Masters of the Novella

by Delphi Classics

  ‘Well, my lass, this is cousin Manning, I suppose. Wait a minute, young man, and I’ll put on my coat, and give you a decorous and formal welcome. But — Ned Hall, there ought to be a water-furrow across this land: it’s a nasty, stiff, clayey, dauby bit of ground, and thou and I must fall to, come next Monday — I beg your pardon, cousin Manning — and there’s old Jem’s cottage wants a bit of thatch; you can do that job to-morrow while I am busy.’ Then, suddenly changing the tone of his deep bass voice to an odd suggestion of chapels and preachers, he added. ‘Now, I will give out the psalm, “Come all harmonious tongues”, to be sung to “Mount Ephraim” tune.’

  He lifted his spade in his hand, and began to beat time with it; the two labourers seemed to know both words and music, though I did not; and so did Phillis: her rich voice followed her father’s as he set the tune; and the men came in with more uncertainty, but still harmoniously. Phillis looked at me once or twice with a little surprise at my silence; but I did not know the words. There we five stood, bareheaded, excepting Phillis, in the tawny stubble-field, from which all the shocks of corn had not yet been carried — a dark wood on one side, where the woodpigeons were cooing; blue distance seen through the ash-trees on the other. Somehow, I think that if I had known the words, and could have sung, my throat would have been choked up by the feeling of the unaccustomed scene.

  The hymn was ended, and the men had drawn off before I could stir. I saw the minister beginning to put on his coat, and looking at me with friendly inspection in his gaze, before I could rouse myself.

  ‘I dare say you railway gentlemen don’t wind up the day with singing a psalm together,’ said he; ‘but it is not a bad practice — not a bad practice. We have had it a bit earlier to-day for hospitality’s sake — that’s all.’

  I had nothing particular to say to this, though I was thinking a great deal. From time to time I stole a look at my companion. His coat was black, and so was his waistcoat; neckcloth he had none, his strong full throat being bare above the snow-white shirt. He wore drab-coloured knee-breeches, grey worsted stockings (I thought I knew the maker), and strong-nailed shoes. He carried his hat in his hand, as if he liked to feel the coming breeze lifting his hair. After a while, I saw that the father took hold of the daughter’s hand, and so, they holding each other, went along towards home. We had to cross a lane. In it were two little children, one lying prone on the grass in a passion of crying, the other standing stock still, with its finger in its mouth, the large tears slowly rolling down its cheeks for sympathy. The cause of their distress was evident; there was a broken brown pitcher, and a little pool of spilt milk on the road.

  ‘Hollo! Hollo! What’s all this?’ said the minister. ‘Why, what have you been about, Tommy,’ lifting the little petticoated lad, who was lying sobbing, with one vigorous arm. Tommy looked at him with surprise in his round eyes, but no affright — they were evidently old acquaintances.

  ‘Mammy’s jug!’ said he, at last, beginning to cry afresh.

  ‘Well! and will crying piece mammy’s jug, or pick up spilt milk? How did you manage it, Tommy?’

  ‘He’ (jerking his head at the other) ‘and me was running races.’

  ‘Tommy said he could beat me,’ put in the other.

  ‘Now, I wonder what will make you two silly lads mind, and not run races again with a pitcher of milk between you,’ said the minister, as if musing. ‘I might flog you, and so save mammy the trouble; for I dare say she’ll do it if I don’t.’ The fresh burst of whimpering from both showed the probability of this.

  ‘Or I might take you to the Hope Farm, and give you some more milk; but then you’d be running races again, and my milk would follow that to the ground, and make another white pool. I think the flogging would be best — don’t you?’

  ‘We would never run races no more,’ said the elder of the two.

  ‘Then you’d not be boys; you’d be angels.’

  ‘No, we shouldn’t.’

  ‘Why not?’

  They looked into each other’s eyes for an answer to this puzzling question. At length, one said, ‘Angels is dead folk.’

  ‘Come; we’ll not get too deep into theology. What do you think of my lending you a tin can with a lid to carry the milk home in? That would not break, at any rate; though I would not answer for the milk not spilling if you ran races. That’s it!’

  He had dropped his daughter’s hand, and now held out each of his to the little fellows. Phillis and I followed, and listened to the prattle which the minister’s companions now poured out to him, and which he was evidently enjoying. At a certain point, there was a sudden burst of the tawny, ruddy-evening landscape. The minister turned round and quoted a line or two of Latin.

  ‘It’s wonderful,’ said he, ‘how exactly Virgil has hit the enduring epithets, nearly two thousand years ago, and in Italy; and yet how it describes to a T what is now lying before us in the parish of Heathbridge, county —— , England.’

  ‘I dare say it does,’ said I, all aglow with shame, for I had forgotten the little Latin I ever knew.

  The minister shifted his eyes to Phillis’s face; it mutely gave him back the sympathetic appreciation that I, in my ignorance, could not bestow.

  ‘Oh! this is worse than the catechism,’ thought I; ‘that was only remembering words.’

  ‘Phillis, lass, thou must go home with these lads, and tell their mother all about the race and the milk. Mammy must always know the truth,’ now speaking to the children. ‘And tell her, too, from me that I have got the best birch rod in the parish; and that if she ever thinks her children want a flogging she must bring them to me, and, if I think they deserve it, I’ll give it them better than she can.’ So Phillis led the children towards the dairy, somewhere in the back yard, and I followed the minister in through the ‘curate’ into the house-place. ‘Their mother,’ said he, ‘is a bit of a vixen, and apt to punish her children without rhyme or reason. I try to keep the parish rod as well as the parish bull.’

  He sate down in the three-cornered chair by the fire-side, and looked around the empty room.

  ‘Where’s the missus?’ said he to himself. But she was there in a minute; it was her regular plan to give him his welcome home — by a look, by a touch, nothing more — as soon as she could after his return, and he had missed her now. Regardless of my presence, he went over the day’s doings to her; and then, getting up, he said he must go and make himself ‘reverend’, and that then we would have a cup of tea in the parlour. The parlour was a large room with two casemented windows on the other side of the broad flagged passage leading from the rector-door to the wide staircase, with its shallow, polished oaken steps, on which no carpet was ever laid. The parlour-floor was covered in the middle by a home-made carpeting of needlework and list. One or two quaint family pictures of the Holman family hung round the walls; the fire-grate and irons were much ornamented with brass; and on a table against the wall between the windows, a great beau-pot of flowers was placed upon the folio volumes of Matthew Henry’s Bible. It was a compliment to me to use this room, and I tried to be grateful for it; but we never had our meals there after that first day, and I was glad of it; for the large house-place, living room, dining-room, whichever you might like to call it, was twice as comfortable and cheerful. There was a rug in front of the great large fire-place, and an oven by the grate, and a crook, with the kettle hanging from it, over the bright wood-fire; everything that ought to be black and polished in that room was black and Polished; and the flags, and window-curtains, and such things as were to be white and clean, were just spotless in their purity. Opposite to the fire-place, extending the whole length of the room, was an oaken shovel-board, with the right incline for a skilful player to send the weights into the prescribed space. There were baskets of white work about, and a small shelf of books hung against the wall, books used for reading, and not for propping up a beau-pot of flowers. I took down one or two of those books once when I was left alone in the house-place on the first eveni
ng — Virgil, Caesar, a Greek grammar — oh, dear! ah, me! and Phillis Holman’s name in each of them! I shut them up, and put them back in their places, and walked as far away from the bookshelf as I could. Yes, and I gave my cousin Phillis a wide berth, as though she was sitting at her work quietly enough, and her hair was looking more golden, her dark eyelashes longer, her round pillar of a throat whiter than ever. We had done tea, and we had returned into the house-place that the minister might smoke his pipe without fear of contaminating the drab damask window-curtains of the parlour. He had made himself ‘reverend’ by putting on one of the voluminous white muslin neckcloths that I had seen cousin Holman ironing that first visit I had paid to the Hope Farm, and by making one or two other unimportant changes in his dress. He sate looking steadily at me, but whether he saw me or not I cannot tell. At the time I fancied that he did, and was gauging me in some unknown fashion in his secret mind. Every now and then he took his pipe out of his mouth, knocked out the ashes, and asked me some fresh question. As long as these related to my acquirements or my reading, I shuffled uneasily and did not know what to answer. By-and-by he got round to the more practical subject of railroads, and on this I was more at home. I really had taken an interest in my work; nor would Mr Holdsworth, indeed, have kept me in his employment if I had not given my mind as well as my time to it; and I was, besides, full of the difficulties which beset us just then, owing to our not being able to find a steady bottom on the Heathbridge moss, over which we wished to carry our line. In the midst of all my eagerness in speaking about this, I could not help being struck with the extreme pertinence of his questions. I do not mean that he did not show ignorance of many of the details of engineering: that was to have been expected; but on the premises he had got hold of; he thought clearly and reasoned logically. Phillis — so like him as she was both in body and mind — kept stopping at her work and looking at me, trying to fully understand all that I said. I felt she did; and perhaps it made me take more pains in using clear expressions, and arranging my words, than I otherwise should.

  ‘She shall see I know something worth knowing, though it mayn’t be her dead-and-gone languages,’ thought I.

  ‘I see,’ said the minister, at length. ‘I understand it all. You’ve a clear, good head of your own, my lad, — choose how you came by it.’

  ‘From my father,’ said I, proudly. ‘Have you not heard of his discovery of a new method of shunting? It was in the Gazette. It was patented. I thought every one had heard of Manning’s patent winch.’

  ‘We don’t know who invented the alphabet,’ said he, half smiling, and taking up his pipe.

  ‘No, I dare say not, sir,’ replied I, half offended; ‘that’s so long ago.’ Puff — puff — puff.

  ‘But your father must be a notable man. I heard of him once before; and it is not many a one fifty miles away whose fame reaches Heathbridge.’

  ‘My father is a notable man, sir. It is not me that says so; it is Mr Holdsworth, and — and everybody.’

  ‘He is right to stand up for his father,’ said cousin Holman, as if she were pleading for me.

  I chafed inwardly, thinking that my father needed no one to stand up for him. He was man sufficient for himself.

  ‘Yes — he is right,’ said the minister, placidly. ‘Right, because it comes from his heart — right, too, as I believe, in point of fact. Else there is many a young cockerel that will stand upon a dunghill and crow about his father, by way of making his own plumage to shine. I should like to know thy father,’ he went on, turning straight to me, with a kindly, frank look in his eyes.

  But I was vexed, and would take no notice. Presently, having finished his pipe, he got up and left the room. Phillis put her work hastily down, and went after him. In a minute or two she returned, and sate down again. Not long after, and before I had quite recovered my good temper, he opened the door out of which he had passed, and called to me to come to him. I went across a narrow stone passage into a strange, many-cornered room, not ten feet in area, part study, part counting house, looking into the farm-yard; with a desk to sit at, a desk to stand at, a Spittoon, a set of shelves with old divinity books upon them; another, smaller, filled with books on farriery, farming, manures, and such subjects, with pieces of paper containing memoranda stuck against the whitewashed walls with wafers, nails, pins, anything that came readiest to hand; a box of carpenter’s tools on the floor, and some manuscripts in short-hand on the desk.

  He turned round, half laughing. ‘That foolish girl of mine thinks I have vexed you’ — putting his large, powerful hand on my shoulder. ‘“Nay,” says I, “kindly meant is kindly taken” — is it not so?’

  ‘It was not quite, sir,’ replied I, vanquished by his manner; ‘but it shall be in future.’

  ‘Come, that’s right. You and I shall be friends. Indeed, it’s not many a one I would bring in here. But I was reading a book this morning, and I could not make it out; it is a book that was left here by mistake one day; I had subscribed to Brother Robinson’s sermons; and I was glad to see this instead of them, for sermons though they be, they’re . . . well, never mind! I took ’em both, and made my old coat do a bit longer; but all’s fish that comes to my net. I have fewer books than leisure to read them, and I have a prodigious big appetite. Here it is.’

  It was a volume of stiff mechanics, involving many technical terms, and some rather deep mathematics. These last, which would have puzzled me, seemed easy enough to him; all that he wanted was the explanations of the technical words, which I could easily give.

  While he was looking through the book to find the places where he had been puzzled, my wandering eye caught on some of the papers on the wall, and I could not help reading one, which has stuck by me ever since. At first, it seemed a kind of weekly diary; but then I saw that the seven days were portioned out for special prayers and intercessions: Monday for his family, Tuesday for enemies, Wednesday for the Independent churches, Thursday for all other churches, Friday for persons afflicted, Saturday for his own soul, Sunday for all wanderers and sinners, that they might be brought home to the fold.

  We were called back into the house-place to have supper. A door opening into the kitchen was opened; and all stood up in both rooms, while the minister, tall, large, one hand resting on the spread table, the other lifted up, said, in the deep voice that would have been loud had it not been so full and rich, but without the peculiar accent or twang that I believe is considered devout by some people, ‘Whether we eat or drink, or whatsoever we do, let us do all to the glory of God.’

  The supper was an immense meat-pie. We of the house-place were helped first; then the minister hit the handle of his buck-horn carving-knife on the table once, and said, —

  ‘Now or never,’ which meant, did any of us want any more; and when we had all declined, either by silence or by words, he knocked twice with his knife on the table, and Betty came in through the open door, and carried off the great dish to the kitchen, where an old man and a young one, and a help-girl, were awaiting their meal.

  ‘Shut the door, if you will,’ said the minister to Betty.

  ‘That’s in honour of you,’ said cousin Holman, in a tone of satisfaction, as the door was shut. ‘When we’ve no stranger with us, the minister is so fond of keeping the door open, and talking to the men and maids, just as much as to Phillis and me.

  ‘It brings us all together like a household just before we meet as a household in prayer,’ said he, in explanation. ‘But to go back to what we were talking about — can you tell me of any simple book on dynamics that I could put in my pocket, and study a little at leisure times in the day?’

  ‘Leisure times, father?’ said Phillis, with a nearer approach to a smile than I had yet seen on her face.

  ‘Yes; leisure times, daughter. There is many an odd minute lost in waiting for other folk; and now that railroads are coming so near us, it behoves us to know something about them.’

  I thought of his own description of his ‘prodigious big appe
tite’ for learning. And he had a good appetite of his own for the more material victual before him. But I saw, or fancied I saw, that he had some rule for himself in the matter both of food and drink.

  As soon as supper was done the household assembled for prayer. It was a long impromptu evening prayer; and it would have seemed desultory enough had I not had a glimpse of the kind of day that preceded it, and so been able to find a clue to the thoughts that preceded the disjointed utterances; for he kept there kneeling down in the centre of a circle, his eyes shut, his outstretched hands pressed palm to palm — sometimes with a long pause of silence was anything else he wished to ‘lay before the Lord! (to use his own expression) — before he concluded with the blessing. He prayed for the cattle and live creatures, rather to my surprise; for my attention had begun to wander, till it was recalled by the familiar words.

  And here I must not forget to name an odd incident at the conclusion of the prayer, and before we had risen from our knees (indeed before Betty was well awake, for she made a practice of having a sound nap, her weary head lying on her stalwart arms); the minister, still kneeling in our midst, but with his eyes wide open, and his arms dropped by his side, spoke to the elder man, who turned round on his knees to attend. ‘John, didst see that Daisy had her warm mash to-night; for we must not neglect the means, John — two quarts of gruel, a spoonful of ginger, and a gill of beer — the poor beast needs it, and I fear it slipped out of my mind to tell thee; and here was I asking a blessing and neglecting the means, which is a mockery,’ said he, dropping his voice.

  Before we went to bed he told me he should see little or nothing more of me during my visit, which was to end on Sunday evening, as he always gave up both Saturday and Sabbath to his work in the ministry. I remembered that the landlord at the inn had told me this on the day when I first inquired about these new relations of mine; and I did not dislike the opportunity which I saw would be afforded me of becoming more acquainted with cousin Holman and Phillis, though I earnestly hoped that the latter would not attack me on the subject of the dead languages.