JAN HAS THE FEVER.—CONVALESCENCE IN MASTER SWIFT’S COTTAGE.—THE SQUIRE ON
DEMORALIZATION.
JAN took the fever. He was very ill, too, partly from grief at Abel’s
death. He had also a not unnatural conviction that he would die, which
was unfavorable to his recovery.
The day on which he gave Master Swift his old etching as a last bequest,
he fairly infected him also with this belief, and during a necessary
visit to the village the schoolmaster hung up the little picture in his
cottage with a breaking heart.
But the next time Rufus saw him, he came to prepare for a visitor. Jan
was recovering, and Master Swift had persuaded the windmiller to let him
come to the cottage for a few days, the rather that Mrs. Lake was going
to stay with a relative whilst the windmill was thoroughly cleansed and
disinfected. The weather was delightful now, and, feeble as he had
become, Jan soon grew strong again. If he had not done so, it would have
been from no lack of care on Master Swift’s part. The old schoolmaster
was a thrifty man, and had some money laid by, or he would have been
somewhat pinched at this time. As it was, he drew freely upon his
savings for Jan’s benefit, and made many expeditions to the town to buy
such delicacies as he thought might tempt his appetite. Nor was this
all. The morning when Jan came languidly into the kitchen from the
little inner room, where he and the schoolmaster slept, he saw his
precious paint-box on the table, to fetch which Master Swift had been to
the windmill. And by it lay a square book with the word _Sketch-book_ in
ornamental characters on the binding, a couple of Cumberland lead drawing
pencils, and a three-penny chunk of bottle India-rubber, delicious to
smell.
If the schoolmaster had had any twinges of regret as he bought these
things, in defiance of his principles for Jan’s education, they melted
utterly away in view of his delight, and the glow that pleasure brought
into his pale cheeks. Master Swift was regarded, too, by a colored
sketch of Rufus sitting at table in his arm-chair, with his more mongrel
friend on the floor beside him. It was the best sketch that Jan had yet
accomplished. But most people are familiar with the curious fact that
one often makes an unaccountable stride in an art after it has been laid
aside for a time.
It must not be supposed that Master Swift had neglected his duties in the
village, or left the Parson, the Squire, and the doctor to struggle on
alone, during the illness of Abel and of Jan. Even now he was away from
the cottage for the greater part of the day, and Jan was left to keep
house with the dogs. His presence gave great contentment to Rufus, if it
scarcely lessened the melancholy dignity of his countenance; for dogs who
live with human beings never like being left long alone. And Jan, for
his own part, could have wished for nothing better than to sit at the
table where he had once hoped to make leaf-pictures, and paint away with
materials that Rembrandt himself would not have disdained.
The pestilence had passed away. But the labors of the Rector and his
staff rather increased than diminished at this particular point. To say
nothing of those vile wretches who seem to spring out of such calamities
as putrid matter breeds vermin, and who use them as opportunities for
plunder, there were a good many people to be dealt with of a lighter
shade of demoralization,—people who had really suffered, and whose daily
work had been unavoidably stopped, but to whom idleness was so pleasant,
and the fame of their misfortunes so gratifying, that they preferred to
scramble on in dismantled homes, on the alms extracted by their woes, to
setting about such labor as would place them in comfort. Then that large
class—the shiftless—was now doubly large, and there were widows and
orphans in abundance, and there was hardly a bed or a blanket in the
place.
“I have come,” said Mr. Ammaby, joining the Rector as he sat at
breakfast, “to beg you, in the interests of the village, to check the
flow of that fount of benevolence which springs eternal in the clerical
pocket. You will ruin us with your shillings and half crowns.”
“Bless my soul, Ammaby,” said the Rector, pausing with an eggshell
transfixed upon his spoon, “shillings and half crowns don’t go far in the
present condition of our households. There are not ten families whose
beds are not burnt. What do you propose to do?”
“I’ll tell you, when I have first confessed that my ideas are not
entirely original. I have been studying political economy under that
hard-headed Sandy, our friend the doctor. In the first place, from
to-morrow, we must cease to _give_ any thing whatever, and both announce
that determination and stick to it.”
“And _then_, my dear sir?” said the Rector, smiling; and nursing his
black gaiter.
“And _then_, my dear sir,” said Mr. Ammaby, “I shall be able to get some
men to do some work about my place, and those people at a distance who
have widows here will relieve them (at least the widows will look up
their well-to-do relatives), and the Church, in your person, will not be
charged. And some of the widows will consent to scrub for payment,
instead of sitting weeping in your kitchen—also for payment. They will,
furthermore, compel their interesting sons to mind pigs, or scare birds,
instead of hanging about the Heart of Oak, begging of the visitors who
now begin to invade us. Do you know that the very boys won’t settle to
work, that the children are taking to gutter-life and begging, that the
women won’t even tidy up their houses, and that the men are retailing the
horrors of the fever in every alehouse in the county, instead of getting
in the crops? I give you my word, I had to go down to the inn yesterday,
and a lad of eleven or twelve, who didn’t recognize me in Chuter’s dark
kitchen, came up and began to beg with a whine that would have done
credit to a professional mendicant. I stood in the shadow and let him
tell his whole story, of a widowed mother and three brothers and sisters
living, and six dead; and when he’d finished, and two visitors were
fumbling in their pockets, I took him by the collar and lifted him clean
through the kitchen and down the yard into the street. I nearly knocked
Swift over, or rather I nearly fell myself, from concussion with his
burly person, but he was the very man I wanted. I said, ‘Mr. Swift, may
I ask you to do me a favor? This boy—whose father was a respectable
man—has been begging—_begging_! in a public room. His excuse is that his
mother is starving. Will you kindly take him to the Hall, and put him in
charge of the gardener, with my strict orders that he is to do a good
afternoon’s work at weeding in the shrubbery. And that the gardener is
to see that he comes every day at nine o’clock in the morning, and works
there till four in the afternoon, till the day you reopen school,
meal-times and Sundays excepted. I will pay his mother five shillings a
week, and, if he is a good boy, I’ll give him some old clothes. And if
ever you see or hear of his disgracing himself and his friends by begging
again, if you don’t thrash him within an inch of his life, I shall.’ I
promise you, the widow might starve for the want of that five shillings
if the young gentleman could slip out of his bargain. His face was a
study. But less so than the schoolmaster’s. The job exactly suited him,
and I suspect he knew the lad of old.”
“From what I’ve heard Swift say, I fancy he sympathizes with your
theories,” said the Rector.
“I fear he sympathizes with my temper as well as my theories!” laughed
the Squire. “As I felt the flush on my own cheek-bone, I caught the fire
in his eye. But now, my dear sir, you will consent to some strong
measures to prevent the village becoming a mere nest of _lazzaroni_? Let
us try the system at any rate. I propose that we do not shut up the soup
kitchen yet, but charge a small sum for the soup towards its expenses.
And I want to beg you to write another of those graphic and persuasive
letters, in which you have appealed to the sympathy of the public with
our misfortune.”
“But, bless me!” said the Rector, “I thought you were a foe to assisting
the people, even out of their own parson’s pocket.”
“Well, I taunted the doctor myself with inconsistency, but we do not
propose to make a sixpenny dole of the fund. You know there are certain
things they can’t do, and some help they seem fairly entitled to receive.
We’ve made them burn their bedding, in the interests of the public
safety, and it’s only fair they should be helped to replace it. Then
there is a lot of sanitary work which can only be done by a fund for the
purpose; and, if we get the money, we can employ idlers. The women will
tidy their houses when they see new blankets, and the sooner the
churchyard is made nice, and that monument of yours erected, and we all
get into orderly, respectable ways again, the better.”
“Enough, enough, my dear Ammaby!” cried the Rector; “I put myself in your
hands, and I will see to the public appeal at once; though I may mention
that the credit of those compositions chiefly belongs to old Swift. He
knows the _data_ minutely, and he delights in the putting together. I
think he regards it as a species of literary work. I hope you hear good
news of Lady Louisa and little Amabel?”
“They are quite well, thank you,” said the Squire; “they are in town just
now with Lady Craikshaw, who has gone up to consult her London doctor.”
“Well, farewell, Ammaby, for the present. Tell the doctor I’ll give his
plan a trial, and we’ll get the place into working order as fast as we
can.”
“He will be charmed,” said the Squire. “He says, as we are going on now,
we are breeding two worse pests than the fever,—contentment under
remediable discomfort, and a dislike to work.”