Читать книгу The Birdikin Family - Arthur Hammond Marshall - Страница 6
ОглавлениеTHE POACHER
Mr. Birdikin was not himself an adept with the fowling-piece. He saw nothing wrong in the pursuit of fur and feather, judging that birds and animals suitable for human consumption were intended by an all-wise Providence to appear roasted or boiled on the tables of those whose worldly circumstances entitled them to partake of the more costly viands. But some slight obliquity of vision, not otherwise noticeable, made him an indifferent marksman, and a disinclination for the more arduous forms of bodily exercise, resulting in an increase of girth about the midriff, had caused him some years before to relinquish the pursuit of a sport for which he felt himself unfitted. He had at the same time given up preserving feathered game in the woods and fields of his demesne, but members of the coney tribe abounded there, and birds from the coverts of his neighbours, the Earl of Bellacre and Captain Rouseabout, not infrequently transferred themselves to those of Mr. Birdikin.
One of his numerous outdoor staff was deputed to keep down the vermin and to supply his master's table with the toothsome trophies of his gun or his traps, and Mr. Birdikin was wont to prefer the modest boast that his requirements in the way of game when in season were as fully met as those of his neighbours, and at a tithe of the expense to which they were put.
One morning this man Shotter came to his master and informed him that a cottager of the name of Onion had regaled his family the day before with a rabbit, which had no doubt been illicitly snared on Mr. Birdikin's property. It was not the first time that the savoury smell of this rodent had been detected coming from Onion's dwelling, and Shotter, devoted to his master's interests, respectfully suggested that it was time that a stop should be put to his depredations.
Mr. Birdikin judged it his duty to pursue the matter. Onion had been employed in a boot and shoe factory in the neighbouring town, and inhabited a hovel on the outskirts of Mr. Birdikin's estate, from which he could not be dislodged, as it was his own freehold. He was an unsatisfactory character, never attended the ministrations of Mr. Guff, the excellent curate, and had been known to utter subversive sentiments on the subject of landowners in general and Mr. Birdikin in particular over his potations in the 'Pig and Whistle'. In spite of all this, Mrs. Birdikin, a true Lady Bountiful, had included this man's wife and children in the visits she paid to the cottagers on her husband's estate, and since Onion had lost his employment she had given instructions that the scraps from her own table should be supplied to his wife, if called for, and only that morning had picked out a suitable tract on the sin of gluttony to be added to the eleemosynary gift. Small wonder then that Mr. Birdikin's gorge was aroused at the ingratitude and dishonesty brought to his notice. As a magistrate of the county he sent instructions to a police constable to take Onion into custody, and before night fell he was safely lodged in gaol.
So far the dictates of right and justice had been followed, but Mr. Birdikin's large-minded humanity forbade his including the innocent victims of Onion's turpitude in the punishment he designed for the perpetrator himself. The next morning, in his daily walk with his children, he directed their footsteps to Onion's dwelling, and on the way thither expounded in a manner adapted to their immature understanding the iniquity which he had felt himself bound to punish.
'You will see for yourselves,' he said in conclusion, 'the misery which the turpitude of a husband and father has brought on a comparatively innocent family. The wife is culpable in so far as she cooked the stolen food and the children are to be blamed for having consumed it; but we whose table is bountifully spread may make allowances for those whose food supplies are intermittent, and I do not propose to take further notice in their case of an offence of which I feel bound to exact the full penalty in his.'
'If I were hungry,' said Charles, 'I should eat all the rabbits I could find, and the pheasants too.'
Mr. Birdikin's brow darkened at the thoughtless disposition thus displayed by his elder son, but before he could express his displeasure Henry, who was more responsive to the training he was endeavouring to impart to his children, said, 'So should not I. Our father has continually impressed upon us that the rights of property are sacred, and I would sooner starve than lay a finger on what was not mine'.
Mr. Birdikin was about to commend the propriety of this utterance, but before he could do so Fanny broke in with the question, 'Then why did you gobble up all the comfits that our aunt brought for us yesterday?'
Clara, the Little Peacemaker, hastened to intervene. 'My brother thought they had been a present for himself,' she said, 'and as he was under that misapprehension I willingly resigned to him my share of the dainties.'
'After he had filled his belly with them,' said Fanny, whose propensity to pick up coarse expressions from the stable-lads and others of the lower orders employed in her father's stylish establishment caused her excellent parents much concern.
The rebuke administered by her father withdrew attention from Henry's unfortunate mistake, and by the time it was ended they had arrived at the lowly cot which was the objective of their excursion. Here they were met by Mrs. Onion, who ran out to her benefactor, with half a dozen ragged children hanging on to her skirts, and implored him to have pity upon an innocent man. 'Indeed, your Honour,' said she in her rustic jargon, 'the rabbit were not snared by my Jarge. It come into the garden and was nibbling of our cabbages when it fell down dead, and all we done was to skin it and put it in the pot.'
They were met by Mrs. Onion
Mr. Birdikin was not unmoved by this address, and was proceeding to inquire of her the manner of the rabbit's decease, not being without the suspicion that its life had been ended by violence, when her respectful demeanour suddenly changed. She pointed her finger at Henry and shrieked out, 'Who's the thief now? Get out of my sight you old sarpent, and take your greedy brats with you. I'll have the law on you now. Get out!'
The cause of this deplorable outburst, so little to be expected from one who owed so much to Mr. Birdikin's bounty, was that Henry had picked a bunch of currants from a neighbouring bush and was eating them when the woman's eye fell upon him.
The full weight of Mr. Birdikin's displeasure at her outrageous speech and demeanour would have fallen upon her, but she had retired into her hovel and banged the door in his face. He judged it wiser to remove himself from the scene, all the more so as she thrust her head from the window and cried out that she suspected him of hanging about to 'pinch', as she vulgarly expressed it, the family plate, and adjured him in the most indecorous language to take himself off, and his 'spawn' with him.
'Come, children,' he said, with the dignity that he maintained under the most trying circumstances, 'let us begone. You, Henry, who have brought upon us this indecent exposure of low-breeding, shall yourself gather the twigs which I will bind into a birch for your correction. As for this no-doubt demented woman, I command you all to forget her improprieties. Those of you who disobey me, whether male or female, shall feel the weight of my hand.'
For the children the episode was ended by this command and by Henry's chastisement. For Mr. Birdikin, however, the annoyance and injury to which he had been subjected were not yet over. His upright and perhaps over-scrupulous way of conducting himself was not to the mind of his neighbour, Captain Rouseabout, who was addicted to cockfighting and other low sports, and so far forgot himself as habitually to use unseemly language in Mr. Birdikin's presence for the sake of shocking his sense of propriety. Though totally unfitted for judicial office, except in his abhorrence of poaching and poachers, he sat on the Bench as a magistrate, and when the charge was preferred against Onion had the audacity to say that it was Mr. Birdikin who should have been brought before them for shooting and trapping game reared by his neighbours. The woman Onion's counter-accusation of trespass and fruit-stealing caused Captain Rouseabout to burst into a loud and rude guffaw. She was not permitted to prefer a charge, but it was considered by Mr. Birdikin's fellow magistrates that it was a case of tit for tat, and the charge against the poacher was dismissed.
Mr. Birdikin returned home, and regained from the respect and deference of those dependent upon him the serenity which had been somewhat shaken by the annoyance he had undergone at the hands of Captain Rouseabout. In the spacious and opulent surroundings of Byron Grove he felt himself indeed a king among men, and was upheld by the conviction that such a man as his neighbour must inevitably, be it sooner or later, come to a shameful and dishonoured end.
