Shirley
she offered me tea. It happened that she was called out a minute by Mrs.
Gill. I passed into the moonlit hall, with the design of getting a word
as she returned; nor in this did I fail.
"'Miss Keeldar, stay one instant,' said I, meeting her.
"'Why? the hall is too cold.'
"'It is not cold for me; at my side it should not be cold for you.'
"'But I shiver.'
"'With fear, I believe. What makes you fear me? You are quiet and
distant. Why?'
"'I may well fear what looks like a great dark goblin meeting me in the
moonlight.'
"'_Do not--do not_ pass! Stay with me awhile. Let us exchange a few
quiet words. It is three days since I spoke to you alone. Such changes
are cruel.'
"'I have no wish to be cruel,' she responded, softly enough. Indeed
there was softness in her whole deportment--in her face, in her voice;
but there was also reserve, and an air fleeting, evanishing, intangible.
"'You certainly give me pain,' said I. 'It is hardly a week since you
called me your future husband and treated me as such. Now I am once more
the tutor for you. I am addressed as Mr. Moore and sir. Your lips have
forgotten Louis.'
"'No, Louis, no. It is an easy, liquid name--not soon forgotten.'
"'Be cordial to Louis, then; approach him--let him approach.'
"'I _am_ cordial,' said she, hovering aloof like a white shadow.
"'Your voice is very sweet and very low,' I answered, quietly advancing.
'You seem subdued, but still startled.'
"'No--quite calm, and afraid of nothing,' she assured me.
"'Of nothing but your votary.'
"I bent a knee to the flags at her feet.
"'You see I am in a new world, Mr. Moore. I don't know myself; I don't
know you. But rise. When you do so I feel troubled and disturbed.'
"I obeyed. It would not have suited me to retain that attitude long. I
courted serenity and confidence for her, and not vainly. She trusted and
clung to me again.
"'Now, Shirley,' I said, 'you can conceive I am far from happy in my
present uncertain, unsettled state.'
"'Oh yes, you _are_ happy!' she cried hastily. 'You don't know how happy
you are. Any change will be for the worse.'
"'Happy or not, I cannot bear to go on so much longer. You are too
generous to require it.'
"'Be reasonable, Louis; be patient! I like you because you are patient.'
"'Like me no longer, then; love me instead. Fix our marriage day; think
of it to-night, and decide.'
"She breathed a murmur, inarticulate yet expressive; darted, or melted,
from my arms--and I lost her."
CHAPTER XXXVII.
THE WINDING-UP.
Yes, reader, we must settle accounts now. I have only briefly to narrate
the final fates of some of the personages whose acquaintance we have
made in this narrative, and then you and I must shake hands, and for the
present separate.
Let us turn to the curates--to the much-loved, though long-neglected.
Come forward, modest merit! Malone, I see, promptly answers the
invocation. He knows his own description when he hears it.
No, Peter Augustus; we can have nothing to say to you. It won't do.
Impossible to trust ourselves with the touching tale of your deeds and
destinies. Are you not aware, Peter, that a discriminating public has
its crotchets; that the unvarnished truth does not answer; that plain
facts will not digest? Do you not know that the squeak of the real pig
is no more relished now than it was in days of yore? Were I to give the
catastrophe of your life and conversation, the public would sweep off in
shrieking hysterics, and there would be a wild cry for sal-volatile and
burnt feathers. "Impossible!" would be pronounced here; "untrue!" would
be responded there; "inartistic!" would be solemnly decided. Note well.
Whenever you present the actual, simple truth, it is, somehow, always
denounced as a lie--they disown it, cast it off, throw it on the parish;
whereas the product of your own imagination, the mere figment, the sheer
fiction, is adopted, petted, termed pretty, proper, sweetly natural--the
little, spurious wretch gets all the comfits, the honest, lawful
bantling all the cuffs. Such is the way of the world, Peter; and as you
are the legitimate urchin, rude, unwashed, and naughty, you must stand
down.
Make way for Mr. Sweeting.
Here he comes, with his lady on his arm--the most splendid and the
weightiest woman in Yorkshire--Mrs. Sweeting, formerly Miss Dora Sykes.
They were married under the happiest auspices, Mr. Sweeting having been
just inducted to a comfortable living, and Mr. Sykes being in
circumstances to give Dora a handsome portion. They lived long and
happily together, beloved by their parishioners and by a numerous circle
of friends.
There! I think the varnish has been put on very nicely.
Advance, Mr. Donne.
This gentleman turned out admirably--far better than either you or I
could possibly have expected, reader. He, too, married a most sensible,
quiet, lady-like little woman. The match was the making of him. He
became an exemplary domestic character, and a truly active parish priest
(as a pastor he, to his dying day, conscientiously refused to act). The
outside of the cup and platter he burnished up with the best
polishing-powder; the furniture of the altar and temple he looked after
with the zeal of an upholsterer, the care of a cabinet-maker. His little
school, his little church, his little parsonage, all owed their erection
to him; and they did him credit. Each was a model in its way. If
uniformity and taste in architecture had been the same thing as
consistency and earnestness in religion, what a shepherd of a Christian
flock Mr. Donne would have made! There was one art in the mastery of
which nothing mortal ever surpassed Mr. Donne: it was that of begging.
By his own unassisted efforts he begged all the money for all his
erections. In this matter he had a grasp of plan, a scope of action
quite unique. He begged of high and low--of the shoeless cottage brat
and the coroneted duke. He sent out begging-letters far and wide--to old
Queen Charlotte, to the princesses her daughters, to her sons the royal
dukes, to the Prince Regent, to Lord Castlereagh, to every member of the
ministry then in office; and, what is more remarkable, he screwed
something out of every one of these personages. It is on record that he
got five pounds from the close-fisted old lady Queen Charlotte, and two
guineas from the royal profligate her eldest son. When Mr. Donne set out
on begging expeditions, he armed himself in a complete suit of brazen
mail. That you had given a hundred pounds yesterday was with him no
reason why you should not give two hundred to-day. He would tell you so
to your face, and, ten to one, get the money out of you. People gave to
get rid of him. After all, he did some good with the cash. He was
useful in his day and generation.
Perhaps I ought to remark that on the premature and sudden vanishing of
Mr. Malone from the stage of Briarfield parish (you cannot know how it
happened, reader; your curiosity must be robbed to pay your elegant love
of the pretty and pleasing), there came as his successor another Irish
curate, Mr. Macarthey. I am happy to be able to inform you, _with
truth_, that this gentleman did as much credit to his country as Malone
had done it discredit. He proved himself as decent, decorous, and
conscientious as Peter was rampant, boisterous, and---- This last
epithet I choose to suppress, because it would let the cat out of the
bag. He laboured faithfully in the parish. The schools, both Sunday and
day schools, flourished under his sway like green bay trees. Being
human, of course he had his faults. These, however, were proper,
steady-going, clerical faults--what many would call virtues. The
circumstance of finding himself invited to tea with a Dissenter would
unhinge him for a week. The spectacle of a Quaker wearing his hat in the
church, the thought of an unbaptized fellow-creature being interred with
Christian rites--these things could make strange havoc in Mr.
Macarthey's physical and mental economy. Otherwise he was sane and
rational, diligent and charitable.
I doubt not a justice-loving public will have remarked, ere this, that I
have thus far shown a criminal remissness in pursuing, catching, and
bringing to condign punishment the would-be assassin of Mr. Robert
Moore. Here was a fine opening to lead my willing readers a dance, at
once decorous and exciting--a dance of law and gospel, of the dungeon,
the dock, and the "dead-thraw." You might have liked it, reader, but _I_
should not. I and my subject would presently have quarrelled, and then I
should have broken down. I was happy to find that facts perfectly
exonerated me from the attempt. The murderer was never punished, for the
good reason that he was never caught--the result of the further
circumstance that he was never pursued. The magistrates made a
shuffling, as if they were going to rise and do valiant things; but
since Moore himself, instead of urging and leading them as heretofore,
lay still on his little cottage-couch, laughing in his sleeve, and
sneering with every feature of his pale, foreign face, they considered
better of it, and after fulfilling certain indispensable forms,
prudently resolved to let the matter quietly drop, which they did.
Mr. Moore knew who had shot him, and all Briarfield knew. It was no
other than Michael Hartley, the half-crazed weaver once before alluded
to, a frantic Antinomian in religion, and a mad leveller in politics.
The poor soul died of delirium tremens a year after the attempt on
Moore, and Robert gave his wretched widow a guinea to bury him.
* * * * *
The winter is over and gone; spring has followed with beamy and shadowy,
with flowery and showery flight. We are now in the heart of summer--in
mid-June--the June of 1812.
It is burning weather. The air is deep azure and red gold. It fits the
time; it fits the age; it fits the present spirit of the nations. The
nineteenth century wantons in its giant adolescence; the Titan boy
uproots mountains in his game, and hurls rocks in his wild sport. This
summer Bonaparte is in the saddle; he and his host scour Russian
deserts. He has with him Frenchmen and Poles, Italians and children of
the Rhine, six hundred thousand strong. He marches on old Moscow. Under
old Moscow's walls the rude Cossack waits him. Barbarian stoic! he waits
without fear of the boundless ruin rolling on. He puts his trust in a
snow-cloud; the wilderness, the wind, and the hail-storm are his refuge;
his allies are the elements--air, fire, water. And what are these? Three
terrible archangels ever stationed before the throne of Jehovah. They
stand clothed in white, girdled with golden girdles; they uplift vials,
brimming with the wrath of God. Their time is the day of vengeance;
their signal, the word of the Lord of hosts, "thundering with the voice
of His excellency."
"Hast thou entered into the treasures of the snow? or hast thou seen the
treasures of the hail, which I have reserved against the time of
trouble, against the day of battle and war?
"Go your ways. Pour out the vials of the wrath of God upon the earth."
It is done. The earth is scorched with fire; the sea becomes "as the
blood of a dead man;" the islands flee away; the mountains are not
found.
In this year, Lord Wellington assumed the reins in Spain. They made him
generalissimo, for their own salvation's sake. In this year he took
Badajos, he fought the field of Vittoria, he captured Pampeluna, he
stormed San Sebastian; in this year he won Salamanca.
Men of Manchester, I beg your pardon for this slight _résumé_ of warlike
facts, but it is of no consequence. Lord Wellington is, for you, only a
decayed old gentleman now. I rather think some of you have called him a