Shirley
"The chops are done. Is the punch brewed?"
"There is 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."
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 host, 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 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 but little time at 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 a spectator become aware of this advantage till he
has examined him 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, and 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 but half a Briton, and scarcely that. He came of
a foreign ancestry by the mother's side, and was himself born and partly
reared on a 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 unapt to attach himself to parties, to sects, even to climes and
customs; it is not impossible that he had a 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 Gérard Moore, to the exclusion of
philanthropic consideration for general interests, with which he
regarded the said Gérard Moore as in a great measure disconnected. Trade
was Mr. Moore's hereditary calling: the Gérards 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;
disastrous 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 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 in Antwerp, Robert Moore, had married Hortense
Gérard, with the prospect of his bride inheriting her father Constantine
Gérard'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 fallen house of Gérard and Moore on a
scale at least equal to its former greatness. It was even supposed that
he took by-past circumstances much to heart; and 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 in view, it was not in
his power to employ great means for its attainment. He was obliged to be
content with the day of small things. When he came to Yorkshire,
he--whose ancestors had owned warehouses in this seaport, and factories
in that inland town, had possessed their town-house and their
country-seat--saw no way open to him but to rent a cloth-mill in an
out-of-the-way nook of an out-of-the-way district; to take a cottage
adjoining it for his residence, and to add to his possessions, as
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
Fieldhead estate, then the property of a minor.
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
possessed 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 become inefficient and out of date, he
had from the first evinced the strongest contempt for all its
arrangements and appointments. His aim had been to effect a 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. "Forward" 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
neighbourhood, he did not sufficiently care when the new inventions
threw the old workpeople 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 the history of the 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. National honour was become 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 would receive 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
manufactures 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, overgoaded, stretched the hand
of fraternity to sedition. 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 burnt 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 elude detection; newspaper
paragraphs were written on the subject, and there the thing stopped. As
to the sufferers, whose sole inheritance was labour, 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 Briarfield, with which we have at present to
do, Hollow's Mill was the place held most abominable; Gérard Moore, in
his double character of semi-foreigner and thorough-going progressist,
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 an 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 frame-laden wagons.
Malone's coming and company were, it may be, most unwelcome to him. He
would have preferred sitting alone; for he liked a silent, sombre,
unsafe solitude. His watchman's musket would have been company enough
for him; the full-flowing beck in 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 the
punch, when suddenly that steady gray eye changed, as if another vision
came between it and Malone. Moore raised his hand.
"Chut!" he said in his French fashion, as Malone made a noise with his
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; its flow almost seemed a flood in the utter silence. Moore's
ear, however, caught another sound, very distant but yet dissimilar,
broken and rugged--in short, a sound of heavy wheels crunching a stony
road. He returned to the counting-house and lit a lantern, with which he
walked down the mill-yard, and proceeded to open the gates. The big
wagons were coming on; the dray-horses' huge hoofs were heard splashing
in the mud and water. Moore hailed them.
"Hey, Joe Scott! Is all right?"
Probably Joe Scott was yet at too great a distance to hear the inquiry.
He did not answer it.
"Is all right, I say?" again asked Moore, when the elephant-like
leader's nose almost touched his.
Some one jumped out from the foremost wagon into the road; a voice cried
aloud, "Ay, ay, divil; all's raight! We've smashed 'em."
And there was a run. The wagons stood still; they were now deserted.
"Joe Scott!" No Joe Scott answered. "Murgatroyd! Pighills! Sykes!" No
reply. Mr. Moore lifted his lantern and looked into the vehicles. There
was neither man nor machinery; they were empty and abandoned.