He was much distressed at the state of things, and intended to write to the incumbent, though, as he said, whatever was done would end by being at his own expense, and the move and other calls left him so little in hand that he sighed over the difficulties, and declared that he was better off in London, except for the honour of the thing. Perhaps my mother was of the same opinion after a dreary afternoon, when Griff and Martyn had been wandering about aimlessly, and were at length betrayed by the barking of a little terrier, purchased the day before from Tom Petty, besieging the stable cat, who stood with swollen tail, glaring eyes, and thunderous growls, on the top of the tallest pillar of the ruins. Emily nearly cried at their cruelty. Martyn was called off by my mother, and set down, half sulky, half ashamed, to Henry and his Bearer; and Griff, vowing that he believed it was that brute who made the row at night, and that she ought to be exterminated, strolled off to converse with Chapman, who was a quaint compound of clerk and keeper—in the one capacity upholding his late master, in the other bemoaning Mr. Mears’ unpunctualities, specially as regarded weddings and funerals; one ‘corp’ having been kept waiting till a messenger had been sent to Wattlesea, who finding both clergy out for the day, had had to go to Hillside, ‘where they was always ready, though the old Squire would have been mad with him if he’d a-guessed one of they Fordys had ever set foot in the parish.’
The only school in the place was close to the meeting-house, ‘a very dame’s school indeed,’ as Emily described it after a peep on Monday. Dame Dearlove, the old woman who presided, was a picture of Shenstone’s schoolmistress,—black bonnet, horn spectacles, fearful birch rod, three-cornered buff ’kerchief, checked apron and all, but on meddling with her, she proved a very dragon, the antipodes of her name. Tattered copies of the Universal Spelling-Book served her aristocracy, ragged Testaments the general herd, whence all appeared to be shouting aloud at once. She looked sour as verjuice when my mother and Emily entered, and gave them to understand that ‘she wasn’t used to no strangers in her school, and didn’t want ’em.’ We found that in Chapman’s opinion she ‘didn’t larn ’em nothing.’ She had succeeded her aunt, who had taught him to read ‘right off,’ but ‘her baint to be compared with she.’ And now the farmers’ children, and the little aristocracy, including his own grand-children,—all indeed who, in his phrase, ‘cared for eddication,’—went to Wattlesea.
CHAPTER XI.
‘THEY FORDYS.’
‘Of honourable reckoning are you both,
And pity ’tis, you lived at odds so long.’Shakespeare.
My father had a good deal of business in hand, and was glad of Clarence’s help in writing and accounts,—a great pleasure, though it prevented his being Griff’s companion in his exploring and essays at shooting. He had time, however, to make an expedition with me in the donkey chair to inquire after the herdboy, Amos Bell, and carry him some kitchen physic. To our horror we found him quite alone in the wretched cottage, while everybody was out harvesting; but he did not seem to pity himself, or think it otherwise than quite natural, as he lay on a little bed in the corner, disabled by what Clarence thought a dislocation. Miss Ellen had brought him a pudding, and little Miss Anne a picture-book.
He was not so dense and shy as the children of the hamlet near us, and Emily extracted from him that Miss Ellen was ‘Our passon’s young lady.’
‘Mr. Mears’!’ she exclaimed.
‘No: ourn be Passon Fordy.’
It turned out that this place was not in Earlscombe at all, but in Hillside, a different parish; and the boy, Amos, further communicated that there was old Passon Fordy, and Passon Frank, and Madam, what was Mr. Frank’s lady. Yes, he could read, he could; he went to Sunday School, and was in Miss Ellen’s class; he had been to school worky days, only father was dead, and Farmer Hartop gave him a job.
It was plain that Hillside was under a very different rule from Earlscombe; and Emily was delighted to have discovered that the sweet cottage bonnet’s owner was called Ellen, which just then was the pet Christian name of romance, in honour of the Lady of the Lake.