Cradock Nowell: A Tale of the New Forest. Volume 2 of 3

“To be sure, sir; I forgot. I will speak to Mrs. Brown, sir.”

Mrs. Brown, being a woman of resource, mounted the boy on her donkey, the only quadruped she possessed, but a “wonner to go,” as the boy said, “when you knows the right place to prog him in,” and sent him post–haste to Lymington, whence the required conveyance arrived in about an hour and a half.

Rufus Hutton, having promised to be at home that evening, left Eoa to sleep off her heavy soporific, and followed the carriage on horseback; neither did he leave its track where the Ringwood Road turns off, for he had undertaken to tell Sir Cradock how his niece was getting on. He started nearly half an hour after the Lymington chaise, for Polly would never demean herself by trotting behind the “posters.” During that half–hour he drank hot brown brandy–and–water, although he could not bear it, to ingratiate him with Mrs. Brown for the sake of the poor Eoa. For Mrs. Brown had no other hot method of crowning the flowing bowl. And now, while I think of it, let me warn all gentle and simple people who deign on this tale of the New Forest, never to ask for pale brandy within the perambulations. How do you think they make it? By mixing brown brandy with villanous gin. Rufus was up to this, of course; and, as he must take something for the good of the house, and to get at the kindly kernel of the heavy–browed hostess, he took that which he thought would be least for his own evil. Then, leaving Mrs. Brown (who, of course, had taken her own glass at his sole charge and largesse, after fifty times “Oh no, sir, never! Oh Lord, how my Brown would be shocked!”), having imbued that good Mrs. Brown, who really was not a bad woman – which means that she was a good one, for women have no medium – with a strong aromatic impression that he was a pleasant gentleman, and no pride, not a bit of it, in him, no more than you nor me might, – off he trotted at a furious pace, smoking two cheroots at once.

I believe that there was and is – for I am happy to say that he still inhales the breeze of life down his cigar, and looks browner and redder than ever – I believe that, in spite of all his troubles in connexion with this story, which took a good deal out of him, there was and is no happier man in our merry England than the worthy Rufus Hutton. And, as all happiness is negative, and goes without our knowing it, and only becomes a positive past for us to look back upon, so his went before it came, and goes or eʼer it comes. And yet he enjoys it none the less; he multiplies it by three for the past and by nine for the future, and he never finds it necessary to deduct for the present moment.

Happy man who never thinks beyond salutary average, who can accept, in perfect faith, the traditions of his forbears, and yet is shrewd enough to hope that his grandsons will discard at least a portion of them, – who looks upon the passing life as a thing he need not move in, a world which must improve itself, and every day is doing it. And all the while he sympathises with his fellow–men, enjoys a bit of human nature, laughs at the cross–purposes of native truth and training, loves whatever he finds to be true, and does his best to foster it, is pleased with his after–dinner story, and feels universally charitable; then smiles at his wife, and kisses his children; and goes to bed with the firm conviction that they are worth all the rest put together.

Yet this manʼs happiness is not sound, because it is built upon selfishness.

In Nowelhurst village Dr. Hutton met Mark Stote, the gamekeeper, who begged him to stop for a moment, just to hear a word or two. Rufus, after hearing his news, resolved to take the upper road to the Hall, past Mr. Garnetʼs house; it was not so very far out of his way, and perhaps he might be of service there, and – ah, yes, Dr. Hutton, this last was the real motive, though you may not have thought so – what a fine opportunity to discover something which plagued him! Perhaps I ought to say rather, the want of which was plaguing him. Rufus took so kind an interest in his neighbours’ affairs, that anything not thoroughly luculent in their dealings, mode of life or speech, or management of their households, was to him the subject–matter of continual mental scratchings. Ah, how genteel a periphrase, worthy of Bailey Kettledrum; how happily we have shown our horror of that English monosyllable, beginning with the third vowel, which must be (according to Dr. Aldrich) the correlative of scratch! Score two, and go on after Dr. Hutton.

He overtook the Garnets twain just at their front gate, whence the house could not be seen, on account of a bank of evergreens. The maid came out with her cap flying off, and all her mind perturbed. Rufus Hutton, checking his mare, for the road was very narrow, heard the entire dialogue.

“Oh, sir! oh, master! have you heard of it? Such a thing, to be sure!”

“Heard of what, Sarah? Of course I have heard of the great disaster at Rushford.”

“No, no. Here, sir, here! The two big trees is down on the house. Itʼs a mussy as Nanny and me wasnʼt killed. And poor Miss Pearl have been in hysterics ever since, without no dinner. There, you can hear her screeching now, worse than the mangle, ever so much.”

Mr. Garnet did not say a word, but set off for the house full speed, even forgetting that Bob wanted help to get from the gate to the doorway.

Rufus Hutton jumped down from his mare, and called to the driver to come and hold her, just for a minute or two; no fear of his horses bolting. Then, helping Bob to limp along, he followed through the shrubbery. When they came within full view of the house, he was quite amazed at the mischief. The two oaks interlocked had fallen upon it, and, crashing as they did from the height above, the breaches they made were hideous. They had cloven the house into three ragged pieces, from the roof–ridge down to the first floor, where the solid joists had stopped them. It had happened in the afternoon of the second day of the tempest; when the heart of the storm was broken, but tremendous squalls came now and then from the bright north–west. Mr. Garnetʼs own bed was occupied by the tree which he detested. Pearl had screamed “Judgment, judgment!” and danced among the ruins; so the maid was telling Mr. Garnet, as he feared to enter his own door.

“Judgment for what?” asked Rufus Hutton, and Mr. Garnet seemed not to hear him.

“I am sure I donʼt know, sir,” answered the maid, “for none of us done any harm, sir; unless it was the bottle of pickled onions, when master were away, and there was very few of them left, sir, very few, I do declare to you, and we thought they was on the turn, sir, and it seemed such a pity to waste them. And please, sir, weʼve all been working like horses, though frightened out of our lives ‘most; and we fetched down all the things from your room, where the cupboards was broken open, for ‘fraid it should come on to rain, sir; and weʼve taken all our meals standing, sir; and made up a bed in the meat–screen, and another upon the dresser; and Miss Pearl, what turns she have given us – Here she comes, I do declare.”

“Dr. Hutton,” said Bull Garnet, hastily, “good–bye; I am much obliged to you. I shall see you, I hope, next week. Good–bye, good–bye. Excuse me.”

But, before he could get him out of the way – for Rufus lingered strangely – Pearl Garnet came into the little hall, with her eyes distended fearfully. “There, there it is,” she cried, “there it is, I tell you! No wonder the tree came down upon it. No wonder the house was crushed for it.” And she pointed to a shattered box, tilted up endwise, among a heap of account–books, clothes, and furniture.

“Oh yes, you may look at it. To be sure you may look at it. God would not have it hidden longer. I have done my best, God knows, and my heart knows, and my – I mean that man there knows. Is there anything more I can do for you, anything more, dear father? You have done so much for me, you know. And I will only ask you one little thing – put me in his coffin.”

“The girl is raving,” cried Mr. Garnet. “Poor thing, it comes from her mother.”

“No, it comes from her father,” said Pearl, going boldly up to him, and fixing her large bright eyes upon his. “Do as you like with me; I donʼt care; but donʼt put it on any one else. Oh, father, father, father!”

Moaning, she turned away from him; and then sprang into his arms with shrieks. He lifted her tenderly, and forgot all about his own safety. His great tears fell on her wan, sick face; and his heavy heart throbbed for his daughter only, as he felt hers bounding perilously. He carried her off to an inner room, and left them to their own devices.

“I should like uncommonly,” said Rufus Hutton, rubbing his chin, “to know what is in that box. Indeed, I feel it my duty at once to ascertain.”

“No, you shanʼt,” cried Bob, limping across in front of it; “I know no more than you do, sir. But I wonʼt have fatherʼs things pryed into.”

“You are very polite,” replied the Doctor; “a chip of the old block, I perceive. But, perhaps, you will believe me, my boy, when I tell you that, if ever there was a gentleman totally devoid of improper curiosity, it is Dr. Rufus Hutton, sir.”

“Oh, I am so glad,” said Bob; “because you wonʼt be disappointed, then.”

Rufus grinned, in spite of his wrath; but he was not to be baffled so easily. He could not push poor Bob aside, in his present disabled state, without being guilty of cowardice. So he called in an auxiliary.

“Betsy, my dear, your young mistress wished me just to examine that box. Be kind enough to bring it to the light here, unless it is too heavy for your little hands.”

Oh, if he had only said “Miss Sarah,” what a difference it might have made!

“Betsy, indeed!” cried Sarah, who had followed her mistress, but, being locked out, had come back to see the end of it; “my name, sir, is nothing so low as that. My name is Sarah Mackarness, sir, very much at your service; and my mother keeps a potato–shop, the largest business in Lyndhurst, sir. Betsy, indeed! and from a stranger, not to say a strange gentleman, for fear of making a mistake. And as for my hands” – she thought he had been ironical, for her hands were above regulation size – “my hands are such as pleased God to make them, and honest hands, anyhow, and doesnʼt want to interfere with other peopleʼs business. Oh, what will poor Nanny say, to think of me, Sarah Mackarness, be permiscuous called Betsy?”

At this moment, when Sarah Mackarness, having recovered breath, was starting into another native discourse on prænomina, and Rufus was calling upon his resources for some constitutional measure, Bull Garnet came back, treading heavily, defiant of all that the world could do. His quick eyes, never glimpsing that way, but taking in all the room at once, espied the box unmeddled with, and Bob upon guard in front of it. He was his own man now again. What did he care for anybody, so long as he had his children?

“Dr. Hutton, I thought that you were gone.”

“You see I am not,” said Rufus, squaring his elbows, and looking big, for he was a plucky little fellow, “and, whatʼs more, I donʼt mean to go till I know what is in that box.”

“Box, box!” cried Bull Garnet, striking his enormous forehead, as if to recall something; “have we a box of yours, Dr. Hutton?”

“No, no; that box of yours. Your daughter told us to examine it. And, from her manner, I believe that I am bound to do so.”

“Bound to examine one of my boxes!” Bull Garnet never looked once that way, and Rufus took note of the strange avoidance; “my boxes are full of confidential papers; surely, sir, you have caught my daughterʼs – I mean to say, you are labouring under some hallucination.”

“There are no papers in that box. The contents of it are metal. I have seen one article already through the broken cover, and shall not forget its shape. Beware; there have been strange things done in this neighbourhood. If you refuse to allay my suspicions, you confirm them.”

The only answer he received was a powerful hand at the back of his neck, a sensation of being lifted with no increase of facilities for placid respiration; finally, a lateral movement of great rapidity through the air, and a loud sound as of a bang. Recovering reasonʼs prerogative, he found himself in a dahlia, whose blossoms, turned into heel–balls by the recent frost, were flapping round his countenance, and whose stake had gone through his waistcoat back, and grazed his coxendix, or something; he knows best what it was, as a medical man deeply interested.

He had also a very unpleasant reminiscence of some such words as these, to which he had no responsive power – “You wonʼt take a hint like a gentleman; so take a hit like a blackguard.”

Dr. Rufus Hutton was not the man to sit down quietly under an insult of any sort. At the moment he felt that brute force was irresistibly in the ascendant, and he was wonderfully calm about it. He shook himself, and smoothed his waistcoat, and tried the stretch of his garters; then never once looked toward the house, never shook his fist, nor frowned even. He walked off to his darling Polly as if nothing at all had happened; gave the man a shilling for holding her, after looking long for a sixpence; then mounted, and rode towards Nowelhurst Hall, showing no emotion whatever. Only Polly knew that burning tears of a brave manʼs sense of ignominy fell upon her glossy shoulder, and were fiercely wiped way.

At the Hall he said nothing about it; never even mentioned that he had called at Garnetʼs cottage; but told Sir Cradock, like a true man, of Eoaʼs troubles, of her poor forlorn condition, and power of heart to feel it. He even contrived to interest the bereaved man, now so listless, in the young life thrown upon his care, as if by the breath of heaven. We are never so eloquent for another as when our own hearts are moved deeply by the feeling of wrong to ourselves; unless, indeed, we are very small, and that subject excludes all others.

So it came to pass that the grand new carriage was ordered to the door, and Sir Cradock would himself have gone – only Rufus Hutton had left him, and the eloquence was oozing. The old man, therefore, turned back on the threshold, saying to himself that it would be hardly decent to appear in public yet; and Mrs. OʼGaghan was sent instead, sitting inside, and half afraid to breathe for fear of the crystal. As for her clothes, they were good enough, she knew, for the Lord Mayorʼs coach. “Five–and–sixpence a yard, maʼam, lave alone trimming and binding.” But, knowing what she did of herbs, she could not answer for the peppermint.

Of course, they did not intend to fetch poor Eoa home yet; but Biddy had orders to stay there until the young lady was moveable. Biddy took to her at once, in her heavy, long–drawn sleep, with the soft black lashes now and then lifting from the rich brown cheek.

“An’ if she isnʼt illigant, then,” said Biddy to Mrs. Brown, “ate me wiʼout a purratie. Arl coom ov’ the blude, missus. Sazins, then, if me and Pat had oonly got a child this day! Belikes, maʼam, for the matter o’ that, a drap o’ whisky disagrays with you.”

Biddy, feeling strongly moved, and burning to drink her new childʼs health, showed a bottle of brown potheen.

“To tell you the truth, mem,” said Mrs. Brown, “I know nothing about them subjects. Spirituous liquors is a thing as has always been beyond me.”

“Thin Iʼll clap it away again,” said Biddy, “and the divvil only the wiser. I never takes it alone, marm.”

“It would ill become me, mem,” replied Mrs. Brown, “to be churlish in my own house, mem. I have heard of you very often, mem. Yes, I assure you I have, from the people as comes to bathe here, as a lady of great experience in diseases of the chest. If you recommend any cordial, mem, on the strength of your experience, for a female of weak witality, I should take it as a dooty, mem, strictly as a dooty to my husband and two darters.”

“Arrah, then, Iʼm your femmale. Me witality goes crossways, like, till I has a drap o’ the crather.” And so they made a night of it, and Mr. Brown had some.

CHAPTER VII

Leave we now, with story pending, Biddy and Eoa, Pearl, and even Amy; thee, too, rare Bull, and thee, O Rufus, overcast with anger. It is time to track the steps of him whom Fortune, blithe at her cruel trade, shall track as far as Gades, Cantaber, and wild Syrtes, where the Moorish billow is for ever heaving. Will he exclaim with the poet, who certainly was a jolly mortal, – “I praise her while she is my guest. If she flap her nimble wings, I renounce her charities; and wrap me in my manhood robe, and woo the upright poverty, the bride without a dower.” “A very fine sentiment, Master Horace; but were you not a little too fond even of Sabine and Lesbian – when the Massic juice was beyond your credit – to do anything more than feel it?”