PAGE Tales from the Old Dramatists. By SHIRLEY BROOKS :- Chaps. IX.-X. THE GENTLEMAN'S MAGAZINE DECEMBER, 1869. BROKEN ON THE WHEEL. BY JOSEPH HATTON, AUTHOR OF "CHRISTOPHER KENRICK." E was ever a strange, wild spirit: at one time revelling in fits of dissipation; at another, reading hard and going to church on Sundays, like a plodding, respectable man. A week ago he began to tell me his story, the story of his life from the beginning. There was a peculiarly touching pathos in his style which I can hardly hope to reflect in these pages. It seemed as if he loved to dwell upon his earliest days. He would describe every little incident of his life at the outset, and gradually fall away from this close picturesque painting, as he approached the end, his story becoming more suggestive than narratory, until at last it was nothing but a wild burst of passion, the cry of the maniac broken upon the wheel of fortune, and raving at fate. This is his strange and pitiful story :— "What an ugly little rascal!" exclaimed my father, in answer to the "there, sir," of a portly Gampish woman, who held something in a bundle under his nose, "what an ugly little rascal!" “Lor, sir," said the woman, "for goodness sake don't go and say so to the missus, she'll never get over it." But my father had no particularly delicate scruples on that score, as my mother has since told me. He did repeat this rough and ready criticism on the personal appearance of your humble servant, George Newbolde. How rapidly I changed from anything but a handsome baby, my VOL. IV., N. S. 1869. B mother has often related to me; changed in every way, my nose gradually becoming perfectly Grecian in outline, and my black hair curling sharp and crisply all over my round well-shaped head. "You were soon pretty enough for your father to make a fuss about you, though cross and peevish in the extreme. I shall never forget when I travelled with you from Southtown, all those miles by the coach to Elmsfield; I believe you cried all the way, all those three or four hundred miles, whatever the distance was." "I must have known what a miserable place we were journeying to," said I, pushing my hands into a pair of short velvet trousers, and frowning contempt upon Elmsfield from the mature height of seven summers. "Perhaps you did. I only wish I had never seen Elmsfield, or your father either, for the matter of that," said my mother. "To be married at eighteen, and taken away from your parents, never to see them again, it is enough to make any one wretched." "Have you never seen them since ?" I remember asking. "No, and never shall, and your father that proud and independent it makes one unable to sit easy in one's chair to think of it. My father, that is your grandfather, Mills, would have sent us all the way in his own waggon, and with a good load of furniture and linen; but your father said, 'No, I married her for love, and I will not have a penny in one way or another.' The best of it was we had not a ten pound note between us at the time, and if it had not been for a little purse of gold which my poor mother slipped into my hands just before the coach started, I really don't know what we should have done. And I coming away alone, and to travel all those miles, and the snow falling so heavily that the whole country was covered with it. Your father had gone on a week before to get lodgings for us, and what with your crying and the cold, and feeling lonely, I never spent two such unhappy days in all my life." The room in which we were talking was a semi-kitchen, semiparlour, of a respectable old-fashioned kind of middle-class house. The furniture consisted of a heavy deal table and dresser to match; a woolly, fluffy, chintz covered sofa, two arm chairs, a piece of carpet covering the centre of the room, a shining black-leaded fire-place, and a baby's cot, completely furnished with baby and pillows, which said cot my mother rocked with her foot as she talked; whilst I, her son and heir, sat close by the fire on a little stool, and watched the firelight dancing up the chimney. It was a snug, homely room. Shining tins, of all kinds, hung upon the wall, and a few odd books filled a small shelf at one side of the fire-place. I remember the shining tins, because there was a long spit amongst them which served me for a sword, while the great saucepan lid furnished me with a shield, and enabled me to suit the action to the word, the word to the action, when I recited, for the special edification of occasional tea parties, the grandiloquent address of Norval, in reference to his shrewd parent of the Grampian Hills. The bookshelf also stands out in my early remembrances, because of sundry pictorial representations of "Pickwick," "the Arabian Nights," and Joseph in Egypt. The first of these works was my father's especial favourite, and he would sit over his tea and laugh loud and long to himself without reference to my mother or me, which more than once was the cause of unpleasant bickerings between my respected parents. A cozy little room, I say; and so it was, clean and neat and shiny, with a door leading into the parlour where we sat on Sundays, and another conducting us up into the bed rooms. "And how old was I when you brought me to Elmsfield, mother?" "Twelve months," said my mother, looking up at the little clock over the mantel-piece. "And what made you come to Elmsfield?" "Ah, you may well ask that, child, when we had a good house at Southtown, where your father was doing well, and your grandfather never missed a day without sending us something or another. What is it that makes people rush upon their own destruction, I wonder? It was getting to be from a journeyman to an overseer, I suppose, that made your father come here; and when he arrived he found it was all through a strike, and they called him names and wrote verses upon him, and in the song they said something about our burning a pig up the chimney; for you see your father he is so obstinate, he will insist upon doing things here as they do them at Southtown. They cure their bacon there by smoking it over a wood fire, and your father had a flitch put up the kitchen chimney to smoke it, but the thing caught fire and nearly burnt the house down; and so they put it in a song, and I could have cried my eyes out when some one threw a copy into the house, and the neighbours made remarks about it when I went out." "Are we rich, mother?" "Rich! I should think not, indeed." "Shall we be some day?" "Your father says so; but I very much doubt it. I never heard of a Newbolde who was rich yet. Your father talks of their having as good blood in their veins as anybody in Elmsfield; though what the good of that is I never could make out." |