Book: My Novel, Volume 1.

E >> Edward Bulwer Lytton >> My Novel, Volume 1.




Quite apart from all the rest, with the /nonchalant/ survey of virgin
dandyism, Francis Hazeldean looked over one of the high starched
neckcloths which were then the fashion,--a handsome lad, fresh from Eton
for the summer holidays, but at that ambiguous age when one disdains the
sports of the boy, and has not yet arrived at the resources of the man.

"I should be glad, Frank," said the squire, suddenly turning round to his
son, "to see you take a little more interest in duties which, one day or
other, you may be called upon to discharge. I can't bear to think that
the property should fall into the hands of a fine gentleman, who will let
things go to rack and ruin, instead of keeping them up as I do."

And the squire pointed to the stocks.

Master Frank's eye followed the direction of the cane, as well as his
cravat would permit; and he said dryly,--

"Yes, sir; but how came the stocks to be so long out of repair?"

"Because one can't see to everything at once," retorted the squire,
tartly. "When a man has got eight thousand acres to look after, he must
do a bit at a time."

"Yes," said Captain Barnabas. "I know that by experience."

"The deuce you do!" cried the squire, bluntly. "Experience in eight
thousand acres!"

"No; in my apartments in the Albany,--No. 3 A. I have had them ten
years, and it was only last Christmas that I bought my Japan cat."

"Dear me," said Miss Jemima; "a Japan cat! that must be very curious.
What sort of a creature is it?"

"Don't you know? Bless me, a thing with three legs, and holds toast! I
never thought of it, I assure you, till my friend Cosey said to me one
morning when he was breakfasting at my rooms, 'Higginbotham, how is it
that you, who like to have things comfortable about you, don't have a
cat?' 'Upon my life,' said I, 'one can't think of everything at a
time,'--just like you, Squire."

"Pshaw," said Mr. Hazeldean, gruffly, "not at all like me. And I'll
thank you another time, Cousin Higginbotham, not to put me out when I'm
speaking on matters of importance; poking your cat into my stocks! They
look something like now, my stocks, don't they, Harry? I declare that
the whole village seems more respectable. It is astonishing how much a
little improvement adds to the--to the--"

"Charm of the landscape," put in Miss Jemina, sentimentally.

The squire neither accepted nor rejected the suggested termination; but
leaving his sentence uncompleted, broke suddenly off with--

"And if I had listened to Parson Dale--"

"You would have done a very wise thing," said a voice behind, as the
parson presented himself in the rear.

"Wise thing? Why, surely, Mr. Dale," said Mrs. Hazeldean, with spirit,
for she always resented the least contradiction to her lord and master--
perhaps as an interference with her own special right and prerogative!--
"why, surely if it is necessary to have stocks, it is necessary to repair
them."

"That's right! go it, Harry!" cried the squire, chuckling, and rubbing
his hands as if he had been setting his terrier at the parson: "St--St--
at him! Well, Master Dale, what do you say to that?"

"My dear ma'am," said the parson, replying in preference to the lady,
"there are many institutions in the country which are very old, look very
decayed, and don't seem of much use; but I would not pull them down for
all that."

"You would reform them, then," said Mrs. Hazeldean, doubtfully, and with
a look at her husband, as much as to say, "He is on politics now,--that's
your business."

"No, I would not, ma'am," said the parson, stoutly. "What on earth would
you do, then?" quoth the squire. "Just let 'em alone," said the parson.
"Master Frank, there's a Latin maxim which was often put in the mouth of
Sir Robert Walpole, and which they ought to put into the Eton grammar,
'Quieta non movere.' If things are quiet, let them be quiet! I would
not destroy the stocks, because that might seem to the ill-disposed like
a license to offend; and I would not repair the stocks, because that puts
it into people's heads to get into them."

The squire was a stanch politician of the old school, and be did not like
to think that, in repairing the stocks, he had perhaps been conniving at
revolutionary principles.

"This constant desire of innovation," said Miss Jemima, suddenly mounting
the more funereal of her two favourite hobbies, "is one of the great
symptoms of the approaching crash. We are altering and mending and
reforming, when in twenty years at the utmost the world itself may be
destroyed!" The fair speaker paused, and Captain Barnabas said
thoughtfully, "Twenty years!--the insurance officers rarely compute the
best life at more than fourteen." He struck his hand on the stocks as he
spoke, and added, with his usual consolatory conclusion, "The odds are
that it will last our time, Squire."

But whether Captain Barnabas meant the stocks or the world he did not
clearly explain, and no one took the trouble to inquire.

"Sir," said Master Frank to his father, with that furtive spirit of
quizzing, which he had acquired amongst other polite accomplishments at
Eton,--"sir, it is no use now considering whether the stocks should or
should not have been repaired. The only question is, whom you will get
to put into them."

"True," said the squire, with much gravity.

"Yes, there it is!" said the parson, mournfully. "If you would but learn
'non quieta movere'!"

"Don't spout your Latin at me, Parson," cried the squire, angrily; "I can
give you as good as you bring, any day.

"'Propria quae maribus tribuuntur mascula dicas.--
As in praesenti, perfectum format in avi.'

There," added the squire, turning triumphantly towards his Harry, who
looked with great admiration at this unprecedented burst of learning on
the part of Mr. Hazeldean,--"there, two can play at that game! And now
that we have all seen the stocks, we may as well go home and drink tea.
Will you come up and play a rubber, Dale? No! hang it, man, I've not
offended you?--you know my ways."

"That I do, and they are among the things I would not have altered,"
cried the parson, holding out his hand cheerfully. The squire gave it a
hearty shake, and Mrs. Hazeldean hastened to do the same.

"Do come; I am afraid we've been very rude: we are sad blunt folks. Do
come; that's a dear good man; and of course poor Mrs. Dale too." Mrs.
Hazeldean's favourite epithet for Mrs. Dale was poor, and that for
reasons to be explained hereafter.

"I fear my wife has got one of her bad headaches, but I will give her
your kind message, and at all events you may depend upon me."

"That's right," said the squire; "in half an hour, eh? How d' ye do, my
little man?" as Lenny Fairfield, on his way home from some errand in the
village, drew aside and pulled off his hat with both hands. "Stop; you
see those stocks, eh? Tell all the bad boys in the parish to take care
how they get into them--a sad disgrace--you'll never be in such a
quandary?"

"That at least I will answer for," said the parson.

"And I too," added Mrs. Hazeldean, patting the boy's curly head. "Tell
your mother I shall come and have a good chat with her to-morrow
evening."

And so the party passed on, and Lenny stood still on the road, staring
hard at the stocks, which stared back at him from its four great eyes.

Put Lenny did not remain long alone. As soon as the great folks had
fairly disappeared, a large number of small folks emerged timorously from
the neighbouring cottages, and approached the site of the stocks with
much marvel, fear, and curiosity.

In fact, the renovated appearance of this monster /a propos de bottes/,
as one may say--had already excited considerable sensation among the
population of Hazeldean. And even as when an unexpected owl makes his
appearance in broad daylight all the little birds rise from tree and
hedgerow, and cluster round their ominous enemy, so now gathered all the
much-excited villagers round the intrusive and portentous phenomenon.

"D' ye know what the diggins the squire did it for, Gaffer Solomons?"
asked one many-childed matron, with a baby in arms, an urchin of three
years old clinging fast to her petticoat, and her hand maternally holding
back a more adventurous hero of six, who had a great desire to thrust his
head into one of the grisly apertures. All eyes turned to a sage old
man, the oracle of the village, who, leaning both hands on his crutch,
shook his head bodingly.

"Maw be," said Gaffer Solomons, "some of the boys ha' been robbing the
orchards."

"Orchards!" cried a big lad, who seemed to think himself personally
appealed to; "why, the bud's scarce off the trees yet!"

"No more it ain't," said the dame with many children, and she breathed
more freely.

"Maw be," said Gaffer Solomons, "some o' ye has been sitting snares."

"What for?" said a stout, sullen-looking young fellow, whom conscience
possibly pricked to reply,--"what for, when it bean't the season? And if
a poor man did find a hear in his pocket i' the haytime, I should like to
know if ever a squire in the world would let 'un off with the stocks,
eh?"

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,

"God 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' compassion like!
And every one knows the squire is a koind-hearted man, God bless 'un!"

"God 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 pronounce 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 gods 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 trimming
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 lustre, 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-fashioned 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; relinquishing 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
shining 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 titles, 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
glass 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 shillings out of his purse, and exceedingly
pleased when he put the shillings 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.

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