There was bad blood between Rockville and Stockington-green.  Stockington was incensed, and Sir Roger was hairsore.

A new nuisance sprung up.  The people of Stockington looked on the cottagers of Rockville as sunk in deepest darkeness under such a man as Sir Roger and his cousin the vicar.  They could not picnic, but they thought they could hold a camp-meeting; they could not fish for roach, but they thought they might for souls.  Accordingly there assembled crowds of Stockingtonians on the green of Rockville, with a chair and a table, and a preacher with his head bound in a red handkerchief; and soon there was a sound of hymns, and a zealous call to come out of the darkness of the spiritual Babylon.  But this was more than Sir Roger could bear; he rushed forth with all his servants, keepers, and cottagers, overthrew the table, and routing the assembly, chased them to the boundary of his estate.

The discomfited Stockingtonians now fulminated awful judgments on the unhappy Sir Roger, as a persecutor and a malignant.  They dared not enter again on his park, but they came to the very verge of it, and held weekly meetings on the highway, in which they sang and declaimed as loudly as possible, that the winds might bear their voices to Sir Roger’s ears.

To such a position was now reduced the last of the long line of Rockville.  The spirit of a policeman had taken possession of him.  He had keepers and watchers out on all sides, but they did not satisfy him.  He was perpetually haunted with the idea that poachers were after his game, that trespassers were in his woods.  His whole life was now spent in stealing to and fro in his fields and plantations, and prowling along his river side.  He looked under hedges, and watched for long hours under the forest trees.  If any one had a curiosity to see Sir Roger, they had only to enter his fields by the wood side, and wander a few yards from the path, and he was almost sure to spring out over the hedge, and in angry tones demand their name and address.  The descendant of the chivalrous and steelclad De Rockvilles was sunk into a restless spy on his own ample property.  There was but one idea in his mind—­encroachment.  It was destitute of all other furniture but the musty technicalities of warrants and commitments.  There was a stealthy and skulking manner in everything that he did.  He went to church on Sundays, but it was no longer by the grand iron gate opposite to his house, that stood generally with a large spider’s web woven over the lock, and several others in different corners of the fine iron tracery, bearing evidence of the long period since it had been opened.  How different to the time when the Sir Roger and the Lady of Rockville had had these gates thrown wide on a Sunday morning, and with all their train of household servants after their back, with true antique dignity, marched with much proud humility into the house of God.  Now, Sir Roger—­the solitary, suspicious, undignified Sir Roger, the keeper and policeman of his own property—­stole in at a little side gate from his paddock, and back the same way, wondering all the time whether there was not somebody in his pheasant preserves, or Sunday trespassers in his grove.