Sir Roger Rockville of Rockville was the last of a very long line. It
extended from the Norman Conquest to the present century. His first
known ancestor came over with William, and must have been a man of some
mark, either of bone and sinew, or of brain, for he obtained what the
Americans would call a prime location. As his name does not occur in the
Roll of Battle Abbey, he was, of course, not of a very high Norman
extraction; but he had done enough, it seems, in the way of knocking
down Saxons, to place himself on a considerable eminence in this
kingdom. The centre of his domains was conspicuous far over the country,
through a high range of rock overhanging one of the sweetest rivers in
England. On one hand lay a vast tract of rich marsh land, capable, as
society advanced, of being converted into meadows; and on the other, as
extensive moorlands, finely undulating, and abounding with woods and
deer.
Here the original Sir Roger built his castle on the summit of the range
of rock, with huts for his followers; and became known directly all over
the country of Sir Roger de Rockville, or Sir Roger of the hamlet on the
Rock. Sir Roger, no doubt, was a mighty hunter before the lord of the
feudal district: it is certain that his descendants were. For
generations they led a jolly life at Rockville, and were always ready to
exchange the excitement of the chase for a bit of civil war. Without
that the country would have grown dull, and ale and venison lost their
flavour. There was no gay London in those days, and a good brisk
skirmish with their neighbours in helm and hauberk was the way of
spending their season. It was their parliamentary debate, and was
necessary to thin their woods. Protection and Free Trade were as much
the great topics of interest as they are now, only they did not trouble
themselves so much about Corn bills. Their bills were of good steel, and
their protective measures were arrows a cloth-yard long. Protection
meant a good suit of mail; and a castle with its duly prescribed moats,
bastions, portcullises, and donjon keep. Free Trade was a lively inroad
into the neighbouring baron’s lands, and the importation thence of
goodly herds and flocks. Foreign cattle for home consumption was as
_sticking an article_ in their markets as in ours, only the blows were
expended on one another’s heads, instead of the heads of foreign
bullocks—that is, bullocks from over the Welch or Scotch Marches, as
from beyond the next brook.
Thus lived the Rockvilles for ages. In all the iron combats of those
iron times they took care to have their quota. Whether it were Stephen
against Matilda, or Richard against his father, or John against the
barons; whether it were York or Lancaster, or Tudor or Stuart. The
Rockvilles were to be found in the _mêlée_, and winning power and lands.
So long as it required only stalwart frames and stout blows, no family
cut a more conspicuous figure. The Rockvilles were at Bosworth Field.
The Rockvilles fought in Ireland under Elizabeth. The Rockvilles were
staunch defenders of the cause in the war of Charles I. with his
Parliament. The Rockvilles even fought for James II. at the Boyne, when
three-fourths of the most loyal of the English nobility and gentry had
deserted him in disgust and indignation. But from that hour they had
been less conspicuous.
The opposition to the successful party, that of William of Orange, of
course brought them into disgrace: and though they were never molested
on that account, they retired to their estate, and found it convenient
to be as unobtrusive as possible. Thenceforward you heard no more of the
Rockvilles in the national annals. They became only of consequence in
their own district. They acted as magistrates. They served as high
sheriffs. They were a substantial county family, and nothing more.
Education and civilisation advanced; a wider and very different field of
action and ambition opened upon the aristocracy of England. Our fleets
and armies abroad, our legislature at home, law and the church,
presented brilliant paths to the ambition of those thirsting for
distinction, and the good things that follow it. But somehow the
Rockvilles did not expand with this expansion. So long as it required
only a figure of six feet high, broad shoulders, and a strong arm, they
were a great and conspicuous race. But when the head became the member
most in request, they ceased to go a-head. Younger sons, it is true,
served in army and in navy, and filled the family pulpit, but they
produced no generals, no admirals, no archbishops. The Rockvilles of
Rockville were very conservative, very exclusive, and very stereotype.
Other families grew poor, and enriched themselves again by marrying
plebeian heiresses. New families grew up out of plebeian blood into
greatness, and intermingled the vigour of their fresh earth with the
attenuated aristocratic soil. Men of family became great lawyers, great
statesmen, great prelates, and even great poets and philosophers. The
Rockvilles remained high, proud, bigotted, and _borné_.
The Rockvilles married Rockvilles, or their first cousins, the
Cesgvilles, simply to prevent property going out of the family. They
kept the property together. They did not lose an acre, and they were a
fine, tall, solemn race—and nothing more. What ailed them?
If you saw Sir Roger Rockville,—for there was an eternal Sir Roger
filling his office of high sheriff,—he had a very fine carriage, and a
very fine retinue in the most approved and splendid of antique
costumes;—if you saw him sitting on the bench at quarter sessions, he
was a tall, stately, and solemn man. If you saw Lady Rockville shopping,
in her handsome carriage, with very handsomely attired servants; saw her
at the county ball, or on the race-stand, she was a tall, aristocratic,
and stately lady. That was in the last generation—the present could
boast of no Lady Rockville.
Great outward respect was shown to the Rockvilles on account of the
length of their descent, and the breadth of their acres. They were
always, when any stranger asked about them, declared, with a serious and
important air, to be a very ancient, honourable, and substantial family.
“Oh! a great family are the Rockvilles, a very great family.”
But if you came to close quarters with the members of this great and
highly distinguished family, you soon found yourself fundamentally
astonished: you had a sensation come over you, as if you were trying,
like Moses, to draw water from a rock, without his delegated power.
There was a goodly outside of things before you, but nothing came of it.
You talked, hoping to get talking in return, but you got little more
than “noes” and “yeses,” and “oh! indeeds!” and “reallys,” and sometimes
not even that, but a certain look of aristocratic dignity or
dignification, that was meant to serve for all answers. There was a sort
of resting on aristocratic oars or “sculls,” that were not to be too
vulgarly handled. There was a feeling impressed on you, that eight
hundred years of descent and ten thousand a-year in landed income did
not trouble themselves with the trifling things that gave distinction to
lesser people—such as literature, fine arts, politics, and general
knowledge. These were very well for those who had nothing else to pride
themselves on, but for the Rockvilles—oh! certainly they were by no
means requisite.
In fact, you found yourself, with a little variation, in the predicament
of Cowper’s people,
—— who spent their lives
In dropping buckets into empty wells,
And _growing tired_ of drawing nothing up.
Who hasn’t often come across these “dry wells” of society; solemn gulphs
out of which you can pump nothing up? You know them; they are at your
elbow every day in large and brilliant companies, and defy the best
sucking-buckets ever invented to extract anything from them. But the
Rockvilles were each and all of this adust description. It was a family
feature, and they seemed, if either, rather proud of it. They must be
so; for proud they were, amazingly proud; and they had nothing besides
to be proud of, except their acres, and their ancestors.
But the fact was, they could not help it. It was become organic. They
had acted the justice of peace, maintained the constitution against
upstarts and manufacturers, signed warrants, supported the church and
the house of correction, committed poachers, and then rested on the
dignity of their ancestors for so many generations, that their skulls,
brains, constitutions, and nervous systems, were all so completely
moulded into that shape and baked into that mould, that a Rockville
would be a Rockville to the end of time, if God and Nature would have
allowed it. But such things wear out. The American Indians and the
Australian nations wear out; they are not progressive, and as Nature
abhors a vacuum, she does not forget the vacuum wherever it may be,
whether in a hot desert, or in a cold and stately Rockville;—a very
ancient, honourable, and substantial family that lies fallow till the
thinking faculty literally dies out.
For several generations there had been symptoms of decay about the
Rockville family. Not in its property, that was as large as ever; not in
their personal stature and physical aspect. The Rockvilles continued, as
they always had been, a tall and not bad-looking family. But they grew
gradually less prolific. For a hundred and fifty years past there had
seldom been more than two, or at most three, children. There had
generally been an heir to the estate, and another to the family pulpit,
and sometimes a daughter married to some neighbouring squire. But Sir
Roger’s father had been an only child, and Sir Roger himself was an only
child. The danger of extinction to the family, apparent as it was, had
never induced Sir Roger to marry. At the time that we are turning our
attention upon him, he had reached the mature age of sixty. Nobody
believed that Sir Roger now would marry; he was the last, and likely to
be, of his line.
It is worth while here to take a glance at Sir Roger and his estate.
They wore a strange contrast. The one bore all the signs of progress,
the other of a stereotyped feudality. The estate, which in the days of
the first Sir Roger de Rockville had been half morass and half
wilderness, was now cultivated to the pitch of British agricultural
science. The marshlands beyond the river were one splendid expanse of
richest meadows, yielding a rental of four solid pounds per acre. Over
hill and dale on this side for miles, where formerly ran wild deer, and
grew wild woodlands or furze-bushes, now lay excellent farms and
hamlets, and along the ridge of the ancient cliffs rose the most
magnificent woods. Woods, too, clothed the steep hill-sides, and swept
down to the noble river, their very boughs hanging far out over its
clear and rapid waters. In the midst of these fine woods stood Rockville
Hall, the family seat of the Rockvilles. It reared its old brick walls
above the towering mass of elms, and travellers at a distance recognised
it for what it was, the mansion of an ancient and wealthy family.
The progress of England in arts, science, commerce, and manufacture, had
carried Sir Roger’s estate along with it. It was full of active and
moneyed farmers, and flourished under modern influences. How lucky it
would have been for the Rockville family had it done the same!
But amid this estate there was Sir Roger solitary, and the last of the
line. He had grown well enough—there was nothing stunted about him, so
far as you could see on the surface. In stature, he exceeded six feet.
His colossal elms could not boast of a properer relative growth. He was
as large a landlord, and as tall a justice of the peace, as you could
desire; but, unfortunately, he was, after all, only the shell of a man.
Like many of his veteran elms, there was a very fine stem, only it was
hollow. There was a man, just with the rather awkward deficiency of a
soul.
And it were no difficult task to explain, either, how this had come
about. The Rockvilles saw plainly enough the necessity of manuring their
lands, but they scorned the very idea of manuring their family. What!
that most ancient, honourable, and substantial family, suffer any of the
common earth of humanity to gather about its roots! The Rockvilles were
so careful of their good blood, that they never allied it to any but
blood as pure and inane as their own. Their elms flourished in the
rotten earth of plebeian accumulations, and their acres produced large
crops of corn from the sewage of towns and fat sinks, but the Rockvilles
themselves took especial care that no vulgar vigour from the real heap
of ordinary human nature should infuse a new force of intellect into
their race. The Rockvilles needed nothing; they had all that an ancient,
honourable, and substantial family could need. The Rockvilles had no
need to study at school—why should they? They did not want to get on.
The Rockvilles did not aspire to distinction for talent in the world—why
should they? They had a large estate. So the Rockville soul, unused from
generation to generation, grew—
Fine by degrees, and _spiritually_ less,
till it tapered off into nothing.
Look at the last of a long line in the midst of his fine estate. Tall he
was, with a stoop in his shoulders, and a bowing of his head on one
side, as if he had been accustomed to stand under the low boughs of his
woods, and peer after intruders. And that was precisely the fact. His
features were thin and sharp; his nose prominent and keen in its
character; his eyes small, black, and peering like a mole’s, or a hungry
swine’s. Sir Roger was still oracular on the bench, after consulting his
clerk, a good lawyer,—and looked up to by the neighbouring squires in
election matters, for he was an unswerving tory. You never heard of a
rational thing that he had said in the whole course of his life; but
that mattered little, he was a gentleman of solemn aspect, of stately
gait, and of a very ancient family.
With ten thousand a-year, and his rental rising, he was still, however,
a man of overwhelming cares. What mattered a fine estate if all the
world was against him? And Sir Roger firmly believed that he stood in
that predicament. He had grown up to regard the world as full of little
besides upstarts, radicals, manufacturers, and poachers. All were
banded, in his belief, against the landed interest. It demanded all the
energy of his very small faculties to defend himself and the world
against them.
Unfortunately for his peace, a large manufacturing town had sprung up
within a couple of miles of him. He could see its red-brick walls, and
its red-tiled roofs, and its tall smoke-vomiting chimneys, growing and
extending over the slopes beyond the river. It was to him the most
irritating sight in the world; for what were all those swarming weavers
and spinners but arrant radicals, upstarts, sworn foes of the ancient
institutions and the landed interests of England? Sir Roger had passed
through many a desperate conflict with them for the return of members to
parliament. They brought forward men that were utter wormwood to all his
feelings, and they paid no more respect to him and his friends on such
occasions than they did to the meanest creature living. Reverence for
ancient blood did not exist in that plebeian and rapidly multiplying
tribe. There were master manufacturers there actually that looked and
talked as big as himself, and _entre nous_, a vast deal more cleverly.
The people talked of rights and franchises, and freedom of speech and of
conscience, in a way that was really frightful. Then they were given
most inveterately to running out in whole and everlasting crowds on
Sundays and holidays into the fields and woods; and as there was no part
of the neighbourhood half so pleasant as the groves and river banks of
Rockville, they came swarming up there in crowds that were enough to
drive any man of acres frantic.
Unluckily, there were roads all about Rockville; foot roads, and high
roads, and bridle roads. There was a road up the river side, all the way
to Rockville woods, and when it reached them, it divided like a fork,
and one pony or footpath led straight up a magnificent grove of a mile
long, ending close to the hall; and another ran all along the river
side, under the hills and branches of the wood.
Oh, delicious were these woods! In the river there were islands, which
were covered in summer with the greenest grass, and the freshest of
willows, and the clear waters rushed around them in the most inviting
manner imaginable. And there were numbers of people extremely ready to
accept this delectable invitation of these waters. There they came in
fine weather, and as these islands were only separated from the mainland
by a little and very shallow stream, it was delightful for lovers to get
across—with laughter, and treading on stepping-stones, and slipping off
the stepping-stones up to the ankles into the cool brook, and pretty
screams, and fresh laughter, and then landing on those sunny, and to
them really enchanted, islands. And then came fishermen, solitary
fishermen, and fishermen in rows; fishermen lying in the flowery grass,
with fragrant meadow-sweet and honey-breathing clover all about their
ears; and fishermen standing in file, as if they were determined to
clear all the river of fish in one day. And there were other lovers, and
troops of loiterers, and shouting roysterers, going along under the
boughs of the wood, and following the turns of that most companionable
of rivers. And there were boats going up and down; boats full of young
people, all holiday finery and mirth, and boats with duck-hunters and
other, to Sir Roger, detestable marauders, with guns and dogs, and great
bottles of beer. In the fine grove, on summer days, there might be found
hundreds of people. There were pic-nic parties, fathers and mothers with
whole families of children, and a grand promenade of the delighted
artisans and their wives or sweethearts.
In the times prior to the sudden growth of the neighbouring town, Great
Stockington, and to the simultaneous development of the love-of-nature
principle in the Stockingtonians, nothing had been thought of all these
roads. The roads were well enough till they led to these inroads. Then
Sir Roger aroused himself. This must be changed. The roads must be
stopped. Nothing was easier to his fancy. His fellow-justices, Sir
Benjamin Bullockshed and Squire Sheepshank, had asked his aid to stop
the like nuisances, and it had been done at once. So Sir Roger put up
notices all about, that the roads were to be stopped by an Order of
Session, and these notices were signed, as required by law, by their
worships of Bullockshed and Sheepshank. But Sir Roger soon found that it
was one thing to stop a road leading from One-man-Town to Lonely Lodge,
and another to attempt to stop those from Great Stockington to
Rockville.
On the very first Sunday after the exhibition of those notice-boards,
there was a ferment in the grove of Rockville, as if all the bees in the
county were swarming there, with all the wasps and hornets to boot.
Great crowds were collected before each of these obnoxious placards, and
the amount of curses vomited forth against them was really shocking for
any day, but more especially for a Sunday. Presently there was a rush at
them; they were torn down, and simultaneously pitched into the river.
There were great crowds swarming all about Rockville all that day, and
with looks so defiant that Sir Roger more than once contemplated sending
off for the Yeoman Cavalry to defend his house, which he seriously
thought in danger.
But so far from being intimidated from proceeding, this demonstration
only made Sir Roger the more determined. To have so desperate and
irreverent a population coming about his house and woods, now presented
itself in a much more formidable aspect than ever. So, next day, not
only were the placards once more hoisted, but rewards offered for the
discovery of the offenders, attended with all the maledictions of the
insulted majesty of the law. No notice was taken of this, but the whole
of Great Stockington was in a buzz and an agitation. There were posters
plastered all over the walls of the town, four times as large as Sir
Roger’s notices, in this style:—
“Englishmen! your dearest rights are menaced! The Woods of Rockville,
your ancient, rightful, and enchanting resorts, are to be closed to you.
Stockingtonians! the eyes of the world are upon you. ‘Awake! arise! or
be for ever fallen!’ England expects every man to do his duty! And your
duty is to resist and defy the grasping soil-lords, to seize on your
ancient Patrimony!”
“Patrimony! Ancient and rightful resort of Rockville!” Sir Roger was
astounded at the audacity of this upstart, plebeian race. What! they
actually claimed Rockville, the heritage of a hundred successive
Rockvilles, as their own. Sir Roger determined to carry it to the
Sessions; and at the Sessions was a magnificent muster of all his
friends. There was Sir Roger himself in the chair; and on either hand, a
prodigious row of county squire-archy. There was Sir Benjamin
Bullockshed, and Sir Thomas Tenterhook, and all the squires,—Sheepshank,
Ramsbottom, Turnbull, Otterbrook, and Swagsides. The Clerk of Session
read the notice for the closing of all the footpaths through the woods
of Rockville, and declared that this notice had been duly, and for the
required period publicly, posted. The Stockingtonians protested by their
able lawyer Daredeville, against any order for the closing of these
ancient woods—the inestimable property of the public.
“Property of the public!” exclaimed Sir Roger. “Property of the public!”
echoed the multitudinous voices of indignant Bullocksheds, Tenterhooks,
and Ramsbottoms. “Why, Sir, do you dispute the right of Sir Roger
Rockville to his own estate?”
“By no means;” replied the undaunted Daredeville; “the estate of
Rockville is unquestionably the property of the honourable baronet, Sir
Roger Rockville; but the roads through it are the as unquestionable
property of the public.”
The whole bench looked at itself; that is, at each other, in wrathful
astonishment. The swelling in the diaphragms of the squires Otterbrook,
Turnbull, and Swagsides, and all the rest of the worshipful row, was too
big to admit of utterance. Only Sir Roger himself burst forth with an
abrupt—
“Impudent fellows! But I’ll see them —— first!”
“Grant the order!” said Sir Benjamin Bullockshed; and the whole bench
nodded assent. The able lawyer Daredeville retired with a pleasant
smile. He saw an agreeable prospect of plenty of grist to his mill. Sir
Roger was rich, and so was Great Stockington. He rubbed his hands, not
in the least like a man defeated, and thought to himself, “Let them go
at it—all right.”
The next day the placards on the Rockville estate were changed for
others bearing “STOPPED BY ORDER OF SESSIONS!” and alongside of them
were huge carefully painted boards, denouncing on all trespassers
prosecutions according to law. The same evening came a prodigious
invasion of Stockingtonians—tore all the boards and placards down, and
carried them on their shoulders to Great Stockington, singing as they
went, “See, the Conquering Heroes come!” They set them up in the centre
of the Stockington marketplace, and burnt them, along with, an effigy of
Sir Roger Rockville.
That was grist at once to the mill of the able lawyer Daredeville. He
looked on, and rubbed his hands. Warrants were speedily issued by the
Baronets of Bullockshed and Tenterhook, for the apprehension of the
individuals who had been seen carrying off the notice-boards, for
larceny, and against a number of others for trespass. There was plenty
of work for Daredeville and his brethren of the robe; but it all ended,
after the flying about of sundry mandamuses and assize trials, in Sir
Roger finding that though Rockville was his, the roads through it were
the public’s.
As Sir Roger drove homeward from the assize, which finally settled the
question of these footpaths, he heard the bells in all the steeples of
Great Stockington burst forth with a grand peal of triumph. He closed
first the windows of his fine old carriage, and sunk into a corner; but
he could not drown the intolerable sound. “But,” said he, “I’ll stop
their pic-nic-ing. I’ll stop their fishing. I’ll have hold of them for
trespassing and poaching!” There was war henceforth between Rockville
and Great Stockington.
On the very next Sunday there came literally thousands of the jubilant
Stockingtonians to Rockville. They had brought baskets, and were for
dining, and drinking success to all footpaths. But in the great grove
there were keepers, and watchers, who warned them to keep the path, that
narrow well-worn line up the middle of the grove. “What! were they not
to sit on the grass?”—“No!”—“What! were they not to pic-nic?”—“No! not
there!”
The Stockingtonians felt a sudden damp on their spirits. But the river
bank! The cry was “To the river bank! There they _would_ pic-nic.” The
crowd rushed away down the wood, but on the river bank they found a
whole regiment of watchers, who pointed again to the narrow line of
footpath, and told them not to trespass beyond it. But the islands! they
went over to the islands. But there too were Sir Roger’s forces, who
warned them back! There was no road there—all found there would be
trespassers, and be duly punished.
The Stockingtonians discovered that their triumph was not quite so
complete as they had flattered themselves. The footpaths were theirs,
but that was all. Their ancient license was at an end. If they came
there, there was no more fishing; if they came in crowds, there was no
more pic-nic-ing; if they walked through the woods in numbers, they must
keep to Indian file, or they were summoned before the county magistrates
for trespass, and were soundly fined; and not even the able Daredeville
would undertake to defend them.
The Stockingtonians were chop-fallen, but they were angry and dogged;
and they thronged up to the village and the front of the hall. They
filled the little inn in the hamlet—they went by scores, and roving all
over the churchyard, read epitaphs
That teach the rustic moralists to die,
but don’t teach them to give up their old indulgences very
good-humouredly. They went and sat in rows on the old churchyard wall,
opposite to the very windows of the irate Sir Roger. They felt
themselves beaten, and Sir Roger felt himself beaten. True, he could
coerce them to the keeping of the footpaths—but, then, they had the
footpaths! True, thought the Stockingtonians, we have the footpaths, but
then the pic-nic-ing, and the fishing, and the islands! The
Stockingtonians were full of sullen wrath, and Sir Roger was—oh, most
expressive old Saxon phrase—HAIRSORE! Yes, he was one universal round of
vexation and jealousy of his rights. Every hair in his body was like a
pin sticking into him. Come within a dozen yards of him; nay, at the
most, blow on him, and he was excruciated—you rubbed his sensitive hairs
at a furlong’s distance.
The next Sunday the people found the churchyard locked up, except during
service, when beadles walked there, and desired them not to loiter and
disturb the congregation, closing the gates, and showing them out like a
flock of sheep the moment the service was over. This was fuel to the
already boiling blood of Stockington. The week following, what was their
astonishment to find a much frequented ruin gone! it was actually gone!
not a trace of it; but the spot where it had stood for ages, turfed,
planted with young spruce trees, and fenced off with post and rail! The
exasperated people now launched forth an immensity of fulminations
against the churl Sir Roger, and a certain number of them resolved to
come and seat themselves in the street of the hamlet and there dine; but
a terrific thunderstorm, which seemed in league with Sir Roger, soon
routed them, drenched them through, and on attempting to seek shelter in
the cottages, the poor people said they were very sorry, but it was as
much as their holdings were worth, and they dare not admit them.
Sir Roger had triumphed! It was all over with the old delightful days at
Rockville. There was an end of pic-nic-ing, of fishing, and of roving in
the islands. One sturdy disciple of Izaak Walton, indeed, dared to fling
a line from the banks of Rockville grove, but Sir Roger came upon him
and endeavoured to seize him. The man coolly walked into the middle of
the river, and, without a word, continued his fishing.
“Get out there!” exclaimed Sir Roger, “that is still on my property.”
The man walked through the river to the other bank, where he knew that
the land was rented by a farmer. “Give over,” shouted Sir Roger, “I tell
you the water is mine.”
“Then,” said the fellow, “bottle it up, and be hanged to you! Don’t you
see it is running away to Stockington?”
There was bad blood between Rockville and Stockington-green. Stockington
was incensed, and Sir Roger was hairsore.
A new nuisance sprung up. The people of Stockington looked on the
cottagers of Rockville as sunk in deepest darkness under such a man as
Sir Roger and his cousin the vicar. They could not pic-nic, but they
thought they could hold a camp-meeting; they could not fish for roach,
but they thought they might for souls. Accordingly there assembled
crowds of Stockingtonians on the green of Rockville, with a chair and a
table, and a preacher with his head bound in a red handkerchief; and
soon there was a sound of hymns, and a zealous call to come out of the
darkness of the spiritual Babylon. But this was more than Sir Roger
could bear; he rushed forth with all his servants, keepers, and
cottagers, overthrew the table, and routing the assembly, chased them to
the boundary of his estate.
The discomfited Stockingtonians now fulminated awful judgments on the
unhappy Sir Roger, as a persecutor and a malignant. They dared not enter
again on his park, but they came to the very verge of it, and held
weekly meetings on the highway, in which they sang and declaimed as
loudly as possible, that the winds might bear their voices to Sir
Roger’s ears.
To such a position was now reduced the last of the long line of
Rockville. The spirit of a policeman had taken possession of him. He had
keepers and watchers out on all sides, but that did not satisfy him. He
was perpetually haunted with the idea that poachers were after his game,
that trespassers were in his woods. His whole life was now spent in
stealing to and fro in his fields and plantations, and prowling along
his river side. He looked under hedges, and watched for long hours under
the forest trees. If any one had a curiosity to see Sir Roger, they had
only to enter his fields by the wood side, and wander a few yards from
the path, and he was almost sure to spring out over the hedge, and in
angry tones demand their name and address. The descendant of the
chivalrous and steel-clad De Rockvilles was sunk into a restless spy on
his own ample property. There was but one idea in his mind—encroachment.
It was destitute of all other furniture but the musty technicalities of
warrants and commitments. There was a stealthy and skulking manner in
everything that he did. He went to church on Sundays, but it was no
longer by the grand iron gate opposite to his house, that stood
generally with a large spider’s web woven over the lock, and several
others in different corners of the fine iron tracery, bearing evidence
of the long period since it had been opened. How different to the time
when the Sir Roger and Lady of Rockville had had these gates thrown wide
on a Sunday morning, and, with all their train of household servants
after their back, with true antique dignity, marched with much proud
humility into the house of God. Now, Sir Roger—the solitary, suspicious,
undignified Sir Roger, the keeper and policeman of his own
property—stole in at a little side gate from his paddock, and back the
same way, wondering all the time whether there was not somebody in his
pheasant preserves, or Sunday trespassers in his grove.
If you entered his house, it gave you as cheerless a feeling as its
owner. There was the conservatory, so splendid with rich plants and
flowers in his mother’s time—now a dusty receptacle of hampers, broken
hand-glasses, and garden tools. These tools could never be used, for the
gardens were grown wild. Tall grass grew in the walks, and the huge
unpruned shrubs disputed the passage with you. In the wood above the
gardens, reached by several flights of fine, but now moss-grown, steps,
there stood a pavilion, once clearly very beautiful. It was now damp and
ruinous—its walls covered with greenness and crawling insects. It was a
great lurking-place of Sir Roger when on the watch for poachers.
The line of the Rockvilles was evidently running fast out. It had
reached the extremity of imbecility and contempt—it must soon reach its
close.
Sir Roger used to make his regular annual visit to town; but of late,
when there, he had wandered restlessly about the streets, peeping into
the shop-windows; and if it rained, standing under entries for hours
after, till it was gone over. The habit of lurking and peering about,
was upon him; and his feet bore him instinctively into those narrow and
crowded alleys where swarm the poachers of the city—the trespassers and
anglers in the game preserves and streams of humanity. He had lost all
pleasure in his club; the most exciting themes of political life
retained no piquancy for him. His old friends ceased to find any
pleasure in him. He was become the driest of all dry wells. Poachers,
and anglers, and Methodists, haunted the wretched purlieus of his lost
fading-out mind, and he resolved to go to town no more. His whole nature
was centred in his woods. He was for ever on the watch; and when at
Rockville again, if he heard a door clap when in bed, he thought it a
gun in his woods, and started up, and was out with his keepers.
Of what value was that magnificent estate to him?—those superb woods;
those finely-hanging cliffs; that clear and _riant_ river coming
travelling on, and taking a noble sweep below his windows,—that glorious
expanse of neat verdant meadows stretching almost to Stockington, and
enlivened by numerous herds of the most beautiful cattle—those old farms
and shady lanes overhung with hazel and wild rose; the glittering brook,
and the songs of woodland birds—what were they to that worn-out old man,
that victim of the delusive doctrine of blood, of the man-trap of an
hereditary name?
There the poet could come, and feel the presence of divinity in that
noble scene, and hear sublime whispers in the trees, and create new
heavens and earths from the glorious chaos of nature around him, and in
one short hour live an empyrean of celestial life and love. There could
come the very humblest children of the plebeian town, and feel a throb
of exquisite delight pervade their bosoms at the sight of the very
flowers on the sod, and see heaven in the infinite blue above them. And
poor Sir Roger, the holder, but not the possessor of all, walked only in
a region of sterility, with no sublimer ideas than poachers and
trespassers—no more rational enjoyment than the brute indulgence of
hunting like a ferret, and seizing his fellow-men like a bulldog. He was
a specimen of human nature degenerated, retrograded from the divine to
the bestial, through the long-operating influences of false notions and
institutions, continued beyond their time. He had only the soul of a
keeper. Had he been only a keeper, he had been a much happier man.
His time was at hand. The severity which he had long dealt out towards
all sorts of offenders made him the object of the deepest vengeance. In
a lonely hollow of his woods, watching at midnight with two of his men,
there came a sturdy knot of poachers. An affray ensued. The men
perceived that their old enemy, Sir Roger, was there: and the blow of a
hedge-stake stretched him on the earth. His keepers fled—and thus
ignominiously terminated the long line of the Rockvilles. Sir Roger was
the last of his line, but not of his class. There is a feudal art of
sinking, which requires no study; and the Rockvilles are but one family
amongst thousands who have perished in its practice.