Brother Jacob | Page 5

with inconveniences that could
be avoided. Besides, it is not robbery to take property belonging to your
mother: she doesn't prosecute you. And David was very well behaved
to his mother; he comforted her by speaking highly of himself to her,
and assuring her that he never fell into the vices he saw practised by
other youths of his own age, and that he was particularly fond of
honesty. If his mother would have given him her twenty guineas as a
reward of this noble disposition, he really would not have stolen them
from her, and it would have been more agreeable to his feelings.
Nevertheless, to an active mind like David's, ingenuity is not without
its pleasures: it was rather an interesting occupation to become
stealthily acquainted with the wards of his mother's simple key (not in
the least like Chubb's patent), and to get one that would do its work
equally well; and also to arrange a little drama by which he would
escape suspicion, and run no risk of forfeiting the prospective hundred
at his father's death, which would be convenient in the improbable case
of his NOT making a large fortune in the "Indies."
First, he spoke freely of his intention to start shortly for Liverpool and
take ship for America; a resolution which cost his good mother some
pain, for, after Jacob the idiot, there was not one of her sons to whom
her heart clung more than to her youngest-born, David. Next, it
appeared to him that Sunday afternoon, when everybody was gone to
church except Jacob and the cowboy, was so singularly favourable an
opportunity for sons who wanted to appropriate their mothers' guineas,
that he half thought it must have been kindly intended by Providence
for such purposes. Especially the third Sunday in Lent; because Jacob
had been out on one of his occasional wanderings for the last two days;
and David, being a timid young man, had a considerable dread and

hatred of Jacob, as of a large personage who went about habitually with
a pitchfork in his hand.
Nothing could be easier, then, than for David on this Sunday afternoon
to decline going to church, on the ground that he was going to tea at Mr.
Lunn's, whose pretty daughter Sally had been an early flame of his, and,
when the church-goers were at a safe distance, to abstract the guineas
from their wooden box and slip them into a small canvas bag--nothing
easier than to call to the cowboy that he was going, and tell him to keep
an eye on the house for fear of Sunday tramps. David thought it would
be easy, too, to get to a small thicket and bury his bag in a hole he had
already made and covered up under the roots of an old hollow ash, and
he had, in fact, found the hole without a moment's difficulty, had
uncovered it, and was about gently to drop the bag into it, when the
sound of a large body rustling towards him with something like a
bellow was such a surprise to David, who, as a gentleman gifted with
much contrivance, was naturally only prepared for what he expected,
that instead of dropping the bag gently he let it fall so as to make it
untwist and vomit forth the shining guineas. In the same moment he
looked up and saw his dear brother Jacob close upon him, holding the
pitchfork so that the bright smooth prongs were a yard in advance of
his own body, and about a foot off David's. (A learned friend, to whom
I once narrated this history, observed that it was David's guilt which
made these prongs formidable, and that the "mens nil conscia sibi"
strips a pitchfork of all terrors. I thought this idea so valuable, that I
obtained his leave to use it on condition of suppressing his name.)
Nevertheless, David did not entirely lose his presence of mind; for in
that case he would have sunk on the earth or started backward; whereas
he kept his ground and smiled at Jacob, who nodded his head up and
down, and said, "Hoich, Zavy!" in a painfully equivocal manner.
David's heart was beating audibly, and if he had had any lips they
would have been pale; but his mental activity, instead of being
paralysed, was stimulated. While he was inwardly praying (he always
prayed when he was much frightened)-- "Oh, save me this once, and I'll
never get into danger again!"--he was thrusting his hand into his pocket
in search of a box of yellow lozenges, which he had brought with him
from Brigford among other delicacies of the same portable kind, as a

means of conciliating proud beauty, and more particularly the beauty of
Miss Sarah Lunn. Not