THE first paroxysm of rage being over, Sir Moses remounted his
dog-cart, and drove rapidly off, seeming to take pleasure in
making his boy-groom (who was at the mare’s head) run after it as
long as he could.
“What’s it Baronet off?” exclaimed Mr. Gallon, staring with
astonishment at the fast-receding vehicle; “what’s it, Baronet
off?” repeated he, thinking he would have to go to Pangburn Park
for his money.
“O dear Thir Mothes is gone!” lisped pretty Miss Mechlinton, who
wanted to have a look at our hero, Mr. Pringle, who she heard was
frightfully handsome, and alarmingly rich. And the ladies, who
had been too much occupied with the sudden rush of excited people
to notice Sir Moses’s movements, wondered what had happened that
he didn’t come to give his tongue an airing among them as usual.
One said he had got the tooth-ache; another, the ear-ache; a
third, that he had got something in his eye; while a satirical
gentleman said it looked more like a B. in his bonnet.
“Ony hoo,” however, as Mr. Gallon would say, Sir Moses was
presently out of the field and on to the hard turnpike again.
We need scarcely say that Mr. Pringle’s ride home with him was
not of a very agreeable character: indeed, the Baronet had seldom
been seen to be so put out of his way, and the mare came in for
frequent salutations with the whip—latitudinally, longitudinally,
and horizontally, over the head and ears, accompanied by cutting
commentaries on Flintoff’s utter uselessness and inability to do
anything but drink.
He “never saw such a man—domd if ever he did,” and he whipped the
mare again in confirmation of the opinion.
Nor did matters mend on arriving at home; for here Mr. Mordecai
Nathan met him in the entrance hall, with a very doleful face, to
announce that Henerey Brown & Co., who had long been coddling up
their horses, had that morning succeeded in sloping with them and
their stock to Halterley Fair, and selling them in open market,
leaving a note hanging to the key in the house-door, saying that
they had gone to Horseterhaylia where Sir Moses needn’t trouble
to follow them.
“Ond dom it!” shrieked the Baronet, jumping up in the air like a
stricken deer; “ond dom it! I’m robbed! I’m robbed! I’m ruined!
I’m ruined!” and tottering to an arm-chair, he sank, overpowered
with the blow. Henerey Brown & Co. had indeed been too many for
him. After a long course of retrograding husbandry, they seemed
all at once to have turned over a new leaf, if not in the tillage
way, at all events in that still better way for the land, the
cattle line,—store stock, with some symptoms of beef on their
bones, and sheep with whole fleeces, going on all-fours
depastured the fields, making Mordecai Nathan think it was all
the fruits of his superior management. Alaek a-day! They belonged
to a friend of Lawyer Hindmarch’s, who thought Henerey Brown &
Co. might as well eat all off the land ere they left. And so they
ate it as bare as a board.
“Ond dom it, how came you to let them escape?” now demanded the
Baronet, wringing his hands in despair; “ond dom it, how came you
to let them escape?” continued he, throwing himself back in the
chair.
“Why really, Sir Moses, I was perfectly deceived; I thought they
were beginning to do better, for though they were back with their
ploughing, they seemed to be turning their attention to stock,
and I was in hopes that in time they would pull round.”
“Pull round!” ejaculated the Baronet; “pull round! They’ll
flatten me I know with their pulling;” and thereupon he kicked
out both legs before him as if he was done with them altogether.
His seat being in the line of the door, a rude draught now caught
his shoulder, which making him think it was no use sitting there
to take cold and the rheumatism, he suddenly bounced up, and
telling Nathan to stay where he was, he ran up stairs, and
quickly changed his fine satiney, velvetey, holiday garments, for
a suit of dingy old tweeds, that looked desperately in want of
the washing-tub. Then surmounting the whole with a drab
wide-awake, he clutched a knotty dog-whip, and set off on foot
with his agent to the scene of disaster, rehearsing the licking
he would give Henerey with the whip if he caught him, as he went.
Away he strode, as if he was walking a match, down Dolly’s Close,
over the stile, into Farmer Hayford’s fields, and away by the
back of the lodges, through Orwell Plantation and Lowestoff End,
into the Rushworth and Mayland Road.
Doblington farm-house then stood on the rising ground before him.
It was indeed a wretched, dilapidated, woe-begone-looking place;
bad enough when enlivened with the presence of cattle and the
other concomitants of a farm; but now, with only a poor white
pigeon, that Henerey Brown & Co., as if in bitter irony, had left
behind them, it looked the very picture of misery and
poverty-stricken desolation.
It was red-tiled and had been rough-cast, but the casting was
fast coming off, leaving fine map-like tracings of green damp on
the walls,—a sort of map of Italy on one side of the door, a map
of Africa on the other, one of Horseterhaylia about the centre,
with a perfect battery of old hats bristling in the broken panes
of the windows. Nor was this all; for, by way of saving coals,
Henerey & Humphrey had consumed all the available wood about the
place—stable-fittings, cow-house-fittings, pig-sty-fittings, even
part of the staircase—and acting under the able advice of Lawyer
Hindmarch, had carried away the pot and oven from the kitchen,
and all the grates from the fire-places, under pretence of having
bought them of the outgoing tenant when they entered,—a fact that
the lawyer said “would be difficult to disprove.” If it had not
been that Henerey Brown & Co. had been sitting rent-free, and
that the dilapidated state of the premises formed an excellent
subject of attack for parrying payment when rent came to be
demanded, it would be difficult to imagine people living in a
house where they had to wheel their beds about to get to the
least drop-exposed quarter, and where the ceilings bagged down
from the rafters like old-fashioned window-hangings. People,
however, can put up with a great deal when it saves their own
pockets. Master and man having surveyed the exterior then
entered.
“Well,” said Sir Moses, looking round on the scene of desolation,
“they’ve made a clean sweep at all events.”
“They have that,” assented Mr. Mordecai Nathan.
“I wonder it didn’t strike you, when you caught them selling
their straw off at night, that they would be doing something of
this sort,” observed Sir Moses.
“Why, I thought it rather strange,” replied Mr. Nathan; “only
they assured me that for every load of straw they sold, they
brought back double the value in guano, or I certainly should
have been more on the alert.”
“Guano be hanged!” rejoined the Baronet, trying to open the
kitchen window, to let some fresh air into the foul apartment;
“guano be hanged! one ton of guano makes itself into twenty ton
with the aid of Kentish gravel. No better trade than spurious
manure-manufacturing; almost as good as cabbage-cigar making.
Besides,” continued he, “the straw goes off to a certainty,
whereas there’s no certainty about the guano coming back instead
of it. Oh, dom it, man,” continued he, knocking some of the old
hats out of the broken panes, after a fruitless effort to open
the window, “I’d have walked the bailiffs into the beggars if I
could have foreseen this.”
“So would I, Sir Moses,” replied Mr. Nathan; “only who could we
get to come in their place?”
That observation of Mr. Mordecai Nathan comprises a great deal,
and accounts for much apparent good landlordism, which lets a bad
tenant go on from year to year with the occasional payment of a
driblet of rent, instead of ejecting him; the real fact being
that the landlord knows there is no one to get to come in his
place—no better one at least—and that fact constitutes one of the
principal difficulties of land-owning. If a landlord is not
prepared to take an out-of-order farm into his own hands, he must
either put up with an incompetent non-paying tenant, or run the
risk of getting a worse one from the general body of outlying
incompetence. A farm will always let for something.
There is a regular rolling stock of bad farmers in every country,
who pass from district to district, exercising their ingenuity in
extracting whatever little good their predecessors have left in
the land. These men are the steady, determined enemies to grass.
Their great delight is to get leave to plough out an old
pasture-field under pretence of laying it down better. There
won’t be a grass field on a farm but what they will take some
exception to, and ask leave to have “out” as they call it. Then
if they get leave, they take care never to have a good take of
seeds, and so plough on and plough on, promising to lay it down
better after each fresh attempt, just as a thimble-rigger urges
his dupe to go on and go on, and try his luck once more, until
land and dupe are both fairly exhausted. The tenant then marches,
and the thimble-rigger decamps, each in search of fresh fields
and flats new.
Considering that all writers on agriculture agree that grass land
pays double, if not treble, what arable land does, and that one
is so much more beautiful to the eye than the other, to say
nothing of pleasanter to ride over, we often wonder that
landlords have not turned their attention more to the increase
and encouragement of grass land on their estates than they have
done.
To be sure they have always had the difficulty to contend with we
have named, viz., a constant hankering on the part of even some
good tenants to plough it out. A poor grass-field, like Gay’s
hare, seems to have no friends. Each man proposes to improve it
by ploughing it out, forgetful of the fact, that it may also be
improved by manuring the surface. The quantity of arable land on
a farm is what puts landlords so much in the power of bad
farmers. If farms consisted of three parts grass and one part
plough, instead of three parts plough and one part grass, no
landlord need ever put up with an indifferent, incompetent
tenant; for the grass would carry him through, and he could
either let the farm off, field by field, to butchers and
graziers, or pasture it himself, or hay it if he liked. Nothing
pays better than hay. A very small capital would then suffice for
the arable land; and there being, as we said before, a rolling
stock of scratching land-starvers always on the look-out for
out-of-order farms, so every landowner should have a rolling
stock of horses and farm-implements ready to turn upon any one
that is not getting justice done it. There is no fear of
gentlemen being overloaded with land; for the old saying, “It’s a
good thing to follow the laird,” will always insure plenty of
applicants for any farm a landlord is leaving—supposing, of
course, that he has been doing it justice himself, which we must
say landlords always do; the first result we see of a gentleman
farming being the increase of the size of his stock-yard, and
this oftentimes in the face of a diminished acreage under the
plough.
Then see what a saving there is in grass-farming compared to
tillage husbandry: no ploughs, no harrows, no horses, no lazy
leg-dragging clowns, who require constant watching; the cattle
will feed whether master is at home or polishing St. James’s
Street in paper boots and a tight bearing-rein.
Again, the independence of the grass-farmer is so great. When the
wind howls and the rain beats, and the torrents roar, and John
Flail lies quaking in bed, fearing for his corn, then old Tom
Nebuchadnezzar turns quietly over on his side like the Irish
jontleman who, when told the house was on fire, replied, “Arrah,
by Jasus, I’m only a lodger!” and says, “Ord rot it, let it rain;
it’ll do me no harm! I’m only a grass-grower!”
But we are leaving Sir Moses in the midst of his desolation, with
nothing but the chilly fog of a winter’s evening and his own
bright thoughts to console him.
“And dom it, I’m off,” exclaimed he, fairly overcome with the
impurity of the place; and hurrying out, he ran away towards
home, leaving Mr. Mordecai Nathan to lock the empty house up, or
not, just as he liked.
And to Pangburn Park let us now follow the Baronet, and see what
our friend Billy is about.