Читать книгу Eli's Children: The Chronicles of an Unhappy Family - Fenn George Manville - Страница 6

People had always said that the Rev. Eli Mallow was a most fortunate man, but somehow fate gave him his share of reverses. He had been born with the customary number of bones in his vertebra, wonderfully joined together after Dame Nature’s regular custom and good style of workmanship, with suitable muscle and nerve to give proper pliability. The nurse who used to wash and wipe and then powder his delicate young skin considered that he was a beautiful baby, and certainly he had grown up into a very handsome man, an ornament, with his portly form and grey head, to the county bench, to his seat on which he was warmly welcomed back by his neighbours, for however unpopular he might be in the dissent-loving town of Lawford, the Rev. Eli Mallow was a favourite in his part of the county.

The late Lord Artingale had always been one of the loudest in his praise.

“He is a man of breed, sir,” his lordship would say. “There’s blood and bone in the man. I wish we had more clergymen of his kind. There’d be less poaching in the country, I can tell you, and fewer empty bags.”

For the Rev. Eli Mallow worked by rule, that is to say, by law. Secular and ecclesiastical law were to be obeyed to the letter, and he was most exacting in carrying out what he considered to be his mission, with the result that, however well he stood in favour with his friends, his popularity did not increase.

He was not a bad man, for he was strictly moral and self-denying, fairly charitable, had prayers morning and evening, always walked to church on Sundays, kept a good table, and was proud of having the best horses in the neighbourhood. He did his duty according to his light, but that light was rather a small one, and it illumined a very narrow part of the great book of life. There were certain things which he considered duties, and his stern obedience to cut-and-dried law, rule, and regulation made him seem harsher than he really was.

During his absence from Lawford something approaching to economy had been practised, and his wife’s and his own property had been nursed; but now the family had returned there was no sign of saving, for, in addition to being a clergyman, the Rector devoted himself largely to the carrying out of what he called his rôle as a country gentleman, and at whatever cost to his pocket and general strain upon the property, this he did well as a rule. Now, for reasons of his own relating to his two daughters, he was launching out to an extent that made a second visit to the Continent a very probable matter before many years were past.

Breakfast was over at the rectory. There had been words between master and Mr Cyril, the butler said, and master had been very angry, but, as was usually the case, Mr Cyril had come off victorious; and now, as it was market-day at Lawford, the bays were at the door, champing their bits, the butler and footman were in the hall waiting, and punctual to the moment the young ladies came hurrying down the oak staircase just as the Rev. Eli received his gloves from the butler and put them on, the domestic waiting to hand him his hat. This was carefully placed upon his head, and then there was a little ceremony gone through of putting on the glossy black overcoat, as if it were some sacred garment.

The Rev. Eli did justice to his clothes, looking a thoroughly noble specimen of his class, and once ready he unbent a little and smiled at his pretty, ladylike daughters, whom he followed down to the handsome barouche, which it had always been a custom to have out on bench days, the appearance of the stylish turn-out lending no little éclat to the magisterial proceedings.

It was certainly not a mile and a half to the market-place, but though that distance might be traversed again and again upon ordinary days, this was out of the question when the magistrates were about to sit.

So the steps were rattled down, the young ladies handed in, Cyril Mallow, with a cigar in his mouth, watching the proceedings from his bedroom window. The Rev. Eli followed and took his seat with dignity; the steps were closed, the door shut, the footman mounted to the box beside the coachman, both stretched their legs out rigidly, and set their backs as straight as their master’s, and away the carriage spun, through the avenue, and out at the lodge gates, where the gardener’s wife was ready to drop a curtsey and close them afterwards, and then away through the lanes by the longest way round, so as to pass Portlock’s farm and enter Lawford by the London road.

Market-day was a busy day at Lawford, and the ostler at the King’s Head had his hands full attending to the gigs of the farmers and the carts of the clergy and gentry round.

The word “cart” seems more suggestive of the vehicle of the tradesman; but it was the custom around Lawford for the clergy to use a capacious kind of spring cart, neatly painted and padded within, but in other respects built exactly on the model of an ordinary butcher’s or grocer’s trap, save that it had a door and step behind for access to the back seats, while, below the door, painted in regular tradesman style for the evasion of tax, would be, in thin white letters, the owners name and address, as in the case of the vicar of Slowby, whose cart was lettered —

“Arthur Smith, Clerk, Slowby.”

There were several such carts in the inn yard on this particular morning, for the ladies of the clerical families generally shopped on market-days, and fetched the magazines from the bookseller’s if it was near the first of the month.

The farmers’ wives and daughters, too, put in a pretty good appearance with their egg and butter baskets, which were carried in good old style upon the woman’s arm, irrespective of the fact that she was probably wearing a velvet jacket, and had ostrich feathers in her bonnet.

Tomlinson, the draper, was answerable for the show, and he used to boast that the Rector might preach as he liked against finery; his shop-window could preach a far more powerful sermon in silence, especially with bonnets for a text.

Some of the farmers had protested a little against the love of show evinced by their wives and daughters, but in vain. The weaker vessels said that the egg and butter money was their own to spend as they pleased, and they always had something nice to show for their outlay, which was more than the husbands and fathers, who stayed at the King’s Head so long after the market ordinary, could say.

The Rev. Eli Mallow was dropped at the town-hall, where a pretty good group of people were assembled. There were the rustic policemen from the various outlying villages and a couple of Lord Artingale’s keepers in waiting ready to touch their hats. Then the ladies went off in the carriage to make a few calls before returning to pick up papa after the magistrates’ sitting was over.

The usual country town cases: Matthew Tomlin had been drunk and riotous again; James Jellicoe had been trespassing in search of rabbits; Martha Madden had assaulted Elizabeth Snowshall, and had said, so it was sifted out after a great deal of volubility, that she would “do for her” – what she would do for her not stated; a diminutive being, a stranger, who gave his name as Simpkins, had torn up his clothes at the workhouse, and now appeared, to the great delight of the spectators, in a peculiar costume much resembling a sack; another assault case arising out of the fact that Mrs Stocktle had “called” Mrs Stivvison, – spelt Stockton and Stevenson, – with the result that their lawful protectors had been dragged into the quarrel, and “Jack Stivvison had ‘leathered’ Jem Stocktle.”

Upon these urgent cases the bench of magistrates, consisting of the Rev. Eli Mallow, chairman, the Rev. Arthur Smith, Sir Joshua St. Henry, and the Revds. Thomas Hampson, James Lawrence Barton, and Onesimus Leytonsby, solemnly adjudicated.

Then came the important case of the day; two men, who gave the names of Robert Thorns and Jock Morrison, were placed at the table.

The first was a miserable, dirty-looking object, who seemed to have made a vow somewhere or another never to wash, shave, or sleep in anything but hay and straw, some of which was sticking still in his tangled hair; the other was a different breed of rough.

Rough, certainly, a spectator who had judged the two idlers would have said; but he was decidedly a country rough, and did not belong to town. His big, burly look and length of limb indicated a man of giant strength; at least six feet high, his chest was deep and broad, and in his brown, half gipsy-looking face, liberally clothed with the darkest of dark-brown beards, there shone a pair of fierce dark eyes. Scraped and sand-papered down, and clothed in brown velveteen, with cord trousers and brown leather gaiters, he would have made a gamekeeper of whose appearance any country magnate might have been proud. As it was, his appearance before the country bench of magistrates was enough to condemn him for poaching.

There was something of the keeper, too, in his appearance, for he had on a well-worn velveteen coat and low soft hat, but his big, soft hands told the tale of what he was – a ne’er-do-well, who looked upon life as a career in which no man was bound to work.

Such was Jock Morrison.

The case was plain against them, and they knew that they would have to suffer, for Jock was pretty well known for these affairs. Upon former occasions his brother Tom, the wheelwright, had paid guineas to Mr Ridley, the Lawford attorney, to defend him, but there were bounds to brotherly help.

“I can’t do it for ever,” Tom Morrison had said to his young wife. “I’ve give Jock every chance I could; now he must take care of himself.”

Big Jock Morrison looked perfectly able to do that, as he now stood with his hands in his pockets, staring about him in a cool defiant way. It seemed that he had been warned off Lord Artingale’s ground several times, but had been too cunning for the keepers, and had only been taken red-handed the previous day, very early in the morning, so evidence showed; and he and his companion had upon them a hare, a rabbit, and a couple of pheasants, beside some wire snares and a little rusty single-barrelled gun, whose barrel unscrewed into two pieces, and which, so the head-keeper deposed, was detached from the stock and stowed away in the inner pocket of the big prisoner’s coat.

Gun, powder-flask, tin measure, and bag of shot, with game, placed upon the table.

“And what did the prisoners say when you came upon them by – where did you say, keeper?” said one magistrate.

“Runby Spinney, Sir Joshua, just where the Greenhurst lane crosses the long coppice, Sir Joshua.”

“And what did the prisoners say?” said the chairman stiffly.

“Said they was blackberrying, Sir.”

“Oh!” said the chairman, and he appeared so stern that no one dared laugh, though a young rustic-looking policeman at whom Jock Morrison winked turned red in the face with his efforts to prevent an explosion.

“Did they make any – er – er – resistance, keeper?” said the chairman.

“The big prisoner, sir, said he’d smash my head if I interfered with him.”

“Dear me! A very desperate character,” said Sir Joshua. “And did he?”

“No, Sir Joshua, we was too many for him. There was me, Smith, Duggan, and the two pleecemen, so they give in.”

And so on, and so on.

Had the prisoners anything to say in their defence?

The dirty man had not, Jock Morrison had. “Lookye here: he didn’t take the game, shouldn’t ha’ taken it, only they foun’ ’em all lying aside the road. It was a fakement o’ the keeper’s, that’s what it was. They was a pickin’ blackberries, that’s what him and his mate was a doin’ of, and as soon as the ’ops was ready they was a going down south to pick ’ops.”

The magistrates’ clerk, the principal solicitor in the town, smiled, and said he was afraid they would miss the hop-picking that season, as it was over.

There was a short conference on the bench, and then the Rev. Eli Mallow sentenced the prisoners to three months’ imprisonment, and told them it was very fortunate for them that they had not resisted the law.

“You arn’t going to quod us for three months along o’ them birds and that hare, are you?” said Jock Morrison.

“Take them away, policeman.”

“Hold hard a moment,” said the big fellow, so fiercely that the sergeant present drew back. “Look here, parsons, you’ll spoil our hop-picking.”

“Take them away, constable,” said the Rev. Eli. “The next case.”

“Hold hard, d’ye hear!” cried the big ruffian, in a voice of thunder. “I s’pose, parson,” he continued, addressing the chairman, “if I say much to you, I shall get it laid on thicker.”

“My good fellow,” said the Rev. Eli, “you have been most leniently dealt with. I am sorry for you on account of your brother, a most respectable man, who has always set you an admirable example, and – ”

“I say,” exclaimed Jock, “this arn’t chutch, is it?”

There was a titter here, but the chairman continued: —

“I will say no more, as you seem in so hardened a frame of mind, only that if you are violent you may be committed for trial.”

“All right,” said the great fellow, between his gritting teeth; “I don’t say no more, only – all right: come along, matey; we can do the three months easy.”

There was a bit of a bustle, and the prisoners were taken off. The rest of the cases were despatched. The carriage called for the chairman, and on the way back it passed the police cart, with the sergeant giving the two poaching prisoners a ride, but each man had his ankle chained to a big ring in the bottom of the vehicle, where they sat face to face, and the sergeant and his man were driving the blackberry pickers to the county gaol.

“What a dreadful-looking man!” said Julia, as in passing Jock Morrison ironically touched his soft felt hat.

“Yes, my dear – poachers,” said the Rev. Eli calmly, as one who felt that he had done his duty to society, and never for a moment dreaming that he had been stirring Fate to play him another bitter turn.