Shirley
marriages. Where affection is reciprocal and sincere, and minds are
harmonious, marriage _must_ be happy."
"It is never wholly happy. Two people can never literally be as one.
There is, perhaps, a possibility of content under peculiar
circumstances, such as are seldom combined; but it is as well not to run
the risk--you may make fatal mistakes. Be satisfied, my dear. Let all
the single be satisfied with their freedom."
"You echo my uncle's words!" exclaimed Caroline, in a tone of dismay.
"You speak like Mrs. Yorke in her most gloomy moments, like Miss Mann
when she is most sourly and hypochondriacally disposed. This is
terrible!"
"No, it is only true. O child, you have only lived the pleasant morning
time of life; the hot, weary noon, the sad evening, the sunless night,
are yet to come for you. Mr. Helstone, you say, talks as I talk; and I
wonder how Mrs. Matthewson Helstone would have talked had she been
living. She died! she died!"
"And, alas! my own mother and father----" exclaimed Caroline, struck by
a sombre recollection.
"What of them?"
"Did I never tell you that they were separated?"
"I have heard it."
"They must, then, have been very miserable."
"You see all _facts_ go to prove what I say."
"In this case there ought to be no such thing as marriage."
"There ought, my dear, were it only to prove that this life is a mere
state of probation, wherein neither rest nor recompense is to be
vouchsafed."
"But your own marriage, Mrs. Pryor?"
Mrs. Pryor shrank and shuddered as if a rude finger had pressed a naked
nerve. Caroline felt she had touched what would not bear the slightest
contact.
"My marriage was unhappy," said the lady, summoning courage at last;
"but yet----" She hesitated.
"But yet," suggested Caroline, "not immitigably wretched?"
"Not in its results, at least. No," she added, in a softer tone; "God
mingles something of the balm of mercy even in vials of the most
corrosive woe. He can so turn events that from the very same blind, rash
act whence sprang the curse of half our life may flow the blessing of
the remainder. Then I am of a peculiar disposition--I own that--far from
facile, without address, in some points eccentric. I ought never to have
married. Mine is not the nature easily to find a duplicate or likely to
assimilate with a contrast. I was quite aware of my own ineligibility;
and if I had not been so miserable as a governess, I never should have
married; and then----"
Caroline's eyes asked her to proceed. They entreated her to break the
thick cloud of despair which her previous words had seemed to spread
over life.
"And then, my dear, Mr.--that is, the gentleman I married--was, perhaps,
rather an exceptional than an average character. I hope, at least, the
experience of few has been such as mine was, or that few have felt their
sufferings as I felt mine. They nearly shook my mind; relief was so
hopeless, redress so unattainable. But, my dear, I do not wish to
dishearten; I only wish to warn you, and to prove that the single should
not be too anxious to change their state, as they may change for the
worse."
"Thank you, my dear madam. I quite understand your kind intentions, but
there is no fear of my falling into the error to which you allude. I, at
least, have no thoughts of marriage, and for that reason I want to make
myself a position by some other means."
"My dear, listen to me. On what I am going to say I have carefully
deliberated, having, indeed, revolved the subject in my thoughts ever
since you first mentioned your wish to obtain a situation. You know I at
present reside with Miss Keeldar in the capacity of companion. Should
she marry (and that she _will_ marry ere long many circumstances induce
me to conclude), I shall cease to be necessary to her in that capacity.
I must tell you that I possess a small independency, arising partly from
my own savings, and partly from a legacy left me some years since.
Whenever I leave Fieldhead I shall take a house of my own. I could not
endure to live in solitude. I have no relations whom I care to invite to
close intimacy; for, as you must have observed, and as I have already
avowed, my habits and tastes have their peculiarities. To you, my dear,
I need not say I am attached; with you I am happier than I have ever
been with any living thing" (this was said with marked emphasis). "Your
society I should esteem a very dear privilege--an inestimable privilege,
a comfort, a blessing. You shall come to me, then. Caroline, do you
refuse me? I hope you can love me?"
And with these two abrupt questions she stopped.
"Indeed, I _do_ love you," was the reply. "I should like to live with
you. But you are too kind."
"All I have," went on Mrs. Pryor, "I would leave to you. You should be
provided for. But never again say I am _too kind_. You pierce my heart,
child!"
"But, my dear madam--this generosity--I have no claim----"
"Hush! you must not talk about it. There are some things we cannot bear
to hear. Oh! it is late to begin, but I may yet live a few years. I can
never wipe out the past, but perhaps a brief space in the future may
yet be mine."
Mrs. Pryor seemed deeply agitated. Large tears trembled in her eyes and
rolled down her cheeks. Caroline kissed her, in her gentle, caressing
way, saying softly, "I love you dearly. Don't cry."
But the lady's whole frame seemed shaken. She sat down, bent her head to
her knee, and wept aloud. Nothing could console her till the inward
storm had had its way. At last the agony subsided of itself.
"Poor thing!" she murmured, returning Caroline's kiss, "poor lonely
lamb! But come," she added abruptly--"come; we must go home."
For a short distance Mrs. Pryor walked very fast. By degrees, however,
she calmed down to her wonted manner, fell into her usual characteristic
pace--a peculiar one, like all her movements--and by the time they
reached Fieldhead she had re-entered into herself. The outside was, as
usual, still and shy.
CHAPTER XXII.
TWO LIVES.
Only half of Moore's activity and resolution had been seen in his
defence of the mill; he showed the other half (and a terrible half it
was) in the indefatigable, the relentless assiduity with which he
pursued the leaders of the riot. The mob, the mere followers, he let
alone. Perhaps an innate sense of justice told him that men misled by
false counsel and goaded by privations are not fit objects of vengeance,
and that he who would visit an even violent act on the bent head of
suffering is a tyrant, not a judge. At all events, though he knew many
of the number, having recognized them during the latter part of the
attack when day began to dawn, he let them daily pass him on street and
road without notice or threat.
The leaders he did not know. They were strangers--emissaries from the
large towns. Most of these were not members of the operative class. They
were chiefly "down-draughts," bankrupts, men always in debt and often in
drink, men who had nothing to lose, and much, in the way of character,
cash, and cleanliness, to gain. These persons Moore hunted like any
sleuth-hound, and well he liked the occupation. Its excitement was of a
kind pleasant to his nature. He liked it better than making cloth.
His horse must have hated these times, for it was ridden both hard and
often. He almost lived on the road, and the fresh air was as welcome to
his lungs as the policeman's quest to his mood; he preferred it to the
steam of dye-houses. The magistrates of the district must have dreaded
him. They were slow, timid men; he liked both to frighten and to rouse
them. He liked to force them to betray a certain fear, which made them
alike falter in resolve and recoil in action--the fear, simply, of
assassination. This, indeed, was the dread which had hitherto hampered
every manufacturer and almost every public man in the district. Helstone
alone had ever repelled it. The old Cossack knew well he might be shot.
He knew there was risk; but such death had for his nerves no terrors. It
would have been his chosen, might he have had a choice.
Moore likewise knew his danger. The result was an unquenchable scorn of
the quarter whence such danger was to be apprehended. The consciousness
that he hunted assassins was the spur in his high-mettled temper's
flank. As for fear, he was too proud, too hard-natured (if you will),
too phlegmatic a man to fear. Many a time he rode belated over the
moors, moonlit or moonless as the case might be, with feelings far more
elate, faculties far better refreshed, than when safety and stagnation
environed him in the counting-house. Four was the number of the leaders
to be accounted for. Two, in the course of a fortnight, were brought to
bay near Stilbro'; the remaining two it was necessary to seek farther
off. Their haunts were supposed to lie near Birmingham.
Meantime the clothier did not neglect his battered mill. Its reparation
was esteemed a light task, carpenters' and glaziers' work alone being
needed. The rioters not having succeeded in effecting an entrance, his
grim metal darlings--the machines--had escaped damage.
Whether during this busy life--whether while stern justice and exacting
business claimed his energies and harassed his thoughts--he now and then
gave one moment, dedicated one effort, to keep alive gentler fires than
those which smoulder in the fane of Nemesis, it was not easy to
discover. He seldom went near Fieldhead; if he did, his visits were
brief. If he called at the rectory, it was only to hold conferences with
the rector in his study. He maintained his rigid course very steadily.
Meantime the history of the year continued troubled. There was no lull
in the tempest of war; her long hurricane still swept the Continent.
There was not the faintest sign of serene weather, no opening amid "the
clouds of battle-dust and smoke," no fall of pure dews genial to the
olive, no cessation of the red rain which nourishes the baleful and
glorious laurel. Meantime, Ruin had her sappers and miners at work under
Moore's feet, and whether he rode or walked, whether he only crossed his
counting-house hearth or galloped over sullen Rushedge, he was aware of
a hollow echo, and felt the ground shake to his tread.
While the summer thus passed with Moore, how did it lapse with Shirley
and Caroline? Let us first visit the heiress. How does she look? Like a
love-lorn maiden, pale and pining for a neglectful swain? Does she sit
the day long bent over some sedentary task? Has she for ever a book in
her hand, or sewing on her knee, and eyes only for that, and words for
nothing, and thoughts unspoken?
By no means. Shirley is all right. If her wistful cast of physiognomy is
not gone, no more is her careless smile. She keeps her dark old
manor-house light and bright with her cheery presence. The gallery and
the low-ceiled chambers that open into it have learned lively echoes
from her voice; the dim entrance-hall, with its one window, has grown
pleasantly accustomed to the frequent rustle of a silk dress, as its
wearer sweeps across from room to room, now carrying flowers to the
barbarous peach-bloom salon, now entering the dining-room to open its
casements and let in the scent of mignonette and sweet-briar, anon
bringing plants from the staircase window to place in the sun at the
open porch door.
She takes her sewing occasionally; but, by some fatality, she is doomed
never to sit steadily at it for above five minutes at a time. Her
thimble is scarcely fitted on, her needle scarce threaded, when a sudden
thought calls her upstairs. Perhaps she goes to seek some
just-then-remembered old ivory-backed needle-book or older china-topped
work-box, quite unneeded, but which seems at the moment indispensable;
perhaps to arrange her hair, or a drawer which she recollects to have