“Yes,” said Captain Barnabas. “I know that by experience.”
“The deuce you do!” cried the squire, bluntly. “Experience in eight thousand acres!”
“No; in my apartments in the Albany,—No. 3 A. I have had them ten years, and it was only last Christmas that I bought my Japan cat.”
“Dear me,” said Miss Jemima; “a Japan cat! that must be very curious. What sort of a creature is it?”
“Don’t you know? Bless me, a thing with three legs, and holds toast! I never thought of it, I assure you, till my friend Cosey said to me one morning when he was breakfasting at my rooms, ‘Higginbotham, how is it that you, who like to have things comfortable about you, don’t have a cat?’ ‘Upon my life,’ said I, ‘one can’t think of everything at a time,’—just like you, Squire.”
“Pshaw,” said Mr. Hazeldean, gruffly, “not at all like me. And I’ll thank you another time, Cousin Higginbotham, not to put me out when I’m speaking on matters of importance; poking your cat into my stocks! They look something like now, my stocks, don’t they, Harry? I declare that the whole village seems more respectable. It is astonishing how much a little improvement adds to the—to the—”
“Charm of the landscape,” put in Miss Jemina, sentimentally.
The squire neither accepted nor rejected the suggested termination; but leaving his sentence uncompleted, broke suddenly off with—
“And if I had listened to Parson Dale—”
“You would have done a very wise thing,” said a voice behind, as the parson presented himself in the rear.
“Wise thing? Why, surely, Mr. Dale,” said Mrs. Hazeldean, with spirit, for she always resented the least contradiction to her lord and master—perhaps as an interference with her own special right and prerogative!—“why, surely if it is necessary to have stocks, it is necessary to repair them.”
“That’s right! go it, Harry!” cried the squire, chuckling, and rubbing his hands as if he had been setting his terrier at the parson: “St—St—at him! Well, Master Dale, what do you say to that?”
“My dear ma’am,” said the parson, replying in preference to the lady, “there are many institutions in the country which are very old, look very decayed, and don’t seem of much use; but I would not pull them down for all that.”
“You would reform them, then,” said Mrs. Hazeldean, doubtfully, and with a look at her husband, as much as to say, “He is on politics now,—that’s your business.”
“No, I would not, ma’am,” said the parson, stoutly. “What on earth would you do, then?” quoth the squire. “Just let ‘em alone,” said the parson. “Master Frank, there’s a Latin maxim which was often put in the mouth of Sir Robert Walpole, and which they ought to put into the Eton grammar, ‘Quieta non movere.’ If things are quiet, let them be quiet! I would not destroy the stocks, because that might seem to the ill-disposed like a license to offend; and I would not repair the stocks, because that puts it into people’s heads to get into them.”
The squire was a stanch politician of the old school, and he did not like to think that, in repairing the stocks, he had perhaps been conniving at revolutionary principles.
“This constant desire of innovation,” said Miss Jemima, suddenly mounting the more funereal of her two favourite hobbies, “is one of the great symptoms of the approaching crash. We are altering and mending and reforming, when in twenty years at the utmost the world itself may be destroyed!” The fair speaker paused, and Captain Barnabas said thoughtfully, “Twenty years!—the insurance officers rarely compute the best life at more than fourteen.” He struck his hand on the stocks as he spoke, and added, with his usual consolatory conclusion, “The odds are that it will last our time, Squire.”
But whether Captain Barnabas meant the stocks or the world he did not clearly explain, and no one took the trouble to inquire.
“Sir,” said Master Frank to his father, with that furtive spirit of quizzing, which he had acquired amongst other polite accomplishments at Eton,—“sir, it is no use now considering whether the stocks should or should not have been repaired. The only question is, whom you will get to put into them.”
“True,” said the squire, with much gravity.
“Yes, there it is!” said the parson, mournfully. “If you would but learn ‘non quieta movere’!”
“Don’t spout your Latin at me, Parson,” cried the squire, angrily; “I can give you as good as you bring, any day.
“‘Propria quae maribus tribuuntur mascula dicas.—
As in praesenti, perfectum format in avi.’
“There,” added the squire, turning triumphantly towards his Harry, who looked with great admiration at this unprecedented burst of learning on the part of Mr. Hazeldean,—“there, two can play at that game! And now that we have all seen the stocks, we may as well go home and drink tea. Will you come up and play a rubber, Dale? No! hang it, man, I’ve not offended you?—you know my ways.”
“That I do, and they are among the things I would not have altered,” cried the parson, holding out his hand cheerfully. The squire gave it a hearty shake, and Mrs. Hazeldean hastened to do the same.
“Do come; I am afraid we’ve been very rude: we are sad blunt folks. Do come; that’s a dear good man; and of course poor Mrs. Dale too.” Mrs. Hazeldean’s favourite epithet for Mrs. Dale was poor, and that for reasons to be explained hereafter.
“I fear my wife has got one of her bad headaches, but I will give her your kind message, and at all events you may depend upon me.”
“That’s right,” said the squire; “in half an hour, eh? How d’ ye do, my little man?” as Lenny Fairfield, on his way home from some errand in the village, drew aside and pulled off his hat with both hands. “Stop; you see those stocks, eh? Tell all the bad boys in the parish to take care how they get into them—a sad disgrace—you’ll never be in such a quandary?”
“That at least I will answer for,” said the parson.
“And I too,” added Mrs. Hazeldean, patting the boy’s curly head. “Tell your mother I shall come and have a good chat with her to-morrow evening.”
And so the party passed on, and Lenny stood still on the road, staring hard at the stocks, which stared back at him from its four great eyes.
Put Lenny did not remain long alone. As soon as the great folks had fairly disappeared, a large number of small folks emerged timorously from the neighbouring cottages, and approached the site of the stocks with much marvel, fear, and curiosity.
In fact, the renovated appearance of this monster a propos de bottes, as one may say—had already excited considerable sensation among the population of Hazeldean. And even as when an unexpected owl makes his appearance in broad daylight all the little birds rise from tree and hedgerow, and cluster round their ominous enemy, so now gathered all the much-excited villagers round the intrusive and portentous phenomenon.
