The Vicar of Bullhampton I

THE VICAR OF BULLHAMPTON

“He thought it was one of them police. They do be coming here a’most every day, till one’s heart faints at seeing ’em. I’d go away if I’d e’er a place to go to.”

“Have you no place at home, Carry?” “No, sir; no place.”

This was so true that he couldn’t tell himself why he had asked the question. She certainly had no place at home till her father’s heart should be changed towards her.

“Carry,” said he, speaking very slowly, “they tell me that you are married. Is that true?”

She made him no answer.

“I wish you would tell me, if you can. The state of a married woman is honest at any rate, let her husband be who he may.”

“My state is not honest.” “You are not married, then?” “No, sir.”

He hardly knew how to go on with this interrogation, or to ask questions about her past and present life, without expressing a degree of censure which, at any rate for the present, he wished to repress.

“You are living here, I believe, with old Mrs. Burrows?” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

“I was told that you were married to her son.”

“They told you untrue, sir. I know nothing of her son, except just to have see’d him.”

“Is that true, Carry?”

“It is true. It wasn’t he at all.” “Who was it, Carry?”

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“Not her son; — but what does it signify? He’s gone away, and I shall see un no more. He wasn’t no good, Mr. Fenwick, and if you please we won’t talk about un.”

“He was not your husband?”

“No, Mr. Fenwick; I never had a husband, nor never shall, I suppose. What man would take the likes of me? I have just got one thing to do, and that’s all.”

“What thing is that, Carry?”

“To die and have done with it,” she said, bursting out into loud sobs. “What’s the use o’ living? Nobody’ll see me, or speak to me. Ain’t I just so bad that they’d hang me if they knew how to catch me?”

“What do you mean, girl?” said Fenwick, thinking for the moment that from her words she, too, might have had some part in the murder.

“Ain’t the police coming here after me a’most every day? And when they hauls about the place, and me too, what can I say to ’em? I have got that low that a’most everybody can say what they please to me. And where can I go out o’ this? I don’t want to be living here always with that old woman.”

“Who is the old woman, Carry?”

“I suppose you knows, Mr. Fenwick?”

“Mrs. Burrows, is it?” She nodded her head. “She is the mother of the man they call the Grinder?” Again she nodded her head. “It is he whom they accuse of the murder?” Yet again she nodded her head. “There was another man?” She nodded it again. “And they say that there was a third,” he said, — “your brother Sam.”

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“Then they lie,” she shouted, jumping up from her seat. “They lie like devils. They are devils; and they’ll go, oh, down into the fiery furnace for ever and ever.” In spite of the tragedy of the moment, Mr. Fenwick could not help joining this terribly earnest threat and the Marquis of Trowbridge together in his imagination. “Sam hadn’t no more to do with it than you had, Mr. Fenwick.”

“I don’t believe he had,” said Mr. Fenwick.

“Yes; because you’re good, and kind, and don’t think ill of poor folk when they’re a bit down. But as for them, they’re devils.”

“I did not come here, however, to talk about the murder, Carry. If I thought you knew who did it, I shouldn’t ask you. That is business for the police, not for me. I came here partly to look after Sam. He ought to be at home. Why has he left his home and his work while his name is thus in people’s mouths?”

“It ain’t for me to answer for him, Mr. Fenwick. Let ’em say what they will, they can’t make the white of his eye black. But as for me, I ain’t no business to speak of nobody. How should I know why he comes and why he goes? If I said as how he’d come to see his sister, it wouldn’t sound true, would it, sir, she being what she is?”

He got up and went to the front door, and opened it, and looked about him. But he was looking for nothing. His eyes were full of tears, and he didn’t care to wipe the drops away in her presence.

“Carry,” he said, coming back to her, “it wasn’t all for him that I came.”

“For who else, then?”

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“Do you remember how we loved you when you were young, Carry? Do you remember my wife, and how you used to come and play with the children on the lawn? Do you remember, Carry, where you sat in church, and the singing, and what trouble we had together with the chaunts? There are one or two at Bullhampton who never will forget it?”

“Nobody loves me now,” she said, talking at him over her shoulder, which was turned to him.

He thought for a moment that he would tell her that the Lord loved her; but there was something human at his heart, something perhaps too human, which made him feel that were he down low upon the ground, some love that was nearer to him, some love that was more easily intelligible, which had been more palpably felt, would in his frailty and his wickedness be of more immediate avail to him than the love even of the Lord God.

“Why should you think that, Carry?” “Because I am bad.”

“If we were to love only the good, we should love very few. I love you, Carry, truly. My wife loves you dearly.”

“Does she?” said the girl, breaking into low sobs. “No, she don’t. I know she don’t. The likes of her couldn’t love the likes of me. She wouldn’t speak to me. She wouldn’t touch me.”

“Come and try, Carry.”

“Father would kill me,” she said.

“Your father is full of wrath, no doubt. You have done that which must make a father angry.”

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“Oh, Mr. Fenwick, I wouldn’t dare to stand before his eye for a minute. The sound of his voice would kill me straight. How could I go back?”

“It isn’t easy to make crooked things straight, Carry, but we may try; and they do become straighter if one tries in earnest. Will you answer me one question more?”

“Anything about myself, Mr. Fenwick?”

“Are you living in sin now, Carry?” She sat silent, not that she would not answer him, but that she did not comprehend the extent of the meaning of his question. “If it be so, and if you will not abandon it, no honest person can love you. You must change yourself, and then you will be loved.”

“I have got the money which he gave me, if you mean that,” she said.

Then he asked no further questions about herself, but reverted to the subject of her brother. Could she bring him in to say a few words to his old friend? But she declared that he was gone, and that she did not know whither; that he might probably return this very day to the mill, having told her that it was his purpose to do so soon. When he expressed a hope that Sam held no consort with those bad men who had murdered and robbed Mr. Trumbull, she answered him with such naïve assurance that any such consorting was out of the question, that he became at once convinced that the murderers were far away, and that she knew that such was the case. As far as he could learn from her, Sam had really been over to Pycroft with the view of seeing his sister, taking probably a holiday of a day or two on the way. Then he again reverted to herself, having as

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he thought obtained a favourable answer to that vital question which he had asked her.

“Have you nothing to ask of your mother?” he said. “Sam has told me of her and of Fan.”

“And would you not care to see her?”

“Care, Mr. Fenwick! Wouldn’t I give my eyes to see her? But how can I see her? And what could she say to me? Father ‘d kill her if she spoke to me. Sometimes I think I’ll walk there all the day, and so get there at night, and just look about the old place, only I know I’d drown myself in the mill-stream. I wish I had. I wish it was done. I’ve seed an old poem in which they thought much of a poor girl after she was drowned, though nobody wouldn’t think nothing at all about her before.”

“Don’t drown yourself, Carry, and I’ll care for you. Keep your hands clean. You know what I mean, and I will not rest till I find some spot for your weary feet. Will you promise me?” She made him no answer. “I will not ask you for a spoken promise, but make it yourself, Carry, and ask God to help you to keep it. Do you say your prayers, Carry?”

“Never a prayer, sir.”

“But you don’t forget them. You can begin again. And now I must ask for a promise. If I send for you will you come?”

“What — to Bull’ompton?”

“Wheresoever I may send for you? Do you think that I would have you harmed?”

“Perhaps it’d be — for a prison; or to live along with a lot of others. Oh, Mr. Fenwick, I could not stand that.”

He did not dare to proceed any further lest he should be tempted to make promises which he himself could not per-

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it not be expected that all his tenants would be murdered? Many applications had already been made to the Marquis for the Church Farm; but as it happened that the applicant whom the Marquis intended to favour, had declared that he did not wish to live in the house because of the murder, the Marquis felt himself justified in concluding that if everything about the parish were not changed very shortly, no decent person would be found willing to live in any of his houses. And now, when they had been talking of murderers, and worse than murderers, as the Marquis said to himself, shaking his head with horror in the carriage as he thought of such iniquity, this infidel clergyman had dared to allude to his lordship’s daughters! Such a man had no right even to think of women so exalted. The existence of the Ladies Stowte must no doubt be known to such men, and among themselves probably some allusion in the way of faint guesses might be made as to their modes of life, as men guess at kings and queens, and even at gods and goddesses. But to have an illustration, and a very base illustration, drawn from his own daughters in his own presence, made with the object of confuting himself, — this was more than the Marquis could endure. He could not horsewhip Mr. Fenwick; nor could he send out his retainers to do so; but, thank God, there was a bishop! He did not quite see his way, but he thought that Mr. Fenwick might be made at least to leave that parish. “Turn my daughters out of my house, because — oh, oh!” He almost put his fist through the carriage window in the energy of his action as he thought of it.

As it happened, the Marquis of Trowbridge had never sat in the House of Commons, but he had a son who sat there now.

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Lord St. George was member for another county in which Lord Trowbridge had an estate, and was a man of the world. His father admired him much, and trusted him a good deal, but still had an idea that his son hardly estimated in the proper light the position in the world which he was called to fill. Lord St. George was now at home at the Castle, and in the course of that evening the father, as a matter of course, consulted the son. He considered that it would be his duty to write to the bishop, but he would like to hear St. George’s idea on the subject. He began, of course, by saying that he did not doubt but that St. George would agree with him.

“I shouldn’t make any fuss about it,” said the son. “What! pass it over?”

“Yes; I think so.”

“Do you understand the kind of allusion that was made to your sisters?”

“It won’t hurt them, my lord; and people make allusion to everything now-a-days. The bishop can’t do anything. For aught you know he and Fenwick may be bosom friends.”

“The bishop, St. George, is a most right-thinking man.” “No doubt. The bishops, I believe, are all right-thinking

men, and it is well for them that they are so very seldom called on to go beyond thinking. No doubt he’ll think that this fellow was indiscreet; but he can’t go beyond thinking. You’ll only be raising a blister for yourself.”

“Raising a what?”

“A blister, my lord. The longer I live the more convinced I become that a man shouldn’t keep his own sores open.”

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