"It was—I believe—I—fancy—some people on the outskirts of the meeting—people from Warwick I should imagine."
"Bah! can't you speak out like a man, instead of beating about the bush like a fool? Who began the disturbance?" The old Captain was clearly getting excited.
"The—the farmers and—but—" blurted out Codling.
"Ah! the farmers was it?" interrupted Hawthorn, "and would you have had these lads stand still like asses to be thwacked? Do you mean to come out here anddeliberately blame my tenants for having spirit enough left to resent insult and abuse? A nice parson you are—a fine preacher of peace. Suppose it had been the other way, and the farmers had been taunted and stoned by the labourers until they turned and thrashed them. What would you have said then? No doubt that these wretches deserved their fate. I hate all this snivelling cant about the obligation of the poor to submit to whatever is put upon them."
Hawthorn spoke fast and bitterly, and, as he ended, his audience broke into ringing cheers much prolonged.
Codling stood dumb, and looked so cowed and sheepish that Slocome tried a diversion.
"Captain Hawthorn—I believe—and good people," he began, but his voice was drowned amid cries of "Silence—hold your tongue; we want to hear the Captain."
"I have a little more to say, my boys," Hawthorn answered. "My chief object in coming here, and in asking the Vicar to come here, was to tell you that I have decided to assign to you, the men of my own village, the twenty acre field just by on Warwick road, to be made into allotment gardens. I admire"—but he got no further. Shout upon shout, the men cheered, and the women wept and laughed by turns, as if the speaker had promised them all fortunes. The announcement was so unexpected, and the way it was made went so about the hearts of these poor villagers, that they could have hugged the old Captain to death for joy had he let himself within their reach. As it was, they crowdedround the waggon to shake hands with him, hustling the Vicar and his friend out of the way, and it was fully five minutes before order could be restored. During the hubbub the Vicar and Mr. Slocome managed to slink away. What Codling may have thought about his own conduct on that evening no one can say, but he evidently resented Hawthorn's freedom of speech most bitterly. He was disgusted also that the people should have got their allotments so obviously without his help, and from this time forth he may be said to have abjured philanthropy. Henceforth he found it safer and much more pleasant to confine his attention to Church ritual and the worship of feudalism.
The labourers never missed the Vicar in their delight over Hawthorn's announcement. They wanted to escort him home in a body, but he would not hear of it. He peremptorily ordered them to go home to bed, and departed with his servant and his dog. A few of the younger men followed him to the end of the village, then sending a parting cheer after him quickly dispersed. Thus ended the great Ashbrook allotment meeting. It was a nine days' wonder in the neighbourhood, and the oddities of Hawthorn were held to be dangerous by the squires, while farmers cursed him for his liberality. But these things did not prevent the labourers from obtaining their allotments, and they were thereby rendered perhaps a degree less hungry for a time.
Nothing serious came directly of the Ashbrook fight. There was a talk of bringing certain labourers before the justices, and the Pembertons in particular uttered loud threats against Tom Wanless, young Satchwell, the blacksmith, and one or two others; but old Hawthorn let it be widely known that if any steps were taken to prosecute the labourers, he would not only provide means for their defence, but enable them also to raise counter actions, in support of which he would compel the Vicar to enter the witness-box. That did not suit the farmers or their abettors, still less Codling, so after a little noisy squabbling the matter dropped.
Henceforth, however, the feud, if such it may be called, between the Pembertons and Wanless was renewed, and became on their part a sleepless desire for petty vengeances. They never missed the smallest opportunity of making him feel their ill-will. Thomas had in other ways enough to bear with in those days, helped though he was by his freehold cottage and allotment. His intelligence told against him with most of the farmers, making them regard him with hatred and suspicion. So he got noopportunity of bettering himself, was, indeed, hardly able to keep his head above water by the severest labour. Many a time did he see other and less skilled workmen preferred before him, and often in harvest had he to work as one of a gang of reapers under another contractor, instead of himself taking the lead. This, by and by, caused him to try and find work at greater distances from home, and he was occasionally away for months at a time wood-cutting, ditch-cutting, toiling early and late for what pittance he could pick up, while his wife struggled at home to make ends meet in spite of her increasing family. By the time Thomas was 35 years old, she had borne him eight children, of whom seven were alive, and it was almost more than mortal could do to bring these up decently on 9s. or 10s. a-week. How his neighbours, who had rent to pay, managed, was more than Thomas could divine, unless they quietly stole what was not given them; as, indeed, most of them did. Many also were so demoralised as to look upon poor relief as a perquisite which they thought it no shame to accept, and even demand, on all occasions. Nearly all poached game, when they had a chance, and boasted of it to each other. In regard to game there was, in fact, no consciousness of wrong-doing in the mind of any labourer, and Thomas himself thought nothing of killing a rabbit or leveret when he had the chance; the only anxiety was not to be caught doing it. There was a clear distinction in his mind between slaying wild animals protected by selfish and abominable laws, and stealing vegetables, fowls, stray eggs, or fruit, which many of his comrades made apractice of doing, pleading in their defence that man must live.
Thomas Wanless had a soul above petty thieving of this kind. Not only was he naturally high-spirited and jealous of a good conscience, but his mind had become considerably expanded by diligent cultivation. He did not again forget his reading, and though his books were few, he still contrived to read enough on odd Sundays in summer, and in the winter evenings, to stimulate his naturally strong thinking powers. His friends, the blacksmith and the parish clerk, were also often in his company, and the three discussed matters of Church and State in the freest possible style over their jugs of thin ale. Poor Brown, the parish clerk and schoolmaster, had not improved his prospects by settling in Ashbrook, for the vicar had long ceased to interest himself in the education of the poor, and the school emoluments had become meagre enough. But Brown had married, and so was, in a measure, rooted to the spot, not knowing where to better himself.
He eked out his parish clerkship with odd accountant jobs for surrounding farmers, and occasionally picked up a crown or two by acting as clerk at country auctions, and his greatest earthly blessing was a contested parliamentary election. Yet life was hard for him withal, and his Radicalism naturally was bitter, for adversity is the best nursery of democratic ideas. It is only the noblest natures that can enjoy prosperity, and yet be just and considerate towards all men. Too often the man who when poor was a blatant Radical becomes a hollowtin kettle sort of creature when he has struggled up from the earth where his Radicalism took birth. I say not that Brown was of this sort, but undeniably poverty and disappointment put an edge on his wit when he dealt with the inequalities of life, and under his leadership Thomas Wanless stood in no danger of becoming an unquestioning pauper. The three friends solved social problems in a style that would have amazed their superiors had they known; nay, that they would have even startled some of the limp and dilettante friends of the people who, in these days, haunt London clubs, and dilate with wondrous volubility on social reform. Thomas's Radicalism, however, never interfered with his work, for his family was more to him than the ills of the State. He viewed these wrongs, perhaps, from too narrow a standpoint for him to be a great social reformer. He felt for his little ones, and for his once blooming, patient wife—now grown brown, gaunt, and hollow-eyed from incessant care, toil, and privation—and the disjointed order of society was to him a personal wrong. His life was, indeed, cheerless; and after his father died and his brother had been killed by a fall from a rick, he often felt lonely and sullen at the heart, working against his fate as a prisoner might in chains. For him this life had no hope, no prospect of rest but the grave.
Struggling bravely, though bitter at the heart, Thomas dragged his family through the terrible years that followed the passing of the Reform Bill—years during which his wife and children were almost as familiar with want as with the light of the sun. How they survived he couldhardly tell. "My remembrance of that time," he one day said to me, "is but a kind of confused dream. I ceased to think or feel. I just worked where and when I could; and I swallowed my crust like a dumb beast. But now I thank God that I had health, though then to commit murder would at times to me have seemed as nothing."
In that time Thomas became a strong Chartist, and was a leader among his fellows; and, feeling as he did, it says much for his force of character that there were no outbreaks by the Ashbrook villagers such as occurred in many parts of Warwickshire at that time. His opinions, however, were well known, and he was called a rogue freely enough by his enemies the farmers. More than once he might have suffered unjust imprisonment for his freedom of speech at village gatherings and elsewhere, had not old Squire Hawthorn stood his friend. Ever since Ashbrook fight, that strange old man had taken a special interest in Thomas. It only extended, however, to occasional efforts to keep him out of the grip of the justices, and could hardly perhaps have gone further, for Thomas was proud; and, besides, he was a labourer, and in that lowly lot he was predestined by the laws of the landed oligarchy to remain. Over the great gulf fixed by that mighty trades union of the Take-alls he could never pass.
So passed the years of my friend's early manhood. He was familiar with care; poverty was his abiding portion. A young family gathered round his knee; which he tried to bring up in less ignorance than hadbeen his early lot, but whom he could not always keep less hungry. Thomas had many times difficulty in providing his household with a sufficiency of coarse dry bread. Insufficiently nourished his children were weakly and stunted; little able to wrestle with disease. His two eldest boys were sent to work for good at the age of ten; and the younger of the two died through exposure and hunger before he was twelve. The girls were kept longer at home, hard though the fight for life was; but the third boy (Thomas) was taken on at Squire Hawthorn's own farm, at 2s. per week, when he was little over nine. That same year, Thomas himself had had a fine spell of harvesting; and his wife, having no new baby to provide for, had saved a few shillings by selling vegetables from the allotment garden, to people in Warwick town, so that the winter was faced by the couple in better heart than they had known almost since the day they were married. A pound or two in hand after meeting the bills that the harvest money had to pay! Surely greater bliss no man could know. The thought of such riches made Thomas declare that he might yet escape the workhouse, as, thank God, his father had done. Already, though not forty years old, the shadow of that accursed refuge of the English poor had begun to loom over Thomas's future, grim and horrible as the gate of Hell. As he thought, in his hours of bitterness, of whither his endless toil was carrying him, of the sole "good" that the Take-alls left to him and such as him, he set his teeth and cursed his country. Nor would he believe that for this he had been born. His soul wasbitter within him, and, young as he yet was, hard work and harder fare were telling on his stalwart frame.
But this autumn had brought him a gleam of hope; and the stirring events of the time helped to strengthen that hope. All things were changing. The great towns had been roused into political activity by the Reform Bill, and railways were fast revolutionising the habits of the people the land through, as well as opening up new fields of labour. At last, then, and even in sleepy, wealth worshipping, hide-bound England, democracy might be considered born. Thomas was sanguine that in the coming struggles the people would win, and, like all sanguine believers in the future good, his belief expected instant fulfilment. The apostles themselves lived in the belief that the end of the world was at hand. Might not the way-worn and heart-weary agricultural labourer therefore hope? Thomas Wanless, at least, did so. The world was changing for others; for him and his also better times might be at hand. Hitherto, alas, the changes had been mostly to his hurt. Railway-making itself had done his class harm rather than good, for the new iron roads linked the country more and more closely to the great centres of industry. Prices of all kinds of agricultural produce went higher and higher, but without bringing a corresponding increase in the labourer's pay. The landowner grabbed all he could of the augmented gains, and what he left the farmer took. For the hind was there not still the workhouse? Yet the demand for labour was increasing fast, and not all the hungry kerns of Ireland seemed able to meet that demand. For once Thomasand his wife had enjoyed a good year. Was not Leamington Priors growing a big town moreover, and going to have a college of its own to outshine Rugby itself? Surely Ashbrook would benefit from the nearness of so much wealth as this implied. The grounds for this hope were many and obvious. Thomas might yet rent his own little farm, and be independent. His ambition ran no higher, yet the indulgence of it proved him to be a short-sighted fool.
At this time Thomas was an odd or day labourer, taking contract jobs on his own account when he could get them, and working for a daily wage when these failed. This winter found him at work grubbing up old hedges, and helping to lay out anew some land on a farm of Lord Duckford's beyond Radbury. He had to walk about four miles each way daily to and from his work, but as the days were short he lost no time, and the company of a fellow villager engaged with him at the same job made the trudge lighter. And the hopes that lay around his heart helped him more than aught else, as they always help us poor will-o'-the-wisp-led mortals in this dark world.
Alas for these hopes! Thomas Wanless had not been a month at his new work when an epidemic of scarlet fever broke out at Ashbrook, and amongst the first to catch the disease was his youngest child, a girl of two years. Ere ten days had elapsed five out of his seven surviving children were down with the treacherous disease. His eldest boy and girl had had it years before, but the boy was sent home from the farm where he worked forfear of spreading contagion, and the girl was little more than nine years old, so that she could not do much to help the overworked mother.
Crowded together in the long low-roofed attic of the cottage, three of the five lay helpless and wailing for many days. After the first week the other two whose attack had been slight got out of bed, but were kept in the same room to avoid cold. The food of all was poor, the medical attendance miserable and infrequent. Thomas's heart was nearly broken. All his hopes vanished, and the old bitterness settled down on his spirit. The rage of helplessness often swept over him as he looked at his tired and harassed wife, or thought of her left alone, day in and out, with those sick children. The little savings would mostly be needed for the doctor's bill; there was only the 10s. a-week that Thomas happily still earned to stand between the whole family and want. Can anyone wonder that Thomas grew moody, and glowered at the world to which he owed so little?
One evening, in the middle of the third week of their affliction, as he and neighbour Robins were trudging home together through the perplexing obscurity of a grey November fog, the latter said—
"Couldn't we get a rabbit or two, Tummas? They'd make a nice pot for the young ones, poor things; better nor barley gruel, any way."
"I don't mind," said Thomas, in an indifferent tone. "But where can we come at 'em?"
"Oh, there's a warren up in Squire Greenaway's fir coppice to the left here, just off the Banbury road. Wecan beat it in five minutes. Come on," he added, seizing Thomas's arm.
"All right, let's have some o' the wermin," his friend answered, and presently they turned off the road, making for the coppice.
"You keep up by the fence here, and you'll strike the edge of the wood in no time," said Robins. "The burrows lie mostly along to the right. Crouch down by the holes and be ready. I'll walk round the field and drive the bunnies in. There's sure to be lots feedin' to-night in old Claypole's turmuts."
Thomas obeyed, and the two at once lost sight of each other. Robins, it is to be feared, had often helped himself to a rabbit before now, here and elsewhere, but by some chance Thomas had never yet been a regular poacher. He could not say why, for certainly he had no respect for the game laws. Such, however, was the fact, and he said a queer kind of feeling came over him when he found himself alone, and realised the errand he was upon. But his mind was in tone to be tempted now, and he never thought of turning back. There was, indeed, little time to think of it, for he was among the rabbit-holes in a minute, and choosing a handy bush where the holes were thick he knelt down, grasped his stick and waited. Presently he heard a low whistle from the field below, but quite near, and almost as it reached his ears rabbits by the dozen came hopping up cautiously, and with frequent pauses of watchfulness. The foremost caught sight of Thomas and scudded to the left, whither the whole troop might have followed had not Robins at that instantrushed up and sent a batch of the scared creatures right amongst Thomas's feet. Ere they could get under ground he managed to knock over three, and Robins himself maimed but did not succeed in catching a fourth. Two of the three knocked over were not quite dead, but Robins at once finished them, and as he did so, said:—
"Look here Tummas, you takes the two big uns. You're more in need o' 'em than me," and as he would take no denial the spoil was so divided.
Thomas thanked his friend, and stowing the rabbits inside their coats as best they could, the two carefully made their way out of the coppice, and again took the road for home.
By this time it was very dark, and the fog thicker than ever, so that they had never a thought of danger. Yet they had not been unobserved. Tom Pemberton, as ill-luck would have it, had been passing the coppice while the two labourers were after the rabbits, and had either heard their voices or the whistling, made more audible by the fog. Suspecting that poachers were at work, and always eager to do his fellow man an ill turn, Pemberton stopped his walk, and stole along the edge of the field till he reached the gate, where he crouched for his prey. In a few minutes the voices of the approaching labourers reached his ears, and being a coward he crawled along the ground, and lay down in the frozen ditch lest he should be seen, but still kept well within earshot. To his intense satisfaction he recognised one at least of the men by his voice, as they passed him, unconscious of his presence. Robins he could not be sure of, but he had only too good cause torecollect the voice of Wanless. The two were talking of the pleasure their families would have in eating stewed rabbit, and doubtless Pemberton chuckled to himself as he heard. But he had the prudence to keep quite still until the labourers got well beyond hearing. Then he arose and went on his mission of evil. The unsuspecting labourers trudged home in peace. Thomas with even a flicker of gladness at his heart, a flicker that deepened to a glow of thankfulness, when he reached his cottage and learned that the doctor had pronounced the child who had suffered most out of danger. She was the youngest but one, a little girl of four. Before her illness she had been a fair-haired, delicate-looking, but healthy child, with bright, engaging ways, and a sweet merry voice, a great favourite of her father's. Now she was thin and worn, and her lips had become dry and cracked with the fire that had burned and burned in her little body, till all its flesh was consumed. Night after night Thomas had come home, and, changing his wet clothes, had, after a hasty supper, gone up beside his little ones to watch and tend them in the early night, while the mother tried to snatch an hour or two's sleep. Through these weary weeks nothing had wrung his heart so keenly as the sore battle for life made by wee Sally. Hour after hour her little transparent feverish hands would clutch his nervously, as she lay panting in his arms, or wander pitifully about his weather-worn face, her burning touch causing him to shiver to the very marrow of his bones.
"I'se so ill, daddy; I'se so ill," she would keep moaning, and sometimes she would start screaming from an uneasyslumber that gave no rest. Then she grew too ill to speak, and lay gasping and delirious in the close, ill-ventilated attic beside her two sisters, who were themselves part of the time too ill to raise their heads. Thomas thought that death had come for his little girl the night before he brought the rabbits home, and the nearer death seemed to come the more agonising grew the pain at his heart. His wife and he together had watched by Sally's cot till towards morning, fearing that each moment she would choke. But about half-past two the breath began to be more free; she swallowed a little weak tea, and gradually fell into the quietest sleep she had had for more than ten days.
When Thomas left for his day's work she was asleep still, and he had held the hope that she would yet get better to his heart all day. So mixed are the motives that sway men that this very hope made him the more ready to go after the rabbits. The savoury broth might help his little ones—and Sally.
So they were glad that night in the little Ashbrook Cottage. Sally had slept till daylight, and woke quiet, cooler-skinned and hungry. The doctor said she would live yet. Thomas went up as usual beside his little ones, and told them about the rabbits that Robins and he had caught, making them laugh at the thought of to-morrow's treat. He had not waited for supper, and his wife brought it up stairs, spreading it out at the foot of the bed where "baby" and "bludder" Jack lay, and then the whole family enjoyed the luxury of a cup of tea in honour of Sally's improvement. How little the labourer suspectedthen that the hand of vengeance was already stretched forth to blast him and his joys, it might be, for ever. Yet so it was, and thus does life ever mock us, especially if we be poor. And had not Thomas sinned against the English Baal. The sacred laws of property had been violated by him; he had entered its holy of holies—a game preserve—and must bear the penalty.
The thought did not quite thus shape itself in Tom Pemberton's mind as he crept from his lair and made off as fast as the thick gloom would permit him, to Squire Greenaway's gamekeeper's cottage; but his heart exulted at the thought of the vengeance it was now in his power to wreak. That very night he hoped to see the hated Wanless locked up. In this hope, however, he was disappointed. The gamekeeper was not at home, nor could his wife say exactly where he was. Probably she knew well enough; and certain gamedealers in Leamington also were likely to know, for, like most of his class, this fellow was only a licensed poacher; but Pemberton had to be content with his answer. He told the keeper's wife that he wanted some poachers apprehended, and that he would return to-morrow.
Sure enough he came, and came early, but the keeper was again out, setting his gins probably, and had left word that he would not be back till dinner-time. Ultimately, Pemberton met his man, and the two decided to go and seize Wanless at night in his own cottage. Accordingly, that same evening as Thomas and his family were enjoying their supper together in the attic, they were disturbed by a rude thumping at the doorand before Thomas himself could get down to see who was there, the latch was lifted, and in walked Tom Pemberton with the gamekeeper at his heels. The latter was a squat, ill-favoured, heavy man, with small piercing eyes that were never at rest. He sniffed noisily as he entered, and gave vent to a gleeful chuckle as he caught sight of Wanless. Dull Pemberton had grown fat and bloated-looking since the days of the allotment agitation, but his usually stolid, sodden-looking features, were to-night almost animated by the leer of triumph which had displaced the customary sullen vacuity. Yet he was not at his ease; and when Thomas, divining the men's purpose, drew himself up, and holding up his rushlight the better to see the faces of his visitors, flashed a look of scornful defiance at the farmer, that worthy drew back involuntarily.
But the keeper had no feelings, and at once struck in with—
"Sorry to hinterrup' yer feast, my man; but we want ye, d'ye see. God! what a prime smell! Kerruberatin' evidence, eh, farmer? Ye've been poachin', Wanless, that's evident; an' the Squire'll be glad to speak wi' ye about it. Ha! ha!"
For a moment Thomas felt disposed to fight. A thrill of fury swept through him, and he wished he could tear keeper and farmer in pieces with his hands. But that soon passed, and he stood dumbfounded. Hearing the strange voices, his wife stole down the stair, followed by the three children who were able to be about the house, and two of these latter, catching a vague fear of danger,began to cry. Young Tom did not weep, but stole softly up to his father's side. But a minute before all had been happiness, such happiness as a family of miserable groundlings might dare to feel, and now——
Bah! Why give a thought to such wretches. They can have no feelings like my lord and the squire, or his scented and sanctified parsonship. And yet the cold night wind made these sick children shiver as you or I might; and the stricken wife, who had caught the purport of the keeper's speech, was just as ready to faint with grief and terror, as if she had had your feelings or mine. Her first act was to protect the children from harm by trying to shut the door; but Pemberton, with a growl, pushed her back, and she then gathered them in her arms, and sat down on an old box by the fire, weeping silently.
Still Thomas stood, silent but not cowed, and the keeper's wrath began to blaze up.
"Come along, man," he growled, "none of yer hobstinincy, now. We don't want no scenes here; none o' yer blubberin' wife and family kick-ups. Come along."
Then Pemberton plucked up heart to laugh. With a mocking hee! hee! hee! he said—
"We've got you now, Wanless, and no mistake, you d——d old blackguard, an' we'll tame that devilish spirit of yours afore we're done wi' ye. Roast me if we don't."
His voice roused the spirit of Wanless once more. Clenching his hands he stepped forward, moving the keeper aside, and putting his fist in Pemberton's face,said, in a voice that quivered with concentrated passion—
"Hold your tongue, you black-hearted scoundrel, and leave my house this instant, or I'll throw you out at the door. What right have you to enter my door? Be off!"
Pemberton shrank back and looked as if he thought it might be best for him to obey; but the keeper grasped Thomas by the collar from behind and swung him round, at the same time saying—
"Come, come, none o' this nonsense now, Wanless. I'll have no fightin' here, or, by God, if you do I'll transport you, sure's my name's Crabb. You must go with us quietly."
At the threat of transporting him, Thomas's wife uttered a shrill cry of horror, and Thomas himself grew pale, but he was now too much stirred to yield at once. Instead, he shook off the keeper's hand; and demanded fiercely what right he had to arrest him.
The keeper laughed mockingly.
"Well now, that is a good un'. Why, damme, you've been poaching."
"How do you know that? And what is it to you if I have?"
"How do I know? Why, bless my life, I can smell it, you fool. But I beant here to hargify the p'int. I harrest ye on a criminal charge, Wanless, that's all; and I've brought the bracelets, my boy. Just the correct horneyments for chaps like you, he, he," croaked the keeper, with malign glee.
"But where's your warrant?" urged Thomas. "You have no right to enter a man's own house in this way, andhaul him wherever you like when it suits you to put out your spites on him. Poachers, faith; who's a poacher, I'd like to know, if you ain't? Leave my house, both of you, or, by God, I'll rouse the village. Tom, Tom," he added, turning to his son, who had again crept to his side, "go and find Sutchwell, and Pease, and——"
"Hold hard there, you —— fool," roared the keeper. "Curse you, d'ye suppose we came here to stand your insolence."
Pemberton closed the door and put his back to it.
"Look ye here, my fine haristocrat," continued the keeper in the boundless wrath of fear, "look ye here, if you don't go quietly, devil take me if I don't get ye a trip to Botany Bay for this job. I'm a sworn constable, and I've got the justices' warrant, surely that's 'nuff for thieves like you. Come, farmer Pemberton," he added more quietly, "help me to hornament this gent," and in a very brief space the two mastered and handcuffed the labourer.
He, indeed, made little resistance, for he began to see that he was at the mercy of these scoundrels. His wife clung to him, but they tore her roughly away. The children wailed in chorus, and "bludder Jack" crept downstairs in his thin nightgown to see what was causing the hubbub, howling like the rest without knowing why. But it was soon all over. Thomas barely got time to kiss his wife, and to whisper to her to tell Hawthorn, ere he was out of the cottage and away with his captors. All down the little village street the shrieks of his family rung in his ears, and his heart within him was like to burst with grief, humiliation, and impotent wrath.
That night he was formally committed by Squire Greenaway himself to be tried for poaching, before the justices at Leamington Priors, on Tuesday next. This was Friday.
In due course Thomas Wanless appeared before the "Justices"—God save them! and, after a very brief trial, was "let off," as one phrased it, with six months' hard labour in Warwick Jail. The only evidence against him was that of Tom Pemberton, but he made no attempt to deny the charge, and as the squires already considered him a "dangerous" fellow, they thought their sentence a model of clemency. So did Pemberton and Keeper Crabb. His judges were Wiseman, Greenaway, the man whose vermin he had helped to thin by just three rabbits, Parson Codling, of Ashbrook, and a bibulous old creature who lived in Leamington Priors, a retired Birmingham merchant, who had been made J.P. for his subservience to the Tories. Greenaway was violent, and rather disposed to give an "exemplary" sentence; Wiseman was contemptuously indifferent, as became a big acred man and the husband of a woman with a handle to her name; and Parson Codling was unctuously severe.
An attempt was made to get Wanless to tell the name of his co-offender, but that he refused, so he was told that his obstinacy had prevented a more lenient sentence, which was false. But something is due to appearances at times, and even from such divine personages as justices of the peace. So careful was the "bench" of proprieties on this occasion, that Codling, on a hint from the chairman, gave Wanless the benefit of a short exhortationbefore consigning him to the salutary and eminently Christian discipline of the jailer. In the course of this homily, Codling took occasion to observe that he had once hoped better things of the prisoner, but had long ago been forced to give him up. "With grief and sorrow," said the parson, "I have again and again watched his obduracy, and his tendency to consort with agitators, or worse. His fate will, I trust, be a warning to others."
This Parson Codling you will perceive had become tame. Once on a time he had been almost given over to agitation himself; but that danger soon passed, and he was now a proper ornament to and supporter of the British hierarchy. Its morals were his morals. He knew no god but the god of the landed gentry. In his youth the functions of the priestly office had been misunderstood by him; but he had married soon after we last met him a gentlewoman of Worcestershire with £2,000 a year, and that cured him of many weaknesses—amongst others of the foolish craze he once had that the religion of Christ was a religion to be practised. He now knew that it was nothing of the kind. Certain tenets of it had been made up into a creed "to be said or sung," and a singularly complex institution called the Church had been elaborated for the good of public morals, and the support of the English aristocracy—that was all. Therefore could he now wag his head pompously at poor Tom Wanless standing dumb before him; therefore could he now raise his fat soft hands, and thrust from his sight with sanctimonious horror that criminal guilty of rabbitmurder. A stranger, unfamiliar with the usages of rural England—that country whose liberties, we are told, all nations admire and envy—might have supposed that Wanless was some foul manslayer, some midnight assassin meeting his just doom. Unhappy stranger, woe on thy ignorance. Know thou that in England no crime is so heinous as the least approach to rebellion against the sacred rights of the Have-alls? "Touch not the land nor anything that is thereon," is to the English landholder all the law and the prophets. So Codling cursed Wanless for his crime, and the doom-stricken labourer passed from his sight.
Captain Hawthorn had been duly apprised of Thomas's misfortune, but was unable to do anything directly to help him. Because of his obnoxious opinions Hawthorn was not a justice of the peace; and he felt that any attempt on his part to appear as the labourer's champion might only end in making the poor fellow's sentence all the heavier. Since the Reform Bill and the Chartist agitations had alarmed the landholders, they had shown less disposition than ever to admit such a nondescript radical as Hawthorn into their society; and his interference in local affairs was so prominently resented on several occasions that he had almost ceased to attempt any. He had even some difficulty in obtaining access to Wanless in jail; but ultimately succeeded, by the help of a little judicious bribery, and the friendly assistance of a mountebank drunken parson, who was in jail for debt during six days of the week, but got bailed out on Sundays, so that he might edify his flock and keep down expenses.
The old man's first greeting to Wanless was in his customary rough form.
"Well, Tom, a nice ass you have made of yourself. Why the devil hadn't you more sense, man? Eh? D—n it, you might have taken some of my rabbits, my boy, and never a keeper would have said you nay."
This was true enough, for Hawthorn had now no keeper, and, for that matter, little game. He allowed his tenants to do as they pleased, and one of the deepest grievances his neighbours had against him, was that these tenants thinned their game wherever their lands marched with his.
To this sally Thomas, however, made no answer beyond a smothered groan. The man's spirit was too much broken to bear rough comfort of this kind, as his visitor instantly perceived. Changing his tone at once, the Captain bent over the bench where the prisoner sat hanging his head, and laying his hand on Thomas's shoulder, added—
"Come, come, Tom, my boy; bless my life! don't lose heart because you've been a fool. I'll see that the chicks don't starve, and you'll soon be out of this, and a man again."
The kind tones of Hawthorn's voice affected Tom more even than the promise. He tried to speak, but his voice broke in sobs.
"Tut, tut. 'Pon my life, don't, Tom, d—n it, man, don't," spluttered the Captain; but, as Tom did not stop, he grasped his hand suddenly and gave it a hearty grip. Then he turned and fled, afraid probably of himself betraying his feelings.
His visit did Thomas much good, and he bore his trials more patiently henceforth, though the bitterness of his heart at times nearly maddened him. I can never forget the description which he gave me in after days of the agonies suffered by him during those horrible six months. We were seated together in his little garden one September evening, the sun was far down in the west, the ruddy glow of a calm, bright autumn evening fell athwart Wanless's grey, worn face, lighting it with a sober brilliance that fitted well the fixed look of sadness that sat on it as he then told me of that dark time. His voice was calm for the most part, although full of subdued passion; and the impression his narrative made on me was so deep that I can almost give you his very words.
"At first," said he, "I felt like a caged wild beast, and could do nothing but chafe. The night in the keeper's out-house, where the villain kept me to save himself trouble, with both hands and feet cruelly tied, had been bad enough; and the nights and days in Leamington lock-up were hard to bear, but a kind of hope sustained me, and I did not fully comprehend what loss of liberty was till I lay in Warwick Jail. For three nights after I entered that hell upon earth I did not sleep a wink. The very air I breathed seemed to choke me. Sometimes I felt so mad that I could hardly keep from dashing my head against the walls of the cell. Had I been alone perhaps I might have done it, but there were five beside myself cooped up in a den not much bigger than my kitchen, and in the darkness I was for a time horribly afraid lest one or other of these men should do me an injury. Though in one senseeager for death, I did not like being killed; and when not raging I was trembling with fear. It was nervousness, no doubt, but you can hardly wonder when I tell you what my neighbours were. One was a burglar from Birmingham, sentenced to transportation for stealing a coat from somebody's hall; two were miners from Dudley way, "doing" sixty days for kicking a chum and breaking his leg, another was a wild, brutish-like day labourer, who had got six months at last Assizes for cutting his wife's throat, not quite to the death, and the last was a poor, hungry youth of a tailor's apprentice, who had got the same sentence for stealing some cloth. We were a strange lot, and I feared these men in the darkness. If one moved, my heart leapt to my mouth; and the horrible language in which some of them indulged, made my flesh creep. That wild labourer especially terrified me. What if the murderous frenzy was to come upon him, and he should try to throttle me in the dark.
"After a few nights, exhausted nature asserted herself, and I slept. Then other thoughts arose in my heart that were still worse to bear—thoughts about my wife and family. Sarah had been allowed to speak to me for a minute or two before I was removed from the Leamington Courthouse to jail, and she then told me that Jack and Fanny caught coldthatnight, and threatened dropsy. Lucy, also, had had a relapse of the fever. Poor woman, she looked so broken-hearted and worn-out like, and I could say nothing, still less do anything now. 'Oh, Tummas, Tummas, that it should a' coom to this' she cried, and wept bitterly behind her thin old shawl. It was theshawl I married her in, sir; and I thought on the past and the future till I, too, broke down and cried like a child. But what good was that to her; to either of us? Well; I couldn't help it.
"Then she picked up a bit, and tried to cheer me, as women will when the worst comes. She told me that Mrs. Robins was very kind, and had come to look after the children for her that day, having none of her own, and no fear of the infection, and she was sure that the neighbours would never see her want. That was some comfort at the time; but once I came to myself in jail the thought that I was now helpless, that my family might be dying and I unable to reach them, raised anew the agony in my mind. I saw them gathered round our Sally's bed weeping for their absent father. My wife's weary looks and thin white face haunted me in the night seasons far worse than the wife mutilator. What could neighbours do for her in such a strait; what could I do now? The thought of my helplessness came over me with waves of agonising self-abasement and disgust, till my nerves seemed to crack and my brain spin round. Often did I stuff my sleeve into my mouth to stop myself from crying out as I lay tossing on the floor of the den. I would beat my head with my clenched hands till the sparks danced in my eyes, and groan till my neighbours muttered curses through their sleep. Oh, I thought, if I could but get an hour with my little ones, to see wee Sally and the baby in their bed, to watch poor Jack and Fan, and help the worn out mother. An hour! nay, half an hour, only five minutes! God, it was unbearable; it was hell to be caged like this!
"And what had I done to be thus torn from my wife and children, and made to consort with brutal criminals? What had I done? Killed three rabbits, vermin that curse God's earth and devour the bread of the poor. They belonged to nobody any more'n rats or mice or weasels, and did nobody good in this world. Why, the man that had nearly killed his wife was not harder treated than me. What then was my crime? Was I indeed a criminal? I asked myself again and again, and the answer came—'No, Tom Wanless, but you were worse; you were a fool. You knew the power of the landlords; you knew that to them the rabbit was a sacred animal, and that they could punish you if they caught you. You were a fool ever to put yourself in their clutches.' Ah yes, there was the sting of it. How could I hope to escape doom when all the world except the labourers were on one side.
"But though I saw I had been a fool; that made me no better in my mind; rather worse; for, as I tossed and raved in my heart, I took to cursing squire and parson: I cursed, too, the land of my birth, and ended by cursing the God who made me. Ay, that did I. In the darkness I mocked at Him, I swore at Him, and told Him that I wouldn't believe there was a God at all. Why, if He lived, did he suffer scoundrels to call themselves His chosen people, and mock Him by their chattering prayers and mumblings all the time that they lived only to oppress the poor. Life was a curse if that was right.
"Well," Thomas continued, after a short pause, during which he leant back and watched the changing tints ofgold flitting across the western sky, "well, that mood also passed, and after the old captain had been to see me I got a little quieter. But the jailers did not make life easy for me, I can tell you. Because I was silent, speaking little, eating little, and hardly fit for the task they set me upon that weary treadmill, they gave me a taste of the whip many a time, and abused me for a sullen gallows bird, but I paid no heed.
"Within a fortnight after my punishment began, little Tom brought me word that two of my children, Jack and Lucy, were dead, and that Fanny was not expected to live. When I heard this news I laughed a bitter laugh, and said, 'Thank God, some good has been done. The squires won't imprison them, anyway!' My boy looked terrified for a moment, and then fell a-weeping bitterly. The sight of him crouching at my feet, and quivering in passionate grief, brought me a bit to. A vision of my dear little ones, of my dying wee Fan, swept over me; my heart yearned for them, and I mingled my tears with my son's. I charged him to be kind to mother, and tried to comfort him. Poor lad, poor lad! He is in Australia now, and has a farm of his own. The sorrow of that time is past for him long ago."
Here my old friend paused, wiping the tears from his eyes furtively, and sighing softly to himself. The dying glow of the sunset was now on his face, gleaming in his silvery hair, and making his sad but animated features shine with a soft glory. I sat still and gazed at him with feelings too strong for speech. After a little he turned to me with a smile, and said:—
"Yes, my friend, that's all passed, and many sorrows beside, nor do I now curse God as I look back upon them. But I cannot tell you more to-night. I didn't think that I should have been moved so much by recalling that old story. Let us go indoors, the night is growing chilly."
Future conversations gave me most of the particulars of that time, but I cannot harrow the reader's feelings with a full recital of all that Thomas Wanless felt and suffered in these six months of misery. Three of his children died while he chafed and toiled in Warwick Jail. The heart-stricken mother alone received their dying words, heard their last farewell. Kind neighbours tried to comfort her. The parson's wife even called, and said, "Poor woman, I'm afraid you've had too many children to bring up. I'll see if the vicar can spare you a few shillings from the poor box;" but the shillings never came, much to Thomas's satisfaction in after days. Perhaps Codling thought the family altogether too reprobate for his charity.
It would have gone hard indeed with Mrs. Wanless and the little ones spared to her but for old Captain Hawthorn. Though verging on seventy, and by no means strong, no single week elapsed all that winter when his cheery voice was not heard in the cottage. Often he came twice a week, but never with any ostentation of charity. On the contrary, he went so far the other way as to pretend to take a bond over the cottage for money, professedly lent to the family, and without which they must have gone into the workhouse. He never, perhaps, felt so like a hypocrite in his life as he did when hetook this bond to the jail for Thomas to sign. Young Tom was put back to his work on the home farm, and his wages raised on some pretence or other to six shillings a week. The dry, old man, so hard and repellant, had, after all, a human heart in him that my Lord Bishop of Worcester might have envied had he ever experienced any desire for such an organ. More true sympathy with distress was shown by this hardened old Voltarian since this family had attracted his notice than by all the squires of the district and the parsons to boot. It had not yet become fashionable for the latter to rehearse deeds of philanthropy in pedantic garments. Hawthorn's fault was not want of heart or of sympathy, but a self-centredness which prevented him from seeing his duty, except when, as in this instance, it was forced upon him. Yet, after all, what could he have done to help the poor around him that would not in some way have redounded to their hurt? Charity doles would have demoralised them more than their hard lot did; and any opening of the door for them to help themselves would have brought hatred, contumely, and perhaps real injury to them and him. He could not raise wages by his fiat, nor could he break up his land and distribute it to the people. All the laws of the country, as well as the prejudices of "society," were against him, if he had ever thought of so wild a project; which I do not suppose he ever did. He sat apart and mocked at a world with which he had no sympathy; whose hollowness, self-seeking, and cruelty, hid beneath infinite hypocrisies, he thoroughly understood.
And this good, at least, has to be recorded of him, that he saved the family of Thomas Wanless from want, by consequence, also, in all probability, saving Thomas himself from becoming an abandoned Ishmaelite. The sight of his family beggared, homeless, and in the workhouse, either would have driven him reckless or broken his heart. From that sight, at least, he was saved; and Thomas has often told me that the conduct of the old squire during these six months did more to revive hope in his heart and keep him from losing all faith in God or man, than any other single event of his life. Yet had his heart bitterness enough.
"I remember," he said, one night as we conversed together; "I remember the morning I left jail. It was a warm, May morning, and the air was so fresh and sweet that the first breath of it made me feel quite giddy with joy. 'Free! free! I am free!' I whispered softly to myself, and with difficulty refrained from capering about the road like a madman, as the joyous thought surged through my heart. It lasted only for a few moments. Pain took hold of the heels of my joy as usual. I was a man disgraced. Why should I be glad to get out of jail? Were not its forbidding, gloomy walls the best shelter left for one like me? Why should I be glad? The law of the land had branded me a criminal; let the law makers enjoy paying for their work.
"Ah, no; disgraced as I was, filled with bitter passionate hate of those above me as my heart might be, I was not yet ready to stoop to deliberate crime as a mode of revenge. The memory of my lost children andmy lonely, heart-broken wife stole into my heart and brought the tears to my eyes. The four that were left to me would be waiting on this May morning for my home coming. I would go home.
"So I started; but when I reached the castle bridge my heart again failed me. I was weak through long confinement, ill-usage, and want of food, for the messes served to us in that jail were often worse than I would have given to my pig. The very thought of meeting a village neighbour terrified me. My limbs shook, and I crept through a gap in the fence, resolved to hide till night and steal home in the darkness. For a little while I sat behind a bush at the water's edge, feeling a coward, but wholly unable to scold myself for it. Then I crept along the bank of the Avon towards Grimscote, till I reached a clump of osiers, into which I plunged. The ground was very damp, and here and there almost swampy; but presently I found a dry mound, and there I lay down, buried from all eyes. How long I lay I cannot tell, for I paid no heed to time, though I gradually became calmer. Once again I was in contact with nature. The air was full of the music of birds, and the chirp of insects among the grass sounded almost like the movement of life in the very ground itself. A sweet smell of hawthorn blossom came to me from some old trees close by, and now and then I heard the plash of oars on the river, and voices came to me sweet and clear off the water. Gradually I became more hopeful. Life was all around me; the bushes themselves seemed moved by it as I lay beneath their shade. Behind me the trafficof the high road made a constant rattle, and beyond the river I heard the bleating of lambs. And life somehow came back to me also. I arose with new hopes in my breast. All could not yet be lost to me, I somehow felt; and, at any rate, I would go home, for I began to be very hungry.
"I often stopped on the way with weariness and faint-heartedness, but did not again turn back, and by two o'clock in the afternoon I reached my own cottage. My wife welcomed me with a burst of crying. I learnt from her that she had begun to dread that I had done something rash. She and the little ones had gone to meet me in the morning as far as the castle bridge, which they must have reached soon after I lay down among the willows. There they sat for a while hoping that I would come, but seeing nothing of me they crept back again with hearts sad enough, you may be sure. I was not long behind them, and my wife soon brightened enough to be able to eat some dinner with me; but my heart smote me for being so selfish and unkind as to go and hide as if no one had to be considered but myself."
Such in faint outline was Thomas's account of his release from prison. His meeting with his family was sad beyond description. In the short six months of his absence three of his little ones had been put under the sod. Out of a family of eight in all he had now but four left. A great mercy that it was so, some will say; and possibly they may be right. The world's goods are so ill distributed that death is for many the only blessing left. Nevertheless, I question if the sorrow of the labourerat the loss of his children was not keener than that of many who need not fear a want of bread for their offspring. He had toiled and suffered for all the eight, and the love that grows up in the heart through such discipline as his is akin to the deepest and holiest passion known to man. Thomas and his wife mourned for their dead to their own life's end, because the little ones had been part of their life. Is it so with you, pert censor of the miserable poor?
Though sorrowing, Thomas had yet no time to nurse his sorrow. The world had to be faced again, and work to be found. For sentimental griefs and morbid wailings in the world's ear the Wanlesses had no time. At first Thomas got some jobs from Mr. Hawthorn, but he soon saw that they were jobs mostly created on purpose for him, and he could not bear the thought of living on charity, no matter how disguised. Therefore, he began to hunt about for odd work in the neighbourhood, and found much difficulty in getting it. His recent imprisonment told against him everywhere, if not in keeping work from his hands, at all events in low pay for the work. The farmers had now got their feet on his neck, and took it out of him, as they alone knew how; for the brutalised slave is always the cruellest of slave-drivers. But Thomas fought on, and for the best part of a year contrived to exist with the help that young Tom's wages gave. He did no more; nay, not always so much; for he and his wife sometimes wanted their own dinners that their children might have enough. Still he existed; lived through the year somehow and was thankful, notwithstanding the fact that he had made noprogress in paying off his debt to the old Captain. "He can take the cottage, Thomas," said his wife. "Someone will pay him rent enough for it, though we can't; but we can get a hovel somewhere."
He was spared this last sacrifice, for about this time old Hawthorn died, and a sealed packet addressed to Thomas Wanless was found among his papers. When the labourer came to open this, he found that it contained his bond with the signature torn off, a receipt in full for the money advanced, and a £20 note. On a slip of paper was written in the Captain's scraggy, trembling hand, "Don't mention this to a living soul, Tom Wanless, or by God I'll haunt you.—E.H." Thus the scorned infidel was soft-hearted and characteristic to the last. His estate passed to a cousin, who soon gave the tenants cause to remember how good the old Captain had been. And once more he had kept the labourer's heart from breaking. The deliverance from debt which this packet brought, and the prodigious wealth a £20 note appeared to be to Thomas, renewed his courage and made him resolve to strike further afield in search of better paid labour. Railway making was at its height all over the country, and he had often thought of becoming a navvy. Now he decided to be one if he could get work on the line down Worcester way. A bit of that line came within fifteen miles of Ashbrook, and he might therefore see his family now and then at least Young Tom was to stay at home, and the 5s. a-week, to which his wages was reduced after old Hawthorn's death, would help to keep house till work was found by his father. The £20 wasnot to be touched till the very last extremity, and in the meantime Thomas put it in as a deposit in a savings bank at Stratford-on-Avon. He would not deposit it in Warwick lest questions might be asked, and the Captain's dying command be in consequence disobeyed.
The new plans succeeded better almost than Thomas had hoped. He got work on the railway; it was very hard work, but the wages were good; at first he only got 18s. per week, and he began by stinting himself in order to send 10s. of this home; but he soon found that to be a mistake. His work demanded full vigour of body, and to be in full vigour he must be well fed. The other men had meat of some kind three times a day, and Thomas followed their example, with the best results. Not only did he stand by his work with the rest, but he displayed such energy and intelligence that within a few weeks he obtained charge of the work in a deep cutting at 28s. per week. Of this he saved from 12s. to 14s. a-week, after paying for clothes, lodgings, and food. It seemed very little, and he grudged much the cost of his own living; but there was no help for it. Besides, what he saved now was more than all he earned in Ashbrook, except for a few weeks during harvest. Much reason had he to thank the dairyman's wife for feeding him in his youth so as to fit him now for a navvy's toil.
Truly the life was rough, and little to Wanless' liking, yet he worked with a heart and hope rarely his before. Altogether this job lasted for two years, and regularly all that time Thomas went home once a month with his savings. Sometimes he had more than 20 miles to walkeach way, but he had health, and never failed. Starting on Saturday evenings, in wet weather and dry, summer and winter, he would reach home early on Sunday morning, when after a good sleep, he passed a few happy hours, and then started on the Sunday afternoon for his work again.
During these two years the attitude of Thomas's mind changed much towards society and its institutions. He may be said for the first time to have become a religious man, and his religion was of the simpler and more unsophisticated type which comes to a man who knows little of dogma, but much of the contents of the Bible. That book was studied by him as something fresh and altogether new on the lonely Sundays he passed amongst the navvies. He took to it at first more because he had no other book to read, but it laid hold of his imagination after a time, and he began to test the world around him by the lofty morality of the New Testament. In due course the thoughts that burned within him found utterance and infected some of his fellow workmen. Almost before he was aware a certain following gathered round him. They drew together in the parlour of the inn, which most of the navvies frequented, and discussed things political and religious on the Saturday and Sunday nights.
The wilder spirits soon nicknamed Thomas and his friends the Saints, and he himself went by the sobriquet of Methody Tom; but, though jeered at and sometimes cursed by the wilder sort, their influence spread, andradical views of society were canvassed among these navvies with a freedom that would have made parson and squire alike shiver with horror had they known. But they did not know. How could they? Such creatures as navvies were not, strictly speaking, human at all. They lived beyond the pale, like the Irish ancestors of many among them, and were essentially of the nature of wild beasts, for whom the policeman's baton or the soldier's musket was the only available moral force.
No parson ever looked near that community of busy workers, whose strong backed labour was swiftly altering the physical conditions of modern civilisation, and calling a new world into being for squire and trader alike. Nay, I am wrong. Thomas informed me that a parson did go astray among the workmen in the cutting of which he had charge. A poor, deluded young curate came round once distributing tracts. The fervour of a yesterday's ordination was upon him, and shone in the rigorous cut of his garments. He thought he might do the navvies good by the sight of him, and bless them with his tracts. But his visit was a failure, and his reception rough. Thomas declared that he felt sorry for the poor fellow, and yet could not refrain from joining in the laugh at his expense. One sturdy northerner, to whom he handed a tract, protested loudly that he "hadn't done nothing to be summonsed for," and when the curate blandly explained that it was a tract, he blessed his stars, and swore that he "took the chap for one of the new peelers." Another was of an opinion that "the parson had a mighty easy job of it," and suggested his taking a turn at the pick;while one more blasphemous than the rest, declared that he didn't know who the Lord Jesus might be, and didn't care; but, in his opinion, it was d——d impudent of him to send any of his flunkeys down their way "a spyin' and a pryin'." They chaffed the poor man about his clothes; begged a yard or two of the tail of his coat to mend their Sunday breeches with; explained how much better he could walk in a short jacket; wanted to know why he wore a white choker—and altogether made such a fool of the poor wretch that he soon turned and fled, amid their jeers and laughter.
That was the only time they ever saw a parson of the Church during these two years; and no doubt this poor curate felt that they were a reprobate crew whom the Church did quite right to abandon to their fate. It is so much pleasanter and easier to play at pietism amongst well-bred, comfortable people "of good society" than to save souls. The sweet order of a gorgeous ritual, the vanities of richly-embroidered garments, squabbles about archaic rites as worthless as an Egyptian mummy—these things are more valuable to the modern parson, and more pleasing in the sight of his God, than the lives of such men as Wanless and his fellow-labourers. For the parson's God is the God of the rich, to whom gorgeous ritual and sensuous music are necessary as foretastes of the blessedness of an æsthetic paradise.
So be it: far be it from me to question the taste of parson or parson's following. They can go their own way, only it may be permitted to one to point out that outside their charmed circle there are forces at work, beforethe power of which their fair fabric may yet crumble and disappear like sand heaps before the rushing tide. Thomas Wanless and his friends were rude and unlettered, but they had definite ideas enough, and a wild sense of justice. In their dim way they tried to fit together the various parts of the human life that lay around them, and failing to do so, as better than they have failed, they came to the conclusion that they and their class were cheated by the rest. Democracy, communism, subversive ideas of all kinds, therefore, found currency among them, as in ever-growing volume they find currency now. Imagine if you can these men trying to evolve the prototype of a modern Lord Bishop, in lawn sleeves and pompous state, from the simple records of the New Testament. Can you wonder at their failure in that instance, or in many such like? Where could they find church or chapel that was no respecter of persons? in which the possession of money and power was not the ultimate test of true godliness? Is it astonishing that in placing the ideal and actual side by side, these men should have come to the conclusion that the actual was a fraud: that the whole basis of modern society was corrupt?
Do not, I beseech you, pass lightly by the doings of these men, most sublime Lord Bishops, most serene peers of the realm, smug buyers of county votes. These ideas are spreading all around you. Few possessed them fifty years ago among the agricultural poor; but there, as elsewhere, democracy is getting educated, is awaking to the reality of things, and will make its feelings knownto you in a manner you little dream of one of these days. Your Olympus will prove but a molehill when the earth shakes with the onset of the millions on whose necks you have sat all these ages. Titles are a mockery, hereditary dignities a contempt, in the eyes of men who live face to face with the hard realities of existence. A new life is abroad in the world. The image-breaker is exalted above my Lord Bishop in all his glory of lawn sleeves and piety in uniform by men like Wanless and his friends. They want to know, not what part "my lord" professes to act, what creed this or that snug Church dignitary chants or drones; but what his life is worth? What are you? in short, is the question, not what you give yourself out to be; and, depend upon it, if the answer is unsatisfactory, you and your hypocrisies will disappear together.
Nothing struck me so forcibly in my intercourse with Wanless as the extraordinary bitterness with which he spoke of the English Church. To it he seemed in his later life to have transferred the greater part of his hatred of the landed gentry. He viewed it as an organised blasphemy, and worse than that, as the jailor, so to say, by whom the chains of a miserable captivity had been rivetted for ages on the limbs of the toiling poor. The ground for this attitude of mind on the part of the labourer was easily discovered. He read his Bible much, and endeavoured to fit its precepts and the example of its greatest characters to the life around him, and of course he failed. The more he tried to bring together the presentment of Christianity afforded by the modern Church and teaching ofthe New Testament, the more he saw their divergencies. This set him pondering, and he soon came to the conclusion that this modern institution was not Christian at all, but Pagan. It was a department of State, paid by the State, and employed by it for the purpose of deluding the people into the belief that the existing order of life was divinely appointed. How effectively it had done this work, he said, let history show. The clergy had aided and abetted the gentry in all their robberies of the people; it had been the instrument of many flagrant thefts of endowments left for the education of the poor; there never had been a reform proposed calculated to benefit the people that had not been ardently opposed by this organised band of hypocrites, and no class of the community was so habitually, so flagrantly selfish as preachers. Take them all in all, Thomas Wanless declared, the people who preached for a trade, be they dissenters or Anglican, gave him a lower idea of human nature than any navvy he ever met. "Their trade makes them bad," he often declared; "and I suppose I ought to pity the miserable wretches, but they do so much mischief that I really cannot."
Once I recollect urging the commonplace argument that there were many good men among them, but he caught me up short with—
"Yes, yes, I admit all that; but that proves nothing in favour of either the Church or the parson's trade. These men would have been good anywhere, as Papists, Mohamedans, or Hindus, just as certainly as in church or chapel. It is their nature to, and they cannot help it. But their very goodness is a curse to people, sir—yes, acurse, for they prop up fabrics and institutions that but for them would long ago have been too rotten to stand."
Thus it will be seen that Wanless, though in his way a profoundly religious man, was in no sense a sectary. He was in fact ranged among the iconoclasts. He sighed for a living faith, not a dead creed; and were he living to-day he would certainly give his hearty support to that band of men who wage war on the shams of modern creeds, who mock unceasingly at the disgusting spectacle of men who call themselves disciples of Christ wrangling over the cut and embroidery of garments, and trying to make themselves martyrs for the sake of a candle or two. The tractarian movement attracted Thomas's attention in a dim way, and he was amused at the frightful din made by the conversions to Romanism which accompanied that curious upheaval of mediævalism. Not that he understood much of the meaning of what was going on. It was not worth discovering, he said; but he was amused over it, and roundly declared that for this and all other ills of the Church there was but one cure—to take away its money. "Let these parsons try living by faith," he would often exclaim. "If they believe in God as they say, why do they not trust him for a living? Their proud stomachs would come down a bit if they are just turned adrift in a body and let shift for themselves. But Lord, what a howl they'll make if the people get up and say we'll have no more of your mummeries, we want our money for a better purpose. They won't think much about God then, I can tell you. It will be every man for himself, and who can grab the most. I never have any patience with parsons, never. Theyare bad from the beginning, bad all through, self-deluders and misleaders of others at the best, and at the worst—well, not much more except in degree."
"These are the mere ravings of an ignorant peasant," most readers will exclaim. I do not deny that in a certain sense they may seem only that. Yet look around and consider the signs of the times before you dismiss these things as of no significance. What means the spread of secularism amongst the working classes of the present day, the contempt for religion and parsons which most of them display? Is it not a most ominous indication of future trouble for serene lord bishops and their brood when events bring them face to face with the people? I do not admire Charles Bradlaugh's teaching on many points; but I cannot deny the power that he and such as he wield on the common people. It is a power that increases with the spread of education; and what does it betoken? Only this; that in time, for one man among the peasantry who now thinks like Thomas Wanless there will be tens of thousands. The churches and chapels themselves, with their exceedingly worldly respectability, produce these men more certainly than all the teachings of the Bradlaughs; nay, Bradlaugh himself is directly the product of a corrupt, time-serving and utterly blasphemous church organisation. Therefore be not too contemptuous of sentiments like those of this peasant. They are significant of many things—of a coming democracy that will at least try to burn up the rottenness of our modern ultra Pagan-civilization.
On other questions than those of Church and State theopinions of Thomas Wanless were equally uncompromising, and, perhaps, equally impracticable. His intelligence was far deeper than his reading, and much of his political economy, as well as of his code of social morals, was taken from the Bible. To my thinking he could have gone to no better book, but I am also free to admit that his too exclusive study of it gave a quaint and sometimes impracticable turn to his conceptions that may lead many to have a poor opinion of his wisdom.