Cradock Nowell: A Tale of the New Forest. Vol. 1 (of 3)Blackmore, R. D. (Richard Doddridge)
General
Cradock Nowell: A Tale of the New Forest. Vol. 1 (of 3)
Blackmore, R. D. (Richard Doddridge)
New Forest (England : Forest) -- Fiction
“Sir, you ought to know better. Your sense of justice will lead you, I
hope, to apologise to that man”.
He did not wait to see the effect of this public reproof, which was
heard by a hundred people, but struck his mare hastily on the shoulder,
called Clayton, and rode away. Cradock, who now had the ball in his
hands, threw it a hundred feet high.
“Catch it who will”, he said; “I shall bowl no more to–day. Farmer
Blackers, I apologise to you; I did not know you were so tender”.
Feeling far more tender himself (for all that was the youthʼs bravado),
he went away, doubting right and wrong, to his own little room on the
ground floor. There he would smoke his pipe, and meditate, and condemn
himself, if the verdict were true. That young fellowʼs sense of justice
was larger, softer, more deeply fibred, than any Sir Cradock Nowellʼs.
CHAPTER XIV.
Men of high culture and sensitive justice, who have much to do with
ill–taught workmen, lie under a terrible disadvantage. They fear to
presume upon the mere accident of their own position, they dread to
extract more dues from another than they in his place would render,
they shrink from saying what may recall the difference betwixt them,
they cannot bear to be stiff and dogmatic, yet they know that any light
word may be taken in heavy earnest. True sympathy is the only thing to
bring master and man together; and sympathy is a subtle vein, direct
when nature hits it, but crooked and ungrammatical to the syntax of
education. Cradock Nowell often touched it, without knowing how; and
hence his popularity among the “lower classes”. Clayton hit upon it
only in the softer sex. Bull Garnet knew how to move it deeply, and
owed his power to that knowledge, even more than to his energy.
Cradock was pondering these things in the pipe of contemplation, when a
pair of keen eyes twinkled in at the window, and a shrewd, shrill voice
made entry.
“Pray let me in, Mr. Cradock Nowell; I want to inquire about the
grapes”.
“What a wonderful man that is”! said Cradock to himself, as he came
from his corner reluctantly to open the French window; “there is
nothing he doesnʼt inquire about. Erotetic philosopher! He has only
been here some three or four days, and he knows all our polity better
than we do! I wish his wife would come; though I believe he is an
honest fellow”.
Unconscious of any satirical antithesis, he opened the window, and
admitted the polypragmonic doctor; and, knowing that homœopathic
treatment is the wisest for garrulous subjects, he began upon him at
once. Nor omitted a spice of domesticity, which he thought would be
sovereign.
“Now, Dr. Hutton, it is too bad of you to wander about like a bachelor.
How long before we have the pleasure of seeing Mrs. Hutton”?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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