Friarswood Post Office

CHAPTER VIII—CONFIRMATION

If Harold had known all the consequences of his neglect, perhaps he would have been more sorry for it than as yet he had chosen to be.

The long walk and the warm beer and fire sent Paul to his hay-nest so heavy with sleep, that he never stirred till next morning he was wakened by Tom Boldre, the shuffler, kicking him severely, and swearing at him for a lazy fellow, who stayed out at night and left him to do his work.

Paul stumbled to his feet, quite confused by the pain, and feeling for his shoes in the dark loft.  The shuffler scarcely gave him an instant to put them on, but hunted him down-stairs, telling him the farmer was there, and he would catch it.

It would do nobody any good to hear the violent way in which Mr. Shepherd abused the boy.  He was a passionate man, and no good labourers liked to work with him because of his tongue.  With such grown men as he had, he was obliged to keep himself under some restraint, but this only incited him to make up for it towards the poor friendless boy.

It was really nearly eight o’clock, and Paul’s work had been neglected, which was enough to cause displeasure; and besides, Boldre had heard Paul coming home past eleven, and the farmer insisted on knowing what he had been doing.

Under all his rags, Paul was a very proud boy, and thus asked, he would not tell, but stood with his legs twisted, looking very sulky.

‘No use asking him,’ cried Mrs. Shepherd’s shrill voice at the back door; ‘why, don’t ye hear that Mrs. Barker’s hen-roost has been robbed by Dick Royston and two or three more on ’em?’

‘I never robbed!’ cried Paul indignantly.

‘None of your jaw,’ said the farmer angrily.  ‘If you don’t tell me this moment where you’ve been, off you go this instant.  Drinking at the Tankard, I’ll warrant.’

‘No such thing, Sir,’ said Paul.  ‘I went to Elbury after some medicine for a sick person.’

Somehow he had a feeling about the house opposite, which would not let him come out with the name in such a scene.

‘That’s all stuff,’ broke in Mrs. Shepherd, ‘I don’t believe one word of it!  Send him off; take my advice, Farmer, let him go where he comes from; Ellen King told me he was out of prison.’

Paul flushed crimson at this, and shook all over.  He had all but turned to go, caring for nothing more at Friarswood; but just then, John Farden, one of the labourers, who was carrying out some manure, called out, ‘No, no, Ma’am.  Sure enough he did go to Elbury to Dr. Blunt’s.  I was on the road myself, and I hears him.  “Good-night,” says I.  “Good-night,” says he.  “Where be’est going?” says I.  “To doctor’s,” says he, “arter some stuff for Alfred King.”

‘Yes,’ said Paul, speaking more to Farden than to his master, ‘and then Mrs. King gave me some supper, and that was what made me so late.’

‘She ought to be ashamed of herself, then,’ said Mrs. Shepherd spitefully, ‘having a vagabond scamp like that drinking beer at her house at that time of night.  How one is deceived in folks!’

‘Well, what are you doing here?’ cried the farmer, turning on Paul angrily; ‘d’ye mean to waste any more of the day?’

So Paul was not turned off, and had to go straight to his work.  It was well he had had so good a supper, for he had not a moment to snatch a bit of breakfast.  It so happened that his work was to go with John Farden, who was carrying out the manure in the cart.  Paul had to hold the horse, while John forked it out into little heaps in the field.  John was a great big powerful man, with a foolish face, not a good workman, nor a good character, or he would not have been at that farm.  He had either never been taught anything, or had forgotten it all; he never went near church; he had married a disreputable wife, and had two or three unruly children, who were likely to be the plagues of their parents and the parish, but not a whit did John heed; he did not seem to have much more sense than to work just enough to get food, lodging, beer, and tobacco, to sleep all night, and doze all Sunday.  There was not any malice nor dishonesty in him; but it was terrible that a man with an immortal soul should live so nearly the life of the brute beasts that have no understanding, and should never wake to the sense of God or of eternity.

He was not a man of many words, and nothing passed for a long time but shouts of hoy, and whoa, and the like, to the horse.  Paul went heavily on, scarce knowing what he was about; there was a stunned jaded feel about him, as if he were hunted and driven about, a mere outcast, despised by every one, even by the Kings, whose kindness had been his only ray of brightness.  Not that his senses or spirits were alive enough even to be conscious of pain or vexation; it was only a dull dreary heedlessness what became of him next; and, quick clever boy as he had been in the Union, he did not seem to have a bit more sense, thought, or feeling, than John Farden.

John Farden was the first to break the silence: ‘I wouldn’t bide,’ said he.

Paul looked up, and muttered, ‘I have nowhere to go.’

‘Farmer uses thee shameful,’ repeated John.  ‘Why don’t thee cut?’

Paul saw the smoke of Mrs. King’s chimney.  That had always seemed like a friend to him, but it came across him that they too thought him a runaway from prison, and he felt as if his only bond of fellowship was gone.  But there was something else, too; and he made answer, ‘I’ll bide for the Confirmation.’

‘Eh?’ said John, ‘what good’ll that do ye?’

‘Help me to be a good lad,’ said Paul, who knew John Farden would not enter into any other explanation.

‘Why, what’ll they do to ye?’

‘The Bishop will put his hand on me and bless me,’ said Paul; and as he said the words there was hope and refreshment coming back.  He was a child of God, if no other owned him.

‘Whoy,’ said Farden, much as he might have spoken to his horse, ‘rum sort of a head thou’st got!  Thee’ll never go up to Bishop such a guy!’

‘Can’t help it,’ said Paul rather sullenly; ‘it ain’t the clothes that God looks at.’

John scanned him all over, with his face looking more foolish than ever in the puzzle he felt.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘and what wilt get by it?’

‘God’s grace to do right, I hope,’ said Paul; then he added, out of his sad heart, ‘It’s bad enough here, to be sure.  It would be a bad look-out if one hoped for nothing afterwards.’

Somehow John’s mind didn’t take in the notion of afterwards, and he did not go on talking to Paul.  Perhaps there was a dread in his poor dull mind of getting frightened out of the deadly stupefied sleep it was bound in.

But that bit of talk had done Paul great good, by rousing him to the thought of what he had to hope for.  There was the Confirmation nigh at hand, and then on beyond there was rest; and the words came into his mind, ‘There the wicked cease from troubling, and there the weary are at rest.’

Poor, poor boy!  He was very young to have such yearnings towards the grave, and well-nigh to wish he lay as near to it as Alfred King, so he might have those loving tender hands near him, those kind voices round him.  Paul had gone through a great deal in these few months; and, used to good shelter and regular meals, he was less inured to bodily hardship than many a cottage boy.  His utter neglect of his person was telling on him; he was less healthy and strong than he had been, and though high spirits, merriment, and the pleasure of freedom and independence, had made all light to him in the summer, yet now the cold weather, with his insufficient food and scanty clothing, was dulling him and deadening him, and hard work and unkind usage seemed to be grinding his very senses down.  To be sure, when twelve o’clock came, he went up into the loft, ate his bit of dry bread, and said his prayers, as he had not been able to do in the morning, and that made him feel less forlorn and downcast for a little while; but then as he sat, he grew cold, and numb, and sleepy, and seemed to have no life in him, but to be moving like a horse in a mill, when Boldre called him down, and told him not to be idling there.

The theft in Mrs. Barker’s poultry-yard was never traced home to any one, but the world did not the less believe Dick Royston and Jesse Rolt to have been concerned in it.  Indeed, they had been drinking up some of their gains when Harold met them at the shooting-gallery: and Mrs. Shepherd would not put it out of her head that Paul Blackthorn was in the secret, and that if he did really go for the medicine as he said, it was only as an excuse for carrying the chickens to some receiver of stolen goods.  She had no notion of any person doing anything out of pure love and pity.  Moreover, it is much easier to put a suspicion into people’s heads than out again; and if Paul’s whole history and each day’s doings had been proved to her in a court of justice, she would still have chiefly remembered that she had always thought ill of him, and that Ellen King had said he was a runaway convict, and so she would have believed him to the end.

Ellen had long ago forgotten that she had said anything of the kind; and though she still held her nose rather high when Paul was near, she would have answered for his honesty as readily as for that of her own brothers.  But hers had not been the charity that thinketh no evil, and her idle words had been like thistle-down, lightly sent forth, but when they had lighted, bearing thorns and prickles.

Those thorns were galling poor Paul.  Nobody could guess what his glimpses of that happy, peaceful, loving family were to him.  They seemed to him like a softer, better kind of world, and he looked at their fair faces and fresh, well-ordered garments with a sort of reverence; a kind look or greeting from Mrs. King, a mere civil answer from Ellen, those two sights of the white spirit-looking Alfred, were like the rays of light that shone into his dark hay-loft.  Sometimes he heard them singing their hymns and psalms on a Sunday evening, and then the tears would come into his eyes as he leant over the gate to listen.  And, as if it was because Ellen kept at the greatest distance from him, he set more store by her words and looks than those of any one else, was always glad when she served him in the shop, and used to watch her on Sunday, looking as fresh as a flower in her neat plain dress.

And now to hear that she not only thought meanly of him, which he knew well enough, but thought him a thief, a runaway, and an impostor coming about with false tales, was like a weight upon his sunken spirits, and seemed to take away all the little heart hard usage had left him, made him feel as if suspicious eyes were on him whenever he went for his bit of bread, and took away all his peace in looking at the cottage.

He did once take courage to say to Harold, ‘Did your sister really say I had run away from gaol?’

‘Oh, nobody minds what our Ellen says,’ was the answer.

‘But did she say so?’

‘I don’t know, I dare say she did.  She’s so fine, that she thinks no one that comes up-stairs in dirty shoes worth speaking to.  I’m sure she’s the plague of my life—always at me.’

That was not much comfort for Paul.  He had other friends, to be sure.  All the boys in the place liked him, and were very angry with the way the farmer treated him, and greatly to their credit, they admired his superior learning instead of being jealous of it.  Mrs. Hayward, the sexton’s wife, the same who had bound up his hand when he cut it at harvest, even asked him to come in and help her boys in the evenings with what they had to prepare for Mr. Cope.  He was not sorry to do so sometimes.  The cottage was a slatternly sort of place, where he did not feel ashamed of himself, and the Haywards were mild good sort of folks, from whom he was sure never to hear either a bad or an unkind word; though he did not care for them, nor feel refreshed and helped by being with them as he did with the Kings.

John Farden, too, was good-natured to him, and once or twice hindered Boldre from striking or abusing him; he offered him a pipe once, but Paul could not smoke, and another time brought him out a pint of beer into the field.  Mrs. Shepherd spied him drinking it from her upper window, and believed all the more that he got money somehow, and spent it in drink.

So the time wore on till the Confirmation, all seeming like one dull heavy dream of bondage; and as the weather became colder, the poor boy seemed to have no power of thinking of anything, but of so getting through his work as to avoid violence, to keep himself from perishing with cold, and not to hurt his chilblains more than he could help.

All his quick intellect and good instruction seemed to have perished away, and the last time he went to Mr. Cope’s, he sat as if he were stupid or asleep, and when a question came to him, sat with his mouth open like silly Bill Pridden.

Mr. Cope knew him too well not to feel, as he wrote the ticket, that there were very few of whom he could so entirely from his heart say ‘Examined and APPROVED,’ as the poor lonely outcast foundling, Paul Blackthorn, who could not even tell whether he were fifteen, sixteen, or seventeen, but could just make sure that he had once been caned by old Mr. Haynes, who went away from the Union twelve years ago.

‘Do you think you can keep the ticket safe if I give it you now, Paul?’ asked Mr. Cope, recollecting that the cows might sup upon it like his Prayer-book.

Paul put his hands down to the bottom of his pockets.  They were all one hole, and that sad lost foolish look came over his wan face again, and startled Mr. Cope.

The boys grinned, but Charles Hayward stepped forward.  ‘Please, Sir, let me take care of it for him.’

Mr. Cope and Paul both agreed, and Mr. Cope kept Charles for a moment to say, as he gave him a shilling, ‘Look here, Charles, do you think you can manage to get that poor fellow a tolerable breakfast on Saturday before he goes?  And if you could make him look a little more decent?’

Charles pulled his forelock and looked knowing.  In fact, there was a little plot among these good-natured boys, and Harold King was in it too, though he was not of the Confirmation party, and said and thought he was very glad of it.  He did not want to bind himself to be so very good.  Silly boy; as if Baptism had not bound him already!

Mrs. Hayward put her head out as Paul passed her cottage, and called out, ‘I say, you Paul, you come in to-morrow evening with our Charlie and Jim, and I’ll wash you when I washes them.’

Good Mrs. Hayward made a mistake that the more delicate-minded Mrs. King would never have made.  Perhaps if a pail of warm water and some soap had been set before Paul, he might actually have washed himself; but he was much too big and too shamefaced a lad to fancy sharing a family scrubbing by a woman, whatever she might do to her own sons.  But considering the size of the Hayward cottage, and the way in which the family lived, this sort of notion was not likely to come into the head of the good-natured mother.

So she and her boys were much vexed when Paul did not make his appearance, and she made a face of great disgust when Charles said, ‘Never mind, Mother, my white frock will hide no end of dirt.’

‘I shall have to wash it over again before you can wear it, I know,’ said Mrs. Hayward.  ‘Not as I grudges the trouble; he’s a poor lost orphant, that it’s a shame to see so treated.’