Martin Farquhar Tupper - The Crock of Gold

M >> Martin Farquhar Tupper >> The Crock of Gold

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14

THE CROCK OF GOLD;

A Rural Novel.

by

MARTIN FARQUHAR TUPPER, ESQ., M.A.,

Author of "Proverbial Philosophy."

Hartford:
Silas Andrus and Son.

1851.

CHAPTER I.

THE LABOURER; AND HIS DAWNING DISCONTENT.

ROGER ACTON woke at five. It was a raw March morning, still
dark, and bitterly cold, while at gusty intervals the rain beat in
against the crazy cottage-window. Nevertheless, from his poor pallet he
must up and rouse himself, for it will be open weather by sunrise, and
his work lies two miles off; Master Jennings is not the man to show him
favour if he be late, and Roger cannot afford to lose an hour: so he
shook off the luxury of sleep, and rose again to toil with weary effort.

"Honest Roger," as the neighbours called him, was a fair specimen of a
class which has been Britain's boast for ages, and may be still again,
in measure, but at present that glory appears to be departing: a class
much neglected, much enduring; thoroughly English--just, industrious,
and patient; true to the altar, and loyal to the throne; though haply
shaken somewhat now from both those noble faiths--warped in their
principles, and blunted in their feelings, by lying doctrines and harsh
economies; a class--I hate the cold cant term--a race of honourable men,
full of cares, pains, privations--but of pleasures next to none; whose
life at its most prosperous estate is labour, and in death we count him
happy who did not die a pauper. Through them, serfs of the soil, the
earth yields indeed her increase, but it is for others; from the fields
of plenty they glean a scanty pittance, and fill the barns to bursting,
while their children cry for bread. Not that Roger for his part often
wanted work; he was the best hand in the parish, and had earned of his
employers long ago the name of Steady Acton; but the fair wages for a
fair day's labour were quite another thing, and the times went very hard
for him and his. A man himself may starve, while his industry makes
others fat: and a liberal landlord all the winter through may keep his
labourers in work, while a crafty, overbearing bailiff mulcts them in
their wages.

For the outward man, Acton stood about five feet ten, a gaunt, spare,
and sinewy figure, slightly bent; his head sprinkled with gray; his face
marked with those rigid lines, which tell, if not of positive famine, at
least of too much toil on far too little food; in his eye, patience and
good temper; in his carriage, a mixture of the sturdy bearing, necessary
to the habitual exercise of great muscular strength, together with that
gait of humility--almost humiliation--which is the seal of oppression
upon poverty. He might be about forty, or from that to fifty, for
hunger, toil, and weather had used him the roughest; while, for all
beside, the patched and well-worn smock, the heavily-clouted high-laced
boots, a dingy worsted neck-tie, and an old felt hat, complete the
picture of externals.

But, for the matter of character within, Roger is quite another man. If
his rank in this world is the lowest, many potentates may envy him his
state elsewhere. His heart is as soft, as his hand is horny; with the
wandering gipsy or the tramping beggar, thrust aside, perhaps
deservedly, as impudent impostors from the rich man's gate, has he
often-times shared his noon-day morsel: upright and sincere himself, he
thinks as well of others: he scarcely ever heard the Gospels read in
church, specially about Eastertide, but the tears would trickle down his
weather-beaten face: he loves children--his neighbour's little ones as
well as his own: he will serve any one for goodness' sake without reward
or thanks, and is kind to the poor dumb cattle: he takes quite a pride
in his little rod or two of garden, and is early and late at it, both
before and after the daily sum of labour: he picks up a bit of knowledge
here and there, and somehow has contrived to amass a fund of information
for which few would give him credit from his common looks; and he joins
to that stock of facts a natural shrewdness to use his knowledge wisely.
Though with little of what is called sentiment, or poetry, or fancy in
his mind (for harsh was the teaching of his childhood, and meagre the
occasions of self-culture ever since), the beauty of creation is by no
means lost upon him, and he notices at times its wisdom too. With a
fixed habit of manly piety ever on his lips and ever in his heart, he
recognises Providence in all things, just, and wise, and good. More than
so; simply as a little child who endures the school-hour for the
prospect of his play-time, Roger Acton bears up with noble meekness
against present suffering, knowing that his work and trials and
troubles are only for a little while, but his rest and his reward remain
a long hereafter. He never questioned this; he knew right well Who had
earned it for him; and he lived grateful and obedient, filling up the
duties of his humble station. This was his faith, and his works followed
it. He believed that God had placed him in his lot, to be a labourer,
and till God's earth, and, when his work is done, to be sent on better
service in some happier sphere: the where, or the how, did not puzzle
him, any more than divers other enigmatical whys and wherefores of his
present state; he only knew this, that it would all come right at last:
and, barring sin (which he didn't comprehend), somehow all was right at
present. What if poverty pinched him? he was a great heir still; what if
oppression bruised him? it would soon be over. He trusted to his Pilot,
like the landsman in a storm; to his Father, as an infant in the dark.
For guilt, he had a Saviour, and he thought of him in penitence; for
trouble, a Guardian, and he looked to him in peace; and as for toil,
back-breaking toil, there was another Master whom he served with spade,
and mattock, and a thankful heart, while he only seemed to be working
for the landlord or his bailiff.

Such a man then had been Roger Acton from his youth up till now, or, if
sadness must be told, nearly until now; for, to speak truth, his heart
at times would fail him, and of late he had been bitter in repinings and
complaint. For a day or two, in particular, he had murmured loudly. It
was hard, very hard, that an honest, industrious man, as he was, should
so scantily pick a living out of this rich earth: after all said, let
the parson preach as he will, it's a fine thing to have money, and that
his reverence knows right well, or he wouldn't look so closely for his
dues. [N.B. Poor Mr. Evans was struggling as well as he could to bring
up six children, on a hundred and twenty pounds per annum.] Roger, too,
was getting on in years, with a blacker prospect for the future than
when he first stood behind a plough-tail. Then there were many wants
unsatisfied, which a bit of gold might buy; and his wife teased him to
be doing something better. Thus was it come at length to pass, that,
although he had endured so many years, he now got discontented at his
penury;--what human heart can blame him?--and with murmurings came
doubt; with doubt of Providence, desire of lucre; so the sunshine of
religion faded from his path;--what mortal mind can wonder?

CHAPTER II.

THE FAMILY; THE HOME; AND MORE REPININGS.

NOW, if Malthus and Martineau be verily the pundits that men
think them, Roger had twice in his life done a very foolish thing: he
had sinned against society, statistics, and common sense, by a two-fold
marriage. The wife of his youth (I am afraid he married early) had once
been kitchen-maid at the Hall; but the sudden change from living
luxuriously in a great house, to the griping poverty of a cotter's
hovel, had changed, in three short years, the buxom country girl into an
emaciated shadow of her former self, and the sorrowing husband buried
her in her second child-bed. The powers of the parish clapped their
hands; political economy was glad; prudence chuckled; and a
coarse-featured farmer (he meant no ill), who occasionally had given
Roger work, heartlessly bade him be thankful that his cares were the
fewer and his incumbrance was removed; "Ay, and Heaven take the babies
also to itself," the Herodian added. But Acton's heart was broken!
scarcely could he lift up his head; and his work, though sturdy as
before, was more mechanical, less high-motived: and many a year of
dreary widowhood he mourned a loss all the greater, though any thing but
bitterer, for the infants so left motherless. To these, now grown into a
strapping youth and a bright-eyed graceful girl, had he been the
tenderest of nurses, and well supplied the place of her whom they had
lost. Neighbours would have helped him gladly--sometimes did; and many
was the hinted offer (disinterested enough, too, for in that match
penury must have been the settlement, and starvation the dower), of
giving them a mother's kindly care; but Roger could not quite so soon
forget the dead: so he would carry his darlings with him to his work,
and feed them with his own hard hands; the farmers winked at it, and
never said a word against the tiny trespassers; their wives and
daughters loved the little dears, bringing them milk and possets; and
holy angels from on high may have oft-times hovered about this rude
nurse, tending his soft innocents a-field, and have wept over the poor
widower and his orphans, tears of happy sorrow and benevolent affection.
Yea, many a good angel has shed blessings on their heads!

Within the last three years, and sixteen from the date of his first
great grief, Roger had again got married. His daughter was growing into
early womanhood, and his son gave him trouble at times, and the cottage
wanted a ruling hand over it when he was absent, and rheumatism now and
then bade him look out for a nurse before old age, and Mary Alder was a
notable middle-aged careful sort of soul, and so she became Mary Acton.
All went on pretty well, until Mrs. Acton began to have certain little
ones of her own; and then the step-mother would break out (a contingency
poor Roger hadn't thought of), separate interests crept in, and her own
children fared before the others; so it came to pass that, however truly
there was a ruling hand at home, and however well the rheumatism got
nursed (for Mary was a good wife in the main), the grown-up son and
daughter felt themselves a little jostled out. Grace, gentle and
submissive, found all her comforts shrunk within the space of her father
and her Bible; Thomas, self-willed and open-hearted, sought his pleasure
any where but at home, and was like to be taking to wrong courses
through domestic bickering: Grace had the dangerous portion, beauty,
added to her lowly lot, and attracted more admiration than her father
wished, or she could understand; while the frank and bold spirit of
Thomas Acton exposed him to the perilous friendship of Ben Burke the
poacher, and divers other questionable characters.

Of these elements, then, are our labourer and his family composed; and
before Roger Acton goes abroad at earliest streak of dawn, we will take
a casual peep within his dwelling. It consists of four bare rubble
walls, enclosing a grouted floor, worn unevenly, and here and there in
holes, and puddly. There were but two rooms in the tenement, one on the
ground, and one over-head; which latter is with no small difficulty got
at by scaling a ladder-like stair-case that fronts the cottage-door.
This upper chamber, the common dormitory, for all but Thomas, who sleeps
down stairs, has a thin partition at one end of it, to screen off the
humble truckle-bed where Grace Acton forgets by night the troubles of
the day; and the remainder of the little apartment, sordid enough, and
overhung with the rough thatch, black with cobweb, serves for the father
and mother with their recent nursery. Each room has its shattery
casement, to let in through linchened panes, the doubtful light of
summer, and the much more indubitable wind, and rain, and frost of
wintry nights. A few articles of crockery and some burnished tins
decorate the shelves of the lower apartment; which used to be much
tidier before the children came, and trimmer still when Grace was sole
manager: in a doorless cupboard are apparent sundry coarse edibles, as
the half of a huge unshapely home-made loaf, some white country cheese,
a mass of lumpy pudding, and so forth; beside it, on the window-sill, is
better bread, a well-thumbed Bible, some tracts, and a few odd volumes
picked up cheap at fairs; an old musket (occasionally Ben's companion,
sometimes Tom's) is hooked to the rafters near a double rope of onions;
divers gaudy little prints, tempting spoil of pedlars, in honour of
George Barnwell, the Prodigal Son, the Sailor's Return, and the Death of
Nelson, decorate the walls, and an illuminated Christmas carol is pasted
over the mantel-piece: which, among other chattels and possessions,
conspicuously bears its own burden of Albert and Victoria--two plaster
heads, resplendently coloured, highly varnished, looking with arched
eye-brows of astonishment on their uninviting palace, and royally
contrasting with the sombre hue of poverty on all things else. The
pictures had belonged to Mary, no small portion of her virgin wealth;
and as for the statuary, those two busts had cost loyal Roger far more
in comparison than any corporation has given to P.R.A., for majesty and
consortship in full. There is, moreover, in the room, by way of
household furniture, a ricketty, triangular, and tri-legged table, a
bench, two old chairs with rush-bottoms, and a yard or two of matting
that the sexton gave when the chancel was new laid. I don't know that
there is any thing else to mention, unless it be a gaunt lurcher
belonging to Ben Burke, and with all a dog's resemblance to his master,
who lies stretched before the hearth where the peaty embers never quite
die out, but smoulder away to a heap of white ashes; over these is
hanging a black boiler, the cook of the family; and beside them, on a
substratum of dry heather, and wrapped about with an old blanket, nearly
companioned by his friend, the dog, snores Thomas Acton, still fast
asleep, after his usual extemporaneous fashion.

As to the up-stairs apartment, it contained little or nothing but its
living inmates, their bedsteads and tattered coverlids, and had an air
of even more penury and discomfort than the room below; so that, what
with squalling children, a scolding wife, and empty stomach, and that
cold and wet March morning, it is little wonder maybe (though no small
blame), that Roger Acton had not enough of religion or philosophy to
rise and thank his Maker for the blessings of existence.

He had just been dreaming of great good luck. Poor people often do so;
just as Ugolino dreamt of imperial feasts, and Bruce, in his delirious
thirst on the Sahara, could not banish from his mind the cool fountains
of Shiraz, and the luxurious waters of old Nile. Roger had unfortunately
dreamt of having found a crock of gold--I dare say he will tell us his
dream anon--and just as he was counting out his treasure, that blessed
beautiful heap of shining money--cruel habit roused him up before the
dawn, and his wealth faded from his fancy. So he awoke at five, anything
but cheerfully.

It was Grace's habit, good girl, to read to her father in the morning a
few verses from the volume she best loved: she always woke betimes when
she heard him getting up, and he could hear her easily from her little
flock-bed behind the lath partition; and many a time had her dear
religious tongue, uttering the words of peace, soothed her father's
mind, and strengthened him to meet the day's affliction; many times it
raised his thoughts from the heavy cares of life to the buoyant hopes of
immortality. Hitherto, Roger had owed half his meek contentedness to
those sweet lessons from a daughter's lips, and knew that he was
reaping, as he heard, the harvest of his own paternal care, and
heaven-blest instructions. However, upon this dark morning, he was full
of other thoughts, murmurings, and doubts, and poverty, and riches. So,
when Grace, after her usual affectionate salutations, gently began to
read,

"The sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with
the glory--"

Her father strangely stopped her on a sudden with--

"Enough, enough, my girl! God wot, the sufferings are grievous, and the
glory long a-coming."

Then he heavily went down stairs, and left Grace crying.

CHAPTER III.

THE CONTRAST.

THUS, full of carking care, while he pushed aside the proffered
consolation, Roger Acton walked abroad. There was yet but a glimmer of
faint light, and the twittering of birds told more assuringly of morning
than any cheerful symptom on the sky: however, it had pretty well ceased
raining, that was one comfort, and, as Roger, shouldering his spade, and
with the day's provision in a handkerchief, trudged out upon his daily
duty, those good old thoughts of thankfulness came upon his mind, and he
forgot awhile the dream that had unstrung him. Turning for a moment to
look upon his hovel, and bless its inmates with a prayer, he half
resolved to run back, and hear a few more words, if only not to vex his
darling child: but there was now no time to spare; and then, as he gazed
upon her desolate abode--so foul a casket for so fair a jewel--his
bitter thoughts returned to him again, and he strode away, repining.

Acton's cottage was one of those doubtful domiciles, whose only
recommendation it is, that they are picturesque in summer. At present we
behold a reeking rotting mass of black thatch in a cheerless swamp; but,
as the year wears on, those time-stained walls, though still both damp
and mouldy, will be luxuriantly overspread with creeping
plants--honeysuckle, woodbine, jessamine, and the everblowing monthly
rose. Many was the touring artist it had charmed, and Suffolk-street had
seen it often: spectators looked upon the scene as on an old familiar
friend, whose face they knew full well, but whose name they had
forgotten for the minute. Many were the fair hands that had immortalized
its beauties in their albums, and frequent the notes of admiration
uttered by attending swains: particularly if there chanced to be taken
into the view a feathery elm that now creaked overhead, and dripped on
the thatch like the dropping-well at Knaresborough, and (in the near
distance) a large pond, or rather lake, upon whose sedgy banks, gay--not
now, but soon about to be--with flowering reeds and bright green
willows, the pretty cottage stood. In truth, if man were but an
hibernating animal, invisible as dormice in the winter, and only to be
seen with summer swallows, Acton's cottage at Hurstley might have been a
cantle cut from the Elysian-fields. But there are certain other seasons
in the year, and human nature cannot long exist on the merely
"picturesque in summer."

Some fifty yards, or so, from the hither shore, we discern a roughly
wooded ait, Pike Island to wit, a famous place for fish, and the grand
rendezvous for woodcocks; which, among other useful and ornamental
purposes, serves to screen out the labourer's hovel, at this the
narrowest part of the lake, from a view of that fine old mansion on the
opposite shore, the seat of Sir John Vincent, a baronet just of age, and
the great landlord of the neighbourhood. Toward this mansion, scarcely
yet revealed in the clear gray eye of morning, our humble hero, having
made the long round of the lake, is now fast trudging; and it may merit
a word or two of plain description, to fill up time and scene, till he
gets nearer.

A smooth grassy eminence, richly studded with park-like clumps of trees,
slopes up from the water's very edge to--Hurstley Hall; yonder goodly,
if not grand, Elizabethan structure, full of mullioned windows, carved
oak panels, stone-cut coats of arms, pinnacles, and traceries, and
lozenges, and drops; and all this glory crowned by a many-gabled,
high-peaked roof. A grove of evergreens and American shrubs hides the
lower windows from vulgarian gaze--for, in the neighbourly feeling of
our ancestors, a public way leads close along the front; while, behind
the house, and inaccessible to eyes profane, are drawn terraced gardens,
beautifully kept, and blooming with a perpetual succession of the
choicest flowers. The woods and shrubberies around, attempted some half
a century back to be spoilt by the meddlesome bad taste of Capability
Brown, have been somewhat too resolutely robbed of the formal avenues,
clipped hedges, and other topiarian adjuncts which comport so well with
the starch prudery of things Elizabethan; but they are still replete
with grotto, fountain, labyrinth, and alcove--a very paradise for the
more court-bred rank of sylphs, and the gentler elves of Queen Titania.

However, we have less to do with the gardens than, probably, the elves
have; and as Roger now, just at breaking day, is approaching the windows
somewhat too curiously for a poor man's manners, it may not be amiss if
we bear him company. He had pretty well recovered of his fit of
discontent, for morning air and exercise can soon chase gloom away; so
he cheerily tramped along, thinking as he went, how that, after all, it
is a middling happy world, and how that the raindrops, now that it had
cleared up, hung like diamonds on the laurels, when of a sudden, as he
turned a corner near the house, there broke upon his ear, at that quiet
hour, such a storm of boisterous sounds--voices so loud with oaths and
altercation--such a calling, clattering, and quarrelling, as he had
never heard the like before. So no wonder that he stepped aside to see
it.

The noise proceeded from a ground-floor window, or rather from three
windows, lighted up, and hung with draperies of crimson and gold: one of
the casements, flaring meretriciously in the modest eye of morn, stood
wide open down to the floor, probably to cool a heated atmosphere; and
when Roger Acton, with a natural curiosity, went on tiptoe, looked in,
and just put aside the curtain for a peep, to know what on earth could
be the matter, he saw a vision of waste and wealth, at which he stood
like one amazed, for a poor man's mind could never have conceived its
equal.

Evidently, he had intruded on the latter end of a long and luxurious
revel. Wax-lights, guttering down in gilded chandeliers, poured their
mellow radiance round in multiplied profusion--for mirrors made them
infinite; crimson and gold were the rich prevailing tints in that wide
and warm banqueting-room; gayly-coloured pictures, set in frames that
Roger fancied massive gold, hung upon the walls at intervals; a
wagon-load of silver was piled upon the sideboard; there blazed in the
burnished grate such a fire as poverty might imagine on a frozen
winter's night, but never can have thawed its blood beside: fruits, and
wines, and costly glass were scattered in prodigal disorder on the
board--just now deserted of its noisy guests, who had crowded round a
certain green table, where cards and heaps of sovereigns appeared to be
mingled in a mass. Roger had never so much as conceived it possible that
there could be wealth like this: it was a fairy-land of Mammon in his
eyes: he stood gasping like a man enchanted; and in the contemplation of
these little hills of gold--in their covetous longing contemplation, he
forgot the noisy quarrel he had turned aside to see, and thirsted for
that rich store earnestly.

In an instant, as he looked (after the comparative lull that must
obviously have succeeded to the clamours he had first heard), the roar
and riot broke out worse than ever. There were the stormy revellers, as
the rabble rout of Comus and his crew, filling that luxurious room with
the sounds of noisy execration and half-drunken strife. Young Sir John,
a free and generous fellow, by far the best among them all, has
collected about him those whom he thought friends, to celebrate his
wished majority; they had now kept it up, night after night, hard upon a
week; and, as well became such friends--the gambler, the duellist, the
man of pleasure, and the fool of Fashion--they never yet had separated
for their day-light beds, without a climax to their orgie, something
like the present scene.

Henry Mynton, high in oath, and dashing down his cards, has charged Sir
Richard Hunt with cheating (it was _sauter la coupe_ or _couper la
saut_, or some such mystery of iniquity, I really cannot tell which):
Sir Richard, a stout dark man, the patriarch of the party, glossily
wigged upon his head, and imperially tufted on his chin, retorts with a
pungent sarcasm, calmly and coolly uttered; that hot-headed fool
Silliphant, clearly quite intoxicated, backs his cousin Mynton's view of
the case by the cogent argument of a dice-box at Sir Richard's head--and
at once all is struggle, strife, and uproar. The other guests, young
fellows of high fashion, now too much warmed with wine to remember their
accustomed Mohican cold-bloodedness--those happy debtors to the prowess
of a Stultz, and walking advertisers of Nugee--take eager part with the
opposed belligerents: more than one decanter is sent hissing through
the air; more than one bloody coxcomb witnesses to the weight of a
candle-stick and its hurler's clever aim: uplifted chairs are made the
weapons of the chivalric combatants; and along with divers other less
distinguished victims in the melee, poor Sir John Vincent, rushing into
the midst, as a well-intentioned host, to quell the drunken brawl, gets
knocked down among them all; the tables are upset, the bright gold runs
about the room in all directions--ha! no one heeds it--no one owns
it--one little piece rolled right up to the window-sill where Roger
still looked on with all his eyes; it is but to put his hand in--the
window is open to the floor--nay a finger is enough: greedily, one
undecided moment, did he gaze upon the gold; he saw the hideous contrast
of his own dim hovel and that radiant chamber--he remembered the pining
faces of his babes, and gentle Grace with all her hardships--he thought
upon his poverty and well deserts--he looked upon wastefulness of wealth
and wantonness of living--these reflections struck him in a moment; no
one saw him, no one cared about the gold; that little blessed morsel,
that could do him so much good; all was confusion, all was opportunity,
and who can wonder that his fingers closed upon the sovereign, and that
he picked it up?

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14