CHAPTER XIII

WAR AT OLMER

Lively doings were on the leap to animate Weyburn at Olmer during Easter
week. The Rev. Mr. Hampton-Evey, rector of Barborough, on hearing that
Lady Charlotte Eglett was engaged in knocking at the doors of litigation
with certain acts that constituted distinct breaches of the law and the
peace, and were a violation of the rights of her neighbour, Mr. Gilbert
Addicote, might hope that the troublesome parishioner whom he did not
often number among his congregation would grant him a term of repose.
Therein he was deceived. Alterations and enlargements of the church,
much required, had necessitated the bricking up of a door regarded by the
lady as the private entrance to the Olmer pew. She sent him notice of
her intention to batter at the new brickwork; so there was the prospect
of a pew-fight before him. But now she came to sit under him every
Sunday; and he could have wished her absent; for she diverted his
thoughts from piety to the selections of texts applicable in the case of
a woman who sat with arms knotted, and the frown of an intemperate
schoolgirl forbidden speech; while her pew's firelight startlingly at
intervals danced her sinister person into view, as from below. The
lady's inaccessible and unconquerable obtuseness to exhortation informed
the picture with an evil spirit that cried for wrestlings.

Regularly every week-day she headed the war now rageing between Olmer and
Addicotes, on the borders of the estates. It was open war, and herself
to head the cavalry. Weyburn, driving up a lane in the gig she had sent
to meet the coach, beheld a thicket of countrymen and boys along a ridge;
and it swayed and broke, and through it burst the figure of a mounted
warrior woman at the gallop, followed by what bore an appearance of horse