“Ma’am,” said the doctor, reluctantly summoned away to look at a passage in some prophetic periodical upon that interesting subject,—“ma’am, it is very hard that you should make one remember the end of the world, since, in conversing with you, one’s natural temptation is to forget its existence.”
Miss Jemima’s cheeks were suffused with a deeper scarlet than Frank’s had been a few minutes before. Certainly that deceitful, heartless compliment justified all her contempt for the male sex; and yet—such is human blindness—it went far to redeem all mankind in her credulous and too confiding soul.
“He is about to propose,” sighed Miss Jemima.
“Giacomo,” said Riccabocca, as he drew on his nightcap, and stepped majestically into the four-posted bed, “I think we shall get that boy for the garden now!”
Thus each spurred his hobby, or drove her car, round the Hazeldean whirligig.
CHAPTER XIII
Whatever, may be the ultimate success of Miss Jemima Hazeldean’s designs upon Dr. Riccabocca, the Machiavellian sagacity with which the Italian had counted upon securing the services of Lenny Fairfield was speedily and triumphantly established by the result. No voice of the parson’s, charmed he ever so wisely, could persuade the peasant-boy to go and ask pardon of the young gentleman, to whom, because he had done as he was bid, he owed an agonizing defeat and a shameful incarceration; and, to Mrs. Dale’s vexation, the widow took the boy’s part. She was deeply offended at the unjust disgrace Lenny had undergone in being put in the stocks; she shared his pride, and openly approved his spirit. Nor was it without great difficulty that Lenny could be induced to resume his lessons at school,—nay, even to set foot beyond the precincts of his mother’s holding. The point of the school at last he yielded, though sullenly; and the parson thought it better to temporize as to the more unpalatable demand. Unluckily, Lenny’s apprehensions of the mockery that awaited him in the merciless world of his village were realized. Though Stirn at first kept his own counsel the tinker blabbed the whole affair. And after the search instituted for Lenny on the fatal night, all attempt to hush up what had passed would have been impossible. So then Stirn told his story, as the tinker had told his own; both tales were very unfavourable to Leonard Fairfield. The pattern-boy had broken the Sabbath, fought with his betters, and been well mauled into the bargain; the village lad had sided with Stirn and the authorities in spying out the misdemeanours of his equals therefore Leonard Fairfield, in both capacities of degraded pattern-boy and baffled spy, could expect no mercy,—he was ridiculed in the one, and hated in the other.
It is true that, in the presence of the schoolmaster and under the eye of Mr. Dale, no one openly gave vent to malignant feelings; but the moment those checks were removed, popular persecution began.
Some pointed and mowed at him, some cursed him for a sneak, and all shunned his society; voices were heard in the hedgerows, as he passed through the village at dusk, “Who was put into the stocks?—baa!” “Who got a bloody nob for playing spy to Nick Stirn?—baa!” To resist this species of aggression would have been a vain attempt for a wiser head and a colder temper than our poor pattern-boy’s. He took his resolution at once, and his mother approved it; and the second or third day after Dr. Riccabocca’s return to the Casino, Lenny Fairfield presented himself on the terrace with a little bundle in his hand. “Please, sir,” said he to the doctor, who was sitting cross-legged on the balustrade, with his red silk umbrella over his head,—“please, sir, if you’ll be good enough to take me now, and give me any hole to sleep in, I’ll work for your honour night and day; and as for wages, Mother says, ‘just suit yourself, sir.’”
“My child,” said the doctor, taking Lenny by the hand, and looking at him with the sagacious eye of a wizard, “I knew you would come! and Giacomo is already prepared for you! As to wages, we’ll talk of them by and by.”
Lenny being thus settled, his mother looked for some evenings on the vacant chair, where he had so long sat in the place of her beloved Mark; and the chair seemed so comfortless and desolate, thus left all to itself, that she could bear it no longer.
Indeed the village had grown as distasteful to her as to Lenny,—perhaps more so; and one morning she hailed the steward as he was trotting his hog-maued cob beside the door, and bade him tell the squire that “she would take it very kind if he would let her off the six months’ notice for the land and premises she held; there were plenty to step into the place at a much better rent.”
“You’re a fool,” said the good-natured steward; “and I’m very glad you did not speak to that fellow Stirn instead of to me. You’ve been doing extremely well here, and have the place, I may say, for nothing.”
“Nothin’ as to rent, sir, but a great deal as to feelin’,” said the widow. “And now Lenny has gone to work with the foreign gentleman, I should like to go and live near him.”
“Ah, yes, I heard Lenny had taken himself off to the Casino, more fool he; but, bless your heart, ‘t is no distance,—two miles or so. Can’t he come home every night after work?”
“No, sir,” exclaimed the widow, almost fiercely; “he sha’n’t come home here, to be called bad names and jeered at!—he whom my dead good man was so fond and proud of. No, sir; we poor folks have our feelings, as I said to Mrs. Dale, and as I will say to the squire hisself. Not that I don’t thank him for all favours,—he be a good gentleman if let alone; but he says he won’t come near us till Lenny goes and axes pardin. Pardin for what, I should like to know? Poor lamb! I wish you could ha’ seen his nose, sir,—as big as your two fists. Ax pardin! if the squire had had such a nose as that, I don’t think it’s pardin he’d been ha’ axing. But I let the passion get the better of me,—I humbly beg you’ll excuse it, sir. I’m no schollard, as poor Mark was, and Lenny would have been, if the Lord had not visited us otherways. Therefore just get the squire to let me go as soon as may be; and as for the bit o’ hay and what’s on the grounds and orchard, the new comer will no doubt settle that.”
The steward, finding no eloquence of his could induce the widow to relinquish her resolution, took her message to the squire. Mr. Hazeldean, who was indeed really offended at the boy’s obstinate refusal to make the amende honorable to Randal Leslie, at first only bestowed a hearty curse or two on the pride and ingratitude both of mother and son. It may be supposed, however, that his second thoughts were more gentle, since that evening, though he did not go himself to the widow, he sent his “Harry.” Now, though Harry was sometimes austere and brusque enough on her own account, and in such business as might especially be transacted between herself and the cottagers, yet she never appeared as the delegate of her lord except in the capacity of a herald of peace and mediating angel. It was with good heart, too, that she undertook this mission, since, as we have seen, both mother and son were great favourites of hers. She entered the cottage with the friendliest beam in her bright blue eye, and it was with the softest tone of her frank cordial voice that she accosted the widow. But she was no more successful than the steward had been. The truth is, that I don’t believe the haughtiest duke in the three kingdoms is really so proud as your plain English rural peasant, nor half so hard to propitiate and deal with when his sense of dignity is ruffled. Nor are there many of my own literary brethren (thin-skinned creatures though we are) so sensitively alive to the Public Opinion, wisely despised by Dr. Riccabocca, as that same peasant. He can endure a good deal of contumely sometimes, it