Pearl-Fishing; Choice Stories from Dickens' Household Words; Second Series

On the very next Sunday there came literally thousands of the jubilant Stockingtonians to Rockville. They had brought baskets, and were for dining, and drinking success to all footpaths. But in the great grove there were keepers, and watchers, who warned them to keep the path, that narrow well-worn line up the middle of the grove. “What! were they not to sit on the grass?” – “No!” – “What! were they not to pic-nic?” – “No! not there!”

The Stockingtonians felt a sudden damp on their spirits. But the river bank! The cry was. “To the river bank! There they would pic-nic.” The crowd rushed away down the wood, but on the river bank they found a whole regiment of watchers, who pointed again to the narrow line of footpath, and told them not to trespass beyond it. But the islands! they went over to the islands. But there too were Sir Roger’s forces, who warned them back! There was no road there – all found there would be trespassers, and be duly punished.

The Stockingtonians discovered that their triumph was not quite so complete as they had flattered themselves. The footpaths were theirs, but that was all. Their ancient license was at an end. If they came there, there was no more fishing; if they came in crowds, there was no more pic-nic-ing; if they walked through the woods in numbers, they must keep to Indian file, or they were summoned before the county magistrates for trespass, and were soundly fined; and not even the able Daredeville would undertake to defend them.

The Stockingtonians were chop-fallen, but they were angry and dogged; and they thronged up to the village and the front of the hall. They filled the little inn in the hamlet – they went by scores, and roving all over the churchyard, read epitaphs

but don’t teach them to give up their old indulgences very good-humoredly. They went and sat in rows on the old churchyard wall, opposite to the very windows of the irate Sir Roger. They felt themselves beaten, and Sir Roger felt himself beaten. True, he could coerce them to the keeping of the footpaths – but, then, they had the footpaths! True, thought the Stockingtonians, we have the footpaths, but then the pic-nic-ing, and the fishing, and the islands! The Stockingtonians were full of sullen wrath, and Sir Roger was – oh, most expressive old Saxon phrase – HAIRSORE! Yes, he was one universal wound of vexation and jealousy of his rights. Every hair in his body was like a pin sticking into him. Come within a dozen yards of him; nay, at the most, blow on him, and he was excruciated – you rubbed his sensitive hairs at a furlong’s distance.

The next Sunday the people found the churchyard locked up, except during service, when beadles walked there, and desired them not to loiter and disturb the congregation, closing the gates, and showing them out like a flock of sheep the moment the service was over. This was fuel to the already boiling blood of Stockington. The week following, what was their astonishment to find the much frequented inn gone! it was actually gone! not a trace of it; but the spot where it had stood for ages, turfed, planted with young spruce trees, and fenced off with post and rail! The exasperated people now launched forth an immensity of fulminations against the churl Sir Roger, and a certain number of them resolved to come and seat themselves in the street of the hamlet and there dine; but a terrific thunderstorm, which seemed in league with Sir Roger, soon routed them, drenched them through, and on attempting to seek shelter in the cottages, the poor people said they were very sorry, but it was as much as their holdings were worth, and they dare not admit them.

Sir Roger had triumphed! It was all over with the old delightful days at Rockville. There was an end of pic-nic-ing, of fishing, and of roving in the islands. One sturdy disciple of Izaak Walton, indeed, dared to fling a line from the banks of Rockville grove, but Sir Roger came upon him and endeavored to seize him. The man coolly walked into the middle of the river, and, without a word, continued his fishing.

“Get out there!” exclaimed Sir Roger, “that is still on my property.” The man walked 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 running away to Stockington?”

There was bad blood between Rockville and Stockington forever. Stockington was incensed, and Sir Roger was hairsore.

A new nuisance sprung up. The people of Stockington looked on the cottagers of Rockville as sunk in deepest darkness under such a man as Sir Roger and his cousin the vicar. 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 Stockingtonians 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 the spiritual 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 Stockingtonians now fulminated awful judgments on the unhappy Sir Roger, as a persecutor and a malignant. They dared not enter again on his parish, 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 position 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 stealing to and fro in his fields and plantations, and prowling along his river side. He lurked under hedges, and watched for long hours under the 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 angry 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 that he did. He went to church on Sundays, 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 different corners of the fine iron tracery, bearing evidence of the long period since it had been opened. How different to the time when the Sir Roger and Lady of Rockville had had these gates thrown wide on a 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 the 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 were 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, once clearly 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, standing under entries for hours together, till it was gone over. The habit of lurking and peering about, was upon him; 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 pleasures 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 forever 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 started up, and was out with his keepers.

Of what value was that magnificent estate to him? – those superb woods; those finely-hanging cliffs; that clear and riant river coming travelling on, and taking a noble sweep below his windows, – that glorious expanse of neat verdant meadows stretching almost to Stockington, 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 of the delusive doctrine of blood, of the man-trap of an hereditary name?

There the poet could come, and feel the presence of divinity in that noble scene, and hear sublime whispers in the trees, and create new heavens and earths from the glorious chaos of nature around him, and in one short hour live an empyrean of celestial life and love. There could come the very humblest children of the plebeian town, and feel a throb of exquisite delight pervade their bosoms at the sight of the very flowers on the sod, and see heaven in the infinite blue above them. And poor Sir Roger, the holder, but not the possessor of all, walked only in a region of sterility, with no sublimer ideas than poachers and trespassers – no more rational enjoyment than the brute indulgence of hunting like a ferret, and seizing his fellow-men like a bull-dog. He was a specimen of human nature degenerated, retrograded from the divine to the bestial, through the long-operating influences of false notions and institutions, continued beyond their time. He had only the soul of a keeper. Had he been only a keeper, he had been a much happier man.

His time was at hand. The severity which he had long dealt out towards all sorts of offenders made him the object of the deepest vengeance. In a lonely hollow of his woods, watching at midnight with two of his men, there came a sturdy knot of poachers. An affray ensued. The men perceived that their old enemy, Sir Roger, was there; and the blow of a hedge-stake stretched him on the earth. His keepers fled – and thus ignominiously terminated the long line of the Rockvilles. Sir Roger was the last of his line, but not of his class. There is a feudal art of sinking, which requires no study; and the Rockvilles are but one family among thousands who have perished in its practice.

In Great Stockington there lived a race of paupers. From the year of the 42d of Elizabeth, or 1601, down to the present generation, this race maintained an uninterrupted descent. They were a steady and unbroken line of paupers, as the parish books testify. From generation to generation their demands on the parish funds stand recorded. There were no lacunæ in their career; there never failed an heir to these families; fed on the bread of idleness and legal provision, these people nourished, increased, and multiplied. Sometimes compelled to work for the weekly dole which they received, they never acquired a taste for labor, or lost the taste for the bread for which they did not labor. These paupers regarded this maintenance by no means as a disgrace. They claimed it as a right, – as their patrimony. They contended that one-third of the property of the Church had been given by benevolent individuals for the support of the poor, and that what the Reformation wrongfully deprived them of, the great enactment of Elizabeth rightfully – and only rightfully – restored.

Those who imagine that all paupers merely claimed parish relief because the law ordained it, commit a great error. There were numbers who were hereditary paupers, and that on a tradition carefully handed down, that they were only manfully claiming their own. They traced their claims from the most ancient feudal times, when the lord was as much bound to maintain his villein in gross, as the villein was to work for the lord. These paupers were, in fact, or claimed to be, the original adscripti glebæ, and to have as much a claim to parish support as the landed proprietor had to his land. For this reason, in the old Catholic times, after they had escaped from villenage by running away and remaining absent from their hundred for a year and a day, dwelling for that period in a walled town, these people were among the most diligent attendants at the Abbey doors, and when the Abbeys were dissolved, were, no doubt, among the most daring of these thieves, vagabonds, and sturdy rogues, who, after the Robin Hood fashion, beset the highways and solitary farms of England, and claimed their black mail in a very unceremonious style. It was out of this class that Henry VIII. hanged his seventy-two thousand during his reign, and, as it is said, without appearing materially to diminish their number.

That they continued to “increase, multiply, and replenish the earth,” overflowing all bounds, overpowering by mere populousness all the severe laws against them of whipping, burning in the hand, in the forehead or the breast, and hanging, and filling the whole country with alarm, is evident by the very act itself of Elizabeth.

Among these hereditary paupers who, as we have said, were found in Stockington, there was a family of the name of Deg. This family had never failed to demand and enjoy what it held to be its share of its ancient inheritance. It appeared from the parish records, that they had practised in different periods the crafts of shoe-making, tailoring, and chimney-sweeping; but since the invention of the stocking frame, they had, one and all of them, followed the profession of stocking-weavers, or as they were there called, stockingers. This was a trade which required no extreme exertion of the physical or intellectual powers. To sit in a frame, and throw the arms to and fro, was a thing that might either be carried to a degree of extreme diligence, or be let down into a mere apology for idleness. An “idle stockinger” was there no very uncommon phrase, and the Degs were always classed under that head. Nothing could be more admirably adapted than this trade for building a plan of parish relief upon. The Degs did not pretend to be absolutely without work, or the parish authorities would soon have set them to some real labor, – a thing that they particularly recoiled from, having a very old adage in the family, that “hard work was enough to kill a man.” The Degs were seldom, therefore, out of work, but they did not get enough to meet and tie. They had but little work if times were bad, and if they were good, they had large families and sickly wives or 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 up, that he most likely got a sharp rebuke from the benevolent but uninquiring magistrate, and acquired a character for hard-heartedness that stuck to him.

So parish overseers learned to let the Degs alone; and their children 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 parent of two children. One such precocious individual being asked by a rather verdant officer why he had 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 never had been able to maintain himself by his labor, 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 ale-house and of 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 among Degs, yet among the same class. None but a pauper would dream of marrying a Deg. 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 Stockington, 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 last 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 with his regiment of the line which has no end. Parish overseers, magistrates, and master manufacturers, felicitated themselves at this unhoped-for deliverance from the ancient family of the Degs.

But one cold, clear winter evening, the east wind piping its sharp sibilant ditty in the bare-shorn hedges, and poking his sharp fingers into the sides of well broad-clothed men by way of passing jest, Mr. Spires, a great manufacturer of Stockington, 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 great-coat 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?”

“To Great Stockington, sir, if God give me strength.”

“To Stockington!” exclaimed Mr. Spires. “Why you seem ready to drop. You’ll never reach it. You’d better stop at the next village.”

“Ay, sir, it’s easy stopping for those that have money.”

“And you’ve none, eh?”

“As God lives, sir, I’ve a sixpence, and that’s all.”

Mr. Spires put his hand in his pocket, and held out to her the next instant half-a-crown.

“There stop, poor thing – make yourself comfortable – it’s quite out of the question to reach Stockington. But stay – are your friends living in Stockington – what are you?”

“A poor soldier’s widow, sir. And may God Almighty bless you!” said the poor woman, taking the money, the tears standing in her large brown eyes as she curtsied very low.

“A soldier’s widow,” said Mr. Spires. She had touched the softest place in the manufacturer’s heart, for he was a very loyal man, and vehement champion of his country’s honor in the war. “So young,” said he, “how did you lose your husband?”

“He fell, sir,” said the poor woman; but she could get no further; she suddenly caught up the corner of her gray cloak, covered her face with it, and burst into an excess of grief.

The manufacturer felt as if he had hit the woman a blow by his careless question; he sat watching her for a moment in silence, and then said, “Come, get into the gig, my poor woman; come, I must see you to Stockington.”

The poor woman dried her tears, and heavily climbed into the gig, expressing her gratitude in a very touching and modest manner. Spires buttoned the apron over her, and taking a look at the child, said in a cheerful tone to comfort her, “Bless me, but that is a fine thumping fellow, though. I don’t wonder you are tired, carrying such a load.”

The poor woman pressed the stout child, apparently two years old, to her breast, as if she felt it a great blessing and no load: the gig drove rapidly on.

Presently Mr. Spires resumed his conversation.

“So you are from Stockington?”

“No, sir; my husband was.”

“So: what was his name?”

“John Deg, sir.”

“Deg?” said Mr. Spires. “Deg, did you say?”

“Yes, sir.”

The manufacturer seemed to hitch himself off towards his own side of the gig, gave another look at her, and was silent. The poor woman was somewhat astonished at his look and movement, and was silent too.

After awhile Mr. Spires said again, “And do you hope to find friends in Stockington? Had you none where you came from?”

“None, sir, none in the world!” said the poor woman, and again her feelings seemed too strong for her. At length she added, “I was in service, sir, at Poole, in Dorsetshire, when I married; my mother only was living, and while I was away with my husband, she died. When – when the news came from abroad – that – when I was a widow, sir, I went back to my native place, and the parish officers said I must go to my husband’s parish, lest I and my child should become troublesome.”

“You asked relief of them?”

“Never; oh, God knows, never! My family have never asked a penny of a parish. They would die first, and so would I, sir; but they said I might do it, and I had better go to my husband’s parish at once – and they offered me money to go.”

“And you took it, of course?”

“No, sir; I had a little money, which I had earned by washing and laundering, and I sold most of my things, as I could not carry them, and came off. I felt hurt, sir; my heart rose against the treatment of the parish, and I thought I should be better among my husband’s friends – and my child would, if anything happened to me; I had no friends of my own.”

Mr. Spires looked at the woman in silence. “Did your husband tell you anything of his friends? What sort of a man was he?”

“Oh, he was a gay young fellow, rather, sir; but not bad to me. He always said his friends were well off in Stockington.”

“He did!” said the manufacturer, with a great stare, and as if bolting the words from his heart in a large gust of wonder.

The poor woman again looked at him with a strange look. The manufacturer whistled to himself, and giving his horse a smart cut with the whip, drove on faster than ever. The night was fast settling down; it was numbing cold; a gray fog rose from the river as they thundered over the old bridge; and tall engine chimneys, and black smoky houses loomed through the dusk before them. They were at Stockington.