Shirley
escaped. "No doubt," Mr. Yorke observed, "it was done in revenge. It was
a pity ill-will had ever been raised; but that could not be helped now."
"He is my only brother," said Louis, as Shirley returned the note. "I
cannot hear unmoved that ruffians have laid in wait for him, and shot
him down, like some wild beast from behind a wall."
"Be comforted; be hopeful. He will get better--I know he will."
Shirley, solicitous to soothe, held her hand over Mr. Moore's as it lay
on the arm of the chair. She just touched it lightly, scarce palpably.
"Well, give me your hand," he said. "It will be for the first time; it
is in a moment of calamity. Give it me."
Awaiting neither consent nor refusal, he took what he asked.
"I am going to Briarmains now," he went on. "I want you to step over to
the rectory and tell Caroline Helstone what has happened. Will you do
this? She will hear it best from you."
"Immediately," said Shirley, with docile promptitude. "Ought I to say
that there is no danger?"
"Say so."
"You will come back soon, and let me know more?"
"I will either come or write."
"Trust me for watching over Caroline. I will communicate with your
sister too; but doubtless she is already with Robert?"
"Doubtless, or will be soon. Good-morning now."
"You will bear up, come what may."
"We shall see that."
Shirley's fingers were obliged to withdraw from the tutor's. Louis was
obliged to relinquish that hand folded, clasped, hidden in his own.
"I thought I should have had to support her," he said, as he walked
towards Briarmains, "and it is she who has made me strong. That look of
pity, that gentle touch! No down was ever softer, no elixir more potent!
It lay like a snowflake; it thrilled like lightning. A thousand times I
have longed to possess that hand--to have it in mine. I _have_ possessed
it; for five minutes I held it. Her fingers and mine can never be
strangers more. Having met once they must meet again."
CHAPTER XXXII.
THE SCHOOLBOY AND THE WOOD-NYMPH.
Briarmains being nearer than the Hollow, Mr. Yorke had conveyed his
young comrade there. He had seen him laid in the best bed of the house,
as carefully as if he had been one of his own sons. The sight of his
blood, welling from the treacherously inflicted wound, made him indeed
the son of the Yorkshire gentleman's heart. The spectacle of the sudden
event, of the tall, straight shape prostrated in its pride across the
road, of the fine southern head laid low in the dust, of that youth in
prime flung at once before him pallid, lifeless, helpless--this was the
very combination of circumstances to win for the victim Mr. Yorke's
liveliest interest.
No other hand was there to raise--to aid, no other voice to question
kindly, no other brain to concert measures; he had to do it all himself.
This utter dependence of the speechless, bleeding youth (as a youth he
regarded him) on his benevolence secured that benevolence most
effectually. Well did Mr. Yorke like to have power, and to use it. He
had now between his hands power over a fellow-creature's life. It suited
him.
No less perfectly did it suit his saturnine better half. The incident
was quite in her way and to her taste. Some women would have been
terror-struck to see a gory man brought in over their threshold, and
laid down in their hall in the "howe of the night." There, you would
suppose, was subject-matter for hysterics. No. Mrs. Yorke went into
hysterics when Jessie would not leave the garden to come to her
knitting, or when Martin proposed starting for Australia, with a view to
realize freedom and escape the tyranny of Matthew; but an attempted
murder near her door--a half-murdered man in her best bed--set her
straight, cheered her spirits, gave her cap the dash of a turban.
Mrs. Yorke was just the woman who, while rendering miserable the
drudging life of a simple maid-servant, would nurse like a heroine a
hospital full of plague patients. She almost loved Moore. Her tough
heart almost yearned towards him when she found him committed to her
charge--left in her arms, as dependent on her as her youngest-born in
the cradle. Had she seen a domestic or one of her daughters give him a
draught of water or smooth his pillow, she would have boxed the
intruder's ears. She chased Jessie and Rose from the upper realm of the
house; she forbade the housemaids to set their foot in it.
Now, if the accident had happened at the rectory gates, and old Helstone
had taken in the martyr, neither Yorke nor his wife would have pitied
him. They would have adjudged him right served for his tyranny and
meddling. As it was, he became, for the present, the apple of their eye.
Strange! Louis Moore was permitted to come--to sit down on the edge of
the bed and lean over the pillow; to hold his brother's hand, and press
his pale forehead with his fraternal lips; and Mrs. Yorke bore it well.
She suffered him to stay half the day there; she once suffered him to
sit up all night in the chamber; she rose herself at five o'clock of a
wet November morning, and with her own hands lit the kitchen fire, and
made the brothers a breakfast, and served it to them herself.
Majestically arrayed in a boundless flannel wrapper, a shawl, and her
nightcap, she sat and watched them eat, as complacently as a hen beholds
her chickens feed. Yet she gave the cook warning that day for venturing
to make and carry up to Mr. Moore a basin of sago-gruel; and the
housemaid lost her favour because, when Mr. Louis was departing, she
brought him his surtout aired from the kitchen, and, like a "forward
piece" as she was, helped him on with it, and accepted in return a
smile, a "Thank you, my girl," and a shilling. Two ladies called one
day, pale and anxious, and begged earnestly, humbly, to be allowed to
see Mr. Moore one instant. Mrs. Yorke hardened her heart, and sent them
packing--not without opprobrium.
But how was it when Hortense Moore came? Not so bad as might have been
expected. The whole family of the Moores really seemed to suit Mrs.
Yorke so as no other family had ever suited her. Hortense and she
possessed an exhaustless mutual theme of conversation in the corrupt
propensities of servants. Their views of this class were similar; they
watched them with the same suspicion, and judged them with the same
severity. Hortense, too, from the very first showed no manner of
jealousy of Mrs. Yorke's attentions to Robert--she let her keep the post
of nurse with little interference; and, for herself, found ceaseless
occupation in fidgeting about the house, holding the kitchen under
surveillance, reporting what passed there, and, in short, making herself
generally useful. Visitors they both of them agreed in excluding
sedulously from the sickroom. They held the young mill-owner captive,
and hardly let the air breathe or the sun shine on him.
Mr. MacTurk, the surgeon to whom Moore's case had been committed,
pronounced his wound of a dangerous, but, he trusted, not of a hopeless
character. At first he wished to place with him a nurse of his own
selection; but this neither Mrs. Yorke nor Hortense would hear of. They
promised faithful observance of directions. He was left, therefore, for
the present in their hands.
Doubtless they executed the trust to the best of their ability; but
something got wrong. The bandages were displaced or tampered with; great
loss of blood followed. MacTurk, being summoned, came with steed afoam.
He was one of those surgeons whom it is dangerous to vex--abrupt in his
best moods, in his worst savage. On seeing Moore's state he relieved his
feelings by a little flowery language, with which it is not necessary to
strew the present page. A bouquet or two of the choicest blossoms fell
on the unperturbed head of one Mr. Graves, a stony young assistant he
usually carried about with him; with a second nosegay he gifted another
young gentleman in his train--an interesting fac-simile of himself,
being indeed his own son; but the full _corbeille_ of blushing bloom
fell to the lot of meddling womankind, _en masse_.
For the best part of one winter night himself and satellites were busied
about Moore. There at his bedside, shut up alone with him in his
chamber, they wrought and wrangled over his exhausted frame. They three
were on one side of the bed, and Death on the other. The conflict was
sharp; it lasted till day broke, when the balance between the
belligerents seemed so equal that both parties might have claimed the
victory.
At dawn Graves and young MacTurk were left in charge of the patient,
while the senior went himself in search of additional strength, and
secured it in the person of Mrs. Horsfall, the best nurse on his staff.
To this woman he gave Moore in charge, with the sternest injunctions
respecting the responsibility laid on her shoulders. She took this
responsibility stolidly, as she did also the easy-chair at the bedhead.
That moment she began her reign.
Mrs. Horsfall had one virtue--orders received from MacTurk she obeyed to
the letter. The ten commandments were less binding in her eyes than her
surgeon's dictum. In other respects she was no woman, but a dragon.
Hortense Moore fell effaced before her; Mrs. Yorke withdrew--crushed;
yet both these women were personages of some dignity in their own
estimation, and of some bulk in the estimation of others. Perfectly
cowed by the breadth, the height, the bone, and the brawn of Mrs.
Horsfall, they retreated to the back parlour. She, for her part, sat
upstairs when she liked, and downstairs when she preferred it. She took
her dram three times a day, and her pipe of tobacco four times.
As to Moore, no one now ventured to inquire about him. Mrs. Horsfall had
him at dry-nurse. It was she who was to do for him, and the general
conjecture now ran that she did for him accordingly.
Morning and evening MacTurk came to see him. His case, thus complicated
by a new mischance, was become one of interest in the surgeon's eyes. He
regarded him as a damaged piece of clockwork, which it would be
creditable to his skill to set agoing again. Graves and young
MacTurk--Moore's sole other visitors--contemplated him in the light in
which they were wont to contemplate the occupant for the time being of
the dissecting-room at Stilbro' Infirmary.
Robert Moore had a pleasant time of it--in pain, in danger, too weak to
move, almost too weak to speak, a sort of giantess his keeper, the three
surgeons his sole society. Thus he lay through the diminishing days and
lengthening nights of the whole drear month of November.
In the commencement of his captivity Moore used feebly to resist Mrs.
Horsfall. He hated the sight of her rough bulk, and dreaded the contact
of her hard hands; but she taught him docility in a trice. She made no
account whatever of his six feet, his manly thews and sinews; she turned
him in his bed as another woman would have turned a babe in its cradle.
When he was good she addressed him as "my dear" and "honey," and when he
was bad she sometimes shook him. Did he attempt to speak when MacTurk
was there, she lifted her hand and bade him "Hush!" like a nurse
checking a forward child. If she had not smoked, if she had not taken
gin, it would have been better, he thought; but she did both. Once, in
her absence, he intimated to MacTurk that "that woman was a
dram-drinker."
"Pooh! my dear sir, they are all so," was the reply he got for his
pains. "But Horsfall has this virtue," added the surgeon--"drunk or
sober, she always remembers to obey _me_."
* * * * *
At length the latter autumn passed; its fogs, its rains withdrew from
England their mourning and their tears; its winds swept on to sigh over
lands far away. Behind November came deep winter--clearness, stillness,
frost accompanying.