Thomas Wanless

“ Had Thomas Wanless known what was in store for him in the future he might have elected to leave Ashbrook for ever, and continue the life of a railway navvy. As such his pay was good, and by thrift he might save enough money either to venture on small contracts for himself, or start some kind of business in one of the growing midland towns. But Thomas did not consider these possibilities. The life he led grew more and more repulsive to him as time went on; and he yearned unceasingly for the quietude of his native village, and for his own fireside peace. ”

“ What is this that your Christian civilisation has done to your daughter? Has it made you ashamed even to look for her? Poor, hide-bound, "respectable" sinner that you are, you shall behold her again, though you sought her not—though her mother bade you close your heart and home against her for ever, because she had with that mother's help allowed herself to be betrayed.
One cold March night Thomas Wanless had strayed on to Waterloo Bridge in his coal-begrimed dress. Something, he could not have said what, had impelled him to go there that night. ”

“ Possibly Thomas would have been less confident had he known what going to London, and work in London, meant; but in spite of his dread of the great city, his conceptions were so hazy, that in his heart, as he afterwards confessed, he never contemplated needing to work there at all. He hoped to find Sarah in a day or two, or at most within a week, and once found, was sure that she would come home. His wife, it turned out, formed a truer conception of the task before him, although she had never seen a bigger town than Leamington or Warwick. But her fears did not abate her husband's confidence. ”

“ Thomas had one thing to cheer him, though, and no doubt that gave him more courage to face the world again than he otherwise would have had. His precious son, [100] young Tom, had emigrated to Australia about a year before this terrible illness had enfeebled his father. He had gone as an assisted emigrant, but the old man had given him £10 of old Hawthorn's £20 to begin the New World upon. The parting had cost the family much, and the father most of all; but they felt it to be for the best. There was no room to grow in the old land ”

“ Thomas paid no attention to her, but stalking up to the Captain, glared at him till that wretched being shivered with fear in spite of himself. Perhaps this "gallant" soldier thought Wanless would knock him down, and that may have been the peasant's first impulse. However, he did not, but instead turned after a minute or so to Mrs. Codling, and asked, with stern abruptness—
"Madam, do you know who this man is?"
For a brief space the woman seemed scared and cowed by the tones and at the face she saw looming above her. "Good gracious me!" she exclaimed, half to herself. "What does the man mean?" ”

“ Codling provoked Wanless most unjustifiably. She, at all events, got no more than she deserved. But the labourer was sensitive and proud, and these feelings made him prefer silent endurance to the loss of self-respect. Could he have foreseen the consequences which seemed at least to flow from his one effort at bringing home to the sinner his sin, he might have had still greater doubts about the wisdom of the course he pursued on that calm October Sunday afternoon.
For one thing, the noise of the row between the Captain and Thomas was soon heard all over Ashbrook. ”

“ Thus the wrench of parting was keenest for old Thomas in his case, because the joy had been but a flash of light in a dark existence.
"I will never see your face again," the old man said to his children the last Sunday evening they passed together. "To your mother and me this parting will be bitterer than death, because you will live, and we will never hear your voices nor see you more in this world."
"Oh, father, do not say that," sobbed Jane; "you and mother will come out to Australia to us, and we'll all live together and be so happy." ”

“ Adelaide Codling passed on, unconscious of the presence of her fellow-villager, saw not the pleading look that crossed his face, the eager step forward he took as if to speak with her. She entered a cab with Wiseman and two others, and disappeared from sight.
The eagerness of Thomas to find his lost one was intensified after that night. Hardly a night-watchman in all the district escaped his importunities, and from most of them the old man met with a rough kindness that soothed him even in his absorbing grief. ”

“ Once more their nights were nights of sorrow and tears, and for them the mornings brought no joy. Only the little one that lay sleeping in its wee cot was all unconscious of trouble, or that its presence added poignancy to the bitterness with which the labourer and his wife mourned for their lost one.
Thomas Wanless, however, was not a man to abandon himself long to useless grief. The more keen the pain the more certain was his nature to rise and fight for deliverance, and before long he had made up his mind that, while he had life, his child should not be abandoned. ”

“ It was a sharp-edged bit of flint which cut the cheek open, and made Thomas furious. Turning his bleeding face, now barely visible in the gathering dusk, to the crowd, and heedless of the vicar's shouts for silence, he exclaimed—"Lads, are you going to stand this stone-throwing any longer; are these slave-drivers to be allowed to bully us on our own village green?"
"No, no, no," shouted the labourers in a chorus.
"Let us thrash them, then," he replied, "and teach them that we have the right to live." ”

“ To this sally Thomas, however, made no answer beyond a smothered groan. The man's spirit was too much broken to bear rough comfort of this kind, as his visitor instantly perceived. Changing his tone at once, the Captain bent over the bench where the prisoner sat hanging his head, and laying his hand on Thomas's shoulder, added—
"Come, come, Tom, my boy; bless my life! don't lose heart because you've been a fool. I'll see that the chicks don't starve, and you'll soon be out of this, and a man again."
The kind tones of Hawthorn's voice affected Tom more even than the promise. ”

“ Wanless also spoke of his quest and his sorrow, and the Vicar listened with sympathy; but when the peasant ventured to urge that it was his duty to denounce, and expose the ravenous wolf, who had destroyed the peace of so many families, Codling shook his head and answered—"No, no, Thomas, I cannot; I dare not. It is too late."
"Why too late, sir? Are you not a minister of Christ, and bound by the office you hold to denounce the sinner and his sin?" ”

“ How his neighbours, who had rent to pay, managed, was more than Thomas could divine, unless they quietly stole what was not given them; as, indeed, most of them did. Many also were so demoralised as to look upon poor relief as a perquisite which they thought it no shame to accept, and even demand, on all occasions. Nearly all poached game, when they had a chance, and boasted of it to each other. In regard to game there was, in fact, no consciousness of wrong-doing in the mind of any labourer, and Thomas himself thought nothing of killing a rabbit or leveret when he had the chance ”

“ Good heavens, man, that'll no keep ye a week. Ye'll starve, Wanless, lang afore you find the lassie, if ye ever find her. God, man, if that's a' you can scrape for the job, you'd better bide where ye are?"
"That I cannot do," Thomas answered. "Starve or not, I must go and seek my child."
The farmer looked at him for a moment, gave a grunt of amazement, and turned on his heel, with the remark—
"Well, well, Wanless, a wilful man must hae his way, they say, and you must have yours, I suppose, but, faith, I doubt you'll rue your folly." ”

“ I, too, long to be as she is. Life has become all a waste desert to me; oh, so dreary, dreary." Then, after a pause, he went on—"And I envy you, Thomas, for have you not cause to rejoice that Sarah has died in her father's house forgiven? Had it been but so with my Adelaide; oh, had it been but so, I think—I—hope would not have been lost to me. ”

“ Why cannot you look after your own, Thomas Wanless? I do not want your help." [208]
"I watch for my child night and day," said the peasant solemnly. "It was in seeking her that I met yours—too late. There is ever a prayer in my heart that when I find my Sally I may not be too late for her also. Ah! poor Sally!" he sighed, and the Vicar, taking no more notice of him, he presently added—"Come out of this place, sir. It is not wise for you to stop here when there is so much yet to be done." ”

“ It is a power that increases with the spread of education; and what does it betoken? Only this; that in time, for one man among the peasantry who now thinks like Thomas Wanless there will be tens of thousands. The churches and chapels themselves, with their exceedingly worldly respectability, produce these men more certainly than all the teachings of the Bradlaughs; nay, Bradlaugh himself is directly the product of a corrupt, time-serving and utterly blasphemous church organisation. Therefore be not too contemptuous of sentiments like those of this peasant. ”

“ Like his fellows, he promised to become an old man at 50, but he would have stuck to his work had not a sharp attack of pleurisy laid him up in the winter of 1855, and once more compelled him to seek to live by farm labour. He could not face the bleak unsheltered railway track again, and even if he could, there was no room for him. His place had been filled up. With a weary heart and a spirit well-nigh crushed, Thomas once more looked for work on the farms around Ashbrook. "Is there no hope for us, Sally, lass?" he would often cry. "Must we go to the workhouse at last?" ”

“ Yet, refined reader, gentle reader, Thomas Wanless was only a peasant; a man that sold vegetables and flowers from door to door in little Warwick town to eke out his means of subsistence. His was the toiler's lot; the lot without [9] hope for this world, whose natural end is want, and a pauper's grave.
Can I hope to interest you in this man's history? I confess I have my doubts. There is tragedy in it; it is mostly tragedy; but then it is the tragedy of the low born. ”

“ At last he found her. "When hope was calm, and grief was dead" almost, he lighted on his lost child unexpectedly, in a place where he would never have dreamed of looking for her, had it not been for the friendly advice of the police.
All over London there are coffee-houses, tobacco-shops, and confectioner-looking shops, whose real use is to be haunts of vice. Thomas had learned to know this, and his eye was always upon such as he wandered through the streets. Perchance he might see his Sally in one of them some night. ”

“ Take care, woman, take care. The serpent that destroyed my precious lass has not lost his fangs, and your turn to mourn as I mourn may be nearer than you think. Because you have fine clothes and luxuries, and live in a grand house, you think that the ills of the poor cannot reach you. Take care, I say, or the day may come when I can return your taunt, and tell you that if you had set a better example to your children, if you had guarded them against evil company, you might have been spared much sorrow and humiliation." With this, Thomas turned to go, but the cries of Mrs. Codling arrested him. ”

“ Many came from garrison towns, the seduced of the officers there; quiet country parsonages gave their quota of girls educated to feel, and therefore hurrying the faster to their doom, when once cut off from their families by the devices of their betrayers. One woman excited Thomas's pity deeply. Though wasted and fast dying, she still had traces of great beauty when he first met her, leaning wearily on the parapet of Waterloo Bridge, looking out on the water below. ”

“ There now, to be equally forgotten, lay squire, and parson, and parson's wife, all peacefully sleeping, life's fever over, its jealousies and petty dignities laid aside for evermore.
And Mrs. Wanless waits still, attended by her grandchild, young Sarah, now a bright, intelligent, well-educated young woman. When her grandmother joins Thomas in the last rest of all, she will be taken across the ocean to these warm-hearted friends far away, and then the old [240] land will never more see aught of this sturdy peasant stock. ”

“ One evening, in the middle of the third week of their affliction, as he and neighbour Robins were trudging home together through the perplexing obscurity of a grey November fog, the latter said—
"Couldn't we get a rabbit or two, Tummas? They'd make a nice pot for the young ones, poor things; better nor barley gruel, any way."
"I don't mind," said Thomas, in an indifferent tone. "But where can we come at 'em?"
"Oh, there's a warren up in Squire Greenaway's fir coppice to the left here, just off the Banbury road. We [57] can beat it in five minutes. Come on," he added, seizing Thomas's arm. ”

“ That same year, Thomas himself had had a fine spell of harvesting; and his wife, having no new baby to provide for, had saved a few shillings by selling vegetables from the allotment garden, to people in Warwick town, so that the winter was faced by the couple in better heart than they had known almost since the day they were married. A pound or two in hand after meeting the bills that the harvest money had to pay! Surely greater bliss no man could know. The thought of such riches made Thomas declare that he might yet escape the workhouse, as, thank God, his father had done. ”