COLIN CLINK.

Affords a capital illustration of the way of the world. For, whereas knaves and fools not unusually take precedence of better men, so this chapter, though placed at the head of a long regiment, is yet inferior to any one that comes after.

THE famous John Bunyan, or Bunion,—for the true orthography of this renowned name is much doubted amongst the learned of the present age,—has laid it down as an axiom in that most glorious of all Progresses, the Pilgrim's Progress, that “He that is down, needs fear no fall.” And who, in good truth, will undertake to dispute the good pilgrim's remark? Since nothing can be more clear to an eye as philosophic as was that of Mr. Bunyan, that if a man be seated on the ground, he most certainly is not in much danger of slipping through his chair; or that, being already at the bottom of the water, he “needs fear no fall” from the yard-arm.

On this assurance, I take courage for Colin Clink. Down in the world with respect to its goods, down in society, down in the estimation of his own father and mother, and down in that which our modern political ragamuffins are pleased to term the “accident” of birth, he assuredly had not the least occasion for a single instant to trouble his mind with fears of falling any lower.

From the very earliest, therefore, he had, and could have, but one prospect before him, and that was, the prospect of rising above his first condition. To be sure, like Bruce's spider, he afterwards fell sometimes; but then he reflected that rising and falling, like standing up and sitting down, constitute a portion of the lot of every man's life.

It is currently related amongst the good folks of the country-side wherein our hero first saw the light, that while three or four officious neighbourly women were stealing noiselessly about the room, attending to the wants of the sick woman, and while the accoucheur of the parish was inly congratulating himself on having introduced his round five-thousandth child to the troublesome pleasures of this world, young Colin turned from the arms of the nurse who held him, and, as though even then conscious of the obligation conferred upon him by his admission to the stage of life, stretched out his hand towards the astonished surgeon, and in a very audible voice exclaimed, “Thank you, doctor—thank you!”

I do not vouch for the truth of this anecdote; but this I do say,—whether or not he had anything to be thankful for will be seen, much as he himself saw it, during the course of this his own true history.

That he was lucky in opening his eyes, even though in an humble cottage, amidst the scenes that nature spread around him, is certain enough. To be born poor as the spirit of poverty herself, is sufficiently bad; but far worse is it to be thus born in the bottom of some noisome alley of a vast town, where a single ray of sunlight never falls, nor a glimpse of the sky itself is ever caught, beyond what may be afforded by that small dusky section of it which seems to lie like a dirty ceiling on the chimney-tops, and even then cannot be seen, unless (to speak like a geometrician) by raising the face to a horizontal position and the eyes perpendicularly. Fresh air, fields, rivers, clouds, and sunshine, redeem half the miseries of want, and make a happy joyful being of him who, in any other sense, cannot call one single atom of the world his own.

Colin Clink was a native of the village of Bramleigh, about twenty miles west of that city of law and divinity, of sermons and proctors' parchment, the silent city of York.

Some time previous to his birth, his mother had taken a fancy, suggested, very probably, by the powerful pleading of a weak pocket, or, with equal probability, by something else to the full as argumentative, to reside in a small cottage, (as rural landowners are in the habit of terming such residences, though they are known to everybody else as hovels,) altogether by herself; if I except a little girl, of some five or six years of age, who accompanied her in the capacity of embryo housemaid, gruel-maker, and, when strong enough, of nurse to the expected “little stranger.”

For the discharge of the more important and pressing duties incident to her situation, she depended upon one or two of those permanently unemployed old crones, usually to be found in country places, who pass the greater portion of their time in “preserving” themselves, like red herrings or hung beef, over the idle smoke of their own scanty fires, and who, as they are always waiting chances, may be had by asking for at any moment. Their minimum of wages depended upon a small sum of money derived by Mistress Clink, the mother of our hero, from a source which, as she then followed no particular employment, we are compelled to pronounce obscure.

The sagacious reader may perhaps, in the height of his wisdom, marvel how so young a child as one of five or six years of age should be introduced to his notice in the capacity above-mentioned; but the practice is common enough, and may be accounted for, in the way of cause and effect, upon the most modern philosophical principles. Thus:—Great states require great taxes to support them; great taxes produce political extravagance; political extravagance enforces domestic economy; and domestic economy in the lowest class, where misery would seem almost rudely to sever the most endearing ties, now-a-days, demands that every pair of hands, however small, shall labour for the milk that supports them; and every little heart, however light, shall be filled with the pale cares and yearning anxieties which naturally belong only to mature age.

Of such as these was Mistress Clink's diminutive housemaid, Fanny Woodruff.

Brought up amidst hardships from the first day of her existence, through the agency either of the rod, the heavier stick, or of keener hunger, during at least twelve hours out of every twenty-four that passed over her head; she presented, at five years of age, the miniature picture, painted in white and yellow,—for all the carnation had fled from Nature's palette when she drew this mere sketch of incipient woman,—she presented, I repeat, the miniature picture, not of what childhood is, a bright and joyful outburst of fresh life into a new world of strange attractive things—not of that restless inquiring existence, curious after every created object, and happy amidst them all; but of a little, pale, solemn thing, looking as though it had suddenly fallen, heart-checked, upon a world of evil—as though its eyes had looked only upon discouragement, and its hands been stretched in love, only to be repulsed with indifference or with hatred. The picture of a little baby soul, prematurely forced upon the grown-up anxieties of the world, and made almost a woman in demeanour, before she knew half the attractive actions of a child.

Notwithstanding all this, and in spite of the unnatural care-worn expression of her little melancholy countenance, Fanny's features retained something of that indefinite quality commonly termed “interesting.” Two black eyes, which showed nothing but black between the lids, looked openly but fearfully from beneath the arched browless bones of the forehead, and, with an irrepressible questioning in the face of the spectator, seemed ever to be asking doubtfully, whether there was or was not such a creature as a friend in the world; but her sunken cheeks and wasted arms belied the happy age of childhood, and spoke only of hard usage and oft-continued suffering.

On the eventful day that gave young Master Colin Clink to the world, and about twelve hours previous to the time at which he should have made his actual appearance, Mistress Clink, his mother, was lying upon a bed in an inner ground-floor room of her cottage, think-ing—if the troubled and confused ideas that filled her brain might be termed thinking—upon her coming trials; while little Fanny, taking temporary advantage of the illness of her mistress, and relaxing, in a moment of happy forgetfulness, again into a child, was sitting upon the ground near the door, and noiselessly amusing herself by weighing in a halfpenny pair of tin scales the sand which had been strown upon the floor by way of carpet, when the abrupt entrance of some one at the outer door, though unheard by the sick woman amidst her half-dreaming reveries, so startled the little offender on the ground, that, in her haste to scramble on to her feet, and recover all the solemn proprieties and demure looks which, in a returning moment of infantile nature, had been cast aside, she upset the last imaginary pound of sand-made sugar that had been heaped up on a stool beside her, and at the same time chanced to strike her head against the under side of the little round table which stood at hand, whereby a bottle of physic was tossed uninjured on to the bed, and a spoon precipitated to the floor. Her countenance instantly changed to an expression which told that the crime was of too black a dye to be forgiven. But patience without tears, and endurance without complaint, were also as visible; virtues which hard necessity had instilled into her bosom long before.

Ill as Mistress Clink may readily be presumed to have been, she started half up in bed, leaning with her elbow upon the pillow, her countenance, pale and ghastly with sickness, rendered still more pale and horrible with anger, and gasping for words, which even then came faint in sound though strong in bitterness, she began to rate the child vehemently for her accidental disaster.

In another instant a female servant of the squire of the parish stood by the bedside.

Mistress Clink fell back upon the pillow, while her face for a moment blushed scarlet, and then became again as white as ashes.

“Don't rate the poor child, if you please, ma'am,” said the woman. “Poor thing! it's only a bag of bones at best.”

“Oh, I'm ill!” sighed Mistress Clink.

“Ay, dear! you do look ill,” responded the woman. “I 'll run and fetch the doctor; but, if you please, ma'am, master has sent this little basket of things for you.”

“What things?” asked the sick woman, slightly rallying, and in an eager voice.

“Linen, ma'am,” observed the servant, at the same time opening the lid of the basket.

“How very good of him!” whispered Fanny.

“Yes, child,” replied the serving woman; “he's always very kind to poor women.”

The invalid was aroused; she almost raised herself again upon her hand.

“Very kind, is he? Yes, yes—say so, say so. But”—and she hesitated, and passed her hand across her forehead, as though mentally striving to recall her flitting senses—“Take 'em back—away with 'em—tell him—Oh! I'm ill, I'm ill!”

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She fell back insensible. The old woman and Fanny screamed first, and then ran for the surgeon. Within a very brief period Master Colin Clink appeared before the world, some half a day or so earlier than, to the best of my belief, nature originally intended he should. But it is the peculiar faculty of violent tempers to precipitate events, and realize prospective troubles before their time.

As the reader will subsequently be called upon to make a more close acquaintance with the professional gentleman now introduced to notice, it may not be improper briefly to observe, that, amongst many other recommendations to the notice and favour of the public, the doctor offered himself as a guardian to “persons of unsound mind,” with, of course, the kindest and best mode of treatment that could possibly be adopted. In plain words, he kept a “retreat,” or private madhouse, for the especial and peculiar accommodation of those eager young gentlemen who may, perchance, find it more agreeable to shut up their elderly relations in a lunatic's cell, than to wait until death shall have relieved them of the antique burthen. The doctor's establishment was one of the worst of a bad kind; and, as we shall eventually see, he was in the regular practice of making a very curious application of it.

We may now conclude the chapter.

While Doctor Rowel was preparing for his departure, he chanced, in the course of some casual chat with one of the old gossips present, to ask where the sick woman's husband was at this interesting moment of his life; but, unluckily for his curiosity, all the old women were immediately seized with a momentary deafness, which totally prevented them from hearing his question, though it was twice repeated. He then asked how it came about that the Squire had sent such a pretty basket of baby-linen to Mistress Clink? But their ears were equally impervious to the sound of that inquiry as to the other; thus proving to a demonstration, that while there are some matters which certain ingenious people imagine they thoroughly understand even from the slightest hints and innuendoes, which is precisely the case with the good reader himself at this moment, (so far as our present story is concerned,) there are other matters that, put them into whatever language you will, can never be rendered at all comprehensible to discreet grown-up people.

Nevertheless, the doctor did not depart unenlightened. Though the women were deaf and ignorant, a little child was present who seemed to know all about it. Finding that nobody else answered the great gentleman, little Fanny screwed her courage up to the speaking point, and looking the doctor earnestly in the face, said, “If you please, sir, the lady that brought the basket said it was because the squire is always so very kind to poor women.”

The doctor burst into a laugh, though what for nobody present could imagine, as all the old women, and the child too, looked grave enough in all conscience.

CHAPTER II.

Involves a doubtful affair still deeper in doubt, through the attempts made to clear it up; and at the same time finds Colin Clink a reputable father, in a quarter the least expected.

SHORTLY after the maid-servant had returned to Kiddal, (a name by which Squire Lupton's family-house had been known for centuries,) and explained to her master, as in duty bound, how she found Mistress Clink, and how she left the linen, and how, likewise, another boy had been added to the common stock of mortals, that benevolent and considerate gentleman assumed a particularly grave aspect; and then, for the especial edification and future guidance of the damsel before him, he began to “improve” the event which had just taken place in the village, and to express his deep regret that the common orders of people were so very inconsiderate as to rush headlong, as it were, upon the increase of families which, after all, they could not support without entailing a portion of the burthen upon the rich and humane, who, strictly speaking, ought to have no hand whatever in the business. His peroration consisted of some excellent advice to the girl herself, (equally applicable to everybody else in similar situations,) not by any means to think of marrying either the gardener or the gamekeeper, until she knew herself capable of maintaining a very large family, without palming any of them upon either generous individuals or on the parish. She could not do better than keep the case of Mistress Clink continually before her eyes, as a standing warning of the evil effects of being in too great a hurry. The girl retired to her kitchen filled with great ideas of her master's goodness, and strengthened in her determination to disbelieve every word of the various slanders afloat throughout the lower part of the house, and through the village at large, which turned the squire's kindness to mere merchandise, by attributing it to interested motives.

That same evening, as the squire sat alone by lamplight taking a glass of wine in his library, he was observed by the servant who had carried in the decanter to be in a humour not the most sprightly and frolicsome imaginable; and so he told the maid who had been lectured in the afternoon, at the same time going so far as to say, that he thought if master was more prudent sometimes than some folks said he was, it might be that he would not have occasion to be melancholy so often. The maid replied, that she knew all about it; and if the squire was melancholy, it was because some people in the world were so very wicked as to run head-first on to families, and then go for to come on the first people in the parish to maintain them. It was his own supernumerary goodness that got imposed on by deceitful and resolute women, who went about having children, because they knew that the squire was father to the whole parish, and would not let little innocents starve, let them belong to whomsoever they might.

John was about rising to reply to this able defence when the library bell rang, and called him up stairs instead. The squire wanted to see his steward immediately, but the steward was just then getting his dinner; and therefore—as the dinner of a steward, in a great house with an easy master, is not, as Richard Oastler well knows, a matter of very easy despatch—he sent word that he was at that moment very deeply engaged in digesting his accounts, but would wait upon his master as soon as possible. In the mean time, the kitchen was converted into a debating room by John and the maid; but as the same subject was very shortly afterwards much better discussed in the second chamber, we will repair thither and ascertain what passed.

“Come in, Longstaff,” cried the squire, in reply to a tap at the door which announced the presence of the steward, and in another second that worthy approached the table.

“Dined, Longstaff?—take a glass of wine? Sit down, sit down. I've a little matter on hand, Longstaff, that requires to be rather nicely managed, and I know of no man so likely to do it well as you are, Longstaff, eh?”

“You flatter me, sir—” began Mr. Longstaff: but the squire interrupted him.

“No, no, Longstaff, no,—I flatter no man. Plain speaking is a jewel; but I know I can depend upon you for a little assistance when it is needed, better than upon any other man that ever entered my service.”

“You flatter—” again began the steward, but a second time was interrupted by his master.

“No, no Longstaff, no, no,—truth's no flattery, as everybody knows; and no man need be afraid or ashamed of speaking truth before the best face in all Christendom.”

Mr. Longstaff mistook this last observation, and interpreted it as a compliment to his own beauty; he therefore felt himself bound to repeat his previously intended observation, and accordingly began, “You flat—” but for the third time was prevented giving utterance to it, through the interruption of Squire Lupton.

“I 'll tell you what, Longstaff,—the thing is here. A little secresy and a little manoeuvring are just what's required. If you can Talleyrand it a little,—you understand me?”

And the squire eked out his meaning with a certain jerk upwards of the head more significant than words, but which when dimly translated into English, seemed to mean as much as the mysterious popular phrase, “that's your ticket.” He then drank a bumper, and, pushing the bottle to Longstaff, waited in seeming anxiety half a minute before he filled again.

“Well, Longstaff, magistrate as I am, and bound, of course, to carry the law, while it is law, into execution, I must say this,—and I speak from my own observation and experience, as you well know,—while the members of the British Legislature allow that clause of the forty-third of Elizabeth to remain upon the statute-books, they do not do their duty as legislators either to man, woman, or child.”

A loud thump on the table, accompanied with corresponding emphasis of speech, made the word child sound a great deal bigger than either man or woman. The squire then went on,—“Look at the effect of it, Longstaff. Any man,—I myself,—you,—any of us, or all of us,—are liable at any time to have fathered upon us a thing, a brat,—any tinkers whelp that ever was bred, very likely in Cumberland or Cornwall, or a thousand miles off,—though, in point of fact, you or I had no more acquaintance with that child's mother—no, no more than we had with Donna Maria! Now mark, Longstaff. You know I've been something of a teazer in the course of my time to people of that sort. I've made them pay for their whistle, as Franklin says, pretty smartly. Well, what is the consequence?—what ensues? Why, just this. After I've ferreted out some of the worst of them, and put them, as I thought, upon better manners,—the very next time anything of the kind happens again, they lay their heads together, and have the audacious impudence,—the rascality, as I may call it,—the—the—the abominable—However, I should say, to—to go before the overseers of the parish, and persist in swearing every child, without exception, every one, girl and boy,—to me. Now, Longstaff, I dare say you have heard reports of this kind in the course of your acquaintance with one person or another, though I never mentioned a word about it before. Don't you think it a shame, a disgrace to the Parliament of Elizabeth that passed that law, that all county magistrates were not personally and especially excepted from the operation of that clause?—and that it was not rendered a misdemeanour, punishable by imprisonment or the stocks, for any woman, no matter what her degree, to swear a child to any county magistrate? Such a provision, Longstaff, would have effectually secured individuals like me against the malice of convicted persons, and prevented the possibility of such statements being circulated, as are now quite as common in the parish as rain and sunshine.”

“Certainly, sir,” replied Longstaff, acquiescingly; “but then, sir, might it not have operated, in the case of some individuals of the magistracy, as a sort of warrant of impunity to—”

“Impunity!” exclaimed the squire. “I mean to assert and to maintain it, that if Queen Bess had been a man, as she ought to have been, women would never have had it in their power to swear with impunity one half,—no, nor one-tenth part of that that they are now swearing every hour of their lives. Why, look ye,—here again to-day,—this very morning, that young woman Clink is laid up of another; and, as sure as there's head and tail to a shilling, so sure am I that, unless something be done beforehand to find a father somewhere or other for the young cub, it 'll be laid at my door, along with all the rest. But I 'm resolved this time to put a stop to it; and, as a man's word goes for nothing, though he be magistrate or anything else, we 'll try for once if we cannot fix the saddle on the right horse some other way.”

The complying Mr. Longstaff willingly lent himself to the squire's designs; and, after some farther conversation of a similar character to that above given, it was agreed that the steward, acting as Squire Lupton's agent, should make use of all the means and appliances within his power, in order to ward off the expected declaration by Mistress Clink, and to induce her to avow before the overseers the real father of our hero Colin.

Accordingly, as soon as the condition of that good lady would allow of a visit from Mr. Longstaff, he waited upon her, stuffed with persuasions to the very throat; and, after an hour and a half's exhortation, coupled with a round number of slices of that pleasant root, commonly called “the root of all evil,” he succeeded, to his great joy and satisfaction, in extorting from her a solemn promise to confer the honour of her son's parentage upon any man in the parish rather than upon Squire Lupton.

As a moral-minded historian, I must confess this whole transaction to be most nefarious, regard it in whatever light we may.

Longstaff was delighted with the success of his negociation, and, reflecting that there is nothing like striking while the iron is hot, he would not be satisfied unless Mistress Clink agreed there and then to go with him to Skinwell the overseer, to make her declaration respecting Colin's father.

On the road to that functionary's office, Longstaff employed himself in suggesting to the excellent woman by his side the names of several individuals, with whom secretly he was upon very ill terms, as fit and proper persons from amongst whom to select a parent, chuckling with renewed glee every now and then as the thought came afresh over his mind of taking revenge upon some one or other of his enemies, through the medium of two and sixpence or three shillings per week. Mistress Clink replied to his suggestions by assuring him that she would endeavour to satisfy him in that particular to his heart's content.

Skin well, besides being overseer of the parish during the year of which we are writing, was by profession a lawyer; and, in order to obtain a living in so small a field, was in the regular practice of getting up petty squabbles in a friendly way, and merely for the sake of obtaining justice to all parties, between his neighbours and acquaintances. A clothes-line across a yard, a stopped-up drain, or the question whether a certain ditch belonged to the right or to the left land owner, would afford him food for a fortnight; and while he laboured most assiduously in order to involve two parties in litigation, he contrived so ingeniously to gloss over his own conduct with the varnish of “favour to none, justice to all,” as invariably to come off without offending either.

On entering Skinwell's office, Longstaff and the lady found that worthy at work on one side of a double desk, face to face, though divided by a miniature railing along the top, with a poor miserable-looking stripling of a clerk, not unlike, both in shape and colour, to a bricklayer's lath.

Skinwell looked vacantly up at Mrs. Clink, recognised the steward by a nod, and then went on with his work. In the mean time Mrs. C. sat down on a three-legged-stool, placed there for the accommodation of weary clients, behind a high partition of boards, which divided the room, and inclosed, as in a sheep-pen, the man of law and his slave.

At one end of the mantel-shelf stood a second-hand brown japanned tin box, divided into three compartments, and respectively lettered, “Delivery,—Received,—Post.” But there appeared not to be anything to deliver, nor to receive, nor to send to the post; for each division was as empty as a pauper's stomach. The remaining portion of the shelf was occupied by some few fat octavos bound in dry-looking unornamental calf; while over the fireplace hung the Yorkshire Almanack for the year but one preceding, Skinwell's business not being usually in a sufficiently flourishing condition to allow of the luxury of a clean almanack every twelve months; and even the one which already served to enlighten his office had been purchased at half price when two months old.

“Do take a seat, Mr. Longstaff!” exclaimed the legal adviser of the village, as he raised his head, and, in apparent astonishment, beheld that gentleman still upon his feet, though without reflecting, it would seem, that his request could be much more easily made than complied with, there being not a single accommodation for the weary in his whole office, with the exception of the two high stools occupied respectively by himself and his clerk, and the low one of which Mrs. Clink had already taken possession. Longstaff, however, was soon enabled very kindly to compromise the matter; for while hunting about with his eyes in quest of a supporter of the description mentioned, he beheld in the far corner by the fireplace a few breadths of deal-plank fixed on tressels, by way of table, and partially covered with sundry sheets of calf-skin, interspersed with stumps of long-used pens, and crowned with a most business-like, formidable-looking pounce-box. To this quarter he accordingly repaired, and having placed one thigh across the corner of the make-shift table, while he stood plump upright on the other leg, began very seriously to stare into the fire.

Some minutes of profound silence ensued.

The ghostly clerk stopped short in his half-idle labour, as though hesitating what to do, and then made this learned inquiry of his employer, “Pray, sir, should this parchment be cut?”

“Certainly it should,” replied the latter testily. “Don't you see it's an indenture?—and an indenture is not an indenture, and of no force, until it is cut.”

The novice accordingly, at a very accelerated speed, proceeded to cut it. Shortly afterwards he again had to trouble his master.

“Should I say 'before said' or 'above said?'”

“Above, certainly,” replied the sage. “'Before said' means the first thing that ever was written in the world,—before anything else that has ever been written since. Write 'above,' to be sure.”

The clerk wrote “above” accordingly, while Longstaff and the lady looked up in admiration of Mr. Skinwells acuteness, and Skin well himself looked boldly into the steward's face, with all the brass of a knowing one triumphant in his knowledge.

It will be remembered by the reader, that on the occasion of the birth of our hero Colin, Dr. Rowel expressed to those about him some curiosity respecting the little fellow's father.

Happily, then, for the doctor's satisfaction, he chanced to enter Skinwell's office upon private business just as the above brief conversation had terminated, and before that examination of Mrs. Clink had commenced, in which a father was legally to be given him. The doctor, then, was upon the point of being gratified from the very best authority.

Having now concluded the writing with which he had been engaged, the joint lawyer and overseer of the parish called to the woman Clink, and bade her stand up and look at him; and, in order to afford her every facility for doing so to the best advantage, he planted both his elbows firmly upon the desk, rested his chin upon both his hands, which stood up against his cheeks in such a manner as to convey to a casual spectator the idea that he was particularly solicitous about a pair of red scanty whiskers, like moles, which grew beneath, and then fixed his eyes in that particular place above the wooden horizon that inclosed him, in which the disc of Mrs. Clink's head now began slowly to appear. As she came gradually and modestly up, she met first the gaze of the lawyer, then of his clerk, then of Dr. Rowel, and then of Mr. Longstaff; so that by the time she was fully risen, four men's faces confronted her at once, and with such familiar earnestness, that, though not apt to be particularly tender-hearted in others' cases, she burst into tears at her own.

“Ay, ay, doctor,” sneeringly remarked Skinwell to that worthy professional, “this is just it. They can always cry when it is too late, instead of crying out at the proper time.” Then looking fiercely in the downcast countenance of the yet feeble culprit before him, he thus continued his discourse. “Come, come, woman, we can't have any blubbering here—it won't do. Hold your head up; for you can't be ashamed of seeing a man, I should think.” The surgeon, the steward, the clerk, and the brutal wit himself smiled.

“Come, up with it, and let us look at you.”

Colin's mother sobbed louder, and, instead of complying with this gratuitously insolent request, buried her face so much lower in the folds of the shawl that covered her neck, and hung down upon her bosom, as to present to the gaze of the inquiring overseer almost a full-moon view of the crown of her bonnet.

“Hum!” growled Skinwell; “like all the rest—not a look to be got at them. Well, now, listen to me, my good woman. You know what you 're brought here for?”

A long-drawn snuffle from the other side of the partition, which sounded very much like what musicians term a shake, seemed to confess too deeply the painful fact.

Mr. Longstaff's merriment was here evinced by a single explosion of the breath, which would have done much better to blow a lamp out with than to convince any body that he was pleased. The surgeon did not change countenance, while the clerk made three or four discursive flourishes with his pen on the blotting-paper before him, as much as to say he would take the propriety of laughing into further consideration. Mr. Skinwell then continued.

“Now, now, woman,—do attend to me. It is impossible that my valuable time can be wasted in this manner. Who is that child's father?”

“Yes, yes,” echoed Mr. Longstaff, tapping the poor woman in joyful expectation upon the shoulder; “just say the word, and have done with it.”

Every eye was fixed on Mrs. Clink. After a brief pause, during which the tears yet remaining in her eyes were hastily dried up with the corner of her shawl, she raised her head with a feeling of confidence scarcely to be expected, and directing her eyes through the little palisadoes which stopped the wooden partition full at Mr. Skinwell, she said, in a voice sufficiently loud to be heard by all present,—

“If you please, sir, it is Mr. Longstaff, the steward.”

The office was amazed; while Mr. Longstaff himself started up in an attitude of mute astonishment, which Chantrey himself could scarcely have represented.

“Longstaff, the steward!” ejaculated Skin-well.

“Impossible!” observed Dr. Rowel.

“It's false!” muttered the clerk.

“It is false!” repeated the accused man in a faint voice. “Why, gentlemen,—a man with a wife and family,—in my situation;—it's monstrous and diabolical. If I could pull your tongue across your teeth,” he continued, turning to Colin's mother, and shaking his fist in her face, “I'd cure it and hang it up, as an eternal example to such arrant liars. You know I'm as innocent as a March lamb,—you do, you deceitful woman!”

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Mrs. Clink, however, persisted in her statement, and avowed her readiness to take her oath upon the fact; so that Mr. Longstaff was obliged to submit with the best or the worst grace he might.

This small scrap of experience fully convinced him, however, that Squire Lupton's views upon the subject of the forty-third of Elizabeth, which he had formerly opposed, were not only perfectly correct in themselves, but that they ought to have been extended much further, and that the exemption of which the squire had spoken, ought to have embraced not only county magistrates, but their stewards also.

How the matter really was, the reader may decide for himself upon the following evidence, which is the best I have to offer him:—that Mr. Longstaff regularly paid the charge of three shillings per week towards the maintenance of that life which I am now writing, and that he failed not to account for it in the squire's books, under the mysterious, though very ministerial, title of “secret service money.”

Possibly, however, Mr. Longstaff might economically consider the squire much more capable of paying it than he was himself. Nor, even in case it was so, would he have been the first steward in these latter days who, for his own use, has kindly condescended to borrow for a brief season his master's money.

CHAPTER III.

Describes the sufferings endured by Mr. Longstaff, in consequence of the diabolical proceedings against him recorded in the last chapter; and also hints at a cowardly piece of revenge which he and his wife planned, in the middle of the night, upon Mrs. Clink and Colin.

MR. LONGSTAFF returned towards the old house of Kiddal vexed, mortified, and ashamed; and while he mentally vowed never again to undertake a piece of dirty work for the best man living, neither for bribe, nor place, nor the hope of favour, he also as firmly, and in a spirit much more to be depended upon, determined to pour, to the very last drop, the phials of his wrath upon the devoted head of Colin's mother. “If there be not power in a steward,” thought he, “to harass such a poor, helpless, despicable thing as she is, where in the world is it to be found?—and if any steward knows how to do it better than I do, why, I 'll give him leave to eat me.” With which bold and magnanimous reflection he bustled along the road, almost heedless of the straggling briers which every now and then caught hold of his face or his ankles, and as though fully conscious only of the pleasing fact that each additional step brought him still a step nearer his revenge. Besides this, had the truth been fully known, his feelings of resentment against Mrs. Clink were in no small degree increased by the thoughts that crowded his brain touching the manner in which he should meet “the partner of his joys and woes,” Mrs. Æneasina Macleay Longstaff: a lady, as some years of hard experience had taught him, who well merited the title of a woman of spirit, and with whom in his soul, though he scarcely dare allow himself to believe it, he anticipated no very pleasant encounter.

As for the squire, who naturally enough would wish to know how his steward had sped in the business, Mr. Longstaff did not feel much of the humour of eagerness to visit him, having already about as large a load on his stomach as he could conveniently carry, and being in his own mind fully persuaded that he really should not have a tithe of the requisite courage left to meet Mrs. Longstaff, if he ventured to encounter the jeers of the squire previously. With the view, then, of making the best of his way unobserved down to his own house, he left the high road, and exerted himself in a very unusual manner to leap half a score hedges and ditches which crossed the bird's-flight path he had taken, and ultimately stole privily down the side of the boundary-wall which inclosed the northern side of the plantations, intending to creep through a small private door, placed there for the convenience of the gamekeepers, which conducted to a path in the immediate direction of his own house. But, notwithstanding all his trouble, fortune again turned her wheel upon Mr. Longstaff; he fell into the very trap that he had taken so much trouble to avoid, and what—to a man already in a state of aggravation—was still worse, he fell into it solely because he had endeavoured to avoid it. Had he taken the common road, he would have arrived at home uninterrupted; as it was, scarcely had he reached within twenty yards of the little door when, to his great alarm, he heard the voice of the squire hailing him from some distance up the fields to the left hand. Mr. Longstaff pushed forwards with increased speed, and without taking more notice of his master's call than if he had not heard it; but before he could reach the gate of that which had now become as a fortress to him, Mr. Lupton again hallooed in a tone which even a deaf man could not, with any show of grace, have denied hearing something of. Longstaff accordingly stopped, and, on turning his head, beheld the squire on horseback beckoning to him with his hand. There was now no alternative; and in a few minutes the steward was by his side.

“Well, Longstaff,” said he, as he carelessly twirled the lash of his whip upon its stock like a horizontal wheel, “how has it ended? I suppose you have given a son-and-heir to somebody or other?”

“It has turned out a deal worse job than I expected,” dolefully observed the steward.

“Ah!—a bad job is it?”

“Very, sir, very!” sighed the unfortunate go-between.

“Why—what—wouldn't she be persuaded, Longstaff?”

“Oh, yes,” replied the steward, with a deep curse on Mrs. Clink, “she took all I was authorised to give her—”

“And gave me the whelp in exchange, eh?” added the squire.

“No, sir, no,”—(he inly wished she had)”—worse than that, sir,—a great deal worse.”

“Worse!” earnestly exclaimed Mr. Lupton; “that is impossible. Have you got him then?”

Mr. Longstaff cast his eyes to the ground, arranged the shoe-tie of his left foot with the toe of his right, and with a dolorous face, drawn nearly as long as his own name, faintly drawled out, “I have, sir!”

Mr. Lupton burst into a fit of laughter, which lasted two whole minutes, blew out his breath in a prolonged whistle, not unlike an autumn blast through an out-door key-hole, and then dashed away, cracking his whip and laughing as long as he could be heard.

“Dang the woman!” exclaimed the steward, as he began to move off the ground homewards, “I 'll kick her and her barn * out of house and home to-night, or may I be———”

* A common Yorkshire corruption of the Scottish bairn.

Somehow or other, however, he could not screw up sufficient courage to carry him immediately home, and, as it were, into the very jaws of Mrs. Æneasina Longstaff. He therefore crossed the corners of two other fields again, on to the high-road, and walked into the Cock and Bottle, the only inn in Bramleigh, with the intention of strengthening his shaken nerves with a respectable potation of brandy and water.

On entering, he thought the landlady—with whom he had always been upon the best of terms, not only because of his situation, but also of his excellent moral character,—looked more than usually distant with him. The landlord, too, cast an eye at him, as much as to say, “I hear, Mr. Longstaff, you have had something unpleasant this morning?” While the maid, who formerly used to smile very prettily whenever he appeared, actually brushed by him as he went down the passage, as though she thought he was a better man half a mile off than between two such walls. As he passed the kitchen-door, everybody within turned to look at him; and, when he got into the parlour, he beheld four of the village farmers round the table, all of whom were smiling, evidently at something very funny. Mr. Longstaff, by that peculiar instinct which usually attends men in suspicious circumstances, knew, as well as if he had been told, that it was at him. He could not endure the company, the house, the landlord and his wife, nor himself; and, therefore, he marched out again, and homeward, in a state, as may easily be supposed, of more extraordinary preparation for meeting his lady, than if he had thrice over fulfilled his intention of imbibing at the Cock and Bottle some two or three glasses of aqua vitæ. The truth was, he had by this time, like a bull with running about, grown very desperate; and, for the moment, he cared no more about the temper of Mrs. Æneasina Longstaff than he cared for the wind that blew around him.

And well was it for the steward that he did not. Everybody of experience knows that the worst news invariably flies the fastest: and, in the present case, the result of the examination in Mr. Skinwell's office, which has already been described, was made known to poor unhappy Mrs. Longstaff, through such a rapid chain of communication, as nearly equalled the transmission of a Government despatch by telegraph. By the time her husband arrived at home, then, she was, as a necessary consequence, not only filled with grief at the discovery that had been made, but also was more than filled,—she was absolutely overflowing—with feelings of jealous rage against the faithless barbarian, with whom, as she then thought, the most perverse destiny had united her. Every moment of cessation in the paroxysms of her grief was mentally employed in preparing a very pretty rod in pickle for him: with Cleopatra, she could have whipped him with wire first, and stewed him in brine afterwards; or she could, with the highest satisfaction, have done any other thing which the imagination most fertile in painful inventions might have suggested.

All this latent indignation, however, Mr. Longstaff braved. He did not relish the undertaking, to be sure; but then, inly conscious of his own blamelessness, he concluded that, provided he could only get the first word with her, the storm might be blown aside. But, alas! he could not get the first word, although he had it on his lips as he entered the door. Mrs. Longstaff attacked him before he came in sight: and, in all probability, such an oratorical display of all the deprecatory figures of speech,—such disparagements, and condemnations, and denunciations; such hatreds, and despisings, and contempts, and upbraidings,—were never before, throughout the whole range of domestic disturbances, collected together within so brief a space of time. In fact, such an arrowy sleet of words was rained upon the unlucky steward, and so suddenly, that, without having been able to force in a single opposing syllable between them, he was at last compelled, after the royal example of some of our too closely besieged emperors and kings, to make good his retreat at the rear of the premises.

According to the good old custom in cases of this kind, it is highly probable that Mr. and Mrs. Longstaff would that night have done themselves the pleasure of retiring to rest in most peaceable dumb-show, if not, indeed, the additional felicity of sleeping in separate beds, out of the very praiseworthy desire of mutual revenge, had it not so fallen out,and naturally enough, considering what had happened,—that Mr. Longstaff, contrary to his usual habit, consoled himself as well as he was able, by staying away from home until very late in the evening: so late indeed, that, as Mrs. Longstaff cooled, she really began to entertain very serious fears whether she had not carried matters rather too far; and, perhaps,—for the thing did not to her half-repentant mind appear impossible, had driven her husband, in a moment of desperation, to make away with himself. Hour after hour passed on; and the time thus allowed her for better reflection was not altogether ill-spent. She began to consider the many chances there were of great exaggeration in the report that had been brought to her; the fondness of human kind in general to deal in atrocities, even though one half of them be self-invented; the great improbability of Mr. Longstaff's having really compromised his character in the manner which it was currently related he had; and, above all, the very possible contingency that, as in many other similar cases, open perjury had been committed. Under any circumstances she now felt conscious that she had too suddenly allowed her feelings of jealousy to run riot upon the doubtful evidence of a piece of scandal, probably originating in malice, as it certainly had been repeated with secret gratification.

These reflections had prepared her to hear in a proper spirit a quiet explanation of the whole transaction from the mouth of Mr. Longstaff himself; when, much to her private satisfaction, he returned home not long afterwards.

That gentleman had already commanded a candle to be brought him, and was about to steer off to his chamber without exchanging a word, when some casual observation, dropped in an unexpectedly kind tone by his good lady, arrested his progress, and induced him to sit down in a chair about the same spot where he chanced to be standing. By and by he edged round to the fire; and, shortly afterwards, at her especial suggestion, he consented—much to his inward gratification—to take a little supper. This led to a kind of tacitly understood reconciliation; so that, eventually, the same subject which had caused so much difference in the afternoon, was again introduced and discussed in a manner truly dove-like and amiable. Mrs. Longstaff felt perfectly satisfied with the explanation given by her husband, that he had undertaken the negotiation with Mrs. Clink solely to oblige the squire; and that that infamous woman had attributed her disaster to him merely out of a spirit of annoyance and revenge, for which he expressed himself perfectly unable to account.

But the steward's wife was gratified most to hear his threats of retaliation upon the little hero of our story and his mother. In these she joined with great cordiality, still farther urging him on to their immediate fulfilment, so that by the time he had taken his usual nightly allowance of punch, he found himself in particularly high condition, late as was the hour, for the instant execution of his cowardly and cruel enterprise.

CHAPTER IV.

Mr. Longstaff gets fuddled, and revenges himself upon Mrs. Clink; together with some excellent discourse of his while in that pleasing condition. The mother of our hero partially discloses a secret which the reader has been anxious to know ever since he commenced this history.

WHILE things were thus progressing elsewhere, the poor and destitute, though erring, creature, over whose head the rod of petty tyranny now hung so threateningly, had passed a solitary evening by the side of her small fire, unnoticed even by the neighbours humble as herself; for adversity, though it is said to make men friends, yet renders them selfish also, and leaves in their bosoms but few feelings of charity for others.

Little Fanny, transformed into a miniature washerwoman, and elevated on two or three lumps of Yorkshire stone to lengthen her out, had been employed since nightfall, by the hazy light of a candle scarcely thicker than her own little finger, in washing some few things for the baby; while young Colin himself, held up in his mother's arms, with his face pressed close to her bosom, was silently engaged in fulfilling, as Voltaire has it, one of the most abstruse laws of natural philosophy. Having at length resolved this problem perfectly to his satisfaction, Master Colin betook himself, with the utmost complacency, to sleep, just as though his mother had had no trouble whatever in the world with him; or, as though Mr. Longstaff, the steward, had been fast asleep in bed, dreaming of felled timbers and unpaid arrears, and utterly regardless of Colin's existence, instead of preparing, as he was—untimely and heartlessly—to disturb that baby slumber, and to harass with additional pains and fears the bosom of one who had already found too abundantly that folly and vice mete out their own punishment.

The child had already been placed in the cradle, and little Fanny had taken her seat on a small stool in the chimney-corner, with her supper in her hand, consisting of a basin of milk and water, thickened with cold potatoes; while the mother sat before the fire, alternately knitting a ball of black worsted on the floor into a stocking, and giving the cradle an additional push, as the impetus it had previously received died away and left it again almost at rest. Everything was silent, save one or two of those quiet homely sounds, which fall on the ear with a sensation that appears to render even silence itself still more silent. The solitary ticking of an old caseless Dutch clock on the wall was interrupted only by the smothered rocking of the cradle, wherein lay the yet unconscious cause of all I have told, or may yet have to tell. As hand or foot was applied to keep it in motion, the little charge within was tossed alternately against each blanketed side of his wooden prison, and jolted into the utterance, every now and then, of some slight sound of complaint, which as regularly sunk again to nothing as the rocking was increased, and the mother's low voice cried—

“Hush, child! peace, peace! Sleep, barn, sleep!”

And then rounded off into a momentary chant of the old ditty, beginning,

“There was an old woman, good lack! good lack!”

But out of doors, as the rustic village had long ago been gone to rest, everything was as silent as though the country had been depopulated.

Fatigued by the long day's exertion, Fanny had fallen asleep, with half her supper uneaten in her lap; and Mistress Clink, unconsciously overtaken in a similar manner, had instinctively covered her face with her hand, and fallen into that imperfect state of rest in which realities and dreamy fictions are fused together like things perfectly akin,—when the sound of visionary tongues seemed to be about her.

“Go straight in,” said one. “Don't stand knocking.”

“Perhaps she's a-bed,” observed another.

“Then drag her out again, that 's all,” replied the same person that had first spoken; “I 've sworn to kick her and her young 'un into th' street to-night, and the devil's in it if I don't, dark as it is. It will not be the first time she's lay i' th' hedge-bottom till daylight, I 'll swear.”

Mrs. Clink started up, terrified. The door was pushed violently open, and the village constable, an assistant, and Mr. Longstaff, the steward,—in a state of considerable mental elevation, arising from the combination of punch and revenge,—stood in the middle of the room.

“Now, missis!” bawled the steward, advancing, and clenching his fist before his own face, while he stared at her through a pair of leaden eyes, with much of the expression of an owl in the sun; “You see me, don't you? You see me, I say? Mark that. Did you expect me, I say, missis? No, no, I think not. You thought you were safe enough, but I've got you! I've got you, I tell you, as sure as a gun; and now I'm going to learn you how to put your whelps down i' th' parish books to my account; I am, my lady. I 'll teach you how to touch a steward again, you may 'pend on't!”

“Oh, sir!” began Mrs. Clink imploringly; but she was instantly stopped by Mr. Longstaff.

“Ay, ay,—you may oh, sir! as long as you like, but I'm not to be oh sir'd, that way. Do you know aught about rent?—rent, I say—rent?—last year?—t' other house?—d 'ye know you hav'n't paid it? or are you going to swear that to me, an' all?—'Cause if you are, I wish you may die in a ditch, and your baby under you! Now, look you, I'm going to show you a pretty trick;—about as pretty, missis, as you showed me this morning. What d 'ye think of that, now, for a change? How d 'ye like that, eh? I'm going to seize on you—”

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No sooner did Mrs. Clink hear these words from the mouth of the intoxicated Mr. Longstaff, than she screamed, and fell on her knees; crying out in broken exclamations, “Oh, not to-night, sir—not to-night! Tomorrow, if you please, sir,—to-morrow—tomorrow!”

But, though joined in this petition by the tears of little Fanny, and the unintentional pleadings of Colin, who now began to scream lustily in his cradle, the steward disregarded all, until, finding prayers and entreaties vain, the voice of the woman sunk into suppressed sobbings, or was only heard to utter repeatedly,

“What will become of my poor baby!”

“Become of him?” exclaimed Longstaff, turning towards her as she yet remained on her knees on the ground. “Why,—take and throw him into th' horsepond, that's my advice. He 'll never be good for aught in this world but to hang on th' work'us, and pull money out of other people's pockets. Go on, Bill;—go on, my lad:—put 'em all down, stick and stone; and away with 'em all to-night. There sha'n't be a single thing of any sort left in this house for th' sun to shine on to-morrow morning.”

The excitement produced by Mr. Longstaff's discourse upon his own stomach and brain had the effect of rendering him, in this brief period of time, apparently much more intoxicated than he was on first entering the cottage, and he now sunk heavily upon a chair, as though unable to remain upon his feet any longer.

“Have you put this chair down, Bill?” he asked, at the same time tapping with his fingers the back of that upon which he was sitting, by way of drawing attention to it.

The constable answered in the affirmative.

“That's right, my boy—that's right. And that clock, there, have you got him? Bless his old pendulum! we 'll stop his ticking very soon:—we 'll show him what o'clock it is,—won't we, missis?”

But this facetiousness passed unheeded by the poor woman to whom it was addressed, unless one look of reproachful scorn, which she cast in the stupid face of the steward, might be considered as an answer to it.

“Why, you 're looking quite pretty, tonight, Miss Clink,” said Mr. Longstaff in a more subdued tone:—“I don't wonder—though he is married, and all that sort of thing,—I don't wonder at the squire, if he did patronise you a little.”

The cheeks of our hero's mother blushed scarlet with indignation. She rose from the cradle-side, on which she had been sitting, and with an evident struggle to overcome the sobs that were rising in her throat, so as to enable her to speak distinctly, she stood up before the astonished steward, displaying a countenance and figure that would have graced many a far fairer place, and thus addressed him:—

“I'm a poor helpless woman, Mr. Longstaff, and you know it; but such men as you are always cowards. You may rob me of my few goods; you may destroy my home, though it is almost too poor to be worth the trouble; you may turn me out of my house, with that baby, without a roof to put my head under, because you may have power to do it, and no humanity left in you. But, I say, he is a mean contemptible man,—whether it be you, or any one else,—who can thus insult me, bad as I am. I can bear anything but that, and that I won't bear from any man. Especially—” and she laid strong emphasis on her words, and pointed with her finger emphatically to the person she addressed:—“Especially from such a man as you: for you know that if it had not been for you and your wife—”

Longstaff began to lose his colour somewhat rapidly, and to look half a dozen degrees more sober.

“—Yes, I repeat it, you and your wife,—I should not have been the wretched creature that I am. And yet you seek to be revenged on me,—” she continued, growing more passionate as she proceeded, “you have courage enough to set your foot on such a hovel as this, because it shelters me, and crush it.”

It was clear beyond dispute, from Mr. Longstaff's manner, that he had drawn down upon himself a retort which he never intended—especially in the presence of two other persons. He leaned half over his chair-back, with his dull eyes fixed, though evidently in utter absence of mind, upon the ceiling; while a visible nervous quivering of his pale lips and nostrils evinced the working of inward emotions, to which his tongue either could not, or dared not, give utterance.

Meantime, Mrs. Clink had taken little Colin out of his cradle, and wrapped him warmly round with all the clothes it contained. She then led Fanny into the inner room, which was occupied as a bed-chamber.

“Come, Fanny,” said she; “if there be still less charity under a bare sky than under this stripped roof, we cannot do much worse. Put on all the clothes you have, child, for perhaps we may want them before morning.”

And then she proceeded to select from her scantily stored drawers such few trifles as she wished to retain; and afterwards, in accordance with her own injunction, dressed herself as if for a long night-journey.

“Come, lads,” at length remarked Mr. Longstaff, after a long silence, “hav'n't you done yet? You mustn't take any notice of this woman, mind;—she's had her liquor, and hardly knows what she's talking about.”

“Won't to-morrow do, sir, to finish off with?” asked the holder of the distress-war-rant: and at the same moment our hero's mother, with Colin in her arms, and Fanny by her side, passed out of the door-way of the inner room. Mr. Longstaff looked up, and, seeing them prepared for leaving the place, observed, in a tone very different to that in which he had before spoken, “We shall not remove anything now; so you may stay to-night, if you like.”

“No, sir,” replied Mrs. Clink; “your master's charity is quite enough: I want none of yours. But, before I go, let me tell you I know that Mr. Lupton has never sanctioned this; and I doubt your right to do what you are doing.”

Here again was something which appeared to throw another new light upon the steward's mind; for, in reality, his passion had not allowed him for a moment to consider what might be the squire's opinion about such an off-hand and barbarous proceeding. He began to feel some misgivings as to the legal consequences of his own act, and eventually even went so far as to request that Mrs. Clink would remain in the house until the morrow, when something more could be seen about it.

“No,” said she again, firmly, “whatever I may be now, I was not born to be blown about by every fool's breath that might come across me. Once done is not undone. Come, Fanny.”

In another minute, Mr. Longstaff, Bill the constable, and his assistant, were the only living creatures beneath that roof, which, an hour before, with all its poverty, seemed to offer as secure a home, as inviolable a hearth stone, as the castle of the best lordling in the kingdom.

CHAPTER V.

Introduces to the reader two new characters of considerable importance, and describes a scene between them to which a very peculiar interest is attached.

AMONGST all those who were most materially concerned in the circumstances detailed in the preceding chapters, I must now name one person who has hitherto only been once passingly alluded to in the most brief manner, but whose happiness was (if not more) at least as deeply involved in the events which had taken place as was that of any other individual whatever, not excepting even our hero's mother herself. That person—for Mr. Longstaff has already hinted that his master was married—was Squire Lupton's wife.

Should the acute reader's moral or religious sensibilities be shocked at the discovery of so much human depravity, as this avowal must necessarily uncurtain to him, it is to be hoped he will lay the blame thereof upon the right shoulders, and not rashly attack the compiler of this history, who does only as Josephus, Tacitus, and other great historians have done before him,—make use of the materials which other men's actions prepare ready to his hands, and with the good or evil of which he himself is no more chargeable, than is the obedient workman who mouldeth a vessel with clay of the quality which his master may please to put before him.

During a period of some weeks prior to the time at which our story commences, Mrs. Lupton had been upon a visit to the family of Mr. Shirley, a resident in York, with whom she was intimately acquainted previously to her marriage with the heir of Kiddal House. Owing, however, to circumstances of a family nature, with which she had early become acquainted after her destiny had been for ever united with that of Mr. Lupton, she had hitherto found it impossible to introduce to her own house, with any degree of pleasure to herself, even the dearest companions of her youth; and no one was more so, for they had known each other from girlhood, than Miss Mary Shirley, the only daughter of her esteemed friend. Like many others in similar circumstances, she long strove to hide her own unhappiness from the world; but, in doing so, had been too often compelled to violate the most cherished feelings of her bosom; and—when at home—had chosen to remain like a recluse in her own house, when otherwise she would gladly have had some one with whom to commune when grief pressed heavily upon her; and he who had sworn to be all in all to her was in reality the cause, instead of the allayer, of her sorrows.

On the afternoon when those events took place which have been chronicled in the last chapter, Mrs. Lupton returned to Kiddal, accompanied, for the first time, by Miss Mary Shirley.

“Here we are at last,” remarked the lady of the house, as they drove up to the gate, and the highly ornamented oaken gable-ends of the old hall became visible above the garden-walls. “I have not a very merry home to bring you to, my dear Mary, and I dare not promise how long you may like to stay with us; but I hope you will enjoy yourself as well as you can; and when that is over,—though I could wish to keep you with me till I die,—when the time comes that you can be happy here no longer, then, my dear, you must not consider me;—leave me again alone, for I shall not dare to ask you to sacrifice another hour on my poor account, in a place so infinitely below the happy little home we have left in yonder city.”

“Nay,” replied the young lady, endeavouring to hide some slight feelings of emotion, “you cannot forbode unhappiness here. In such a place as this, these antique rooms, these gardens, and with such a glorious landscape of farms and hamlets, as lies below this hill, farther almost than the eye can reach,—it is impossible to be otherwise than happy.”

“Ay, and so I said,” replied Mrs. Lupton, “when Walter first brought me here; and so he told me too, as we passed under this very gateway. But I have learned since then that such things have no pleasure in them, when those we love and with whom we live are not that to us which they ought to be.” Miss Shirley remained silent, for she feared to prolong a conversation which, at its very commencement, seemed to recall to the mind of her friend such painful reminiscences.

On their introduction to the hall, Miss Shirley could not fail to remark the cold, unimpassioned, and formal manner in which Mr. Lupton received his lady; while towards herself he evinced so much affability and kindness, that the degradation of the wife was for the moment rendered still more striking and painful by the contrast. But, out of respect for the feelings of her friend, she affected not to notice it; although it was not without difficulty that she avoided betraying herself, when she observed Mrs. Lupton suddenly retire to another part of the room, because she was unable any longer to restrain the tears which now burst, in the bitterness of uncomplaining silence, from her eyes.

Perhaps no feelings of mortification could readily be imagined more acute than were those which arose from this slight incident in the bosom of a sensible, a sensitive, and, I may add, a beautiful woman, too,—for such Mrs. Lupton undoubtedly was. To be thus slighted when alone, she had already learned to bear; but to be so slighted, for the first time, and, as if by a studied refinement of contempt, before another individual, and that individual a woman, to whom extraordinary attentions were at the same moment paid, was indeed more than she could well endure; though pride, and the more worthy feeling of self-respect, would not allow her openly to confess it. But while the throb-bings of her bosom could scarcely be repressed from becoming audible, and the tears welled up in her large blue eyes until she could not see distinctly for the space of half a minute together, she yet stood at one of the high-pointed windows of the antique room, and affected to be beckoning to one of the gallant peacocks on the grass before her, as he stretched his brilliant neck towards the window, in anticipation of that food which from the same fair hand was seldom expected in vain.

In the mean time, seated at the farther end of the room, Mr. Lupton was endeavouring, though, after what had occurred it may be supposed, with but ill success, to engage the whole attention of the young lady who sat beside him. They had met some twelve months before at the house of her father, in York, during the time that he was paying his addresses to her friend, Miss Bernard, now his wife, and some short period before their ill-fated marriage.

After inquiring with great particularity after the health of her family and relatives, and expressing the very high pleasure he felt in having the daughter of one of his most esteemed friends an inmate of his house, the squire proceeded to descant in very agreeable language upon the particular beauties of the situation and neighbourhood of his house, and to enlarge upon the many pleasures which Miss Shirley might enjoy there during the ensuing summer,—a period over which, he fully trusted, she would do himself and Mrs. Lupton the honour and pleasure of her company.

“But shall we not ask Mrs. Lupton to join us?” remarked Miss Shirley. “It is unfair that we should have all this conversation to ourselves. I see she is at the window still;—though I remember the time, sir,” she added, dropping her voice to a more sedate tone, and looking archly in his face, “when there would have been no occasion, while you were in the room, for any other person to have made such a request.”

“Oh!” exclaimed Mr. Lupton, “she is happy enough with those birds about her. She and they are old friends, and it is now some time since they saw each other. Shall I have the pleasure of conducting you over the gardens, Miss Shirley?”

“I thank you,” replied she—“if Mrs. Lupton will accompany us.”

“She cannot be better employed,” rejoined the squire, “nor, very probably, more to her own satisfaction, than she is.”

“But shall we not know that best on inquiry?” rejoined the young lady, as she rose from her seat, and, without farther parley, bounded across the room towards the object of their discourse.

A brief conversation, carried on in a subdued tone of voice, ensued, during which Miss Shirley took a seat by the window, and appeared to sink into a more pensive mood, as though the contagion of unhappiness had communicated itself to her from the unfortunate lady with whom she had been speaking. The proposed walk in the gardens was eventually declined; and shortly afterwards Mrs. Lupton and her friend retired to their private apartment.

“In yonder chapel,” remarked the lady of the house, as they passed along towards the great oaken staircase, “lie buried all the family of the Luptons during the last three or four hundred years. When we walk out, you will see upon that projecting part of the great hall where the stained windows are, a long inscription, carved in stone, just under the parapet, with the date of 1503 upon it, asking the passer-by to pray for the souls of Roger Lupton and of Sibylla his wife, whom God preserve! I hope,” continued Mrs. Lupton, “they will never think of burying me in that chapel. Not that I dislike the place itself so much; but then, to think that I should lie there, and that my spirit might see the trailing silks that would pass above my face, and unhallowed dames stepping lightly in the place where an honest wife had been a burthen,—and to hear in the distance their revelry and their hollow laughter of a night! O Mary! I should get out of my coffin and knock against those stones till I frightened the very hearts out of them. I should haunt this house day and night, till not a woman dare inhabit it.”

“Nay,” ejaculated Miss Shirley, “you will frighten me, before all this happens, till I shall not sleep a wink. Let us go up stairs.”

“But wherefore frighten you?” asked Mrs. Lupton,—“why, Mary, should you fear? You would not flaunt over me if I did lie there,—you would not sit in my chair, and simper at my husband:—I say it touches not you. I should not have your heels upon my face, whoever else might be there. Leave those to fear who have need;—but for you—no one can approach those pure lips till he has sealed his faith before the altar, and had Heaven's approval.”

Mrs. Lupton's manner, as well as language, so alarmed the young lady, that she trembled violently, and burst into tears. Her friend, however, did not appear to observe it; for it was just at that time of the evening when, in such a place, the turn of darkness obliterates the individual features of things, and leaves only a shadowy phantom of their general appearance. She then resumed:

“And, not that alone. There is another reason why I would not be buried there.” The sound of her foot upon the pavement made the gallery ring again. “Though I have been wed, it has not made me one of this family; and you have seen and known to-day that, though I am the poor lady of this house, I am still a stranger. In two months more that man will have quite forgotten me; and, if I remember myself to the end, why, I shall thank him, dear heart, I shall. But you are beautiful, Mary; and to paint such as you the memory is an excellent artist. I saw—oh! take care, my girl. There is bad in the best of men; the worst of them may make a woman's life not worth the keeping, within the ticking of five minutes. When we go out we will walk in the gardens together. Now we will go up stairs.”

So saying, she clasped Miss Shirley by the wrist, much more forcibly than the occasion rendered needful, and hurried her, notwithstanding her fears, to her own dressing-room. When both had entered she closed the door, and locked it,—an action which, under present circumstances, threw her visitor into a state of agitation which she could scarcely conceal; though, while she strove to maintain an appearance of confident indifference, she took the precaution of placing herself so as to command the bell-rope in case—(for the horrible possibility did cross her mind)—it might be needful for her, though at the instant she knew not why, to summon assistance.

As I have before hinted, the first shadows of night had fallen on the surrounding lower grounds and valleys, and had already hidden the ill-lighted corridors and rooms on the eastern side of the hall in a kind of visible darkness, although a dull reflection of red light from the western sky still partially illumined the upper portion of the room in which the two ladies now were; sufficiently so, indeed, to enable them perfectly to distinguish each other; a circumstance which, however slight in itself, enabled Miss Shirley to keep up her courage much better than otherwise she would have been able to do.

Having, as before observed, turned the key in the lock, Mrs. Lupton walked on tip toe, as though afraid of being overheard, towards her visitor, and began to whisper to her, very cautiously, as follows:—

“I have brought you here, Mary, to tell you something that I have heard since we came back to-day. But, my dear, it has confused my mind till I forget what I am saying. You will forgive me, won't you?” Her companion begged her to defer it until another time, and not to trouble herself by trying to remember it; but Mrs. Lupton interrupted her with a hysterical laugh.

“The pain is not because I forget it, but because I can do nothing but remember it. I cannot get rid of it. It haunts me wherever I go; for, do you know, Mary, Walter Lupton grows worse and worse. I can never live under it; I know I cannot! And, as for beds, you and I will sleep in this next chamber, so that if there be women's feet in the night, we shall overhear it all. Now, keep awake, Mary, for sleep is of no use at all to me: and, besides that, she told me the baby was as like her master as snow to the clouds; so that what is to become of me I do not know.—I cannot tell, indeed!”

Here Mrs. Lupton wrung her hands, and wept bitterly.

Miss Shirley grew terrified at this incoherent discourse, and with an unconscious degree of earnestness begged her to go down stairs.

“Never heed,—never heed,” said she, turning towards the table, and apparently forgetting her grief: “there will come an end. Days do not last for ever, nor nights either.”

“Do not sigh so deeply,” observed her companion. “I have heard say it wears the heart out, though that is idle.”

“Nay,—nay,” replied Mrs. Lupton, “the woman that first said that spoke fairly, for surely she had a bad husband. It wears mine out, truly; though not too soon for him. You know now that he cares nothing for me.”

“But, let us hope it is not so,” replied Miss Shirley, somewhat re-assured from the more sane discourse of her entertainer.

“And yet,” continued Mrs. Lupton, as though unconscious of the last remark, “I have striven to commend myself to him as my best abilities would enable me. Mary, turn the glass to me. It is almost dark. How is this bodice? Is the unlaced shape of a country girl more handsome than the turn of this?”

“Oh, no—no—no!” answered the young lady, “nothing could be more handsome.”

“Nay,” protested Mrs. Lupton, “it is not what you think, or what I think; but with what eyes do the men see? Does it sit ungracefully on me?”

“Indeed, my dear, I heard my father say that one like you he never saw—”

“Do not tell me—do not tell me!” she exclaimed emphatically; “it is nothing to me, so that he who ought to say everything says not one word that I please him.”

And again she burst into a flood of hysterical tears.

“Come,” at length observed Miss Shirley, “it is too dark to see any longer here. Look, the little lights are beginning to shine in the cottage-windows yonder; let us go below. I dare say those poor labourers are making themselves as happy by their firesides as little kings; and why should not we, who have a thousand times more to be happy with, endeavour to do at least as much?”

“Why not?” repeated Mrs. Lupton, “you ask why not?—Ay, why not, indeed? Let me see. Well, I do not know just now. This trouble keeps me from considering; or else I could answer you any questions in the world; for my education was excellent; and, ever since I was married, I have sat in the library, day and night, because Mr. Lupton did not speak to me. Now, Mary, you go down stairs, and take supper; but I shall stay here to watch; and, if that child comes here, if he should come to make me more ashamed, I will stamp my foot upon him, and crush him out: and then I will put him for the carrion-crows on the turret top!”

“But, you said before,” observed Miss Shirley, “that you and I should always go together.”

“Oh!—yes,—-so I did; truly. I had forgotten that, too! My memory is good for nothing: an hour's lease of it is not worth a loose feather. To be sure, Mary, I will go down with you. There is danger in waiting for all of us; and if you should be harmed under my care, your father would never—never forgive me!”

So saying, she rose, and took her visitor by the hand; unlocked the door, and, resisting every proposal to call for a lamp, groped her way down stairs in utter darkness.

Although, as might naturally be expected, the alarm experienced by Miss Shirley under the circumstances above related was very great, far deeper was her grief on being thus unexpectedly made aware for the first time that some additional unanticipated cause of sorrow (communicated most probably to her friend in a very incautious manner by some forward ignorant menial of the house,) had had the appalling effect,—if for no long period, at least for the moment,—of impairing her senses to a very painful degree. What the real cause of that sorrow might be,—evident as it is to the reader who has accompanied me thus far,—Miss Shirley could not fully comprehend, from the broken exclamations and the incoherent discourse of Mrs. Lupton; though enough had been conveyed, even in that manner, to give her the right end of a thread, the substance of which, however, she was left to spin out from conjecture and imagination. She felt extremely irresolute, too, as to the course most proper to be adopted by herself; for, though she had left her home with the intention of staying at Kiddal during a period of at least some weeks, the impropriety of remaining under the circumstances that had taken place, impressed itself strongly upon her mind. It might be that Mr. Lupton would secretly regard her as a kind of familiar spy upon his conduct and actions; and as one who might possibly report to the world those passages of his life which he wished to be concealed from it. Or, in case these conjectures were utterly groundless, it yet remained to be decided how far her conduct might be considered prudent and becoming, if she continued to tarry at the residence of Mr. Lupton, while his wife,—for thus, very possibly, it might happen,—was confined to her chamber in consequence of either bodily or mental afflictions. These and similar considerations doubtfully occupied her mind during the whole evening; but at length the ties of friendship and of feminine pity prevailed over all objections. She felt it to be impossible to leave the once happy companion of her girlish days in such a fearful condition as this; and inwardly resolved, in case of Mrs. Lupton's increased indisposition, to request permission of the squire that she might be allowed to send for her mother from York to keep her company.

With these thoughts revolving in her mind much more rapidly than the time it has occupied the reader to become acquainted with them, Miss Shirley, followed by Mrs. Lupton, entered a side-room adjoining the great banquetting-hall, wainscotted from roof to ceiling with oak, now almost black with age, and amply filled throughout with ponderous antique furniture in corresponding taste. An old carved arm-chair, backed and cushioned with crimson velvet, stood on the farther side of the fire-place; and as it fitfully caught the glimmering of occasional momentary flames, stood out with peculiar distinctness, from the deep background of oaken panels, ample curtains, and dimly visible mirrors, beyond. On this seat—her favourite place—Mrs. Lupton threw herself; while Mary Shirley—as though anxious to evince still more attention to her in proportion as she failed to receive it from others,—seated herself, with her left arm laid upon the lap of her friend, on a low ottoman by her side.

As the lady of the mansion persisted in refusing that lamps should be brought, the apartment remained shrouded in that peculiarly illuminated gloom, which to some temperaments is the very beau idéal of all imaginable degrees of light; and which gives to even the most ordinary scenes all the fulness and rich beauty of a masterpiece from the hand of Rembrandt. The ladies had been seated, as I have described, scarcely longer than some few minutes, and had not yet exchanged a word with each other, when the door of the apartment slowly opened, and the squire himself entered. Fearful of the consequences of an interview, at this particular time, between that gentleman and his unhappy wife, Miss Shirley hastily rose as he entered, and, advancing towards him before he could open his lips to address them, requested in a whisper that he would not heed anything Mrs. Lupton might say, lest his replies should still farther excite her, as she certainly had not the proper command of her senses some short time ago; and the least irritation might, she dreaded, render her still worse. The squire expressed a great deal of astonishment and concern, though not, it is to be supposed, very deeply felt, as he took a seat somewhat in the darkness beyond the table.

“Who is that man?” asked Mrs. Lupton, in a voice just audible, as she bent down to Miss Shirley, in order to prevent her question being overheard.

“My dear, you know him well enough, though you cannot see him in this light—it is your husband, Mr. Lupton.”

“No, no!” she exclaimed in a loud voice, and with a penetrating look at the indistinct figure beyond the table; “he cannot be come back again! I always feared what judgment he would come to, in spite of all my prayers for him; and to-night I saw a foul fiend carry his ghost away. You are not he, are you?”

“Be assured I am, indeed, dear wife,” said the squire, rising from his chair, and advancing towards her; “you know me now. Give me your hand.”

“If you be a gentleman, sir, leave me. The manners of this house have been corrupted so, that even strangers come here to insult me. Send him out, Mary; call William. I won't have men coming here, as though we were all disciples in the same school.”

Mr. Lupton began to act upon the hint previously given by his fair visitor, by leaving his seat, and retreating towards the door:—

“Yes, sir,” continued his wife, “begone! for, as the sun shines in the daytime, and the moon by night, Mary, so I shall be to the end; and never wed again—never again,—never! Hark! I heard the rustling of a gown below that window. They are coming!” and she held up her hand in an attitude bidding silence, and listened. The dull roaring of the wind in the chimney-top, and the creak of the door-latch as Mr. Lupton closed it after him, were alone audible to the young lady whom she addressed.

“Stay!” continued Mrs. Lupton, “perhaps his mother is bringing him home.”

Her voice was at that instant interrupted by the unequivocal and distinct cry of a babe, uttered apparently within very few yards of them.

“It is he!” shrieked the lady, as she strove by one energetic and convulsive spring to reach the window; but nature, overstrained so long, now failed her, and she fell like a stone, insensible, on the ground. Miss Shirley had started to her feet with terror, on hearing the first sound of that little living thing, which seemed to be close upon them in the room, or hidden behind the oaken panels of the wainscot: but before she could recover breath to raise an alarm, several of the domestics of the house rushed into the room; and seeing the situation of their mistress, raised her up, and by the direction of the squire, conveyed her up-stairs to her own apartment. While this was going on, others, at the bidding of Miss Shirley, examined both the room itself, and the outside of the premises; but as nothing could be seen, or even heard again, it was concluded either that the ladies had been deceived, or that the ghost of some buried ancestor had adopted this strange method of terrifying the present master of Kiddal into better morals. The logic, however, of this argument did not agree with Miss Shirley's conceptions; since, in that case, the squire, and not his lady, would have been the proper person for the ghost of his grandmother to appeal to.

The messenger who, meanwhile, had been despatched into the village of Bramleigh to summon Doctor Rowel to the assistance of his mistress, returned with another conjectural interpretation of the affair. He had passed on the road a pedlar woman, with a little girl by her side, and a child wrapped up in her arms: was it not possible that she had been lurking about the house for reasons best known to herself, until the crying of her child obliged her to decamp, through fear of being detected? The doctor declared it must have been so, as a matter of course; but the maids, who had other thoughts in their heads, resolved, for that night at least, to huddle themselves for reciprocal security all in one room together.

CHAPTER VI.

Explains the last-recorded occurrence, and introduces Mistress Clink to an individual whom she little expected to see. Scene in a hedge alehouse, with a company of poachers. They are surprised by very unwelcome visitors. A terrible conflict ensues, and its consequences described.

AT the time when Mrs. Clink, with little Fanny by her side, and Colin snugly wrapped up, like a field-mouse in its winter's nest, in her arms, was driven away from her humble home, as related in a previous chapter, and forced to seek a retreat for the night wherever chance or Providence might direct her, the hand of Bramleigh church clock pointed nigh upon eleven. By and by she heard the monotonous bell toll, with a startling sound, over the deserted fields and the sleeping village; while she, divided between the stern resolution of an unconquered spirit, and the yearnings of Nature to provide a pillow for the heads of the two helpless creatures who could call no other soul but her their friend, paced the road which led towards the highway from York to Leeds, in painful irresolution as to the course most proper to pursue. To solicit the charity of a night's protection from any of the villagers with whom she was acquainted, appeared at once almost hopeless in itself, and beneath the station which she had once held amongst them, when her word of praise or of blame would have been decisive with him who held the whole neighbourhood in a state almost approaching to serfdom. Those whom she had served had nothing more to expect from the same hand; and one half at least of the world's gratitude is paid, not so much in requital of past, as in anticipation of future and additional favours. Amongst such as had received nothing at her hands, she felt it would be a bootless task to solicit assistance in her present condition.

With her thoughts thus occupied, the distance over which she had passed seemed swallowed up; so that, somewhat to her surprise, an exclamation from the lips of little Fanny unexpectedly reminded her of the fact that they were now close upon the grounds adjoining the old hall of Kiddal. Its groups of ornamented stone chimneys, and its high-pointed roofs, stood black against the sky; while its lightless windows, and its homestead hushed in death-like silence, which not even the bark of a dog disturbed, appeared to present to her mind a gloomy, though a fitting, picture of the residence of such a tenant.

“Here, at least,” thought she, “if I can find a barn open, or a bedding of dry straw to place under the wall between some of the huge buttresses of the house, we shall be secure from molestation; for should they even find us in the morning, the master will scarcely deny, even to me, the pitiable shelter of his walls for a creature that is indebted to him for its existence.”

Thus thinking, she passed through the gateway adjoining the road, and thence on to the lawn and garden in front of the house, intending to make her way beyond the reach and hearing of the dogs, to a more remote and unfrequented portion of the out-buildings; but, as she passed the windows of the old wainscotted room before-mentioned, the sound of voices within caught her ear. Was it not possible that the squire might be speaking in some way or other of her?

We are ever jealous of those who have done us wrong; and never more so, however little we may credit it, than when the sense of that wrong lies most keenly upon us. Colin was soundly asleep in her arms; she had nothing to fear. Leaving Fanny, therefore, under cover of a laurel-tree, she stepped lightly but rapidly up, and placed herself close by the window, about the same moment that, as previously described, Mr. Lupton had entered the room. Of the conversation that passed she could only catch occasional portions; and, in her endeavours to press still closer to the casement, young Master Colin got squeezed against the projecting moulding of the stone wall, in a manner which called forth that instantaneous expression of complaint and resentment, by which Mrs. Lupton and her friend had been so dreadfully alarmed. It was now no time for Mrs. Clink to stay any longer in concealment there; she accordingly smothered her baby's head in its clothes to stifle the sound; and having again taken the hand of little Fanny, made the best of her way over ditch and brier in the direction of the high road.

Beyond the boundary of Mr. Lupton's grounds she came upon a by-way, originally intended, (as the blackthorn hedges on either side denoted,) to be used as a kind of occupation lane, by the farmers who held the fields adjacent; but which, from the abundant grass, with which it was overgrown, save where, in the middle, a narrow path meandered, like a packthread along a strip of green cloth, was evidently but little used, except as a footway by the straggling bumpkins who so thinly populated that remote territory. Mrs. Clink remembered, from the local features of the place, that, at about a mile farther up this road, stood a small hedge alehouse, of no very brilliant repute to be sure, amongst those to whom such an accommodation was needless, but highly necessary and useful to a certain class of persons whose convenience was best attained in places beyond the immediate reach and inspection of all descriptions of local and legal authorities. It stood upon a piece of ground just beyond the domains of Squire Lupton, and, though generally known as the resort of many lawless characters, was maintained by the proprietor of the soil in pure spite to his neighbour, the squire, whom he hated with that cordial degree of hatred not uncommonly existing between great landed proprietors, and the jealous little freeholders who dwell upon their skirts. Towards this house, then, Mrs. Clink, in her extremity, bent her way; and after half an hour spent in stumbling over the irregularities of a primitive road, winding amongst a range of low hills, studded with thick plantations and close preserves for game, she arrived in sight of the anticipated haven. It was not, however, without some degree of fear, that, several times in the course of the journey, when she chanced to cast her eyes back upon the way she had passed, the shadowy figure of a human being, skulking along under cover of the hedgerows, and apparently dodging her footsteps, had appeared to her; though under an aspect so blended with the shadows of night as left it still doubtful whether or not the whole was a creation of imagination and imperfect vision.

A small desolate-looking hut, with a publican's sign over the door, put up more for pretence than use, now stood before her. At the same moment the figure she had seen shot rapidly forward up a ditch by the road-side, and disappeared behind the house.

As she approached, the sound of several boisterous voices reached her ear; and then the distinct words of part of an old song, which one of the company was singing:—

“As I and my dogs went out one night,
The moon and the stars did shine so bright,
To catch a fat buck we thought we might,
Fal de ral lu ra la!”

A rushing blast of wind bore away a verse or two of the narrative; but, as she had by this time reached the door, she stood still a moment, while the singer went on—

“He came all bleeding, and so lame,
He was not able to follow the game,
And sorry was I to see the same,
Fal de ral lu ra la!
“I 'll take my long staff in my han',
And range the woods to find that man,
And if that I do, his hide I 'll tan,
Fal de ral lu ra la!”

The singer stopped.

“Go on—go on!” cried several voices, “finish it, somehow; let's hear th' end on't!”

“Dang it!” exclaimed the singer, in a sort of good-natured passion, I don't remember it. This isn't the next verse, I know it isn't; but I 'll try.

“!Next day we offer'd it for sale,
Fal de ral lu ra li to la!
Unto an old woman that did sell ale,
Fal de ral lu ra la!
“Next day we offer'd it for sale
Unto an old woman that did sell ale,
But she 'd liked to have put us all in gaol,
Fal de ral lu ra la!

“There!” he exclaimed again, “I know no more if you 'd fee me to sing it, so good b'ye to that, and be dang'd to it! as th' saying goes.” At the same time the sound of a huge pot, bounced upon the table, bore good evidence that the speaker had not allowed his elegant sentiment to pass without due honour.

Mrs. Clink scarcely felt heart enough to face such a company as this without some previous notice. She accordingly knocked at the door somewhat loudly, whereupon every voice suddenly became silent, and a scrambling sound ensued, as of the gathering up of weapons; or, as though the individuals within were striving, upon the instant, to put themselves, from a state of disorder, into a condition fitted for the reception of any kind of company as might at such an hour chance to do them the honour of a visit.

“Who's there?” cried a sharp voice inside the door, which Colin's mother recognised as that of the landlady of the house. She applied her mouth near the keyhole, and replied, “It's only me, Mrs. Mallory—only Anne Clink. I want a bed to-night, if you can let me have one.”

“A bed!” repeated Mrs. Mallory. “This time o' night, and a bed! Sure there's nobody else?”

Mrs. Clink satisfied the inquiries of the landlady in this particular, and gave her very full assurances that no treachery was intended; still farther giving her to understand that Longstaff, the steward, had turned her out of house and home, late as it was, not an hour before. The bolt was undrawn, and Mrs. Clink walked in. The first greeting she received was from a dogged-looking savage, in a thick old velveteen shooting-jacket, who sat directly opposite the door.

“It's well for you, missus, you aren't a gamekeeper, or I should have put a leaden pill in your head afore this.” Saying which, he raised from his side a short gun that had been held in readiness, and put it up the sleeve of his coat,—to which its construction was especially adapted, for security.

“Yes; we tell no tales here,” observed another: “a ditch in th' woods is longer than th' longest tongue that ever spoke.”

“What, you think,” added the first speaker, “a crack on th' scull, and two or three shovelfuls of dirt, soon stops a gabbler, do ye? Ay, by Go'! you're right, lad, there; and so it does.”

Colin Clink, Volume 1 (of 3)

COLIN CLINK.

By Charles Hooton

IN THREE VOLUMES. VOL. I.

LONDON:RICHARD BENTLEY, NEW BURLINGTON STREET.

1841

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CHAPTER I.

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CHAPTER II.

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CHAPTER III.

CHAPTER IV.

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CHAPTER V.

CHAPTER VI.

LONDON:
RICHARD BENTLEY, NEW BURLINGTON STREET.