The invitation was accepted forthwith, and when Captain Hulbert dropped in at teatime it was discovered that he, too, had been asked, and that he meant to accept, if his friends at the Angler’s Nest were to be there.
A thunderbolt fell upon the little village on the following Sunday. When the old men and women, creeping to church a little in advance of younger legs, came to the church-path, they found the gate locked against them, locked and barricaded with bars which looked as if they were meant to last till the final cataclysm. The poor old creatures looked up wonderingly at a newly-painted board, on which the more intelligent among them spelt out the following legend—
“This wood is the private property of J. Vansittart Crowther, Esq. Trespassers will be prosecuted.”
Martin Disney and his wife and sister came up when a little crowd of men, women, and children, numbering about thirty, had assembled round the gate, all in their Sunday best.
“What’s the meaning of this?” asked Disney.
“Ah, colonel, that’s what we all want to know,” replied old Manley, the village carpenter, a bent and venerable figure, long past work. “I’m over eighty, but I never remember that gate being locked as long as I have lived at Trelasco, and that’s all my life, colonel. There’s always been a right of way through that wood.”
“And there always shall be,” answered Martin Disney. “We won’t take any violent measures to-day, my friends—first because it is Sunday, and next because one should always try fair means before one tries foul. I shall write to Mr. Crowther to-morrow, asking him civilly to open that gate. If he refuses, I’ll have it opened for him, and I’ll take the consequences of the act. Now, my good friends, you’d better go to church by the road. You’ll get there after the service has begun. Wait till the congregation are standing up, and then go into church all together, so that everybody may understand why and by whose fault it is that you are late.”
The appearance of this large contingent after the first lesson created considerable surprise, and much turning of heads and rustling of bonnet-strings in the echoing old stone church. Mr. Crowther stood in his pew of state on one side of the chancel, and felt that the war had begun. Everybody was against him in the matter, he knew; but he wanted to demonstrate the rich man’s right to do what he liked with the things which he had bought. The wood was his, and he did not mean to let the whole parish tramp across it.
He received a stiffly polite letter from Colonel Disney, requesting him to re-open the church-path without loss of time, and informing him of the great inconvenience caused to the older and weaker members of the congregation by the illegal closing of the path during church hours.