Delphi Complete Works of George Eliot (Illustrated) (553 page)

“Why, he’ll eat a sovereign’s worth in no time,” said Mr. Palfrey, thinking Mr. Freely a little too magnificent in his generosity.

“Eh, Zavy, come back?” exclaimed Jacob, giving his dear brother another hug, which crushed Mr. Freely’s features inconveniently against the stale of the pitchfork.

“Aye, aye,” said Mr. Freely, smiling, with every capability of murder in his mind, except the courage to commit it.  He wished the Bath buns might by chance have arsenic in them.

“Mother’s zinnies?” said Jacob, pointing to a glass jar of yellow lozenges that stood in the window.  “Zive ‘em me.”

David dared not do otherwise than reach down the glass jar and give Jacob a handful.  He received them in his smock-frock, which he held out for more.

“They’ll keep him quiet a bit, at any rate,” thought David, and emptied the jar.  Jacob grinned and mowed with delight.

“You’re very good to this stranger, Mr. Freely,” said Letitia; and then spitefully, as David joined the party at the parlour-door, “I think you could hardly treat him better, if he was really your brother.”

“I’ve always thought it a duty to be good to idiots,” said Mr. Freely, striving after the most moral view of the subject.  “We might have been idiots ourselves — everybody might have been born idiots, instead of having their right senses.”

“I don’t know where there’d ha’ been victual for us all then,” observed Mrs. Palfrey, regarding the matter in a housewifely light.

“But let us sit down again and finish our tea,” said Mr. Freely.  “Let us leave the poor creature to himself.”

They walked into the parlour again; but Jacob, not apparently appreciating the kindness of leaving him to himself, immediately followed his brother, and seated himself, pitchfork grounded, at the table.

“Well,” said Miss Letitia, rising, “I don’t know whether
you
mean to stay, mother; but I shall go home.”

“Oh, me too,” said Penny, frightened to death at Jacob, who had begun to nod and grin at her.

“Well, I think we
had
better be going, Mr. Palfrey,” said the mother, rising more slowly.

Mr. Freely, whose complexion had become decidedly yellower during the last half-hour, did not resist this proposition.  He hoped they should meet again “under happier circumstances.”

“It’s my belief the man is his brother,” said Letitia, when they were all on their way home.

“Nonsense!” said Mr. Palfrey.  “Freely’s got no brother — he’s said so many and many a time; he’s an orphan; he’s got nothing but uncles — leastwise, one.  What’s it matter what an idiot says?  What call had Freely to tell lies?”

Letitia tossed her head and was silent.

Mr. Freely, left alone with his affectionate brother Jacob, brooded over the possibility of luring him out of the town early the next morning, and getting him conveyed to Gilsbrook without further betrayals.  But the thing was difficult.  He saw clearly that if he took Jacob himself, his absence, conjoined with the disappearance of the stranger, would either cause the conviction that he was really a relative, or would oblige him to the dangerous course of inventing a story to account for his disappearance, and his own absence at the same time.  David groaned.  There come occasions when falsehood is felt to be inconvenient.  It would, perhaps, have been a longer-headed device, if he had never told any of those clever fibs about his uncles, grand and otherwise; for the Palfreys were simple people, and shared the popular prejudice against lying.  Even if he could get Jacob away this time, what security was there that he would not come again, having once found the way?  O guineas!  O lozenges! what enviable people those were who had never robbed their mothers, and had never told fibs!  David spent a sleepless night, while Jacob was snoring close by.  Was this the upshot of travelling to the Indies, and acquiring experience combined with anecdote?

He rose at break of day, as he had once before done when he was in fear of Jacob, and took all gentle means to rouse this fatal brother from his deep sleep; he dared not be loud, because his apprentice was in the house, and would report everything.  But Jacob was not to be roused.  He fought out with his fist at the unknown cause of disturbance, turned over, and snored again.  He must be left to wake as he would.  David, with a cold perspiration on his brow, confessed to himself that Jacob could not be got away that day.

Mr. Palfrey came over to Grimworth before noon, with a natural curiosity to see how his future son-in-law got on with the stranger to whom he was so benevolently inclined.  He found a crowd round the shop.  All Grimworth by this time had heard how Freely had been fastened on by an idiot, who called him “Brother Zavy”; and the younger population seemed to find the singular stranger an unwearying source of fascination, while the householders dropped in one by one to inquire into the incident.

“Why don’t you send him to the workhouse?” said Mr. Prettyman.  “You’ll have a row with him and the children presently, and he’ll eat you up.  The workhouse is the proper place for him; let his kin claim him, if he’s got any.”

“Those may be
your
feelings, Mr. Prettyman,” said David, his mind quite enfeebled by the torture of his position.

“What!
is
he your brother, then?” said Mr. Prettyman, looking at his neighbour Freely rather sharply.

“All men are our brothers, and idiots particular so,” said Mr. Freely, who, like many other travelled men, was not master of the English language.

“Come, come, if he’s your brother, tell the truth, man,” said Mr. Prettyman, with growing suspicion.  “Don’t be ashamed of your own flesh and blood.”

Mr. Palfrey was present, and also had his eye on Freely.  It is difficult for a man to believe in the advantage of a truth which will disclose him to have been a liar.  In this critical moment, David shrank from this immediate disgrace in the eyes of his future father-in-law.

“Mr. Prettyman,” he said, “I take your observations as an insult.  I’ve no reason to be otherwise than proud of my own flesh and blood.  If this poor man was my brother more than all men are, I should say so.”

A tall figure darkened the door, and David, lifting his eyes in that direction, saw his eldest brother, Jonathan, on the door-sill.

“I’ll stay wi’ Zavy,” shouted Jacob, as he, too, caught sight of his eldest brother; and, running behind the counter, he clutched David hard.

“What, he
is
here?” said Jonathan Faux, coming forward.  “My mother would have no nay, as he’d been away so long, but I must see after him.  And it struck me he was very like come after you, because we’d been talking of you o’ late, and where you lived.”

David saw there was no escape; he smiled a ghastly smile.

“What! is this a relation of yours, sir?” said Mr. Palfrey to Jonathan.

“Aye, it’s my innicent of a brother, sure enough,” said honest Jonathan.  “A fine trouble and cost he is to us, in th’ eating and other things, but we must bear what’s laid on us.”

“And your name’s Freely, is it?” said Mr. Prettyman.

“Nay, nay, my name’s Faux, I know nothing o’ Freelys,” said Jonathan, curtly.  “Come,” he added, turning to David, “I must take some news to mother about Jacob.  Shall I take him with me, or will you undertake to send him back?”

“Take him, if you can make him loose his hold of me,” said David, feebly.

“Is this gentleman here in the confectionery line your brother, then, sir?” said Mr. Prettyman, feeling that it was an occasion on which format language must be used.

“
I
don’t want to own him,” said Jonathan, unable to resist a movement of indignation that had never been allowed to satisfy itself.  “He ran away from home with good reasons in his pocket years ago: he didn’t want to be owned again, I reckon.”

Mr. Palfrey left the shop; he felt his own pride too severely wounded by the sense that he had let himself be fooled, to feel curiosity for further details.  The most pressing business was to go home and tell his daughter that Freely was a poor sneak, probably a rascal, and that her engagement was broken off.

Mr. Prettyman stayed, with some internal self-gratulation that
he
had never given in to Freely, and that Mr. Chaloner would see now what sort of fellow it was that he had put over the heads of older parishioners.  He considered it due from him (Mr. Prettyman) that, for the interests of the parish, he should know all that was to be known about this “interloper.”  Grimworth would have people coming from Botany Bay to settle in it, if things went on in this way.

It soon appeared that Jacob could not be made to quit his dear brother David except by force.  He understood, with a clearness equal to that of the most intelligent mind, that Jonathan would take him back to skimmed milk, apple-dumpling, broad beans, and pork.  And he had found a paradise in his brother’s shop.  It was a difficult matter to use force with Jacob, for he wore heavy nailed boots; and if his pitchfork had been mastered, he would have resorted without hesitation to kicks.  Nothing short of using guile to bind him hand and foot would have made all parties safe.

“Let him stay,” said David, with desperate resignation, frightened above all things at the idea of further disturbances in his shop, which would make his exposure all the more conspicuous.  “
You
go away again, and to-morrow I can, perhaps, get him to go to Gilsbrook with me.  He’ll follow me fast enough, I daresay,” he added, with a half-groan.

“Very well,” said Jonathan, gruffly.  “I don’t see why
you
shouldn’t have some trouble and expense with him as well as the rest of us.  But mind you bring him back safe and soon, else mother’ll never rest.”

On this arrangement being concluded, Mr. Prettyman begged Mr. Jonathan Faux to go and take a snack with him, an invitation which was quite acceptable; and as honest Jonathan had nothing to be ashamed of, it is probable that he was very frank in his communications to the civil draper, who, pursuing the benefit of the parish, hastened to make all the information he could gather about Freely common parochial property.  You may imagine that the meeting of the Club at the Woolpack that evening was unusually lively.  Every member was anxious to prove that he had never liked Freely, as he called himself.  Faux was his name, was it?  Fox would have been more suitable.  The majority expressed a desire to see him hooted out of the town.

Mr. Freely did not venture over his door-sill that day, for he knew Jacob would keep at his side, and there was every probability that they would have a train of juvenile followers.  He sent to engage the Woolpack gig for an early hour the next morning; but this order was not kept religiously a secret by the landlord.  Mr. Freely was informed that he could not have the gig till seven; and the Grimworth people were early risers.  Perhaps they were more alert than usual on this particular morning; for when Jacob, with a bag of sweets in his hand, was induced to mount the gig with his brother David, the inhabitants of the market-place were looking out of their doors and windows, and at the turning of the street there was even a muster of apprentices and schoolboys, who shouted as they passed in what Jacob took to be a very merry and friendly way, nodding and grinning in return.  “Huzzay, David Faux! how’s your uncle?” was their morning’s greeting.  Like other pointed things, it was not altogether impromptu.

Even this public derision was not so crushing to David as the horrible thought that though he might succeed now in getting Jacob home again there would never be any security against his coming back, like a wasp to the honey-pot.  As long as David lived at Grimworth, Jacob’s return would be hanging over him.  But could he go on living at Grimworth — an object of ridicule, discarded by the Palfreys, after having revelled in the consciousness that he was an envied and prosperous confectioner?  David liked to be envied; he minded less about being loved.

His doubts on this point were soon settled.  The mind of Grimworth became obstinately set against him and his viands, and the new school being finished, the eating-room was closed.  If there had been no other reason, sympathy with the Palfreys, that respectable family who had lived in the parish time out of mind, would have determined all well-to-do people to decline Freely’s goods.  Besides, he had absconded with his mother’s guineas: who knew what else he had done, in Jamaica or elsewhere, before he came to Grimworth, worming himself into families under false pretences?  Females shuddered.  Dreadful suspicions gathered round him: his green eyes, his bow-legs had a criminal aspect.  The rector disliked the sight of a man who had imposed upon him; and all boys who could not afford to purchase, hooted “David Faux” as they passed his shop.  Certainly no man now would pay anything for the “goodwill” of Mr. Freely’s business, and he would be obliged to quit it without a peculium so desirable towards defraying the expense of moving.