harry, that was the oddest trump of yours. Ho, ho, ho!" or a "Bless me, Hazeldean--why, they made three tricks in clubs, and you had the ace in your hand all the time! Ha, ha, ha!"

Upon which occasions Captain Barnabas, with great goodhumour, always echoed both the squire's Ho, ho, ho! and Mrs. Hazeldean's Ha, ha, ha!

Not so the parson. He had so keen and sportsmanlike an interest in the game, that even his adversaries' mistakes ruffled him. And you would hear him, with elevated voice and agitated gestures, laying down the law, quoting Hoyle, appealing to all the powers of memory and common-sense against the very delinquencies by which he was enriched,--a waste of eloquence that always heightened the hilarity of Mr. and Mrs.

Hazeldean. While these four were thus engaged, Mrs. Dale, who had come with her husband despite her headache, sat on the sofa beside Miss Jemima, or rather beside Miss Jemima's Flimsey, which had already secured the centre of the sofa, and snarled at the very idea of being disturbed. And Master Frank--at a table by himself--was employed sometimes in looking at his pumps and sometimes at Gilray's Caricatures, which his mother had provided for his intellectual requirements. Mrs.

Dale, in her heart, liked Miss Jemima better than Mrs. Hazeldean, of whom she was rather in awe, notwithstanding they had been little girls together, and occasionally still called each other Harry and Carry. But those tender diminutives belonged to the "Dear" genus, and were rarely employed by the ladies, except at times when, had they been little girls still, and the governess out of the way, they would have slapped and pinched each other. Mrs. Dale was still a very pretty woman, as Mrs. Hazeldean was still a very fine woman. Mrs. Dale painted in water-colours, and sang, and made card-racks and penholders, and was called an "elegant, accomplished woman;" Mrs. Hazeldean cast up the squire's accounts, wrote the best part of his letters, kept a large establishment in excellent order, and was called "a clever, sensible woman." Mrs. Dale had headaches and nerves; Mrs. Hazeldean had neither nerves nor headaches. Mrs. Dale said, "Harry had no real harm in her, but was certainly very masculine;" Mrs. Hazeldean said, "Carry would be a good creature but for her airs and graces." Mrs. Dale said Mrs.

Hazeldean was "just made to be a country squire's lady;" Mrs. Hazeldean said, "Mrs. Dale was the last person in the world who ought to have been a parson's wife." Carry, when she spoke of Harry to a third person, said, "Dear Mrs. Hazeldean;" Harry, when she referred incidentally to Carry, said, "Poor Mrs. Dale." And now the reader knows why Mrs.

Hazeldean called Mrs. Dale "poor,"--at least as well as I do. For, after all, the word belonged to that cla.s.s in the female vocabulary which may be called "obscure significants," resembling the Konx Ompax, which hath so puzzled the inquirers into the Eleusinian Mysteries: the application is rather to be ill.u.s.trated than the meaning to be exactly explained.

"That's really a sweet little dog of yours, Jemima," said Mrs. Dale, who was embroidering the word CAROLINE on the border of a cambric pocket handkerchief; but edging a little farther off, as she added, "he'll not bite, will he?"

"Dear me, no!" said Miss Jemima; "but" (she added in a confidential whisper) "don't say he,--'t is a lady dog!"

"Oh," said Mrs. Dale, edging off still farther, as if that confession of the creature's s.e.x did not serve to allay her apprehensions,--"oh, then, you carry your aversion to the gentlemen even to lap-dogs,--that is being consistent indeed, Jemima!"

MISS JEMIMA.--"I had a gentleman dog once,--a pug!--pugs are getting very scarce now. I thought he was so fond of me--he snapped at every one else; the battles I fought for him! Well, will you believe--I had been staying with my friend Miss Smilec.o.x at Cheltenham. Knowing that William is so hasty, and his boots are so thick, I trembled to think what a kick might do. So, on coming here I left Bluff--that was his name--with Miss Smilec.o.x." (A pause.)

MRS. DALE (looking up languidly).--"Well, my love?"

MISS JEMIMA.--"Will you believe it, I say, when I returned to Cheltenham, only three months afterwards, Miss Smilec.o.x had seduced his affections from me, and the ungrateful creature did not even know me again? A pug, too--yet people say pugs are faithful! I am sure they ought to be, nasty things! I have never had a gentleman dog since,--they are all alike, believe me, heartless, selfish creatures."

MRS. DALE.--"Pugs? I dare say they are!"

MISS JEMIMA (with spirit).-"MEN!--I told you it was a gentleman dog!"

MRS. DALE (apologetically).--"True, my love, but the whole thing was so mixed up!"

MISS JEMIMA.--"You saw that cold-blooded case of Breach of Promise of Marriage in the papers,--an old wretch, too, of sixty-four. No age makes them a bit better. And when one thinks that the end of all flesh is approaching, and that--"

MRS. DALE (quickly, for she prefers Miss Jemima's other hobby to that black one upon which she is preparing to precede the bier of the universe).--"Yes, my love, we'll avoid that subject, if you please. Mr.

Dale has his own opinions, and it becomes me, you know, as a parson's wife" (said smilingly: Mrs. Dale has as pretty a dimple as any of Miss Jemima's, and makes more of that one than Miss Jemima of three), "to agree with him,--that is, in theology."

MISS JEMIMA (earnestly).--"But the thing is so clear, if you will but look into--"

MRS. DALE (putting her hand on Miss Jemima's lips playfully).--"Not a word more. Pray, what do you think of the squire's tenant at the Casino, Signor Riccabocca? An interesting creature, is he not?"

MISS JEMIMA.--"Interesting! not to me. Interesting? Why is he interesting?"

Mrs. Dale is silent, and turns her handkerchief in her pretty little white hands, appearing to contemplate the R in Caroline.

MISS JEMIMA (half pettishly, half coaxingly).--"Why is he interesting?

I scarcely ever looked at him; they say he smokes, and never eats. Ugly, too!"

MRS. DALE.--"Ugly,--no. A fine bead,--very like Dante's; but what is beauty?"