The Life Of Thomas Wanless, Peasant Part 1

The Life of Thomas Wanless, Peasant.

by Alexander Johnstone Wilson.

INTRODUCTORY.

Some years ago it was my habit to spend the long vacation in a quiet Warwickshire village, not far from the fashionable town of Leamington. I chose this spot for its sweet peace and its withdrawnness; for the opportunities it gave me of wandering along the beautiful tree-shaded country lanes; for its nearness to such historical spots as Warwick, Kenilworth, and Stratford-on-Avon, to all of which I could either walk or ride in a morning. But I love a quiet village for its own sake above most things, and would rather spend my leisure amongst its simple cottage folk, take my rest on the bench at the village alehouse door, and walk amid the smock-frocked peasantry to the grey village church, than mingle with the fashionable, over-dressed, prurient, hollow-hearted, and artificial products of civilisation that const.i.tute themselves society--yea a thousand-fold rather. To me the restfulness of a little village, with its cots nestling among the drowsy trees in a warm summer day, is a foreshadowing of the rest of heaven. So I settled myself in little Ashbrook, in a room sweet and cool, of its little inn, and laughed at the foolish creatures who, with weary, purposeless steps trode daily the Leamington Parade with hearts full of all envy and jealousy at sight of such other descendants of our tattooed ancestors as fortune might enable to gaud their bodies more lavishly than they. These droned their idle life away flirting, reading the skim-milk, often unwholesome, literature of the fashionable library; jabbering about dress, and picking characters to pieces; shooting in the gardens at archery meetings; patronising religious shows and thinking it refinement. And I? I wander forth alone, filling my sketch-book with whatsoever takes my fancy, or, in sociable moods, drink my ale in rustic company, talking of hard winters and low wages, the difficulty of living, of rural incidents, and the joys and sorrows of those toilers by whose hard labour the few are made rich. They are not faultless, these rustics, but they are very human, and their vices are unsophisticated vices--the art of gilding iniquity, of luxuriously tricking out a frivolous existence in the most subtle conceits of dress and demeanour, has not yet reached them. When they sin they do not sublimise their sins into the little peccadilloes and amus.e.m.e.nts incident to civilisation. So I love them; marred and crooked and dull-witted though they may be, they suit my humour, and fall in with my tastes for the open air, the free expanse of landscape, the grand old trees, and the verdure-clothed banks of the sleepy streams.

It was in this village that I met my peasant. He was not a man easy to pick acquaintance with, for he mingled little among the gossips of the place. Never once did I see him at the village inn or in church. He lived apart in a little cottage near the Warwick end of the village, with his wife and a little la.s.s of ten or eleven summers--his granddaughter. I often met him in the early morning going to market with his baskets of vegetables, or in the cool of the evening, when he would go out with his little girl skipping and dancing by his side. And the very first time I saw him he awakened in me a strong interest. There was something striking in his aspect--a still calm was on his face, and at the same time a hardness lay about the mouth, and in the wrinkles around the eyes, which was almost repellant. His figure had been above the middle height; and although now bent and gaunt-looking, had still an aspect of calm energy and decayed strength. But what struck me most was the grand, almost majestic outline of his profile, and the keenness of his yet undimmed eye, which flashed from beneath grey s.h.a.ggy eyebrows with a light that entered one's soul. The face was thoroughly English in type, with features singularly regular, the forehead broad, the nose aquiline, the chin large; and still in old age round and clean and full, though the cheeks had fallen in and the mouth had become drawn and hard.

Had one met this man in "society," dressed in correct evening costume, surrounded by courtly dames in half-dress, one would have been struck by the individuality of that grand, grey face. Meanly clad, bent, and leaning on a common oaken staff, the face and figure of this old peasant were such as once looked at could not be easily forgotten. This also was a man with a soul in him; ay, and with a heart too; for does not his eye rest with an inexpressibly sad tenderness on the slim girl by his side when she interrupts his reverie with the eager query, "Grand-dad, grand-dad! Oh look at this poor dead bird in the path; who could have killed it?"

My interest in this solitary man was keenly roused; and, from the inquiries I made, I learned enough of his history to make me anxious to know him. But that was not a desire easily gratified. Although always courteous in returning my "good evening," he did so with an air that forbade conversation, and gave me back but monosyllables to any remarks I might make about the weather, the crops, or the child. He was not rude, only reserved and dry, and that not with me only. To nearly all the villagers his manner was the same. Only two may be said to have been frequenters of his house, the old schoolmaster and the s.e.xton. Even his wife had few or no gossips. Yet everyone seemed to respect him, and many spoke of him with a kind of friendly pity. Whether or not the respect was partly due to the fact that the old man was supposed to have means--that is, that although no longer able to do more than cultivate his little garden and allotment patch, he was yet not on the parish--I cannot say, but it was clear that the kindliness at least was genuine.

And so no one intruded on him. All saluted him respectfully and left him to himself, save perhaps when one of the village milk dealers might give him a lift on his way to market. Sometimes on a warm evening I have seen him seated at his cottage door with a newspaper on his knee, smoking his evening pipe, and answering the greetings of pa.s.sers by. But except his two old friends, and perhaps some village children playing with his little one, there was no gathering of neighbours; no gossips leant over his fence to discuss village scandals and local politics. He was a man apart; and thus it happened that my first holiday in the village pa.s.sed away leaving me still a stranger to old Thomas Wanless.

But for an accident we might have been strangers still, and I would not have troubled the world with this old peasant's history. I was walking home one morning from Leamington, whither I had gone to buy some fresh colours and a sketch-book, when I heard in a hollow behind me a vehicle of some sort coming along the road at a great pace. Almost immediately a dog-cart driven tandem overtook and pa.s.sed me. It contained a stout, rather blotched-looking man, who might be any age from thirty-five to fifty, and a groom. Just beyond the road took rather a sharp turn to the right, dipping into another hollow, and the dog-cart had hardly disappeared round the corner when I heard a shrill scream of pain, followed by oaths, loud and deep, uttered in a harsh, metallic, but husky voice. I ran forward and immediately came upon Thomas Wanless's little girl lying moaning in the road, white and unable to move, grasping a bunch of wild flowers in one hand. Half-a-crown lay amongst the dust near her, and the dog-cart was dashing over the crest of the further slope, apparently on its way to the Grange. Without pausing to think, but cursing the while the heartlessness of those who seemed to think half-a-crown compensation enough for the injury done to this little one, I flung my parcel over the hedge, and gathering the half-fainting child as gently as I could in my arms, hurried with her to her grandfather's cottage. It was a good half-mile walk, partly through the village. The child was heavy, and I arrived hot and out of breath, followed by several matrons who had caught sight of me as I pa.s.sed by, and who stood round the door with anxious faces. A milkman's cart met me on the way, and I begged its occupant to drive with all speed to Warwick for a surgeon, as the child had been run over. The man answered yes, and went.

When I burst into Thomas's house he was dozing in his armchair, but the noise woke him and brought his wife in from the garden. "Oh, my G.o.d,"

cried Thomas, as he caught sight of the child; and he tried to rise, but sank again into his seat pale as death, and trembling all over. His wife burst into tears, but immediately swept an old couch clear of some clothes and child's playthings, and there I laid poor Sally, as the old woman called her, half unconscious and still moaning. Rapidly Mrs.

Wanless loosened the child's clothes, and as she did so I told them what had occurred. When I described the man who had run over the child, I was startled by a sudden flash of angry scorn, almost of hate, that mantled over the old man's face. He clutched the arms of his chair convulsively, and half rose from his seat as he almost hissed out the words--"By Heaven, the child has been killed by its own father." He seemed to regret the words as soon as uttered, and tried to hide his confusion by eagerly inquiring of his wife if she had found out where Sally was hurt. The effort failed him, however, and he remained visibly embarra.s.sed by my presence. I would have left, but I too was anxious to see where Sarah was hurt, so I turned to the couch to give Thomas time to recover himself. As I did so, Sally screamed. Her grandmother had attempted to draw down her loosened dress, and in doing so had disturbed the child's legs, causing acute pain.

I judged at once that a leg was either bruised or broken, and begged Mrs. Wanless to feel gently for the hurt. Almost immediately the child uttered a scream, crying, "Oh, my right leg, my right leg;" and a brief examination proved the fact that it was broken just a little way below the knee. The sobbing of the child unnerved Mrs. Wanless, and she seemed about to faint, so I led her to a seat, gave her a gla.s.s of water, and returned to Sarah, turning her carefully flat on her back, and kneeling down, gently removed her stocking from the broken limb, which I then laid straight out on the couch, propping it on either side with such soft articles as I could lay hands on. That done, I told Sarah to lie as still as she could until the doctor came, when he would soon ease her pain. Soothing the child thus, and hardly thinking of the old people, I was suddenly interrupted by Thomas. He had risen from his chair, and, leaning on his staff, had approached the couch. He stood there for a little, looking at his little maiden with an expression of intense pain and sorrow on his face. Then he turned to me, and, without speaking, held out his hand. I rose to my feet, grasped it, and, suddenly bethinking myself for the first time, uncovered my head. The tears gathered in my eyes in spite of myself. I knew in my heart that Thomas Wanless and I were friends.

And great friends we became in time. At first I went to the cottage daily to enquire after little Sarah, who progressed favourably under the Warwick surgeon's care; and when she was past all danger and pain, I went to talk with old Thomas. Gradually his heart opened to me; and bit by bit I gathered up the main incidents of his history. A commonplace history enough, yet tragic too; for Thomas was no commonplace man. There was a depth of pa.s.sion beneath that still hard face; a wealth of feeling, a range of thought that to me was utterly astounding. What had not this village labourer known and suffered; what sorrow; what baffled hope; yea, what despair; and, through despair, what peace! As I sat by his chair on the summer evenings and listened to his talk with his old friends, or walked with him in the by-lanes, gathering from his lips the leading events of his life, my heart often burned within me. Yet, refined reader, gentle reader, Thomas Wanless was only a peasant; a man that sold vegetables and flowers from door to door in little Warwick town to eke out his means of subsistence. His was the toiler's lot; the lot without hope for this world, whose natural end is want, and a pauper's grave.

Can I hope to interest you in this man's history? I confess I have my doubts. There is tragedy in it; it is mostly tragedy; but then it is the tragedy of the low born. I shall not be able to introduce you to any arch plotter; to groups of refined adulteresses clad in robes of satin and blazoned with jewels and gold, at once the sign and the fruit of their shame. Nor can I promise to unweave startling plots, or to deal in mysterious horrors such as cause the flesh of dainty ladies to creep with a delicious excitement. No; the incidents of Thomas Wanless's story are mostly those of a plain English villager, doomed to suffer and to bear his share of the load of our national greatness; one above the common level in his personal qualities to be sure, but nowise above the common lot. Those who cannot bear to read of such, had better close the book.

Read by you or not, Thomas Wanless's story I must write, for it is a story that all the upper powers of these realms would do well to ponder--from the serene defenders of the faith, with their high satellite, lord bishops in lawn sleeves, downwards. The day is coming, and coming soon, when the men of Thomas Wanless's stamp will invite these dignitaries to give an account of themselves, and to justify the manner of their being under penalty of summary notice to quit.

CHAPTER I.

WHEREIN IS SET FORTH THE BLESSEDNESS OF A HELOT'S NURTURE.

The grandfather of Thomas Wanless had been a small Warwickshire yeoman, whom the troublous times towards the latter end of the last century, family misfortunes, and the pressure of the large landowners, had combined to reduce in circ.u.mstances. His son Jacob had, therefore, found himself in the position of a day labourer on the farms around Ashbrook, raised above his fellow labourers only by the fact that he could sign his name, and that, through his wife, he owned a small freehold cottage with about a quarter of an acre of garden in the village. His unusual literary accomplishments, and his small possession did little to relieve him from the common miseries which pressed more or less on all, but most, of course, on the lowest cla.s.s, during the years that succeeded the "glorious" Napoleonic wars. The winter of 1819, therefore, found him wrestling with the bitter energy of a hungry despair to get bread for a family of six children. The task proved too much for him, and he was reluctantly driven to let his oldest boy Thomas go to work on the Whitbury farm for a shilling a week. Thomas had been trying to pick up some inkling of the art of reading at a dame's school in the village, but had not made much progress--could, when thus launched on the world, do no more than spell out the Sermon on the Mount, or the first verses of the 1st chapter in John's Gospel, and ere a year was well over he had forgotten even that. There were no demagogues in those days disturbing peaceful villages with clamours for education; no laws prohibiting the labour of little children at tasks beyond their strength.

The squires, the parsons, and the larger farmers had the law in their own hands, and combined to keep the lower orders in ignorance, giving G.o.d thanks that they had the power so to do. The sporting parson of Ashbrook of that day even thought it superfluous to teach those d----d labourers' brats the Catechism. He appeared to think his duty done when he had stumbled through the prayers once a week in church. That, at least, was the range of his spiritual duties. For the rest, he considered it of the highest moment that his t.i.thes should be promptly paid; that all poaching should be summarily punished, and that the hunting appointments of the shire should always be graced by his presence. It was also a point of duty with him always to vote true blue, and never to miss a good dinner at any aristocratic table within his reach. He would say grace with fervour, and drink the good wines till his face grew purple and his eyes bloodshot. If he had another mission in life, it was to do his best to divert in sublime disregard of merit or human wants, the charity which some reluctantly contrite sinner of former days had left for the poor of the parish, to the use of creatures who had excited his good feeling by their obsequiousness.

So it came to pa.s.s that little Thomas Wanless was launched on the world at the early age of eight, at the age when the well-to-do begin to think of sending their children to school. Clad in a sort of blue smock and heavy clog boots; patched, not over-warm breeches and stockings, Thomas had to face the wintry blasts in the early morning, for it was a good mile walk to Whitbury Farm. There, all day long, he either trudged wearily by the sides of the horses at plough, often nearly frozen with cold, or did rough jobs about the cattle or pigs in the muck-littered farmyard. Weary, heavy hearted, and hungry, the lad came home at night to his meagre supper of thin oatmeal porridge, or of black bread flavoured with coa.r.s.e bacon, washed down sometimes with a little thin ale or cider. Often he had for dinner only dry bread and a little watery cheese, and rarely or never any meat or milk. Supper over the boy crept straight to bed. For two years this was the life the boy led, and at the end of these two years his wage was but eighteenpence a week. No food was given him save, perhaps, an occasional hunch of bread surrept.i.tiously conveyed to him beneath the ap.r.o.n of a dairymaid endowed with fellow feeling. What need to fill up the picture of these years--who does not know it now? The long autumn days spent watching the corn, often, weary with watching, and hungry, falling asleep by the hedge side. The dreary winters, the hard pallet, and still harder fare, the scant clothing and chilled blood, the crowded sleeping rooms and wan stunted figures; find you not all the history of lives like this set forth in Parliamentary Blue Books for legislators to ponder over and mend, if they can or care. Thomas Wanless suffered no more hardships than millions that have gone before him, or that follow after to this day, bearing on their weary, patient shoulders the burden of our magnificent civilization. He and the others suspected not that this was their allotted mission in our immaculate order of society; but the concrete sufferings of his lot he could feel. For him the harsh words and cruel blows of the farmer were real enough, and, in the misery of his present sufferings, his young life lost its joy and hope. For him the birds that sang in the sweet spring time brought no melody of heaven, the autumn with its golden grain no joy. He knew only of labour, and men's hardness, and was familiar mostly with hunger and cold and pain. The divine order of the British Const.i.tution had ordained it--why should he complain? If my lord and my lady lived in wasteful luxury, if proud squires and their henchmen trod crops under foot in their pursuit of sport, totally regardless of a people's necessities; if vermin, strictly preserved, ate the bread of the poor in order that the lordly few might indulge the wild brute pa.s.sion for slaughter, deemed by them a mark of high-breeding, what was that to Thomas and his kind? Had not those people a right to their pleasure? Was not the land theirs, by theft or fraud it might be, but still theirs by a power none dared gainsay? All that was as clear as day, and religion itself was distinctly on the side of the upper cla.s.ses. The Church through its t.i.thes shared in their exclusive privileges, and the parson of the parish was a diligent guardian of property. On the rare occasions when he preached a sermon his theme was the duty of the poor to be contented and obedient. Men who dared to think, he cla.s.sed as rioters, who, like poachers and rick-burners, were an abomination to the Lord. Who so dared to question the divine order of British society, deserved, in the parson's view, everlasting death. Wealth, in short, according to this beautiful gospel, was for them that had it or could steal it within the lines of the const.i.tution, and for the poor there was degradation, hunger, rags, and, by way of hope, a chance of the pauper's heaven.

It must be all right, of course; but somehow, gradually, to little Thomas it did not appear so. Very young and ignorant as he was, strange thoughts began to stir within him. At home he saw his father sinking more and more into the hopeless state of a man whose only earthly hope was the parish workhouse; he saw his mother beaten to the earth with the weary work of rearing a family of six children, without the means of giving them enough to eat. One by one these went out, like himself, from their little three-roomed cottage to try and earn the bread they needed.

The girls worked in the fields like the rest. All were, like himself, uneducated, and, in spite of all, the wolf could hardly be kept from the door when bread was dear, as it often was in those days. His father's wages never averaged more than 8s. a-week the year round. But what did that matter? Had not the parish provided a poorhouse, and did it not give bread of a kind to every miserable groundling whom it could not drive beyond its bounds? They ought surely to have been contented. Yet Thomas, who saw and often felt their hunger, and contrasted it with the coa.r.s.e profusion at the farm, and the pampered condition of the squire's menials at the Grange--he doubted many things.

The sight of a meeting of fox-hunters, and of the rush of their horses across the cultivated land, filled him with wrath even then. The life he saw around him had no unity in it. Thus it happened that, by the time he was 13, though still stunted in body, he had begun to a.s.sert some amount of dogged independence, and was driven away from Whitbury farm because he flew at his drunken master for striking him with the waggoner's whip.

With some difficulty he got work after this, at 2s. a week and his dinner, on a small dairy farm called the Brooks, which lay a mile further from the village, on the Stratford Road. There he got better treatment. His master was a quiet hard-working man, who had himself a hard struggle to meet his rent, maintain his stock of nine cows, and get a living. His own troubles had tended rather to soften than harden his nature. Thomas, though having to work early and late, at least always got his warm dinner, and often received a draught of milk from the motherly housewife. Here, therefore, he began to grow; his stunted limbs straightened out; his chest expanded, and, by the time he was seventeen he gave the promise of becoming a more than usually stalwart labourer.

While Thomas was still new at this dairy farm, and while the remembrance of his defiance was still fresh in the minds of farmer Pemberton, of Whitbury, and his family, he was subjected to an outrage which almost killed him, and left a mark on his mind which was fresh and vivid to the day of his death. Farmer Pemberton's sons resolved to have a lark with the "impudent young devil." Their first idea was to catch Thomas as he came home at night, and, after trouncing him soundly, duck him in the stinking pond formed by the farm sewage. On consulting their friend, the eldest son of Lawyer Turner, of Warwick, he, however, said that it would be better to frighten the little beggar into doing something they might get him clapped into jail for. Led by this young knave, the farmer's three sons disguised themselves by blackening their faces and donning old clothes. Then, armed with bludgeons and knives, they lay in wait for Thomas as he came home from work in the gloom of an October evening.

Their intention was to seize him, and amid great demonstrations of knives and fearful imprecations, order him to take them to Farmer Pemberton's rickyard. Once there they intended to force him to set fire to some straw in the yard, and then seize him for fire-raising. As young Turner said, they might easily in this way swear him into jail for a twelvemonth.

This diabolical plot was actually and literally carried out upon this poor, ignorant, peasant lad by four young men, supposed to be educated and civilised; and it might have had all the disastrous consequences they could have wished but for an accident. A labourer on the farm overheard part of the conversation of the plotters as they marshalled themselves on the night of the expedition, and, as soon as the coast was clear, stole off to warn the boy's father. Jacob Wanless and he at once roused the neighbours; and, after a delay of perhaps twenty minutes, half a dozen men started for Whitbury Farm, while as many took the Stratford Road to try to save the boy from capture.

The latter party was too late; Thomas was caught near a cross-road about a quarter of a mile from the farm. Two disguised men rushed upon him from opposite sides of the road with savage growls, their blackened faces half hid in m.u.f.flers. Brandishing clubs and knives, they demanded his name. Thomas gave one piercing yell of terror and dashed forward, but was seized and held fast. Gripping him by the collar of his smock till he was nearly choked, young Turner again demanded his name, and, on Thomas gasping it out, roared in his ear, "then you are the villain we want. You must take us to farmer Pemberton's rickyard and stables. We are rick-burners, and will kill you unless you obey." Whereat he flourished a knife, and drew the back of it across his own throat, with a significant gurgle. Thomas trembled in every limb, tried to speak, but his tongue failing him, burst into a wail of crying instead, and sank to the ground. The scoundrels laughed hoa.r.s.ely, and, amid a volley of oaths, hauled him to his feet. Then forcing him on his knees, Turner ordered him to swear to lead them to the place, and keep faith with them. As the boy hesitated, they stood over him crying, "Swear, swear, you obstinate pig, or you die," and Turner held the knife to his heart.

Thoroughly cowed and terror stricken, Thomas gasped out, "I swear." A man on each side then laid hold of him, hauled him to his feet and led him towards the farm, the other two ruffians acting guards, muttering foul oaths, and brandishing their cudgels within an inch of his face in a way that froze his very heart's blood with terror.

Arrived at the barn, they produced a tinderbox, and, lighting a match, ordered Thomas to set fire to a heap of loose straw that lay near the barn door. Thomas refused. A dim glimmer of the fact that he was being hoaxed had risen through his fears. He thought he knew the voices of at least two of his tormentors, and he grew bolder. Twice the order was repeated amid ominous handling of knives, but he sullenly bade them light the straw themselves, and thrust his hands into his pockets. After a third refusal one of the Pembertons struck him in the face a blow that loosened three of his teeth, and made his nose bleed profusely. Then once more he was asked to light the straw, but the only reply was a piercing cry for help. In a moment a gag was thrust into his bleeding mouth, and he was flung on the ground, where they proceeded to pinion his hands and his feet. Before completing the tying, Turner hissed into his ear, "Hold up your hand to say you yield, you little devil, or we will beat you to death." But Thomas lay still, so the whole four of them commenced to push him about with their feet, and to strike him with their sticks, amid growls and horrid oaths. Then Thomas lost consciousness. When he awoke again he was at home in his mother's bed.

His mother was kneeling by his side weeping bitterly, and his father stood over him holding a feeble rushlight, watching for the return of life. The boy was in great pain, especially about the legs and abdomen, and could not move his left arm at all. His face was swollen, his lips and gums lacerated and sore, and he lay tossing in pain till the grey morning light, when he dropt off into a fitful sleep. A fortnight elapsed before he was able to resume work.

The rescuing party had reached the farm barely in time to prevent the brutal ruffians from carrying their sport to perhaps a fatal conclusion.

Guided by the curses and laughter, Jacob and his friends had rushed upon the savages in the midst of the kicking, and Jacob himself in a frenzy of rage wrenched a cudgel from the nearest of them, felled him to the earth with it, and dragged his son from amongst the others' feet. The man he struck happened to be Turner; and, seeing him down, the cowardly young Pembertons took to their heels before the slower moving labourers could capture them. Turner, all bleeding as he was, they attempted to take with them in order to give him into custody, but on the way to the village he tripped up one of his guards, wrenched himself free, and bolted. An outrage like this surely could not go unpunished. Jacob Wanless determined that it should not, and went to a Warwick lawyer, a rival of old Turner's, with a view to get redress. This lawyer, Overend by name, was a sort of pettifogger, who laid himself out for poor men's work. In his way he was clever enough; but, unfortunately, he often got drunk; and, even when sober, was hardly a match for old Turner. When Thomas's case came before the justices, Jacob, therefore, fared badly.

Overend had just enough drink to make him violent and abusive, and the result was that his witnesses were so bamboozled and browbeaten by both Turner and the bench that they became confused, and gave incoherent answers; so it was not very difficult, false swearing being easy, for Turner and his clients to make Thomas the criminal. His attack on old Pemberton's person was raked up in proof of his bad disposition, and his presence in the farmyard was attributed to motives of revenge. As a result, instead of obtaining redress, Jacob's case was dismissed by the magistrates, and he and his son admonished. The chairman of the day, Squire Polewhele, of Middlebury, told Jacob he might be thankful that they did not put his son in jail for a.s.sault. There could be no doubt in his opinion that the young scamp had gone to farmer Pemberton's rickyard with malicious intent, for it was clear that he was an ill-conditioned rascal, and if his father did not take better care of his upbringing he might live to see him come to a bad end.

Such was Jacob's consolation. It took him and his son six months to pay Overend's bill of 30s. The unlucky labourer who had brought the news of the plot fared perhaps worse than anybody, for old Pemberton, at the instigation of his sons, turned him off at a moment's notice. It was nearly four months before the poor fellow could get another steady job, and he and his family were all winter chargeable on the rates.

As for the boy Thomas, his nervous system had received such a shock that it became a positive agony to him to have to trudge home from his work in the dark winter nights, and when his father was unable to go to meet him he always ran at the top of his speed past Whitbury farm, his heart within him palpitating like to burst. All his life long, so deep was the impression that fright made on him, a certain nervous tremor seized him whenever he found himself alone on a strange road on a moonless night.

The rest of the boyhood of Thomas Wanless was uneventful. He grew in mind and in stature, and suffered less withal from hunger than many of his order. At the age of twenty he took a wife, following in that respect the habits of those around him. 'Tis the fashion nowadays to inveigh against early marriages, and especially against the poor who marry early. By such a practice it is declared miseries are heaped upon them, and our pauper roll is augmented. This is an easy way to push aside one of the most perplexing social problems that this country has ever had to face. With the growth of wealth marriage has become a luxury even to the rich, and for the comparatively poor a forbidden indulgence.

As a consequence of this the youth of the present day avoid marriage with all its hampering ties. A code of morals has thus grown up which may be said to be paving the way for a coming negation of all morality.

A young man may commit almost any crime against a young woman with impunity so long as he steers clear of all hints of marriage. The relations of the s.e.xes are under this modern code utterly unnatural and fruitful of corruption. Nor can it be otherwise while a man is forbidden under penalty of social ostracism to take a wife. To marry is almost as sure a way to renounce the world, with all its hopes and advantages, as of old was the taking of a monastic vow. What the next generation will be, what licenses it will give itself under the modern restrictions which outrage all that is best in humanity, I must not venture to predict. But that corruption is spreading on all hands, that flippancy, folly, and worse, dominate the relationships of the young of both s.e.xes is even now too apparent.

But I am travelling far from Thomas Wanless's history. He at all events felt no social restraint save that of poverty, which he did not fear, and so he married young. The lad had, indeed, little choice.

His mother died when he was 19, and one of his sisters, the youngest of the family, was also dead. The other had married and gone to a village five miles beyond Warwick. Of his three brothers, one only remained at home, a boy of 14. William, the next in age to himself, had been kidnapped at Gloucester, and carried off to sea in a Government ship; and the other boy, Jacob, had a place as stable-boy at Melton Priory, Lord Raven's place, near which his married sister lived. There was no woman, therefore, at home to cook food for the three that were left. His father was too broken down to dream of marrying again, there were no houses in the miserable overcrowded village where the three could be taken in to lodge together, and so, unless they separated, what could Thomas do but marry? He was willing enough, of course, being, like all country lads of his years, honestly in love; and so at twenty he brought home his wife to take his mother's place in the old freehold cottage, soon to be his own. Sarah Leigh was a year or two older than her husband, and had been an under-housemaid at the Grange, the family seat of Squire Wiseman, who was the greatest man of the parish, and lord of the manor. Her experiences there were not, perhaps, such as best fitted her to be a labourer's wife, and at first she was inclined to commiserate herself. But at bottom Sarah was a woman of sense, and by the time her second child arrived had grown into a staid, affectionate housewife, ever cheerfully busy in making her home comfortable.

Prudent or not, Thomas thus found himself in a humble and modest way happy. He was now acting as under-waggoner at a farm called Grimscote, near Warwick, and had as much as 9s. 6d. a week in summer, besides beer and extra money in harvest. In winter his work was also regular, though his wages were then only 8s. a week. His duties often took him considerable distances away from home. He was frequently at Coventry and Stratford-on-Avon, and he had once been as far as Worcester, and as his observant faculties were keen, he took mental notes of what he saw. Full of pity for the misery that he everywhere met, the feelings of his boyhood became keener, and his independence of spirit more out-spoken.

Already this had attracted in a pa.s.sing way the attention of the authorities, and some even went so far as to shake their wiseacre heads over him, and dubiously hint that he might be dangerous.

CHAPTER II

INTRODUCES THE READER TO A PHILANTHROPIC PARSON AND A GREAT SQUIRE.

In the years that elapsed between the close of the Napoleonic wars and the pa.s.sing of the Reform Bill, as indeed often since, the debas.e.m.e.nt and misery of the agricultural poor rose to agony point, and soon after Thomas Wanless's marriage an outbreak of popular discontent, based on hunger, stirred a little the smooth surface of society. It became necessary, for very shame, to at least appear to do something for the pauperised ma.s.ses on whose backs "society" was supported. Accordingly, a pseudo philanthropic agitation was started in the rural districts with the object of bettering, or rather of seeming to better, the peasant's lot. Ma.s.s meetings were held, parsons and even bishops threw themselves into the movement, patronised it, and sought to guide it to a consummation safe for themselves and their "dear church," itself then so great a landowner.

For rustic miseries these high personages had one main panacea, and one only. This was not free land, fixity of tenure for the besotted farmers always so content to lie at the feet of their earthly lords; it was not disendowment of the Church and the distribution of its lands among the people from whom they had been taken originally by chicane and greed; nor was it the dismissal, with due payment, of those inheritors of the ancient marauders and appropriators of the soil, with all that is on it and under it, for whom the people have been kept as slaves for many generations. No; none of these things did the servants of the British deity, that idealisation of the sacred rights of feudal property, advocate. Far be such traitor conduct from them. Their cure for the agricultural distress was the "allotment system." To these reformers the free migration of labour, the abolition of that abomination of the poor law which prevented the poor from leaving their parishes, was as nothing compared with allotments. Landlords and parish authorities had but to permit the labourers to cultivate for themselves little patches of land, let to them at a good rent, and what opulence would these serfs not reach.

In the agitation on this tremendous reform, Thomas Wanless took a keen interest, and then first felt sorely his inability to read. He tried to recall the lessons of his childhood, but could not, and was ashamed to apply for help. Few, indeed, amongst his neighbours could have helped him. His wife was as uneducated as himself, so he had to be contented with gathering the purport of what was going on from those he met at market or mill. As far as his mind could comprehend the question it was very clearly made up. He was convinced that all this agitation about professed interest in the down-trodden labourers would do them no good, and he doubted whether any good was meant.

"It's not a bit of charity land we want," he always said. "What I maintain is that you and me an' the likes of us ought to get 10 acres or more at a fair honest rent if we can do wi' it, and let's take our chance. Why shouldn't I be able to keep cows and grow corn as well as the farmer? He often wastes more than three labourers' families could live on, and yet pays his rent. I tell ye, lads, this talk of 'lotments and half acres, and all that, is just d.a.m.ned nonsense, an' that's what it be."

Sentiments like these did not make Thomas popular with the upper powers, and had old Parson Field been alive he might have smarted for his freedom of speech. But the old parson had died shortly before the noise about allotments came to a head, and the new vicar was supposed to be of a different stamp. He was reputed to be a favourite of one of those strange fungoid excrescences of Christianity, the "Lord" Bishop of the diocese, who recommended him for the vacancy, and as he was young and ignorant of the world, he began his work with some moral fervour and a tendency to religious zeal. The Rev. Josiah Codling, M.A., of Jesus College, Cambridge, was in fact a young man of liberal, not to say democratic tendencies. He had been sufficiently impressed by some of the more glorious precepts of the faith he came to teach to wish in a general sort of a way to do good. Left to follow his higher impulses he probably might have led a life of active philanthropy, and the democratic thoroughness of the Christian faith might have enabled him to do something to lift the down-trodden people who formed the bulk of his flock. It was well, at all events, that Mr. Codling began with good intent. He was hardly warm in the parish before he went into the allotment agitation with the feverish enthusiasm of inexperience, and he also had the temerity to start a school. Dismissing the old parish clerk who had drowsily mumbled the "amens" and "we beseech Thee's" for nigh forty years, he brought a young man from Birmingham who knew something of the three R's, and was rumoured to have even conned a Latin primer, and const.i.tuted him parish clerk and schoolmaster. The vicarage coach-house was turned into a schoolroom till better could be provided, and the vicar and his a.s.sistant began, the one to hunt up pupils, and the other to guide their feet in the way of knowledge.