Chapter Thirty Six.
The Sword.
Although the neighbourhood had by this time got thoroughly accustomed to the new state of things at Cranston, and had voted it a great improvement on the old, yet the said vicinity was unanimous in its opinion that the General’s successor was decidedly queer.
True, a man in his position should be popular and not eccentric, but then, there were extenuating circumstances. If the county was not so much entertained at Cranston Hall as it deemed it had a right to expect, at any rate open house was kept periodically; and, as all things are relative, the contrast between even this and the inhospitality which characterised the late General’s tenure, told to tenfold advantage. Another claim had Roland Dorrien upon the indulgence of the neighbourhood. He had taken his wife from among the daughters of the land. No stranger to them and theirs had he brought into their midst, but one whom they had seen grow up among them, and right nobly did she grace her far from unimportant, and at first rather trying, position. So, taking all things into account, the neighbourhood was inclined to congratulate itself on the acquisition of a new lord for Cranston, and to look with indulgent eyes upon his moods and vagaries.
And these were multifold. Though not of a hilarious disposition, yet there were times when he would yield himself up to the excitement of the hour with an unthinking abandon which made even the youngest and liveliest of his guests stare, and then, while they were wondering with an agreeable surprise how it was that they had never suspected Dorrien of having so much in him, the mercury would fall with alarming suddenness, and he would relapse into a moody taciturnity, for which there was no accounting. Sometimes, too, those staying at Cranston never saw their host for days at a time, except at meals, and these he seemed to get through in a half-absent kind of way, answering in monosyllables if appealed to, but never originating a remark. In his normal frame of mind, however, Roland Dorrien struck his acquaintance as somewhat cold and uncomfortably reticent, but as a peculiarly keen-witted and observant man.
For a long time he had steadfastly refused to be placed on the Commission of the Peace, and his old friend, Colonel Neville, had waxed very sore and disappointed thereat. For Dorrien of Cranston not to have his place among the judicial luminaries adorning the Wandsborough Bench was, in the gallant veteran’s eyes, a thing simply unheard of in the annals of the county. Why, it was tantamount to a prediction of the family downfall. But Roland had stood firm, and the Colonel had taken the matter quite seriously to heart. Then all of a sudden, just as his friends had given up trying to persuade him, he had, of his own accord, expressed his willingness to serve, and the Colonel was overjoyed. But from the day of his appointment up till now he had only taken his seat on the bench three times, and then, either by accident or design, when there was a peculiarly light list of cases for adjudication. Moreover, his voice had been strenuously raised on the side of mercy, to the no small astonishment of those who had ever been wont to look upon his name as a convertible term for unbending severity. “A hard Dorrien” was how inferiors and dependents had been wont to speak of the heads of the family.
“I don’t think it exactly my line in life,” he observed to Mr Curtis, the vicar of Cranston, in reply to that worthy’s expostulation with him for his scant attendance at Petty Sessions, “to sit in judgment on a lot of poor devils who knock over a rabbit when they’re half-starving. It doesn’t seem a very ennobling kind of office to fill, does it?”
“That’s all very well, Mr Dorrien,” had replied the vicar, who was a zealous attendant at the Wandsborough Bench, and not a little proud of his connection therewith. “But birth and station have their duties, you must remember, and if those who by virtue of these advantages are appointed to ‘execute justice and maintain truth’ shrink from their responsibilities, why, it will soon be a bad thing for the country. For what is the country to do?”
“Pay some fellow—one of the Great Unbriefed, for instance—to perform these onerous duties,” was the reply, with a careless laugh, not wholly free from satire. “Plenty of sharp fellows in these hard times would jump at the billet, any one of whom would be quite as competent as we are collectively to fine Bill Gubbins ten shillings and costs for driving a horse and cart down the street when drunk and incapable, or to decide whether John Hodge or Tom Podge shall be adjudged to contribute towards the maintenance of Sarah Timms’ latest hopeful. At any rate it doesn’t strike me that the discharge of these elevating duties should be monopolised by ‘birth and station.’”