If from lass you take the letter L.
Then lass is ass if I have learnt to spell;
Yes ass and lass methinks are coupled ill.
Though human asses follow lasses still!
An ass were I too—could I so arrange ill,
If now I stay’d to claim my promised angel.
CHAPTER XVII.
Twm finds that his father-in-law is as churlish as ever, but Carmarthen Jack comes to grief in consequence. The Squire turns reformer. His children arrive at the hall. A tender Devonian. Twm satirizes the cook. Thrashes the young squire, and then “disappears.” Calls upon Cadwgan and Rhys. An adventure on the hills.
Twm reached his mother’s at Tregaron about one o’clock in the morning, and alarmed her greatly by the account he gave of his flight from the squire’s, and the cause which led to it. Jack consoled poor Catty by assuring her that her son would go to the devil, and that ruin would come upon them through his tricks, to a certainty. Number one again, as the reader will see, with very little affection for his wife’s offspring. It is a selfish world, and Jack did as Rome did, none the less eagerly because it always suited his own convenience. He concluded by saying that they ought to turn poor Twm adrift, and leave him to himself in order to conciliate the squire. While Jack beneath the bed-clothes, was grunting these suggestions of worldly wisdom, Catty half-dressed, was sitting dejectedly in the chimney corner.
Having caught the drift of his father-in-law’s mutterings, he rose abruptly, snatched up his hat, and while striding to the door, cried, “Good night, mother.” Alarmed at his precipitate movement, and the tone in which he spoke,—“Where are you going, Twm?” said Catty. Turning around, while he held the door in his left hand, he replied, “Anywhere mother—the world is wide—and I’ll go headlong to the devil, rather than stay here, where I am not welcome.” With that he closed the door, and was in a moment out of sight, notwithstanding the cries and entreaties of his mother, who ran after, and earnestly sought to bring him back.
Catty, with a bitter conscience, now found that her son had a step-father, and she a husband, who was a rude and churlish tyrant. To give him his due, Jack was far from being regardless of her sorrow, but showed the tenderness of a husband in comforting her, in a manner most natural to himself. “What signifies crying for such an imp of a devil as that?” said this kind step-father: “if he starves in the field by being out to-night, it will save him from dying at the gallows, where he would be sure to come some day or other.”
This tender-hearted speech had the unexpected effect of immediately curing Catty’s grief, which turned to a desperate fit of rage, and without a word to signify the transition wrought by his oratory, she snatched up a stout broom-stick from the floor, and be-laboured him with all her strength, as he lay beneath the bed-clothes, till he roared like a baited bull. When the strength of her arm failed, the energy of her tongue commenced; and after rating him soundly, she concluded her harangue with eloquent pithiness, hoping that she had left him a shirtful of bones; and expressing a devout hope that he would eventually arrive at that elevated position in society which he had described as the probable fate of her darling son. After which exertion and speechifying, she thought proper to disappear.
Jack, although he received some hard blows, by dodging under the bed-clothes, escaped better than his help-mate intended he should; he soon rose, dressed himself and went to his master’s sauntering sullenly about the outhouses till daylight, when a servant informed him, after narrating Twm’s trick on his master, that he was to take Cadwgan’s ass home.
Squire Graspacre, since the death of his wife, gave such free range to his licentious pleasures, as placed him, especially at his years, in a most unseemly light. His only son had been two years at Oxford, returning only occasionally during the vacations; while his two daughters on the death of their mother, were sent to a boarding-school at Exeter. Thus in his own family he had no witnesses of his vices and follies. He soon found, however, that in Wales, his offences against religion and morality were not to be committed with impunity. The respect in which he was formerly held by the country people gradually declined, while those who had daughters became extremely shy, and sent their female inmates out of the way whenever he approached.
The squire was not slow to discover these changes, and all the pride of his nature, that pride which loved ambition and power, which demanded implicit obedience, and loved to sway the sceptre of power, had aroused him within; determined to subdue the glaring insolence, as he deemed it, of his neighbours. Never deficient in penetration, he was not long in discovering this change in the bearings of his tenants and neighbours, which to a mind like his, proud, fond of domineering, and being looked up to as the superior—the grand central luminary of his sphere, round which all others moved as silent and respectful satellites—was a very hell.