Still your policy of half-measures, which irritates without crushing its victims, which flaps an exasperated wasp-nest with a silk pocket-handkerchief, instead of blowing it up with a match and train, is rarely successful; and after three or four other and much guiltier victims than Lenny had been incarcerated in the stocks, the parish of Hazeldean was ripe for any enormity. Pestilent Jacobinical tracts, conceived and composed in the sinks of manufacturing towns, found their way into the popular beer-house,—Heaven knows how, though the tinker was suspected of being the disseminator by all but Stirn, who still, in a whisper, accused the Papishers. And, finally, there appeared amongst the other graphic embellishments which the poor stocks had received, the rude gravure of a gentleman in a broad-brimmed hat and top-boots, suspended from a gibbet, with the inscription beneath, “A warnin to hall tirans—mind your hi!—sighnde Captin sTraw.”
It was upon this significant and emblematic portraiture that the squire was gazing when the parson joined him. “Well, Parson,” said Mr. Hazeldean, with a smile which he meant to be pleasant and easy, but which was exceedingly bitter and grim, “I wish you joy of your flock,—you see they have just hanged me in effigy!”
The parson stared, and though greatly shocked, smothered his emotion; and attempted, with the wisdom of the serpent and the mildness of the dove, to find another original for the effigy.
“It is very bad,” quoth he, “but not so bad as all that, Squire; that’s not the shape of your bat. It is evidently meant for Mr. Stirn.”
“Do you think so?” said the squire, softened. “Yet the top-boots—Stirn never wears top-boots.”
“No more do you, except in the hunting-field. If you look again, those are not tops, they are leggings,—Stirn wears leggings. Besides, that flourish, which is meant for a nose, is a kind of hook, like Stirn’s; whereas your nose—though by no means a snub—rather turns up than not, as the Apollo’s does, according to the plaster cast in Riccabocca’s parlour.”
“Poor Stirn!” said the squire, in a tone that evinced complacency, not unmingled with compassion, “that’s what a man gets in this world by being a faithful servant, and doing his duty with zeal for his employer. But you see things have come to a strange pass, and the question now is, what course to pursue. The miscreants hitherto have defied all vigilance, and Stirn recommends the employment of a regular nightwatch, with a lanthorn and bludgeon.”
“That may protect the stocks certainly; but will it keep those detestable tracts out of the beer-house?”
“We shall shut the beer-house up the next sessions.”
“The tracts will break out elsewhere,—the humour’s in the blood!”
“I’ve half a mind to run off to Brighton or Leamingtongood hunting at Leamington—for a year, just to let the rogues see how they can get on without me!”
The squire’s lip trembled.
“My dear Mr. Hazeldean,” said the parson, taking his friend’s hand, “I don’t want to parade my superior wisdom; but, if you had taken my advice, ‘quieta non movere!’ Was there ever a parish so peaceable as this, or a country gentleman so beloved as you were, before you undertook the task which has dethroned kings and ruined States,—that of wantonly meddling with antiquity, whether for the purpose of uncalled-for repairs, or the revival of obsolete uses.”
At this rebuke, the squire did not manifest his constitutional tendencies to choler; but he replied almost meekly, “If it were to do again, faith, I would leave the parish to the enjoyment of the shabbiest pair of stocks that ever disgraced a village. Certainly I meant it for the best,—an ornament to the green; however, now the stocks is rebuilt, the stocks must be supported. Will Hazeldean is not the man to give way to a set of thankless rapscallions.”
“I think,” said the parson, “that you will allow that the House of Tudor, whatever its faults, was a determined, resolute dynasty enough,—high-hearted and strong-headed. A Tudor would never have fallen into the same calamities as the poor Stuart did!”
“What the plague has the House of Tudor got to do with my stocks?”
“A great deal. Henry VIII. found a subsidy so unpopular that he gave it up; and the people, in return, allowed him to cut off as many heads as he pleased, besides those in his own family. Good Queen Bess, who, I know, is your idol in history—”
“To be sure!—she knighted my ancestor at Tilbury Fort.”
“Good Queen Bess struggled hard to maintain a certain monopoly; she saw it would not do, and she surrendered it with that frank heartiness which becomes a sovereign, and makes surrender a grace.”
“Ha! and you would have me give up the stocks?”
“I would much rather the stocks had remained as it was before you touched it; but, as it is, if you could find a good plausible pretext—and there is an excellent one at hand,—the sternest kings open prisons, and grant favours, upon joyful occasions. Now a marriage in the royal family is of course a joyful occasion! and so it should be in that of the King of Hazeldean.” Admire that artful turn in the parson’s eloquence!—it was worthy of Riccabocca himself. Indeed, Mr. Dale had profited much by his companionship with that Machiavellian intellect.
“A marriage,—yes; but Frank has only just got into coattails!”
“I did not allude to Frank, but to your cousin Jemima!”
CHAPTER XXV
The squire staggered as if the breath had been knocked out of him, and, for want of a better seat, sat down on the stocks. All the female heads in the neighbouring cottages peered, themselves unseen, through the casements. What could the squire be about? What new mischief did he meditate? Did he mean to fortify the stocks? Old Gaffer Solomons, who had an indefinite idea of the lawful power of squires, and who had been for the last ten minutes at watch on his threshold, shook his head and said, “Them as a cut out the mon a hanging, as a put it in the squire’s head!”
“Put what?” asked his grand-daughter.