CHAPTER XIX.

DOE DEM. ROE.

WHEN I gave Uncle Corny, as I was bound to do, a full account of that day’s work, he was mightily pleased, and clapped me on the back for having spoken so plainly to that haughty woman.

“But now you must make up your mind,” he said, “to have the door slammed in your face, if ever you attempt to get a glimpse of your sweetheart there. Poor thing, what a time of it she will have! What puts my back up is to think that her own father lets her be knocked about like that. She never tells him, you think, because it would only get him into trouble, and do her no good. Well, she is a noble girl, if that is the case. But he must know how she is treated, as I told you, in fifty other ways,—badly dressed, half starved, or at any rate fed on rice and suet-pudding, and kept in the schoolroom away from the others. How was she dressed now? What clothes had she on?”

I answered that I really did not know; and this was the truth, though I blamed myself for it. When first she began to be so much to me, I had noticed how neat and becoming her cloak was, and her hat, and a little tender muff, which held a still tenderer pair of hands. But now that she was all the world to me, and more, I seemed to have no sense of her apparel, but to be filled with herself alone, as if her existence came into mine. I did not tell him that because he would have cried “Stuff!”

But he understood my meaning, so far as to tell me of a case he had known some years ago. A friend of his had married a lovely girl, who had not a penny to bless herself with, and he was most deeply attached to her. But although he was very well off for money, and not at all of a stingy turn, for a long time it never came into his head that his wife had only two gowns, two bonnets, and one cloak. She was too proud to ask him for money; and instead of doing that, went on and on, wearing out all her poor things, until they were scarcely fit to be looked at. And many bitter tears she shed, as she darned, and patched, and let pieces in, convinced more and more, as the light shone through, that her husband must hate her to keep her like that. And perhaps it would have ended in the ruin of them both, for some villain was making love to her, when, luckily a sister of his came to see them, and scolded him roundly for his blind neglect. “Why, bless her heart!” he cried, opening his eyes; “I never see Mary’s clothes—I see Mary.”

“Now mind you are not such a jackanapes as that;” my Uncle drew the moral, as he rubbed his hands, for he loved to have his stories laughed at; “when you have got your Kitty, and I don’t see why you should not, be sure that you praise her dresses and bonnets; not quite so much perhaps as you praise herself, but still every time you can think of it. Women like that sort of thing, somehow. I can hardly tell you why; for if any man praised my coat or my hat, I should be vexed with him, unless it was to say that I had got them dirt-cheap. But perhaps the reason is that a woman’s clothes are a part of her mind and her body too, a sort of another self to her.”

“How on earth do you know such a lot about women?” I asked, though I thought that he did not know much. “One would think you had been married for forty years! What woman can have taught you all these things!”

“Mind your own business,” my Uncle answered sharply. “You will have quite enough to do with that, as things appear at present. You have made play with this pretty girl, and you have booked your place with her father. Also you have got over me, who meant to have nothing to do with it. And you have given that hateful woman a Roland for her Oliver. But I will go bail that you have no idea whose shoulders will bear the brunt of it. Who should you say was the trump-card now?”

“The learned Professor,” I replied; “the man who could kill that woman with a wire, if he were not so magnanimous. The man who knows everything in this world, except how to manage his own household. He will stand up for me, and I shall win.”

“So you shall, my boy; you are quite right there. But it won’t be done through him, I can tell you; or you would have a precious time to wait. It shall be done through a small market-gardener—as she had the cheek to call me—and she may grind her teeth, and slap her husband. Very few people know what I am; because I don’t care what they think of me. But I see the proper thing to do, and I mean to begin to-morrow. Now go to bed, and dream as you do all day. You’ll be no good to me, till you’ve had too much of Kitty.”

Being weary in body and in mind, I slept until Tabby called out that the breakfast was ready. For this I expected to be well upbraided, as my uncle was always afoot with the sun; but to my surprise he was not come home, and I kept his rasher hot for him. At last he came in, and sat down without a word beyond his short “Good morning, Kit!” His appetite was fine, and his face most cheerful; though his gray curls appeared a little grimy, and his coat had a smell more peculiar than pleasant.

“Shall have to go under the pump again,” he said, as he pushed away his plate; “but it won’t matter now till dinner-time. That twitch does make such a sticky smoke, with the sow-thistles whelmed down over it. But the wind was the right way, and took it very level. Bless my soul, how he did cough, and how he ran from one room to another! ’Twas enough to kill American blight a’most, let alone what they call a ‘human.’ But it’s high time to rouse them up again, my lad; bring one of them runner-sticks, and lend a hand. If he don’t bolt by dinner-time, we’ll try a little sulphur. I would have done it sooner, if it had not been for the Dutch Honeysuckle, and blue creeper.”

Wondering what this device could be, I took a kidney-bean stick and followed him. He marched at a great pace, with a pitchfork on his shoulder, down a long alley of pears and apples; on which, though the leaves hung very late from the wetness of the season, the chill air of some frosty mornings had breathed divers colours. Then we came into an open break, which I had helped to plant with potatoes in the spring, and here were a score of bonfires burning, or rather smoking furiously. Beyond them was “Honeysuckle Cottage,” belonging to my uncle, and standing at the north end of his grounds, against a lane which led to Hanworth.

This cottage had five windows facing us, and receiving the volleys of foul gray smoke, as a smart south-west wind drove it; and the fires being piled with diseased potato-haulm, of which there was abundance in that bad year, as well as bottomed with twitch-grass, beth-wine, cat’s-tail, and fifty other kinds of weed, and still more noxious refuse, the reek was more than any nose could stand, when even a mild puff strayed towards us. But the main and solid mass was rushing, in a flood of embodied stench, straight into the windows of that peaceful cot, penetrating sash and frame and lining. Once or twice as the cloud wisped before the wind, we seemed to catch a brief glimpse of some agitated mortal, holding up his hands in supplication, or wringing them, and applying them in anguish to his nose.

“Pile on some more, Bill, and stir them up again,” shouted Uncle Corny, with his pitchfork swinging in the thick of it. “Agricultural operations must not be suspended to suit the caprice of individuals,—as the County-court judge said, when Noakes tried to stop me from carting manure near his parlour-window. If old Harker won’t hearken, well make him sniff, eh? See the joke, Selsey Bill?”

Selsey Bill saw it, after deep reflection, and shook his long sides with a longer guffaw. “If a’ don’t sniff at this, a’ must have quare nostrils”—he was wheezing himself, as he clapped on another great dollop of rottenness, and stirred it; “I could never have bided it two minutes; though the Lord hathn’t made me too partiklar. Sure us’ll vetch ’un out this time, Maister. Here a’ coom’th, here a’ coom’th. Lookey see!”

Following his point we descried a little man, timidly opening the cottage door, and apparently testing the smells outside, to compare them with those he was quitting. He glanced at the bonfires, and shook his fist wildly; then threw his skirt over his head, and made off, as if he had smelled quite enough of this world.

“Run and get the key, Bill,” my uncle cried, as soon as he could speak for laughing; “lock the door, and bring the key to me. We’ll send for the fire-engine by-and-by, and wash down the front, and then put your wife in, and scrub the whole place out. Beat abroad the fires, men, and throw some earth upon them. That’s what I call something like an ejectment. The old rogue has paid no rent since Lady Day; though he had it dirt cheap at three and six a week, and me to pay the rates and taxes. Come, you shall have a pint of beer all round. I am sure you want something to take the taste out.”

As we went home, to have a good wash, and change our coats, I learned all the meaning of this strong measure, and felt no more pity for the tenant evicted. He had occupied this cottage for some seven years now, and although he lived so close to us and on our land, scarcely any one had exchanged ten words with him. He was of a morose and silent nature, living all alone, though he had some money, and never going out of doors when he could help it. His name was Ben Harker, and throughout the village his nickname was “Old Arkerate;” for when anything was said to him that he could pick a hole in, if it were only a remark about the weather, he would always say—“No. That isn’t arkerate.” It was said that he had lost a considerable fortune, before he came to Sunbury, by some inaccuracy in a will, or title-deeds, and thence he had taken to challenge the correctness of even the most trivial statement. My uncle had been longing for months to recover possession of his own premises; but old Harker took advantage of the obstacles richly provided by English law in such a case, and swore he would never go out without a law-suit. But he had never spent a halfpenny on repairs, though he had it so cheap through his promises; and by his own default he was thus smoked out, and the key was in the landlord’s pocket.

Mrs. Selsey Bill, mother of seventeen living children, was very fat and stumpy—as behoves a giant’s wife—and was blest with a cold in her head just now, which redeemed all her system from prejudice. The greatest philosophers assure us that all things—if there be anything—are good or bad, simply as we colour them in our own minds—that is to say, if we have minds—and to Mrs. Bill Tompkins the stench of that house was as sweet as the perfumes of Araby. She flung up the windows, from the force of habit, and not from “æsthetic preference,” and she scrubbed away with soda, and fuller’s earth, and soft soap, and bristle, and cocoa-fibre. And the next day, as soon as we had finished dinner (which we never left for nightfall, as if it were a burglary), my uncle said, “let us go and see how that place looks, after Old Arkerate has had to cut and run.”

When we got there, fat little Mrs. Tompkins was scrubbing almost as hard as ever. It is quite wrong to talk as if fat people cannot work. Many of them can, and can even carry on, by drawing on their own resources, when a lean person having hollow places down her begins to pant, and has no stuff to fill them out. She drew her breath a little, as she got up from the bucket; but neither of her hands went to her waist, because there was no such place to go to. She had three of the young ones strapped down on the floor of the room she had not yet grappled with; for her husband was of an ingenious mind, and necessity had taught him invention. Mrs. Selsey Bill stood up and faced us; she thought that we were come to say she had not done enough.

“Honourable gents,” she began with the lead, as women love to do, “it don’t look much; and you might think you got the worst of one and ninepence for a day, with the days going on for dusk at five o’clock. But when you has to find your own soap and flannels—”

“I think you have done wonders, Mrs. Tompkins;” my uncle made answer with his pleasant smile. “If I only got the best of every bargain like this, I need never be out of elbows, ma’am. Why the stairs are as white as a scraped horse-radish. May we go up and see the view from the best bedroom? Not if it will upset any of your clever doings. You are the mistress now; and we take your orders.”

With a laugh, which challenged our criticism (for no man, except a sailor, knows the rudiments of scrubbing), she loosed for us a cord which she had tied across, lest any Selsey baby might break bonds, and crawl upstairs; and presently we stood in a pretty little bedroom, with an ample but rickety window, facing southwards. The room was not too lofty, and I might have knocked my hat against the ceiling, if I had not doffed it. But Uncle Corny, being not so tall though wider, had plenty of head-room, and asked what man could want more. And when I looked out of the window, I agreed that a man deserved less, who could not be pleased with this.

For Honeysuckle Cottage stood at the very highest corner of all his pleasant fruit-grounds; and I was much surprised, having never been inside this house before, at the rich view of gardening ever varied, and of fair land and water beyond the fruit-alleys, which shone in the soft spread of sunshine far away. Over the heads of countless trees, and betwixt their coats of many colours, matched by the motherly hands of autumn, the broad reaches of the flooded Thames, with many a bend of sheen and shadow, led the eye to dwell with pleasure, and the heart with wonder. And across the wide water, sloping meadows, streaked and rounded with hedge and breastland, spread a green footing for the dark and distant hills.

“Let me see, to-day is Friday—an unlucky day, Kit, for you to come first to the house. If I had thought of that, we might have waited for to-morrow. But it can’t be helped now; and I am not superstitious. On Monday I’ll have Joe and Jimmy Andrews in, and put all these window-frames and doors to rights. Then we’ll have Tilbury from Hampton, to see to the papering and painting, and all that. By the end of the week, we’ll have it snug and tidy. I have sent all old Harker’s traps after him to-day. They tell me he has taken that tumbledown barn of Osborne’s, over by Halliford. I suppose I may whistle for my back rents. I ought to have distrained upon his sticks; but I laughed so, when I saw how he bolted, that I could not do it. But you’ll have to pay an improved rent, my lad. You can’t have it under five shillings a week, and cheap enough at that, I can tell you.”

“Why, what do you mean?” I asked. “I don’t want a house; and if I did, how am I to keep it up? I haven’t got a sixpence to call my own.”

“Then a pretty fellow you are, to make up to Captain Fairthorn’s daughter! Where did you intend to put her, I should like to know? But we’ll make that all right, between you and me and the bedpost. I have got a little nest-egg of your mother’s money for you, and a heel-tap of your father’s. Didn’t you know why I smoked that old rogue out? Why, that this might be a little home for Kit and Kitty.”