“Well, Sir George, no; I think not. I b’lieve I must go to Rufford and hear that fellow Scrobby get it hot and heavy.”
“We seem all to be going that way. You think he’ll be convicted, Sir?”
“If there’s a juryman left in the country worth his salt, he’ll be convicted,” said Mr. Runce, almost enraged at the doubt. “But that other fellow;—he’s to get off. That’s what kills me, Sir George.”
“You’re alluding to Mr. Goarly, Sir?” said the Senator.
“That’s about it, certainly,” said Runce, still looking very suspiciously at his companion.
“I almost think he is the bigger rogue of the two,” said the Senator.
“Well,” said Runce; “well! I don’t know as he ain’t. Six of one and half a dozen of the other! That’s about it.” But he was evidently pacified by the opinion.
“Goarly is certainly a rascal all round,” continued the Senator. Runce looked at him to make sure whether he was the man who had uttered such fearful blasphemies at the breakfast-table. “I think we had a little discussion about this before, Mr. Runce.”
“I am very glad to see you have changed your principles, Sir.”
“Not a bit of it. I am too old to change my principles, Mr. Runce. And much as I admire this country I don’t think it’s the place in which I should be induced to do so.” Runce looked at him again with a scowl on his face and with a falling mouth. “Mr. Goarly is certainly a blackguard.”
“Well;—I rather think he is.”
“But a blackguard may have a good cause. Put it in your own case, Mr. Runce. If his Lordship’s pheasants ate up your wheat—”
“They’re welcome;—they’re welcome! The more the merrier. But they don’t. Pheasants know when they’re well off.”
“Or if a crowd of horsemen rode over your fences, don’t you think—”
“My fences! They’d be welcome in my wife’s bedroom if the fox took that way. My fences! It’s what I has fences for—to be ridden over.”
“You didn’t exactly hear what I have to say, Mr. Runce.”
“And I don’t want. No offence, sir, if you be a friend of my Lord’s;—but if his Lordship was to say hisself that Goarly was right, I wouldn’t listen to him. A good cause—and he going about at dead o’night with his pockets full of p’ison! Hounds and foxes all one!—or little childer either for the matter o’ that, if they happened on the herrings!”
“I have not said his cause was good, Mr. Runce.”
“I’ll wish you good evening, Sir George,” said the farmer, reining his pony round. “Good evening to you, sir.” And Mr. Runce trotted or rather ambled off, unable to endure another word.
“An honest man, I dare say,” said the Senator.
“Certainly;—and not a bad specimen of a British farmer.”
“Not a bad specimen of a Briton generally;—but still, perhaps, a little unreasonable.” After that Sir George said as little as he could, till he had brought the Senator back to the hall.
“I think it’s all over now,” said Lady Penwether to Miss Penge, when the gentlemen had left them alone in the afternoon.
“I’m sure I hope so—for his sake. What a woman to come here by herself, in that way!”
“I don’t think he ever cared for her in the least.”
“I can’t say that I have troubled myself much about that,” replied Miss Penge. “For the sake of the family generally, and the property, and all that, I should be very very sorry to think that he was going to make her Lady Rufford. I dare say he has amused himself with her.”
“There was very little of that, as far as I can learn;—very little encouragement indeed! What we saw here was the worst of it. He was hardly with her at all at Mistletoe.”
“I hope it will make him more cautious;—that’s all,” said Miss Penge. Miss Penge was now a great heiress, having had her lawsuit respecting certain shares in a Welsh coal-mine settled since we last saw her. As all the world knows she came from one of the oldest Commoner’s families in the West of England, and is, moreover, a handsome young woman, only twenty-seven years of age. Lady Penwether thinks that she is the very woman to be mistress of Rufford, and I do not know that Miss Penge herself is averse to the idea. Lord Rufford has been too lately wounded to rise at the bait quite immediately; but his sister knows that her brother is impressionable and that a little patience will go a long way. They have, however, all agreed at the hall that Arabella’s name shall not again be mentioned.
LXIX
Scrobby’s Trial
Rufford was a good deal moved as to the trial of Mr. Scrobby. Mr. Scrobby was a man who not long since had held his head up in Rufford and had the reputation of a well-to-do tradesman. Enemies had perhaps doubted his probity; but he had gone on and prospered, and, two or three years before the events which are now chronicled, had retired on a competence. He had then taken a house with a few acres of land, lying between Rufford and Rufford Hall—the property of Lord Rufford, and had commenced genteel life. Many in the neighbourhood had been astonished that such a man should have been accepted as a tenant in such a house; and it was generally understood that Lord Rufford himself had been very angry with his agent. Mr. Scrobby did not prosper greatly in his new career. He became a guardian of the poor and quarrelled with all the Board. He tried to become a municipal counsellor
