Shirley

There was a certain dignity in the little elderly gentleman’s manner of rebuking these youths, though it was not, perhaps, quite the dignity most appropriate to the occasion. Mr. Helstone, standing straight as a ramrod, looking keen as a kite, presented, despite his clerical hat, black coat, and gaiters, more the air of a veteran officer chiding his subalterns than of a venerable priest exhorting his sons in the faith. Gospel mildness, apostolic benignity, never seemed to have breathed their influence over that keen brown visage, but firmness had fixed the features, and sagacity had carved her own lines about them.

“I met Supplehough,” he continued, “plodding through the mud this wet night, going to preach at Milldean opposition shop. As I told you, I heard Barraclough bellowing in the midst of a conventicle like a possessed bull; and I find you, gentlemen, tarrying over your half-pint of muddy port wine, and scolding like angry old women. No wonder Supplehough should have dipped sixteen adult converts in a day – which he did a fortnight since; no wonder Barraclough, scamp and hypocrite as he is, should attract all the weaver-girls in their flowers and ribbons, to witness how much harder are his knuckles than the wooden brim of his tub; as little wonder that you, when you are left to yourselves, without your rectors – myself, and Hall, and Boultby – to back you, should too often perform the holy service of our church to bare walls, and read your bit of a dry discourse to the clerk, and the organist, and the beadle. But enough of the subject. I came to see Malone. – I have an errand unto thee, O captain!”

“What is it?” inquired Malone discontentedly. “There can be no funeral to take at this time of day.”

“Have you any arms about you?”

“Arms, sir? – yes, and legs.” And he advanced the mighty members.

“Bah! weapons I mean.”

“I have the pistols you gave me yourself. I never part with them. I lay them ready cocked on a chair by my bedside at night. I have my blackthorn.”

“Very good. Will you go to Hollow’s Mill?”

“What is stirring at Hollow’s Mill?”

“Nothing as yet, nor perhaps will be; but Moore is alone there. He has sent all the workmen he can trust to Stilbro’; there are only two women left about the place. It would be a nice opportunity for any of his well-wishers to pay him a visit, if they knew how straight the path was made before them.”

“I am none of his well-wishers, sir. I don’t care for him.”

“Soh! Malone, you are afraid.”

“You know me better than that. If I really thought there was a chance of a row I would go: but Moore is a strange, shy man, whom I never pretend to understand; and for the sake of his sweet company only I would not stir a step.”

“But there is a chance of a row; if a positive riot does not take place – of which, indeed, I see no signs – yet it is unlikely this night will pass quite tranquilly. You know Moor has resolved to have new machinery, and he expects two wagonloads of frames and shears from Stilbro’ this evening. Scott, the overlooker, and a few picked men are gone to fetch them.”

“They will bring them in safely and quietly enough, sir.”

“Moore says so, and affirms he wants nobody. Someone, however, he must have, if it were only to bear evidence in case anything should happen. I call him very careless. He sits in the counting house with the shutters unclosed; he goes out here and there after dark, wanders right up the hollow, down Fieldhead Lane, among the plantations, just as if he were the darling of the neighbourhood, or – being, as he is, its detestation – bore a ‘charmed life,’ as they say in tale-books. He takes no warning from the fate of Pearson, nor from that of Armitage – shot, one in his own house and the other on the moor.”

“But he should take warning, sir, and use precautions too,” interposed Mr. Sweeting; “and I think he would if he heard what I heard the other day.”

“What did you hear, Davy?”

“You know Mike Hartley, sir?”

“The Antinomian weaver? Yes.”

“When Mike has been drinking for a few weeks together, he generally winds up by a visit to Nunnely vicarage, to tell Mr. Hall a piece of his mind about his sermons, to denounce the horrible tendency of his doctrine of works, and warn him that he and all his hearers are sitting in outer darkness.”

“Well, that has nothing to do with Moore.”

“Besides being an Antinomian, he is a violent Jacobin and leveller, sir.”

“I know. When he is very drunk, his mind is always running on regicide. Mike is not unacquainted with history, and it is rich to hear him going over the list of tyrants of whom, as he says, ‘the revenger of blood has obtained satisfaction.’ The fellow exults strangely in murder done on crowned heads or on any head for political reasons. I have already heard it hinted that he seems to have a queer hankering after Moore. Is that what you allude to, Sweeting?”

“You use the proper term, sir. Mr. Hall thinks Mike has no personal hatred of Moore. Mike says he even likes to talk to him and run after him, but he has a hankering that Moore should be made an example of. He was extolling him to Mr. Hall the other day as the mill owner with the most brains in Yorkshire, and for that reason he affirms Moore should be chosen as a sacrifice, an oblation of a sweet savour. Is Mike Hartley in his right mind, do you think, sir?” inquired Sweeting simply.

“Can’t tell, Davy. He may be crazed, or he may be only crafty, or perhaps a little of both.”

“He talks of seeing visions, sir.”

“Ay! He is a very Ezekiel or Daniel for visions. He came just when I was going to bed last Friday night to describe one that had been revealed to him in Nunnely Park that very afternoon.”

“Tell it, sir. What was it?” urged Sweeting.

“Davy, thou hast an enormous organ of wonder in thy cranium. Malone, you see, has none. Neither murders nor visions interest him. See what a big vacant Saph he looks at this moment.”

“Saph! Who was Saph, sir?”

“I thought you would not know. You may find it out. It is biblical. I know nothing more of him than his name and race; but from a boy upwards I have always attached a personality to Saph. Depend on it he was honest, heavy, and luckless. He met his end at Gob by the hand of Sibbechai.”

“But the vision, sir?”

“Davy, thou shalt hear. Donne is biting his nails, and Malone yawning, so I will tell it but to thee. Mike is out of work, like many others, unfortunately. Mr. Grame, Sir Philip Nunnely’s steward, gave him a job about the priory. According to his account, Mike was busy hedging rather late in the afternoon, but before dark, when he heard what he thought was a band at a distance – bugles, fifes, and the sound of a trumpet; it came from the forest, and he wondered that there should be music there. He looked up. All amongst the trees he saw moving objects, red, like poppies, or white, like may blossom. The wood was full of them; they poured out and filled the park. He then perceived they were soldiers – thousands and tens of thousands; but they made no more noise than a swarm of midges on a summer evening. They formed in order, he affirmed, and marched, regiment after regiment, across the park. He followed them to Nunnely Common; the music still played soft and distant. On the common he watched them go through a number of evolutions. A man clothed in scarlet stood in the centre and directed them. They extended, he declared, over fifty acres. They were in sight half an hour; then they marched away quite silently. The whole time he heard neither voice nor tread – nothing but the faint music playing a solemn march.”

“Where did they go, sir?”

“Towards Briarfield. Mike followed them. They seemed passing Fieldhead, when a column of smoke, such as might be vomited by a park of artillery, spread noiseless over the fields, the road, the common, and rolled, he said, blue and dim, to his very feet. As it cleared away he looked again for the soldiers, but they were vanished; he saw them no more. Mike, like a wise Daniel as he is, not only rehearsed the vision but gave the interpretation thereof. It signifies, he intimated, bloodshed and civil conflict.”

“Do you credit it, sir?” asked Sweeting.

“Do you, Davy? – But come, Malone; why are you not off?”

“I am rather surprised, sir, you did not stay with Moore yourself. You like this kind of thing.”

“So I should have done, had I not unfortunately happened to engage Boultby to sup with me on his way home from the Bible Society meeting at Nunnely. I promised to send you as my substitute; for which, by-the-bye, he did not thank me. He would much rather have had me than you, Peter. Should there be any real need of help I shall join you. The mill bell will give warning. Meantime, go – unless (turning suddenly to Messrs. Sweeting and Donne) – unless Davy Sweeting or Joseph Donne prefers going. – What do you say, gentlemen? The commission is an honourable one, not without the seasoning of a little real peril; for the country is in a queer state, as you all know, and Moore and his mill and his machinery are held in sufficient odium. There are chivalric sentiments, there is high-beating courage, under those waistcoats of yours, I doubt not. Perhaps I am too partial to my favourite Peter. Little David shall be the champion, or spotless Joseph. – Malone, you are but a great floundering Saul after all, good only to lend your armour. Out with your firearms; fetch your shillelah. It is there – in the corner.”

With a significant grin Malone produced his pistols, offering one to each of his brethren. They were not readily seized on. With graceful modesty each gentleman retired a step from the presented weapon.

“I never touch them. I never did touch anything of the kind,” said Mr. Donne.

“I am almost a stranger to Mr. Moore,” murmured Sweeting.

“If you never touched a pistol, try the feel of it now, great satrap of Egypt. As to the little minstrel, he probably prefers encountering the Philistines with no other weapon than his flute. – Get their hats, Peter. They’ll both of ’em go.”

“No, sir; no, Mr. Helstone. My mother wouldn’t like it,” pleaded Sweeting.

“And I make it a rule never to get mixed up in affairs of the kind,” observed Donne.

Helstone smiled sardonically; Malone laughed a horse-laugh. He then replaced his arms, took his hat and cudgel, and saying that “he never felt more in tune for a shindy in his life, and that he wished a score of greasy cloth-dressers might beat up Moore’s quarters that night,” he made his exit, clearing the stairs at a stride or two, and making the house shake with the bang of the front door behind him.

Chapter II

The Wagons

The evening was pitch dark: star and moon were quenched in gray rain clouds – gray they would have been by day; by night they looked sable. Malone was not a man given to close observation of nature; her changes passed, for the most part, unnoticed by him. He could walk miles on the most varying April day and never see the beautiful dallying of earth and heaven – never mark when a sunbeam kissed the hilltops, making them smile clear in green light, or when a shower wept over them, hiding their crests with the low-hanging, dishevelled tresses of a cloud. He did not, therefore, care to contrast the sky as it now appeared – a muffled, streaming vault, all black, save where, towards the east, the furnaces of Stilbro’ ironworks threw a tremulous lurid shimmer on the horizon – with the same sky on an unclouded frosty night. He did not trouble himself to ask where the constellations and the planets were gone, or to regret the “black-blue” serenity of the air-ocean which those white islets stud, and which another ocean, of heavier and denser element, now rolled below and concealed. He just doggedly pursued his way, leaning a little forward as he walked, and wearing his hat on the back of his head, as his Irish manner was. “Tramp, tramp,” he went along the causeway, where the road boasted the privilege of such an accommodation; “splash, splash,” through the mire-filled cart ruts, where the flags were exchanged for soft mud. He looked but for certain landmarks – the spire of Briarfield Church; farther on, the lights of Redhouse. This was an inn; and when he reached it, the glow of a fire through a half-curtained window, a vision of glasses on a round table, and of revellers on an oaken settle, had nearly drawn aside the curate from his course. He thought longingly of a tumbler of whisky-and-water. In a strange place he would instantly have realized the dream; but the company assembled in that kitchen were Mr. Helstone’s own parishioners; they all knew him. He sighed, and passed on.