Shirley
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. Yorke 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-Yorkshire look. These points
seem frivolous, unlikely to influence a character like Yorke'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 Moore's; he had heard, in Parisian
cafés 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 drew them together was
that of Mr. Yorke 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 guest now present in Mr. Yorke's parlour, Mr. Helstone,
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. Yorke, 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 belles 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. Helstone, at that time curate of Briarfield, 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 to the commission of matrimony, and which
Miss Cave did not find in any of the young wool-staplers, her other
adorers. Mr. Helstone neither had, nor professed to have, Mr. Yorke'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. Helstone 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,
an aversion to that, she had no partialities or aversions, and it was
useless to consult her tastes. He made no pretence of comprehending
women, or comparing them with men. They were a different, probably a
very inferior, order of existence. A wife could not be her husband's
companion, much less his confidante, much less his stay. _His_ wife,
after a year or two, was of no great importance to him in any shape; and
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 mould 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 wrung tears.
His dry-eyed and sober mourning scandalized an old housekeeper, and
likewise a female attendant, who had waited upon Mrs. Helstone 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 to some indignation
against the austere little man, who sat examining papers in an adjoining
room, unconscious of what opprobrium he was the object.
Mrs. Helstone was hardly under the sod when rumours began to be rife in
the neighbourhood 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. Yorke heard them, partly
believed them. Already, 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 Cave 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. Helstone was but half
aware. He neither knew how much Yorke had loved Mary Cave, what he had
felt on losing her, nor was he conscious of the calumnies concerning his
treatment of her, familiar to every ear in the neighbourhood but his
own. He believed political and religious differences alone separated him
and Mr. Yorke. Had he known how the case really stood, he would hardly
have been induced by any persuasion to cross his former rival's
threshold.
* * * * *
Mr. Yorke did not resume his lecture of Robert Moore. The conversation
ere long recommenced 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. Helstone thought the masters aggrieved, the workpeople 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. Yorke 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 grievances had
been heaped on them by a "corrupt, base, and bloody" government (these
were Mr. Yorke's epithets). Madmen like Pitt, demons like Castlereagh,
mischievous idiots like Perceval, were the tyrants, the curses of the
country, the destroyers of her trade. It was their 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; where such a humbug as a bench of
bishops, such an arrogant abuse as a pampered, persecuting established
church was endured and venerated; where a standing army was maintained,
and a host of lazy parsons and their pauper families were kept on the
fat of the land?"
Mr. Helstone, 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 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 and order. Ere 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. Yorke that blasphemy against God and the king was a
deadly sin, and that there was such a thing as 'judgment to come.'"
Mr. Yorke "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
honourable callings, took the bread out of the mouths of the poor,
browbeat the humble, and truckled 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 t'
owd book" (pointing to a great Bible in the bookcase), "opened it like
at a chance, and he was sure to light of a verse blazing wi' a blue
brimstone low that set all straight. He knew," he said, "where some folk
war bound for, just as weel as if an angel wi' great white wings had