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WOODBURN GRANGE.
WOODBURN GRANGE.
A Story of English Country Life.
BY
WILLIAM HOWITT.
IN THREE VOLUMES.
VOL. I.
LONDON:
CHARLES W. WOOD, 13, TAVISTOCK ST., STRAND.
1867.
[_Right of Translation reserved._]
LONDON:
BRADBURY, EVANS, AND CO., PRINTERS, WHITEFRIARS.
CONTENTS.
CHAP. PAGE
I.—THE LAST OF A LONG LINE 1
II.—THE FIRST OF A NEW LINE 42
III.—THINGS AS THEY USED TO BE 78
IV.—THE WOODBURNS AND THEIR NEIGHBOURS 95
V.—BETTY TRAPPS COMES TO NOTICE 130
VI.—THORSBY AMONGST THE WOODBURNS 156
VII.—THE HAY-FIELD FÊTE 187
VIII.—A NICE SAMPLE OF FARMERS 229
IX.—THE FRIENDS’ PARTY 263
X.—THE PIC-NIC ON THE ISLAND 306
WOODBURN GRANGE.
CHAPTER I.
THE LAST OF A LONG LINE.
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 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 the kingdom. 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 as 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
_striking an article_ in their market as ours, only the blows were
expended on one another’s heads, instead of the heads of foreign
bullocks—that is, bullocks from over the Welsh or Scotch marches, or
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 was Stephen
against Matilda, or Richard against his father, or John against the
barons; whether it were York or Lancaster, 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 crown in the wars 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 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 first 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, bigoted, and _bornés_.
The Rockvilles married Rockvilles, or their first cousins the
Cliffvilles, 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 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 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 dignity, or
dignification, that was meant to serve for all purposes. 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 yourselves, 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 has not often come across these dry wells of society?—solemn
gulfs 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 actual 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 else 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, and 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 sculls, brains, constitutions, and nervous systems were
all so completely moulded into that shape, and baked in 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 natives 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 exhibited 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
three-quarters wilderness, was now cultivated to the pitch of British
agricultural science. The marsh lands 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 over 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 manufactures,
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, as far as you could see on the surface. In stature he exceeded
six feet. His colossal elms could not boast of a more proper relative
growth. He was as large a landlord and as tall a justice of the peace
as you could desire; but, unfortunately, after all, he was 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 was 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 necessity
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, and a large estate implies
large honour and respect, though the owners of it be simply cyphers.
So the Rockville soul—unused from generation to generation—grew
“Fine by degrees and beautifully 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, who was 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 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 beside 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 landed aristocracy 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_, talked 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 foot-path 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 those woods! In the river there were islands,
which were covered in summer with the greenest grass, and the
freshest of willows, and the clearest of 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, with 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 a 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 others, in Sir
Roger’s eyes, 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 artizans and their wives or sweethearts.
In the times prior to the growth, rapid yet steady, of the
neighbouring town, Great Castleborough, and to the simultaneous
development of the love-of-nature principle in the Castleburghians,
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 leading from Great Castleborough 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, and 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 the next, being
St. Monday, with looks so defiant, that Sir Roger more than once
contemplated sending off for the Yeomanry 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 Castleborough 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 resort, are to be closed to
you. Castleburghians, 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 country squirearchy. There was
Sir Benjamin Bullockshed, and Sir Thomas Tenterhook, and all the
squires—Sheepshank, Ramsbottom, Turnbull, Otterbrook, and Swagsides.
The clerk of the Sessions read the notice for the closing of all
the foot-paths through the woods of Rockville, and declared that
this notice had been duly, and for the required period, publicly
posted. The Castleburghians protested by their able lawyer, Dare
Deville, 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 Dare Deville; “the estate of
Rockville is unquestionably the property of the honourable baronet,
Sir Roger Rockville; but the roads through it are as unquestionably
the 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
of Otterbrook, Turnbull, and Swagsides, and all the rest of the
worshipful row, was too big for utterance. Only Sir Roger himself
burst forth with an abrupt—“Impudent fellow! But I’ll see him ——
first!”
“Grant the order!” said Sir Benjamin Bullockshed; and the whole
bench nodded assent. The able lawyer Dare Deville 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 Castleborough. 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 Castleburghians, who tore down all the
boards and placards, and carried them on their shoulders to Great
Castleborough, singing as they went, “See the Conquering Heroes
come!” They set them up in the centre of the Castleborough
market-place, and burnt them along with an effigy of Roger Rockville.
This was grist at once to the mill of the able lawyer Dare Deville.
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, and for
aiding and abetting. There was plenty of work for Dare Deville 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 homewards from the assize, which finally settled
the question of those foot-paths, he heard the bells in all the
steeples of Great Castleborough burst forth with a grand peal of
triumph. He closed 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-nicing. I’ll stop their fishing. I’ll
have hold of them for trespassing and poaching!” There was war
henceforth between Rockville and Great Castleborough.
On the next Sunday there came literally thousands of the jubilant
Castleburghians to Rockville. They had brought baskets and wine for
dining and drinking success to all foot-paths. 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 Castleburghians 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 there they found
a whole regiment of watchers, who pointed again to the narrow line of
foot-path, and told them not to trespass beyond it. But the islands!
They went over to the islands. 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 Castleburghians discovered that their triumph was not quite
so complete as they had flattered themselves. The foot-paths were
theirs, but that was all. Their ancient licence was at an end. If
they came there, there was no more fishing; if they came in crowds,
there was no more pic-nicing; 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 Dare Deville would undertake to defend them.
The Castleburghians 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 a row 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 foot-path—but, then, they had the
foot-paths: yet, on the other hand, the pic-nicing, and the fishing,
and the islands! The Castleburghians were full of sullen wrath, and
Sir Roger was—oh, most expressive old Saxon phrase—HAIRSORE! Yes,
he was one universal wound of vexation and jealousy of his rights.
Every hair in his body was like a pin sticking in 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 Castleborough.
The week following, what was their astonishment to find the much
frequented, the charming little rustic inn 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-nicing, of fishing, 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
himself 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 waded 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 all running away to Castleborough?”
The story was carried by the man to the town, and occasioned a good
laugh, and many a time when Sir Roger appeared in the place, he
was greeted with—“Why don’t you bottle up the Trent?” But the joke
did not compensate for a tittle of what was lost: there was bad
blood between Rockville and Castleborough as a settled condition.
Castleborough was incensed, and Sir Roger was hairsore.
A new nuisance sprang up. The people of Castleborough looked on
the cottagers of Rockville as sunk in the deepest darkness under
Sir Roger, and his cousin the vicar, who had seconded, and it was
believed had instigated the baronet to a great portion of these
proceedings. 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
Castleburghians 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 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 Castleburghians now fulminated awful judgments on
the unhappy Sir Roger, as a persecutor and 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 condition 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 strolling to and fro in his fields and plantations,
and in prowling along his river-side. He looked under hedges, and
watched for long hours under 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 hurried and angry, almost
stammering 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 he did. He went to church
on Sunday, 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 the corners of the fine iron tracery,
bearing evidence of the long period since it had been opened. How
different to the time when Sir Roger and Lady Rockville had had these
gates thrown wide on Sunday morning, and with all their train of
household servants at 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 a 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 had 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, which had once clearly been
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, he would stand under an entry
for hours, waiting till it was gone over, rather than take a cab or
omnibus. The habit of lurking and peering about was become fixed, 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 fast 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 was up and out with his keepers.
Of what value was that magnificent estate to him? those superb
woods; those finely-hanging cliffs; that clear and _riante_ river,
careering, travelling on, and taking a noble sweep below his window;
that glorious expanse of most verdant meadows, stretching almost to
Castleborough, 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 to the delusive doctrine
of blood, that 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 new earths from the glorious charms 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 thrill 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.