CHAPTER III.
THINGS AS THEY USED TO BE.
One of the first things which Simon Deg did after Mr. Spires had so indignantly refused him his daughter on account of his origin, was to conceive and to carry out a resolve that, however the brand of pauperism might attach to his ancestors, none of its obligations should lie on him. “Let past generations settle their own accounts,” he said; “but so far as this generation goes, there is not a man of it shall say that I owe the country, or rather this town, a farthing for life and growth. If my father ever received a bodle of parish-pay, which I know not, or his father or father’s father for him, it shall be repaid.” He went, therefore, successively to the committee of the poor in each parish, of which the town contained three, and desired permission to search the pay-books of each of these parishes for the last eighty years. “Beyond that period,” he said, “there can be no man living who ever paid a farthing to the poor-rates.” He did not conceal the object of his research. It was to ascertain, to a fraction, what amount had been paid during that period to any individual of the name of Deg. His position in the town readily secured him this opportunity, and he immediately employed an able accountant in each parish to trace down, through the books, items of these payments. He promised, moreover, to the stipendiary, or sub-overseers of the poor, a handsome honorarium, to assist the accountant in seeing that his work was done completely, and in aiding him in any difficulty. He himself frequently attended, and made tests, by going over certain extents of these accounts, of the accuracy with which they were done. It was a great labour, and was not completed much under a year. But it was accomplished at last, and the result was a statement of several thousand pounds as having been paid to persons of the name of Deg. This amount Simon Deg paid over with great satisfaction to the respective committees, and took receipts for it. The parish officers represented to him that there was no reason whatever that he should make so extraordinary a refundment to the parish, from which neither he himself nor his father in his own person could be shown to have derived a penny. Still more, they represented that Mr. Deg could not be descended from all the Degs; he could only have descended in one line, and from that specific line did he only incur even the shadow of an obligation to the parishes.
Simon Deg replied, that that was true; but, on the other hand, there was a female side to the line, the fathers and mothers of women who married Degs, and daughters of Degs who married and passed under other names, had swelled the account. He therefore requested to be allowed to pay the whole account, as it appeared under the name of Deg; and this was done. He observed, that he did not wish to dictate in any way the manner in which these sums should be expended, but he thought that the whole of them might with advantage be employed in extending and rendering more comfortable those parts of the workhouses where the aged paupers or the sick were accommodated; and this suggestion was fully and freely complied with.
This act of Simon Deg’s, demonstrating a feeling of such a profound sense of honour and integrity, made a grand impression on his townspeople, and raised him still higher in public estimation. In the course of his inquiry he made the discovery that the family name was in reality Degge, and had been thus spelled from the earliest period till within the last half of the last century. He therefore resumed the dropped letters, as giving a greater finish of the name to the eye; and saying pleasantly that, as he had now discharged the debts of his progenitors, at least to this generation, he thought he might be allowed to take the two last letters out of pawn. Henceforth, therefore, he and every one else wrote him Simon “Degge.”
Not long after his marriage, he bought a farm at Hillmartin, a village not far from Rockville. He was naturally of an active temperament, was fond of riding, and took a great fancy to farming and shooting. These divertisements were all afforded him by this little estate. After close confinement in his counting-house, he liked to get on his horse, and ride briskly out of town, over the old Trent Bridge, and up the winding way to his farm. Hillmartin was about three miles out, and stood on a fine, airy elevation, overlooking the country round, and from this side of it giving a full view of Castleborough. Simon’s farm lay a little over the hill beyond Hillmartin, and stretched in one direction towards Gotham, and in another towards the estate of Sir Benjamin Bullockshed.
Simon Degge’s purchase of this farm was a subject of great annoyance to Sir Benjamin, who was very anxious to have it, as it lay alongside of his woods and game preserves. The fact of seeing his pheasants, which had found a favourite, because a plentiful feeding-place, on this farm, shot down by Mr. Degge and his numerous friends from Castleborough, was, in truth, as great a misfortune as Sir Benjamin well could imagine to himself. For a quarter of a mile these woods of his ran along the corn-lands of this farm. The previous farmer had complained in vain of the depredations of the game—hares, rabbits and pheasants—which issued out of the preserves in legions. He was told that he must fence them out, but the fence was Sir Benjamin’s; and the farmer dared no more to put a stick into it to stop their runs, than he dared have taken a stick to Sir Benjamin himself. His growing corn was trodden down by the hares and rabbits; the hares, according to their habit, cut paths through it, and made playgrounds in it; the rabbits cropped it as fast as it grew for fifty yards, all along the woodsides. What escaped and went into ear was regularly eaten up by the pheasants. They sat on the hedges along the woodside as tame as barn-door fowls, knowing well that they were under powerful protection, and during harvest, if a daring waggoner snapped his whip at them, they disdained to move. On a fine afternoon, so long as there was anything to pick on the stubble, you might see them feeding in flocks of a hundred together, as quietly as fowls in a barn-yard.
The nuisance of this great game-manufactory, ruinous to the farmer, had compelled one tenant after another to throw the farm up. In fact, no one knowing the farm would take it; they were only men from a distance who did so, and were in terrible but vain trepidation when they discovered the real nature of the game-preserving incubus that lay upon the land. In itself the land was excellent, and, therefore, a stranger examining it, who had not already lived in a game-preserving country, was readily taken in by it. If the farmer, on discovering the alarming evil, complained, the answer from Sir Benjamin’s steward was, as I have said, “You can stop the runs in the hedges but if the farmer did stop them, he found the stoppage very soon removed by the keepers in their nocturnal rounds. One bold farmer had kept terriers to scour the woodsides; but he soon found his dogs, when they followed the game into the wood, shot, or trapped in the iron traps so freely used by our English gamekeepers, who are the greatest and most extensive animal torturers that the world ever knew.
The farm, belonging to a gentleman of Lincolnshire, he had, by the frequent change of tenants, grown out of love with it, and had offered it to Sir Benjamin at a moderate price; but Sir Benjamin, who did not believe any one thereabout would dare to come between him and the vendor, was standing out in the secure expectation of getting it at a very low figure, when Simon Degge, who was inquiring for such a farm, not far from town, heard of it from a lawyer in Castleborough who had carried on the negotiations with Sir Benjamin for the owner. This gentleman was much disgusted with the gross selfishness, the many delays, and haughty conduct of Sir Benjamin, and was delighted at the opportunity of putting the property at once and for ever out of his power. Mr. Degge closed with the conditions of sale at once, and as the whole of the purchase-money was ready, in a month the farm was fully conveyed to him, and put into his possession.
The consternation and indignation of Sir Benjamin on receiving this intelligence may be imagined. He saw at once that the tables were now most completely turned against him. He had no longer a half-informed and comparatively poor farmer to contend with, but a young man of great acknowledged ability and wealth, as well as activity of character. Instead of telling Mr. Degge to put sticks and bushes into the runs of the hares, rabbits, and pheasants, which his keepers could pull out again, he himself ordered the fences all along Mr. Degge’s farm to be made game-tight. A fence, inside the hawthorn-fence, of stakes about two feet long, which were driven down nearly in contact, side by side, was made to prevent egress from the preserves to the farm. But all this did not avail. The pheasants, as the corn ripened, flew over the fences, and fed freely on Mr. Degge’s corn. The hares travelled round and squatted themselves down thickly in the green crops of corn, grass, and clover; and the rabbits burrowed under, requiring continually the stopping of their holes: for although the rabbits were less cared for by Sir Benjamin, they were more cared for by his keepers, who made a profitable perquisite out of them.
On his part, Mr. Degge did not trouble himself at all about a certain amount of damage done by this game to his crops along the woodside; for the money value did not distress him, and he looked on that part of the farm as a nursery for the game which he meant to invite his Castleborough friends in the autumn to shoot.
But the annoyance to Sir Benjamin and his friends did not end here. Scattered about on that side of the country lay the estates of a number of squires—the Tenterhooks, Sheepshanks, Otterbrooks, Swagsides, &c.—who were of a thoroughly countryfied school. They were men not destitute of a certain amount of education, but who had no tastes beyond those of living on their property, and being the lords paramount as far as it extended. To be the great men of their little ancestral spots of earth; to rule over the farmers; to rear and destroy game; to officiate as magistrates, and convict poachers and petty culprits—that was the extent of their ambition. They seldom frequented the metropolis, or mixed in the society of the more elevated and refined aristocracy. They formed a circle of society of their own, looking proudly down on the moneyed men of the market town, on the farmers and villagers around them—at once ignorant of all superior knowledge, proud, and arbitrary.
That a man of the manufacturing town should have dared to step in, and catch away a valuable farm from before Sir Benjamin Bullockshed’s very nose, and, as they said, in actually gasping astonishment, whilst he was in negotiation for it, was a piece of audacity which really took away their breath. It was ominous of fresh attempts of the kind. The sanctity of the country and of game was no longer secure from the unhallowed inroads of plebeian audacity. Sir Roger Rockville, whose property also at one point came up to Mr. Degge’s farm, was in a state of most imbecile exasperation at this event. The dreaded manufacturing town was thus already marching into the very heart of the country; and of the manufacturing town, the very worst in his eyes of its odious population. For who was this Degge? he asked. A pauper, and the last of a long line of paupers. It mattered not that Mr. Degge had most fully discharged the pauper debt so far as this generation was concerned. To Sir Roger it was only another proof of the upstart pride and abundance of money of this dangerous class.
The sensation which this shocking event, as it was called, created in the whole circle of this squirearchy was visible at the meetings of these men of the earth, earthy, at their dinner-parties at each other’s houses, and at their meetings at the justice-rooms, and their morning rides to one another’s houses. A feeling of strange inveteracy was entertained against Simon Degge. If any of them met him on the highway as they rode to or from Castleborough, they scowled at him as though he had been a most suspicious character. More than once, when two of them were together, he had heard them remark to one another—for it was done loud enough for him to hear it—“That is that upstart pauper, Degge.” If any labourer of his could be caught on any pretence, and brought before them, as magistrates, he was sure to be handled with the utmost severity and the least possible modicum of justice; and when Mr. Degge went forward to speak a word in his defence, he was sure to be treated with a marked contempt, and even incivility.
This proceeding did not tend on Mr. Degge’s part to excite any pleasant feelings in his bosom towards these lords of the soil; but he maintained a demeanour of true gentlemanliness and self-respect. At the same time that he certainly felt a great satisfaction in the idea of the sweeping devastation of the game which he and his friends would make in the autumn, and which he was sure no precautions could prevent making its way to his fields so long as there was a better pasture there, or whilst he scattered a quantity of barley on his stubbles, after the corn naturally shed on them had been gathered off by the pheasants.
Such was the state of feelings all round Simon Degge’s new farm. So far as he himself was concerned, it seemed only to amuse him and his town friends, but to the whole squiral group, including Sir Roger Rockville, it was an acute, and promised to become a chronic condition of gall and wormwood. Mr. Degge brought his mother to live at the house belonging to the farm, for she delighted in the country;—not at the farm-house, for there he had a bailiff, but in a large old house at the village of Hillmartin itself, with a fine old-fashioned garden; and there himself and Mrs. Degge spent a great deal of the fine summer weather.
Simon Degge had also removed William Watson from his cottage by the farm meadow, and from his trade, and he was now acting as a sort of orderly at Mr. Degge’s chief manufactory. He occupied the lodge, and walked about, and saw that all was safe, and moving as it should do.
There were several wealthy and intelligent families in the neighbourhood of Mr. Degge’s farm, who, however, at once acknowledged the distinguished merit and virtues of this young man, and who did not hesitate to call on him and Mrs. Degge, much to the disgust of the class of country gentlemen of whom I have spoken. These, it must be admitted, had indeed little in common with men of game and warrants, and did not stand very highly in their favour before. Let us see whether they may not present a more agreeable aspect to us.