ABOUT JUSTICE
What luck is nobody can know, but it is certainly a gift to be preferred before natural ability. Luck is that undefinable thing which enables a man to push his head and shoulders well above the crowd. Make him wise it cannot, but no man cares about wisdom if he can only be wealthy. Lucky men pile up big fortunes, and invariably become humbugs in their old age, and assure young men that their affluence is entirely owing to the splendid virtues of application, perseverance, and early rising, which they practised in their youth. No doubt the virtues help, but hard work alone makes no man wealthy, let him toil like Sisyphus. It is luck that lodges the stone on the top of the mountain. The idle apprentice who has luck is far more likely to marry his master's daughter than the industrious apprentice who hasn't it. The clever man and the lucky one start out side by side, but they soon drift apart; the lucky man goes to the right door, the clever man goes to the wrong one; and the end of it is that the clever man writes from his cottage to the lucky man in his mansion, begging the loan of a few pounds to keep the bailiffs out. There is nothing to which a man without luck cannot attain by hard work, except one thing—success.
Decidedly there had been no fairy godmothers at Brightly's christening. None of the good things of life had fallen upon him; and yet he possessed those virtues which are supposed to make for wealth; no man could have worked harder or showed more perseverance; and as for early rising it was easy because he had no bed to rise from. Still he could not make a living. The elusive coppers refused to increase and multiply into shillings; and as for sovereigns they were as extinct as dodos.
Brightly continued his various progresses with that strict attention to business which had always characterised him, and with the empty stomach which had become a habit; but without any luck. Any one might have mistaken him for a poet.
He was working the same old stretch: Meldon, Sourton Down, Bridestowe, Lydford, Brentor, and the Tavys, his basket dragging at his arm, and Ju trotting her poor little life away at his heels. Ju also had been deserted by canine fairy godmothers. Perhaps she too had dreams—of a basket, furnished with soft cushions beside a fire, and perennial plates of bones and biscuits.
Brightly had a fresh stock of atrocious yellow vases, thanks to the generosity of the lovers at the fair; and he was hard at work again collecting rabbit-skins; and still encouraged himself by thinking of the glorious time when he would jog contentedly along the stony roads in a little cart neatly littered with fern, with a lamp to be lighted after dark, and the board bearing the inscription: "A. Brightly. Purveyor of rabbit-skins," set forth for all to read. It was not a very lofty ambition, although quite an impossible one. Brightly was getting on in years; his rheumatism and asthma were increasing; so was his blindness; he wept sometimes, but that did not assist his business. Sometimes he thought the time was getting near when he would have to sell his vases and buy two pennyworth of rat-poison. He thought he would do it with rat-poison. Perhaps when he woke up, if he did wake up, he would find himself in Jerusalem among the jugs of milk and honey-pots; and perhaps there would be somebody like Boodles looking at him with the same moist eyes. He could not go into the poorhouse. They would frighten him there, and he would much rather be dead than in that prison. Nature seemed rather to have overreached herself when she created Brightly. What was the use of such a defenceless creature, this sort of human rabbit whom any one could attack? Why turn him out feeble and half blind when he had his living to make? Even the wayside weed is better cared for. When its crown-bud is bitten off by a cow Nature sets to work to repair the injury at once, and the plant grows up as well as ever. Nature did nothing to repair Brightly's injuries. She did not even permit him to enjoy tobacco, that one luxury of the lonely and friendless. Probably she foresaw what a boon tobacco would be to him, so she afflicted him with asthma. Nature delights in thus adding toil to toil and trouble to trouble. It is only in the matter of adding pleasure to pleasure that she is niggardly.
Brightly was coming up the moor towards St. Mary Tavy. His face looked smaller and his hands bigger. There was another change, a far more striking one; he was actually well dressed; there was nothing, of course, in the shape of useless accessories, such as shirt or underwear, but the black seal-like raiment had been discarded and a suit of brown cloth had taken its place. He had picked up those clothes while burrowing in a wheal to find shelter from a pitiless downpour. It had been a great find which had rejoiced his heart, for although he was accustomed to make a living by picking up things which other people threw away, he had never before discovered anything half as priceless as a suit of stout garments. It had never occurred to him that they might not have been thrown away, but merely hidden in the wheal, or that he had no right to them, or that it could be dangerous for him to be seen about in them.
"Us will pitch here," said Brightly, stopping near the moor gate, and lowering his basket carefully. "It be dinner time, Ju."
The little dog wagged at the prospect. Dinner time occurred frequently, but generally without the dinner. She sniffed ravenously at the handkerchief in the corner of the basket, and decided that the menu of the day was cheese, largely rind, but still cheese, a slab of bread, and two onions. It was one of the feast-days. They reposed upon heather, and Brightly made a division of the food, reserving the onions for himself, but allotting Ju a bigger piece of rind as compensation. "You'm a lot littler than I," he explained. "Your belly be filled quicker. It be no good giving yew an onion, 'cause yew wun't yet 'en. Tak' your cheese—don't swallow like that, ye little stoopid! Yew don't get the taste of 'en at all. Yet 'en slow, and tak' a bit o' bread wi' 'en same as I du. Us wun't get no more to-day like enough."
The meal was soon over, and then Brightly sat up and began to whistle, while Ju squatted upon the heather, her tongue lolling out, and her poor little mongrel head following every motion of her master's body. Brightly's only recreation was whistling, and he took the pastime seriously. With his pinched face and big round glasses set towards Brentor he piped away as hard as he could; first a ballad which he had heard in an ale-house, then a hymn, and another ballad, and then the favourite of all, Jerusalem the Golden. He whistled them all wrong, but he didn't know it. For the time being he was happy enough, as he was a contented soul, and his chief happiness was to be alone on the moor, which then seemed to be his own property, with the scented garden of heather and gorse about him, and the sweet wind blowing upon his face; and they all seemed to be his own while he was alone. It was only when he saw a cottage, or a farm, or a man approaching him, that he understood they were not his own, but the property of the cottage, or the farm, or the man approaching him, and that he lived only upon sufferance, and might get into trouble for lying on the heather, and smelling the gorse, or for permitting the pleasant wind to blow upon his face.