The squire’s carpenters were taken from the park pales and set to work at the parish stocks. Then came the painter and coloured them a beautiful dark blue, with white border—and a white rim round the holes—with an ornamental flourish in the middle. It was the gayest public edifice in the whole village, though the village possessed no less than three other monuments of the Vitruvian genius of the Hazeldeans,—to wit, the almshouse, the school, and the parish pump.
A more elegant, enticing, coquettish pair of stocks never gladdened the eye of a justice of the peace.
And Squire Hazeldean’s eye was gladdened. In the pride of his heart he brought all the family down to look at the stocks. The squire’s family (omitting the frere de loin) consisted of Mrs. Hazeldean, his wife; next, of Miss Jemima Hazeldean, his first cousin; thirdly, of Mr. Francis Hazeldean, his only son; and fourthly, of Captain Barnabas Higginbotham, a distant relation,—who, indeed, strictly speaking, was not of the family, but only a visitor ten months in the year. Mrs. Hazeldean was every inch the lady,—the lady of the parish. In her comely, florid, and somewhat sunburned countenance, there was an equal expression of majesty and benevolence; she had a blue eye that invited liking, and an aquiline nose that commanded respect. Mrs. Hazeldean had no affectation of fine airs, no wish to be greater and handsomer and cleverer than she was. She knew herself, and her station, and thanked Heaven for it. There was about her speech and manner something of the shortness and bluntness which often characterizes royalty; and if the lady of a parish is not a queen in her own circle, it is never the fault of a parish. Mrs. Hazeldean dressed her part to perfection. She wore silks that seemed heirlooms,—so thick were they, so substantial and imposing; and over these, when she was in her own domain, the whitest of aprons; while at her waist was seen no fiddle-faddle chatelaine, with breloques and trumpery, but a good honest gold watch to mark the time, and a long pair of scissors to cut off the dead leaves from her flowers,—for she was a great horticulturalist. When occasion needed, Mrs. Hazeldean could, however, lay by her more sumptuous and imperial raiment for a stout riding-habit, of blue Saxony, and canter by her husband’s side to see the hounds throw off. Nay, on the days on which Mr. Hazeldean drove his famous fast-trotting cob to the market town, it was rarely that you did not see his wife on the left side of the gig. She cared as little as her lord did for wind and weather, and in the midst of some pelting shower her pleasant face peeped over the collar and capes of a stout dreadnought, expanding into smiles and bloom as some frank rose, that opens from its petals, and rejoices in the dews. It was easy to see that the worthy couple had married for love; they were as little apart as they could help it. And still, on the first of September, if the house was not full of company which demanded her cares, Mrs. Hazeldean “stepped out” over the stubbles by her husband’s side, with as light a tread and as blithe an eye as when, in the first bridal year, she had enchanted the squire by her genial sympathy with his sports.
So there now stands Harriet Hazeldean, one hand leaning on the squire’s broad shoulder, the other thrust into her apron, and trying her best to share her husband’s enthusiasm for his own public-spirited patriotism, in the renovation of the parish stocks. A little behind, with two fingers resting on the thin arm of Captain Barnabas, stood Miss Jemima, the orphan daughter of the squire’s uncle, by a runaway imprudent marriage with a young lady who belonged to a family which had been at war with the Hazeldeans since the reign of Charles the First respecting a right of way to a small wood (or rather spring) of about an acre, through a piece of furze land, which was let to a brickmaker at twelve shillings a year. The wood belonged to the Hazeldeans, the furze land to the Sticktorights (an old Saxon family, if ever there was one). Every twelfth year, when the fagots and timber were felled, this feud broke out afresh; for the Sticktorights refused to the Hazeldeans the right to cart off the said fagots and timber through the only way by which a cart could possibly pass. It is just to the Hazeldeans to say that they had offered to buy the land at ten times its value. But the Sticktorights, with equal magnanimity, had declared that they would not “alienate the family property for the convenience of the best squire that ever stood upon shoe leather.” Therefore, every twelfth year, there was always a great breach of the peace on the part of both Hazeldeans and Sticktorights, magistrates and deputy-lieutenants though they were. The question was fairly fought out by their respective dependants, and followed by various actions for assault and trespass. As the legal question of right was extremely obscure, it never had been properly decided; and, indeed, neither party wished it to be decided, each at heart having some doubt of the propriety of its own claim. A marriage between a younger son of the Hazeldeans and a younger daughter of the Sticktorights was viewed with equal indignation by both families; and the consequence had been that the runaway couple, unblessed and unforgiven, had scrambled through life as they could, upon the scanty pay of the husband, who was in a marching regiment, and the interest of L1000, which was the wife’s fortune independent of her parents. They died and left an only daughter (upon whom the maternal L1000 had been settled), about the time that the squire came of age and into possession of his estates. And though he inherited all the ancestral hostility towards the Sticktorights, it was not in his nature to be unkind to a poor orphan, who was, after all, the child of a Hazeldean. Therefore he had educated and fostered Jemima with as much tenderness as if she had been his sister; put out her L1000 at nurse, and devoted, from the ready money which had accrued from the rents during his minority, as much as made her fortune (with her own accumulated at compound interest) no less than L4000, the ordinary marriage portion of the daughters of Hazeldean. On her coming of age, he transferred this sum to her absolute disposal, in order that she might feel herself independent, see a little more of the world than she could at Hazeldean, have candidates to choose from if she deigned to marry; or enough to live upon, if she chose to remain single. Miss Jemima had somewhat availed herself of this liberty, by occasional visits to Cheltenham and other watering-places. But her grateful affection to the squire was such that she could never bear to be long away from the Hall. And this was the more praise to her heart, inasmuch as she was far from taking kindly to the prospect of being an old maid; and there were so few bachelors in the neighbourhood of Hazeldean, that she could not but have that prospect before her eyes whenever she looked out of the Hall windows. Miss Jemima was indeed one of the most kindly and affectionate of beings feminine; and if she disliked the thought of single blessedness, it really was from those innocent and womanly instincts towards the tender charities of hearth and home, without which a lady, however otherwise estimable, is little better than a Minerva in bronze. But, whether or not, despite her fortune and her face, which last, though not strictly handsome, was pleasing, and would have been positively pretty if she had laughed more often (for when she laughed, there appeared three charming dimples, invisible when she was grave),—whether or not, I say, it was the fault of our insensibility or her own fastidiousness, Miss Jemima approached her thirtieth year, and was still Miss Jemima. Now, therefore, that beautifying laugh of hers was very rarely heard, and she had of late become confirmed in two opinions, not at all conducive to laughter. One was a conviction of the general and progressive wickedness of the male sex, and the other was a decided and lugubrious belief that the world was coming to an end. Miss Jemima was now accompanied by a small canine favourite, true Blenheim, with a snub nose. It was advanced in life, and somewhat obese. It sat on its haunches, with its tongue out of its mouth, except when it snapped at the flies. There was a strong platonic friendship between Miss Jemima and Captain Barnabas Higginbotham; for he, too, was unmarried, and he had the same ill opinion of your sex, my dear madam, that Miss Jemima had of, ours. The captain was a man of a slim and elegant figure; the less said about the face the better, a truth of which the captain himself was sensible, for it was a favourite maxim of his, “that in a man, everything is a slight, gentlemanlike figure.” Captain Barnabas did not absolutely deny that the world was coming to an end, only he thought it would last his time.
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 he 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.
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