In due course Thomas Wanless appeared before the "Justices"—God save them! and, after a very brief trial, was "let off," as one phrased it, with six months' hard labour in Warwick Jail. The only evidence against him was that of Tom Pemberton, but he made no attempt to deny the charge, and as the squires already considered him a "dangerous" fellow, they thought their sentence a model of clemency. So did Pemberton and Keeper Crabb. His judges were Wiseman, Greenaway, the man whose vermin he had helped to thin by just three rabbits, Parson Codling, of Ashbrook, and a bibulous old creature who lived in Leamington Priors, a retired Birmingham merchant, who had been made J.P. for his subservience to the Tories. Greenaway was violent, and rather disposed to give an "exemplary" sentence; Wiseman was contemptuously indifferent, as became a big acred man and the husband of a woman with a handle to her name; and Parson Codling was unctuously severe.
An attempt was made to get Wanless to tell the name of his co-offender, but that he refused, so he was told that his obstinacy had prevented a more lenient sentence, which was false. But something is due to appearances at times, and even from such divine personages as justices of the peace. So careful was the "bench" of proprieties on this occasion, that Codling, on a hint from the chairman, gave Wanless the benefit of a short exhortation before consigning him to the salutary and eminently Christian discipline of the jailer. In the course of this homily, Codling took occasion to observe that he had once hoped better things of the prisoner, but had long ago been forced to give him up. "With grief and sorrow," said the parson, "I have again and again watched his obduracy, and his tendency to consort with agitators, or worse. His fate will, I trust, be a warning to others."
This Parson Codling you will perceive had become tame. Once on a time he had been almost given over to agitation himself; but that danger soon passed, and he was now a proper ornament to and supporter of the British hierarchy. Its morals were his morals. He knew no god but the god of the landed gentry. In his youth the functions of the priestly office had been misunderstood by him; but he had married soon after we last met him a gentlewoman of Worcestershire with £2,000 a year, and that cured him of many weaknesses—amongst others of the foolish craze he once had that the religion of Christ was a religion to be practised. He now knew that it was nothing of the kind. Certain tenets of it had been made up into a creed "to be said or sung," and a singularly complex institution called the Church had been elaborated for the good of public morals, and the support of the English aristocracy—that was all. Therefore could he now wag his head pompously at poor Tom Wanless standing dumb before him; therefore could he now raise his fat soft hands, and thrust from his sight with sanctimonious horror that criminal guilty of rabbit murder. A stranger, unfamiliar with the usages of rural England—that country whose liberties, we are told, all nations admire and envy—might have supposed that Wanless was some foul manslayer, some midnight assassin meeting his just doom. Unhappy stranger, woe on thy ignorance. Know thou that in England no crime is so heinous as the least approach to rebellion against the sacred rights of the Have-alls? "Touch not the land nor anything that is thereon," is to the English landholder all the law and the prophets. So Codling cursed Wanless for his crime, and the doom-stricken labourer passed from his sight.
CHAPTER V.
MAKES KNOWN THE EXCELLENT QUALITIES OF JAIL LIFE.
Captain Hawthorn had been duly apprised of Thomas's misfortune, but was unable to do anything directly to help him. Because of his obnoxious opinions Hawthorn was not a justice of the peace; and he felt that any attempt on his part to appear as the labourer's champion might only end in making the poor fellow's sentence all the heavier. Since the Reform Bill and the Chartist agitations had alarmed the landholders, they had shown less disposition than ever to admit such a nondescript radical as Hawthorn into their society; and his interference in local affairs was so prominently resented on several occasions that he had almost ceased to attempt any. He had even some difficulty in obtaining access to Wanless in jail; but ultimately succeeded, by the help of a little judicious bribery, and the friendly assistance of a mountebank drunken parson, who was in jail for debt during six days of the week, but got bailed out on Sundays, so that he might edify his flock and keep down expenses.
The old man's first greeting to Wanless was in his customary rough form.
"Well, Tom, a nice ass you have made of yourself. Why the devil hadn't you more sense, man? Eh? D—n it, you might have taken some of my rabbits, my boy, and never a keeper would have said you nay."