THINGS AS THEY USED TO BE.
One of the first things which Simon Deg did after Mr. Spires had so
indignantly refused him his daughter on account of his origin, was
to conceive and to carry out a resolve that, however the brand of
pauperism might attach to his ancestors, none of its obligations
should lie on him. “Let past generations settle their own accounts,”
he said; “but so far as this generation goes, there is not a man
of it shall say that I owe the country, or rather this town, a
farthing for life and growth. If my father ever received a bodle of
parish-pay, which I know not, or his father or father’s father for
him, it shall be repaid.” He went, therefore, successively to the
committee of the poor in each parish, of which the town contained
three, and desired permission to search the pay-books of each of
these parishes for the last eighty years. “Beyond that period,”
he said, “there can be no man living who ever paid a farthing to
the poor-rates.” He did not conceal the object of his research. It
was to ascertain, to a fraction, what amount had been paid during
that period to any individual of the name of Deg. His position in
the town readily secured him this opportunity, and he immediately
employed an able accountant in each parish to trace down, through
the books, items of these payments. He promised, moreover, to the
stipendiary, or sub-overseers of the poor, a handsome honorarium, to
assist the accountant in seeing that his work was done completely,
and in aiding him in any difficulty. He himself frequently attended,
and made tests, by going over certain extents of these accounts,
of the accuracy with which they were done. It was a great labour,
and was not completed much under a year. But it was accomplished at
last, and the result was a statement of several thousand pounds as
having been paid to persons of the name of Deg. This amount Simon Deg
paid over with great satisfaction to the respective committees, and
took receipts for it. The parish officers represented to him that
there was no reason whatever that he should make so extraordinary
a refundment to the parish, from which neither he himself nor his
father in his own person could be shown to have derived a penny.
Still more, they represented that Mr. Deg could not be descended from
all the Degs; he could only have descended in one line, and from that
specific line did he only incur even the shadow of an obligation to
the parishes.
Simon Deg replied, that that was true; but, on the other hand, there
was a female side to the line, the fathers and mothers of women who
married Degs, and daughters of Degs who married and passed under
other names, had swelled the account. He therefore requested to be
allowed to pay the whole account, as it appeared under the name of
Deg; and this was done. He observed, that he did not wish to dictate
in any way the manner in which these sums should be expended, but
he thought that the whole of them might with advantage be employed
in extending and rendering more comfortable those parts of the
workhouses where the aged paupers or the sick were accommodated; and
this suggestion was fully and freely complied with.
This act of Simon Deg’s, demonstrating a feeling of such a profound
sense of honour and integrity, made a grand impression on his
townspeople, and raised him still higher in public estimation. In the
course of his inquiry he made the discovery that the family name was
in reality Degge, and had been thus spelled from the earliest period
till within the last half of the last century. He therefore resumed
the dropped letters, as giving a greater finish of the name to the
eye; and saying pleasantly that, as he had now discharged the debts
of his progenitors, at least to this generation, he thought he might
be allowed to take the two last letters out of pawn. Henceforth,
therefore, he and every one else wrote him Simon “Degge.”
Not long after his marriage, he bought a farm at Hillmartin, a
village not far from Rockville. He was naturally of an active
temperament, was fond of riding, and took a great fancy to farming
and shooting. These divertisements were all afforded him by this
little estate. After close confinement in his counting-house, he
liked to get on his horse, and ride briskly out of town, over the
old Trent Bridge, and up the winding way to his farm. Hillmartin
was about three miles out, and stood on a fine, airy elevation,
overlooking the country round, and from this side of it giving a full
view of Castleborough. Simon’s farm lay a little over the hill beyond
Hillmartin, and stretched in one direction towards Gotham, and in
another towards the estate of Sir Benjamin Bullockshed.
Simon Degge’s purchase of this farm was a subject of great annoyance
to Sir Benjamin, who was very anxious to have it, as it lay alongside
of his woods and game preserves. The fact of seeing his pheasants,
which had found a favourite, because a plentiful feeding-place, on
this farm, shot down by Mr. Degge and his numerous friends from
Castleborough, was, in truth, as great a misfortune as Sir Benjamin
well could imagine to himself. For a quarter of a mile these woods of
his ran along the corn-lands of this farm. The previous farmer had
complained in vain of the depredations of the game—hares, rabbits
and pheasants—which issued out of the preserves in legions. He was
told that he must fence them out, but the fence was Sir Benjamin’s;
and the farmer dared no more to put a stick into it to stop their
runs, than he dared have taken a stick to Sir Benjamin himself. His
growing corn was trodden down by the hares and rabbits; the hares,
according to their habit, cut paths through it, and made playgrounds
in it; the rabbits cropped it as fast as it grew for fifty yards, all
along the woodsides. What escaped and went into ear was regularly
eaten up by the pheasants. They sat on the hedges along the woodside
as tame as barn-door fowls, knowing well that they were under powerful
protection, and during harvest, if a daring waggoner snapped his whip
at them, they disdained to move. On a fine afternoon, so long as
there was anything to pick on the stubble, you might see them feeding
in flocks of a hundred together, as quietly as fowls in a barn-yard.
The nuisance of this great game-manufactory, ruinous to the farmer,
had compelled one tenant after another to throw the farm up. In
fact, no one knowing the farm would take it; they were only men from
a distance who did so, and were in terrible but vain trepidation
when they discovered the real nature of the game-preserving incubus
that lay upon the land. In itself the land was excellent, and,
therefore, a stranger examining it, who had not already lived in a
game-preserving country, was readily taken in by it. If the farmer,
on discovering the alarming evil, complained, the answer from Sir
Benjamin’s steward was, as I have said, “You can stop the runs in
the hedges but if the farmer did stop them, he found the stoppage
very soon removed by the keepers in their nocturnal rounds. One bold
farmer had kept terriers to scour the woodsides; but he soon found
his dogs, when they followed the game into the wood, shot, or trapped
in the iron traps so freely used by our English gamekeepers, who are
the greatest and most extensive animal torturers that the world ever
knew.
The farm, belonging to a gentleman of Lincolnshire, he had, by the
frequent change of tenants, grown out of love with it, and had
offered it to Sir Benjamin at a moderate price; but Sir Benjamin, who
did not believe any one thereabout would dare to come between him and
the vendor, was standing out in the secure expectation of getting it
at a very low figure, when Simon Degge, who was inquiring for such a
farm, not far from town, heard of it from a lawyer in Castleborough
who had carried on the negotiations with Sir Benjamin for the owner.
This gentleman was much disgusted with the gross selfishness, the
many delays, and haughty conduct of Sir Benjamin, and was delighted
at the opportunity of putting the property at once and for ever out
of his power. Mr. Degge closed with the conditions of sale at once,
and as the whole of the purchase-money was ready, in a month the farm
was fully conveyed to him, and put into his possession.
The consternation and indignation of Sir Benjamin on receiving
this intelligence may be imagined. He saw at once that the tables
were now most completely turned against him. He had no longer a
half-informed and comparatively poor farmer to contend with, but
a young man of great acknowledged ability and wealth, as well as
activity of character. Instead of telling Mr. Degge to put sticks
and bushes into the runs of the hares, rabbits, and pheasants, which
his keepers could pull out again, he himself ordered the fences all
along Mr. Degge’s farm to be made game-tight. A fence, inside the
hawthorn-fence, of stakes about two feet long, which were driven down
nearly in contact, side by side, was made to prevent egress from the
preserves to the farm. But all this did not avail. The pheasants, as
the corn ripened, flew over the fences, and fed freely on Mr. Degge’s
corn. The hares travelled round and squatted themselves down thickly
in the green crops of corn, grass, and clover; and the rabbits
burrowed under, requiring continually the stopping of their holes:
for although the rabbits were less cared for by Sir Benjamin, they
were more cared for by his keepers, who made a profitable perquisite
out of them.
On his part, Mr. Degge did not trouble himself at all about a certain
amount of damage done by this game to his crops along the woodside;
for the money value did not distress him, and he looked on that part
of the farm as a nursery for the game which he meant to invite his
Castleborough friends in the autumn to shoot.
But the annoyance to Sir Benjamin and his friends did not end here.
Scattered about on that side of the country lay the estates of
a number of squires—the Tenterhooks, Sheepshanks, Otterbrooks,
Swagsides, &c.—who were of a thoroughly countryfied school. They
were men not destitute of a certain amount of education, but who had
no tastes beyond those of living on their property, and being the
lords paramount as far as it extended. To be the great men of their
little ancestral spots of earth; to rule over the farmers; to rear
and destroy game; to officiate as magistrates, and convict poachers
and petty culprits—that was the extent of their ambition. They seldom
frequented the metropolis, or mixed in the society of the more
elevated and refined aristocracy. They formed a circle of society
of their own, looking proudly down on the moneyed men of the market
town, on the farmers and villagers around them—at once ignorant of
all superior knowledge, proud, and arbitrary.
That a man of the manufacturing town should have dared to step in,
and catch away a valuable farm from before Sir Benjamin Bullockshed’s
very nose, and, as they said, in actually gasping astonishment,
whilst he was in negotiation for it, was a piece of audacity which
really took away their breath. It was ominous of fresh attempts of
the kind. The sanctity of the country and of game was no longer
secure from the unhallowed inroads of plebeian audacity. Sir Roger
Rockville, whose property also at one point came up to Mr. Degge’s
farm, was in a state of most imbecile exasperation at this event. The
dreaded manufacturing town was thus already marching into the very
heart of the country; and of the manufacturing town, the very worst
in his eyes of its odious population. For who was this Degge? he
asked. A pauper, and the last of a long line of paupers. It mattered
not that Mr. Degge had most fully discharged the pauper debt so far
as this generation was concerned. To Sir Roger it was only another
proof of the upstart pride and abundance of money of this dangerous
class.
The sensation which this shocking event, as it was called, created
in the whole circle of this squirearchy was visible at the meetings
of these men of the earth, earthy, at their dinner-parties at each
other’s houses, and at their meetings at the justice-rooms, and
their morning rides to one another’s houses. A feeling of strange
inveteracy was entertained against Simon Degge. If any of them met
him on the highway as they rode to or from Castleborough, they
scowled at him as though he had been a most suspicious character.
More than once, when two of them were together, he had heard them
remark to one another—for it was done loud enough for him to hear
it—“That is that upstart pauper, Degge.” If any labourer of his could
be caught on any pretence, and brought before them, as magistrates,
he was sure to be handled with the utmost severity and the least
possible modicum of justice; and when Mr. Degge went forward to
speak a word in his defence, he was sure to be treated with a marked
contempt, and even incivility.
This proceeding did not tend on Mr. Degge’s part to excite any
pleasant feelings in his bosom towards these lords of the soil; but
he maintained a demeanour of true gentlemanliness and self-respect.
At the same time that he certainly felt a great satisfaction in the
idea of the sweeping devastation of the game which he and his friends
would make in the autumn, and which he was sure no precautions could
prevent making its way to his fields so long as there was a better
pasture there, or whilst he scattered a quantity of barley on his
stubbles, after the corn naturally shed on them had been gathered off
by the pheasants.
Such was the state of feelings all round Simon Degge’s new farm.
So far as he himself was concerned, it seemed only to amuse him
and his town friends, but to the whole squiral group, including Sir
Roger Rockville, it was an acute, and promised to become a chronic
condition of gall and wormwood. Mr. Degge brought his mother to
live at the house belonging to the farm, for she delighted in the
country;—not at the farm-house, for there he had a bailiff, but in
a large old house at the village of Hillmartin itself, with a fine
old-fashioned garden; and there himself and Mrs. Degge spent a great
deal of the fine summer weather.
Simon Degge had also removed William Watson from his cottage by the
farm meadow, and from his trade, and he was now acting as a sort of
orderly at Mr. Degge’s chief manufactory. He occupied the lodge, and
walked about, and saw that all was safe, and moving as it should do.
There were several wealthy and intelligent families in the
neighbourhood of Mr. Degge’s farm, who, however, at once
acknowledged the distinguished merit and virtues of this young man,
and who did not hesitate to call on him and Mrs. Degge, much to the
disgust of the class of country gentlemen of whom I have spoken.
These, it must be admitted, had indeed little in common with men of
game and warrants, and did not stand very highly in their favour
before. Let us see whether they may not present a more agreeable
aspect to us.