The Chronicles of Barsetshire by Anthony Trollope Read Free Book Online

would have cut his hand off sooner than have signed it. It was then suggested by Finney that if even eleven could be induced to sanction the document, the one obstinate recusant might have been represented as unfit to judge on such a question—in fact, as being non compos mentis —and the petition would have been taken as representing the feeling of the men. But this could not be done: Bunce’s friends were as firm as himself, and as yet only six crosses adorned the document. It was the more provoking, as Bunce himself could write his name legibly, and one of those three doubting souls had for years boasted of like power, and possessed, indeed, a Bible, in which he was proud to show his name written by himself some thirty years ago—”Job Skulpit;” but it was thought that Job Skulpit, having forgotten his scholarship, on that account recoiled from the petition, and that the other doubters would follow as he led them. A petition signed by half the hospital would have but a poor effect.
    It was in Skulpit’s room that the petition was now lying, waiting such additional signatures as Abel Handy, by his eloquence, could obtain for it. The six marks it bore were duly attested, thus:

    &c., and places were duly designated in pencil for those brethren who were now expected to join: for Skulpit alone was left a spot on which his genuine signature might be written in fair clerk-like style. Handy had brought in the document, and spread it out on the small deal table, and was now standing by it persuasive and eager. Moody had followed with an inkhorn, carefully left behind by Finney; and Spriggs bore aloft, as though it were a sword, a well-worn ink-black pen, which from time to time he endeavoured to thrust into Skulpit’s unwilling hand.
    With the learned man were his two abettors in indecision, William Gazy and Jonathan Crumple. If ever the petition were to be forwarded, now was the time—so said Mr. Finney; and great was the anxiety on the part of those whose one hundred pounds a year, as they believed, mainly depended on the document in question.
    “To be kept out of all that money,” as the avaricious Moody had muttered to his friend Handy, “by an old fool saying that he can write his own name like his betters!”
    “Well, Job,” said Handy, trying to impart to his own sour, ill-omened visage a smile of approbation, in which he greatly failed; “so you’re ready now, Mr. Finney says; here’s the place, d’ye see”—and he put his huge brown finger down on the dirty paper—”name or mark, it’s all one. Come along, old boy; if so be we’re to have the spending of this money, why the sooner the better—that’s my maxim.”
    “To be sure,” said Moody. “We a’n’t none of us so young; we can’t stay waiting for old Catgut no longer.”
    It was thus these miscreants named our excellent friend. The nickname he could easily have forgiven, but the allusion to the divine source of all his melodious joy would have irritated even him. Let us hope he never knew the insult.
    “Only think, old Billy Gazy,” said Spriggs, who rejoiced in greater youth than his brethren, but having fallen into a fire when drunk, had had one eye burnt out, one cheek burnt through, and one arm nearly burnt off, and who, therefore, in regard to personal appearance, was not the most prepossessing of men; “a hundred a year, and all to spend; only think, old Billy Gazy;” and he gave a hideous grin that showed off his misfortunes to their full extent.
    Old Billy Gazy was not alive to much enthusiasm. Even these golden prospects did not arouse him to do more than rub his poor old bleared eyes with the cuff of his bedesman’s gown, and gently mutter: “he didn’t know, not he; he didn’t know.”
    “But you’d know, Jonathan,” continued Spriggs, turning to the other friend of Skulpit’s, who was sitting on a stool by the table, gazing vacantly at the petition. Jonathan Crumple was a meek, mild man, who had known better