Her father had been much angered at her marriage; as in those days her young husband bore no very steady character, and was better known in the tap-room of the alehouse than at the labour-muster of the Captain of the mine. Indeed, the father had threatened to turn her out of doors for persisting in keeping acquaintance with the idle miner; and her brother, William Wakeham, a very robust and quick-tempered young man, had beaten her lover severely in a drunken quarrel, originating in the same cause. The injuries were so severe that John Short was carried to an hospital, where his kind-hearted but violent assailant paid him the most careful and anxious attention. A friendship was there formed which resulted in William Wakeham becoming a miner and John marrying his sister. The father was finally and with much difficulty reconciled to both these arrangements.
The young couple toiled on well enough through their hard life; the alehouse was abandoned, and but that poor John was sometimes weak and ailing and could not work, Polly had no reason to regret her choice. William, who lived with them, was not quite so steady as they could have wished: he often staid out all night, and they were not without suspicion that the employment of these hours of darkness was scarcely reconcileable with strict obedience to the very arbitrary game-laws. In short, he was “had up” several times, and more indebted to good luck, than either his innocence or any mild weakness of legislation, that he did not become one of those whom we have driven forth from among ourselves to be the founders of that great future empire, whose principal geographical feature is Botany Bay.
But whenever his brother was too ill to go down to the mines, he worked double tides; and neither the heathery moors nor shady coverts had charms enough to tempt him away, when his sister or her family wanted half the loaf his labour was to purchase. At length hard times came upon the neighbourhood: work was scarce and wages low; the consequence was that the game in the adjoining preserves suffered considerably, and the tap-room of the village alehouse echoed with the voice of sedition and discontent, instead of the coarse but good-humoured gossip and song which had formerly been wont to be heard within its walls. This proved an excellent opportunity for the mining agent to secure good workmen for some speculations then being entered upon in South America. Accordingly a flaming advertisement in huge red and blue letters was posted up all over the country,—“Speedy fortune to be realised—gold mines of Peru—wanted some steady and experienced miners—high wages—free passage and a bounty.”
Poor William Wakeham’s literary acquirements but just enabled him to make out the drift of the offer: Peru or Palestine, it was all the same to him; no change could make him much worse off than he already was. A picture at the top of the advertisement, of a man with a broad-brimmed hat, a pickaxe in one hand, and an enormously plethoric purse in the other, had great weight with him; and a strong hint from a neighbouring magistrate who preserved pheasants, quite determined his acceptance of the opportunity, if he could only persuade his brother-in-law to join the venture. After a good deal of argument and many consultations, John Short consented to go. He was threatened with ejectment from his cottage for arrears of rent, which the company’s promised bounty would be more than sufficient to discharge; but what overcame his greatest difficulty was, that he received a promise from the agent, that Polly and the little ones should follow them out next spring, for in this present voyage the number of women allowed to accompany the emigrants had been already completed. In the mean time she was to receive a portion of her husband’s and brother’s wages, which would make her comfortable and independent in her father’s house. Poor thing! she combated the scheme strenuously; and all the prospects of making their fortune, and their present dire necessity, could scarcely induce her to agree to so long a separation.
Her husband and brother embarked after a cheerful but affectionate parting. She went home to her father’s, who treated her kindly enough, and cried her eyes out for a week; but then the toils and anxieties of daily life distracted the sadness of her mind, and the strong hope of soon joining her husband again, and of their returning to England in a few years’ time, supported her through the tedious interval.
The brothers were astonished at all they saw on board. The ship itself—the rudder—the compass, every thing was new to them: they had scarcely ever been out of their own remote parish before, and the strangeness and novelty of what they saw diverted their simple minds for a time even from poor Polly and her parting sorrow. But when the vessel was once fairly under way, and the verdant slopes and woody hills of their fatherland had begun to grow dim in the distance, and the gloomy monotony of the great sea lay around instead, a dreary anxiety possessed their minds, and a vague feeling, almost of terror, sank into their stout hearts. They would then have gladly sacrificed all their gilded prospects, to be back once again in their little cottage, with poor Polly and their poverty. It was, however, too late; they could scarcely tell, in the fading light of evening, whether it were a cloud or a dim line of hills which stretched close along the horizon, in the direction where lay the home they had left behind, perhaps for ever.
Before them was the ocean; to them a confused and indistinct idea—unknown and uncertain as their future fate.
I am sorry to say William Wakeham’s education had been by no means elaborate. Perhaps he was not altogether to blame for this; for though the masters he had laboured under cared very closely for the development of his stout and vigorous limbs, his moral improvement by no means interested them. But, worse than all, his ideas on theological subjects were exceedingly indistinct—the only religious instruction he had ever received having been in a small chapel of the Ranting persuasion, which, as the only house of worship close at hand, he occasionally attended. Indeed his stock of knowledge on these subjects consisted in a vague notion that the Pope and the Devil were perpetually engaged in mining operations, with explosive intentions, under houses of parliament.
But there was an instinct of reverence in his rude mind, an impression of awe and love for that God of whom he had heard his mother often speak, many years ago when he was a little child, before her early death. Sometimes in the bright summer nights, when he was labouring in the bowels of the earth, he would rest awhile from his work, and gaze up through the shafts at the blue sky, till the dim but holy memories of the past crowded on his brain. He fancied then that the Great Being looked down from the high Heaven through a million starry eyes, into the deep mine—into his simple heart; and he felt that there was One far greater than the Captain of the workmen, or even than Squire Trebeck the neighbouring magistrate, and to whom the strength of his vigorous limbs was but the weakness of a child.
When in the summer Sunday afternoon, he rambled on the pleasant surface of the earth, in the fresh open air, with his brother and sister, and felt the warm sunshine, and saw the golden corn, and the lazy cattle, and the trout leaping in the pool; and heard little fidgety birds with very big voices, singing with all their might to tell how happy they were; he felt that He who is great is also good.—that He who has all power has boundless mercy too.