Black Jack seized the empty flaggon and was about to hurl it at the head of the facetious under-strapper, when his arm was arrested by the old man who had first spoken.
ONE:"I speak but the truth," replied Calverley. "You have been rewarded well for the deed you did; and think not that your braggart speech will win my lord. This maid is no meet wife for such as you. My lord has offered me fair lands and her freedom if I choose to wed her: and though many a free dowered maid would smile upon the suit of Thomas Calverley, yet have I come to offer wedlock to Margaret."Reuben moved away from the crest and stood looking round him at what had once been Boarzell Moor. A clear watery light had succeeded the sunset, and he was able to see the full extent of his possessions. From the utmost limits of Grandturzel in the south, to the Glotten brook in the north, from Socknersh in the east to Cheat Land in the westall that he could see was his. Out of a small obscure farm of barely sixty acres he had raised up this splendid dominion, and he had tamed the roughest, toughest, fiercest, cruellest piece of ground in Sussex, the beast of Boarzell.
THREE:"Aye, Master," said another, "he is laid up but I fear he has forgot the shrieving. However, he will never again say guilty or not guilty in a jury-box, or kiss the book in justification of bail!""By God, it's not my gateit's your wheat."
TWO:It was some months since Sir John Bardon, Squire of the Manor of Flightshot, had taken advantage of the Inclosure Act and man?uvred a bill for the inclosure of Boarzell. Since then there had been visits of commissioners, roamings of surveyors, deliveries of schedules, strange talk of turbary and estovers, fire-bote and house-bote. The neighbourhood was troubled, perplexed. Then perplexity condensed into indignation when all that Inclosure stood for became knownno more pasturage for the cow or goat which meant all the difference between wheaten and oaten bread, no more wood-gleanings for fire or wind-beaten roof, no more of the tussocky grass for fodder, or of gorse to toughen palings against escaping fowls.
But for a Private Man to raise a toll,"It is not justice, Sir Robert Skipwith," said he, "to wrest the unfortunate from the merciful interposition of the churchit is not justice, but a high contempt of supreme law, to set at nought the merciful commands of the sovereignit is not justice to usurp a power that belongs not to you, in order to crush a friendless womanit is not justice to set the opinions of an individual against the sacred authority of God's church. The church alone, I repeat, has power to judge in cases where the soul is concerned, as in heresy and witchcraft."
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THREE:"I know you have, and I promise you nothing of this kind shall ever happen again."
THREE:The January twilight deepened, and soon Reuben's blue shirt was all that was clear in the hollow. The bites of the axe cracked out on the still airand suddenly with a soft swish of boughs the tree fell.Lucy promised to be circumspect, and in less than ten minutes placed a flagon of her father's best ale before the galleyman, and then bounding away with a light laugh, as Wells sprang forward to pay for it with a kiss, her little form was instantly lost in the darkness of the evening.
