It was at this juncture that Elcy entered the room, her blue eyes bathed in a flood of tears, to pour into her father’s bosom the fate of her beloved “piggy!” Overpowered with this battery of hysterics, and the accumulated distresses and disaffection of his united household, Sandboys would have rushed from the apartment—and, indeed, did make an effort to do so; but remembering the paucity of his attire, he plumped rapidly down again, wrapping his blanket round him with the dignity of an Indian chief.
It was impossible, however, after a fortnight’s low living, to maintain for a length of time anything like grandeur of soul, so Sandboys soon got to participate in that depression of spirits which, owing to the spare diet, had begun to pervade the whole household at Hassness. In a few minutes the would-be stoical Cursty was melted, like the rest of them, into tears. Now blubbering, now snivelling, now sobbing, he proceeded to appeal to the generosity of Postlethwaite and the feelings of Ann Lightfoot, he spoke of their long services, and how the affection between the master and the servant was the pride of their native county, and imploringly besought them not to leave him in his present position, but to wait only a few days longer, when their friends and neighbours could not fail of returning; for he was convinced London wickedness must pall, after a brief experience, upon the pure and simple minds of the people of Buttermere; and he wound up by pointing to his children, and begged of them not to force him to drag those dear innocents into the foul contamination of a London life.
This appeal had not the desired effect. Postlethwaite, although he had been with Sandboys since a boy, and looked upon Jobby, from long association, almost as a child of his own,—and although in the most lively period of the village, he had never been known to take part in the festivities, nor had made his appearance at a “Merry Night,” for the last fifteen years—nevertheless, felt himself, after the departure of the Excursion train of his fellow villagers, lonely and ill-used, in not being allowed to participate in the general holiday. The consequence was, that Mr. Sandboys’ eloquence was utterly lost upon the surliness that had usurped the place of his usual regard and respect for his master.
Moreover, Ann Lightfoot had been unable to get over the loss of her “Jwohnny,” whom, with a jaundiced eye, she saw clattering away, in calkered boots, at all the merry nights of London, now standing up in many a square-eight reel, or now kneeling at the feet of some “fause-feaced fair,” in the sly vagaries of the Cushion-dance. Under these circumstances, she had passed her evening unusually lonely, even for Buttermere; and having no lover to sit up for at night, she had usually spent her leisure time with Postlethwaite, mutually grumbling by the kitchen fire, and filling his mind with ideas and desires for London enjoyments, to which he would otherwise have been an entire stranger. Accordingly, Ann Lightfoot was as little inclined as Deaf Postlethwaite, and Deaf Postlethwaite as little inclined as Ann Lightfoot—for the grumblings of the one were echoed in the growlings of the other—to be in any way mollified by their master’s appeal to their feelings. So Postlethwaite murmured out that they had made up their minds to go the next day, without further warning.
Sandboys, shuddering, saw the coming desolation of his home, and for a moment had serious thoughts of calling in the constable to make them fulfil their engagements. But, alas, his next remembrance was that the constable, like the grocer, and the blacksmith, and the cobblers, had gone up to London to see the Great Exhibition.
The wretched Cursty resigned himself to his fate. But Fate had still something worse in store for him. No sooner had the servants discharged themselves, than Mrs. Sandboys unmasked a new grievance, and opened a full battery upon him, as he sat dismal and desponding, in the blanket, sipping his gruel in deep despair. She told him, as she handed him the clean shirt she had been airing, that she would advise him to take great care of it—that was the last their stock of soap would allow him to have—it might be for months—and she would advise him to do, as he had read to her from the newspaper the other day, as the nasty, filthy Russians did—and grease it all over well, so that he might wear it until it dropped off his body, for she could tell him he wouldn’t have another until he went to fetch that Harker from the Great Exhibition. She did not mind, she told him, so much about the loss of her tea—severe trial as that was to her, and requiring all her Christian fortitude to bear—the want of beer was little or no privation to her—it was the servants—the poor, hardworking servants that she felt for. The dearth of fresh meat did not affect her—it was her dear Elcy’s complexion that she looked at; she could have gone barefoot all her life herself, but the idea of her children going about the earth shoeless, realized a wretchedness that she never could have imagined when she left her father’s home.
Still this was nothing—wretchedness was nothing—starvation was nothing—shoelessness was nothing, compared with the want of soap—she could bear anything but dirt. It was the terror of that had kept her from going to London, and now she saw that, in spite of all her efforts, Mr. Sandboys’ obstinacy about his trumpery wickedness would bring upon her those very horrors which she had made so many sacrifices to avoid. She did not care about any of his Great Exhibitions, only all she knew was, that she would rather go through any wickedness than live in the dirt that she could see he was forcing her into. Stay in Hassness she would not; and she had made up her mind, as Mr. Sandboys would not leave it, that she would throw herself on Messrs. Brag and Steal, and trust to them—for they were her father’s lawyers—to make him provide her with a separate and comfortable maintenance. Dearly as she once had loved him, she loved cleanliness more, and it remained for him to say whether they were to continue any longer together in the same wholesome state in which they had lived for thirty long years. And having given vent to her feelings, she seized the bed candlestick and marched indignantly into Elcy’s room, where she declared her resolution to pass the night.
Sandboys, in the enthusiasm of his excited feelings and the sad prospect of his threatened widowerhood, would have jumped up and followed her; but again remembering the paucity of his attire, sank back into his chair. In a few minutes it struck him that he had been sitting with his feet in the pail until the water had become as cold as that of the brook into which he had tumbled, and he began to think that, by remaining in his present position, he was perhaps adding another cold to the one he had already caught, in his fatal attempt at theoretical and practical pig-driving.
For the first time since his wedding-day, Cursty Sandboys was left to monopolize the amplitude of the matrimonial feather-bed, and no sooner had he rested his nightcap on his pillow, than there began to pass before his mind a dismal diorama of all the incidents of the day. As he looked upon the picture of the destitution, and desolation, and devastation, and denudation of his home, he half-relented of his stern resolve. For himself and Mrs. Sandboys he feared not the infection of the Great Metropolis; but it was the young and trusting Elcy, and the too-adventurous Jobby—that caused the trepidation of his soul. First he thought of the sufferings and the privations around him—and then he asked himself whether he were making his children and his household suffer these for what was a mere whim on his own part. Was not the sacrifice he required too much for youthful minds, and was he not once young himself? The reply of experience was, that he certainly had been young, but that he never had felt any wish to travel further than ten miles from his native valley. And as the conflict of affection and determination went on in his brain, he now felt assured it was all selfishness on his part to keep his children locked up in abstemious solitude—and the next moment was declaring that he should be a woman and worse than a woman, if he were weak enough to allow them whom he loved best in all the world to be exposed to the vicious allurements of the Great Metropolis. Now he was all ice—and now the ice was thawing with the brine of his tears—now he was rock—and now, like Hannibal, he was cutting a way towards London through his bosom with the vinegar of repentance.
The first thing that met Mr. Sandboys’ eyes in the morning was the pair of trousers in which he had driven the pig on the previous day. Again and again he gazed upon the ruins, for, until that moment, he had no definite idea as to the tatterdemalion state of his nether garments. The legs hung in long strips down the chair-back, more like shreds of list than human pantaloons; and, as he looked at them, he bethought him, for the first time, that his other pair, which he had just had made of his own grey, had been sent a fortnight previously to Johnson, the Loweswater tailor, to be altered, by Mrs. Sandboys, who took a great pride in her Cursty’s appearance, and found fault with the cut of them, declaring they were not sufficiently tight at the knees, or wide enough over the boot, for the last new fashion.