Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of 'Eighty
he was still engaged when, shortly after dusk, John Grueby entered and
announced a visitor.
‘Let him come in,’ said Gashford.
‘Here! come in!’ growled John to somebody without; ‘You’re a Protestant,
an’t you?’
‘I should think so,’ replied a deep, gruff voice.
‘You’ve the looks of it,’ said John Grueby. ‘I’d have known you for one,
anywhere.’ With which remark he gave the visitor admission, retired, and
shut the door.
The man who now confronted Gashford, was a squat, thickset personage,
with a low, retreating forehead, a coarse shock head of hair, and eyes
so small and near together, that his broken nose alone seemed to
prevent their meeting and fusing into one of the usual size. A dingy
handkerchief twisted like a cord about his neck, left its great veins
exposed to view, and they were swollen and starting, as though with
gulping down strong passions, malice, and ill-will. His dress was of
threadbare velveteen--a faded, rusty, whitened black, like the ashes
of a pipe or a coal fire after a day’s extinction; discoloured with the
soils of many a stale debauch, and reeking yet with pot-house odours. In
lieu of buckles at his knees, he wore unequal loops of packthread; and
in his grimy hands he held a knotted stick, the knob of which was carved
into a rough likeness of his own vile face. Such was the visitor who
doffed his three-cornered hat in Gashford’s presence, and waited,
leering, for his notice.
‘Ah! Dennis!’ cried the secretary. ‘Sit down.’
‘I see my lord down yonder--’ cried the man, with a jerk of his thumb
towards the quarter that he spoke of, ‘and he says to me, says my lord,
“If you’ve nothing to do, Dennis, go up to my house and talk with Muster
Gashford.” Of course I’d nothing to do, you know. These an’t my working
hours. Ha ha! I was a-taking the air when I see my lord, that’s what
I was doing. I takes the air by night, as the howls does, Muster
Gashford.’
And sometimes in the day-time, eh?’ said the secretary--‘when you go out
in state, you know.’
‘Ha ha!’ roared the fellow, smiting his leg; ‘for a gentleman as ‘ull
say a pleasant thing in a pleasant way, give me Muster Gashford agin’
all London and Westminster! My lord an’t a bad ‘un at that, but he’s a
fool to you. Ah to be sure,--when I go out in state.’
‘And have your carriage,’ said the secretary; ‘and your chaplain, eh?
and all the rest of it?’
‘You’ll be the death of me,’ cried Dennis, with another roar, ‘you will.
But what’s in the wind now, Muster Gashford,’ he asked hoarsely, ‘Eh?
Are we to be under orders to pull down one of them Popish chapels--or
what?’
‘Hush!’ said the secretary, suffering the faintest smile to play upon
his face. ‘Hush! God bless me, Dennis! We associate, you know, for
strictly peaceable and lawful purposes.’
‘I know, bless you,’ returned the man, thrusting his tongue into his
cheek; ‘I entered a’ purpose, didn’t I!’
‘No doubt,’ said Gashford, smiling as before. And when he said so,
Dennis roared again, and smote his leg still harder, and falling into
fits of laughter, wiped his eyes with the corner of his neckerchief, and
cried, ‘Muster Gashford agin’ all England hollow!’
‘Lord George and I were talking of you last night,’ said Gashford, after
a pause. ‘He says you are a very earnest fellow.’
‘So I am,’ returned the hangman.
‘And that you truly hate the Papists.’
‘So I do,’ and he confirmed it with a good round oath. ‘Lookye here,
Muster Gashford,’ said the fellow, laying his hat and stick upon the
floor, and slowly beating the palm of one hand with the fingers of the
other; ‘Ob-serve. I’m a constitutional officer that works for my living,
and does my work creditable. Do I, or do I not?’
‘Unquestionably.’
‘Very good. Stop a minute. My work, is sound, Protestant,
constitutional, English work. Is it, or is it not?’
‘No man alive can doubt it.’
‘Nor dead neither. Parliament says this here--says Parliament, “If any
man, woman, or child, does anything which goes again a certain number
of our acts”--how many hanging laws may there be at this present time,
Muster Gashford? Fifty?’
‘I don’t exactly know how many,’ replied Gashford, leaning back in his
chair and yawning; ‘a great number though.’
‘Well, say fifty. Parliament says, “If any man, woman, or child, does
anything again any one of them fifty acts, that man, woman, or child,
shall be worked off by Dennis.” George the Third steps in when they
number very strong at the end of a sessions, and says, “These are too
many for Dennis. I’ll have half for myself and Dennis shall have half
for himself;” and sometimes he throws me in one over that I don’t
expect, as he did three year ago, when I got Mary Jones, a young woman
of nineteen who come up to Tyburn with a infant at her breast, and was
worked off for taking a piece of cloth off the counter of a shop in
Ludgate Hill, and putting it down again when the shopman see her;
and who had never done any harm before, and only tried to do that, in
consequence of her husband having been pressed three weeks previous, and
she being left to beg, with two young children--as was proved upon the
trial. Ha ha!--Well! That being the law and the practice of England, is
the glory of England, an’t it, Muster Gashford?’
‘Certainly,’ said the secretary.
‘And in times to come,’ pursued the hangman, ‘if our grandsons should
think of their grandfathers’ times, and find these things altered,
they’ll say, “Those were days indeed, and we’ve been going down hill
ever since.” Won’t they, Muster Gashford?’
‘I have no doubt they will,’ said the secretary.
‘Well then, look here,’ said the hangman. ‘If these Papists gets into
power, and begins to boil and roast instead of hang, what becomes of my
work! If they touch my work that’s a part of so many laws, what becomes
of the laws in general, what becomes of the religion, what becomes of
the country!--Did you ever go to church, Muster Gashford?’
‘Ever!’ repeated the secretary with some indignation; ‘of course.’
‘Well,’ said the ruffian, ‘I’ve been once--twice, counting the time I
was christened--and when I heard the Parliament prayed for, and thought
how many new hanging laws they made every sessions, I considered that I
was prayed for. Now mind, Muster Gashford,’ said the fellow, taking
up his stick and shaking it with a ferocious air, ‘I mustn’t have
my Protestant work touched, nor this here Protestant state of things
altered in no degree, if I can help it; I mustn’t have no Papists
interfering with me, unless they come to be worked off in course of law;
I mustn’t have no biling, no roasting, no frying--nothing but hanging.
My lord may well call me an earnest fellow. In support of the great
Protestant principle of having plenty of that, I’ll,’ and here he beat
his club upon the ground, ‘burn, fight, kill--do anything you bid me, so
that it’s bold and devilish--though the end of it was, that I got hung
myself.--There, Muster Gashford!’
He appropriately followed up this frequent prostitution of a noble word
to the vilest purposes, by pouring out in a kind of ecstasy at least
a score of most tremendous oaths; then wiped his heated face upon his
neckerchief, and cried, ‘No Popery! I’m a religious man, by G--!’
Gashford had leant back in his chair, regarding him with eyes so sunken,
and so shadowed by his heavy brows, that for aught the hangman saw of
them, he might have been stone blind. He remained smiling in silence for
a short time longer, and then said, slowly and distinctly:
‘You are indeed an earnest fellow, Dennis--a most valuable fellow--the
staunchest man I know of in our ranks. But you must calm yourself;
you must be peaceful, lawful, mild as any lamb. I am sure you will be
though.’
‘Ay, ay, we shall see, Muster Gashford, we shall see. You won’t have to
complain of me,’ returned the other, shaking his head.
‘I am sure I shall not,’ said the secretary in the same mild tone, and
with the same emphasis. ‘We shall have, we think, about next month, or
May, when this Papist relief bill comes before the house, to convene our
whole body for the first time. My lord has thoughts of our walking
in procession through the streets--just as an innocent display of
strength--and accompanying our petition down to the door of the House of
Commons.’
‘The sooner the better,’ said Dennis, with another oath.
‘We shall have to draw up in divisions, our numbers being so large; and,
I believe I may venture to say,’ resumed Gashford, affecting not to
hear the interruption, ‘though I have no direct instructions to that
effect--that Lord George has thought of you as an excellent leader for
one of these parties. I have no doubt you would be an admirable one.’
‘Try me,’ said the fellow, with an ugly wink.
‘You would be cool, I know,’ pursued the secretary, still smiling, and
still managing his eyes so that he could watch him closely, and really
not be seen in turn, ‘obedient to orders, and perfectly temperate. You
would lead your party into no danger, I am certain.’
‘I’d lead them, Muster Gashford,’--the hangman was beginning in a
reckless way, when Gashford started forward, laid his finger on his
lips, and feigned to write, just as the door was opened by John Grueby.
‘Oh!’ said John, looking in; ‘here’s another Protestant.’
‘Some other room, John,’ cried Gashford in his blandest voice. ‘I am
engaged just now.’
But John had brought this new visitor to the door, and he walked
in unbidden, as the words were uttered; giving to view the form and
features, rough attire, and reckless air, of Hugh.
Chapter 38
The secretary put his hand before his eyes to shade them from the glare
of the lamp, and for some moments looked at Hugh with a frowning brow,
as if he remembered to have seen him lately, but could not call to mind
where, or on what occasion. His uncertainty was very brief, for before
Hugh had spoken a word, he said, as his countenance cleared up:
‘Ay, ay, I recollect. It’s quite right, John, you needn’t wait. Don’t
go, Dennis.’
‘Your servant, master,’ said Hugh, as Grueby disappeared.
‘Yours, friend,’ returned the secretary in his smoothest manner. ‘What
brings YOU here? We left nothing behind us, I hope?’
Hugh gave a short laugh, and thrusting his hand into his breast,
produced one of the handbills, soiled and dirty from lying out of doors
all night, which he laid upon the secretary’s desk after flattening it
upon his knee, and smoothing out the wrinkles with his heavy palm.
‘Nothing but that, master. It fell into good hands, you see.’
‘What is this!’ said Gashford, turning it over with an air of perfectly
natural surprise. ‘Where did you get it from, my good fellow; what does
it mean? I don’t understand this at all.’
A little disconcerted by this reception, Hugh looked from the secretary
to Dennis, who had risen and was standing at the table too, observing
the stranger by stealth, and seeming to derive the utmost satisfaction
from his manners and appearance. Considering himself silently appealed
to by this action, Mr Dennis shook his head thrice, as if to say of
Gashford, ‘No. He don’t know anything at all about it. I know he don’t.
I’ll take my oath he don’t;’ and hiding his profile from Hugh with one
long end of his frowzy neckerchief, nodded and chuckled behind this
screen in extreme approval of the secretary’s proceedings.
‘It tells the man that finds it, to come here, don’t it?’ asked Hugh.
‘I’m no scholar, myself, but I showed it to a friend, and he said it
did.’
‘It certainly does,’ said Gashford, opening his eyes to their utmost
width; ‘really this is the most remarkable circumstance I have ever
known. How did you come by this piece of paper, my good friend?’
‘Muster Gashford,’ wheezed the hangman under his breath, ‘agin’ all
Newgate!’