Shirley
the eve of marriage with this miss and that; but I suppose it is none of
it true?"
"You may well suppose that. I think I am not in a position to be
dreaming of marriage. Marriage! I cannot bear the word; it sounds so
silly and utopian. I have settled it decidedly that marriage and love
are superfluities, intended only for the rich, who live at ease, and
have no need to take thought for the morrow; or desperations--the last
and reckless joy of the deeply wretched, who never hope to rise out of
the slough of their utter poverty."
"I should not think so if I were circumstanced as you are. I should
think I could very likely get a wife with a few thousands, who would
suit both me and my affairs."
"I wonder where?"
"Would you try if you had a chance?"
"I don't know. It depends on--in short, it depends on many things."
"Would you take an old woman?"
"I'd rather break stones on the road."
"So would I. Would you take an ugly one?"
"Bah! I hate ugliness and delight in beauty. My eyes and heart, Yorke,
take pleasure in a sweet, young, fair face, as they are repelled by a
grim, rugged, meagre one. Soft delicate lines and hues please, harsh
ones prejudice me. I won't have an ugly wife."
"Not if she were rich?"
"Not if she were dressed in gems. I could not love--I could not fancy--I
could not endure her. My taste must have satisfaction, or disgust would
break out in despotism, or worse--freeze to utter iciness."
"What! Bob, if you married an honest, good-natured, and wealthy lass,
though a little hard-favoured, couldn't you put up with the high
cheek-bones, the rather wide mouth, and reddish hair?"
"I'll never try, I tell you. Grace at least I _will_ have, and youth and
symmetry--yes, and what I call beauty."
"And poverty, and a nursery full of bairns you can neither clothe nor
feed, and very soon an anxious, faded mother; and then bankruptcy,
discredit--a life-long struggle."
"Let me alone, Yorke."
"If you are romantic, Robert, and especially if you are already in love,
it is of no use talking."
"I am not romantic. I am stripped of romance as bare as the white
tenters in that field are of cloth."
"Always use such figures of speech, lad; I can understand them. And
there is no love affair to disturb your judgment?"
"I thought I had said enough on that subject before. Love for me?
Stuff!"
"Well, then, if you are sound both in heart and head, there is no
reason why you should not profit by a good chance if it offers;
therefore, wait and see."
"You are quite oracular, Yorke."
"I think I am a bit i' that line. I promise ye naught and I advise ye
naught; but I bid ye keep your heart up, and be guided by
circumstances."
"My namesake the physician's almanac could not speak more guardedly."
"In the meantime, I care naught about ye, Robert Moore: ye are nothing
akin to me or mine, and whether ye lose or find a fortune it maks no
difference to me. Go home, now. It has stricken ten. Miss Hortense will
be wondering where ye are."
CHAPTER X.
OLD MAIDS.
Time wore on, and spring matured. The surface of England began to look
pleasant: her fields grew green, her hills fresh, her gardens blooming;
but at heart she was no better. Still her poor were wretched, still
their employers were harassed. Commerce, in some of its branches, seemed
threatened with paralysis, for the war continued; England's blood was
shed and her wealth lavished--all, it seemed, to attain most inadequate
ends. Some tidings there were indeed occasionally of successes in the
Peninsula, but these came in slowly; long intervals occurred between, in
which no note was heard but the insolent self-felicitations of Bonaparte
on his continued triumphs. Those who suffered from the results of the
war felt this tedious, and, as they thought, hopeless struggle against
what their fears or their interests taught them to regard as an
invincible power, most insufferable. They demanded peace on any terms.
Men like Yorke and Moore--and there were thousands whom the war placed
where it placed them, shuddering on the verge of bankruptcy--insisted on
peace with the energy of desperation.
They held meetings, they made speeches, they got up petitions to extort
this boon; on what terms it was made they cared not.
All men, taken singly, are more or less selfish; and taken in bodies,
they are intensely so. The British merchant is no exception to this
rule: the mercantile classes illustrate it strikingly. These classes
certainly think too exclusively of making money; they are too oblivious
of every national consideration but that of extending England's--that
is, their own--commerce. Chivalrous feeling, disinterestedness, pride in
honour, is too dead in their hearts. A land ruled by them alone would
too often make ignominious submission--not at all from the motives
Christ teaches, but rather from those Mammon instils. During the late
war, the tradesmen of England would have endured buffets from the
French on the right cheek and on the left; their cloak they would have
given to Napoleon, and then have politely offered him their coat also,
nor would they have withheld their waistcoat if urged; they would have
prayed permission only to retain their one other garment, for the sake
of the purse in its pocket. Not one spark of spirit, not one symptom of
resistance, would they have shown till the hand of the Corsican bandit
had grasped that beloved purse; _then_, perhaps, transfigured at once
into British bulldogs, they would have sprung at the robber's throat,
and there they would have fastened, and there hung, inveterate,
insatiable, till the treasure had been restored. Tradesmen, when they
speak against war, always profess to hate it because it is a bloody and
barbarous proceeding. You would think, to hear them talk, that they are
peculiarly civilized--especially gentle and kindly of disposition to
their fellow-men. This is not the case. Many of them are extremely
narrow and cold-hearted; have no good feeling for any class but their
own; are distant, even hostile, to all others; call them useless; seem
to question their right to exist; seem to grudge them the very air they
breathe, and to think the circumstance of their eating, drinking, and
living in decent houses quite unjustifiable. They do not know what
others do in the way of helping, pleasing, or teaching their race; they
will not trouble themselves to inquire. Whoever is not in trade is
accused of eating the bread of idleness, of passing a useless existence.
Long may it be ere England really becomes a nation of shop-keepers!
We have already said that Moore was no self-sacrificing patriot, and we
have also explained what circumstances rendered him specially prone to
confine his attention and efforts to the furtherance of his individual
interest; accordingly, when he felt himself urged a second time to the
brink of ruin, none struggled harder than he against the influences
which would have thrust him over. What he _could_ do towards stirring
agitation in the north against the war he did, and he instigated others
whose money and connections gave them more power than he possessed.
Sometimes, by flashes, he felt there was little reason in the demands
his party made on Government. When he heard of all Europe threatened by
Bonaparte, and of all Europe arming to resist him; when he saw Russia
menaced, and beheld Russia rising, incensed and stern, to defend her
frozen soil, her wild provinces of serfs, her dark native despotism,
from the tread, the yoke, the tyranny of a foreign victor--he knew that
England, a free realm, could not _then_ depute her sons to make
concessions and propose terms to the unjust, grasping French leader.
When news came from time to time of the movements of that MAN then
representing England in the Peninsula, of his advance from success to
success--that advance so deliberate but so unswerving, so circumspect
but so certain, so "unhasting" but so "unresting;" when he read Lord
Wellington's own dispatches in the columns of the newspapers, documents
written by modesty to the dictation of truth--Moore confessed at heart
that a power was with the troops of Britain, of that vigilant, enduring,
genuine, unostentatious sort, which must win victory to the side it led,
in the end. In the end! But that end, he thought, was yet far off; and
meantime he, Moore, as an individual, would be crushed, his hopes ground
to dust. It was himself he had to care for, his hopes he had to pursue;
and he would fulfil his destiny.
He fulfilled it so vigorously that ere long he came to a decisive
rupture with his old Tory friend the rector. They quarrelled at a public
meeting, and afterwards exchanged some pungent letters in the
newspapers. Mr. Helstone denounced Moore as a Jacobin, ceased to see
him, would not even speak to him when they met. He intimated also to his
niece, very distinctly, that her communications with Hollow's Cottage
must for the present cease; she must give up taking French lessons. The
language, he observed, was a bad and frivolous one at the best, and most
of the works it boasted were bad and frivolous, highly injurious in
their tendency to weak female minds. He wondered (he remarked
parenthetically) what noodle first made it the fashion to teach women
French. Nothing was more improper for them. It was like feeding a
rickety child on chalk and water gruel. Caroline must give it up, and
give up her cousins too. They were dangerous people.
Mr. Helstone quite expected opposition to this order; he expected tears.
Seldom did he trouble himself about Caroline's movements, but a vague
idea possessed him that she was fond of going to Hollow's Cottage; also
he suspected that she liked Robert Moore's occasional presence at the
rectory. The Cossack had perceived that whereas if Malone stepped in of
an evening to make himself sociable and charming, by pinching the ears
of an aged black cat, which usually shared with Miss Helstone's feet the
accommodation of her footstool, or by borrowing a fowling-piece, and
banging away at a tool shed door in the garden while enough of daylight
remained to show that conspicuous mark, keeping the passage and
sitting-room doors meantime uncomfortably open for the convenience of
running in and out to announce his failures and successes with noisy
_brusquerie_--he had observed that under such entertaining circumstances
Caroline had a trick of disappearing, tripping noiselessly upstairs, and
remaining invisible till called down to supper. On the other hand, when
Robert Moore was the guest, though he elicited no vivacities from the
cat, did nothing to it, indeed, beyond occasionally coaxing it from the
stool to his knee, and there letting it purr, climb to his shoulder, and
rub its head against his cheek; though there was no ear-splitting
cracking off of firearms, no diffusion of sulphurous gunpowder perfume,
no noise, no boasting during his stay--that still Caroline sat in the
room, and seemed to find wondrous content in the stitching of Jew-basket
pin-cushions and the knitting of missionary-basket socks.
She was very quiet, and Robert paid her little attention, scarcely ever
addressing his discourse to her; but Mr. Helstone, not being one of
those elderly gentlemen who are easily blinded--on the contrary, finding
himself on all occasions extremely wide-awake--had watched them when
they bade each other good-night. He had just seen their eyes meet
once--only once. Some natures would have taken pleasure in the glance
then surprised, because there was no harm and some delight in it. It was
by no means a glance of mutual intelligence, for mutual love secrets
existed not between them. There was nothing then of craft and
concealment to offend: only Mr. Moore's eyes, looking into Caroline's,