There was a moment of silence, then a fluttered uprising.
“Yes, if you’m in a mind to, Mr. Lethbridge.”
BENJAMIN’S MESS
When Farmer Yelland died, everybody in Postbridge village was sorry—for theirselves, but not for him, mind you. Because if ever a good man went straight to glory ’twas Michael Yelland. He’d had his ups an’ downs like the best an’ worst of us; but though the poor old gentleman weern’t overblessed in his life,—nor yet his only son for that matter,—yet ’twas made up to him in a manner of speaking, for never a farm in Dartymoor did better. His things were always the first to be ready for market; his grass was always ready to cut a week ahead of his neighbours, an’ he always had fine weather to cut it in; while as for his corn an’ roots—why, at the Agricultural Show to Ashburton, it comed to be a joke all over the countryside, for first prize always went to Yelland as a regular thing. The Lord looks after His own, you see, in His own partickler way. An’ such a patient, large-hearted man as he was! When Sarah Yelland, his wife, was took off, after clacking nonsense for fifty year, us all thanked God in our hearts for her good man. For ’tweern’t a happy marriage, an’ he’d had more to put up with unbeknownst in his home circle than falls to the lot of many of us. But not an unkind word did he ever say either afore or after she died. Never would grumble about it, but kept his thoughts to hisself. I mind I met him in the churchyard six months after he’d buried his wife, an’ he was smoking his old clay pipe an’ seeing about a granite gravestone for the tomb.
“So there her lies at peace,” I said in my civil way.
An’ farmer takes his pipe out of his mouth an’ spits ’pon the grave, but not with any rude meaning.
“Yes, John,” he says to me. “There Sarah lies, poor old dear—at peace, I hope, I’m sure. Anyway, if she’s so peaceful as I be since her’s gone, she’ll do very well.”
Two year after that he was in the pit beside her, an’ the space left ’pon the stone was filled up with his vartues.
Then Nicholas Yelland—his son—a lad five-an’-twenty years old an’ a bit cross in the grain—found hisself master of Cator Court, as the place was called. We shook our heads, for he was known to us as a chap pretty near spoilt by over-educating. Old Yelland had got his patience an’ sense from the land, an’ his wisdom an’ sweetness of disposition out of no other book than the Bible; but his missis had great notions for her one an’ only child, an’ she wanted more than the Bible could teach him; which, in my judgement, is to cry out for better bread than can be made of wheat. Farmering weern’t a grand enough trade for him, she thought; so she kept nagging an’ nagging by day an’ night, till, in self-defence, the old man sent his lad to Tavistock Grammar School—a very great seat of larning in them days, by all accounts. Yet what they didn’t teach him was worth knowing too, for manners he never larned, nor yet his duty to his neighbour. He comed home at seventeen with some Latin, ’twas said, though ’twas only rumoured like, an’ a very pretty way of reading the lessons to church on Sundays; but when he returned, the first thing as he told his faither was, “I be a Radical in politics evermore, an’ I ban’t going to touch my hat again to nobody living. One man’s so good as another.”
“So he be, Nick,” said his faither. “An’ a darned sight better, too, for that matter. The world will larn ’e that, if nothing else. I’m sorry ever I sent ’e to school, if they’ve taught ’e such tomfoolery there. But life will unlarn ’e, I hope. To touch your hat to your betters ban’t no sign of weakness in you, but a sign of sense: Lord Luscombe hisself takes off his hat to the King, an’ the King takes off his’n to God A’mighty. ’Tis the laws of Nature,” said farmer, “an’ if you break the laws o’ Nature, you’ll damn soon get broke yourself, as everybody finds out after they’m turned fifty, if not sooner.”