The Gauger’s Pocket35
Poor old Tristram Pentire! How he comes up before me as I pronounce his name! That light, active, half-stooping form, bent as though he had a brace of kegs upon his shoulders still; those thin, grey, rusty locks that fell upon a forehead seamed with the wrinkles of threescore years and five; the cunning glance that questioned in his eye, and that nose carried always at half-cock, with a red blaze along its ridge, scorched by the departing footstep of the fierce fiend Alcohol, when he fled before the reinforcements of the coast-guard.
He was the last of the smugglers; and when I took possession of my glebe, I hired him as my servant-of-all-work, or rather no-work, about the house, and there he rollicked away the last few years of his careless existence, in all the pomp and idleness of “The parson’s man.” He had taken a bold part in every landing on the coast, man and boy, full forty years; throughout which time all kinds of men had largely trusted him with their brandy and their lives, and true and faithful had he been to them, as sheath to steel.
Gradually he grew attached to me, and I could but take an interest in him. I endeavoured to work some softening change in him, and to awaken a certain sense of the errors of his former life. Sometimes, as a sort of condescension on his part, he brought himself to concede and to acknowledge, in his own quaint, rambling way—
“Well, sir, I do think, when I come to look back, and to consider what lives we used to live,—drunk all night and idle abed all day, cursing, swearing, fighting, gambling, lying, and always prepared to shet [shoot] the gauger,—I do really believe, sir, we surely was in sin!”
But, whatever contrite admissions to this extent were extorted from old Tristram by misty glimpses of a moral sense and by his desire to gratify his master, there were two points on which he was inexorably firm. The one was, that it was a very guilty practice in the authorities to demand taxes for what he called run goods; and the other settled dogma of his creed was, that it never could be a sin to make away with an exciseman. Battles between Tristram and myself on these themes were frequent and fierce; but I am bound to confess that he always managed, somehow or other, to remain master of the field. Indeed, what Chancellor of the Exchequer could be prepared to encounter the triumphant demand with which Tristram smashed to atoms my suggestions of morality, political economy, and finance? He would listen with apparent patience to all my solemn and secular pleas for the revenue, and then down he came upon me with the unanswerable argument—
“But why should the king tax good liquor? If they must have taxes, why can’t they tax something else?”
My efforts, however, to soften and remove his doctrinal prejudice as to the unimportance, in a moral point of view, of putting the officers of his Majesty’s revenue to death, were equally unavailing. Indeed, to my infinite chagrin, I found that I had lowered myself exceedingly in his estimation by what he called standing up for the exciseman.
“There had been divers passons,” he assured me, “in his time in the parish, and very learned clergy they were, and some very strict; and some would preach one doctrine and some another; and there was one that had very mean notions about running goods, and said ’twas a wrong thing to do; but even he, and the rest, never took part with the gauger—never! And besides,” said old Trim, with another demolishing appeal, “wasn’t the exciseman always ready to put us to death when he could?”
With such a theory it was not very astonishing—although it startled me at the time—that I was once suddenly assailed, in a pause of his spade, with the puzzling inquiry, “Can you tell me the reason, sir, that no grass will ever grow upon the grave of a man that is hanged unjustly?”
“No, indeed, Tristram. I never heard of the fact before.”
“Well, I thought every man know’d that from the Scripture: why, you can see it, sir, every Sabbath-day. That grave on the right hand of the path, as you go down to the porch-door, that heap of airth with no growth, not one blade of grass on it—that’s Will Pooly’s grave that was hanged unjustly.”
“Indeed! but how came such a shocking deed to be done?”
“Why, you see, sir, they got poor Will down to Bodmin, all among strangers, and there was bribery, and false swearing; and an unjust judge came down—and the jury all bad rascals, tin-and-copper-men—and so they all agreed together, and they hanged poor Will. But his friends begged the body and brought the corpse home here to his own parish; and they turfed the grave, and they sowed the grass twenty times over, but ’twas all no use, nothing would ever grow—he was hanged unjustly.”
“Well, but, Tristram, you have not told me all this while what this man Pooly was accused of: what had he done?”
“Done, sir! Done? Nothing whatever but killed the exciseman!”
The glee, the chuckle, the cunning glance, were inimitably characteristic of the hardened old smuggler; and then down went the spade with a plunge of defiance, and as I turned away, a snatch of his favourite song came carolling after me like the ballad of a victory:—
“On, through the ground-sea, shove!
Light on the larboard bow!
There’s a nine-knot breeze above,
And a sucking tide below!
Hush! for the beacon fails:
The skulking gauger’s by.
Down with your studding-sails,
Let jib and foresail fly!
Hurrah for the light once more!
Point her for Shark’s-Nose Head;
Our friends can keep the shore,
Or the skulking gauger’s dead.
On, through the ground-sea, shove!
Light on the larboard bow!
There’s a nine-knot breeze above,
And a sucking tide below!”
Among the “king’s men,” whose achievements haunted the old man’s memory with a sense of mingled terror and dislike, a certain Parminter and his dog occupied a principal place. This officer appeared to have been a kind of Frank Kennedy36 in his way, and to have chosen for his watchword the old Irish signal, “Dare!”
“Sir,” said old Tristram once, with a burst of indignant wrath—“Sir, that villain Parminter and his dog murdered with their shetting-irons no less than seven of our people at divers times, and they peacefully at work in their calling all the while!”
I found on further inquiry that this man Parminter was a bold and determined officer, whom no threats could deter and no money bribe. He always went armed to the teeth, and was followed by a large, fierce, and dauntless dog, which he had thought fit to call Satan. This animal he had trained to carry in his mouth a carbine or a loaded club, which, at a signal from his master, Satan brought to the rescue. “Ay, they was bold audacious rascals—that Parminter and his dog—but he went rather too far one day, as I suppose,” was old Tristram’s chuckling remark, as he leaned on his spade, and I stood by.
“Did he, Trim; in what way?”
“Why, sir, the case was this. Our people had a landing down at Melhuach,37 in Johnnie Mathey’s hole, and Parminter and his dog found it out. So they got into the cave at ebb tide, and laid in wait, and when the first boat-load came ashore, just as the keel took the ground, down storms Parminter, shouting for Satan to follow. The dog knew better, and held back, they said, for the first time in all his life: so in leaps Parminter smash into the boat alone, with his cutlass drawn; but” (with a kind of inward ecstasy) “he didn’t do much harm to the boat’s crew——”
“Because,” as I interposed, “they took him off to their ship?”
“No, not they; not a bit of it. Their blood was up, poor fellows; so they just pulled Parminter down in the boat, and chopped off his head on the gunwale!”
The exclamation of horror with which I received this recital elicited no kind of sympathy from Tristram. He went on quietly with his work, merely moralising thus—“Ay, better Parminter and his dog had gone now and then to the Gauger’s Pocket at Tidnacombe38 Cross, and held their peace—better far.”
The term “The Gauger’s Pocket,” in old Tristram’s phraseology, had no kind of reference to any place of deposit in the apparel of the exciseman, but to a certain large grey rock, which stands upon a neighbouring moorland, not far from the cliffs which overhang the sea. It bears to this day, among the parish people, the name of the Witan-stone—that is to say, in the language of our forefathers, the Rock of Wisdom; because it was one of the places of usual assemblage for the Grey Eldermen of British or of Saxon times—a sort of speaker’s chair or woolsack in the local parliaments. It was, moreover, there is no doubt, one of the natural altars of the old religion; and, as such, it is greeted with a fond and legendary reverence still. Hither Trim guided me one day, to show, as he told me, “the great rock set up by the giants, so they said—long, long ago, before there was any bad laws such as they make now.” It was indeed a wild, strange, striking scene; and one to lift and fill, and, moreover, to subdue the thoughtful mind. Around was the wild, half-cultured moor; yonder, within reach of sight and ear, that boundless, breathing sea, with that shout of waters which came up ever and anon to recall the strong metre of the Greek39—
“Hark! how old ocean laughs with all his waves!”
And there, before me, stood the tall, vast, solemn stone: grey and awful with the myriad memorials of ancient ages, when the white fathers bowed around the rocks and worshipped!
“And now, sir,” clashed in a shrill, sharp voice, “let me show you the wonderfullest thing in all the place, and that is, the Gauger’s Pocket.”
Accordingly I followed my guide, for it seems “I had a dream that was not all a dream,” as he led the way to the back of the Witan-stone; and there, grown over with moss and lichen, with a movable slice of rock to conceal its mouth, old Tristram pointed out, triumphantly, a dry and secret crevice, almost an arm’s-length deep. “There, sir,” said he, with a joyous twinkle in his eye,—“there have I dropped a little bag of gold, many and many a time, when our people wanted to have the shore quiet and to keep the exciseman out of the way of trouble; and there he would go, if so be he was a reasonable officer, and the byword used to be, when ’twas all right, one of us would go and meet him, and then say, ‘Sir, your pocket is unbuttoned;’ and he would smile and answer, ‘Ay, ay! but never mind, my man, my money’s safe enough;’ and thereby we knew that he was a just man, and satisfied, and that the boats could take the roller in peace; and that was the very way, sir, it came to pass that this crack in the stone was called for evermore ‘The Gauger’s Pocket.’”