Chapter Nine.
“You Here!”
“Before Colonel Neville, Mr Pagnell and the Rev. John Croft, Stephen Devine, a notorious offender, charged with snaring two leverets in a field on the outskirts of Cranston Manor Farm”—began the reporter for the local news, scratching away vigorously with his spluttering quill.
The hall in which Petty Sessions were held at Wandsborough was not by its imposing dimensions calculated to impress anybody with the majesty of the law. It was small, low ceiled and badly lighted. Prisoner and witnesses, constables and magistrates’ clerk all seemed jumbled up together in the cramped space; while their worships themselves were only separated from the common herd by a long, narrow table. A most inconvenient room in fact, and times out of number had the Bench agitated for its enlargement, or better still, for the construction of another. All in vain. The justices had to go on sitting in the stuffy den, an infliction sufficient to bring them together in a state of ill-humour most unpropitious to the culprit. Even their genial and kind-hearted chairman, Colonel Neville, was wont to wax irritable under the circumstances—while constitutionally sterner stuff such as Mr Pagnell or General Dorrien was more than likely to err on the side of severity.
“Well, Devine, and what have you got to say for yourself?” said the chairman. There had been no defence set up; the prisoner had doggedly pleaded guilty. Indeed he could hardly have done otherwise, seeing that he had been caught red-handed in the act of taking one of the leverets out of the “hang,” while the other was found upon him. The head-keeper of Cranston and his subordinate had just been stating to the Bench under what circumstances they had made their capture; moreover, that the culprit was an excessively leery bird, who had long dodged the sharp watch they had kept upon him—and now the justices, having conferred together, were prepared to pass sentence.
“Please your warshups,” said the prisoner sullenly, “I’d bin out o’ work for nigh three weeks, and rent owin’, and nothin’ to keep the pot bilin’ at home. And I set the ‘hangs’ for rabbits, your warshups, which isn’t game, an’ I thowt as how that bit o’ furze were common land, and didn’t belong to nobody. And somehow when the hares got cotched, I took ’em, cos my gal had just come home, and there weren’t nothin’ in the house.”
An eager look came into the man’s swarthy hang-dog countenance. He was a heavy, powerfully built fellow of middle height, and his dark complexion and jet-black hair had gained for him the sobriquet “Gipsy Steve;” that, and the fact that no one knew where he came from, or anything about him. Among his own class he was popularly supposed to be “a man who had committed a murder,” for no reason apparently, unless it were his foreign and uncommon aspect, and a terribly evil look which would come over his dark features when crossed or roused.
Again the magistrates conferred together.