“Get out there!” exclaimed Sir Roger, “that is still on my property.” The man waded through the river to the other bank, where he knew that the land was rented by a farmer. “Give over!” shouted Sir Roger. “I tell you the water is mine!”
“Then,” said the fellow, “bottle it up, and be-hanged to you! Don’t you see it is all running away to Castleborough?”
The story was carried by the man to the town, and occasioned a good laugh, and many a time when Sir Roger appeared in the place, he was greeted with—“Why don’t you bottle up the Trent?” But the joke did not compensate for a tittle of what was lost: there was bad blood between Rockville and Castleborough as a settled condition. Castleborough was incensed, and Sir Roger was hairsore.
A new nuisance sprang up. The people of Castleborough looked on the cottagers of Rockville as sunk in the deepest darkness under Sir Roger, and his cousin the vicar, who had seconded, and it was believed had instigated the baronet to a great portion of these proceedings. They could not pic-nic, but they thought they could hold a camp-meeting. They could not fish for roach, but they thought they might for souls. Accordingly, there assembled crowds of Castleburghians on the green of Rockville, with a chair and a table, and a preacher with his head bound in a red handkerchief; and soon there was a sound of hymns, and a zealous call to come out of the darkness of Babylon. But this was more than Sir Roger could bear; he rushed forth with all his servants, keepers, and cottagers, overthrew the table, and routing the assembly, chased them to the boundary of his estate.
The discomfited Castleburghians now fulminated awful judgments on the unhappy Sir Roger, as a persecutor and malignant. They dared not enter again on his park, but they came to the very verge of it, and held weekly meetings on the highway, in which they sang and declaimed as loudly as possible, that the winds might bear their voices to Sir Roger’s ears.
To such a condition was now reduced the last of the long line of Rockville. The spirit of a policeman had taken possession of him; he had keepers and watchers out on all sides, but that did not satisfy him. He was perpetually haunted with the idea that poachers were after his game; that trespassers were in his woods. His whole life was now spent in strolling to and fro in his fields and plantations, and in prowling along his river-side. He looked under hedges, and watched for long hours under forest trees. If any one had a curiosity to see Sir Roger, they had only to enter his fields by the wood side, and wander a few yards from the path, and he was almost sure to spring out over the hedge, and in hurried and angry, almost stammering tones, demand their name and address. The descendant of the chivalrous and steel-clad De Rockvilles was sunk into a restless spy on his own ample property. There was but one idea in his mind—encroachment. It was destitute of all other furniture but the musty technicalities of warrants and commitments. There was a stealthy and skulking manner in everything he did. He went to church on Sunday, but it was no longer by the grand iron-gate opposite to his house,—that stood generally with a large spider’s web woven over the lock, and several others in the corners of the fine iron tracery, bearing evidence of the long period since it had been opened. How different to the time when Sir Roger and Lady Rockville had had these gates thrown wide on Sunday morning, and with all their train of household servants at their back, with true antique dignity, marched, with much proud humility, into the house of God. Now, Sir Roger—the solitary, suspicious, undignified Sir Roger, the keeper and policeman of his own property—stole in at a little side-gate from his paddock, and back the same way, wondering all the time whether there was not somebody in his pheasant preserves, or Sunday trespassers in his grove.
If you entered his house, it gave you as cheerless a feeling as its owner. There was a conservatory, so splendid with rich plants and flowers in his mother’s time, now a dusty receptacle of hampers, broken hand-glasses and garden tools. These tools could never be used, for the gardens had grown wild. Tall grass grew in the walks, and the huge unpruned shrubs disputed the passage with you. In the wood above the gardens, reached by several flights of fine, but now moss-grown steps, there stood a pavilion, which had once clearly been very beautiful. It was now damp and ruinous—its walls covered with greenness and crawling insects. It was a great lurking place of Sir Roger, when on the watch for poachers.
The line of the Rockvilles was evidently running fast out. It had reached the extremity of imbecility and contempt—it must soon reach its close.
Sir Roger used to make his regular annual visit to town; but of late, when there he had wandered restlessly about the streets peeping into the shop-windows: and if it rained, he would stand under an entry for hours, waiting till it was gone over, rather than take a cab or omnibus. The habit of lurking and peering about was become fixed, and his feet bore him instinctively into those narrow and crowded alleys where swarm the poachers of the city—the trespassers and anglers in the game preserves and streams of humanity. He had lost all pleasure in his club; the most exciting themes of political life retained no piquancy for him. His old friends ceased to find any pleasure in him. He was become the driest of all dry wells. Poachers, and anglers, and Methodists, haunted the wretched purlieus of his fast fading-out mind, and he resolved to go to town no more. His whole nature was centred in his woods. He was for ever on the watch; and when at Rockville again, if he heard a door clap when in bed, he thought it a gun in his woods; and was up and out with his keepers.
Of what value was that magnificent estate to him? those superb woods; those finely-hanging cliffs; that clear and riante river, careering, travelling on, and taking a noble sweep below his window; that glorious expanse of most verdant meadows, stretching almost to Castleborough, and enlivened by numerous herds of the most beautiful cattle; those old farms and shady lanes overhung with hazel and wild rose; the glittering brook, and the songs of woodland birds—what were they to that worn-out old man, that victim to the delusive doctrine of blood, that man-trap, of an hereditary name?