The Carbonels. Yonge Charlotte Mary
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out the number of the Psalm, “new version,” that is, from Brady and Tate, which every one had bound up with the Prayer-book. Then a bassoon brayed, and a fiddle squealed, and the Psalm resounded with hearty goodwill and better tone than could have been expected.
Master Hewlett stayed to assist in the second singing, and the children, who sat on low forms and on the chancel step, profited by it to make their voices more audible than the Commandments, though the clergyman had not gone to the altar, and once in the course of the sermon, Captain Carbonel was impelled to stand up and look over the edge of the pew, when he beheld a battle royal going on over a length of string, between a boy in a blue petticoat and one in a fustian jacket. At the unwonted sight, the fustian-clad let go, and blue petticoat tumbled over backwards, kicking up a great pair of red legs, grey socks, and imperfect but elephantine boots, and howling at the same time. The preacher stopped short, the clerk had by this time worked his way down from the gallery, and, collaring both the antagonists, hauled them out into the churchyard, the triple stamping being heard on the pavement all the way. The sermon was resumed and read to its conclusion. It was a very good one, but immensely beyond the capacity of the congregation, and Mary Carbonel had a strong suspicion that she had heard it before.
It was only on coming out that any notion could be gathered of the congregation. There were a good many men and big boys, in smocks, a few green, but most of them beautifully white and embroidered; their wearers had sat without books through the whole service, and now came out with considerable trampling.
The pews contained the young girls in gorgeous colours, the old women, and the better class of people, but not many of them, for the “petit noblesse” of Uphill were very “petit” indeed, in means and numbers; but their bonnets were enormous, and had red or purple bows standing upright on them, and the farmers had drab coats and long gaiters. The old dames curtsied low, the little girls stared, and the boys peeped out from behind the slanting old headstones and grinned. Some of them had been playing at marbles on the top of the one square old monument, until routed by Master Hewlett on his coming out with the two combatants.
Captain Carbonel had gone round to the vestry door to make acquaintance with the clergyman, though Farmer Goodenough informed him in an audible whisper, “He ain’t the right one, sir; he be only schoolmaster.”
And when the two met at the door, and the captain shook hands and said that they would be neighbours, he was received with a certain hesitating smile.
“I should tell you, sir, that I am only taking occasional duty here—assisting. I am Mr Atkins. I have a select private academy at the vicarage, which the President of Saint Cyril’s lets to me. He is here in the summer holidays.”
“I understand. The curate lives at Downhill!” said Captain Carbonel.
“At the priory, in fact, with his father’s family. Yes, it is rather an unfortunate state of affairs,” he said, answering the captain’s countenance rather than his words; “but I have no responsibility. I merely assist in the Sunday duty; and, indeed, I advise you to have as little to do with the Uphill people as possible. An idle good-for-nothing set! Any magistrate would tell you that there’s no parish where they have so many up before them.”
“No wonder!” said Captain Carbonel under his breath.
“A bad set,” repeated Mr Atkins, pausing at the shed where his old grey horse was put up; and there they parted.
The captain and his wife and her sister walked to Downhill, two miles off, across broad meadows, a river, and a pretty old bridge, the next Sunday morning, found the church scantily filled, but with more respectable-looking people, and heard the same sermon over again, so that Mary was able to identify it with one in a published volume.
Chapter Three.
The Turnip Field
“You ask me why the poor complain, And these have answered thee.”
“Hullo, Molly Hewlett, who’d ha’ thought of seeing you out here?”
It was in a wet turnip field, and a row of women were stooping over it, picking out the weeds. The one that was best off had great boots, a huge weight to carry in themselves; but most had them sadly torn and broken. Their skirts, of no particular colour, were tucked up, and they had either a very old man’s coat, or a smock-frock cut short, or a small old woollen shawl, which last left the blue and red arms bare; on their heads were the oldest of bonnets, or here and there a sun-bonnet, which looked more decent. One or two babies were waiting in the hedgeside in the charge of little girls.
“Molly Hewlett,” exclaimed another of the set, straightening herself up. “Why, I thought your Dan was working with Master Hewlett, for they Gobblealls,” (which was what Uphill made of Carbonel).
“So he be; but what is a poor woman to do when more than half his wage goes to the ‘Fox and Hounds,’ and she has five children to keep and my poor sister, not able to do a turn? There’s George Hewlett, grumbling and growling at him too, and no one knows how long he’ll keep him on.”
“What! George, his cousin, as was bound to keep him on?”
“I don’t know; George is that particular himself, and them new folks, Gobbleall as they call them, are right down mean, and come down on you if they misses one little mossle of parkisit; and there’s my poor sister to keep—as is afflicted, and can’t do nothing!”
“But she pays you handsome,” said Betsy Seddon, “and looks after the children besides.”
“Pays, indeed! Not half enough to keep her, with all the trouble of helping her about! Not that I grudges it, but she wants things extry, you see, and Dan he don’t like it. But no doubt the ladies will take notice of her.”
“I thought the lady kind enough,” interposed another woman. “She noticed how lame our granny was with the rheumatics, and told me to send up for broth.”
“We wants somewhat bad enough,” returned another thin woman, with her hand to her side. “Nobody never does nothing for no one here!”
“Nor we don’t want no one to come worriting and terrifying,” cried the last of the group, with fierce black eyes and rusty black hair sticking out beyond her man’s beaver hat, tied on with a yellow handkerchief. “Always at one about church and school, and meddling with everything—the ribbon on one’s bonnet and to the very pots on the fire. I knows what they be like in Tydeby! And what do you get by it, but old cast clothes and broth made of dish-washings?” She enforced all this with more than one word not to be written.
“I know, I’d be thankful for that!” murmured the thin woman, who looked as if she had barely a petticoat on, and could have had scarcely a breakfast.
“Oh, we all know’s Bessy Mole is all for what she can get!” said the independent woman, tossing her head.
“And had need to be,” returned Molly Hewlett, in a scornful tone, which made the poor woman in question stoop all the lower, and pull her groundsel more diligently.
“The broth ain’t bad,” ventured she who had tried it.
“I shall see what I can get out of them,” added another. “I bain’t proud; and my poor children’s shoes is a shame to see.”
“You’ll not get much,” said Molly Hewlett, with a sniff. “The captain, as they calls him, come down on my Jem, as was taking home a little bit of a chip for the fire, and made him put it down, as cross as could be.”
“How now, you lazy, trolloping, gossiping women! What are you after?”
Farmer Goodenough was upon them; and the words he showered on them were not by any means “good enough” to be repeated here. He stormed at them for their idleness so furiously as to set off the babies in the hedge screaming and yelling. Tirzah Todd, the gipsy-looking woman whom he especially abused, tossed her head and marched off in the midst, growling fiercely, to quiet her child; and he, sending a parting imprecation after her, directed his violence upon poor Bessy Mole, though all this time she had been