Mrs. Fleming had a brother in London, who had run away from his Kentish
home when a small boy, and found refuge at a Bank. The position of
Anthony Hackbut in that celebrated establishment, and the degree of
influence exercised by him there, were things unknown; but he had stuck
to the Bank for a great number of years, and he had once confessed to
his sister that he was not a beggar. Upon these joint facts the farmer
speculated, deducing from them that a man in a London Bank, holding
money of his own, must have learnt the ways of turning it over--farming
golden ground, as it were; consequently, that amount must now have
increased to a very considerable sum. You ask, What amount? But one who
sits brooding upon a pair of facts for years, with the imperturbable
gravity of creation upon chaos, will be as successful in evoking the
concrete from the abstract. The farmer saw round figures among
the possessions of the family, and he assisted mentally in this
money-turning of Anthony's, counted his gains for him, disposed his
risks, and eyed the pile of visionary gold with an interest so
remote, that he was almost correct in calling it disinterested. The
brothers-in-law had a mutual plea of expense that kept them separate.
When Anthony refused, on petition, to advance one hundred pounds to the
farmer, there was ill blood to divide them. Queen Anne's Farm missed the
flourishing point by one hundred pounds exactly. With that addition to
its exchequer, it would have made head against its old enemy, Taxation,
and started rejuvenescent. But the Radicals were in power to legislate
and crush agriculture, and “I've got a miser for my brother-in-law,”
said the farmer. Alas! the hundred pounds to back him, he could have
sowed what he pleased, and when it pleased him, partially defying the
capricious clouds and their treasures, and playing tunefully upon his
land, his own land. Instead of which, and while too keenly aware that
the one hundred would have made excesses in any direction tributary to
his pocket, the poor man groaned at continuous falls of moisture, and
when rain was prayed for in church, he had to be down on his knees,
praying heartily with the rest of the congregation. It was done, and
bitter reproaches were cast upon Anthony for the enforced necessity to
do it.
On the occasion of his sister's death, Anthony informed his bereaved
brother-in-law that he could not come down to follow the hearse as a
mourner. “My place is one of great trust;” he said, “and I cannot be
spared.” He offered, however, voluntarily to pay half the expenses of
the funeral, stating the limit of the cost. It is unfair to sound any
man's springs of action critically while he is being tried by a sorrow;
and the farmer's angry rejection of Anthony's offer of aid must pass. He
remarked in his letter of reply, that his wife's funeral should cost no
less than he chose to expend on it. He breathed indignant fumes against
“interferences.” He desired Anthony to know that he also was “not a
beggar,” and that he would not be treated as one. The letter showed a
solid yeoman's fist. Farmer Fleming told his chums, and the shopkeeper
of Wrexby, with whom he came into converse, that he would honour his
dead wife up to his last penny. Some month or so afterward it was
generally conjectured that he had kept his word.
Anthony's rejoinder was characterized by a marked humility. He expressed
contrition for the farmer's misunderstanding of his motives. His
fathomless conscience had plainly been reached. He wrote again, without
waiting for an answer, speaking of the Funds indeed, but only to
pronounce them worldly things, and hoping that they all might meet in
heaven, where brotherly love, as well as money, was ready made, and
not always in the next street. A hint occurred that it would be a
gratification to him to be invited down, whether he could come or no;
for holidays were expensive, and journeys by rail had to be thought over
before they were undertaken; and when you are away from your post, you
never knew who maybe supplanting you. He did not promise that he could
come, but frankly stated his susceptibility to the friendliness of an
invitation. The feeling indulged by Farmer Fleming in refusing to
notice Anthony's advance toward a reconciliation, was, on the whole,
not creditable to him. Spite is more often fattened than propitiated by
penitence. He may have thought besides (policy not being always a vacant
space in revengeful acts) that Anthony was capable of something stronger
and warmer, now that his humanity had been aroused. The speculation is
commonly perilous; but Farmer Fleming had the desperation of a man who
has run slightly into debt, and has heard the first din of dunning,
which to the unaccustomed imagination is fearful as bankruptcy (shorn
of the horror of the word). And, moreover, it was so wonderful to find
Anthony displaying humanity at all, that anything might be expected of
him. “Let's see what he will do,” thought the farmer in an interval
of his wrath; and the wrath is very new which has none of these cool
intervals. The passions, do but watch them, are all more or less
intermittent.
As it chanced, he acted sagaciously, for Anthony at last wrote to say
that his home in London was cheerless, and that he intended to move
into fresh and airier lodgings, where the presence of a discreet young
housekeeper, who might wish to see London, and make acquaintance with
the world, would be agreeable to him. His project was that one of his
nieces should fill this office, and he requested his brother-in-law to
reflect on it, and to think of him as of a friend of the family, now
and in the time to come. Anthony spoke of the seductions of London quite
unctuously. Who could imagine this to be the letter of an old
crabbed miser? “Tell her,” he said, “there's fruit at stalls at
every street-corner all the year through--oysters and whelks, if she
likes--winkles, lots of pictures in shops--a sight of muslin and silks,
and rides on omnibuses--bands of all sorts, and now and then we can take
a walk to see the military on horseback, if she's for soldiers.”
Indeed, he joked quite comically in speaking of the famous
horse-guards--warriors who sit on their horses to be looked at, and do
not mind it, because they are trained so thoroughly. “Horse-guards blue,
and horse-guards red,” he wrote--“the blue only want boiling.” There is
reason to suppose that his disrespectful joke was not original in him,
but it displayed his character in a fresh light. Of course, if either
of the girls was to go, Dahlia was the person. The farmer commenced
his usual process of sitting upon the idea. That it would be policy
to attach one of the family to this chirping old miser, he thought
incontestable. On the other hand, he had a dread of London, and Dahlia
was surpassingly fair. He put the case to Robert, in remembrance of what
his wife had spoken, hoping that Robert would amorously stop his painful
efforts to think fast enough for the occasion. Robert, however, had
nothing to say, and seemed willing to let Dahlia depart. The only
opponents to the plan were Mrs. Sumfit, a kindly, humble relative of the
farmer's, widowed out of Sussex, very loving and fat; the cook to the
household, whose waist was dimly indicated by her apron-string; and, to
aid her outcries, the silently-protesting Master Gammon, an old man with
the cast of eye of an antediluvian lizard, the slowest old man of his
time--a sort of foreman of the farm before Robert had come to take
matters in hand, and thrust both him and his master into the background.
Master Gammon remarked emphatically, once and for all, that “he never
had much opinion of London.” As he had never visited London, his opinion
was considered the less weighty, but, as he advanced no further speech,
the sins and backslidings of the metropolis were strongly brought to
mind by his condemnatory utterance. Policy and Dahlia's entreaties at
last prevailed with the farmer, and so the fair girl went up to the
great city.
After months of a division that was like the division of her living
veins, and when the comfort of letters was getting cold, Rhoda, having
previously pledged herself to secresy, though she could not guess why
it was commanded, received a miniature portrait of Dahlia, so beautiful
that her envy of London for holding her sister away from her, melted
in gratitude. She had permission to keep the portrait a week; it was
impossible to forbear from showing it to Mrs. Sumfit, who peeped in awe,
and that emotion subsiding, shed tears abundantly. Why it was to be kept
secret, they failed to inquire; the mystery was possibly not without
its delights to them. Tears were shed again when the portrait had to
be packed up and despatched. Rhoda lived on abashed by the adorable new
refinement of Dahlia's features, and her heart yearned to her uncle for
so caring to decorate the lovely face.
One day Rhoda was at her bed-room window, on the point of descending to
encounter the daily dumpling, which was the principal and the unvarying
item of the midday meal of the house, when she beheld a stranger trying
to turn the handle of the iron gate. Her heart thumped. She divined
correctly that it was her uncle. Dahlia had now been absent for very
many months, and Rhoda's growing fretfulness sprang the conviction in
her mind that something closer than letters must soon be coming. She
ran downstairs, and along the gravel-path. He was a little man,
square-built, and looking as if he had worn to toughness; with an
evident Sunday suit on: black, and black gloves, though the day was only
antecedent to Sunday.
“Let me help you, sir,” she said, and her hands came in contact with
his, and were squeezed.
“How is my sister?” She had no longer any fear in asking.
“Now, you let me through, first,” he replied, imitating an arbitrary
juvenile. “You're as tight locked in as if you was in dread of all
the thieves of London. You ain't afraid o' me, miss? I'm not the party
generally outside of a fortification; I ain't, I can assure you. I'm a
defence party, and a reg'lar lion when I've got the law backing me.”
He spoke in a queer, wheezy voice, like a cracked flute, combined with
the effect of an ill-resined fiddle-bow.
“You are in the garden of Queen Anne's Farm,” said Rhoda.
“And you're my pretty little niece, are you? 'the darkie lass,' as your
father says. 'Little,' says I; why, you needn't be ashamed to stand
beside a grenadier. Trust the country for growing fine gals.”
“You are my uncle, then?” said Rhoda. “Tell me how my sister is. Is she
well? Is she quite happy?”
“Dahly?” returned old Anthony, slowly.
“Yes, yes; my sister!” Rhoda looked at him with distressful eagerness.
“Now, don't you be uneasy about your sister Dahly.” Old Anthony, as he
spoke, fixed his small brown eyes on the girl, and seemed immediately to
have departed far away in speculation. A question recalled him.
“Is her health good?”
“Ay; stomach's good, head's good, lungs, brain, what not, all good.
She's a bit giddy, that's all.”
“In her head?”
“Ay; and on her pins. Never you mind. You look a steady one, my dear. I
shall take to you, I think.”
“But my sister--” Rhoda was saying, when the farmer came out, and sent a
greeting from the threshold,--
“Brother Tony!”
“Here he is, brother William John.”
“Surely, and so he is, at last.” The farmer walked up to him with his
hand out.
“And it ain't too late, I hope. Eh?”
“It's never too late--to mend,” said the farmer.
“Eh? not my manners, eh?” Anthony struggled to keep up the ball; and in
this way they got over the confusion of the meeting after many years and
some differences.
“Made acquaintance with Rhoda, I see,” said the farmer, as they turned
to go in.
“The 'darkie lass' you write of. She's like a coal nigh a candle. She
looks, as you'd say, 't' other side of her sister.' Yes, we've had a
talk.”
“Just in time for dinner, brother Tony. We ain't got much to offer, but
what there is, is at your service. Step aside with me.”
The farmer got Anthony out of hearing a moment, questioned, and was
answered: after which he looked less anxious, but a trifle perplexed,
and nodded his head as Anthony occasionally lifted his, to enforce
certain points in some halting explanation. You would have said that a
debtor was humbly putting his case in his creditor's ear, and could only
now and then summon courage to meet the censorious eyes. They went in to
Mrs. Sumfit's shout that the dumplings were out of the pot: old Anthony
bowed upon the announcement of his name, and all took seats. But it was
not the same sort of dinner-hour as that which the inhabitants of the
house were accustomed to; there was conversation.
The farmer asked Anthony by what conveyance he had come. Anthony shyly,
but not without evident self-approbation, related how, having come
by the train, he got into conversation with the driver of a fly at a
station, who advised him of a cart that would be passing near Wrexby.
For threepennyworth of beer, he had got a friendly introduction to the
carman, who took him within two miles of the farm for one shilling, a
distance of fifteen miles. That was pretty good!
“Home pork, brother Tony,” said the farmer, approvingly.
“And home-made bread, too, brother William John,” said Anthony, becoming
brisk.
“Ay, and the beer, such as it is.” The farmer drank and sighed.
Anthony tried the beer, remarking, “That's good beer; it don't cost
much.”
“It ain't adulterated. By what I read of your London beer, this stuff's
not so bad, if you bear in mind it's pure. Pure's my motto. 'Pure,
though poor!'”
“Up there, you pay for rank poison,” said Anthony. “So, what do I do? I
drink water and thank 'em, that's wise.”
“Saves stomach and purse.” The farmer put a little stress on 'purse.'
“Yes, I calculate I save threepence a day in beer alone,” said Anthony.
“Three times seven's twenty-one, ain't it?”
Mr. Fleming said this, and let out his elbow in a small perplexity, as
Anthony took him up: “And fifty-two times twenty-one?”
“Well, that's, that's--how much is that, Mas' Gammon?” the farmer asked
in a bellow.
Master Gammon was laboriously and steadily engaged in tightening himself
with dumpling. He relaxed his exertions sufficiently to take this new
burden on his brain, and immediately cast it off.
“Ah never thinks when I feeds--Ah was al'ays a bad hand at 'counts.
Gi'es it up.”
“Why, you're like a horse that never was rode! Try again, old man,” said
the farmer.
“If I drags a cart,” Master Gammon replied, “that ain't no reason why I
should leap a gate.”
The farmer felt that he was worsted as regarded the illustration, and
with a bit of the boy's fear of the pedagogue, he fought Anthony off by
still pressing the arithmetical problem upon Master Gammon; until the
old man, goaded to exasperation, rolled out thunderingly,--
“If I works fer ye, that ain't no reason why I should think fer ye,”
which caused him to be left in peace.
“Eh, Robert?” the farmer transferred the question; “Come! what is it?”
Robert begged a minute's delay, while Anthony watched him with hawk
eyes.
“I tell you what it is--it's pounds,” said Robert.
This tickled Anthony, who let him escape, crying: “Capital! Pounds it
is in your pocket, sir, and you hit that neatly, I will say. Let it be
five. You out with your five at interest, compound interest; soon comes
another five; treat it the same: in ten years--eh? and then you get into
figures; you swim in figures!”
“I should think you did!” said the farmer, winking slyly.
Anthony caught the smile, hesitated and looked shrewd, and then covered
his confusion by holding his plate to Mrs. Sumfit for a help. The
manifest evasion and mute declaration that dumpling said “mum” on that
head, gave the farmer a quiet glow.
“When you are ready to tell me all about my darlin', sir,” Mrs. Sumfit
suggested, coaxingly.
“After dinner, mother--after dinner,” said the farmer.
“And we're waitin', are we, till them dumplings is finished?” she
exclaimed, piteously, with a glance at Master Gammon's plate.
“After dinner we'll have a talk, mother.”
Mrs. Sumfit feared from this delay that there was queer news to be told
of Dahlia's temper; but she longed for the narrative no whit the less,
and again cast a sad eye on the leisurely proceedings of Master Gammon.
The veteran was still calmly tightening. His fork was on end, with a
vast mouthful impaled on the prongs. Master Gammon, a thoughtful eater,
was always last at the meal, and a latent, deep-lying irritation at
Mrs. Sumfit for her fidgetiness, day after day, toward the finish of the
dish, added a relish to his engulfing of the monstrous morsel. He looked
at her steadily, like an ox of the fields, and consumed it, and then
holding his plate out, in a remorseless way, said, “You make 'em so
good, marm.”
Mrs. Sumfit, fretted as she was, was not impervious to the sound sense
of the remark, as well as to the compliment.
“I don't want to hurry you, Mas' Gammon,” she said; “Lord knows, I like
to see you and everybody eat his full and be thankful; but, all about my
Dahly waitin',--I feel pricked wi' a pin all over, I do; and there's my
blessed in London,” she answered, “and we knowin' nothin' of her, and
one close by to tell me! I never did feel what slow things dumplin's
was, afore now!”
The kettle simmered gently on the hob. Every other knife and fork was
silent; so was every tongue. Master Gammon ate and the kettle hummed.
Twice Mrs. Sumfit sounded a despairing, “Oh, deary me!” but it
was useless. No human power had ever yet driven Master Gammon to a
demonstration of haste or to any acceleration of the pace he had chosen
for himself. At last, she was not to be restrained from crying out,
almost tearfully,--
“When do you think you'll have done, Mas' Gammon?”
Thus pointedly addressed, Master Gammon laid down his knife and fork. He
half raised his ponderous, curtaining eyelids, and replied,--
“When I feels my buttons, marm.”
After which he deliberately fell to work again.
Mrs. Sumfit dropped back in her chair as from a blow.
But even dumplings, though they resist so doggedly for a space, do
ultimately submit to the majestic march of Time, and move. Master Gammon
cleared his plate. There stood in the dish still half a dumpling. The
farmer and Rhoda, deeming that there had been a show of inhospitality,
pressed him to make away with this forlorn remainder.
The vindictive old man, who was as tight as dumpling and buttons could
make him, refused it in a drooping tone, and went forth, looking at
none. Mrs. Sumfit turned to all parties, and begged them to say what
more, to please Master Gammon, she could have done? When Anthony was
ready to speak of her Dahlia, she obtruded this question in utter
dolefulness. Robert was kindly asked by the farmer to take a pipe among
them. Rhoda put a chair for him, but he thanked them both, and said he
could not neglect some work to be done in the fields. She thought that
he feared pain from hearing Dahlia's name, and followed him with her
eyes commiseratingly.
“Does that young fellow attend to business?” said Anthony.
The farmer praised Robert as a rare hand, but one affected with bees in
his nightcap,--who had ideas of his own about farming, and was obstinate
with them; “pays you due respect, but's got a notion as how his way
of thinking's better 'n his seniors. It's the style now with all young
folks. Makes a butt of old Mas' Gammon; laughs at the old man. It ain't
respectful t' age, I say. Gammon don't understand nothing about new
feeds for sheep, and dam nonsense about growing such things as melons,
fiddle-faddle, for 'em. Robert's a beginner. What he knows, I taught
the young fellow. Then, my question is, where's his ideas come from, if
they're contrary to mine? If they're contrary to mine, they're contrary
to my teaching. Well, then, what are they worth? He can't see that. He's
a good one at work--I'll say so much for him.”
Old Anthony gave Rhoda a pat on the shoulder.