CHAPTER VI.
THORSBY AMONGST THE WOODBURNS.
Amongst the Castleborough gentlemen who were on terms of intimacy with the family of Simon Degge, and who, therefore, frequently was to be met at Hillmartin, was a Mr. Henry Thorsby. This Mr. Thorsby was a young man of one of the oldest and most leading families of Castleborough. He was a manufacturing hosier; hosiery being one of the two great staples of the town—the other being lace. These hosiers employed a great number of frame-work-knitters in both town and country. These people, in fact, handloom-weavers, worked in the stocking-frame, receiving the cotton from the hosier, and bringing in to the town-warehouse their woven stockings at so much per dozen every Saturday. A first-rate house, therefore, employed some hundreds of men or women, as it might he, for both men and women are stocking-weavers, or, as they are termed, stockingers.
Mr. Henry, or as he was more commonly called, Harry Thorsby, was the son of a great hosier, who had led a very free and bon vivant life; had been a fearful sufferer from the gout; and had died recently from an attack of it which had been driven to the stomach. He had left only his widow and this one son, who was regarded as one of the most substantial burghers of the place. He had large warehouses, a large and handsome house, in which his mother presided, and to whom he was the apple of her eye. In her eyes her son Harry was one in a thousand; never was such a handsome, good-hearted fellow; he was, she said, as good as twenty daughters to her, and always had been.
In fact, Harry Thorsby was a very good-looking and pleasant young man. He was something above the middle height, rather broadly built, but extremely active. He had a handsome, somewhat large face, of what is called the oval contour, well-defined features, a bushy head of black hair, a rather dark complexion, and well-shaped black whiskers. Thorsby, like his father, had a very sociable and rather jovial turn—that was the rock in his path. His mother, indeed, had often with tears shown him that danger, and implored him to take warning by his father’s example, who had shortened his life by indulgence in wine, and what he called good company; and who might have possessed double the wealth, and the first place in the town,—yes, not even second to Mr. Simon Degge,—had he avoided the snare of good fellowship. Harry would not hurt his mother’s feelings for the world, and he always said,—“Oh, mother, you need not have any anxiety on my account. I am not by any means fond of wine, though I do like a little pleasant company; but I shall not forget what I have seen, and I shall not forget you, mother.”
Harry Thorsby was fond of his horse, and followed the hunt. He might often be seen during the season, in his scarlet coat riding out of town on a fine morning to the meet of the day, looking very gallant and happy; and grave fellow-manufacturers as they passed to their warehouses, while they nodded and smiled in passing, said to themselves,—“Thorsby will be Thorsby; what is bred in the bone will never be out of the flesh. Harry, like his father, finds something pleasanter than his counting-house.”
But, exclusive of this taste for hunting, and for shooting, which was equally a passion of his, Harry Thorsby was a good tradesman, and a steady attendant on his counting-house and warehouse and business altogether. Business over, however, he was much in the company of the young men of position in the town. He was an extremely merry, amusing fellow in company; told an anecdote well, and sung fairly. His nature seemed to demand life and variety. He was extremely excitable, but not to anger,—for he was extremely forbearing under provocation; his tendency was to pleasure, fun—what is termed larking—and to all the jollity of youth.
One of these larks he often was very merry over amongst his intimate friends. He and his mother often breakfasted at a small round table, and the breakfast was brought in on a circular-turned mahogany tray, which had grown rather rotund at the bottom so that it would easily turn round on the table. His mother being very fond of a gossip, and having always a great deal to tell him in his tête-à-tête, had scarcely began her coffee when Harry had despatched his first cup; unperceived, therefore, he would gently turn the tray round, finish her cup too, and then remind her that both were empty. This process went on to the end of Harry’s three cups, when he would spring up and say he must be off to business. “I hope you’ve made a good breakfast, Harry,” his mother would say, rising at the same time; “as for me, I don’t know how it is, but I feel neither fuller nor fatter.”
Harry went laughing slily to himself away, saying, “Well, mother, you have been amusing me with your talk so much, you don’t know whether you have breakfasted or not. Get some more. You’re never wrong if you eat till you are satisfied.” And the old lady would say, “Well, my lad, I think I must, for I feel quite sinking.” And he would leave her wondering how it was, but pouring comfortably out another cup.
Another manœuvre was not quite so innocent. Being sent, as a boy, on his father’s Arab mare, on a disagreeable journey, he dismounted outside of the town, daubed the poor mare’s face and knees with mud, and led her back home, saying that she had fallen and thrown him, and hurt him so much, that he could not go. His clothes being smeared plentifully, too, added to the probability of the story. But if Harry had any feeling, he was severely punished for his ruse, for his father, in a great rage, took the riding-whip and gave the innocent mare, who never made a false step in her life, a most unmerciful beating, and soon after sold her. This fact had reached Betty Trapps through Sylvanus Crook, and she prognosticated something awful of so cruelly artful a lad. Cruelty, however, was far from one of Harry Thorsby’s sins of manhood. He showed often very humane feeling.
Thorsby was frequently at Hillmartin; and there was a belief that he aspired to the hand of a rich Miss Mountain, of Castleborough. However that might be, he soon had occasion to accompany Ann and Letty home one evening, and from that day was as frequent and familiar a visitor at the Grange. George Woodburn had seen something of him at different times in Castleborough and in the hunting-field, and there soon grew up a great friendship. They made appointments to go to the hunt together. George invited him to come and shoot with him; for, besides the game on Woodburn Farm, Sir Emanuel Clavering had given George free range on his lands; and in a while Thorsby was on the most familiar terms at the Grange. Everybody liked him. He was so intelligent and so full of the spirit of good nature and of life enjoyment. He often came and passed the night there, that he might talk with Mr. and Mrs. Woodburn, and sing a variety of popular airs with Letty, which Ann accompanied on the piano.
George Woodburn was a young man of very pleasing person, but considered, by young men in general, peculiar. He had been educated at Repton, the great Derbyshire grammar school, where he had made the acquaintance of the sons of the principal nobles and gentry of the county. Henry Clavering, the son of Sir Emanuel, their near neighbour, had been one of his schoolfellows, and they had ever since been great friends. They had enjoyed together all the pleasures and sports of country life. Clavering was now away, and Thorsby was a very acceptable companion for George. It was in the country and at home, however, that this companionship was enjoyed, for George could never be persuaded to join Thorsby’s social circles in town. George had a steadfast dislike of towns and great companies. From a boy there had been a certain gravity in his character, combined with the utmost kindliness of disposition. He loved above everything the country and country life. His heart and soul were in his profession of agriculturist. In everything connected with farming and with the objects of nature lay his whole happiness. He knew every creature, great and small, that inhabited the fields; their haunts and habits were as familiar to him as the doings in his own family. Every species of insect was known to him, and might be said to be loved by him. As a boy he could tell you not only of every bird that built in the hedges, the orchard-trees, the cart-sheds, and the eaves, but the mason-bees that built in the old garden-wall he could show you passing in and out, and name them by names of his own, knowing every one individually.
He had from a mere lad accustomed himself to exposure to all kinds of weather, hot or cold, to battle with the wildest snows in looking after the sheep, to the most drenching rains, following the plough, or carting out compost for the land. There was no kind of manual labour on the farm in which he was not as expert as any labourer or farm-servant of them all. No one could beat him in mowing, reaping, ploughing, threshing, or in any kind of work. He could plash a hedge, cut a ditch or a drain, or fell a tree with any of them. His strength was prodigious, from constant exercise, and from absence of any enfeebling indulgence, for he had an innate aversion to much wine or beer, preferring what he called the mother and staple of all drinks—the crystal daughter of the rock.
In these respects George Woodburn was a most beneficial companion for Harry Thorsby, for George’s unequivocal dislike of anything dissipated, his equally unmistakeable enjoyment of the simplest pleasures of the country, struck Thorsby with wonder; and when he saw George’s real pleasure in the moderate number of friends that he mixed with, and his enormous capacity for enduring exertion, he wondered the more. In their shooting excursions he would have tired down a horse, and never appeared to know what fatigue was in himself.
“George,” said Thorsby, “how I do envy you your philosophical contempt for the pleasures of gay society, for you seem to enjoy what you do like with such a genuine gusto.”
“But it is no merit, my dear fellow,” George would reply; “for all those things that you call jollities and gaieties are my aversion. To spring out of bed on a summer’s morning, and see the sun shining over the beauteous landscape, steaming and smoking in the ascending dew; to hear the cuckoo calling me in her quaint foreign tongue, the thrushes and blackbirds shouting out their delight, some scores of them, as if they had not hearts big enough for their joy; to hear all the varied sounds of life, from the larks in the sky, from the creatures in the yard; to see the cattle and the flocks all luxuriating in the green or golden fields; to hear human voices making up the concert of nature, and, above all, the merry tongue of Letty, and the grave, loving tones of Ann, already out in the garden; to mount my horse, and ride away through fields and woods amid all the gladness of heaven and earth; to feel the fulness of life beating in my veins and gushing through my heart—Ah! what are all your simpering fine people, and your candle-light companies to me! Thorsby, I see men solitarily passing their lives in the lonely fields, or felling and fagoting in the lonely woods, whose very existence will never be known beyond their own hamlet; and do you think they are miserable? I tell you, no—so long as they can earn a decent reward for their labour. I often talk with these men, the Crusoes of the fields, of whom you fine people never think, or value them more than the sheep which graze beside them, and I find that God has breathed into them, frequently, in His silent language, of the sun, the moon, and stars, of the whispering breezes of evening, the colours of the sky, and the odours of turf and forest—things the haunters of crowds and lamplit festivities never dream of. These humble creatures, amid all their ignorance, in all their unvalued life, go home at night to loving hearts, and taste a happiness in communion with a few loved objects, which never can come to those whose affections are dissipated by running over countless forms and faces without settling on any. I would rather be one of these poor, despised, unknown, uncared-for creatures than the finest, wealthiest man or woman who lives the mere life of fashion and conventionalism.
“Our philosophical poet Wordsworth has exactly hit my idea of the philosophy of existence:—
“‘Yet life, you say, is life; we have seen and see,
And with a living pleasure we describe;
And fits of sprightly malice do but bribe
The languid mind into activity.
Sound sense, and love itself, and mirth and glee,
Are fostered by the comment and the gibe.
Even be it so: yet still among your tribe,
Our daily world’s true worldlings, rank not me.
“Nor can I not believe but that hereby
Great gains are mine: for thus I live remote
From evil-speaking; rancour never sought,
Comes to me not; malignant truth, or lie.
Hence have I genial seasons; hence have I
Smooth passions, smooth discourse, and joyous
thought.’”
Had George Woodburn been an austere or moping sort of young man, such conversations as these would not have surprised Harry Thorsby; but when he saw, that in everything George Woodburn found a pleasure as fresh as a mountain spring, that he was at home in the evening, all fun and playfulness, with his sisters, listened with delight to their music and singing, though he took no share in these things himself; with what sound sense and early wisdom he entered into the conversation with his parents and friends on any topic of domestic or public concern, he was deeply struck by it, and entertained a profound respect and esteem for so uncommon a specimen of modern youth.
There was one person, however, in the Woodburn Grange family, who looked on the introduction of Harry Thorsby on so familiar a footing as a real misfortune, and that was Betty Trapps. From the first moment of his entering the house, she regarded him with a cold and unwelcome eye. “Well,” said she, when asked whether she did not think him a very pleasant man, “he is not one of my men. I say, if I must speak my mind, dunna put much faith in him. Beware, I say, beware of cockatrices.”
“Oh, Betty!” exclaimed the stern Ann, “how can you be so uncharitable? Mr. Thorsby is a most respectable gentleman, known to be so to all Castleborough. Surely a friend of the Degges and of the Heritages cannot be a very bad man.”
“I did not say he was a bad man,” said Betty. “I only said he wasna one of my sort.”
“Why no,” said Letty, indignantly, “he is not a Methodist; but for all that, it does not follow that he is a cockatrice. What do you mean by cockatrices?”
“Ah! Miss Letty, beware! beware!” said Betty, looking very serious. “I say not to your young fluttering heart more, nor to any one else. I see a great candle and a little, pretty, very pretty moth, a-flying round it. If it burns its wings, then it won’t be the fault of Betty Trapps.”
Letty laughed outright. “Why, Betty, you are growing prophetic; but what about the cockatrices? I have often heard of such nondescripts, but I never saw one yet.”
“I’m not so sure of that,” said Betty. “If you have not I wish you never may. But as to this Thorsby, he crows when he laughs. He crows and chuckles, and shakes those black locks of his. Oh! he is too full of wild fire by half. See if it dunna run clean away with him one of these days.
“‘A crowing hen and crowing men,
Twist off their heads and sleep again.’”
“Betty!” said Ann, “what do you mean with your superstitious rhymes? Would you twist off Mr. Thorsby’s head?”
“Oh no!” said Betty. “I would not twist off his head; I’d only turn it hind before, that when he thought he was coming here he might be going somewhere else. I would not trust him or his head. I only mean that crowing hens and crowing men are out of natur. There’s no sureness of ’em. Mark! I don’t say there’s any guillery in this young man; but he’s no stop in him.”
“Well,” said the young ladies, “we hope you and Mr. Thorsby will become better friends as you get to know one another better. He thinks very much of you, Betty.”
Betty shook her head. “I’ve said my say,” she rejoined. “What must be, must be. It’s none of my doings nor shapings. Pray God all come out right.”
Thorsby was always very affable and very pleasantly jocose with Betty. Of course, he was not apprised of her unfavourable idea of him; but he saw that she did not willingly converse with him, but then he knew that she was reckoned an oddity, and he thought it her way. As time went on Betty seemed to soften down a little. He frequently offered her money when he had been staying there; but she would never take it. “It is for the trouble I give it you, Betty,” said Thorsby.
“You give me no trouble,” answered Betty. “I have just the same to cook and to do whether you are here or aren’t here. You can give it to Thomasin”—the other maid.
Thorsby found the very way to call Betty out was to give her a little wipe about Methodism, when she was sure to take up cudgels, as she called it, on that point; but this did not seem to raise Mr. Thorsby in her favour.
As time went on the intimacy of this little circle of families increased. Sometimes Sir Emanuel rode up to the Grange, and after chatting for an hour with the ladies, and walking with them round their garden, noticing their trees and young broods of different feathered stock, and telling them an anecdote of his foreign sojourns, and then carrying off the ever-ready Letty for a ride, and picking up, perhaps, Miss Heritage by the way, he would invite a number of them, and their parents, brothers, and sisters, to come up and spend an evening, and see the wonders of the heavens through his great telescope in the tower. Advancing spring and summer drew the young people out to rides and walks through the fields and woods, and to boat sails on the river. Summer made all busy at the Grange: the swarming of bees, the making of cheese and butter, the labourers all engaged in weeding the green corn, and coming in in troops for plentiful dinners and suppers, kept Betty Trapps in constant action, and in nimble bandying of country wit with these workpeople. Betty sat at table and carved for them, and dealt out sly hits to one or another as she dealt out plates well-heaped with boiled beef or bacon, and plenty of broad beans, cabbage, and other vegetables. There was often more genuine wit and humour circulating amongst these sons of the soil than illumines the boards of very great men.
“Ah! you there, Joe Clay,” cried Betty, “let me give you some more greens.”
“O! no more greens, thank you,” said Joe ruefully, “but a little more cabbage if you please, Betty.”
There was a loud burst of laughter, which the uninitiated would not have seen the gist of; but Joe Clay had married a Green, who led him anything but a green life. Not even Xantippe could have cut gibes with her.
“How’s your wife’s mother, Nathan Hopcroft?”
Nathan Hopcroft, a stupid-looking fellow, shakes his head. “Th’ owd ooman’s stark dead, Missis; and I canna bury her; an’ I mun ha’ it done.”
“Good rest to her,” said Betty, “she had long ceased to know much of this world—and, Nathan, if you canna bury her, you know where to go.”
“Where?”
“To the club.”
“Ay, I’ve been there, an’ said I mun ha’ it done, but they said, ‘No, the coffer were empty; I was very able to do’t mysen,’ an’ I ar’n’t. Th’ pigs hanna done well this year, and ar Jack’s rabbits has been stown—nothing but ill luck. Nay, they wanted me to pay th’ doctor’s bill.”
“What doctor had you?”
“Owd Doctor Drawatter.”
“What! him with th’ pigtail and powdered head,” said Betty, “and that fine gold-headed cane, and that smooth finiking voice? My gracious! that such a fine powdery peacock sort of a doctor should come to you, Nathan.”
“Ay, and what do you think he said? When I told him poor folks couldna pay doctors’ bills—they had enough to do to get bread—he says, ‘Pooh, pooh, man! the poor are the best off of any people; they’ve got no dignity to support, like gentlemen, and gentlemen doctors.’”
“There’s something in that, though,” said Betty, “though you laugh at it.”
“Ay,” said another man, “if they would na plague us wi’ lawyers and doctors, we might do. There’s Lawyer Metthard been selling up poor Judy Selston for rent, poor old soul, and now she must end her days i’ th’ workhouse.”
“Oh, drat that Lawyer Metthard,” said Betty. “He should be called Meteasy, for he’s only too easy to meet, and not so easy to get away from.”
Betty’s sally was warmly applauded, and was sure to be reported all over the parish. “But, Betty,” says another, “pr’ythee give me just a spoonful more beer.”
Betty, who was an English female Eulenspiegel, though she never had heard of him even in his English name of Owlinglass, and often amused herself by taking people literally at their word, took up a table-spoon, filled it with beer, and handed it to the astonished labourer.
“Nay, Missis,” he said, “I did not mean to be so very exact.”
“Why, then, don’t people say what they do mean?” asked Betty, gravely; “how is one to know?”
The laugh went round at the man’s expense; and Betty suddenly calls out to a humorous-looking little man in a soldier’s old red jacket, at the bottom of the table,—
“Well, Tom Boddily, so you are out of the House of Correction again, I see.”
“Yes, Missis,” says Tom, who had been shut up a few months for making free with Sir Benjamin Bullockshed’s hares. “Yes, Missis, and who should I meet as I was coming home that very day, but Sir Benjamin’s own self. It was on the Furze Bank, where I had snickled my hares. ‘So Tom,’ says he, ‘you are abroad again, eh? I hope you have learned, however, now to know your own.’ ‘Oh yes! your worship,’ says I, ‘and a little of other folks’s.’ ‘Ah! thou hast learned too much by half,’ Sir Benjamin said, says he, and rode on, but suddenly turning round, ‘Eh! Boddily! here’s a gate thrown off the hooks. Can you tell me who’s done that?’ ‘Yes, your worship,’ said I, and he looked all alive to know. ‘Yes,’ said I, ‘I can tell your worship. As Sir Roger Rockville says,—“It’s either Bill Newton, or Jack Shelton, or somebody else.”’ The squire asked no more questions; but before he could get out of ear-shot, I said, ‘Thank your worship for sending me to the Stone Jug for three months; there’s better keep there nor at home. I don’t know how I shall ever make you amends, unless I come and dine with your worship some day.’ ‘Dine with the devil!’ he exclaimed, turning as red as Farmer Winterwheat’s new-painted barndoor, and digging his spurs into his innocent horse—wishing, I reckon, as it had bin me.”
With this anecdote of Tom Boddily’s, the whole rustic company rose, with a great scraping of feet and scrawling of wooden chairs on the brick floor; and sallied forth with much laughter and approbation of Tom’s tu-quoque.
The summer was now in its glory. The elder-flower scented the breeze, the pink wild rose waved in long sprays from the hawthorn hedges. The breeze fanned deliciously the hot brown cheek of the milkmaid, as she sang over her milking-pail in the golden-flowered croft. The lark sung her lustiest and clearest strains over the heads of mowers and haymakers at the Grange farm.
It was busy time at the Grange in the hay-season. Besides several fields of mowing-grass on his farm on this side of the river, Mr. Woodburn had a great extent of hay-meadow on the other side. This hay they got up and stacked in the field, and it was sold thence to Castleborough. Mr. Woodburn and George were every day busy with the workpeople there till it was done. They had access to these great meadows by a primitive sort of ferry over the Trent, just below the Grange, to which a winding hollow lane, betwixt high banks and hedges, led. The boat, or rather punt, was capable of taking a horse, but not a cart over: carts and wagons they had to take over at the bridge, lower down the river. Anyone could pass himself over at this punt, by pulling at a chain which stretched across the river, and was secured at each end to a post with a pulley. The ferry was known by the name of “Wink’s Ferry,” from a man who once lived in a cottage near.
When the haymaking was transferred to the home fields, everybody in the family took an interest in it. Letty took a part, and joined George and Betty Trapps in tossing about the grass, and making a sport of haymaking. Wherever she was, there was plenty of talk and laughter; and George, who directed the operations of the workpeople, often saluted her with a shower of hay, from his fork, over her head, telling her that she would never earn salt to her porridge at haymaking; whereupon Letty would appeal to Betty Trapps, whether she did not work famously, and Betty said, “Why, Miss Letty, your laughter is worth a day’s work. I’m sure it makes me feel young again.”
Ann would come out, too, and lend a hand soberly, but soon tiring of it and sitting down with her mother, who brought out her knitting, and sate under a shady tree, enjoying the scene. Mr. Woodburn was leisurely at work, too; stopping, every now and then, to lean on his rake or fork, and wipe his brow, and calling to his wife and the girls to come and look at a mouse-nest, with a number of sleek young ones all in motion, or to share the honey of some little colony of humble-bees, clustered up in its brown cells not unlike a round bunch of grapes.
The last day of haymaking was always a sort of haymaking fête at Woodburn Grange. A tent was pitched under a huge-spreading oak-tree, in a pretty hilly field opposite to the house. A number of young people of the neighbourhood were invited to dine in the tent in rural fashion, and also to take tea, if the weather was warm, on the grass in front. On this occasion there appeared on the ground, Miss Millicent Heritage, under the guardianship of her mother; and Sylvanus Crook drove them thither, and was to assist at the haymaking, which he liked. With them came also a new acquaintance, at least to the Woodburns; for he was an old friend of the Heritages. This was a fair, amiable-looking young man, who bore, however, the learned title of Dr. Frank Leroy, and whom they had all heard of as a young Quaker physician of Castleborough, who had a very great reputation for talent, and for skill in his profession, having obtained diplomas, with testimonials of the highest kind, from two or three English as well as from foreign schools of medicine. Any one looking at him at that time of day wondered where the signs of Quakerdom were, for he dressed and spoke like any other gentleman. There was nothing, either, very learned or formidable in his appearance. He was courteous, agreeable in his manners, and, as a stranger, somewhat retiring. He soon, however, became animated on joining the other young people, seized a fork, and set manfully to work; and the group, full of merriment and sport, were soon reinforced by Harry Thorsby, overflowing with life and frolic. Our company being collected, we will take a closer view of the rural gathering in another chapter.