 CHAPTER 1 LIVITICAL Of late years an abundant share of curates has fallen upon the north of England. They lie very thick on the hills, every parish has one or more of them. They are young enough to be very active, and ought to be doing a great deal of good. But not of late years are we about to speak. We are going back to the beginning of this century. Late years, present years, a dusty sun-bent, hot, arid. We will evade the noon, forget it in siesta, pass the midday in slumber, and dream of dawn. If you think, from this prelude, that anything like a romance is preparing for you, reader, you were never more mistaken. Do you anticipate sentiment, and poetry, and reverie? Do you expect passion, and stimulus, and melodrama? Calm your expectations. Reduce them to a lowly standard, something real, cool, solid lies before you. Something unromantic, as a Monday morning, when all who have work wake with the consciousness that they must rise and betake themselves thereto. It is not positively affirmed that you shall not have the taste of the exciting. Perhaps towards the middle and close of the meal, but it is resolved that the first dish set upon the table shall be one that a Catholic, i.e. even an Anglo-Catholic, might eat on Good Friday in Passion Week. It shall be cold lentils and vinegar without oil. It shall be unleavened bread with bitter herbs, and no roast lamb. Of late years, I say, an abundant shower of curits has fallen upon the north of England, but in 1811-12 that affluent rain had not descended. Curits were scarce then. There was no pastoral aid, no additional curate society, to stretch a helping hand to worn out-old rectors and incumbents, and give them the wherewithal to pay a vigorous young colleague from Oxford or Cambridge. The present successors of the apostles, disciples of Dr. Pusy, and tools of the propaganda, were at that time being hatched under crater-blankets, or undergoing regeneration by nursery baptism, in wash-hand basins. You could not have guessed, by looking at any one of them, that the Italian eye and double-fills of its net-cap surrounded the brows of a pre-ordained, specially sanctified successor of St. Paul, St. Peter, or St. John. Nor could you have foreseen, in the folds of its long night-gown, the white surplus in which it was hereafter cruelly to exercise the souls of its parishioners, and strangely to non-plus its old-fashioned vicar, by flushing aloft in a pulpit, the shirt-like raiment, which had never before waved higher than the reading-desk. Yet even in those days of scarcity there were curits. The precious plant was rare, but it might be found. A certain favoured district, in the west riding of Yorkshire, could boast three rods of iron blossoming within a circuit of twenty miles. You shall see them, reader. Step into this neat garden-house, on the skirts of Winbury, walk forward into the little parlour. There they are at dinner. Allow me to introduce them to you. Mr. Don, Curit of Winbury. Mr. Malone, Curit of Brifield. Mr. Sweeting, Curit of Nunnerly. These are Mr. Don's lodgings, being the habitation of one John Gale, a small clothier. Mr. Don has kindly invited his brethren to regale with him. You and I will join the party, see what is to be seen, and hear what is to be heard. At present, however, they are only eating, and while they eat, we will talk aside. These gentlemen are in the bloom of youth. They possess all the activity of that interesting age, an activity which their moping-old vickers would feign turn into the channel of their pastoral duties, often expressing a wish to see it expended in a diligent superintendence of the school, and in frequent visits to the sick of their respective parishes. But the youthful Levites feel this to be dull work. They prefer lavishing their energies, on a course of preceding which, though to other eyes it may appear more heavy with onnui, more cursed with monotony, than the toil of the weaver it is loom, seems to yield them an unfailing supply of enjoyment and occupation. I allude to a rushing backwards and forwards amongst themselves, to and from their respective lodgings, not a round, but a triangle of visits, which they keep up all the year through, in winter, spring, summer and autumn. Season and weather make no difference, with unintelligible zeal. They dare snow and hail, wind and rain, mire and dust, to go and die, or drink tea, or sup with one another. What attracts them it would be difficult to say. It is not friendship, for whenever they meet they quarrel. It is not religion, the thing is never named amongst them, theology they may discuss occasionally, but piety never. It is not the love of eating and drinking. Each might have as good a joint in pudding, tea is potent, and toast is succulent as his own lodgings, as is served to him at his brother's. Mrs. Gale, Mrs. Hogg and Mrs. Whip, their respective landlady, affirm that it is just for naught else but to give folk trouble. By folk, the good ladies, of course, mean themselves, for indeed they are kept in a continual fry by this system of mutual invasion. Mr. Donnellty's guests, as I have said, are at dinner. Mrs. Gale waits on them, but a spark of the hot kitchen fire is in her eye. She considers that the privilege of inviting a friend to a meal occasionally, without additional charge—a privilege included in the terms on which she lets her lodgings—has been quite sufficiently exercised of late. The present week is yet but at Thursday, and on Monday Mr. Malone, procured of Briarfield, came to breakfast and stayed for dinner. On Tuesday Mr. Malone and Mr. Sweeting, of Nunnelly, came to tea, remained to supper, occupied the spare bed, and favoured her with their company to breakfast on Wednesday morning, and now, on Thursday, they are both here at dinner, and she is almost certain they will stay all night. Even a trough, she would say, if she could speak French. Mr. Sweeting is mincing the slices of roast beef on his plate, and complaining that it is very tough. Mr. Don says the beer is flat. Aye, that is the worst of it. If they would only be civil, Mrs. Gale wouldn't mind it so much. If they would only seem satisfied with what they get, she wouldn't care. But these young Parsons is so eye-and-so scornful, they set everybody beneath their feet. They treat her with less than civility, just because she doesn't keep a servant, but does the work of the house herself, as her mother did for her. Then they are always speaking against Yorkshire ways and Yorkshire folk. And by that very token, Mrs. Gale does not believe one of them to be a real gentleman, or come of gentle kin. The old Parsons is worth the ol' lump of the college lads. They know what belongs to good manners, and is kind to eye and lo. More bread, cries Mr. Malone, in a tone which, though prolonged but to utter two syllables, foreclaims him at once a native of the land of shamrocks and potatoes. Mrs. Gale hates Mr. Malone more than either of the other two. But she fears him also, for he is a tall, strongly built personage, with real Irish arms and legs, and a face is genuinely national. Not the Malaysian face, not Daniel O'Connell's style, but the high-featured North American Indian sort of visage, which belongs to a certain class of the Irish gentry, and has a petrified and proud look, better suited to the owner of an estate of slaves, than to the landlord of a free peasantry. Mr. Malone's father termed himself a gentleman. He was poor and in debt, and besottedly arrogant, and his son was like him. Mrs. Gale offered the lo. Cut it, woman, said her guest. And the woman cut it accordingly. Had she followed her inclinations, she would have cut the parson also. Her Yorkshire soul revolted absolutely from his manner of command. The cuwits had good appetites, and though the beef was tough, they ate a great deal of it. They swallowed, too, a tolerable allowance of the flat beer. While a dish of Yorkshire pudding and two terrenes of vegetables disappeared like leaves before locusts. The cheese, too, received distinguished marks of their attention, and a spice-cake, which followed by a way of dessert, vanished like a vision, and was no more found. Its energy was chanted in the kitchen by Abraham, Mrs. Gale's son-and-air, a youth of six summers. He had reckoned upon the reversion thereof, and when his mother brought down the empty platter, he lifted up his voice, and wept soar. The cuwits, meantime, sat and sipped their wine, a liquor of unpretending vintage, moderately enjoyed. Mr. Malone, indeed, would much rather have had whiskey, but Mr. Don, being an Englishman, did not keep the beverage. While they sipped, they argued, not on politics, nor on philosophy, nor on literature. These topics were now, as ever, totally without interest for them, not even on theology, practical or doctrinal, but on minute points of ecclesiastical discipline, fervolities which seemed as empty as bubbles to all save themselves. Mr. Malone, who contrived to secure two glasses of wine, when his brethren contented themselves with one, waxed by degrees hilarious after his own fashion. That is, he grew a little insolent, said rude things in a hectoring tone, and laughed clamorously at his own brilliancy. Each of his companions became, in turn, his butt. Malone had a stock of jokes at their service, which he was accustomed to serve out regularly on convivial occasions like the present, seldom vying his wit, for which, indeed, there was no necessity, as he never appeared to consider himself monotonous, and did not at all care of what others thought. Mr. Donne, he had favoured with hints about his extreme meagerness, allusions to his turned-up nose, cutting sarcasms on a certain thread-bare chocolate-certu, which that gentleman was accustomed to sport, whenever it rained or seemed likely to rain, and criticisms on a choice-set of cockney phrases and modes of pronunciation, Mr. Donne's own property, and certainly deserving of remark for the elegance and finish they communicated to his style. Mr. Sweeting was banted about his stature. He was a little man, a mere boy in height, and breadth, compared with the athletic Malone, rallied on his musical accomplishments. He played the flute and sang hymns like a sara, some young ladies of his parish thought, sneered at, as, the lady's pet, teased about his mamma and sisters, for whom poor Mr. Sweeting had some lingering regard, and of whom he was foolish enough, now and then, to speak in the presence of the priestly paddy, from whose anatomy the bowels of natural affection had somehow been omitted. The victims met these attacks, each in his own way. Mr. Donne with a stilted self-complacency, and a half-cell and phlegm, the sole props of his otherwise somewhat rickety dignity. Mr. Sweeting with the indifference of a light easy disposition, which never professed to have any dignity to maintain. When Malone's railway became rather too offensive, which it soon did, they joined an attempt to turn the tables on him, by asking him how many boys had shouted, Irish Peter, after him, as he came along the road that day. Malone's name was Peter, the Reverend Peter Augustus Malone. Requesting to be informed whether it was the mode in Ireland, for clergymen to carry loaded pistols in their pockets, and a shillayly in their hands when they made pastoral visits, inquiring the signification of such words as velle, theorem, helm, storum, so Mr. Malone invariably pronounced veil, thumb, helm, and storm, and employing such other methods of retaliation as the innate refinement of their minds suggested. This of course would not do. Malone, being neither good-natured nor phlegmatic, was presently in a towering passion. He visiferated, gesticulated, dawn and sweetened laughed. He reviled them as Saxons and snobs with a very pitch of his high Celtic voice. They taunted him with being the native of a conquered land. He menaced the Berlin in the name of his country, vented bitter hatred against English rule. They spoke of rags, beggary, and pestilence. The little parlour was in an uproar. You might have thought a duel must follow such virulent abuse. It seemed a wonder that Mr. and Mrs. Gale did not take alarm at the noise, and send for a constable to keep the peace. But they were accustomed to such demonstrations. They well knew that the curates never dined or took tea together, without a little exercise of the sort, and were quite easy as to the consequences, knowing that these clerical quarrels were as harmless as they were noisy, that they resulted in nothing, and that, on whatever terms the curates might part to night, they would be sure to meet the best friends in the world tomorrow morning. As the worthy pair were sitting by their kitchen fire, listening to the repeated and sonorous contact of Malone's fist with the mahogany plain of the parlour-table, and to the consequent start and jingle of the decanters and glasses following each assault, to the mocking laughter of the allied English disputants, and the stuttering declamation of the isolated hibernium. As they thus sat, a foot was heard on the outer doorstep, on the knocker quivered to a sharp peel. Mr. Gale went and opened. "'Whom have you upstairs in the parlour?' asked the voice. A rather remarkable voice, nasal in tone, abrupt in utterance. "'Oh, Mr. Hellstone, is it you, sir? I could hardly see for the darkness. It is so soon dark now. Will you walk in, sir?' "'I want to know first whether this is worth my while walking in. Whom have you upstairs?' "'The curate, sir.' "'What, all of them?' "'Yes, sir.' "'Been dining here?' "'Yes, sir.' "'That will do.' With these words a person entered, a middle-aged man in black. He walked across the kitchen to an inner door, opened it, inclined his head forward, and stood listening. There was something to listen to, for the noise above was just then louder than ever. "'Hey!' he ejaculated to himself. Then turning to Mr. Gale. Have you often this sort of work?' Mr. Gale had been a church-boarder, and was indulgent to the clergy. "'They're young, you know, sir,' he said deprecatingly. "'Young? They want cailing. Bad boys, bad boys! And if you had his centre, John Gale, instead of being a good churchman, they'd do the like, they'd expose themselves. But I'll—' By way of finish to this sentence, he passed through the inner door, drew it after him, and mounted the stair. Again he listened a few minutes, when he arrived at the upper room. Making entrance of that warning, he stood before the curates. And they were silent, they were transfixed, and so was the invader. He, a person in short of stature, but straight of port, and bearing on broad shoulders a hawk's head, beak, and eye, the holes amounted by a rehaboam or shovel-hat, which he did not seem to think it necessary to lift or remove before the presence in which he then stood. He folded his arms on his chest, and surveyed his young friends, if friends they were, much at his leisure. "'What!' he began, delivering his words in a voice no longer nasal, but deep, more than deep, a voice made purposely hollow and cavernous. "'What! Has the miracle of Pentecost been renewed? Have the cloven tongues come down again? Where are they?' the sound fills the house just now. I heard the seventeen languages in full action, Parthians and Medes and Elamites, the dwellers of Mesopotamia, and in Judea, and Cappadocia, in Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphila, in Egypt and in the parts of Libya, about Siring, strangers of Rome, Jews, and Prosalites, Cretes and Arabians. One must have had its representative in this room two minutes since. "'I beg your pardon, Mr. Hellstone,' began Mr. Don. "'Take a seat, pray, sir. Have a glass of wine?' His evilities received no answer. The falcon in the blackcoat proceeded, "'What do I talk about the gift of tongues? Tongues indeed. I mistook the chapter and book and testament, Gospel for law, Acts for Genesis, the city of Jerusalem for the plain of Shinar. It was no gift but the confusion of tongues which has gabbled me deaf as a post. You apostles, what, you three, certainly not, three presumptuous Babylonish masons, neither more nor less. "'I assure you, sir, we were only having a little chat together over a glass of wine, after a friendly dinner. Settling the dissenters.' "'Oh, settling the dissenters, where are you? Was Malone settling the dissenters? It sounded to me much more like settling his co-apostles. You were quarrelling together, making almost as much noise, you three alone, as Moses Barocloff, the preaching tailor, and all his heroes are making in the Methodist chapel down yonder, where they are in the thick of a revival. I know whose fault it is. It is yours, Malone.' "'Mine, sir.' "'Yours, sir. Don and Sweeting were quiet before you came, and would be quiet if you were gone. I wish, when you crossed the channel, you had left your Irish habits behind you. Doubling students' ways won't do here. The proceedings which might pass unnoticed in a wildbog and mountain district of Canaught, will, in a decent English parish, bring disgrace on those who indulge in them, and what is far worse on the sacred institution of which they are merely the humble appendages. There was a certain dignity in the little elderly gentleman's manner of abuking these youths, though it was not, perhaps, quite the dignity most appropriate to the occasion. Mr. Heldstone, standing straight as a ramrod, looking keen as a kite, presented, despite his clerical hat, black coat, and gaiters, more the air of a veteran officer, triding his subalterns than of a venerable priest, exhorting his sons in the faith. Gospel-mildness, apostolic benignity, never seemed to have breathed their influence over that keen brown visage, but firmness had fixed the features, and sagacity had carved her own lines about them. I met Suppelhoe, he continued, plotting through the mud this wet night, going to preach at Meldy in opposition shock. As I told you, I had barrel-cloth, bellowing in the midst of a conventical like a possessed bull, and I find you, gentlemen, tarrying over your half pint of muddy port wine, and scolding like angry old women. No wonder Suppelhoe should have dipped sixteen adult converts in one day, which he did a fortnight since. No wonder barrel-cloth, scamp and hypocrite as he is, should attract all the weaver-girls in their flowers and ribbons, to witness how much harder are his knuckles than the wooden rim of his tub. As little wonder that you, when you are left to yourselves, without your vectors, myself and Hall and Boltby, to back you, should too often perform the holy service of our church to bear walls, and read your bit of dry discourse to the clerk, and the organist, and the beadle. But enough of the subject. I came to see Malone. I have an errand unto thee, O Captain. What is it, inquired Malone, discontentedly? There can be no funeral to take at this time of day. Have you any arms about you? Arms, sir? Yes, and legs. And he advanced the mighty members. Bath! Weapons, I mean. I have the pistols you gave me yourself. I never part with them. I lay them ready cocked in a chair by my bedside at night. I have my black thorn. Very good. Will you go to Hollow's mill? What is stirring at Hollow's mill? Nothing is yet, nor perhaps will be, but more is the loan there. He has sent all the workmen he can trust to stillbrew. There are only two women left about the place, yet would be a nice opportunity for any of his well-wishers to pay him a visit, if they knew how straight the path was made before them. I am none of his well-wishers, sir. I don't care for him. So, Malone, you are afraid. You know me better than that. If I really thought there was a chance of a row I would go, but more is a strange shy man whom I never pretend to understand, and for the sake of his sweet company only I would not stir a step. But there is a chance of a row, if a positive riot does not take place, of which indeed I see no signs. Yet it is unlikely that this night will pass quite tranquilly. You know Moor has resolved to have new machinery, and he expects two weapon loads of frames and shears from stillbrew this evening. Scott, the overlooker, and a few picked men are gone to fetch them. They will bring them in safely and quietly enough, sir. Moor says so, and affirms he wanted to nobody. Someone, however, he must have, if it were only to bear evidence in case anything should happen. I call him very careless. He sits up in the counting-house, with the shutters unclosed. He goes out here and there after dark, wanders right up the hollow, down field-head lane, among the plantations, just as if he were the darling of the neighbourhood, or, being as he is, is dittestation, for a charmed life as they say in tale-books. He takes no warning from the fate of Pearson, nor from that of Armitage. Shot! One in his own house, and the other on the moor. But he should take warning, sir, and use precautions, too, interposed to Mr. Sweeting. And I think he would, if he heard what I heard the other day. What did you hear, Davy? You know Mike Hartley, sir. The antinomian weaver, yes. When Mike has been drinking for a few weeks together, he genuinely winds up by a visit to the Nanaly vicarage, to tell Mr. Hall a piece of his mind about his sermons, to denounce the horrible tendency of his doctrine of works, and warn him that he and all of his hearers are sitting in outer darkness. Well, that has nothing to do with moor. Besides being an antinomian, he is a violent Jacobin, and the leveller, sir. I know, when he is very drunk, his mind is always running on the regicide. Mike is not unacquainted with history, and it is rich to hear him going over the list of tyrants of whom, as he says, the revenge of blood has obtained satisfaction. The fellow exalts strangely in murder done on crowned heads, or on any head for political purposes. The fellow exalts strangely in murder done on crowned heads, or on any head for political reasons. I have already heard it hinted that he seems to have a queer hankering after moor. Is that what you were loo too sweeting? You use the proper term, sir. Mr. Hall thinks Mike has no personal hatred of moor. Mike says he even likes to talk to him and run after him. But he has a hankering that moor should be made an example of. He was extolling him to Mr. Hall the other day, as the mill owner with the most brains in Yorkshire, and for that reason he affirms moor should be chosen as a sacrifice. An oblation of a sweet saviour is Mike Hartley in his right mind, do you think, sir? Inquired sweeting simply. Can't tell, Davey. He may be crazed, or he may only be crafty, or perhaps a little of both. He talks of seeing visions, sir. Aye! He is a very Ezekiel or Daniel for visions. He came just when I was going to bed last Friday night to describe one that had been revealed to him in Nannily Park that afternoon. Tell it, sir. What was it? Urged sweeting. Davey, thou hast an enormous organ of wonder in thy cranium. Malone, you see, has none. Neither murders nor visions interest him. See what a big vacant saff he looks at the moment. Saff? Who was saff, sir? I thought you would not know. You may find out it is biblical. I know nothing more of him than his name and his race. But from a boy upwards I have always attached a personality to saff. Depend on it, he will honest, heavy, and lackless. He met his end at God by the hand of Sibuchai. But the visions are, Davey, thou shalt hear. Don is biting his nails and Malone yawlings, so I will tell it but to thee. Mike is out of work, like many others, unfortunately. Mr. Graham, Sir Philip Nannily Steward, gave him a drop about the priory. According to his accountant, Mike was busy hedging rather late in the afternoon. But before dark, when he heard what he thought was a band in the distance, bugles, fives, and the sound of a trumpet, it came from the forest, and he wondered that there should be music there. He looked up. All amongst the trees he saw moving objects—red, like poppies, or white, like mayblossom. The wood was full of them. They poured out and filled the park. He then perceived they were soldiers—thousands and tens of thousands—but they made no more noise than a swarm of midges on a summer evening. They formed an order, he affirmed, and marched, regiment after regiment, across the park. He followed them to Nannily Common. The music still played soft and distant. On the Common he watched them go through a number of revolutions. A man clothed in scarlet stood in the centre and directed them. They extended, he declared, over fifty acres. They were in sight half an hour, then they marched away quite silently. The whole time he heard neither voice nor tread—nothing but the faint music playing a solemn march. Where did they go, sir? Towards Briarfield, Mike followed them. They seemed passing field-head, when a column of smoke, such as might be vomited by a park of artillery, spread noiseless over the fields, the road, the Common, and royals, he said, blue and dim to his very feet. As it cleared away he looked again for the soldiers, but they were vanished. He saw them no more. Mike, like a wise Daniel, as he is, not only rehearsed the vision, but gave the interpretation thereof. It signifies, he intimated, bloodshed and civil conflict. Do you credit it, sir? Are sweeting. Do you, Davy? But come alone, why are you not off? I am rather surprised, sir, that you did not stay with Moe yourself. You like this kind of thing. So I should have done, had I not unfortunately happened to engage Bultby to sup with me on his way home from the Bible Society meeting at Nannily. I promised to send you as my substitute, for which, by the by, he did not thank me. He would much rather have had me the new Peter. Should there be any real need of help, I shall join you. The mill bell will give warning. Meantime go, unless, suddenly turning to messes, sweeting and darn. Unless Davy sweeting, or Joseph Donne prefers going, what do you say, gentlemen? The commission is an honourable one, not without the seasoning of a little real peril, for the country is in a queer state, as you all know. And Moe and his mill and his machinery are held in sufficient odium. There are several mixed sentiments. There is a high beating courage under those waistcoats of yours. I doubt not. Perhaps I am too partial to my favourite Peter. Little David shall be the champion, or spotless Joseph. Malone you are but a great floundering soul, after all. Good only to lend your armour. Out with your firearms. Fetch your chilele. It is there in the corner. The significant grin Malone produced his pistols, offering one to each of his brethren. They were not readily seized upon. With graceful modesty, each gentleman retired a step from the presented weapon. I never touched them. I never did touch anything of the kind, said Mr. Donne. I am almost a stranger to Mr. Moe, murmured sweeting. If you never touched a pistol, try the fail of it now, great satchop of Egypt. As to the little minstrel, he probably prefers encountering the Philistines with no other weapon than his flute. Get their hats, Peter. They'll both of them go. No, sir, no, Mr. Hellstone. My mother wouldn't like it. Pleaded sweeting. And I make it a rule never to get mixed up in affairs of the kind, observed Donne. Hellstone smiled sardonically. Malone laughed a hoarse laugh. He then replaced his arms, took his hat, and cudgel, and saying that he never felt more in tune for a shindie in his life, and that he wished a score of greasy cloth-dresses might beat up more quarter that night. He made his exit, clearing the stairs at a stride or two, and making the house shake with the bang of the front door behind him. CHAPTER II PART I THE WAGONS. The evening was pitch dark, star and moon were quenched in grey rain-clouds, grey they would have been by day. By night they looked sable. Malone was not a man given to close observation of nature. Her changes passed, for the most part, unnoticed by him. He could walk miles on the most varying April day, and never see the beautiful dallying of earth and heaven. Never mark when a sunbeam kissed the hill-tops, making them smile clear in green light, or when a shower wept over them, hiding their crests with the low-hanging, dishevelled tresses of cloud. He did not therefore care to contrast the sky as it now appeared, a muffled, streaming vault, all black, savoured toward the east, the furnaces of Stillborough ironworks through a tremulous lurid shimmer on the horizon, with the same sky and an unclouded frosty night. He did not trouble himself to ask where the constellations in the planets were gone, or to regret the black-blue serenity of the air-ocean which those white islets stood, and which another ocean, of heavier and denser element, now rolled below and concealed. He just doggedly pursued his way, leaning a little forward as he walked, and wearing his hat on the back of his head, as his Irish manor was. Tramp, tramp, he went along the causeway, where the road boasted the privilege of such an accommodation, splashed, splashed through the mire-filled cart-rats, where the flags were exchanged for soft mud. He looked but for certain landmarks, the spire of Briarfield Church, farther on, the lights at Red House. This was an inn, and when he reached it, the glow of a fire through a half-curtain window, a vision of glasses on a round table, and of revelers on an oaken settle, had nearly drawn aside the curate from its course. He thought longingly of a tumbler of whisky and water. In a strange place he would instantly realise the dream, but the company assembled in that kitchen were Mr. Halstone's own parishioners. They all knew him. He sighed and passed on. The high road was now to be quitted, as the remaining distance to Hollow's mill might be considerably reduced by a shortcut across fields. These fields were level in monotonous. Malone took a direct course through them, jumping hedge and wall. He passed but one building here, and that seemed large and hall-like, though regular. You could see a high gable, then a long front, then a low gable, then a thick lofty stack of chimneys. There were some trees behind it. It was dark, not a candle-shawn from any window. It was absolutely still, the rain running from the eaves, and the rather wild but very low whistle of the wind round the chimneys and through the boughs were the sole sounds in this neighbourhood. This building passed. The fields hitherto flat, declined in a rapid descent, evidently a veil lay below, through which you could hear the water run. One light glimmered in the depths, for that beacon Malone steered. He came to a little white house. You could see it was white, even through this dense darkness, and knocked at the door. A fresh-faced serpent opened it, and by the candle she held was revealed a narrow passage, terminating in a narrow stair. Two doors covered with crimson bays, a strip of crimson carpet down the steps, contrasted with light-coloured walls and a white floor, made the interior look clean and fresh. Mr. Moore is at home, I suppose. Yes, sir, but he is not in. Not in? Where is he, then? At the mill, in the counting-house. Here one of the crimson doors opened. Are the wagons come, Sarah, as to female voice, and a female head at the same time was apparent? It might not be the head of a goddess, indeed a screw of curl paper on each side of the temples quite forbade that supposition, but neither was it the head of a gorgon, yet Malone seemed to take it in the latter light. Big as he was, he shrank bashfully back into the rain at the view thereof, and, saying, I'll go to him, hurried in seeming trepidation down a short lane across an obscure yard towards a huge black mill. The work hours were over, the hands were gone, the machinery was at rest, the mill shut up. Malone walked round it, and somewhere in its great sooty flank he found another chink of light. He knocked at another door, using for the purpose the thick end of his chilella, with which he beat a rousing tattoo. The key turned, the door unclosed. Is it Joe Scott? What news of the wagons, Joe? No, it's myself. Mr. Halston would send me. Oh, Mr. Malone! The voice in uttering this name had the slightest possible cadence of disappointment. After a moment's pause it continued, politely but a little formally. I beg you will come in, Mr. Malone. I regret extremely Mr. Halston should have thought it necessary to trouble you so far. There was no necessity, I told him so, and on such a night, but walk forwards. Through a dark apartment, of aspect undistinguishable, Malone followed the speaker into a light, bright room within. Very light and bright indeed, it seemed to the eyes which, for the last hour, had been striving to penetrate the double darkness of night and fog. But except for his excellent fire, and for a lamp of elegant design and vivid luster burning on a table, it was a very plain place. The boarded floor was carpetless. The three or four stiff-backed, green-painted chairs seemed once to have furnished the kitchen of some farmhouse. A desk of strong, solid formation, the table of four set, and some framed sheets on the stone-colored walls bearing plans for building, for gardening, and designs of machinery, et cetera, completed the furniture of the place. Plain as it was, it seemed to satisfy Malone, who when he had removed and hung up his wets or two in hand, drew one of the rheumatic-looking chairs to the hearth, and set his knees almost within the bars of the red grate. Comfortable quarters you have here, Mr. Moore, and all snug to yourself. Yes, but my sister would be glad to see you, if you would prefer stepping into the house. Oh, no! The ladies are best alone. I never was a lady's man. You don't mistake me for my friend's suiting, do you, Mr. Moore? Suiting? Which of them is that? The gentleman in the chocolate overcoat, or the little gentleman? The little one. He of Nunley, the cavalier of the Mrs. Sykes, with the whole six of whom he's in love. Ha-ha! Better be generally in love with all than, especially with one, I should think, in that quarter. But he is especially in love with one, besides. For when I and Dunn urged him to make a choice amongst the fairer bevy, he named. Which do you think? With a queer, quiet smile, Mr. Moore applied. Dora, of course. Or Harriet. Ha! You would excellent guess. But what made you hit on those, too? Because they are the tallest, the handsomest, and Dora, at least, is the stoutest. And as your friend Mr. Suiting is but a little slight figure, I concluded that, according to a frequent rule in such cases, he preferred his contrast. You're right, Dora it is. But he has no chance, has he, Mr. Moore? What has Mr. Suiting beside his curacy? This question seemed to tickle Malone amazingly. He laughed for full three minutes before he answered it. What has, Sweeting? My David has his harp, or flute, which comes to the same thing. He has a sort of pinch-back watch, ditto ring, ditto eyeglass. That's what he has. How would he propose to keep Miss Sykes in gowns only? Ha! Excellent! I'll ask him that next time I see him. I'll roast him for his presumption. No doubt he expects all Christopher Sykes would do something handsome. He is rich, is he not? They live in a large house. Sykes carries on an extensive concern. Therefore he must be wealthier. Therefore he must have plenty to do with his wealth, and in these times would be about as likely to think of drawing money from the business to give dowries to his daughters as I should be to dream of pulling down the cottage there and constructing on its ruins a house as large as Fieldhead. Do you know what I heard more the other day? No. Perhaps that I was about to affect some such change. Your Briarfield gossips are capable of saying that, or sillier things. That you were going to take Fieldhead on a lease? I thought it looked a dismal place, by the by, tonight, as I passed it, and that it was your intention to settle a Miss Sykes there as mistress. To be married in short. Ha! Ha! Now which is it? Dora, I'm sure. Who said she was the handsomest? I wonder how often it has been settled that I was to be married since I came to Briarfield. They have assigned me every marriageable single woman by turns in the district. Now it was the two Mrs. Wins, first the dark, then the light one, now the red-haired Miss Armitage, then the mature Anne Pearson. At present you throw on my shoulders all the tribe of the Mrs. Sykes. On what grounds this gossip rests God knows. I visit now here. I seek female society, but as deciduously as you do, Mr. Malone. If ever I go to Winbury, it is only to give Sykes or Pearsons a call in their counting-house, where our discussions run on other topics than matrimony, and our thoughts are occupied with other things than courtships, establishments, dowries. The cloth we can't sell, the hands we can't employ, the mills we can't run, the perverse course of events generally, which we cannot alter, fill our hearts I take it, pretty well at present, to the tolerably complete exclusion of such figments as love-making, etc. I go along with you completely more. If there is one notion I hate more than another, it is that of marriage. I am in marriage in the vulgar weak sense, as a mere matter of sentiment, two beggarly fools agreeing to unite their indigents by some fantastic tie of feeling, humbug. But an advantageous connection, such as can be formed in consonance with dignity of views and permanency of solid interests, is not so bad, eh? No, he responded more in an absent manner. The subject seemed to have no interest for him. He did not pursue it. After sitting for some time gazing at the fire with a preoccupied air, he suddenly turned his head. Hark! said he. Did you hear wheels? Rising he went to the window, opened it, and listened. He soon closed it. Which is only the sound of the wind rising, he remarked, and the rivulet a little swole and rushing down the hollow. I expected those wagons at six, as near nine now. Seriously! Do you suppose that the putting up of this new machinery will bring you into danger? inquired Malone. Hellstone seems to think it will. I only wish the machines, the frames, were safe here and large within the walls of this mill. Once put up, I defy the frame-breakers. Let them only pay me a visit and take the consequences. My mill is my castle. One despises such low scoundrels, observed Malone, in a profound vein of reflection. I almost wish a party would call upon you to-night, but the road seemed extremely quiet as I came along. I saw nothing astir. You came by the Red House? Yes. There would be nothing on that road. It is in direction of still brother risk lies. And you think there is risk? What these fellows have done to others they may do to me? There is only this difference. Most of the manufacturers seem paralyzed when they are attacked. Sykes, for instance, when his dressing-shop was set on fire and burned to the ground, when the cloth was torn from his tenders and left in treads in the field, took no steps to discover or punish the miscreants, he gave up as tamely as a rabbit under the jaws of a ferret. Now I, if I know myself, should stand by my trade, my mill, and my machinery. Someone says these three are your gods, that the orders and counsellor with you another name for the seven deadly sins, that cassowry is your antichrist, and the war party his legions. Yes. I abhor all these things, because they ruin me. They stand in my way. I cannot get on. I cannot execute my plans because of them. I see myself baffled at every turn by their untoward effects. But you are rich and thriving more. I am very rich in cloth. I cannot sell. You should step into my warehouse yonder and observe how it is piled to the roof with pieces. Rokes and Pearson are in the same condition. America used to be their market, but the orders and counsellor have cut that off. Malone did not seem prepared to carry on briskly a conversation of this sort. He began to knock the heels of his boots together and to yawn. And then to think, continued Mr. Moore, who seemed too much taken up with the current of his own thoughts to note the symptoms of his guests ennui, to think that these ridiculous gossips of winery and briar food would keep pestering one about getting buried, as if there was nothing to be done in life but to pay attention, as they say, to some young lady, and then to go to church with her, and then to start out a bridal tour, and then to run through a round of visits, and then, I suppose, to be having a family. Oh, k'le diablam porte. He broke off the aspiration into which he was launching with a certain energy and added more calmly. I believe women talk and think only of these things, and they naturally fancy men's minds similarly occupied. Of course, of course," assented Malone, but never mind them. And he whistled, looking impatiently round, and seemed to feel a great want of something. This time Moore caught, and it appeared, comprehended his demonstrations. Mr. Malone, said he, you must require refreshment after your wet walk. I forget hospitality. Not at all, rejoined Malone, but he looked as if the right nail was at last hit on the head, nevertheless. Moore rose and opened the cupboard. It's my fancy, said he, to have every convenience within myself, and not to be dependent on the femininity in the cottage yonder for every mouthful I eat or every drop I drink. I often spend the evening and sup here alone and sleep with Joe Scott in the mill. Sometimes I am my own watchman. I require a little sleep, and it pleases me on a fine night to wander for an hour or two with my musket about the hollow. Mr. Malone, can you cook a mutton chop? Try me. I've done it hundreds of times at college. There's the dishful then, and there's the gridiron. Turn them quickly. You know the secret of keeping the juices in. Never fear me. You shall see. And a knife and fork, please. The currant turned up his cut-cuffs and applied himself to the cookery with vigor. The manufacturer placed on the table plates a loaf of bread, a black bottle, and two tumblers. He then produced a small copper kettle, still from the same well-stored recess, his cupboard. He filled it with water from a large stone jar in a corner, set it on the fire beside the hissing gridiron, got lemon, sugar, and a small china punch-ball. But while he was brewing the punch, a tap at the door called him away. Is it you, Sarah? Yes, sir. Will you come to supper, please, sir? No, I shall not be in to-night. I shall sleep at the mill. So lock the doors and tell your mistress to go to bed. He returned. You have your household in proper order? You have Malone approvingly. As with his fine-faced ruddy is the embers over which he bent, he assiduously turned the mutton chops. You are not under petticoat government like poor suiting. A man—whoo! How the fat spits it has burnt my hand! Destined to be ruled by women. Now, you and I more. There is a fine brown one for you, and full of gravy. You and I will have no gray mares in our stables when we marry. I don't know. I never think about it. If the gray mare is handsome and tractable, why not? The chops are done. Is the punch brewed? There's a glassful. Taste it. When Joe Scott and his minions return, they shall have a share of this, provided they bring home the frames intact. End of Chapter 2, Part 1. Chapter 2, Part 2 of Shirley. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Shirley. By Charlotte Bronte. Chapter 2, Part 2. The Wagons. Malone waxed very exultant over the supper. He laughed aloud at trifles, made bad jokes, and applauded them himself, and, in short, grew unmeaningly noisy. His hosts on the contrary remained quiet as before. It is time, reader, that you should have some idea of the appearance of this same host I must endeavour to sketch him as he sits at the table. He is what you would probably call, at first view, rather a strange looking man, for he is thin, dark, sallow, very foreign of aspect, with shadowy hair carelessly streaking his forehead. It appears that he spends about little time in his toilet, or he would arrange it with more taste. He seems unconscious that his features are fine, that they have a southern symmetry, clearness, regularity in their chiselling. Nor does the spectator become aware of this advantage chilly as examined well, for an anxious countenance and a hollow somewhat haggard outline of face disturb the idea of beauty with one of care. His eyes are large in grave and gray. Their expression is intent and meditative, rather searching than soft, rather thoughtful than genial. When he parts his lips in a smile, his physiognomy is agreeable. Not that it is frank or cheerful even then, but you feel the influence of a certain sedate charm, suggestive, whether truly or delusively, of a considerate, perhaps a kind nature, of feelings that may wear well at home, patient, forbearing, possibly faithful feelings. He is still young, not more than thirty. His stature is tall, his figure slender. His manner of speaking displeases. He has an outlandish accent, which notwithstanding a studied carelessness of pronunciation and diction, grates on a British and especially on a Yorkshire ear. Mr. Moore indeed was about half of Britain, and scarcely that. He came of a foreign ancestry by the mother's side, and was himself born and partly reared on foreign soil. A hybrid in nature, it is probable he had a hybrid's feeling on many points, patriotism for one. It is likely that he was unapped to attach himself to parties, to sex, even to climbs and customs. It is not impossible that he had tendency to isolate his individual person from any community amidst which his lot might temporarily happen to be thrown, and that he felt it to be his best wisdom to push the interests of Robert J. Moore to the exclusion of philanthropic considerations for general interests, with which he regarded the said Gerald Moore as in a great measure disconnected. Trade was Mr. Moore's hereditary calling. The Gerrards of Antwerp had been merchants for two centuries back. Once they had been wealthy merchants, but the uncertainties, the involvements of business had come upon them. Disaster speculations had loosened by degrees the foundations of their credit. The house had stood on a tottering base for a dozen years, and at last in the shock of the French Revolution it had rushed down to a total ruin. In its fall was involved the English and Yorkshire firm of Moore, closely connected with the Antwerp House, and of which one of the partners, Resident Network, Robert Moore, had married Hortense Gerard, with the prospect of his bride inheriting her father Constantine Gerrard's share in the business. She inherited, as we have seen, but his share in the liabilities of the firm. And these liabilities, though duly set aside by a composition with creditors, some said her son Robert accepted in his turn as a legacy, and that he aspired one day to discharge them and to rebuild the Fulgenhouse of Gerard and Moore on a scale at least equal to its former greatness. It was even supposed that he took bypass circumstances much to heart, than if a childhood passed at the side of a Saturnine mother under foreboding of coming evil, and a manhood drenched and blighted by the pitiless descent of the storm could painfully impress the mind. His probably was impressed in no golden characters. If however he had a great end of restoration and view, it was not in his power to employ great means for his attainment. He was obliged to be content with the day of small things. When he came to Yorkshire, he, whose ancestors had owned the warehouses in the seaports and factories in that inland town, had possessed their townhouse in their country-seed, saw no way open to him but to rent a cloth mill in an out-of-the-way nook in an out-of-the-way district, but to take a cottage joining it for his residence, and to add to his possessions his pasture for his horse and space for his cloth-tenters a few acres of the steep, rugged land that lined the hollow through which his mill stream brawled. All this he held at a somewhat high rent, for these war-times were hard and everything was dear, of the trustees of the field-head estate, then the property of a miner. At the time this history commences, Robert Moore had lived but two years in the district, during which period he had at least proved himself possessive of the quality of activity. The dingy cottage was converted into a neat tasteful residence. Of part of the rough land he had made garden-ground, which he cultivated with singular, even with Flemish, exactness and care. As to the mill, which was an old structure, and fitted up with old machinery, now became inefficient and out-of-date, he had from the first devince the strongest contempt for all its arrangements and appointments. His aim had been to affect the radical reform, which he had executed as fast as his very limited capital would allow, and the narrowness of that capital, and consequent check on his progress, was a restraint which galled his spirit sorely. Moore ever wanted to push on. It was the device stamped upon his soul, but poverty curbed him. Sometimes, figuratively, he foamed at the mouth when the reins were drawn very tight. In this state of feeling, it is not to be expected that he would deliberate much as to whether his advance was or was not prejudicial to others. Not being a native, nor for any length of time a resident of the neighborhood, he did not sufficiently care when the new inventions threw the old work-people out of employ. He never asked himself where those to whom he no longer paid weekly wages found daily bread, and in this negligence he only resembled thousands besides, on whom the starving poor of Yorkshire seemed to have a closer claim. The period of which I write was an overshadowed one in British history, and especially in history of northern provinces. War was then at its height. Europe was all involved therein. England, if not weary, was worn with long resistance. Yes, and half her people were weary, too, and cried out for peace on any terms. The royal honour became a mere, empty name of no value in the eyes of many, because their sight was dim with famine, and for a morsel of meat they would have sold their birthright. The orders in council, provoked by Napoleon's Milan and Berlin decrees, and forbidding neutral powers to trade with France, had by offending America cut off the principal market of the Yorkshire woollen trade, and brought it consequently to the verge of ruin. Minor foreign markets were glutted and received no more. The Brazils, Portugal, Sicily were all overstocked by nearly two years' consumption. At this crisis certain inventions in machinery were introduced into the staple manufacturers of the North, which greatly reducing the number of hands necessary to be employed threw thousands out of work, and left them without legitimate means of sustaining life. A bad harvest supervened. Distress reached its climax. Endurance overgoated, stretched the hand of fraternity dissedition. The throes of a sort of moral earthquake were felt heaving under the hills of the northern counties. But as is usual in such cases, nobody took much notice when a food riot broke out in a manufacturing town, when a gig mill was burned to the ground, or a manufacturer's house was attacked, the furniture thrown into the streets, and the family forced to flee for their lives. Some local measures were or were not taken by the local magistracy. A ringleader was detected, or more frequently suffered to allude detection. Newspaper paragraphs were written on the subject, and there the thing stopped. As to the sufferers, whose sole inheritance was labor and who had lost that inheritance, who could not get work and consequently could not get wages, and consequently could not get bread, they were left to suffer on, perhaps inevitably left. It would not do to stop the progress of invention, to damage science by discouraging its improvements. The war could not be terminated. Efficient relief could not be raised. There was no help then. So the unemployed underwent their destiny, ate the bread and drank the waters of affliction. Misery generates hate. These sufferers hated the machines which they believed took their bread from them. They hated the buildings which contained those machines. They hated the manufacturers who owned those buildings. In the parish of Beyerfield, with which we have a present to do, Hollows Mill was the place held most abominable. Gerard Moore, in this double character of semi-foreigner and thoroughgoing, progresses, the man most abominated. And it perhaps rather agreed with Moore's temperament than otherwise to be generally hated, especially when he believed the thing for which he was hated a right and expedient thing. And it was with a sense of warlike excitement he, on this night, sat in his counting-house waiting the arrival of his frameladen wagons. Malone's company were, it may be, most unwelcome to him. He would have preferred sitting alone, for he liked a silent, lumber, unsafe solitude. His watchma's musket would have been company enough for him. The full-flowing beck and the den would have delivered continuously the discourse most genial to his ear. With the queerest look in the world had the manufacturer for some ten minutes been watching the Irish curate, as the latter made free with a punch, when suddenly that steady gray eye changed as if another vision came between it and Malone. Moore raised his hand. Shutt, he said in a French fashion, as Malone made a noise for this glass. He listened a moment, then rose, put his hat on, and went out at the counting-house door. The night was still dark and stagnant, the water yet rushed on full and fast, as flow almost seemed to flood in the utter silence. Moore's ear, however, caught another sound very distant, but yet dissimilar, broken and rugged, insured to sound of heavy wheels crunching a stony road. He returned to the counting-house in Little Lantern, with which he walked down to the millyard and proceeded to open gates. The big wagons were coming on, the dreahors' huge hoofs were heard splashing in the mud and water. Moore hailed them. Hey, Joe Scott! Is all right? Probably Joe Scott was yet a too great distance to hear the inquiry. He did not answer it. He's all right, I say, again asked Moore with the elephant-like leader's nose, almost touched to his. Someone jumped out from the foremost wagon into the road. The voice cried loud. I, I, devil all's right, we've smashed him. And there was a run. The wagons stood still. They were now deserted. Joe Scott? No, Joe Scott answered. Burgotroyd! Hey, gills! Sykes! No reply. Mr. Moore lifted his lantern and looked into the vehicles. There was neither man nor machinery. They were empty and abandoned. Now Mr. Moore loved his machinery. He had risked the last of his capital on the purchase of these frames and shears, which tonight had been expected. Speculation's most important to his interest depended on the results he wrought by them. Where were they? The words we've smashed him, wrang in his ears. How did the catastrophe affect him? The light of the lantern he held were his features visible, relaxing to a singular smile. The smile the man of determined spirit wears when he reaches a juncture in his life where this determined spirit is to feel a demand on its strength when the strain is to be made and the faculty must bear a break. Yet he remained silent and even motionless, for at the instant he neither knew what to say nor what to do. He placed the lantern on the ground and stood with his arms folded, gazing down and reflecting. An impatient trampling of one of the horses made him presently look up. His eye in the moment caught the gleam of something white attached to the part of a harness. Examined by the light of the lantern, this proved to be a folded paper, a billet. There bore no address without, within, with the superscription, to the Devil of Hollowsville. We will not copy the rest of the orthography, which was very peculiar, but translated into legible English. It ran thus. Your hellish machinery shivered to smash on silver moor, and your men are lying bound hand and foot in a ditch by the roadside. Take this as a warning from men that are starving, and have starving wives and children to go home to when they have done this deed. If you get new machines, or if you otherwise go on as you have done, you shall hear from us again. Beware. Hear from you again. Yes, I'll hear from you again. And you shall hear from me. I'll speak to you directly. On silver moor you shall hear from me in a moment. Having led the wagons within the gates, he hastened towards the cottage. Opening the door, he spoke a few words quickly but quietly to two females who ran to meet him in the passage. He calmed the seeming alarm of one by a brief palliative account of what had taken place. Together he said, go into the mill, Sarah. There is the key, and ring the mill bell as loud as you can. Afterwards you will get another lantern and help me to light up the front. Returning to his horses, he unharnessed, fed, and stapled them with equal speed and care, pausing occasionally while so occupied, as if to listen for the mill belt. It clanged out presently with a regular but loud and alarming din. The hurried agitated peels seemed more urgent than if the summons had been steadily given by a practiced hand. On that still night, at that unusual hour, it was heard a long way around. The guests in the kitchen of the Red House were startled by the clamor, and declaring that there must be some more in or common to do at Hollows Mill, they called for lanterns and hurried to the spot in a body, and scarcely had they thronged to the yard with their gleaming lights when the tramp of horses was heard, and a little man in a shovel hat, sitting erect on the back of a shaggy pony, rode lightly in, followed by an edda camp mounted on a larger steed. Mr. Moore, meantime, after stabling his stray horses, had rolled his hackney, and with the aid of Sarah, the servant, lit up his mill, whose wide and long front now glared one great illumination, throwing a sufficient light on the yard to obviate all fear of confusion arising from obscurity. Already a deep hum of voices became audible. Mr. Malone, head at length, issued from the Counting House, previously taking the precaution to dip his head in face in the stone-water jar, and this precaution, together with a sudden alarm, had nearly restored him to the possession of those senses which the punch had partially scattered. He stood with his hat on the back of his head, and his chilella grasped in his dexter fist, answering much at random the questions of the newly arrived party from the Red House. Mr. Moore now appeared, and was immediately confronted by the shovel hat and the shaggy pony. Well, Moore, what is your business with us? I thought you would want us tonight, me and Hetman here, patting his pony's neck, and Tom and his charger. When I heard you mill-bell, I could sit still no longer, so I left Bolby to finish his supper alone. But where is the enemy? I'd not see a mask or a smutted face present, and there's not a pane of glass broken in your windows. Have you had an attack, or do you expect one? Oh, not at all. I have neither had one nor expect one. Answer more coolly. I only ordered the bell three wrong, because I want two or three neighbours to stay here in the hollow, while I and a couple or so more go over to Silvermore. To Silvermore? What to do, to meet the wagons? The wagons are come home an hour ago. Then I was right. What more would you have? They came home empty, and Joe Scott and Company are left on the moor and sore the frames. We'd that scrawl. Mr. Hellstone received and perused the documents of which the contents have before been given. Hm. They only served you as they serve others. But however the poor fellows in the ditch will be expecting help at some impatience. This is a wet night for such a birth. I and Tom will go with you. Malone may stay behind and take care of the mill. What is the matter with him? His eyes seem starting out of his head. He has been eating a mutton chop. Indeed. Peter Augustus, be on your guard. Eat no more mutton chops tonight. You are left here in command of these premises. An honourable host. Is anybody to stay with me? As many of the present assemblages choose. My lads, how many of you remain here, and how many will go a little way with me and Mr. Moore on the civil road to meet some of the men who have been waylaid and assaulted by frame-breakers? The small number of three volunteered to go. The rest preferred staying behind. As Mr. Moore mounted his horse, the rector asked him in a low voice whether he had locked up the mutton chops so that Peter Augustus could not get at them. The manufacturer nodded an affirmative, and the rescue party set out. I make this trite remark because I happen to know that Mrs. Halston and Moore trodded four from the milliard gate at the head of the very small company in the best possible spirits. When away from a lantern, the three pedestrians of the party carried each one fell on Mr. Moore's face, you could see an unusual, because a lively spark dancing in his eyes, and the new found vivacity mantling on his dark, pesy opnemy. And when the reckless visage was eliminated, his heart's features were revealed again, and the shine was bleak. Yet a drizzling night, a somewhat perilous expedition, who would think were not circumstances calculated to unleaven those exposed to the wet and engaged in the adventure. If any member or members of the crew who have been at work and stills or more had caught a view of this party, they would have had great pleasure in shooting either of the leaders from behind a wall. And the leaders knew this. And the fact is, being both men are steady nerves and steady beating hearts, we're late with the knowledge. I am aware reader, and you need not remind me that it is a dreadful thing for a person to be warlike. I am aware that he should be a man of peace. I have something to outline of an idea of what a clothing man's mission is amongst mankind. And I remember distinctly who servant he is, who is message he delivers, who's example he should follow. Yet, of all this, if you are a person hater, you need not expect me to go along with you every step of your dismal, down war tending un-Christian road. You need not expect me to join in your deep anathemas, and once so narrow and so sweeping in your prisoners' rancor, so intense and so absurd against the cloth to lift up my eyes and hands with a subtle hope, or to inflate my lungs with a bare cloth in horror and denunciation of the diabolical vector of Briarfield. He was not diabolical at all. The evil simply was. He had missed his vocation. He should have been a soldier if circumstances had made him a priest. For the rest, he was a conscientious, hard-headed, hard-handed, brave, stern, implacable, faithful little man. A man almost without sympathy, un-gentle, prejudiced and rigid, but a man truly principal, honorable, sagacious and sincere. It seems to me, reader, that you cannot always cut out men to fit their profession, and that you ought not to curse them because their professions sometimes hang from them ungracefully. Nor will I curse Hellstone, clerical Cossack as he was. Yet he was cursed, and by many of his own perishingness, as by others he was adored, which is the frequent fate of men who show partiality in friendship and bitterness and enmity, who are equally attached to principles and adhering to prejudices. Hellstone and Moore came both in excellent spirits and united to the prison in one course. You would expect that as they rose side by side, they would converse amicably. Oh no, these two men of hard, rebellious natures, both rarely came into contact, but they chafed each other's moods. Their frequent bone of contention was the war. Hellstone was a high Tory. There were Tories in those days. And Moore was a bit awake, awake at least, as far as opposition to the war party was concerned, that being the question which affected his own interest, and only on that question did he profess any British politics at all. He liked to infuriate Hellstone by declaring his belief in the invincibility of Bonaparte, by taunting England and Europe with the impotence of the efforts to withstand him, and by coolly advancing the opinion that it was as well to yield to him soon as late, since he must in the end crush every antagonist and reign supreme. Hellstone could not bear these sentiments. It was only on the consideration of Moore being a sort of outcast and alien, and having brought half measure of British blood to temper the foreign guile, which corroded his veins, that he brought himself to listen to them without indulging the wish he felt to came the speaker. Another thing, too, somewhat elate is discussed. Namely, a fellow feeling for the ducket turn with which these opinions were asserted, and the respect for the consistency of Moore's private controversy. As the party turned into the still for a road, they met what little wind there was, the rain dashed in their faces. Moore had been fretting his companion previously. And now, braced up by the raw breeze, and perhaps irritated by the sharp drizzle, he began to go to him. Does your peninsula news please you still? He asked. What do you mean? What's the solely demand of the rector? I mean, have you still faith in that bar of the Lord Wellington? And what do you mean now? Do you still believe that this wooden face and pebble-hearted idol of England, this power to send fire down from heaven to consume the French Holocaust you want to offer up? I believe Wellington will flock Bonaparte's marshals into the sea the day he pleases him to lift his arm. But my dear sir, you can't be serious in what you say. Bonaparte's marshals are great men who act under the guidance of an omnipotent master spirit. Your Wellington is the most home drum of commonplace modernity, whose slow, mechanical movement are further crammed by an ignorant home government. Wellington is the soul of England. Wellington is the right champion of a good cause, the fit representative of a powerful, a resolute, a sensible and an honest nation. Your good cause, as far as I understand it, is simply the restoration of that filthy people burdened to a throne which he disgraced. Your fit representative of an honest people is a dull-witted drover acting for a dull-witted farmer and against these are a raid, victorious supremacy and invincible genius. Against legitimacy is a raid of sub-patience. Against modest, single-minded, righteous and brave resistance to encroachment is a raid boastful, double-tongued, selfish and treacherous ambition to possess. God defends the raid. God often defends the powerful. What? I suppose the handful of Israelites standing dry shold on the AC-8X side of the Red Sea was more powerful than the host of the Egyptians drawn up on the African side. Were they more numerous? Were they better appointed? Were they more mighty in a word? Huh? Don't speak or you'll tell a lie. More. You know you will. They were a poor, over-roared band of bondsmen. Tyrants had oppressed them for four hundred years. A feeble mixture of women and children diluted their thin ranks. Their masters who roared to full of them through the divided flood were a set of pampered Ethiopians, about as strong and brutal as the lions of Libya. They were armed, porced and charioted. The poor Hebrew wanderers were afoot. Few of them, it is likely, had better weapons than the shepherd's crooks or their mason's building tools. The amig and mighty leader himself had only his rod. But we think you, Robert Moore, right was with them. The guard of battles was on their side. Crime and the lost arch angle generaled the ranks of Pharaoh and which triumphed. We know that well. The Lord saved Israel that day out of the hand of the Egyptians, and Israel saw the Egyptians dead upon the seashore. Ye. The depths covered them. They sank to the bottom as a stone. The right hand of the Lord became glorious in power. The right hand of the Lord dashed in pieces the enemy. You are all right. Only you forget the true parallel. France is Israel and Napoleon is Moses. Europe, with all over gorged empires and rotten dynasties, is card Egypt. Gallant France is the twelve tribes and a fresh and vigorous usurper, the shepherd of Europe. I scorn to answer you. Moore accordingly answered himself. At least he subjoined to what he had just said an additional observation in the lower voice. Oh, in Italy he was as great as any Moses. He was the right thing there. Fits of head and organized measures for the regeneration of nations. It puzzled me to this day how the conqueror of Lodi should have condescended to become an emperor, a vulgar, a stupid homebug, and still more how a people who had once called themselves Republicans should have sunk against the grade of mere slaves. I despise France. If England had gone as far in the march of civilization as France did, she would hardly have retreated so shamelessly. You don't mean to say that both sudden imperial France is anywhere from bloody, repropagant France demanded Hellstone fiercely. I mean to say nothing, but I can think what I please, you know, Mr. Hellstone, both about France and England and about revolutions and registrites and restorations in general and about the divine right of kings, which you often stagled for in your sermons, and the duty of non-resistance and the sanity of war and Mr. Moore's sentence was here cut short by the rapid rolling up of a gig and its sudden stoppage in the middle of the road. Both he and the rector had been too much occupied with the discourse to notice its approach till it was close upon them. Now, I'm nice that the devacants hit home, demanded a voice from the vehicle. Can that be Joe Scott? I, I, returned another voice, but the gig contained two persons as was seen by the glimmer of its lamp. The men of the lanterns have now fallen into the rear, or rather the equestrians of the rescue party had outridden the pedestrians. I, Mr. Moore, is Joe Scott, and bringing him back to you in a bunny pickle, I found him on the top of the Moore Yonder, him and three others. What will you give me for restoring him to you? Why, my thanks, I believe, for I could better have afforded to lose a better man. That is you, I suppose, Mr. York, by your voice. I, lad, it's me. I was coming home from Silver Market, and just as I got to the middle of the Moore and was whipping on in a swift as the wind, for these, they say, are not safe times, thanks to a bad government, I heard a groan. I pulled up. Some would have whipped out in faster, but I have not to fear that I know of. I don't believe that the lad in these parts would harm me, at least I'd give them as good as I got if they offered to do it. I said, is there art wrong anywhere? Did it there, somebody says, speaking out of the ground like, what's to do, they sharpened tell me, I ordered. Not but four and I was licking in a ditch, says Joe, as quiet as could be. I told them more shame to him, and beat him up and move on. Or I'd lend them a lick of the gig whip, for my notion was they were all fresh. We'd had done that and I was sinned, but we'd teed we a bit of bands, says Joe. So in a while I got down and loosed him with my pen knife, and Scott would write with me to tell him all how it happened, and daughters are coming on as fast as their feet will bring them. Well, I am greatly obliged to you, Mr York. Are you my lad? You know you're not. However, here are the rest approaching, and here, by the Lord, is another set with lights in the pitches, like the army of Gideon. And as weave the parson with us, good evening, Mr. Hellstone, we stew. Mr. Hellstone returned the salutation of the individual in the gig very stifling indeed. That individual proceeded. We're eleven strong men, and there's both horses and chariots among us. If we could only fall in with some of these starved rack-and-muffins or frame-breakers, we could win a grand victory. Where could everyone be a wellington that would please you, Mr. Hellstone, and teach paragraphs as we could confide for the babies? Briarfield should be famous, but we serve the column and a half to silver a courier over this job as it is. I expect no less. And I'll promise you no less, Mr York, for I'll write the article myself, return the right term. To be sure, sardonyly, and mind you recommend wield at them at break the bits of frames, and teach Joe Scott's legs we bend, should be home without benefit or clergy, if the hanging matter or should be, no doubt of that. If I judge them, I'd give them short shrift quite more, but I mean to let them quite a learn this back, to give them rope enough certain that in the end they will hang themselves. Let them alone will ye more? Do you promise that? Promise? No. All I mean to say is, I shall give myself no particular trouble to catch them, but if one falls in my way, you'll snap him up, of course. Only you would rather they would do something worse than merely stop a wagon before you reckon with them. Well, we'll say no more on a subject at present. Here we are at my door, gentlemen, and I hope you and the men will step in. You will, none of you, be the voice of a little refreshment. More on Halston opposed this proposition as unnecessary. It was, however, pressed on them so courtesely, and the night, besides, was so inclement, and the gleam from the muslin-credent windows of the house, before which they had halted, looked so inviting, that at length they yielded. Mr York, after having alighted from his kick, which she left in charge of a man who issued from an outbuilding on his arrival, let the way in. It will have been remarked that Mr York varied a little in his phraseology. Now he spoke broad Yorkshire, and at none he expressed himself in very pure English. His manners seemed liable to equal alterations. He could be polite and affable, and he could be blonde and rough. His station, then, you could not easily determine by his speech and demeanour. Perhaps the appearance of his residence may decide it. The man he recommended to take the kitchen way, saying that he would see them serve with some way to taste presently. The gentlemen were ushered in at the front entrance. They found themselves in a matted hall, lined almost to the ceiling with pictures. Through this they were conducted to a large parlor, with a magnificent fire and a grate. The most cheerful of rooms it appeared as a whole, and when he came to examine details, the unleavening effect was not diminished. There was no splendour, but there was taste everywhere. Unusual taste, the taste you would have said of a travel man, a scholar, and a gentleman. A series of Italian views decked the walls. Each of these was a specimen of true art. A connoisseur had selected them. They were genuine and valuable. Even by candlelight, the bright clear skies, the soft distances with blue air curing between the eye and the health. The fresh tints and well masked lights and shadows charmed the view. The subjects were all pastoral, the scenes were all sunny. There was a guitar and some music on a sofa. There were cameos, beautiful miniatures, a set of grecian-looking vases on the mantelpiece. There were books well arranged in two elegant bookcases. Mr. York paid his guests besieged it. He then rang for wine. To the servant who brought it, he gave hospitable orders for the refreshment of the man in the kitchen. The rector remained standing. He seemed not to like his quarters. He would not touch the wine his hosts offered him. "'English you will!' remarked Mr. York. "'I reckon you're thinking of Eastern customs, Mr. Hellstone, and you will not eat nor drink under my roof. Feed we should be forced to be friends, but I am not so particular or superstitious. You might stop the contents of that to candy, and you might give me a bottle of the best in your own cellar, and I'd help myself free to approach you at every turn still, in every respite meeting and justice meeting where we encountered one another. It is just what I should expect of you, Mr. York. Does it agree with you now, Mr. Hellstone, to be writing out after rioters of the wet night at your age? It always agrees with me to be doing my duty, and in this case my duty is a thorough pleasure. To hunt down vermin is a noble occupation fit for an archbishop. Fit for ye at any rate, but where's the curate? He's haven't gone to visit some poor body in a sick gird, or he's haven't hunted down vermin in another direction. He is doing garrison duty at Hollows Millen. We left him a silver wine, I hope, Bob, turning to Mr. Moore, to keep his curate sharp. He did not pause for an answer, but continued quickly, still addressing Moore, who had thrown himself into an old-fashioned cheer by the fireside. Move it, Robert! Get up, my lad! That place is mine! Take the sofa or free at a cheers, if you will, but not this. It belongs to me and nobody else. Why are you so particular to that chair, Mr. York? asked Moore, lazily vacating the place and obedient to orders. My father will offer me, and that's all the answer I should give thee, and it's as good a reason as Mr. Halston can give for the main figure's notions. Moore, are you ready to go inquire the rector? Nay, Robert's not ready, or rather, I'm not ready to part with him. He's in there a lot and one's correcting. Why, sir, what have I done? Made they self-animate in every hand? What do I care for that? What difference does it make to me, whether your Yorkshire lords hate me or like me? Aye, there it is. The lad is a make of an alien among us. His father would never have talked to that way. Go back to Antwerp, where you were born, and bread, Moves-Ted. Moves-Ted will name Jennifer Cremon de Wa, kind of wool, Lodard de Peissant, sh'emang-mok. Ang-a-vang sh'emang-gassang, Lodard de Peissant se mok-a-ong de toi. Fo-ong-sa-tang, replied York, speaking with nearly as pure friend's accent as she read more. Se-bang, se-bang, et pisk se-la-may-égal, ke-me-sa-mi-ne-sa-ng-in-ke-te-pah. Te-sa-mi, ou-sa-nt-il, te-a-mi? Che-fe-e-co, ou-sa-nt-il? E-che-swi-fo-de-ke-le-co, se-li-re-spa-ng, ou-de-a-ble-le-ta-mi. Je-me-souvi-ang-an-co-di-me-mong, ou-mong-pe-a-e-me-ang-k-le-che-rad, ap-e-le-re, ou-tou-ye-de-leur-e-mi-e-ju, se-si-le-se-mi, se-sa-ng-a-m-pr-se-e, da-co-ri-e-a-le-se-co-re. Te-ne, M. York, se-mok-e-mi-me-ri-ti-tro, ne-mang-pa-le-pl-u, com-tu-vo-d-re. And here, Mr. York held his peace. And while he sits leaning back in his free-corn-of-carve-oak chair, I will snatch my opportunity to sketch the portrait of this French-speaking Yorkshire gentleman. End of Chapter 3. Recording by Gavige State on the 8th of March, 2010, in Copenhagen, Denmark. Recording by Elisa Klosson in Menlo Park, California. Shirley by Charlotte Bronte. Chapter 4. Mr. York, continued. A Yorkshire gentleman he was, par-es-s-il-ance, in every point, about fifty-five years old, but looking at first sight still older, for his hair was silver-white. His forehead was broad, not high, his face fresh and hail. The harshness of the North was seen in his features, as it was heard in his voice. Every trait was thoroughly English, not a Norman line anywhere. It was an in-elegant, un-classic, un-aristocratic mold of visage. Fine people would perhaps have called it vulgar. Sensible people would have termed it characteristic. Shrewd people would have delighted in it for the pith, sagacity, intelligence, the rude yet real originality marked in every liniment, latent in every furrow. But it was an indossal, a scornful and a sarcastic face. The face of a man, difficult to lead, and impossible to drive. His stature was rather tall, and he was well-made and wiry, and had a stately integrity of port. There was not a suspicion of the clown about him anywhere. I did not find it easy to sketch Mr. York's person, but it is more difficult to indicate his mind. If you expect to be treated to a perfection-reader, or even to a benevolent, philanthropical gentleman in him, you are mistaken. He has spoken with some sense and with some good feeling to Mr. Moore, but you are not dense to conclude that he always spoke and thought justly and kindly. Mr. York, in the first place, was without the organ of veneration, a great want, and which throws a man wrong on every point where veneration is required. Secondly he was without the organ of comparison, a deficiency which strips amount of sympathy, and thirdly he had too little of the organs of benevolence and ideality which took the glory and softness from his nature, and for him diminished those divine qualities throughout the universe. The want of veneration made him intolerant to those above him, kings and nobles and priests, dynasties and parliaments and establishments with all their doings, of their enactments, their forms, their rights, their claims, were to him an abomination, all rubbish. He found no use or pleasure in them and believed it would be clear-gain and no damage to the world if its high places were raised and their occupants crushed in the fall. The want of veneration, too, made him dead at heart to the electric delight of admiring what is admirable. It dried up a thousand pure sources of enjoyment, it withered a thousand vivid pleasures. He was not irreligious, though a member of no sect, but his religion could not be that of one who knows how to venerate. He believed in God and Heaven, but his God in Heaven were those of a man in whom awe, imagination, and tenderness lack. The weakness of his powers of comparison made him inconsistent. While he professed some excellent general doctrines of mutual toleration and forbearance, he cherished towards certain classes a bigoted antipathy. He spoke of Parsons and all who belonged to Parsons, of lords and the appendages of lords, with a harshness, sometimes an insolence as unjust as it was insufferable. He could not place himself in the position of those he vituperated. He could not compare their errors with their temptations, their defects with their disadvantages. He could not realize the effect of such and such circumstances on himself similarly situated, and he would often express the most ferocious and tyrannical wishes regarding those who had acted, as he thought, ferociously and tyrannically. To judge by his threats he would have employed arbitrary, even cruel means to advance the cause of freedom and equality. Equality? Yes, Mr. York talked about equality, but at heart he was a proud man, very friendly to his work-people, very good to all who were beneath him, and submitted quietly to be beneath him, but haughty as Beelzebub to whomesoever the world deemed, for he deemed no man his superior. Revolt was in his blood he could not bear control, his father his grandfather before him could not bear it, and his children after him never could. The want of general benevolence made him very impatient of imbecility and of all faults which grated on his strong shrewd nature. It left no check to his cutting sarcasm. As he was not merciful he was sometimes wound and wound again without noticing how much he hurt or caring how deep he thrust. As to the paucity of ideality in his mind, that can scarcely be called the fault, a fine ear for music, a correct eye for color and form left him the quality of taste, and who cares for imagination? Who does not think it a rather dangerous, senseless attribute akin to weakness, perhaps partaking of frenzy, a disease rather than a gift of the mind? We all think so, but those who possess or fancy they possess it. To hear them speak you would believe that their hearts would be cold if that elixir did not flow about them, that their eyes would be dim if that flame did not refine their vision, that they would be lonely if this strange companion abandoned them. You would suppose that it imparted some glad hope to spring, some fine charm to summer, some tranquil joy to autumn, some consolation to winter which you do not feel. All illusion, of course, but the fanatics cling to their dream and would not give it for gold. As Mr. York did not possess poetic imagination himself, he concerted it a most superfluous quality in others. Painters and musicians he could tolerate and even encourage because he could relish the results of their art. He could see the charm of a fine picture and feel the pleasure of good music, but a quiet poet, whatever force struggled, whatever fire glowed in his breast, if he could not have played the man in the counting-house or the tradesman in the peace-hall, might have lived despised and died scorned under the eyes of Hiram York. And as there are many Hiram Yorks in the world, it is well that the true poet, quiet externally though he may be, has often a truculent spirit under his placidity, and is full of shrewdness in his meekness and can measure the whole stature of those who look down on him, and correctly ascertain the weight and value of the pursuits they disdain him for not having followed. It is happy that he can have his own bliss, his own society with his great friend and goddess-nature, quite independent of those who find little pleasure in him, and in whom he finds no pleasure at all. It is just that while the world and circumstances often turn a dark cold side to him, and properly too, because he first turns a dark cold careless side to them, he should be able to maintain a festal brightness and cherishing glow in his bosom, which makes all bright and genial for him, while strangers, perhaps, deem his existence a polar winter never gladdened by a sun. The true poet is not one whit to be pitied, and he is apt to laugh in his sleeve when any misguided sympathizer whines over his wrongs. Even when utilitarians sit in judgment on him and pronounce him and his art useless, he hears the sentence with such a hard derision, such a broad, deep, comprehensive, and merciless contempt of the unhappy Pharisees who pronounce it, that he is rather to be chidden and condoled with. These, however, are not Mr. York's reflections, and it is with Mr. York we have it present to do. I have told you some of his faults, reader. As to his good points, he was one of the most honorable and capable men in Yorkshire, even those who disliked him were forced to respect him, and he was much beloved by the poor, because he was thoroughly kind and very fatherly to them. To his workmen he was considerate and cordial. When he dismissed them from an occupation he would try to set them on to something else, or, if that was impossible, help them remove with their families to a district where work might possibly be had. It must also be remarked that if, as sometimes chanced, any individual amongst his hands showed signs of insubordination, York, who, like many who abhor being controlled knew how to control with vigor, had the secret of crushing rebellion in the germ, of eradicating it like a bad weed so that it never spread or developed within the sphere of his authority, such being the happy state of his own affairs, he felt himself at liberty to speak with the utmost severity of those who were differently situated, to ascribe whatever was unpleasant in their position entirely to their own fault, to sever himself from the masters and advocate freely the cause of the operatives. Mr. York's family was the first and oldest in the district, and he, though not the wealthiest, was one of the most influential men. His education had been good. In his youth, before the French Revolution, he had traveled on the Continent. He was an adept in the French and Italian languages. During a two-year sojourn in Italy he had collected many good paintings and tasteful rarities with which his residence was now adorned. His manners, when he liked, were those of the finished gentlemen of the old school. His conversation, when he was disposed to please, was singularly interesting and original, and if he usually expressed himself in the Yorkshire dialect it was because he chose to do so, preferring his native Doric to a more refined vocabulary. A Yorkshire burr, he affirmed, was as much better than a cockney's lisp as a bull's bellow than a raton's squeak. Mr. York knew everyone, and was known by everyone for miles round, yet his intimate acquaintances were very few. Rough, thoroughly original, he had no taste for what was ordinary. A racy, rough character, high or low, ever found acceptance with him. A refined insipid personage, however exalted in station, was his aversion. He would spend an hour, any time, in talking freely with a shrewd workman of his own, or with some queer, sagacious old woman amongst his cottagers, when he would have grudged a moment to a commonplace fine gentleman, or to the most fashionable and elegant, if frivolous lady. His preferences on these points he carried to an extreme, forgetting that there may be amiable and even admirable characters amongst those who cannot be original. Yet he made exceptions to his own rule. There was a certain order of mind, plain, ingenuous, neglecting refinement, almost devoid of intellectuality, and quite incapable of appreciating what was intellectual in him, but which at the same time never felt disgusted as rudeness, was not easily wounded by his sarcasm, did not closely analyze his sayings, doings, or opinions with which he was peculiarly at ease, and consequently which he peculiarly preferred. He was lord amongst such characters, they, while submitting implicitly to his influence, never acknowledged, because they never reflected on, his superiority. They were quite tractable, therefore, without running the smallest danger of being servile, and their unthinking, easy, artless insensibility was as acceptable, because as convenient, to Mr. York, as that of the chair he sat on or of the floor he trod. It will have been observed that he was not quite uncordial with Mr. Moore. He had two or three reasons for entertaining a faint partiality to that gentleman. It may sound odd, but the first of these was that Moore spoke English with a foreign, and French with a perfectly pure accent, and that his dark, thin face, with its fine, though rather wasted lines, had a most anti-British and anti-Yorkishy look. These points seemed frivolous, unlikely to influence a character like York's. But the fact is they recalled old, perhaps pleasurable, associations. They brought back his travelling, his youthful days. He had seen, amidst Italian cities and scenes, faces like Moors. He had heard in Parisian cafes and theatres voices like his. He was young then, and when he looked at and listened to the alien he seemed young again. Secondly, he had known Moore's father, and had had dealings with him. That was a more substantial, though by no means a more agreeable tie. For as his firm had been connected with Moore's in business, it had also, in some measure, been implicated in its losses. Thirdly, he had found Robert himself a sharp man of business. He saw reason to anticipate that he would, in the end, by one means or another make money, and he respected both his resolution and acuteness. Perhaps also his hardness. A fourth circumstance which dood them together was that of Mr. York being one of the guardians of the minor on whose estate Hollow's mill was situated. Consequently Moore, in the course of his alterations and improvements, had frequent occasion to consult him. As to the other guests now present in Mr. York's parlor, Mr. Halston, between him and his host there existed a double antipathy. The antipathy of nature and that of circumstances. The free thinker hated the formalist. The lover of liberty detested the disciplinarian. Besides, it was said that in former years they had been rival suitors of the same lady. Mr. York, as a general rule, was when Young noted for his preference of sprightly and dashing women. A showy shape and air, a lively wit, a ready tongue, chiefly seemed to attract him. He never, however, proposed to any of these brilliant bells whose society he sought, and all at once he seriously fell in love with and eagerly wooed a girl who presented a complete contrast to those he had hitherto noticed. A girl with the face of a Madonna, a girl of living marble, stillness personified. No matter that when he spoke to her she only answered him in monosyllables, no matter that his sighs seemed unheard, that his glances were unreturned, that she never responded to his opinions, rarely smiled at his jests, paid him no respect, and no attention, no matter that she seemed the opposite of everything feminine he had ever in his whole life been known to admire. For him, Mary Cave was perfect, because somehow, for some reason, no doubt he had a reason, he loved her. Mr. Helston, at that time curate of Breyerfield, loved Mary too, or at any rate he fancied her. Several others admired her, for she was beautiful as a monumental angel, but the clergyman was preferred for his office's sake. That office, probably investing him with some of the illusion necessary to allure the commission of matrimony, and which Miss Cave did not find in any of the young wool staplers, her other adorers. Mr. Helston neither had, nor professed to have, Mr. York's absorbing passion for her. He had none of the humble reverence which seemed to subdue most of her suitors. He saw her more as she really was than the rest did. He was, consequently, more master of her and himself. She accepted him at the first offer, and they were married. Nature never intended Mr. Helston to make a very good husband, especially to a quiet wife. He thought so long as a woman was silent nothing ailed her, and she wanted nothing. If she did not complain of solitude, solitude, however, continued, could not be irksome to her. If she did not talk and put herself forward, express a partiality for this and aversion to that, she had no partialities or aversions, and it was useless to consult her tastes. He made no pretense of comprehending women or comparing them with men. They were of different, probably a very inferior order of existence. A wife could not be her husband's companion, much less his confidant, much less his stay. His wife, after a year or two, was of no great importance to him in any shape. So when she one day, as he thought suddenly, for he had scarcely noticed her decline, but as others thought gradually, took her leave of him and of life, and there was only a still, beautiful-featured mold of clay left, cold and white in the conjugal couch, he felt his bereavement, who shall say how little, yet perhaps more than he seemed to feel it, for he was not a man from whom grief easily rung tears. His dry-eyed and sober morning scandalized an old housekeeper and likewise a female attendant who had waited upon Mrs. Halston in her sickness, and who perhaps had had opportunities of learning more of the deceased lady's nature, of her capacity for feeling and loving than her husband knew. They gossiped together over the corpse, related anecdotes with embellishments of her lingering decline, and its real or supposed cause. In short they worked each other up into some indignation against the austere little man who sat examining papers in an adjoining room, unconscious of what a probrium he was the object. Mrs. Halston was hardly under the sod when rumors began to be rife in the neighborhood that she had died of a broken heart. These magnified quickly into reports of hard usage, and finally details of harsh treatment on the part of her husband, reports grossly untrue, but not the less eagerly received on that account. Mr. York heard them, partly believed them. Only of course he had no friendly feeling to his successful rival. Though himself a married man now, and united to a woman who seemed a complete contrast to Mary gave in all respects, he could not forget the great disappointment of his life, and when he heard that what would have been so precious to him had been neglected, perhaps abused by another, he conceived for that other a rooted and bitter animosity. Of the nature and strength of this animosity Mr. Halston was but half aware. He neither knew how much York had loved Mary gave, what he had felt on losing her, nor was he conscious of the calamities concerning his treatment of her, familiar to every ear in the neighborhood but his own. He believed political and religious differences alone separated him and Mr. York. Had he known how the case really stood he would hardly have been induced by any persuasion to cross this former rival's threshold. Mr. York did not resume his lecture of Robert Moore. The conversation ere long recommend in a more general form, though still in a somewhat disputative tone. The unquiet state of the country, the various depredations lately committed on mill property in the district, supplied abundant matter for disagreement, especially as each of the three gentlemen present differed more or less in his views on these subjects. Mr. Halston thought the masters aggrieved, the work-people unreasonable. He condemned sweepingly the widespread spirit of disaffection against constituted authorities, the growing indisposition to bear with patience evils he regarded as inevitable. The cures he prescribed were vigorous government interference, strict magisterial vigilance, when necessary prompt military coercion. Mr. York wished to know whether this interference, vigilance and coercion would feed those who were hungry, give work to those who wanted work and whom no man would hire. He scouted the idea of inevitable evils. He said public patience was a camel, on whose back the last atom that could be borne had already been laid, and that resistance was now a duty. The widespread spirit of disaffection against constituted authorities he regarded as the most promising sign of the times. The masters, he allowed, were truly aggrieved, but their main grievance had been heaped upon them by a corrupt, base and bloody government. These were Mr. York's epithets. Madmen like pit, demons like castle-ray, mischievous idiots like Percival were the tyrants, the curses of the country, the destroyers of her trade. It was there infatuated perseverance in an unjustifiable, a hopeless, a ruinous war which had brought the nation to its present pass. It was their monstrously oppressive taxation. It was the infamous orders in council, the originators of which deserved impeachment and the scaffold, if ever public men did, that hung a millstone about England's neck. But where was the use of talking, he demanded? What chance was there of reason being heard in a land that was king-ridden, priest-ridden, peer-ridden, where a lunatic was the nominal monarch, an unprincipled debauchee, the real ruler, where such an insult to common sense as hereditary legislators was tolerated, for such a humbug as a bench of bishops, such an arrogant abuse as pampered, persecuting, established church was endured and venerated, where a standing army was maintained, and a host of lazy parsons, and the popper-families were kept on the fat of the land. Mr. Helston, rising up and putting on his shovel-hat, observed in reply that in the course of his life he had met with two or three instances where sentiments of this sort had been very bravely maintained so long as health, strength, and the worldly prosperity had been the allies of him who professed them. But there came a time, he said, to all men, when the keepers of the house should tremble, when they should be afraid of that which is high and fear should be in the way. And that time was the test of the advocate of anarchy and rebellion, the enemy of religion at order. Air now, he affirmed, he had been called upon to read those prayers our church has provided for the sick by the miserable dying bed of one of her most rancorous foes. He had seen such a one, stricken with remorse, solicitous to discover a place for repentance and unable to find any, though he sought it carefully with tears. He must forewarn, Mr. York, that blasphemy against God and the king was a deadly sin, and that there was such a thing as judgment to come. Mr. York believed fully that there was such a thing as judgment to come. If it were otherwise it would be difficult to imagine how all the scoundrels who seemed triumphant in this world, who broke innocent hearts with impunity, abused unmerited privileges, were a scandal to honorable callings, took the bread out of the mouths of the poor, browbeat the humble, and chuckled meanly to the rich and proud were to be properly paid off in such coin as they had earned. But he added, whenever he got low-spirited about such like goings-on and their seeming success in this mucky lump of a planet, he just reached down to old book, pointing to a great Bible in the bookcase, opened it like at a chance, and he was sure to light up a verse blazing with a blue brimstone load that set all straight. He knew, he said, where some folk were bound for, just as well as if an angel with great white wings had come in over to Dorstone and told him. Sir, said Mr. Halston, collecting all his dignity, sir, the great knowledge of man is to know himself, and the born wither his own steps tend. Aye, aye, you'll recollect, Mr. Halston, that ignorance was carried away from the very gates of heaven, born through the air and thrust in at a door in the side of the hill which led down to hell. For have I forgotten, Mr. York, that vain confidence, not seeing the way before him, fell into a deep pit which was on purpose there made by the Prince of the Grounds to catch vain glorious fools with all, and was dashed to pieces with his fall. Now interposed Mr. Moore, who had hitherto sat a silent but amused spectator of this wordy combat, and in whose indifference to the party politics of the day, as well as to the gossip of the neighborhood, made him an impartial, if apathetic, judge of the merits of such an encounter. You have both sufficiently black-balled each other, and proved how cordially you detest each other, and how wicked you think each other. For my part, my hate is still running in such a strong current against the fellows who have broken my frames, that I have none to spare for my private acquaintance, and still less for such a vague thing as a sect or a government. But really, gentlemen, you both seem very bad by your own showing, worse than I ever suspected you to be. I dare not stay all night with a rebel and a blasphemer like you, York, and I hardly dare ride home with a cruel and tyrannical ecclesiastic like Mr. Halston. I am going, however, Mr. Moore, said the rector sternly, come with me or not, as you please. Nay, he shall not have the choice. He shall go with you, responded York. It's midnight, and past, and I'll have nobody staying up in my house any longer. You men all go!" He rang the bell. Debb, said he to the servant who answered it, clear them folk out of the kitchen and lock the doors and be off to bed. Here's your way, gentlemen," he continued to his guests, and lighting them through the passage he fairly put them out at his front door. They met their party, hurrying out Pell-Mell by the back way. Their horses stood at the gate, they mounted and rode off, Moore laughing at their abrupt dismissal. Halston, deeply indignant they're at. End of Chapter 4. Recording by Ilyse Clawson of Menlo Park, California