or none, bought the meat and took it home. On Sunday morning, they found the meat was—anything you may imagine. It was neither cookable nor eatable; and their anger against Peckaby was not diminished by a certain fact which oozed out to them: namely, that Peckaby himself did not cut his Sunday’s dinner off the meat in his shop, but sent to buy it of one of the Deerham butchers. The general indignation was great; the men, deprived of their Sunday’s meat, joined in it; but nothing could be done until Monday morning. Peckaby’s shop was always hermetically sealed on a Sunday. Mr. Verner had been stringent in allowing no Sunday traffic on the estate.
Monday came. The men went to their work as usual, leaving their wives to deal with the matter. Behold them assembled with their meat, kept for the occasion in spite of its state, before the shop of Peckaby. But of redress they could get none; Peckaby was deaf; and Lionel arrived to find hostilities commenced. Such was the summary of the story.
“You are acting very wrong,” were Lionel’s first words to them in answer. “You should blame the meat, not Peckaby. Is this weather for keeping meat?”
“The weather didn’t get to this heat till yesterday in the afternoon,” said they—and Lionel could not deny the fact. Mrs. Dawson took up the word.
“Our meat warn’t bought at Peckaby’s; our meat were got at Clark’s, and it were sweet as a nut. ’Twere veal, too, and that’s the worst meat for keeping. Roy ’ud kill us if he could; but he can’t force us on to Peckaby’s rubbish. We defy him to’t.”
In point of defying Roy, the Dawsons had done that long ago. There was open warfare between them, and skirmishes took place occasionally. The first act of Roy, after it was known that Lionel was disinherited, had been to discharge old Dawson and his sons from work. How they had managed to live since, was a mystery: funds did not seem to run low with them: tales of their night-poaching went about, and the sons got an odd job at legitimate work now and then.
“It’s an awful shame,” cried a civil, quiet woman, Sarah Grind, one of a very numerous family, commonly called “Grind’s lot,” “that we should be beat down to have our victuals and other things at such a place as Peckaby’s! Sometimes, sir, I’m almost inclined to ask, is it Christians as rules over us?”
Lionel felt the shaft levelled at his family, though not personally at himself.
“You are not beaten down to it,” he said. “Why do you deal at Peckaby’s? Stay a bit! I know what you would urge: that by going elsewhere you would displease Roy. It seems to me that if you would all go elsewhere, Roy could not prevent it. Should one of you attempt to go, he might; but he could not prevent it if you all go with one accord. If Peckaby’s things are bad—as I believe they are—why do you buy them?”
“There ain’t a single thing as is good in his place,” spoke up a woman, half-crying. “Sir, it’s truth. His flour is half bone-dust, and his ’taturs is watery, his sugar is sand, and his tea is leaves dried over again, and his eggs is rotten, and his coals is flint.”
“Allowing that it is so, it is no good reason for your smashing his windows,” said Lionel. “It is utterly impossible that that can be tolerated.”
“Why do he palm his bad things off upon us, then?” retorted the crowd. “He makes us pay half as much again as we do in the other shops; and when we gets them home, we can’t eat ’em. Sir, you be Mr. Verner now; you ought to see as we be protected.”
“I am Mr. Verner; but I have no power. My power has been taken from me, as you know. Mrs. Verner is—”
“A murrain light upon her!” scowled a man from the outskirts of the crowd. “Why do she call herself Mrs. Verner, and stick herself up for missis at Verner’s Pride, if she is to take no notice on us? Why do she leave us in the hands of Roy, to be—”
Lionel had turned upon the man like lightning.
“Davies, how dare you presume so to speak of Mrs. Verner in my presence? Mrs. Verner is not the source of your ills; you must look nearer to you, for that. Mrs. Verner is aged and ailing; she cannot get out of doors to see into your grievances.”
At the moment of Lionel’s turning to the man, he, Davies, had commenced to push his way towards Lionel. This caused the crowd to sway, and Lionel’s hat, which he held carelessly in his hand, having taken it off to wipe his heated brow, got knocked down. Before he could rescue it, it was trampled out of shape; not intentionally—they would have protected Lionel and his things with their lives—but inadvertently. A woman picked it up with a comical look of despair. To put on that again, was impossible.
“Never mind,” said Lionel, good-naturedly. “It was my own fault; I should have held it better.”
“Put your handkercher over your head, sir,” was the woman’s advice. “It’ll keep the sun off.”
Lionel smiled, but did not take it. Davies was claiming his attention: while some of the women seemed inclined to go in for a fight, which should get the hat.
“Could Mr. Verner get out o’ doors and look into our grievances, the last years of his life, any more, sir, nor she can?” he was asking, in continuation of the subject. “No, sir; he couldn’t, and he didn’t; but things wasn’t then brought to the pitch as they be now.”
“No,” acquiesced Lionel, “I was at hand then, to interpose between Roy and Mr. Verner.”
“And don’t you think, sir, as you might be able to do the same thing still?”
“No, Davies. I have been displaced from Verner’s Pride, and from all power connected with it. I have no more right to interfere with the working of the estate than you have. You must make the best of things until Mr. Massingbird’s return.”
“There’ll be some dark deed done, then, afore many weeks is gone over; that’s what there’ll be!”