CHAPTER XXXVIII.
THE RISE OF THE TIDE.
“Come here,” shouted the blacksmith, who was outside his shop, and still wore his apron, and the smut and rust on his hands and face. “Come here, Master Jingles. You’ve come into the midst of us, and we want to know something from you. Where is your father? We’ve seen nothing of him since Friday. If he has not been at mischief, why don’t he come forward like a man? Why don’t your father show his face? He ain’t a tortoise, privileged to draw it in, or a hedgehog, at liberty to coil it up. Where is he? He is not at home. If he is hiding, what is he hiding from unless he be guilty?”
“He may have gone after work,” said young Saltren.
“I heard him say,” said the shoemaker, “that his lordship was doomed to destruction.”
“I know he said it,” answered the blacksmith, “and I ask, is a man like to make a prophecy and not try to make what he said come to pass?”
“Human nature is human nature,” threw in the tailor.
“And fax is fax,” added the miner.
“Then,” pursued the blacksmith, “let us look at things as they affect us. His lordship has kept about twenty-three horses—hunters, cobs, ponies and carriage horses—and each has four hoofs, and all wants shoeing once a month, and some every fortnight. That brings me in a good part of my living. Very well. I ask all who hear me, is his lordship like to keep such a stud now he is dead? Is he like to want hunters? I grant you, for the sake of argument, that the young lady and young gentleman will have their cobs and ponies, but will there be anything like as many horses kept as there have been? No, in reason there cannot be. So you may consider what a loss to me is the death of his lordship. My worst personal enemy couldn’t have hit me harder than when he knocked Lord Lamerton over the Cleave. He as much as knocked a dozen or fourteen horses over with him, each with four hoofs at sixpence a shoe, and shod, let us say, eighteen times in the year.”
“You are right,” put in the tailor, “landed property is tied up, and his lordship’s property is tied up—tied up and sealed like mail bags—till the young lord comes of age, which will not be for eleven years. So Blatchford,”—addressing the blacksmith—“you must multiply your horses by eleven.”
“That makes,” said the smith, working out the sum in chalk on the shutter of the shop, “say fourteen horses eighteen times—two hundred and two—and by four—and again by eleven—and halved because of sixpences, that makes five hundred and fifty-four pounds; then there were odd jobs, but them I won’t reckon. Whoever chucked Lord Lamerton down the Cleave chucked five hundred and fifty-four pounds of as honestly-earned money as ever was got, belonging to me, down along with him.”