CHAPTER XXVI.
RUTS
There are few things more interesting than ruts; regarded at the proper time, and in the proper manner. The artists, who show us so many things unheeded by our duller selves, have dwelled on this subject minutely, and shown their appreciation of a few good ruts. But they are a little inclined sometimes to mark them too distinctly, scarcely making due allowance for the vast diversity of wheels, as well as their many caprices of wagging, according to the state of their washers, the tug of the horse, and their own wearing, and a host of other things. Each rut moreover has a voice of its own; not only in its first formation, but at every period of depression in the muggy weather, or rough rebellion in a fine black frost, and above all other times in the loose insurrection of a thaw. There always is a bit of something hard and something soft in it; jags that contradict all things with a jerk; and deep subsidence, soft as flattery.
There scarcely could be a finer sample of ruts than was afforded by a narrow lane, or timber-track, at the extreme north-western outskirt of Stow Forest. Everything here was favourable to the very finest growth of ruts. The road had once been made, which is a necessary foundation for any masterpiece of rut-work; it then had been left to maintain itself, which encourages wholesome development. Another great advantage was that the hard uniformity of straight lines had no chance here of prevailing. For though the course was not so crooked, as in some lanes it may have been, neither was there hedge, or rail, or other mean constriction; yet some fine old trees insisted now and then, from either side, upon their own grand right of way, and stretched great arms that would sweep any driver, or horseman, backward from his seat, unless he steered so as to double them.
Now therefore to one of these corners came, from out the thicket of underwood, a stout man with a crafty slouch, and a wary and suspicious glance. He had thrown a sack over his long white smock, whether to save it from brambles, or to cover its glare in the shady wood; for his general aspect was that of a man who likes to see all things, but not to be seen. And now as he stooped to examine the ruts at a point where they clearly defined themselves, either from habit, or for special reason, he kept as far back by the briary ditch as he could without loss of near insight.
This man, being a member of the great Cripps race – whether worthy, or not, of that staunch lineal excellence – had an hereditary perception of the right way to examine a rut. It would have been easy enough, perhaps, in a lane of little traffic, to judge whether anything lately had passed, with the weather and ground as usual. But to-day – the day after what has been told of – both weather and ground had just taken a turn, as abrupt as if both were feminine. The smile of soft spring was changed into a frown, and the glad young buoyancy of the earth into a stiff sort of feeling, not frozen or crisp, but as happens to a man when a shiver of ague vibrates through a genial perspiration. To put it more clearly, the wind had chopped round to the east, and was blowing keenly – a masterful, strongly pronounced, and busily energetic east wind, as superior to hypocrisy as it was to all claims of mercy. At the sound and the feel of its vehement sweep, surprise and alarm ran through the wood; and the nestling-places of the sun ruffled up like a hen that calls her chicks to her. The foremost of the buds of the tall trees shook; not as they shake to a west wind, but with a sense of standing naked; the twigs that carried them flattened upwards, having lost all pleasure; the branches, instead of bowing kindly (as they do to any other wind), also went upward, with a stiff cold back, and a hatred at being treated so. Many and many a little leaf, still snug in its own overcoat, shrunk back, and preferred to defer all the joys of the sky, if this were a sample of them. And many and many a big leaf (thrust, without any voice of its own, on the world) had no chance of sighing yet, but whistled on the wind, and felt it piping through its fluted heart; and knowing what a liver-coloured selvage must come round its green, bewailed the hour that coaxed it forth from the notched, and tattered, and cast-off frizzle, dancing by this time the wind knows where.
Because the east wind does what no other wind of the welkin ever does. It does not come from the good sky downward, bringing higher breath to us; nor even on the level of the ancient things, spreading average movement. This alone of all winds strikes from the face of the good earth upward, sweeping the blush from the skin of the land, and wrinkling all who live thereon. That is the time when the very best man finds little to rejoice in; unless it be a fire of seasoned logs, or his own contrariety; the fur of all animals (being their temper) moves away and crawls on them; and even bland dogs and sweet horses feel each several hair at issue with their well-brushed conscience.
All of that may be true; and yet there may be so many exceptions. At any rate, Master Leviticus Cripps looked none the worse for the whole of it. His cheeks were of richly varied fibre, like a new-shelled kidney-bean; his mouth (of a very considerable size) looked comfortable and not hungry; and all around him there was an influence tending to intimate that he had dined.
For that he did not care as he should. He was not a man who allowed his dinner to modify his character. The best streaky bacon and three new-laid eggs had nurtured and manured his outer man, but failed to improve him inwardly. Even the expression of his face was very slightly mollified by a first-rate meal; though some of the corners looked lubricated.
"Hath a been by again, or hath a not?" whispered Tickuss to himself, as he stared at a tangled web of ruts, and blessed the east wind for confounding of them, so that a wheel could not swear to its own. The east wind answered with a scolding dash, that cast his sack over his head, and shook out his white smock, scattering over the view, like a jack-towel on the washing-line. Acknowledging this salutation with a curse, Leviticus gathered his sack more tightly, and bending one long leg before him, stealthily peered awry at the wheel-tracks. This was the way to discover whatever had happened last among them, instead of looking across or along them, where the nicer shades would fail.
At first he could make but little of it. The east wind, whirling last year's leaves from the couches where the west had piled them, and parching the flakes of the mud (as if exposed upon a scraper), had made it a hard thing to settle the date of the transit even of a timber dray. One of these had passed not long ago, with a great trunk swinging and swagging on the road, and slurring the scollops of the horse-track.
Therefore Tickuss, for some time, looked less wise than usual, and scratched his head. The brain replied, as it generally does, to this soft local stimulant, so briskly in fact that the master soon was able to clap both his hands into their natural home – the pockets of his breeches – and thus to survey the scene, and grin.
"Did 'ee think to do me, then, old brother Zak? Now did 'ee, did 'ee, did 'ee? Ah, I were aborn afore you, Zak; or if I were not, it were mother's mistake. Go along wi 'ee, Zak, go along wi' 'ee! Go home to thy cat, and thy little kitten, Etty."
He knew, by the track, that his brother had passed a good while ago, or he would not have dared to speak in this rebellious vein. And what he said next was even more disloyal.
"Danged if I ain't a gude mind to hornstring that old hosebird of a Dobbin; ay, and I wull too, if Zak cometh prowling round my place, like this. If a didn't mane no trachery, why dothn't a come in, and call for a horn of ale and a bite of cold bakkon. Ho, ho, we've a pretty well stopped him of that, though. No Master Zak now; go thine own ways. Keep thyzell to thyzell's the law of the land, to my thinking."
Now a year, or even six months ago, Leviticus Cripps would sooner have lost a score of pigs than make such a speech, inhospitable, unnatural, unbrotherly, and violently un-Crippsian. Nothing but his own bad conscience (as he fell more and more away from honour and due esteem for Beckley) could have suggested to him such a low and crooked view of Zacchary. The Carrier was not, in any measure, spying or prowling, or even watching. Such courses were out of his track altogether. Rather would he have come with a fist, if the family honour demanded it; and therewith have converted his brother's olfactory organ into something loftier, as the medium of a sense of honesty.
In bare point of fact the family honour demanded this vindication. But the need had not as yet been conveyed to the knowledge of the executive power. Zacchary had no suspicion at present of his brother's fearful lapse. And the only thing that brought him down that lane, was another stroke of business in the washing line. Squire Corser had married a new sort of wife with a tendency towards the nobility; wherefore a monthly wash was out of keeping with her loftier views, though she had a fine kitchen-garden; and she cried, till the Squire put the whole of it out, and sent it every week to Beckley. Hence a new duty for Dobbin arose, which he faced with his usual patience, simply reserving his right to travel at the pace he considered expedient, and to have a stronger and deeper bottom stitched to his old nose-bag.
The first time the Carrier traversed that road, fraternal duty impelled him to make all proper inquiries concerning the health of his brother, and the character of his tap. But though the reply upon both these points was favourable and pleasing, Zacchary met with so queer a reception, that dignity and self-respect compelled him to vow that for many a journey he would pass with a dry mouth, rather than turn in. Of all the nephews and nieces, who loved to make him their own carrier, by sitting astride perhaps two on each leg, and one on each oölitic vamp, and shouting "Gee, gee," till he panted worse than Dobbin obese with young saintfoin – likewise who always jumped up in his cart, and laid hold of the reins and the whip even, and wore out the patience of any other horse except the horse before them – of all these delightful young pests, not one was now permitted to come near him. And not only that, which alone was very strange, but even Susannah, the wife of Leviticus, and sister-in-law of Zacchary, evidently had upon her tongue laid a dumb weight of responsibility. Quite as if Zak were an interloper, or an inquisitive stranger, thrusting a keen but unjustified nose into things that were better without it. Susannah was always a very good woman, and used to look up to Zacchary, because her father was a basket-maker; and even now she said no harm; but still there was something about her, when she muttered that she must go and wash the potatoes, timid, and cold, and unhearty-like.
The Carrier made up his mind that they all were in trouble about their mortgage again; just as they were about six months back, when the land was likely to be lost to them. And finding it not a desirable thing to be called upon to contribute, he jogged well away from all such tactics, with his pockets buttoned. Not that he would have grudged any good turn to any one of his family; but that his strong common sense allowed him no faith in a liar. And for many years he had known that Tickuss was the liar of the family.
Leviticus took quite a different view of the whole of this proceeding. He was under no terror about his mortgage, for reasons as yet quite private; and his thick shallow cunning, like an underground gutter, was full of its own rats only. He was certain that Zak had suspected him, in spite of the care he had taken to keep his wife and children away from him; and believing this, he was certain also that Zak was playing the spy on him.
While he was meditating thus in his slow and turbid mind, and turning away from the corner of the road towards his beloved pig-lairs, the rattle of the sharp east wind was laden with a softer and heavier sound – the hoofs of a horse upon sod and mud. Tickuss, with two or three long strides, got behind a crooked tree, so as to hide or exhibit himself, according to what should come to pass.
What came to pass was a horse in the first place, of good family and good feed; and on his back a man who shared in at least the latter excellence. These two were not coming by the forest lane, but along a quiet narrow track, which cut off many of its corners. To judge of the two which looked the more honest, would have required another horse in council with another man. At sight of this arrival Tickuss came forth, and scraped humbly.
"Don't stand there, like a monkey at a fair!" cried Mr. Sharp – for he it was, and no mistake about him. "Am I to come through the brambles to you? Can't you come up, like a man with his wits, where this beastly wind doesn't blow so hard? Who can hear chaw-bacon talk off there?"
Leviticus Cripps made a vast lot of gestures, commending the value of caution, and pointing to the lane half a hundred yards off, as if it contained a whole band of brigands. Mr. Sharp was not a patient man, and he knew that there was no danger. Therefore he swore pretty freely, until the abject lord of swine restored him to a pleasant humour by a pitiful tale of Black George's trouble on the previous afternoon.
"Catching it? Ay, and no mistake!" Tickuss Cripps repeated; "the dust from his jacket – oh Lor', oh Lor! I had followed on softly to see the fun, without Missy knowing I were near, of course; and may I never – if I didn't think a would a'most have killed un! Ho, ho! it'll be a good round week, I reckon, afore Jarge stitcheth up a ferret's mouth again. He took me in terrible, that very morning; he were worse took in hiszell afore the arternoon was out. Praise the Lard for all his goodness, sir."
"Well, well. It shall be made up to him. But of course you did not let him, or any one else, get any idea who the lady is."
"Governor, no man hath any sense of that," Leviticus answered, with one finger on his nose; "save and excep' the old lady to the cottage, and you and I, and you knows whether there be any other."
"Leviticus Cripps, no lies to me! Of course your own wife has got the whole thing out of you."
"Her!" replied Tickuss, with a high contempt, for which he should have had his ears boxed. "No, no, master, a would have been all over Hoxford months ago, if her had knowed ort of it. Her knoweth of course there be zumbody up to cottage with old lady; but her hath zucked in the American story, the same as everybody else have. Who would ever drame of our old Squire's daughter, when the whole world hath killed and buried her? But none the less for that I kep her, and the children, out of the way of our Zak, I did. Um might go talking on the volk up to cottage; and Zak would be for goin' up with one of his cards parraventur. Lor', how old Zak's eyes would come out of his head! The old bat-fowl! – a would crack my zides to see un!"
"You had better keep your fat sides sound and quiet," Mr. Sharp answered sternly; for the slow wits of Tickuss, being tickled by that rare thing, an imagination, the result was of course a guffaw whose breadth was exceeded only by its length.
"Oh Lor', oh Lor' – to see the old bat-fowl with the eyes comin' out of the head of un! I'll be danged if I shouldn't choke! – oh Lor'!"
Mr. Sharp saw that Tickuss, being once set off, might be trusted to go on for at least half an hour, with minute-guns of cackling, loutish, self-glorifying cachinnation, as amenable to reason as a hiccough is. The lawyer's time was too precious to waste thus, so having learned all that he cared to learn, and hearing wheels in the forest lane, he turned back along the narrow covert-ride; and he thought within himself, for he never mused aloud – "My bold stroke bids fair to be a great success. Nobody dreams that the girl is here. She herself believes every word that she is told. Kit is over head and ears; and she will be the same with him, after that fine rescue. Our only marplot has been laid by the heels at the very nick of time. We have only to manage Kit himself – who is a most confounded sort. The luck is with me, the luck is with me; and none shall be the wiser, Only give me one month more."
CHAPTER XXVII.
RATS
Meanwhile at Shotover Grange, as well as at poor old Beckley Barton, trouble was prevailing and the usual style of things upset. Russel Overshute, though not beloved by everybody (because of his strong will and words), was at any rate thought much of, and would be sadly missed by all. All the women of the household made an idol of him. He spoke so kindly, and said "thank you," when many men would have grunted; and he did not seem to be aware of any padlocked bar of humanity betwixt him and his "inferiors." At the same time he took no liberty any more than he invited it; and his fine appearance and strength of readiness made him look the master.
The men, on the other hand, were not sure of their sorrow to see less of him. He had always kept a keen eye upon them, as the master of a large house ought to do; and he always bore in mind the great truth that men on the whole are much lazier than women. Still even the worst man about the place, while he freely took advantage of the present sweet immunity, would have been sorry to hear of a thing which might drive him to seek for another place.
But what were all these, even all put together, in the weight of their feelings, to compare with the mother of young Overshute? Many might cry, but none would mourn; nobody could have any right to mourn, except herself, his mother. This was her son, and her only hope. If it pleased the Lord to rob her of him, He might as well take her soon afterwards, without any more to do.
This middle-aged lady was not pious, and made no pretence to be so. Her opinion was that the Lord awarded things according to what people do, and left them at liberty to carry on, without any great interference. She knew that she always had been superfluously able to manage her own affairs; and to hear weak ladies going on and on about the will of the Lord, and so forth, sometimes was a trial to her manners and hospitality. In this terrible illness of her son, she had plenty of self-command, but very little resignation. With stern activity and self-devotion, she watched him by day and by night so jealously, that the nurses took offence and, fearing contagion, kept their distance, though they drew their wages.
This was the time to show what stuff both men and women were made of. Fair-weather visitors, and delightful gossips, and the most devoted friends, stood far aloof from the tainted gale, and fumigated their letters. The best of them sent their grooms to the lodge, with orders to be very careful, and to be sure to use tobacco during the moment of colloquy. Others had so much faith that everything would be ordered for the best, that they went to the seaside at once, to be delivered from presumption. Many saw a visitation for some secret sin, that otherwise might have festered inwardly and destroyed the immortal part. Of course they would not even hint that he could have murdered Grace Oglander; nothing was further from their thoughts; the idea was much too terrible. Still there were many things that long had called for explanation – and none had been afforded.
Leaving these to go their way, a few kind souls came fluttering to the house of pestilence and death. Two housemaids, and the boy who cleaned the servant's shoes, had been struck down, and never rose again, except with very cautious liftings into their last narrow cells. The disease had spread from their master; and their constitutions were not like his. Also the senior footman and the under-cook, were in their beds; but the people who had their work to do believed them to be only shamming.
The master, however, still fought on, without any knowledge of the conflict. His mind was beyond all the guidance of will, and afar from its wonted subjects. It roved among clouds that had long blown away; nebules of logic, dialectic fogs, and thunderstorms of enthymeme, the pelting of soritic hail, and all the other perturbed condition of undergraduate weather. In these things, unlike his friend Hardenow, he had never taken delight, and now they rose up to avenge themselves. At other times the poor fellow lay in depths of deepest lethargy, voiceless, motionless, and almost breathless. None but his mother would believe sometimes that he was not downright dead and gone.
Of course Mrs. Overshute had called in the best advice to be had from the whole of the great profession of medicine. The roughness of the Abernethy school was still in vogue with country doctors; as even now some of it may be found in a craft which ought to be gentle in proportion to its helplessness. With timid people this roughness goes a long way towards creating faith, and makes them try to get better for fear of being insulted about it. In London however this Centauric school of medicine had not thriven, when the rude Nessus could not heal himself. A soft and soothing and genial race of Æsculapians arose; the "vis medicatrix naturæ" was exalted and fed with calves' feet; and the hand of velvet and the tongue of silver commended and sweetened the pill of bread.
At the head of this pleasing and amiable band (who seldom either killed or cured) was the famous Sir Anthony Thistledown. This was the great physician who had been invoked from London – to the strong disgust of Splinters, then the foremost light at Oxford – when Squire Oglander was seized with his very serious illness. And now Sir Anthony did his best, with the aid of the reconciled Splinters, to soothe away death from the weary couch of the last of the race of Overshute.
"A pretty story I've aheerd in Oxford to-day; make me shamed, it doth," said Zacchary Cripps to his sister Etty, while he smoked his contemplative pipe by the fire of Stow logs, one cold and windy April evening. "What do you think they've abeen and doed?"
"Who, and where, Zak? How can I tell?" Esther was busy, trimming three rashers, before she put them into the frying-pan. "I really do believe you expect me to know everybody that comes to your thoughts, quite as if it was my own mind."
"Well, so you ought," said the Carrier. "The women nowadays are so sharp, no man can have his own mind to his self. But anyhow you ought to know that I mean up to poor Worship Overshute's. Ah, a fine young gentleman as ever lived. Seemeth to be no more than last night as he sat in that there chair and said the queerest thing as ever were said by a Justice of the county bench."
"What do you mean, Zak? I never heard him say anything but was kind and proper, and a credit to him."
"Might be proper, or might not. But anyhow 'twere impossible. Did a tell me, or did a not, he would try to go a-poaching? When folk begins to talk like that, 'tis a sign of the ill come over them. Ah's me, 'tis little he'll ever do of poaching, or shutting, or riding to hounds, or tasting again of my best bottle! Bad enough job it be about old Squire, but he be an old man in a way of speaking. Well, the Lord He knoweth best, and us be all in the hollow of His hand. But he were a fine young fellow, as fine a young fellow as ever I see; and not a bit of pride about un!"
Sadly reflecting, the Carrier stopped his pipe with a twig from the fireplace, and gazed at the soot, because his eyes were bright.
"But what were you going to tell me?" asked Etty, bringing her brother back to his subject, as she often was obliged to do.
"Railly, I be almost ashamed to tell 'ee. For such a thing to come to pass in our own county, and a'most the same parish, and only two turnpike gates atween. What do 'ee think of every soul in that there house running right away, wi'out no notice, nor so much as 'good-bye!' One and all on 'em, one and all; so I were told by a truthful man. And the poor old leddy with her dying son, and not a single blessed woman for to make the pap!"
"I never can believe that they would be such cowards," Esther answered as she left her work and came to look at Zacchary. "Men might, but women never, I should hope. And such a kind good house it is! Oh, Zak, it must be a wicked story!"
"It is true enough, Etty, and too true. As I was a-coming home I seed five on 'em standing all together under the elms by Magdalen College. Their friends would not take them in, I was told, and nobody wouldn't go nigh 'em. Perhaps they were sorry they had doed it then."
"The wretches! They ought to sleep out in the rain, without even a pigsty for shelter! Now, Zak, I never do anything without you; but to Shotover Grange I go to-night, unless you bar the door on me; and if you do I will get out of window!"
"Esther, I never heerd tell of such a thing. If you was under a duty, well and good; but to fly into the face of the Lord like that, without no call upon you – "
"There is a call upon me!" she answered, flushing with calm resolution; "it is the Lord that calls me, Zak, and He will send me back again. Now you shall have your supper, while you think it over quietly. I will not go without your leave, brother; but I am sure you will give it when you come to think."
The Carrier, while he munched his bacon, and drank his quart of home-brewed ale, was, in his quiet mind, more troubled than he had ever been before, or, at any rate, since he used to pass the tent of young Cinnaminta. That was the one great romance of his life, and since he had quelled it with his sturdy strength, and looked round the world as usual, scarcely any trouble worse than pence and halfpence had been on him. From week to week, and year to year, he had worked a cheerful road of life, breathing the fine air, looking at the sights, feeling as little as need be felt the influence of nature, making new friends all along his beat, even quicker than the old ones went their way, carrying on a very decent trade, highly respecting the powers that be, and highly respected by them. But now he found suddenly brought before him a matter for consideration, which, in his ordinary state of mind, would have circulated for a fortnight. Precipitance of mind to him was worse than driving down a quarry; his practice had always been, and now it was become his habit, to turn every question inside out and upside down, and across and across, and finger every seam of it (as if he were buying a secondhand sack) ere ever he began to trust his weight to any side of it. To do all this required some hours with a mind so unelectric, and even after that he liked to have a good night's sleep, and find the core of his resolve set hard in the morning.
For this due process there was now no time. He dared not even to begin it, knowing that it could not be wrought out; therefore he betook himself to a plan which once before had served him well. After groping in the bottom of a sacred pocket (where sample-beans and scarlet runners got into the loops of keys, and bits of whipcord were wound tightly round old turnpike tickets, and a little shoemaker's awl in a cork kept company with a shoe-pick), Master Cripps with his blunt-headed fingers got hold of a crooked sixpence. The bend alone would have only conferred a simple charm upon it, but when to the bend there was added a hole, that sixpence became Delphic. Cripps had consulted it once before when a quick-tempered farmer hurried him concerning the purchase of a rick of hay. The Carrier had no superstition, but he greatly abounded with gratitude; and, having made a great hit about that rick, the least he could do to the sixpence was to consult it again under similar hurry.
He said to himself, "Now the Lord send me right. If you comes out heads, little Etty shall go; if you comes out tails, I shall take it for a sign that we ought to turn tails in this here job."
He said no more, but with great extrication worked his oracular sixpence up through a rattle of obstructions. Like the lots cast in a steep-headed man's helmet, up came the sixpence reluctantly.
"I have a got 'ee. Now, what dost thou say?" cried Cripps, with the triumph of an obstinate man. "Never a lie hast thou told me yet. Spake up, little fellow." Being thus adjured, the crooked sixpence, in gratitude for much friction, gleamed softly in the firelight; but even the Carrier, keen as his eyes were, could not make out head or tail. "Vetch me a can'le and the looking-glass," he called out to Esther; the looking-glass being a large old lens, which had been left behind by Hardenow. Esther brought both in about half a minute; and Cripps, with the little coin sternly sitting as flatly in his palm as its form allowed, began to examine it carefully. With one eye shut, as if firing a gun, he tried the lens at every distance from a foot to half an inch, shifting the candle about until some of his frizzly hair took fire, and with this assistance he exclaimed at last, "Heads, child! – heads it is! Thou shalt go; the will of the Lord ordaineth it! Plaize the Lord to send thee back safe and sound as now thou goest! None on us, to my knowledge, has done aught to deserve to be punished for."