The Degs, then, were seldom out of work; but they did not get enough, or do enough, to meet and tie. They had but little work if times were bad, and if times were good, they complained of large families and sickly wives and children. Be times what they would, therefore, the Degs were due and successful attendants at the parish pay-table. Nay, so much was this a matter of course, that they came at length not even to trouble themselves to receive their pay, but sent their young children for it; and it was duly paid. Did any parish officer, indeed, turn restive, and decline to pay a Deg, he soon found himself summoned before a magistrate, and such pleas of sickness, want of work, and poor earnings brought forward, that he most likely got a sharp rebuke from the benevolent but uninquiring magistrate, and acquired a character of hard-heartedness that stuck to him.
So parish overseers learnt to let the Degs alone; and their children, thus regularly brought up to receive the parish money for their parents, were impatient, as they grew up, to receive it for themselves. Marriages in the Deg family were, consequently, very early, and there were plenty of instances of married Degs claiming parish relief under the age of twenty, on the plea of being the parents of two children. One such precocious individual being asked by a rather verdant officer why he was married before he was able to maintain a family, replied, in much astonishment, that he had married in order to maintain himself by parish assistance. That he had never been able to maintain himself by his labour, nor ever expected to do it: his only hope, therefore, lay in marrying, and becoming the father of two children, to which patriarchal rank he had now attained, and demanded his “pay.”
Thus had lived and flourished the Degs on their ancient patrimony, the parish, for upwards of two hundred years. Nay, we have no doubt whatever that, if it could have been traced, they had enjoyed an ancestry of paupers as long as the pedigree of Sir Roger Rockville himself. In the days of the most perfect villenage they had, doubtless, eaten the bread of idleness, and claimed it as a right. They were numerous, improvident, ragged in dress, and fond of an alehouse and gossip. Like the blood of Sir Roger, their blood had become peculiar through a long persistence of the same circumstances. It was become pure pauper blood.
The Degs married, if not entirely amongst Degs, yet amongst the same class. None but a pauper would dream of marrying a Deg, even were she handsome as Helen of Troy. The Degs, therefore, were in constitution, in mind, in habit, and in inclination, paupers. But a pure and unmixed class of this kind does not die out like an aristocratic stereotype. It increases and multiplies. The lower the grade, the more prolific, as is sometimes seen on a large and even national scale. The Degs threatened, therefore, to become a most formidable clan in the lower purlieus of Castleborough; but, luckily, there is so much virtue even in evils, that one not rarely cures another. War, the great evil, cleared the town of Degs.
Fond of idleness, of indulgence, of money easily got and as easily spent, the Degs were rapidly drained off by recruiting parties during the great French war. The young men enlisted, and were marched away; the young women married soldiers that were quartered in the town from time to time, and marched away with them. There were eventually none of the once numerous Degs left, except a few old people, whom death was sure to draft off at no distant period into his regiment of the line which has no end. Parish overseers, magistrates, and master manufacturers felicitated themselves on this unhoped-for deliverance from the ancient family of the Degs.
But one cold, clear winter evening, the east wind piping his sharp, sibilant ditty in the hawthorn hedges, and poking his sharp fingers into the sides of well broad-clothed men by way of passing joke, Mr. Spires, a great manufacturer of Castleborough, driving in his gig some seven miles from the town, passed a poor woman with a stout child on her back. The large ruddy-looking man in the prime of life, and in the greatcoat and thick worsted gloves of a wealthy traveller, cast a glance at the wretched creature trudging heavily on, expecting a pitiful appeal to his sensibilities, and thinking it a bore to have to pull off a glove, and dive into his pocket for a copper; but to his surprise, there was no demand, only a low curtsey, and the glimpse of a face of singular honesty of expression, and of excessive weariness.
Spires was a man of warm feelings; he looked earnestly at the woman, and thought he had never seen such a picture of fatigue in his life. He pulled up and said,
“You seem very tired, my good woman.”
“Awfully tired, sir.”
“And are you going far to-night?”