Volume Iii Part 2 (1/2)

Such thoughts as these kept the Baronet wide awake, much to his disgust.

It was the dinner, it was the wine, it was the cigar that kept him awake.

Perhaps they did. But there was something else that did so, though the Baronet did not see it-the accusal of a conscience in which he did not believe, the workings of a divine law which he laughed at.

The next day no one was up early, and no one made his appearance at the breakfast-table save the elderly members of the party. Most of the gentlemen visitors overslept themselves, and the ladies were served in their own rooms. Then came the carriages and the departure of the guests-some to town, some to fas.h.i.+onable health resorts. Business required the presence of the great merchant in London, and he took his daughter with him. Sir Watkin managed to get down in time to see them off, and to promise to follow them next day. The lady left quite content; she knew what was to come, and what would be her reply.

Very dull and gloomy seemed the old house as the company one by one departed. Sir Watkin took up the morning papers-there was nothing in them; the society journals-he was better informed than their writers. No novel could interest him in his then state of mind. He had a headache; he would go for a ride, a sovereign remedy for such maladies as gentlemen in his station suffer from. Accordingly the horse was brought round, and he was in the saddle. He would be back before dark, and did not require his groom, and he trotted gaily away from the ancestral Hall under the ancestral oaks, along the gravelled drive through the park, feeling a little fresher for the effort. He would see his steward, and have a talk with him on business matters.

At the lodge-gate he stopped for a moment to order a general smartening up of that quarter. Alas! on the other side was an objectionable old woman, a friend who had before given him so much trouble. Sir Watkin's disgust was only equalled by his anger. He was in no amiable mood, as the old woman clearly saw. She almost wished she had not come; she felt all of a tremble, as she said, as she asked him kindly to stop and hear what she had got to say. He muttered something very much unlike a blessing on his tormentor. He would have ridden over her had he not stopped his horse, which strongly opposed the idea of stopping. Could that old creature have any claim on him? The idea was ridiculous. And as to listening to her, why, that was quite out of the question for so fine a gentleman. She made an effort to clutch the rein. The high-spirited steed resented the indignity. In the scuffle the Baronet was unseated, and was taken up insensible.

'Sure 'nough he's dead as a stone,' said the ploughman, who had first noticed him.

'He's nothing of the kind,' said the gate-keeper, who was soon on the spot, 'Get on the horse and ride to Sloville for the doctor,' said he to the ploughman, while he and the other servants bore the body to the lodge-gate, where it was laid upon a bed.

The doctor came. 'No bones broken,' said he, after a cursory examination, 'but a severe concussion of the brain. Draw down the blinds; put ice on his forehead; keep him quiet, and he may yet rally.

In the meantime I will telegraph to London for the great surgeon, Sir Henry Johnson. If anybody can save him he can.'

The hours that day in that low lodge moved very slowly. No wife, no mother, no sister was there. The old mother had left that day for Scotland. Only one sister was alive, and she was with her husband in Italy; only the housekeeper from the Hall was there to sit and watch and sigh, for she had known Sir Watkin from a baby, and was as proud of him as it behoved her to be, never believing any of the scandals connected with his name, and, indeed, scarcely hearing of them, for his wilder life was out of her sight and hearing. At home he was the model English gentleman; and then, again, when evil things were said of him, she refused to listen.

'It was not her place,' she said, 'to hear bad spoken of any of the family of which she and hers generations before had been retainers.'

About mid-day came a telegram to say that the great Sir Henry was coming down, and that there was to be a carriage at the railway-station to meet him. In a couple of hours after came Sir Henry himself-a calm, dignified man of science, who lived in a world of which science is G.o.d, and was interested in humanity as a subject of dissection or operation. Apart from that, he had a poor opinion of human nature.

'It is a bad case-very bad,' said he to the country doctor, who had explained to him all the particulars of the accident. 'It is a very bad case, but I think science is equal to the emergency. I suppose we must have an operation. I have brought my a.s.sistant with me, and my case of instruments. We'd better begin at once.' Turning to look at the insensible patient, the great Sir Henry exclaimed: 'I have come down for nothing; Sir Watkin is dead!'

CHAPTER XXIII THE FUNERAL.

'Worldly people,' wrote one of our greatest novelists, 'never look so worldly as at a funeral.' The truth of this was very apparent at the funeral of the deceased Baronet. There was the usual parade of outward grief at the churchyard, and in the town all the blinds were drawn down and the shops shut-with the exception of those set apart for the sale of beer and wine and spirits, which were rather better patronized than usual. It is said grief makes men thirsty. That certainly was the case at Sloville, for the usual topers of the place had been increased in number by the addition of numerous thirsty souls from all the adjacent country, drawn together not so much by grief as by a pardonable curiosity.

Heavily tolled the bell of the old-fas.h.i.+oned church, in the gloomy vaults of which slept the family ancestors, whose varied virtues were recorded in marble in all parts of the building, and whose rotting carcases poisoned the atmosphere of the place, and had done so for many generations.

When are we going to reform this and to cremate our dead, so that we may go to church in safety and with no fear of detriment to our physical well-being? The ancients burnt their dead. Is there any earthly reason why we moderns should not do the same? I know none, except a stupid prejudice unworthy of a generation that loves to think itself enlightened, and that flatters itself it is wiser than any that has gone before. If it is to be talked of after death, surely the urn can be as fitting a remembrance of the departed as the costly and c.u.mbrous marble monument, with its deception and untruth. 'Five languages,' writes Sir Thomas Brown, of Norwich, 'secured not the epitaph of Gordia.n.u.s. The man of G.o.d lives longer without a tomb than any by one visibly interred by angels, and adjudged to obscurity, though not without some marks directing human decency. Enoch and Elias, without either tomb or burial, in an anomalous state of being, are the great examples of perpetuity in their long and living memory, in strict account being still on this side death and having a late part yet to act upon the stage of earth.' In vain is all earthly vanity, but there is no vanity so vain as that connected with the grave. 'Yet man is a n.o.ble animal,' as the same writer remarks, 'splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave!'

And thus it was at the funeral of the deceased Baronet. All the clergy round had come to do him honour, and all the county families had come to put in an appearance-or, at any rate, sent their empty carriages to follow in the procession, which is supposed to be the same as attending one's self. A fas.h.i.+onable undertaker from town had been retained for the occasion, and never did men wear so mournful an expression as he and his many men. I had almost written 'merry' men, for none were merrier when the dismal farce was over and they were back to town-refreshed by stimulants, with which they had been plentifully supplied.

There was a great crowd in the church-a great crowd in the churchyard, and a great crowd all the way from the Hall. The heir, the deceased's brother, naturally came in for a good deal of criticism, and he was quite equal to the occasion-apparently mourning for the deceased as if he had loved him as much as everyone was aware he had done the reverse.

Relatives from all parts were there, hoping against hope that they might find their names put down for something in the will. The tenantry made a decent show, for to many of them the deceased was a man after their own hearts-fond of sport, of racing, of good cheer, of fast living. All the world loves a gay spendthrift more than a sober and careful man who tries to live within his means and to save a little money. The enlightened British workman has, as a rule, an intense hatred for the capitalist, who is, after all, his best friend.

The peasantry were there in great force, glad to have a show of any kind to relieve the dull monotony of their lives-though feeling that it would make little difference to them who reigned at the Hall, and expecting little: as it had gone forth that the new Baronet was somewhat of a skinflint, and that little was to be expected from the mother and daughters who were in future to take up their residence at the old Hall.

It is needless to add that the tradesmen of the town were present in great numbers. They knew on which side their bread was b.u.t.tered.

Tradesmen generally do. At any rate there was show enough and funereal pomp to give occasion for the county paper of the following Sat.u.r.day to devote considerable s.p.a.ce to the affair, which-so the reporter wrote, with a touch of imagination which did him credit-had saddened the county and made everyone deplore the sudden and untimely decease of one of its most distinguished men.

The deceased Baronet had been the great man of the district-a leading magistrate, with power to ameliorate the condition of the poor-a power that he had never used. The workhouse was old and unhealthy, yet he had opposed every effort to build a better one; the relieving-officers were drunkards, and generally unable to keep their accounts correctly. The selection of such officers was, in fact, a job in order to make provision for some aged, feeble, drunken bankrupt, a boon companion of the farmers; nor were the medical officers much better. The outdoor paupers were victims of the grossest abuses. The aged were set to eke out their miserable existence by breaking stones on the road, and thus these poor creatures, half-clad, ill-fed, and suffering from rheumatism, had to work on the bleak roadside, exposed to the inclemency of the weather, till they ceased to be a parochial charge at all; and, as a rule, their homes were unfit for human habitation. The vagrants suffered from the grossest ill-usage. One quarter of the workhouse, ill or scarcely provided with bedding accommodation, was appropriated to a cla.s.s consisting of honest seekers for work, tramps, vagabonds, and thieves of all ages, huddled indiscriminately together, using or listening to the vilest language, initiated in the mysteries of vice and crime, quarrelling and fighting.

There were no vagrant wards, and any attempt to introduce them was strenuously resisted, and thus, in spite of the Reformed Poor Law, as it was called, the state of the poor grew more wretched every day.

Sir Watkin knew all this. A word from him would have inaugurated a better state of things, but he never spoke that word. He was far too busy in his pursuit of pleasure to think of the poor on his estate, or to plead their cause, and the guardians were content to let things slide.

Dr. Chalmers maintained that the one main drawback to the effectual working of the new Poor Law would be the defective attendance at the boards of the landlords, and, as far as Sloville was concerned, the doctor was right. Had the deceased Baronet discharged the duties of his position, and concerned himself about the welfare of the poor, he might have been a blessing to the district. As it was, he was very much the reverse. In his time, as in that of the old Hebrew Psalmist, it might truly be said: 'The wicked in his pride doth persecute the poor.'