“Heaste, Jenny! put the bairns to bed,
And mind they say their prayers.
Sweet innocents! their heads yence down,
They sleep away their cares!
But gi’ them first a butter-shag;
When young, they munnet want,—
Nor ever sal a bairn o’ mine
While I’ve a bit to grant.”
_The Happy Family._
THE younger Sandboys took the departure of the villagers more to heart
than did their mother; though, true to her woman’s nature, had the trip
been anywhere but to London, she would have felt hurt at not making one
of the pleasure party. On reaching home, she and Mr. Sandboys
congratulated one another that they were not on their way to suffer the
miseries of a week’s residence amidst either the dirt or the wickedness
of the metropolis; but Elcy and Jobby began, for the first time, to feel
that the retirement, which they heard so much vaunted every day, and
which so many persons came from all parts of the country to look at and
admire, cut them off from a considerable share of the pleasures which
all the world else seemed so ready to enjoy, and which they began
shrewdly to suspect were not quite so terrible as their father was in
the habit of making out.
Thus matters continued at Hassness till the next Tuesday evening, when
Mrs. Sandboys remarked that it was “_very_ strange” that “Matthew
Harker, t’ grocer, had not been to village” with his pony and cart that
day; and what she _s’ud_ do for t’ tea, and sugar, and soft bread, she
didn’t know.
Now, seeing that the nearest grocer was ten miles distant, and that
there was no borrowing this necessary article from any of their
neighbours, as the whole village was then safely housed in London, such
a failure in the visit of the peripatetic tea-man, upon whom the
inhabitants of Buttermere and Crummock Water one and all depended for
their souchong, and lump, and moist, and wheaten bread, was a matter of
more serious importance than a townsman might imagine.
It was therefore arranged that Postlethwaite their man should take Paddy
t’ pony over to Keswick the next day, to get the week’s supply of
grocery, and learn what had happened to Harker, in whom the Sandboys
took a greater interest from the fact of their having subscribed, with
others of the gentry, when Harker lost his hand by blasting cobbles, to
start him in the grocery business, and provide him with a horse and cart
to carry his goods round the country.
Postlethwaite—a long, grave, saturnine-looking man, who was “_a little_”
hard of hearing, was, after much shouting in the kitchen, made to
comprehend the nature of his errand. But he had quitted Hassness only a
short hour, when he returned with the sad intelligence—which he had
picked up from Ellick Crackenthorpe, who was left in charge of
Keskadale, while the family had gone to town,—that Harker, finding all
the folk about Keswick had departed for the Great Exhibition, and
hearing that Buttermere had done the same, had put his wife and his nine
children inside his own van, and was at that time crawling up by easy
stages to London.
Moreover, Postlethwaite brought in the dreary tidings that, in coming
down from the top of the Hause, just by Bear’s fall, Paddy had cast a
shoe, and that it was as much as he could do to get him down the Moss
side. This calamity was a matter of as much delight to the youngsters as
it was of annoyance to the elder Sandboys; for seeing that Bob Beck, the
nearest blacksmith, lived six miles distant, and that it was impossible
to send either to Cockermouth or Keswick for the necessaries of life,
until the pony was armed against the rockiness of the road, it became a
matter of considerable difficulty to settle what could be done.
After much serious deliberation, it was finally arranged that
Postlethwaite should lead the pony on to the “smiddy,” at Loweswater, to
be shod, and then ride him over to Dodgson’s, the grocer’s, at
Cockermouth.
Postlethwaite, already tired, and, it must be confessed, not a little
vexed at the refusal of Mr. Sandboys to permit him to accompany his
fellow-villagers on this London trip—the greatest event of all their
lives—started very sulky, and came back, long after dusk, with the pony
lamed by a stone in his foot, and himself savage with hunger, and almost
rebellious with fatigue; for, on getting to the “smiddy,” he found that
Beck the blacksmith had ruddled on his door the inscription—
“GEANE TO LUNNON FOR TO SEE T’ GIRT ’SHIBITION!”
and, worse than all to Postlethwaite, he discovered, moreover, on
seeking his usual ale at Kirkstile, that Harry Pearson, the landlord,
had accompanied the Buttermere travellers’ train up to town; and that
John Wilkinson, the other landlord, had followed him the day after; so
that there was neither bite nor sup to be had in the place, and no
entertainment either for man or beast.
In pity to Paddy, if not in remembrance of the farmer’s good cheer,
Postlethwaite, on his way back, turned down to Joe Watson’s, at
Lanthwaite, and there found it impossible to make anybody hear him, for
the farmer and his six noble-looking sons—known for miles round as the
flower of the country—had also joined the sight-seers on their way to
the train at Cockermouth.
This was sad news to the little household. It was the first incident
that gave Mrs. Sandboys an insight into the possible difficulties that
their remaining behind, alone, at Hassness, might entail upon the
family. She, and Mr. Sandboys, had hitherto only thought of the
inconveniences attending a visit to London, and little dreamt that their
absence from it, at such a time, might force them to undergo even
greater troubles. She could perhaps have cheerfully tolerated the
abdication of the Cockermouth milliner—she might have heard, without a
sigh, that Mr. Bailey had put up the shutters of his circulating
library, and stopped the supply of “Henrietta Temples,” “Emilia
Wyndhams,” and “The Two Old Men;” she might not even have complained had
Thompson Martin, the draper, cut short her ribbons and laces, by
shutting up his shop altogether—but to have taken away her tea and
sugar, was more than a lady in the vale of years, and the valley of
Buttermere, could be expected to endure, without some outrage to
philosophy!
The partiality of the sex in general for their morning and evening cup
of souchong and “best refined,” is now ranked by physiologists among
those inscrutable instincts of sentient nature, which are beyond the
reach of scientific explanation. What oil is to the Esquimaux, what the
juice of the cocoa-nut is to the monkey, what water is to the fish, what
dew is to the flower, and what milk is to the cat—so is tea to woman! No
person yet, in our own country, has propounded any sufficient theory to
account for the English washerwomen’s all-absorbing love of the Chinese
infusion—nor for the fact of every maid-servant, when stipulating the
terms of her engagement, always making it an express condition of the
hiring, that she should be provided with “tea and sugar,” and of every
mistress continually declaring that she “would rather at any time go
without her dinner than her tea.”
What sage has yet taught us why womankind is as gregarious over tea as
mankind over wine? Sheridan has called the Bottle the sun of the table;
but surely the Teapot, with its attendant cups, may be considered as a
heavenly system, towards which all the more beautiful bodies concentre,
where the piano may be said to represent the music of the spheres, and
in which the gentlemen, heated with wine, and darting in eccentric
course from the dining-room, may be regarded as fiery comets. We would
ask any lady whether Paradise could have been a garden of bliss without
the tea-plant; and whether the ever-to-be-regretted error of our first
mother was not the more unpardonable from the fact of her having
preferred to pilfer an apple rather than pluck the “fullest flavoured
Pekoe.” And may not psychology here trace some faint transcendental
reason for the descendants of Adam still loving to linger over their
apples after dinner, shunning the tea-table and those connected with it.
Yet, perhaps, even the eating of apples has not been more dangerous to
the human family than the sipping of tea. If sin came in with pippins,
surely scandal was brought into the world with Bohea! Adam fell a victim
to his wife’s longing for a Ribston, and how many Eves have since fallen
martyrs to the sex’s love of the slanderous Souchong.
Mrs. Sandboys was not prepared for so great a sacrifice as her tea, and
when she first heard from Postlethwaite the certainty of Harker’s
departure, and saw, by the result of this second journey, that there was
no hope of obtaining a supply from Cockermouth, there _was_ a moment
when she allowed her bosom to whisper to her, that even the terror of a
bed in London would be preferable to a tea-less life at Hassness.
Mr. Sandboys, however, no sooner saw that there was no tea or sugar to
be had, than he determined to sweeten his cup with philosophy; so,
bursting out with a snatch of the “Cumberland Lang Seyne,” he exclaimed,
as cheerily as he could under the circumstances—
“Deuce tek the fuil-invented tea;
For tweyce a day we that mun’ hev;”
and immediately after this, decided upon the whole family’s reverting to
the habits of their ancestors, and drinking “yale” for breakfast. This
was by no means pleasant, but as it was clear she could do nothing else,
Mrs. Sandboys, like a sensible woman, turned her attention to the
contents of the ale-cask, and then discovered that some evil-disposed
person, whom she strongly suspected to be Master Jobby—for that young
gentleman began to display an increasing enjoyment in each succeeding
catastrophe—had left the tap running, and that the cellar floor was
covered three inches deep with the liquid intended to take off the
dryness and somewhat sawdusty character of the oat-cake, which, in the
absence of any wheaten bread, now formed the staple of their morning
meal.
Now it so happened, that it wanted a fortnight of the return of
Jennings’ man, the brewer, whose periodical circumgyrations with the
beer, round about Buttermere, gave, like the sun, life and heat to the
system of its inhabitants. In this dire emergency, Postlethwaite, whose
deafness was found to increase exactly in proportion to the
inconvenience of the journeys required of him, was had out, and shaken
well, and bawled at, preparatory to a walk over to Lorton Vale, where
the brewery was situated—only six miles distant.
But his trip on this occasion was about as successful as the last, for
on reaching the spot, he found that the brewer, like the grocer, the
farrier, and the publicans, had disappeared for London on the same
pleasurable mission.
The family at Hassness was thus left without tea, beer, or bread, and,
consequently, reduced to the pure mountain stream for their beverage,
and oaten cakes and bacon for their principal diet. Their stock of fresh
meat was usually procured from Frank Hutchison, the butcher of
Cockermouth, but to go or send thither, under their present
circumstances, appeared to be impossible. So that Mrs. Sandboys began to
have serious alarms about two or three pimples that made their
appearance on Cursty’s face, lest a continued course of salt meat and
oat-cake should end in the whole family being afflicted with the scurvy.
She would immediately have insisted on putting them, one and all, under
a severe course of treacle and brimstone, with a dash of cream of tartar
in it, to “sweeten their blood;” only, luckily, there was neither
treacle nor brimstone, nor cream of tartar, to be had for twenty miles,
nor anybody to go for it, and then, probably, nobody at Mr. Bowerbank’s
to serve it.
Sandboys, seeing that he had no longer any hope in Postlethwaite, was
now awakened to the necessity of making a personal exertion. His wife,
overpowered by this addition of the loss of dinner to the loss of tea,
did not hesitate to suggest to him, that perhaps it might be as well, if
they consented to do like the rest of the world, and betake themselves
for a few days to London. For her own part, she was ready to make any
sacrifice, even to face the London dirt. But Sandboys would listen to no
compromise, declared that greatness showed itself alone in overcoming
circumstances,—and talked grandly of his forefathers, who had held out
so long in these self-same mountain fastnesses. Mrs. Sandboys had no
objection to make to the heroism, but she said that really Elcy’s
complexion required fresh meat; and that although she herself was
prepared to give up a great deal, yet her Sunday’s dinner was more than
she was inclined to part with, and as for sacrifices, she had already
sacrificed enough in the loss of her tea. Mr. Sandboys upon this
bethought him of John Banks, the pig-butcher at Lorton, and having a
young porker just ready for the knife, fancied he could not do better
than despatch Postlethwaite with the animal to Lorton to be slaughtered.
This, however, was sooner decided upon than effected; for Postlethwaite,
on being summoned, made his appearance in slippers, and declared he had
worn out, in his several foraging excursions about the country, the only
pair of shoes he had left. Whereupon his master, though it was with some
difficulty he admitted the excuse,—and this not until Postlethwaite,
with a piteous gravity, had brought out a pair of calkered boots in the
very worst possible condition,—began to foresee that there was even more
necessity for Postlethwaite to be shod than Paddy, for that unless he
could be got over to Cockermouth, they might be fairly starved out.
Accordingly, he gave his son Jobby instructions to make the best of his
way to the two shoemakers who resided within five miles of Hassness, for
he made sure that one of the cobblers at least could be prevailed upon
to put Postlethwaite in immediate travelling order.
It was long after nightfall, and Mrs. Sandboys had grown very uneasy as
to the fate of her dear boy, when Postlethwaite was heard condoling over
the miserable plight of Master Jobby. His mother rushed out to see what
had happened, and found the bedraggled youth standing with one shoe in
the hall, the other having been left behind in a bog, which he had met
with in his attempt to make a short cut home on the other side of the
lake by Melbrake.
Nor was the news he brought of a more cheerful nature. John Jackson the
shoemaker was nowhere to be found. He had not been heard of since the
departure of the train; and John Coss, the other shoemaker, had turned
post-boy again, and refused to do any cobbling whatsoever. Coss had told
him he got a job to take some gentlefolks in a car over to Carlisle, to
meet the train for London, and he was just about to start; and if Jobby
liked, he would give him a lift thus far on t’ road to Girt ’Shibition.
This was a sad damper for Sandboys, for with John Jackson the shoemaker
seemed to vanish his last hope. Postlethwaite had worn out his boots,
Jobby had lost his shoes, and John Jackson and John Coss, the only men,
within ten miles, who could refit them, were both too fully taken up
with the Great Exhibition to trouble their heads about the destitution
of Hassness.
Postlethwaite almost smiled when he heard the result of Jobby’s
twelve-mile walk, and drily remarked to the servant-maid, who already
showed strong symptoms of discontent—having herself a sweetheart
exposed, without her care, to the temptations and wickedness of
London—that the whole family would be soon barefoot, and going about the
countryside trying to get one another shod.
Sandboys consulted with his wife as to what was to be done, but she
administered but little consolation; for the loss of her tea, and the
prospect of no Sunday’s dinner, had ruffled her usual equanimity. The
sight of her darling boy, too, barefoot and footsore, aroused every
passion of her mother’s heart. Jobby had no other shoes to his feet, she
told her husband, for the rate at which _that_ boy wore his things out
was quite terrible to a mother’s feelings; but Mr. Sandboys had no right
to send the lad to such a distance, after such weather as they had just
had. He might have known that Jobby was always taking short cuts, and
always getting up to his knees in some mess or other; and he must
naturally have expected that Jobby would have left both his shoes behind
him instead of one—and those the only shoes he had. She should not
wonder if Mr. Sandboys had done it for the purpose. Who was to go the
errands now, she should like to know? Mr. Sandboys, perhaps, liked
living there, in that out of the way hole, like a giant or a hermit. Did
he expect that she or Elcy were going to drive that pig to Lorton?—And
thus she continued, going over and over again every one of the troubles
that their absence from London had brought upon them, until Sandboys was
worried into excitement, and plumply demanded of her whether she
actually wished to go herself to the Exhibition? Mrs. Sandboys was at no
loss for a reply, and retorted, that what she wanted was her usual
meals, and shoes for her children; and if she could not get them there,
why, she did not care if she had to go to Hyde Park for them.
Sandboys was little prepared for this confession of hostilities on the
part of his beloved Aggy. He had never known her address him in such a
tone since the day she swore at Lorton to honour and obey him. He jumped
from his chair and began to pace the room—now wondering what had come to
his family and servants, now lamenting the want of tea, now sympathizing
with the absence of ale, now biting his thumb as he contemplated the
approximating dilemma of a dinnerless Sunday, and now inwardly cursing
the Great Exhibition, which had not only taken all his neighbours from
him, and deprived him of almost all the necessaries of life, but seemed
destined to estrange his wife and children!
For a moment the idea passed across his mind, that perhaps it might be
better to give way; but he cast the thought from him immediately, and as
he trod the room with redoubled quickness and firmness of step, he
buttoned his grey coat energetically across his breast, swelling with a
resolution to make a desperate effort. He would drive the pig himself
over to John Banks, the pig-butcher’s, at Lorton! But, as in the case of
Postlethwaite, Mr. Cursty Sandboys soon found that resolving to drive a
pig was a far different thing from doing it. Even in a level country the
pig-driving art is none of the most facile acquirements,—but where the
way to be traversed consists at every other yard of either a fell, a
craig, a gill, a morass, a comb, a pike, a knot, a rigg, a skar, a beck,
a howe, a force, a syke, or a tarn, or some other variety of those
comfortable quarters into which a pig, with his peculiar perversity,
would take especial delight in introducing his _compagnon de voyage_—the
accomplishment of pig-driving in Cumberland partakes of the character of
what aesthetic critics love to term “High Art.”
Nor did Mr. Sandboys’ pig—in spite of the benevolence and “sops”
administered during his education by the gentle Elcy, who shed tears at
his departure—at all detract from the glories of his race. Contrary to
the earnest advice of Postlethwaite, founded on the experience of ages,
who exhorted his master to keep the string loose in his hand—Sandboys,
who had a theory of his own about pig-driving, and who was afraid that
if the animal once got away from him in the hills, he would carry with
him the family’s only chance of fresh meat for weeks to come—made up his
mind to keep a safe hold of him, and so, twisted the string which he had
attached to the porker’s leg two or three turns round his own wrist.
Scarcely had Elcy petitioned her brother for the gentle treatment of her
pet “piggy,” than, crack! Jobby, who held the whip at the gate, while
his father adjusted the reins, sent a flanker on the animal’s
hind-quarters. Away went “piggy,” and we regret to say, away went the
innocent Sandboys, not after, but with him—and precisely in the opposite
direction to what he had intended. “Cwoley,” the dog, who had been
dancing round the pig at the gate, no sooner saw the animal start off at
score, than entering into the spirit of the scene, he gave full chase,
yelping, and jumping, and snapping at him, so that the terrified porker
fetched sharp round upon Sandboys, and bolted straight up the mountain
side.
Now, to the stranger it should be made known, that climbing the fells of
Cumberland is no slight task—even when the traveller is allowed to pick
his steps; but, with a pig to lead, no choice but to follow, and a dog
behind to urge the porker on, the operation becomes one of considerable
hardship, if not peril. Moreover, the mountain over which Mr. Sandboys’
pig had chosen to make his course, was called “the Moss,” or “Morass,”
from its peculiar swampy character. Up went the pig, through bracken,
and furze, and holly-bush, and up by the stunted oaks, and short-cut
stumps, and straight on, up through the larches, over the rugged clump
above Hassness; and up went Mr. Sandboys, over and through every one of
the same obstacles, making a fresh rent in his trousers at every
“whin-bush”—scratched, torn, panting, slipping, and—if we must confess
it—swearing; now tumbling, now up again, but still holding on to the
pig, or the pig holding on to him, for grim death.
But if it were difficult to ascend a Cumberland fell with a pig in
front, how much more trying the descent! No sooner had “Cwoley” turned
the pig at the top, than Sandboys, as he looked down the precipitous
mountain up which his porker had dragged him, “saw his work before him.”
It required but a slight momentum to start him; then, away they all
three went together—in racing technology “you might have covered them
with a sheet”—-the dog barking, and the pig squeaking, and dragging Mr.
Sandboys down the hill at a rate that promised to bring him to the
bottom with more celerity than safety. Unfortunately, too, the pig took
his course towards the beck formed by the torrent at the “Goat’s Gills;”
and no sooner did it reach the ravine, than, worried by the dog, it
precipitated itself and Mr. Sandboys right down into the foaming, but
luckily not very deep, waters.
But, if it were not deep, the bottom of the beck was at least stony; and
there, on his back, without breath to cry out, lay the wretched
Sandboys, a victim to his theory, his coat skirtless, his pantaloons
torn to shreds, and the waters curling white about him, with the driving
string in his hand, cut by the sharp craigs in his fall—while the legs,
the loin, the griskin, and the chine—that were to have consoled the
family for weeks, were running off upon the pettitoes which he had
privately set aside for his own supper on some quiet evening.
Elcy, who, throughout the whole chase, had been bewailing the poor
“piggy’s” troubles, and exclaiming to her father not to hurt it,
screamed with terror, as, from the gate, she saw the plunge and splash;
while the wicked Jobby, who had been rendered powerless by laughter, and
the want of shoes, and Postlethwaite, who also had been inwardly
enjoying the scene, now rushed forward to the rescue, in company with
the whole household, and dragged out from the beck the bruised,
tattered, bedraggled, bespattered, bedrenched, and wretched Sandboys—the
more annoyed, because the first inquiry addressed to him by Mrs.
Sandboys, in a voice of mingled terror and tenderness, was, “Whatever
_has_ become of the pig?”
That was a mystery which took some hour or two to solve; for it was not
until Elcy and Jobby, in Postlethwaite’s old shoes, had explored both
Robinson and the Moss, that they caught sight of “Cwoley” on the slope
beside the foot of Buttermere Lake, dancing, in wild delight, round the
shaft of a deserted mine, known as “Muddock,” where, as became evident
from the string twisted round the bushes, the pig, like Curtius, had
plunged suicidally into the gulf, and was then lying, unbaked,
unroasted, and unboiled, in twelve foot water!
Sandboys, when the news was brought him, was, both metaphorically and
literally, in hot water. He sat with his two feet in a steaming pail,
and wrapped in a blanket, with a basin of smoking oatmeal gruel in his
hand, Mrs. Sandboys by his side, airing a clean shirt at the fire, and
vowing all the while, that she would not wonder if his obstinacy in
stopping down there, starving all the family, and denying them even the
necessaries of life, to gratify his own perversity, were not the death
of herself and the dear children. If he caught _his_ death, he would
only have himself to blame; for there was not a Dover’s Powder within
twenty miles to be had for love or money; and as for tallowing his nose,
it was more than she could afford to do, for the candles were running so
short, and there was not a tallow-chandler remaining in the
neighbourhood, so that in a few days she knew that, all through his fine
management, they would be left not only tealess, beerless, meatless,
and, she _would_ add, her dear boy shoeless, but also in positive
darkness.
This second outbreak on the part of the generally placid and
anti-metropolitan Mrs. Sandboys was superinduced by a discovery she had
made that morning, when about to give out the soap for the next day’s
monthly wash. She then remembered that the stock which she had ordered
of Harker had not come to hand; and there being no opportunity of
getting to Dodgson or to Herd—supposing either of them to be at
Cockermouth—or of reaching any other oilman or tallow-chandler—even if
such a character existed in the neighbourhood within a circuit of fifty
miles—she began to see that by remaining at Hassness, she and her
children would positively be reduced to a more horrible state of
dirtiness than the metropolis could possibly emulate, even taking for
granted the truth of all the reports concerning the Thames water, which
Mr. Sandboys delighted in reading to her from the newspapers.
Scarcely had Mrs. Sandboys given vent to this “bit of her mind,” than
the forms of long Postlethwaite and little Ann Lightfoot appeared at the
door, to give the miserable Cursty “warning.” Ann Lightfoot begged to
state, that the coals were beginning to run so short, and the large fire
Mr. Sandboys had just made up to dry his clothes and shoes had so
reduced their small stock, that they would be left without a spark in
the range below stairs; and they had made up their minds to leave the
very next day, for the kitchen was so damp, that, without a fire, they
knew it would be the death of them.
Sandboys remonstrated, saying, that some of the slate-carts from the
quarries at Honister would be sure to be passing the house on their way
to Cockermouth, and they might order them to bring him a return cargo of
coals from Great Southern. But Postlethwaite, with a pertinacity the
reverse of pleasant, replied, that he had thought of all this before, if
his master had not; and had watched two days consecutively, without
seeing a single cart; Master Jobby, besides, had told him he knew there
was no one working at the quarries, for he had not heard the sound of
the blasting during the last fortnight. Without beer, without meat,
without tea, without sugar, without coals, and, what was more, without
tobacco—as he had been for the last ten days—Postlethwaite observed, he
thought it was hard his master should expect him and Ann to stop, when
the lassie was almost starved; it would be far better that they should
leave the family to share amongst them the few provisions remaining.
Here Ann Lightfoot began to wipe the tears from her eyes with the corner
of her apron—an action that produced a series of sympathetical sobs from
Mrs. Sandboys, who hysterically gurgled out, that it was impossible to
tell what would become of them all in that dreadful lonely, damp
place,—without medicine—or doctor—or dinner—or even the means of
warming, or lighting, or cleaning themselves.
It was at this juncture that Elcy entered the room, her blue eyes bathed
in a flood of tears, to pour into her father’s bosom the fate of her
beloved “piggy!” Overpowered with this battery of hysterics, and the
accumulated distresses and disaffection of his united household,
Sandboys would have rushed from the apartment—and, indeed, did make an
effort to do so; but remembering the paucity of his attire, he plumped
rapidly down again, wrapping his blanket round him with the dignity of
an Indian chief.
It was impossible, however, after a fortnight’s low living, to maintain
for a length of time anything like grandeur of soul, so Sandboys soon
got to participate in that depression of spirits which, owing to the
spare diet, had begun to pervade the whole household at Hassness. In a
few minutes the would-be stoical Cursty was melted, like the rest of
them, into tears. Now blubbering, now snivelling, now sobbing, he
proceeded to appeal to the generosity of Postlethwaite and the feelings
of Ann Lightfoot, he spoke of their long services, and how the affection
between the master and the servant was the pride of their native county,
and imploringly besought them not to leave him in his present position,
but to wait only a few days longer, when their friends and neighbours
could not fail of returning; for he was convinced London wickedness must
pall, after a brief experience, upon the pure and simple minds of the
people of Buttermere; and he wound up by pointing to his children, and
begged of them not to force him to drag those dear innocents into the
foul contamination of a London life.
This appeal had _not_ the desired effect. Postlethwaite, although he had
been with Sandboys since a boy, and looked upon Jobby, from long
association, almost as a child of his own,—and although in the most
lively period of the village, he had never been known to take part in
the festivities, nor had made his appearance at a “Merry Night,” for the
last fifteen years—nevertheless, felt himself, after the departure of
the Excursion train of his fellow villagers, lonely and ill-used, in not
being allowed to participate in the general holiday. The consequence
was, that Mr. Sandboys’ eloquence was utterly lost upon the surliness
that had usurped the place of his usual regard and respect for his
master.
Moreover, Ann Lightfoot had been unable to get over the loss of her
“Jwohnny,” whom, with a jaundiced eye, she saw clattering away, in
calkered boots, at all the merry nights of London, now standing up in
many a square-eight reel, or now kneeling at the feet of some
“fause-feaced fair,” in the sly vagaries of the Cushion-dance. Under
these circumstances, she had passed her evening unusually lonely, even
for Buttermere; and having no lover to sit up for at night, she had
usually spent her leisure time with Postlethwaite, mutually grumbling by
the kitchen fire, and filling his mind with ideas and desires for London
enjoyments, to which he would otherwise have been an entire stranger.
Accordingly, Ann Lightfoot was as little inclined as Deaf Postlethwaite,
and Deaf Postlethwaite as little inclined as Ann Lightfoot—for the
grumblings of the one were echoed in the growlings of the other—to be in
any way mollified by their master’s appeal to their feelings. So
Postlethwaite murmured out that they had made up their minds to go the
next day, without further warning.
Sandboys, shuddering, saw the coming desolation of his home, and for a
moment had serious thoughts of calling in the constable to make them
fulfil their engagements. But, alas, his next remembrance was that the
constable, like the grocer, and the blacksmith, and the cobblers, had
gone up to London to see the Great Exhibition.
The wretched Cursty resigned himself to his fate. But Fate had still
something worse in store for him. No sooner had the servants discharged
themselves, than Mrs. Sandboys unmasked a new grievance, and opened a
full battery upon him, as he sat dismal and desponding, in the blanket,
sipping his gruel in deep despair. She told him, as she handed him the
clean shirt she had been airing, that she would advise him to take great
care of it—that was the last their stock of soap would allow him to
have—it might be for months—and she would advise him to do, as he had
read to her from the newspaper the other day, as the nasty, filthy
Russians did—and grease it all over well, so that he might wear it until
it dropped off his body, for she could tell him he wouldn’t have another
until he went to fetch _that_ Harker from the Great Exhibition. She did
not mind, she told him, so much about the loss of her tea—severe trial
as that was to her, and requiring all her Christian fortitude to
bear—the want of beer was little or no privation to her—it was the
servants—the poor, hardworking servants that she felt for. The dearth of
fresh meat did not affect _her_—it was her dear Elcy’s complexion that
she looked at; she could have gone barefoot all her life herself, but
the idea of her children going about the earth shoeless, realized a
wretchedness that she never could have imagined when she left her
father’s home.
Still this was nothing—wretchedness was nothing—starvation was
nothing—shoelessness was nothing, compared with the want of soap—she
could bear anything but dirt. It was the terror of that had kept her
from going to London, and now she saw that, in spite of all her efforts,
Mr. Sandboys’ obstinacy about his trumpery wickedness would bring upon
her those very horrors which she had made so many sacrifices to avoid.
She did not care about any of his Great Exhibitions, only all she knew
was, that she would rather go through any wickedness than live in the
dirt that she could see he was forcing her into. Stay in Hassness she
would not; and she had made up her mind, as Mr. Sandboys would not leave
it, that she would throw herself on Messrs. Brag and Steal, and trust to
them—for they were her father’s lawyers—to make him provide her with a
separate and comfortable maintenance. Dearly as she once had loved him,
she loved cleanliness more, and it remained for him to say whether they
were to continue any longer together in the same wholesome state in
which they had lived for thirty long years. And having given vent to her
feelings, she seized the bed candlestick and marched indignantly into
Elcy’s room, where she declared her resolution to pass the night.
Sandboys, in the enthusiasm of his excited feelings and the sad prospect
of his threatened widowerhood, would have jumped up and followed her;
but again remembering the paucity of his attire, sank back into his
chair. In a few minutes it struck him that he had been sitting with his
feet in the pail until the water had become as cold as that of the brook
into which he had tumbled, and he began to think that, by remaining in
his present position, he was perhaps adding another cold to the one he
had already caught, in his fatal attempt at theoretical and practical
pig-driving.
For the first time since his wedding-day, Cursty Sandboys was left to
monopolize the amplitude of the matrimonial feather-bed, and no sooner
had he rested his nightcap on his pillow, than there began to pass
before his mind a dismal diorama of all the incidents of the day. As he
looked upon the picture of the destitution, and desolation, and
devastation, and denudation of his home, he half-relented of his stern
resolve. For himself and Mrs. Sandboys he feared not the infection of
the Great Metropolis; but it was the young and trusting Elcy, and the
too-adventurous Jobby—that caused the trepidation of his soul. First he
thought of the sufferings and the privations around him—and then he
asked himself whether he were making his children and his household
suffer these for what was a mere whim on his own part. Was not the
sacrifice he required too much for youthful minds, and was he not once
young himself? The reply of experience was, that he certainly _had_ been
young, but that he never had felt any wish to travel further than ten
miles from his native valley. And as the conflict of affection and
determination went on in his brain, he now felt assured it was all
selfishness on his part to keep his children locked up in abstemious
solitude—and the next moment was declaring that he should be a woman and
worse than a woman, if he were weak enough to allow them whom he loved
best in all the world to be exposed to the vicious allurements of the
Great Metropolis. Now he was all ice—and now the ice was thawing with
the brine of his tears—now he was rock—and now, like Hannibal, he was
cutting a way towards London through his bosom with the vinegar of
repentance.
The first thing that met Mr. Sandboys’ eyes in the morning was the pair
of trousers in which he had driven the pig on the previous day. Again
and again he gazed upon the ruins, for, until that moment, he had no
definite idea as to the tatterdemalion state of his nether garments. The
legs hung in long strips down the chair-back, more like shreds of list
than human pantaloons; and, as he looked at them, he bethought him, for
the first time, that his other pair, which he had just had made of his
own grey, had been sent a fortnight previously to Johnson, the
Loweswater tailor, to be altered, by Mrs. Sandboys, who took a great
pride in her Cursty’s appearance, and found fault with the cut of them,
declaring they were not sufficiently tight at the knees, or wide enough
over the boot, for the last new fashion.
Sandboys felt it was in vain for a man to talk of independence who was
destitute of pantaloons, and fearing even to speak of the subject to his
wife, lest a repetition of the previous night’s scene might be enacted,
sent a private message to his son Jobby, requesting his attendance to a
conference in the bed-room.
Jobby, when informed of the primitive and paradisiacal condition of his
parent, chuckled inwardly as he foresaw the dilemma in which the
disclosure he had to make would place the nether half of the old
gentleman. Accordingly, when Sandboys confidentially solicited him to
put on his father’s shoes, and make the greatest possible haste over to
Johnson for his father’s best trousers, it was with some difficulty that
his son could inform him, with that respect which is due to a parent,
that, on his last fruitless visit to Brackenthwaite, John Coss had told
him he was going to call at Loweswater, on his way to Carlisle, and take
up all the Johnsons, both uncle and nephew, for the mail train to
London.
This was more than poor Sandboys expected, and a heavy blow to him, for
he foresaw that the proprieties of life would compel him to keep between
the sheets, until such time as he could venture to broach the subject of
his denuded and destitute state to his better half. To lie in bed was
his only resource; but to lie in bed was to make him more and more
sensible of the utter destitution in which he was involved. He had
received no newspapers for a fortnight, and of all things he loved his
newspapers the dearest. The loss of them in such a state, at such a
time, he felt more than all. He might, perhaps, have borne the absence
of his pantaloons with all the pride of martyrdom; but to be cut off
from connexion with the outer world of wickedness, in which he took such
extreme interest, was more than human philosophy or mountain stoicism
could bear—for what is solitude without a newspaper! Here was he, three
hundred and one miles from London, in a lonely house, without a single
“daring robbery” to comfort him, or a “diabolical murder” to put life
into him! All the “successful swindling” of the metropolis was going on
without his knowledge; and the excursionists from his native county
were, he felt satisfied, being plundered, one and all, without his
being, as he longed to be. in any way privy to it!
In this situation, thus contemplating, Mr. Sandboys passed the day—a
Zimmerman between the blankets. At last, as the shades of night began to
shut out Melbrake from before his bed-room window, and when Mrs.
Sandboys came to his bedside for the basin which had contained his thin
meal of gruel, as he sat up to receive her he humbly petitioned her,
with a melancholy shake of the tuft on the top of his white cotton
night-cap, to allow him one of the old newspapers and a light, so that
he might relieve his mind by perusing some of the trials at the Central
Criminal Court? if he might be allowed to choose, he would prefer that
_Observer_ and supplement which contained those charming twenty columns
of the last frightful London murder.
But to make the request was to open afresh the vials of Mrs. Sandboys’
wrath; for she gave him plainly to understand that, coal-less as they
were below, Postlethwaite had been obliged to fell some of the trees,
and that the holly was so green that she had been forced to burn every
newspaper in the house in her struggles to make a fire. Indeed, were it
not that they had mustered all hands, and taken turn and turn about at
the bellows, every fifteen minutes, all the day through, the family
would not have been able to have had a mouthful of anything warm to eat;
and now that the last double _Times_ had gone, she had left
Postlethwaite and Ann and Elcy and poor Jobby seated round a fireless
grate, in the circular drawing-room, partaking of oatmeal mixed in cold
water by way of tea.
Bitterly conscious of his deficiency as regarded pantaloons, and feeling
acutely the privation as well as the destruction of his newspapers, the
otherwise benevolent soul of Sandboys reverted for a moment into the
primitive selfishness of savage life; and, seeing no other sorrows but
his own, he angrily glared on Mrs. Sandboys, and burst out, “How
dar’sta, Aggy, burn t’ papers?”
Mrs. Sandboys recoiled! It was the first time she had ever heard her
dear Cursty address her in such a tone. Her woman’s heart fell, and she
whimpered out, as she threw herself on the bed, “I cuddent help it,
Cursty, an if I cud, thar was nae a candle in t’ house for tha to read
by.”
Cursty fell back upon his pillows, and putting his hands over his eyes,
saw vividly pass before his imagination, his house without candle, his
servants without fire, his wife without soap, his boy without shoes, and
himself without breeches!
In that one moment he perceived that it was useless to think of holding
out any longer—London lost its horrors compared with the privations of
Hassness; so gulping down the cup of bitterness, he told his wife he had
made up his mind to be off to the metropolis the next morning.
The words were scarcely out of his mouth, when there again rose up
before his eyes the direful gashes of his inexpressibles—the barefooted
state of his boy! But Mrs. Sandboys soon put an end to all suggested
difficulties, and that evening saw the happy Aggy sitting by the bedside
of her beloved Cursty, and, by the light of a lamp made out of fat bacon
and darning-cotton, sewing away at one of the lacerated legs of the
trousers, with a light heart, and the strongest black thread; while Elcy
was taking the bows off a pair of her mother’s shoes, which, at a family
consultation, it had been arranged would serve to equip Jobby, at least
for the walk to Cockermouth, where he and his father might, perhaps, be
able to provide themselves with necessaries for the voyage to London.
* * * * *
Previous to leaving Hassness the next morning, Mr. Sandboys summoned the
whole of his family together into the dining-room, and addressed them in
a cheerful though solemn manner, saying he regretted to see that, under
their late trials, they had evinced an unphilosophical want of vivacity,
which he considered to be utterly unworthy of the hardy natives of
Cumberland. He wished it, therefore, to be distinctly understood, that
he accompanied them to London upon a single condition only, and that
was—that they one and all made up their minds, come what might, to enjoy
themselves.
How the Sandboys got to Town—the misadventures that happened to them on
the road—the difficulties that the family experienced in obtaining
shelter when they reached the metropolis—how they were glad to accept of
any wretched hole to lay their heads in for the night; and when they
_did_ obtain a bed, the trouble that Mr. and Mrs. Sandboys found in
their endeavours to get their two selves fairly into it—the dire
calamity that befel them while reposing in it, and how excessively hard
they found it under these, and many other circumstances, to carry out
the principle of enjoying themselves,—all this, and much more, remains
to be told in the succeeding chapters of this eventful history.
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