Turning in from his sport one day, in a very sulky humour, with the hounds he was educating, the Parson caught his grandfather withdrawing in a quiet manner from a snug little hen-roost. Not knowing who it was (for his mother had never explained a thing to him, not even that she was his mother), he thought it below his dignity to ride after this old fellow. But at his heels stalked a tall young hound, who had vexed him all day by surliness, and was now whipped in for punishment.
“At him—’loo boy!” he called out; “Hike forrard, catch him by the leg, boy!” But the hound only showed his teeth and snarled; so that Chowne let out his long lash at him. In a moment the dog sprang at his master who was riding a low cob-horse, and bit him in the thigh and the horse in the shoulder, and then skulked off to his kennel. The hound was shot, and the horse shared his fate in less than six weeks afterwards; and as for the Parson, we know too well what they were forced to do with him.
In her first horror, that stony woman, even Mrs. Steelyard, when her son came ravening at her, could not keep her secret. “It is the judgment of God,” she cried; “after all there is a God. He set the dogs at his grandfather, and now he would bite his own mother!”
How she had managed to place him in the stead of the real Chowne heir, I never heard, or at least no clear account of it; for she was not (as we know already) one who would answer questions. Let him rest, whoever he was. His end was bad enough, even for him.
Enough of this fright—for it was a fright even to me, I assure you—let us come back to the innocent people injured so long by his villany.
To begin with Parson Jack. Never in all his life had he taken a stroke towards his own salvation, until by that horrible job he earned repentance, fear, and conscience. And not only this (for none of these would have stood him in any service, with Chowne still at his elbow), but that the face—which had drawn him for years, like a loadstone of hell, to destruction—now ever present in its terror, till his prayers got rid of it, shone in the dark like the face of a scarecrow, if ever he durst think of wickedness. His wife found the benefit of this change, and so did his growing family, and so did the people who flocked to his church, in the pleasure of being afraid of him. In the roads, he might bite; but in his surplice, he was bound to behave himself, or at least, he must bite the churchwarden first. Yet no one would have him to sprinkle a child, until a whole year was over. And then he restored himself, under a hint from a man beyond him in intellect; he made everybody allow that the poker had entirely cured him, by preaching from the bottom of his chest, with a glass of water upon the cushion, a sermon that stirred every heart, with the text, “Is thy servant a dog, that he should do this thing?”
I quit him with sorrow; because I found him a man of true feeling, and good tobacco. We got on together so warmly that expense alone divided us. He would have had me for parish-clerk, if I could have seen my way to it.
What prevails with a man like me, foremost first of everything? Why, love of the blessed native land—which every good Welshman will love me for. I may have done a thing, now and then, below our native dignity, except to those who can enter into all the things we look at. It is not our nature altogether, to go for less than our value. We know that we are of the oldest blood to be found in this ancient island, and we ask nothing more than to be treated as the superior race should be.
In the presence of such great ideas, who cares what becomes of me? I really feel that my marriage to Polly, and prolongation of a fine old breed, scarcely ought to be spoken of. A man who has described the battle of the Nile need not dwell on matrimony.
Hurried speech does not become me on any other subject. Everybody has the right to know, and everybody does know, how the whole of North Devon was filled with joy, talk, and disputation, as to Commodore Bampfylde and the brightness of his acquittal. They drew him from Barnstaple in a chaise, with only two springs broken, men having taken the horses out, and done their best at collar-work. He would have gladly jumped out and kicked them, but for the feeling of their goodwill.
Nothing would have detracted from this, and the feasts that were felt to be due upon it, if Squire Philip had only known how not to die at a time when nobody was seasonably called on to think of death. But when he learned the shame inflicted by himself on his ancient race, through trusting Chowne, and misbelieving his brother out of the selfsame womb; and, above all, when he learned that Chowne was the bastard of a gypsy, he cast himself into his brother’s arms, fetched one long sigh, and departed to a better world with his hat on.
This was the best thing that he could do, if he had chosen the time aright; and it saved a world of trouble. Sir Philip felt it a good bit, of course; and so did Sir Drake Bampfylde. Nevertheless, if a living man withdraws into a shell so calmly, what can he expect more lively than his undertakers?
This was good, and left room for Harry, or rather young Philip Bampfylde, to step into the proper shoes,
