CHAPTER XXII.
TWO LIVES.
Only half of Moore's activity and resolution had been seen in hisdefence of the mill; he showed the other half (and a terrible half itwas) in the indefatigable, the relentless assiduity with which hepursued the leaders of the riot. The mob, the mere followers, he letalone. Perhaps an innate sense of justice told him that men misled byfalse counsel and goaded by privations are not fit objects of vengeance,and that he who would visit an even violent act on the bent head ofsuffering is a tyrant, not a judge. At all events, though he knew manyof the number, having recognized them during the latter part of theattack when day began to dawn, he let them daily pass him on street androad without notice or threat.
The leaders he did not know. They were strangers--emissaries from thelarge towns. Most of these were not members of the operative class. Theywere chiefly "down-draughts," bankrupts, men always in debt and often indrink, men who had nothing to lose, and much, in the way of character,cash, and cleanliness, to gain. These persons Moore hunted like anysleuth-hound, and well he liked the occupation. Its excitement was of akind pleasant to his nature. He liked it better than making cloth.
His horse must have hated these times, for it was ridden both hard andoften. He almost lived on the road, and the fresh air was as welcome tohis lungs as the policeman's quest to his mood; he preferred it to thesteam of dye-houses. The magistrates of the district must have dreadedhim. They were slow, timid men; he liked both to frighten and to rousethem. He liked to force them to betray a certain fear, which made themalike falter in resolve and recoil in action--the fear, simply, ofassassination. This, indeed, was the dread which had hitherto hamperedevery manufacturer and almost every public man in the district. Helstonealone had ever repelled it. The old Cossack knew well he might be shot.He knew there was risk; but such death had for his nerves no terrors. Itwould have been his chosen, might he have had a choice.
Moore likewise knew his danger. The result was an unquenchable scorn ofthe quarter whence such danger was to be apprehended. The consciousnessthat he hunted assassins was the spur in his high-mettled temper'sflank. As for fear, he was too proud, too hard-natured (if you will),too phlegmatic a man to fear. Many a time he rode belated over themoors, moonlit or moonless as the case might be, with feelings far moreelate, faculties far better refreshed, than when safety and stagnationenvironed him in the counting-house. Four was the number of the leadersto be accounted for. Two, in the course of a fortnight, were brought tobay near Stilbro'; the remaining two it was necessary to seek fartheroff. Their haunts were supposed to lie near Birmingham.
Meantime the clothier did not neglect his battered mill. Its reparationwas esteemed a light task, carpenters' and glaziers' work alone beingneeded. The rioters not having succeeded in effecting an entrance, hisgrim metal darlings--the machines--had escaped damage.
Whether during this busy life--whether while stern justice and exactingbusiness claimed his energies and harassed his thoughts--he now and thengave one moment, dedicated one effort, to keep alive gentler fires thanthose which smoulder in the fane of Nemesis, it was not easy todiscover. He seldom went near Fieldhead; if he did, his visits werebrief. If he called at the rectory, it was only to hold conferences withthe rector in his study. He maintained his rigid course very steadily.Meantime the history of the year continued troubled. There was no lullin the tempest of war; her long hurricane still swept the Continent.There was not the faintest sign of serene weather, no opening amid "theclouds of battle-dust and smoke," no fall of pure dews genial to theolive, no cessation of the red rain which nourishes the baleful andglorious laurel. Meantime, Ruin had her sappers and miners at work underMoore's feet, and whether he rode or walked, whether he only crossed hiscounting-house hearth or galloped over sullen Rushedge, he was aware ofa hollow echo, and felt the ground shake to his tread.
While the summer thus passed with Moore, how did it lapse with Shirleyand Caroline? Let us first visit the heiress. How does she look? Like alove-lorn maiden, pale and pining for a neglectful swain? Does she sitthe day long bent over some sedentary task? Has she for ever a book inher hand, or sewing on her knee, and eyes only for that, and words fornothing, and thoughts unspoken?
By no means. Shirley is all right. If her wistful cast of physiognomy isnot gone, no more is her careless smile. She keeps her dark oldmanor-house light and bright with her cheery presence. The gallery andthe low-ceiled chambers that open into it have learned lively echoesfrom her voice; the dim entrance-hall, with its one window, has grownpleasantly accustomed to the frequent rustle of a silk dress, as itswearer sweeps across from room to room, now carrying flowers to thebarbarous peach-bloom salon, now entering the dining-room to open itscasements and let in the scent of mignonette and sweet-briar, anonbringing plants from the staircase window to place in the sun at theopen porch door.
She takes her sewing occasionally; but, by some fatality, she is doomednever to sit steadily at it for above five minutes at a time. Herthimble is scarcely fitted on, her needle scarce threaded, when a suddenthought calls her upstairs. Perhaps she goes to seek somejust-then-remembered old ivory-backed needle-book or older china-toppedwork-box, quite unneeded, but which seems at the moment indispensable;perhaps to arrange her hair, or a drawer which she recollects to haveseen that morning in a state of curious confusion; perhaps only to takea peep from a particular window at a particular view, whence Briarfieldchurch and rectory are visible, pleasantly bowered in trees. She hasscarcely returned, and again taken up the slip of cambric or square ofhalf-wrought canvas, when Tartar's bold scrape and strangled whistle areheard at the porch door, and she must run to open it for him. It is ahot day; he comes in panting; she must convoy him to the kitchen, andsee with her own eyes that his water-bowl is replenished. Through theopen kitchen door the court is visible, all sunny and gay, and peoplewith turkeys and their poults, peahens and their chicks, pearl-fleckedGuinea-fowls, and a bright variety of pure white, and purple-necked, andblue and cinnamon plumed pigeons. Irresistible spectacle to Shirley! Sheruns to the pantry for a roll, and she stands on the door stepscattering crumbs. Around her throng her eager, plump, happy featheredvassals John is about the stables, and John must be talked to, and hermare looked at. She is still petting and patting it when the cows comein to be milked. This is important; Shirley must stay and take a reviewof them all. There are perhaps some little calves, some littlenew-yeaned lambs--it may be twins, whose mothers have rejected them.Miss Keeldar must be introduced to them by John, must permit herself thetreat of feeding them with her own hand, under the direction of hercareful foreman. Meantime John moots doubtful questions about thefarming of certain "crofts," and "ings," and "holmes," and his mistressis necessitated to fetch her garden-hat--a gipsy straw--and accompanyhim, over stile and along hedgerow, to hear the conclusion of the wholeagricultural matter on the spot, and with the said "crofts," "ings," and"holms" under her eye. Bright afternoon thus wears into soft evening,and she comes home to a late tea, and after tea she never sews.
After tea Shirley reads, and she is just about as tenacious of her bookas she is lax of her needle. Her study is the rug, her seat a footstool,or perhaps only the carpet at Mrs. Pryor's feet: there she alwayslearned her lessons when a child, and old habits have a strong powerover her. The tawny and lionlike bulk of Tartar is ever stretched besideher, his negro muzzle laid on his fore paws--straight, strong, andshapely as the limbs of an Alpine wolf. One hand of the mistressgenerally reposes on the loving serf's rude head, because if she takesit away he groans and is discontented. Shirley's mind is given to herbook. She lifts not her eyes; she neither stirs nor speaks--unless,indeed, it be to return a brief respectful answer to Mrs. Pryor, whoaddresses deprecatory phrases to her now and then.
"My dear, you had better not have that great dog so near you; he iscrushing the border of your dress."
"Oh, it is only muslin. I can put a clean one on to-morrow."
"My dear, I wish you could acquire the habit of sitting to a table whenyou read."
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"I will try, ma'am, some time; but it is so comfortable to do as one hasalways been accustomed to do."
"My dear, let me beg of you to put that book down. You are trying youreyes by the doubtful firelight."
"No, ma'am, not at all; my eyes are never tired."
At last, however, a pale light falls on the page from the window. Shelooks; the moon is up. She closes the volume, rises, and walks throughthe room. Her book has perhaps been a good one; it has refreshed,refilled, rewarmed her heart; it has set her brain astir, furnished hermind with pictures. The still parlour, the clean hearth, the windowopening on the twilight sky, and showing its "sweet regent," new thronedand glorious, suffice to make earth an Eden, life a poem, for Shirley. Astill, deep, inborn delight glows in her young veins, unmingled,untroubled, not to be reached or ravished by human agency, because by nohuman agency bestowed--the pure gift of God to His creature, the freedower of Nature to her child. This joy gives her experience of agenii-life. Buoyant, by green steps, by glad hills, all verdure andlight, she reaches a station scarcely lower than that whence angelslooked down on the dreamer of Bethel, and her eye seeks, and her soulpossesses, the vision of life as she wishes it. No, not as she wishesit; she has not time to wish. The swift glory spreads out, sweeping andkindling, and multiplies its splendours faster than Thought can effecthis combinations, faster than Aspiration can utter her longings. Shirleysays nothing while the trance is upon her--she is quite mute; but ifMrs. Pryor speaks to her now, she goes out quietly, and continues herwalk upstairs in the dim gallery.
If Shirley were not an indolent, a reckless, an ignorant being, shewould take a pen at such moments, or at least while the recollection ofsuch moments was yet fresh on her spirit. She would seize, she would fixthe apparition, tell the vision revealed. Had she a little more of theorgan of acquisitiveness in her head, a little more of the love ofproperty in her nature, she would take a good-sized sheet of paper andwrite plainly out, in her own queer but clear and legible hand, thestory that has been narrated, the song that has been sung to her, andthus possess what she was enabled to create. But indolent she is,reckless she is, and most ignorant; for she does not know her dreams arerare, her feelings peculiar. She does not know, has never known, andwill die without knowing, the full value of that spring whose brightfresh bubbling in her heart keeps it green.
Shirley takes life easily. Is not that fact written in her eye? In hergood-tempered moments is it not as full of lazy softness as in her brieffits of anger it is fulgent with quick-flashing fire? Her nature is inher eye. So long as she is calm, indolence, indulgence, humour, andtenderness possess that large gray sphere; incense her, a red raypierces the dew, it quickens instantly to flame.
Ere the month of July was past, Miss Keeldar would probably have startedwith Caroline on that northern tour they had planned; but just at thatepoch an invasion befell Fieldhead. A genteel foraging party besiegedShirley in her castle, and compelled her to surrender at discretion. Anuncle, an aunt, and two cousins from the south--a Mr., Mrs., and twoMisses Sympson, of Sympson Grove, ----shire--came down upon her instate. The laws of hospitality obliged her to give in, which she didwith a facility which somewhat surprised Caroline, who knew her to beprompt in action and fertile in expedient where a victory was to begained for her will. Miss Helstone even asked her how it was shesubmitted so readily. She answered, old feelings had their power; shehad passed two years of her early youth at Sympson Grove.
"How did she like her relatives?"
She had nothing in common with them, she replied. Little Harry Sympson,indeed, the sole son of the family, was very unlike his sisters, and ofhim she had formerly been fond; but he was not coming to Yorkshire--atleast not yet.
The next Sunday the Fieldhead pew in Briarfield Church appeared peopledwith a prim, trim, fidgety, elderly gentleman, who shifted hisspectacles, and changed his position every three minutes; a patient,placid-looking elderly lady in brown satin; and two pattern youngladies, in pattern attire, with pattern deportment. Shirley had the airof a black swan or a white crow in the midst of this party, and veryforlorn was her aspect. Having brought her into respectable society, wewill leave her there a while, and look after Miss Helstone.
Separated from Miss Keeldar for the present, as she could not seek herin the midst of her fine relatives, scared away from Fieldhead by thevisiting commotion which the new arrivals occasioned in theneighbourhood, Caroline was limited once more to the gray rectory, thesolitary morning walk in remote by-paths, the long, lonely afternoonsitting in a quiet parlour which the sun forsook at noon, or in thegarden alcove where it shone bright, yet sad, on the ripening redcurrants trained over the trellis, and on the fair monthly rosesentwined between, and through them fell chequered on Caroline sitting inher white summer dress, still as a garden statue. There she read oldbooks, taken from her uncle's library. The Greek and Latin were of nouse to her, and its collection of light literature was chiefly containedon a shelf which had belonged to her aunt Mary--some venerable Lady'sMagazines, that had once performed a sea-voyage with their owner, andundergone a storm, and whose pages were stained with salt water; somemad Methodist Magazines, full of miracles and apparitions, ofpreternatural warnings, ominous dreams, and frenzied fanaticism; theequally mad letters of Mrs. Elizabeth Rowe from the Dead to the Living;a few old English classics. From these faded flowers Caroline had in herchildhood extracted the honey; they were tasteless to her now. By way ofchange, and also of doing good, she would sew--make garments for thepoor, according to good Miss Ainley's direction. Sometimes, as she feltand saw her tears fall slowly on her work, she would wonder how theexcellent woman who had cut it out and arranged it for her managed to beso equably serene in _her_ solitude.
"I never find Miss Ainley oppressed with despondency or lost in grief,"she thought; "yet her cottage is a still, dim little place, and she iswithout a bright hope or near friend in the world. I remember, though,she told me once she had tutored her thoughts to tend upwards to heaven.She allowed there was, and ever had been, little enjoyment in this worldfor her, and she looks, I suppose, to the bliss of the world to come. Sodo nuns, with their close cell, their iron lamp, their robe strait as ashroud, their bed narrow as a coffin. She says often she has no fear ofdeath--no dread of the grave; no more, doubtless, had St. SimeonStylites, lifted up terrible on his wild column in the wilderness; nomore has the Hindu votary stretched on his couch of iron spikes. Boththese having violated nature, their natural likings and antipathies arereversed; they grow altogether morbid. I do fear death as yet, but Ibelieve it is because I am young. Poor Miss Ainley would cling closer tolife if life had more charms for her. God surely did not create us andcause us to live with the sole end of wishing always to die. I believein my heart we were intended to prize life and enjoy it so long as weretain it. Existence never was originally meant to be that useless,blank, pale, slow-trailing thing it often becomes to many, and isbecoming to me among the rest.
"Nobody," she went on--"nobody in particular is to blame, that I cansee, for the state in which things are; and I cannot tell, however muchI puzzle over it, how they are to be altered for the better; but I feelthere is something wrong somewhere. I believe single women should havemore to do--better chances of interesting and profitable occupation thanthey possess now. And when I speak thus I have no impression that Idisplease God by my words; that I am either impious or impatient,irreligious or sacrilegious. My consolation is, indeed, that God hearsmany a groan, and compassionates much grief which man stops his earsagainst, or frowns on with impotent contempt. I say _impotent_, for Iobserve that to such grievances as society cannot readily cure itusually forbids utterance, on pain of its scorn, this scorn being only asort of tinselled cloak to its deformed weakness. People hate to bereminded of ills they are unable or unwilling to remedy. Such reminder,in forcing on them a sense of their own incapacity, or a more painfulsense of an obligation to make some unpleasant effort, troubles theirease and shakes their self-complacency. Old maids, like the houselessand unemployed
poor, should not ask for a place and an occupation in theworld; the demand disturbs the happy and rich--it disturbs parents. Lookat the numerous families of girls in this neighbourhood--the Armitages,the Birtwhistles, the Sykeses. The brothers of these girls are every onein business or in professions; they have something to do. Their sistershave no earthly employment but household work and sewing, no earthlypleasure but an unprofitable visiting, and no hope, in all their life tocome, of anything better. This stagnant state of things makes themdecline in health. They are never well, and their minds and views shrinkto wondrous narrowness. The great wish, the sole aim of every one ofthem is to be married, but the majority will never marry; they will dieas they now live. They scheme, they plot, they dress to ensnarehusbands. The gentlemen turn them into ridicule; they don't want them;they hold them very cheap. They say--I have heard them say it withsneering laughs many a time--the matrimonial market is overstocked.Fathers say so likewise, and are angry with their daughters when theyobserve their manoeuvres--they order them to stay at home. What do theyexpect them to do at home? If you ask, they would answer, sew and cook.They expect them to do this, and this only, contentedly, regularly,uncomplainingly, all their lives long, as if they had no germs offaculties for anything else--a doctrine as reasonable to hold as itwould be that the fathers have no faculties but for eating what theirdaughters cook or for wearing what they sew. Could men live sothemselves? Would they not be very weary? And when there came no reliefto their weariness, but only reproaches at its slightest manifestation,would not their weariness ferment it time to frenzy? Lucretia, spinningat midnight in the midst of her maidens, and Solomon's virtuous womanare often quoted as patterns of what 'the sex,' as they say, ought tobe. I don't know. Lucretia, I dare say, was a most worthy sort ofperson, much like my cousin Hortense Moore; but she kept her servants upvery late. I should not have liked to be amongst the number of themaidens. Hortense would just work me and Sarah in that fashion, if shecould, and neither of us would bear it. The 'virtuous woman,' again, hadher household up in the very middle of the night; she 'got breakfastover,' as Mrs. Sykes says, before one o'clock a.m.; but _she_ hadsomething more to do than spin and give out portions. She was amanufacturer--she made fine linen and sold it; she was anagriculturist--she bought estates and planted vineyards. _That_ womanwas a manager. She was what the matrons hereabouts call 'a cleverwoman.' On the whole, I like her a good deal better than Lucretia; but Idon't believe either Mr. Armitage or Mr. Sykes could have got theadvantage of her in a bargain. Yet I like her. 'Strength and honour wereher clothing; the heart of her husband safely trusted in her. She openedher mouth with wisdom; in her tongue was the law of kindness; herchildren rose up and called her blessed; her husband also praised her.'King of Israel! your model of a woman is a worthy model! But are we, inthese days, brought up to be like her? Men of Yorkshire! do yourdaughters reach this royal standard? Can they reach it? Can you helpthem to reach it? Can you give them a field in which their faculties maybe exercised and grow? Men of England! look at your poor girls, many ofthem fading around you, dropping off in consumption or decline; or, whatis worse, degenerating to sour old maids--envious, back-biting,wretched, because life is a desert to them; or, what is worst of all,reduced to strive, by scarce modest coquetry and debasing artifice, togain that position and consideration by marriage which to celibacy isdenied. Fathers! cannot you alter these things? Perhaps not all at once;but consider the matter well when it is brought before you, receive itas a theme worthy of thought; do not dismiss it with an idle jest or anunmanly insult. You would wish to be proud of your daughters, and not toblush for them; then seek for them an interest and an occupation whichshall raise them above the flirt, the manoeuvrer, the mischief-makingtale-bearer. Keep your girls' minds narrow and fettered; they will stillbe a plague and a care, sometimes a disgrace to you. Cultivatethem--give them scope and work; they will be your gayest companions inhealth, your tenderest nurses in sickness, your most faithful prop inage."
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