Chapter XVIII…

Chapter XVIII

WHICH THE GENTEEL READER IS RECOMMENDED TO SKIP, LOW PERSONS BEING HERE INTRODUCED.

The evening was still and warm; close and sultry it even promised to become. Round the descending sun the clouds glowed purple; summer tints, rather Indian than English, suffused the horizon, and cast rosy reflections on hillside, house-front, tree-bole, on winding road and undulating pasture-ground. The two girls came down from the fields slowly. By the time they reached the churchyard the bells were hushed; the multitudes were gathered into the church. The whole scene was solitary.

"How pleasant and calm it is!" said Caroline.

"And how hot it will be in the church!" responded Shirley. "And what a dreary long speech Dr. Boultby will make! And how the curates will hammer over their prepared orations! For my part, I would rather not enter."

"But my uncle will be angry if he observes our absence."

"I will bear the brunt of his wrath; he will not devour me. I shall be sorry to miss his pungent speech. I know it will be all sense for the church, and all causticity for schism. He'll not forget the battle of Royd Lane. I shall be sorry also to deprive you of Mr. Hall's sincere friendly homily, with all its racy Yorkshireisms; but here I must stay. The gray church and grayer tombs look divine with this crimson gleam on them. Nature is now at her evening prayers; she is kneeling before those red hills. I see her prostrate on the great steps of her altar, praying for a fair night for mariners at sea, for travellers in deserts, for lambs on moors, and unfledged birds in woods. Caroline, I see her, and I will tell you what she is like. She is like what Eve was when she and Adam stood alone on earth."

"And that is not Milton's Eve, Shirley."

"Milton's Eve! Milton's Eve! I repeat. No, by the pure Mother of God, she is not! Cary, we are alone; we may speak what we think. Milton was great; but was he good? His brain was right; how was his heart? He saw heaven; he looked down on hell. He saw Satan, and Sin his daughter, and Death their horrible offspring. Angels serried before him their battalions; the long lines of adamantine shields flashed back on his blind eyeballs the unutterable splendour of heaven. Devils gathered their legions in his sight; their dim, discrowned, and tarnished armies passed rank and file before him. Milton tried to see the first woman; but, Cary, he saw her not."

"You are bold to say so, Shirley."

"Not more bold than faithful. It was his cook that he saw; or it was Mrs. Gill, as I have seen her, making custards, in the heat of summer, in the cool dairy, with rose-trees and nasturtiums about the latticed window, preparing a cold collation for the rectors--preserves and 'dulcet creams;' puzzled 'what choice to choose for delicacy best; what order so contrived as not to mix tastes, not well-joined, inelegant, but bring taste after taste, upheld with kindliest change.'"

"All very well too, Shirley."

"I would beg to remind him that the first men of the earth were Titans, and that Eve was their mother; from her sprang Saturn, Hyperion, Oceanus; she bore Prometheus----"

"Pagan that you are! what does that signify?"

"I say, there were giants on the earth in those days--giants that strove to scale heaven. The first woman's breast that heaved with life on this world yielded the daring which could contend with Omnipotence, the strength which could bear a thousand years of bondage, the vitality which could feed that vulture death through uncounted ages, the unexhausted life and uncorrupted excellence, sisters to immortality, which, after millenniums of crimes, struggles, and woes, could conceive and bring forth a Messiah. The first woman was heaven-born. Vast was the heart whence gushed the well-spring of the blood of nations, and grand the undegenerate head where rested the consort-crown of creation."

"She coveted an apple, and was cheated by a snake; but you have got such a hash of Scripture and mythology into your head that there is no making any sense of you. You have not yet told me what you saw kneeling on those hills."

"I saw--I now see--a woman-Titan. Her robe of blue air spreads to the outskirts of the heath, where yonder flock is grazing; a veil white as an avalanche sweeps from her head to her feet, and arabesques of lightning flame on its borders. Under her breast I see her zone, purple like that horizon; through its blush shines the star of evening. Her steady eyes I cannot picture. They are clear, they are deep as lakes, they are lifted and full of worship, they tremble with the softness of love and the lustre of prayer. Her forehead has the expanse of a cloud, and is paler than the early moon, risen long before dark gathers. She reclines her bosom on the ridge of Stilbro' Moor; her mighty hands are joined beneath it. So kneeling, face to face she speaks with God. That Eve is Jehovah's daughter, as Adam was His son."

"She is very vague and visionary. Come, Shirley, we ought to go into church."

"Caroline, I will not; I will stay out here with my mother Eve, in these days called Nature. I love her--undying, mighty being! Heaven may have faded from her brow when she fell in paradise, but all that is glorious on earth shines there still. She is taking me to her bosom, and showing me her heart. Hush, Caroline! You will see her and feel as I do, if we are both silent."

"I will humour your whim; but you will begin talking again ere ten minutes are over."

Miss Keeldar, on whom the soft excitement of the warm summer evening seemed working with unwonted power, leaned against an upright headstone; she fixed her eyes on the deep-burning west, and sank into a pleasurable trance. Caroline, going a little apart, paced to and fro beneath the rectory garden wall, dreaming too in her way. Shirley had mentioned the word "mother." That word suggested to Caroline's imagination not the mighty and mystical parent of Shirley's visions, but a gentle human form--the form she ascribed to her own mother, unknown, unloved, but not unlonged for.

"Oh that the day would come when she would remember her child! Oh that I might know her, and knowing, love her!"

Such was her aspiration.

The longing of her childhood filled her soul again. The desire which many a night had kept her awake in her crib, and which fear of its fallacy had of late years almost extinguished, relit suddenly, and glowed warm in her heart, that her mother might come some happy day, and send for her to her presence, look upon her fondly with loving eyes, and say to her tenderly, in a sweet voice, "Caroline, my child, I have a home for you; you shall live with me. All the love you have needed, and not tasted, from infancy, I have saved for you carefully. Come; it shall cherish you now."

A noise on the road roused Caroline from her filial hopes, and Shirley from her Titan visions. They listened, and heard the tramp of horses. They looked, and saw a glitter through the trees. They caught through the foliage glimpses of martial scarlet; helm shone, plume waved. Silent and orderly, six soldiers rode softly by.

"The same we saw this afternoon," whispered Shirley. "They have been halting somewhere till now. They wish to be as little noticed as possible, and are seeking their rendezvous at this quiet hour, while the people are at church. Did I not say we should see unusual things ere long?"

Scarcely were sight and sound of the soldiers lost, when another and somewhat different disturbance broke the night-hush--a child's impatient scream. They looked. A man issued from the church, carrying in his arms an infant--a robust, ruddy little boy of some two years old--roaring with all the power of his lungs. He had probably just awaked from a church-sleep. Two little girls, of nine and ten, followed. The influence of the fresh air, and the attraction of some flowers gathered from a grave, soon quieted the child. The man sat down with him, dandling him on his knee as tenderly as any woman; the two little girls took their places one on each side.

"Good-evening, William," said Shirley, after due scrutiny of the man. He had seen her before, and apparently was waiting to be recognized. He now took off his hat, and grinned a smile of pleasure. He was a rough-headed, hard-featured personage, not old, but very weather-beaten. His attire was decent and clean; that of his children singularly neat. It was our old friend Farren. The young ladies approached him.

"You are not going into the church?" he inquired, gazing at them complacently, yet with a mixture of bashfulness in his look--a sentiment not by any means the result of awe of their station, but only of appreciation of their elegance and youth. Before gentlemen--such as Moore or Helstone, for instance--William was often a little dogged; with proud or insolent ladies, too, he was quite unmanageable, sometimes very resentful; but he was most sensible of, most tractable to, good-humour and civility. His nature--a stubborn one--was repelled by inflexibility in other natures; for which reason he had never been able to like his former master, Moore; and unconscious of that gentleman's good opinion of himself, and of the service he had secretly rendered him in recommending him as gardener to Mr. Yorke, and by this means to other families in the neighbourhood, he continued to harbour a grudge against his austerity. Latterly he had often worked at Fieldhead. Miss Keeldar's frank, hospitable manners were perfectly charming to him. Caroline he had known from her childhood; unconsciously she was his ideal of a lady. Her gentle mien, step, gestures, her grace of person and attire, moved some artist-fibres about his peasant heart. He had a pleasure in looking at her, as he had in examining rare flowers or in seeing pleasant landscapes. Both the ladies liked William; it was their delight to lend him books, to give him plants; and they preferred his conversation far before that of many coarse, hard, pretentious people immeasurably higher in station.

"Who was speaking, William, when you came out?" asked Shirley.

"A gentleman ye set a deal of store on, Miss Shirley--Mr. Donne."

"You look knowing, William. How did you find out my regard for Mr. Donne?"

"Ay, Miss Shirley, there's a gleg light i' your een sometimes which betrays you. You look raight down scornful sometimes when Mr. Donne is by."

"Do you like him yourself, William?"

"Me? I'm stalled o' t' curates, and so is t' wife. They've no manners. They talk to poor folk fair as if they thought they were beneath them. They're allus magnifying their office. It is a pity but their office could magnify them; but it does nought o' t' soart. I fair hate pride."

"But you are proud in your own way yourself," interposed Caroline. "You are what you call house-proud: you like to have everything handsome about you. Sometimes you look as if you were almost too proud to take your wages. When you were out of work, you were too proud to get anything on credit. But for your children, I believe you would rather have starved than gone to the shops without money; and when I wanted to give you something, what a difficulty I had in making you take it!"

"It is partly true, Miss Caroline. Ony day I'd rather give than take, especially from sich as ye. Look at t' difference between us. Ye're a little, young, slender lass, and I'm a great strong man; I'm rather more nor twice your age. It is not my part, then, I think, to tak fro' ye--to be under obligations (as they say) to ye. And that day ye came to our house, and called me to t' door, and offered me five shillings, which I doubt ye could ill spare--for ye've no fortin', I know--that day I war fair a rebel, a radical, an insurrectionist; and ye made me so. I thought it shameful that, willing and able as I was to work, I suld be i' such a condition that a young cratur about the age o' my own eldest lass suld think it needful to come and offer me her bit o' brass."

"I suppose you were angry with me, William?"

"I almost was, in a way. But I forgave ye varry soon. Ye meant well. Ay, I am proud, and so are ye; but your pride and mine is t' raight mak--what we call i' Yorkshire clean pride--such as Mr. Malone and Mr. Donne knows nought about. Theirs is mucky pride. Now, I shall teach my lasses to be as proud as Miss Shirley there, and my lads to be as proud as myseln; but I dare ony o' 'em to be like t' curates. I'd lick little Michael if I seed him show any signs o' that feeling."

"What is the difference, William?"

"Ye know t' difference weel enow, but ye want me to get a gate o' talking. Mr. Malone and Mr. Donne is almost too proud to do aught for theirseln; we are almost too proud to let anybody do aught for us. T' curates can hardly bide to speak a civil word to them they think beneath them; we can hardly bide to tak an uncivil word fro' them that thinks themseln aboon us."

"Now, William, be humble enough to tell me truly how you are getting on in the world. Are you well off?"

"Miss Shirley, I am varry well off. Since I got into t' gardening line, wi' Mr. Yorke's help, and since Mr. Hall (another o' t' raight sort) helped my wife to set up a bit of a shop, I've nought to complain of. My family has plenty to eat and plenty to wear. My pride makes me find means to have an odd pound now and then against rainy days; for I think I'd die afore I'd come to t' parish; and me and mine is content. But t' neighbours is poor yet. I see a great deal of distress."

"And, consequently, there is still discontent, I suppose?" inquired Miss Keeldar.

"Consequently--ye say right--consequently. In course, starving folk cannot be satisfied or settled folk. The country's not in a safe condition--I'll say so mich!"

"But what can be done? What more can I do, for instance?"

"Do? Ye can do not mich, poor young lass! Ye've gi'en your brass; ye've done well. If ye could transport your tenant, Mr. Moore, to Botany Bay, ye'd happen do better. Folks hate him."

"William, for shame!" exclaimed Caroline warmly. "If folks do hate him, it is to their disgrace, not his. Mr. Moore himself hates nobody. He only wants to do his duty, and maintain his rights. You are wrong to talk so."

"I talk as I think. He has a cold, unfeeling heart, yond' Moore."

"But," interposed Shirley, "supposing Moore was driven from the country, and his mill razed to the ground, would people have more work?"

"They'd have less. I know that, and they know that; and there is many an honest lad driven desperate by the certainty that whichever way he turns he cannot better himself; and there is dishonest men plenty to guide them to the devil, scoundrels that reckons to be the 'people's friends,' and that knows nought about the people, and is as insincere as Lucifer. I've lived aboon forty year in the world, and I believe that 'the people' will never have any true friends but theirseln and them two or three good folk i' different stations that is friends to all the world. Human natur', taking it i' th' lump, is nought but selfishness. It is but excessive few, it is but just an exception here and there, now and then, sich as ye two young uns and me, that, being in a different sphere, can understand t' one t' other, and be friends wi'out slavishness o' one hand or pride o' t' other. Them that reckons to be friends to a lower class than their own fro' political motives is never to be trusted; they always try to make their inferiors tools. For my own part, I will neither be patronized nor misled for no man's pleasure. I've had overtures made to me lately that I saw were treacherous, and I flung 'em back i' the faces o' them that offered 'em."

"You won't tell us what overtures?"

"I will not. It would do no good. It would mak no difference. Them they concerned can look after theirseln."

"Ay, we'se look after werseln," said another voice. Joe Scott had sauntered forth from the church to get a breath of fresh air, and there he stood.

"I'll warrant ye, Joe," observed William, smiling.

"And I'll warrant my maister," was the answer.--"Young ladies," continued Joe, assuming a lordly air, "ye'd better go into th' house."

"I wonder what for?" inquired Shirley, to whom the overlooker's somewhat pragmatical manners were familiar, and who was often at war with him; for Joe, holding supercilious theories about women in general, resented greatly, in his secret soul, the fact of his master and his master's mill being, in a manner, under petticoat government, and had felt as wormwood and gall certain business visits of the heiress to the Hollow's counting-house.

"Because there is nought agate that fits women to be consarned in."

"Indeed! There is prayer and preaching agate in that church. Are we not concerned in that?"

"Ye have been present neither at the prayer nor preaching, ma'am, if I have observed aright. What I alluded to was politics. William Farren here was touching on that subject, if I'm not mista'en."

"Well, what then? Politics are our habitual study, Joe. Do you know I see a newspaper every day, and two of a Sunday?"

"I should think you'll read the marriages, probably, miss, and the murders, and the accidents, and sich like?"

"I read the leading articles, Joe, and the foreign intelligence, and I look over the market prices. In short, I read just what gentlemen read."

Joe looked as if he thought this talk was like the chattering of a pie. He replied to it by a disdainful silence.

"Joe," continued Miss Keeldar, "I never yet could ascertain properly whether you are a Whig or a Tory. Pray, which party has the honour of your alliance?"

"It is rayther difficult to explain where you are sure not to be understood," was Joe's haughty response; "but as to being a Tory, I'd as soon be an old woman, or a young one, which is a more flimsier article still. It is the Tories that carries on the war and ruins trade; and if I be of any party--though political parties is all nonsense--I'm of that which is most favourable to peace, and, by consequence, to the mercantile interests of this here land."

"So am I, Joe," replied Shirley, who had rather a pleasure in teasing the overlooker, by persisting in talking on subjects with which he opined she, as a woman, had no right to meddle--"partly, at least. I have rather a leaning to the agricultural interest, too; as good reason is, seeing that I don't desire England to be under the feet of France, and that if a share of my income comes from Hollow's Mill, a larger share comes from the landed estate around it. It would not do to take any measures injurious to the farmers, Joe, I think?"

"The dews at this hour is unwholesome for females," observed Joe.

"If you make that remark out of interest in me, I have merely to assure you that I am impervious to cold. I should not mind taking my turn to watch the mill one of these summer nights, armed with your musket, Joe."

Joe Scott's chin was always rather prominent. He poked it out, at this speech, some inches farther than usual.

"But--to go back to my sheep," she proceeded--"clothier and mill-owner as I am, besides farmer, I cannot get out of my head a certain idea that we manufacturers and persons of business are sometimes a little--a very little--selfish and short-sighted in our views, and rather too regardless of human suffering, rather heartless in our pursuit of gain. Don't you agree with me, Joe?"

"I cannot argue where I cannot be comprehended," was again the answer.

"Man of mystery! Your master will argue with me sometimes, Joe. He is not so stiff as you are."

"Maybe not. We've all our own ways."

"Joe, do you seriously think all the wisdom in the world is lodged in male skulls?"

"I think that women are a kittle and a froward generation; and I've a great respect for the doctrines delivered in the second chapter of St. Paul's first Epistle to Timothy."

"What doctrines, Joe?"

"'Let the woman learn in silence, with all subjection. I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence. For Adam was first formed, then Eve.'"

"What has that to do with the business?" interjected Shirley. "That smacks of rights of primogeniture. I'll bring it up to Mr. Yorke the first time he inveighs against those rights."

"And," continued Joe Scott, "Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression."

"More shame to Adam to sin with his eyes open!" cried Miss Keeldar. "To confess the honest truth, Joe, I never was easy in my mind concerning that chapter. It puzzles me."

"It is very plain, miss. He that runs may read."

"He may read it in his own fashion," remarked Caroline, now joining in the dialogue for the first time. "You allow the right of private judgment, I suppose, Joe?"

"My certy, that I do! I allow and claim it for every line of the holy Book."

"Women may exercise it as well as men?"

"Nay. Women is to take their husbands' opinion, both in politics and religion. It's wholesomest for them."

"Oh! oh!" exclaimed both Shirley and Caroline.

"To be sure; no doubt on't," persisted the stubborn overlooker.

"Consider yourself groaned down, and cried shame over, for such a stupid observation," said Miss Keeldar. "You might as well say men are to take the opinions of their priests without examination. Of what value would a religion so adopted be? It would be mere blind, besotted superstition."

"And what is your reading, Miss Helstone, o' these words o' St. Paul's?"

"Hem! I--I account for them in this way. He wrote that chapter for a particular congregation of Christians, under peculiar circumstances; and besides, I dare say, if I could read the original Greek, I should find that many of the words have been wrongly translated, perhaps misapprehended altogether. It would be possible, I doubt not, with a little ingenuity, to give the passage quite a contrary turn--to make it say, 'Let the woman speak out whenever she sees fit to make an objection.' 'It is permitted to a woman to teach and to exercise authority as much as may be. Man, meantime, cannot do better than hold his peace;' and so on."

"That willn't wash, miss."

"I dare say it will. My notions are dyed in faster colours than yours, Joe. Mr. Scott, you are a thoroughly dogmatical person, and always were. I like William better than you."

"Joe is well enough in his own house," said Shirley. "I have seen him as quiet as a lamb at home. There is not a better nor a kinder husband in Briarfield. He does not dogmatize to his wife."

"My wife is a hard-working, plain woman; time and trouble has ta'en all the conceit out of her. But that is not the case with you, young misses. And then you reckon to have so much knowledge; and i' my thoughts it's only superficial sort o' vanities you're acquainted with. I can tell--happen a year sin'--one day Miss Caroline coming into our counting-house when I war packing up summat behind t' great desk, and she didn't see me, and she brought a slate wi' a sum on it to t' maister. It war only a bit of a sum in practice, that our Harry would have settled i' two minutes. She couldn't do it. Mr. Moore had to show her how. And when he did show her, she couldn't understand him."

"Nonsense, Joe!"

"Nay, it's no nonsense. And Miss Shirley there reckons to hearken to t' maister when he's talking ower trade, so attentive like, as if she followed him word for word, and all war as clear as a lady's looking-glass to her een; and all t' while she's peeping and peeping out o' t' window to see if t' mare stands quiet; and then looking at a bit of a splash on her riding-skirt; and then glancing glegly round at wer counting-house cobwebs and dust, and thinking what mucky folk we are, and what a grand ride she'll have just i' now ower Nunnely Common. She hears no more o' Mr. Moore's talk nor if he spake Hebrew."

"Joe, you are a real slanderer. I would give you your answer, only the people are coming out of church. We must leave you. Man of prejudice, good-bye.--William, good-bye.--Children, come up to Fieldhead to-morrow, and you shall choose what you like best out of Mrs. Gill's store-room."

XIX. A SUMMER NIGHT

The hour was now that of dusk. A clear air favoured the kindling of the stars.

"There will be just light enough to show me the way home," said Miss Keeldar, as she prepared to take leave of Caroline at the rectory garden door.

"You must not go alone, Shirley; Fanny shall accompany you."

"That she shall not. Of what need I be afraid in my own parish? I would walk from Fieldhead to the church any fine midsummer night, three hours later than this, for the mere pleasure of seeing the stars and the chance of meeting a fairy."

"But just wait till the crowd is cleared away."

"Agreed. There are the five Misses Armitage streaming by. Here comes Mrs. Sykes's phaeton, Mr. Wynne's close carriage, Mrs. Birtwhistle's car. I don't wish to go through the ceremony of bidding them all good-bye, so we will step into the garden and take shelter amongst the laburnums for an instant."

The rectors, their curates, and their churchwardens now issued from the church porch. There was a great confabulation, shaking of hands, congratulation on speeches, recommendation to be careful of the night air, etc. By degrees the throng dispersed, the carriages drove off. Miss Keeldar was just emerging from her flowery refuge when Mr. Helstone entered the garden and met her.

"Oh, I want you!" he said. "I was afraid you were already gone.--Caroline, come here."

Caroline came, expecting, as Shirley did, a lecture on not having been visible at church. Other subjects, however, occupied the rector's mind.

"I shall not sleep at home to-night," he continued. "I have just met with an old friend, and promised to accompany him. I shall return probably about noon to-morrow. Thomas, the clerk, is engaged, and I cannot get him to sleep in the house, as I usually do when I am absent for a night. Now----"

"Now," interrupted Shirley, "you want me as a gentleman--the first gentleman in Briarfield, in short--to supply your place, be master of the rectory and guardian of your niece and maids while you are away?"

"Exactly, captain. I thought the post would suit you. Will you favour Caroline so far as to be her guest for one night? Will you stay here instead of going back to Fieldhead?"

"And what will Mrs. Pryor do? she expects me home."

"I will send her word. Come, make up your mind to stay. It grows late; the dew falls heavily. You and Caroline will enjoy each other's society, I doubt not."

"I promise you, then, to stay with Caroline," replied Shirley. "As you say, we shall enjoy each other's society. We will not be separated to-night. Now, rejoin your old friend, and fear nothing for us."

"If there should chance to be any disturbance in the night, captain; if you should hear the picking of a lock, the cutting out of a pane of glass, a stealthy tread of steps about the house (and I need not fear to tell you, who bear a well-tempered, mettlesome heart under your girl's ribbon sash, that such little incidents are very possible in the present time), what would you do?"

"Don't know; faint, perhaps--fall down, and have to be picked up again. But, doctor, if you assign me the post of honour, you must give me arms. What weapons are there in your stronghold?"

"You could not wield a sword?"

"No; I could manage the carving-knife better."

"You will find a good one in the dining-room sideboard--a lady's knife, light to handle, and as sharp-pointed as a poniard."

"It will suit Caroline. But you must give me a brace of pistols. I know you have pistols."

"I have two pairs. One pair I can place at your disposal. You will find them suspended over the mantelpiece of my study in cloth cases."

"Loaded?"

"Yes, but not on the cock. Cock them before you go to bed. It is paying you a great compliment, captain, to lend you these. Were you one of the awkward squad you should not have them."

"I will take care. You need delay no longer, Mr. Helstone. You may go now.--He is gracious to me to lend me his pistols," she remarked, as the rector passed out at the garden gate. "But come, Lina," she continued, "let us go in and have some supper. I was too much vexed at tea with the vicinage of Mr. Sam Wynne to be able to eat, and now I am really hungry."

Entering the house, they repaired to the darkened dining-room, through the open windows of which apartment stole the evening air, bearing the perfume of flowers from the garden, the very distant sound of far-retreating steps from the road, and a soft, vague murmur whose origin Caroline explained by the remark, uttered as she stood listening at the casement, "Shirley, I hear the beck in the Hollow."

Then she rang the bell, asked for a candle and some bread and milk--Miss Keeldar's usual supper and her own. Fanny, when she brought in the tray, would have closed the windows and the shutters, but was requested to desist for the present. The twilight was too calm, its breath too balmy to be yet excluded. They took their meal in silence. Caroline rose once to remove to the window-sill a glass of flowers which stood on the sideboard, the exhalation from the blossoms being somewhat too powerful for the sultry room. In returning she half opened a drawer, and took from it something that glittered clear and keen in her hand.

"You assigned this to me, then, Shirley, did you? It is bright, keen-edged, finely tapered; it is dangerous-looking. I never yet felt the impulse which could move me to direct this against a fellow-creature. It is difficult to fancy that circumstances could nerve my arm to strike home with this long knife."

"I should hate to do it," replied Shirley, "but I think I could do it, if goaded by certain exigencies which I can imagine." And Miss Keeldar quietly sipped her glass of new milk, looking somewhat thoughtful and a little pale; though, indeed, when did she not look pale? She was never florid.

The milk sipped and the bread eaten, Fanny was again summoned. She and Eliza were recommended to go to bed, which they were quite willing to do, being weary of the day's exertions, of much cutting of currant-buns, and filling of urns and teapots, and running backwards and forwards with trays. Ere long the maids' chamber door was heard to close. Caroline took a candle and went quietly all over the house, seeing that every window was fast and every door barred. She did not even evade the haunted back kitchen nor the vault-like cellars. These visited, she returned.

"There is neither spirit nor flesh in the house at present," she said, "which should not be there. It is now near eleven o'clock, fully bedtime; yet I would rather sit up a little longer, if you do not object, Shirley. Here," she continued, "I have brought the brace of pistols from my uncle's study. You may examine them at your leisure."

She placed them on the table before her friend.

"Why would you rather sit up longer?" asked Miss Keeldar, taking up the firearms, examining them, and again laying them down.

"Because I have a strange, excited feeling in my heart."

"So have I."

"Is this state of sleeplessness and restlessness caused by something electrical in the air, I wonder?"

"No; the sky is clear, the stars numberless. It is a fine night."

"But very still. I hear the water fret over its stony bed in Hollow's Copse as distinctly as if it ran below the churchyard wall."

"I am glad it is so still a night. A moaning wind or rushing rain would vex me to fever just now."

"Why, Shirley?"

"Because it would baffle my efforts to listen."

"Do you listen towards the Hollow?"

"Yes; it is the only quarter whence we can hear a sound just now."

"The only one, Shirley."

They both sat near the window, and both leaned their arms on the sill, and both inclined their heads towards the open lattice. They saw each other's young faces by the starlight and that dim June twilight which does not wholly fade from the west till dawn begins to break in the east.

"Mr. Helstone thinks we have no idea which way he is gone," murmured Miss Keeldar, "nor on what errand, nor with what expectations, nor how prepared. But I guess much; do not you?"

"I guess something."

"All those gentlemen--your cousin Moore included--think that you and I are now asleep in our beds, unconscious."

"Caring nothing about them--hoping and fearing nothing for them," added Caroline.

Both kept silent for full half an hour. The night was silent too; only the church clock measured its course by quarters. Some words were interchanged about the chill of the air. They wrapped their scarves closer round them, resumed their bonnets, which they had removed, and again watched.

Towards midnight the teasing, monotonous bark of the house-dog disturbed the quietude of their vigil. Caroline rose, and made her way noiselessly through the dark passages to the kitchen, intending to appease him with a piece of bread. She succeeded. On returning to the dining-room she found it all dark, Miss Keeldar having extinguished the candle. The outline of her shape was visible near the still open window, leaning out. Miss Helstone asked no questions; she stole to her side. The dog recommenced barking furiously. Suddenly he stopped, and seemed to listen. The occupants of the dining-room listened too, and not merely now to the flow of the mill-stream. There was a nearer, though a muffled, sound on the road below the churchyard--a measured, beating, approaching sound--a dull tramp of marching feet.

It drew near. Those who listened by degrees comprehended its extent. It was not the tread of two, nor of a dozen, nor of a score of men; it was the tread of hundreds. They could see nothing; the high shrubs of the garden formed a leafy screen between them and the road. To hear, however, was not enough, and this they felt as the troop trod forwards, and seemed actually passing the rectory. They felt it more when a human voice--though that voice spoke but one word--broke the hush of the night.

"Halt!"

A halt followed. The march was arrested. Then came a low conference, of which no word was distinguishable from the dining-room.

"We must hear this," said Shirley.

She turned, took her pistols from the table, silently passed out through the middle window of the dining-room, which was, in fact, a glass door, stole down the walk to the garden wall, and stood listening under the lilacs. Caroline would not have quitted the house had she been alone, but where Shirley went she would go. She glanced at the weapon on the sideboard, but left it behind her, and presently stood at her friend's side. They dared not look over the wall, for fear of being seen; they were obliged to crouch behind it. They heard these words,--

"It looks a rambling old building. Who lives in it besides the damned parson?"

"Only three women--his niece and two servants."

"Do you know where they sleep?"

"The lasses behind; the niece in a front room."

"And Helstone?"

"Yonder is his chamber. He was burning a light, but I see none now."

"Where would you get in?"

"If I were ordered to do his job--and he desarves it--I'd try yond' long window; it opens to the dining-room. I could grope my way upstairs, and I know his chamber."

"How would you manage about the women folk?"

"Let 'em alone except they shrieked, and then I'd soon quieten 'em. I could wish to find the old chap asleep. If he waked, he'd be dangerous."

"Has he arms?"

"Firearms, allus--and allus loadened."

"Then you're a fool to stop us here. A shot would give the alarm. Moore would be on us before we could turn round. We should miss our main object."

"You might go on, I tell you. I'd engage Helstone alone."

A pause. One of the party dropped some weapon, which rang on the stone causeway. At this sound the rectory dog barked again furiously--fiercely.

"That spoils all!" said the voice. "He'll awake. A noise like that might rouse the dead. You did not say there was a dog. Damn you! Forward!"

Forward they went--tramp, tramp--with mustering, manifold, slow-filing tread. They were gone.

Shirley stood erect, looked over the wall, along the road.

"Not a soul remains," she said.

She stood and mused. "Thank God!" was the next observation.

Caroline repeated the ejaculation--not in so steady a tone. She was trembling much. Her heart was beating fast and thick; her face was cold, her forehead damp.

"Thank God for us!" she reiterated. "But what will happen elsewhere? They have passed us by that they may make sure of others."

"They have done well," returned Shirley, with composure. "The others will defend themselves. They can do it. They are prepared for them. With us it is otherwise. My finger was on the trigger of this pistol. I was quite ready to give that man, if he had entered, such a greeting as he little calculated on; but behind him followed three hundred. I had neither three hundred hands nor three hundred weapons. I could not have effectually protected either you, myself, or the two poor women asleep under that roof. Therefore I again earnestly thank God for insult and peril escaped."

After a second pause she continued: "What is it my duty and wisdom to do next? Not to stay here inactive, I am glad to say, but, of course, to walk over to the Hollow."

"To the Hollow, Shirley?"

"To the Hollow. Will you go with me?"

"Where those men are gone?"

"They have taken the highway; we should not encounter them. The road over the fields is as safe, silent, and solitary as a path through the air would be. Will you go?"

"Yes," was the answer, given mechanically, not because the speaker wished or was prepared to go, or, indeed, was otherwise than scared at the prospect of going, but because she felt she could not abandon Shirley.

"Then we must fasten up these windows, and leave all as secure as we can behind us. Do you know what we are going for, Cary?"

"Yes--no--because you wish it."

"Is that all? And are you so obedient to a mere caprice of mine? What a docile wife you would make to a stern husband! The moon's face is not whiter than yours at this moment, and the aspen at the gate does not tremble more than your busy fingers; and so, tractable and terror-struck, and dismayed and devoted, you would follow me into the thick of real danger! Cary, let me give your fidelity a motive. We are going for Moore's sake--to see if we can be of use to him, to make an effort to warn him of what is coming."

"To be sure! I am a blind, weak fool, and you are acute and sensible, Shirley. I will go with you; I will gladly go with you!"

"I do not doubt it. You would die blindly and meekly for me, but you would intelligently and gladly die for Moore. But, in truth, there is no question of death to-night; we run no risk at all."

Caroline rapidly closed shutter and lattice. "Do not fear that I shall not have breath to run as fast as you can possibly run, Shirley. Take my hand. Let us go straight across the fields."

"But you cannot climb walls?"

"To-night I can."

"You are afraid of hedges, and the beck which we shall be forced to cross?"

"I can cross it."

They started; they ran. Many a wall checked but did not baffle them. Shirley was surefooted and agile; she could spring like a deer when she chose. Caroline, more timid and less dexterous, fell once or twice, and bruised herself; but she rose again directly, saying she was not hurt. A quickset hedge bounded the last field; they lost time in seeking a gap in it. The aperture, when found, was narrow, but they worked their way through. The long hair, the tender skin, the silks and the muslins suffered; but what was chiefly regretted was the impediment this difficulty had caused to speed. On the other side they met the beck, flowing deep in a rough bed. At this point a narrow plank formed the only bridge across it. Shirley had trodden the plank successfully and fearlessly many a time before; Caroline had never yet dared to risk the transit.

"I will carry you across," said Miss Keeldar. "You are light, and I am not weak. Let me try."

"If I fall in, you may fish me out," was the answer, as a grateful squeeze compressed her hand. Caroline, without pausing, trod forward on the trembling plank as if it were a continuation of the firm turf. Shirley, who followed, did not cross it more resolutely or safely. In their present humour, on their present errand, a strong and foaming channel would have been a barrier to neither. At the moment they were above the control either of fire or water. All Stilbro' Moor, alight and aglow with bonfires, would not have stopped them, nor would Calder or Aire thundering in flood. Yet one sound made them pause. Scarce had they set foot on the solid opposite bank when a shot split the air from the north. One second elapsed. Further off burst a like note in the south. Within the space of three minutes similar signals boomed in the east and west.

"I thought we were dead at the first explosion," observed Shirley, drawing a long breath. "I felt myself hit in the temples, and I concluded your heart was pierced; but the reiterated voice was an explanation. Those are signals--it is their way--the attack must be near. We should have had wings. Our feet have not borne us swiftly enough."

A portion of the copse was now to clear. When they emerged from it the mill lay just below them. They could look down upon the buildings, the yard; they could see the road beyond. And the first glance in that direction told Shirley she was right in her conjecture. They were already too late to give warning. It had taken more time than they calculated on to overcome the various obstacles which embarrassed the short cut across the fields.

The road, which should have been white, was dark with a moving mass. The rioters were assembled in front of the closed yard gates, and a single figure stood within, apparently addressing them. The mill itself was perfectly black and still. There was neither life, light, nor motion around it.

"Surely he is prepared. Surely that is not Moore meeting them alone?" whispered Shirley.

"It is. We must go to him. I will go to him."

"That you will not."

"Why did I come, then? I came only for him. I shall join him."

"Fortunately it is out of your power. There is no entrance to the yard."

"There is a small entrance at the back, besides the gates in front. It opens by a secret method which I know. I will try it."

"Not with my leave."

Miss Keeldar clasped her round the waist with both arms and held her back. "Not one step shall you stir," she went on authoritatively. "At this moment Moore would be both shocked and embarrassed if he saw either you or me. Men never want women near them in time of real danger."

"I would not trouble--I would help him," was the reply.

"How?--by inspiring him with heroism? Pooh! these are not the days of chivalry. It is not a tilt at a tournament we are going to behold, but a struggle about money, and food, and life."

"It is natural that I should be at his side."

"As queen of his heart? His mill is his lady-love, Cary! Backed by his factory and his frames, he has all the encouragement he wants or can know. It is not for love or beauty, but for ledger and broadcloth, he is going to break a spear. Don't be sentimental; Robert is not so."

"I could help him; I will seek him."

"Off then--I let you go--seek Moore. You'll not find him."

She loosened her hold. Caroline sped like levelled shaft from bent bow; after her rang a jesting, gibing laugh. "Look well there is no mistake!" was the warning given.

But there was a mistake. Miss Helstone paused, hesitated, gazed. The figure had suddenly retreated from the gate, and was running back hastily to the mill.

"Make haste, Lina!" cried Shirley; "meet him before he enters."

Caroline slowly returned. "It is not Robert," she said. "It has neither his height, form, nor bearing."

"I saw it was not Robert when I let you go. How could you imagine it? It is a shabby little figure of a private soldier; they had posted him as sentinel. He is safe in the mill now. I saw the door open and admit him. My mind grows easier. Robert is prepared. Our warning would have been superfluous; and now I am thankful we came too late to give it. It has saved us the trouble of a scene. How fine to have entered the counting-house toute éperdue, and to have found oneself in presence of Messrs. Armitage and Ramsden smoking, Malone swaggering, your uncle sneering, Mr. Sykes sipping a cordial, and Moore himself in his cold man-of-business vein! I am glad we missed it all."

"I wonder if there are many in the mill, Shirley!"

"Plenty to defend it. The soldiers we have twice seen to-day were going there, no doubt, and the group we noticed surrounding your cousin in the fields will be with him."

"What are they doing now, Shirley? What is that noise?"

"Hatchets and crowbars against the yard gates. They are forcing them. Are you afraid?"

"No; but my heart throbs fast. I have a difficulty in standing. I will sit down. Do you feel unmoved?"

"Hardly that; but I am glad I came. We shall see what transpires with our own eyes. We are here on the spot, and none know it. Instead of amazing the curate, the clothier, and the corn-dealer with a romantic rush on the stage, we stand alone with the friendly night, its mute stars, and these whispering trees, whose report our friends will not come to gather."

"Shirley, Shirley, the gates are down! That crash was like the felling of great trees. Now they are pouring through. They will break down the mill doors as they have broken the gate. What can Robert do against so many? Would to God I were a little nearer him--could hear him speak--could speak to him! With my will--my longing to serve him--I could not be a useless burden in his way; I could be turned to some account."

"They come on!" cried Shirley. "How steadily they march in! There is discipline in their ranks. I will not say there is courage--hundreds against tens are no proof of that quality--but" (she dropped her voice) "there is suffering and desperation enough amongst them. These goads will urge them forwards."

"Forwards against Robert; and they hate him. Shirley, is there much danger they will win the day?"

"We shall see. Moore and Helstone are of 'earth's first blood'--no bunglers--no cravens----"

A crash--smash--shiver--stopped their whispers. A simultaneously hurled volley of stones had saluted the broad front of the mill, with all its windows; and now every pane of every lattice lay in shattered and pounded fragments. A yell followed this demonstration--a rioters' yell--a north-of-England, a Yorkshire, a West-Riding, a West-Riding-clothing-district-of-Yorkshire rioters' yell.

You never heard that sound, perhaps, reader? So much the better for your ears--perhaps for your heart, since, if it rends the air in hate to yourself, or to the men or principles you approve, the interests to which you wish well, wrath wakens to the cry of hate; the lion shakes his mane, and rises to the howl of the hyena; caste stands up, ireful against caste; and the indignant, wronged spirit of the middle rank bears down in zeal and scorn on the famished and furious mass of the operative class. It is difficult to be tolerant, difficult to be just, in such moments.

Caroline rose; Shirley put her arm round her: they stood together as still as the straight stems of two trees. That yell was a long one, and when it ceased the night was yet full of the swaying and murmuring of a crowd.

"What next?" was the question of the listeners. Nothing came yet. The mill remained mute as a mausoleum.

"He cannot be alone!" whispered Caroline.

"I would stake all I have that he is as little alone as he is alarmed," responded Shirley.

Shots were discharged by the rioters. Had the defenders waited for this signal? It seemed so. The hitherto inert and passive mill woke; fire flashed from its empty window-frames; a volley of musketry pealed sharp through the Hollow.

"Moore speaks at last!" said Shirley, "and he seems to have the gift of tongues. That was not a single voice."

"He has been forbearing. No one can accuse him of rashness," alleged Caroline. "Their discharge preceded his. They broke his gates and his windows. They fired at his garrison before he repelled them."

What was going on now? It seemed difficult, in the darkness, to distinguish; but something terrible, a still-renewing tumult, was obvious--fierce attacks, desperate repulses. The mill-yard, the mill itself, was full of battle movement. There was scarcely any cessation now of the discharge of firearms; and there was struggling, rushing, trampling, and shouting between. The aim of the assailants seemed to be to enter the mill, that of the defenders to beat them off. They heard the rebel leader cry, "To the back, lads!" They heard a voice retort, "Come round; we will meet you."

"To the counting-house!" was the order again.

"Welcome! we shall have you there!" was the response. And accordingly the fiercest blaze that had yet glowed, the loudest rattle that had yet been heard, burst from the counting-house front when the mass of rioters rushed up to it.

The voice that had spoken was Moore's own voice. They could tell by its tones that his soul was now warm with the conflict; they could guess that the fighting animal was roused in every one of those men there struggling together, and was for the time quite paramount above the rational human being.

Both the girls felt their faces glow and their pulses throb; both knew they would do no good by rushing down into the mêlée. They desired neither to deal nor to receive blows; but they could not have run away--Caroline no more than Shirley; they could not have fainted; they could not have taken their eyes from the dim, terrible scene--from the mass of cloud, of smoke, the musket-lightning--for the world.

"How and when would it end?" was the demand throbbing in their throbbing pulses. "Would a juncture arise in which they could be useful?" was what they waited to see; for though Shirley put off their too-late arrival with a jest, and was ever ready to satirize her own or any other person's enthusiasm, she would have given a farm of her best land for a chance of rendering good service.

The chance was not vouchsafed her; the looked-for juncture never came. It was not likely. Moore had expected this attack for days, perhaps weeks; he was prepared for it at every point. He had fortified and garrisoned his mill, which in itself was a strong building. He was a cool, brave man; he stood to the defence with unflinching firmness. Those who were with him caught his spirit, and copied his demeanour. The rioters had never been so met before. At other mills they had attacked they had found no resistance; an organized, resolute defence was what they never dreamed of encountering. When their leaders saw the steady fire kept up from the mill, witnessed the composure and determination of its owner, heard themselves coolly defied and invited on to death, and beheld their men falling wounded round them, they felt that nothing was to be done here. In haste they mustered their forces, drew them away from the building. A roll was called over, in which the men answered to figures instead of names. They dispersed wide over the fields, leaving silence and ruin behind them. The attack, from its commencement to its termination, had not occupied an hour.

Day was by this time approaching; the west was dim, the east beginning to gleam. It would have seemed that the girls who had watched this conflict would now wish to hasten to the victors, on whose side all their interest had been enlisted; but they only very cautiously approached the now battered mill, and when suddenly a number of soldiers and gentlemen appeared at the great door opening into the yard, they quickly stepped aside into a shed, the deposit of old iron and timber, whence they could see without being seen.

It was no cheering spectacle. These premises were now a mere blot of desolation on the fresh front of the summer dawn. All the copse up the Hollow was shady and dewy, the hill at its head was green; but just here, in the centre of the sweet glen, Discord, broken loose in the night from control, had beaten the ground with his stamping hoofs, and left it waste and pulverized. The mill yawned all ruinous with unglazed frames; the yard was thickly bestrewn with stones and brickbats; and close under the mill, with the glittering fragments of the shattered windows, muskets and other weapons lay here and there. More than one deep crimson stain was visible on the gravel, a human body lay quiet on its face near the gates, and five or six wounded men writhed and moaned in the bloody dust.

Miss Keeldar's countenance changed at this view. It was the after-taste of the battle, death and pain replacing excitement and exertion. It was the blackness the bright fire leaves when its blaze is sunk, its warmth failed, and its glow faded.

"This is what I wished to prevent," she said, in a voice whose cadence betrayed the altered impulse of her heart.

"But you could not prevent it; you did your best--it was in vain," said Caroline comfortingly. "Don't grieve, Shirley."

"I am sorry for those poor fellows," was the answer, while the spark in her glance dissolved to dew. "Are any within the mill hurt, I wonder? Is that your uncle?"

"It is, and there is Mr. Malone; and, O Shirley, there is Robert!"

"Well" (resuming her former tone), "don't squeeze your fingers quite into my hand. I see. There is nothing wonderful in that. We knew he, at least, was here, whoever might be absent."

"He is coming here towards us, Shirley!"

"Towards the pump, that is to say, for the purpose of washing his hands and his forehead, which has got a scratch, I perceive."

"He bleeds, Shirley. Don't hold me. I must go."

"Not a step."

"He is hurt, Shirley!"

"Fiddlestick!"

"But I must go to him. I wish to go so much. I cannot bear to be restrained."

"What for?"

"To speak to him, to ask how he is, and what I can do for him."

"To tease and annoy him; to make a spectacle of yourself and him before those soldiers, Mr. Malone, your uncle, et cetera. Would he like it, think you? Would you like to remember it a week hence?"

"Am I always to be curbed and kept down?" demanded Caroline, a little passionately.

"For his sake, yes; and still more for your own. I tell you, if you showed yourself now you would repent it an hour hence, and so would Robert."

"You think he would not like it, Shirley?"

"Far less than he would like our stopping him to say good-night, which you were so sore about."

"But that was all play; there was no danger."

"And this is serious work; he must be unmolested."

"I only wish to go to him because he is my cousin--you understand?"

"I quite understand. But now, watch him. He has bathed his forehead, and the blood has ceased trickling. His hurt is really a mere graze; I can see it from hence. He is going to look after the wounded men."

Accordingly Mr. Moore and Mr. Helstone went round the yard, examining each prostrate form. They then gave directions to have the wounded taken up and carried into the mill. This duty being performed, Joe Scott was ordered to saddle his master's horse and Mr. Helstone's pony, and the two gentlemen rode away full gallop, to seek surgical aid in different directions.

Caroline was not yet pacified.

"Shirley, Shirley, I should have liked to speak one word to him before he went," she murmured, while the tears gathered glittering in her eyes.

"Why do you cry, Lina?" asked Miss Keeldar a little sternly. "You ought to be glad instead of sorry. Robert has escaped any serious harm; he is victorious; he has been cool and brave in combat; he is now considerate in triumph. Is this a time--are these causes for weeping?"

"You do not know what I have in my heart," pleaded the other--"what pain, what distraction--nor whence it arises. I can understand that you should exult in Robert's greatness and goodness; so do I, in one sense, but in another I feel so miserable. I am too far removed from him. I used to be nearer. Let me alone, Shirley. Do let me cry a few minutes; it relieves me."

Miss Keeldar, feeling her tremble in every limb, ceased to expostulate with her. She went out of the shed, and left her to weep in peace. It was the best plan. In a few minutes Caroline rejoined her, much calmer. She said, with her natural, docile, gentle manner, "Come, Shirley, we will go home now. I promise not to try to see Robert again till he asks for me. I never will try to push myself on him. I thank you for restraining me just now."

"I did it with a good intention," returned Miss Keeldar.

"Now, dear Lina," she continued, "let us turn our faces to the cool morning breeze, and walk very quietly back to the rectory. We will steal in as we stole out. None shall know where we have been or what we have seen to-night; neither taunt nor misconstruction can consequently molest us. To-morrow we will see Robert, and be of good cheer; but I will say no more, lest I should begin to cry too. I seem hard towards you, but I am not so."

XX. TO-MORROW

The two girls met no living soul on their way back to the rectory. They let themselves in noiselessly; they stole upstairs unheard--the breaking morning gave them what light they needed. Shirley sought her couch immediately; and though the room was strange--for she had never slept at the rectory before--and though the recent scene was one unparalleled for excitement and terror by any it had hitherto been her lot to witness, yet scarce was her head laid on the pillow ere a deep, refreshing sleep closed her eyes and calmed her senses.

Perfect health was Shirley's enviable portion. Though warm-hearted and sympathetic, she was not nervous; powerful emotions could rouse and sway without exhausting her spirit. The tempest troubled and shook her while it lasted, but it left her elasticity unbent, and her freshness quite unblighted. As every day brought her stimulating emotion, so every night yielded her recreating rest. Caroline now watched her sleeping, and read the serenity of her mind in the beauty of her happy countenance.

For herself, being of a different temperament, she could not sleep. The commonplace excitement of the tea-drinking and school-gathering would alone have sufficed to make her restless all night; the effect of the terrible drama which had just been enacted before her eyes was not likely to quit her for days. It was vain even to try to retain a recumbent posture; she sat up by Shirley's side, counting the slow minutes, and watching the June sun mount the heavens.

Life wastes fast in such vigils as Caroline had of late but too often kept--vigils during which the mind, having no pleasant food to nourish it, no manna of hope, no hived-honey of joyous memories, tries to live on the meagre diet of wishes, and failing to derive thence either delight or support, and feeling itself ready to perish with craving want, turns to philosophy, to resolution, to resignation; calls on all these gods for aid, calls vainly--is unheard, unhelped, and languishes.

Caroline was a Christian; therefore in trouble she framed many a prayer after the Christian creed, preferred it with deep earnestness, begged for patience, strength, relief. This world, however, we all know, is the scene of trial and probation; and, for any favourable result her petitions had yet wrought, it seemed to her that they were unheard and unaccepted. She believed, sometimes, that God had turned His face from her. At moments she was a Calvinist, and, sinking into the gulf of religious despair, she saw darkening over her the doom of reprobation.

Most people have had a period or periods in their lives when they have felt thus forsaken--when, having long hoped against hope, and still seen the day of fruition deferred, their hearts have truly sickened within them. This is a terrible hour, but it is often that darkest point which precedes the rise of day--that turn of the year when the icy January wind carries over the waste at once the dirge of departing winter and the prophecy of coming spring. The perishing birds, however, cannot thus understand the blast before which they shiver; and as little can the suffering soul recognize, in the climax of its affliction, the dawn of its deliverance. Yet, let whoever grieves still cling fast to love and faith in God. God will never deceive, never finally desert him. "Whom He loveth, He chasteneth." These words are true, and should not be forgotten.

The household was astir at last; the servants were up; the shutters were opened below. Caroline, as she quitted the couch, which had been but a thorny one to her, felt that revival of spirits which the return of day, of action, gives to all but the wholly despairing or actually dying. She dressed herself, as usual, carefully, trying so to arrange her hair and attire that nothing of the forlornness she felt at heart should be visible externally. She looked as fresh as Shirley when both were dressed, only that Miss Keeldar's eyes were lively, and Miss Helstone's languid.

"To-day I shall have much to say to Moore," were Shirley's first words; and you could see in her face that life was full of interest, expectation, and occupation for her. "He will have to undergo cross-examination," she added. "I dare say he thinks he has outwitted me cleverly. And this is the way men deal with women--still concealing danger from them--thinking, I suppose, to spare them pain. They imagined we little knew where they were to-night. We know they little conjectured where we were. Men, I believe, fancy women's minds something like those of children. Now, that is a mistake."

This was said as she stood at the glass, training her naturally waved hair into curls, by twining it round her fingers. She took up the theme again five minutes after, as Caroline fastened her dress and clasped her girdle.

"If men could see us as we really are, they would be a little amazed; but the cleverest, the acutest men are often under an illusion about women. They do not read them in a true light; they misapprehend them, both for good and evil. Their good woman is a queer thing, half doll, half angel; their bad woman almost always a fiend. Then to hear them fall into ecstasies with each other's creations--worshipping the heroine of such a poem, novel, drama--thinking it fine, divine! Fine and divine it may be, but often quite artificial--false as the rose in my best bonnet there. If I spoke all I think on this point, if I gave my real opinion of some first-rate female characters in first-rate works, where should I be? Dead under a cairn of avenging stones in half an hour."

"Shirley, you chatter so, I can't fasten you. Be still. And, after all, authors' heroines are almost as good as authoresses' heroes."

"Not at all. Women read men more truly than men read women. I'll prove that in a magazine paper some day when I've time; only it will never be inserted. It will be 'declined with thanks,' and left for me at the publisher's."

"To be sure. You could not write cleverly enough. You don't know enough. You are not learned, Shirley."

"God knows I can't contradict you, Cary; I'm as ignorant as a stone. There's one comfort, however: you are not much better."

They descended to breakfast.

"I wonder how Mrs. Pryor and Hortense Moore have passed the night," said Caroline, as she made the coffee. "Selfish being that I am, I never thought of either of them till just now. They will have heard all the tumult, Fieldhead and the cottage are so near; and Hortense is timid in such matters--so, no doubt, is Mrs. Pryor."

"Take my word for it, Lina, Moore will have contrived to get his sister out of the way. She went home with Miss Mann. He will have quartered her there for the night. As to Mrs. Pryor, I own I am uneasy about her; but in another half-hour we will be with her."

By this time the news of what had happened at the Hollow was spread all over the neighbourhood. Fanny, who had been to Fieldhead to fetch the milk, returned in panting haste with tidings that there had been a battle in the night at Mr. Moore's mill, and that some said twenty men were killed. Eliza, during Fanny's absence, had been apprised by the butcher's boy that the mill was burnt to the ground. Both women rushed into the parlour to announce these terrible facts to the ladies, terminating their clear and accurate narrative by the assertion that they were sure master must have been in it all. He and Thomas, the clerk, they were confident, must have gone last night to join Mr. Moore and the soldiers. Mr. Malone, too, had not been heard of at his lodgings since yesterday afternoon; and Joe Scott's wife and family were in the greatest distress, wondering what had become of their head.

Scarcely was this information imparted when a knock at the kitchen door announced the Fieldhead errand-boy, arrived in hot haste, bearing a billet from Mrs. Pryor. It was hurriedly written, and urged Miss Keeldar to return directly, as the neighbourhood and the house seemed likely to be all in confusion, and orders would have to be given which the mistress of the hall alone could regulate. In a postscript it was entreated that Miss Helstone might not be left alone at the rectory. She had better, it was suggested, accompany Miss Keeldar.

"There are not two opinions on that head," said Shirley, as she tied on her own bonnet, and then ran to fetch Caroline's.

"But what will Fanny and Eliza do? And if my uncle returns?"

"Your uncle will not return yet; he has other fish to fry. He will be galloping backwards and forwards from Briarfield to Stilbro' all day, rousing the magistrates in the court-house and the officers at the barracks; and Fanny and Eliza can have in Joe Scott's and the clerk's wives to bear them company. Besides, of course, there is no real danger to be apprehended now. Weeks will elapse before the rioters can again rally, or plan any other attempt; and I am much mistaken if Moore and Mr. Helstone will not take advantage of last night's outbreak to quell them altogether. They will frighten the authorities of Stilbro' into energetic measures. I only hope they will not be too severe--not pursue the discomfited too relentlessly."

"Robert will not be cruel. We saw that last night," said Caroline.

"But he will be hard," retorted Shirley; "and so will your uncle."

As they hurried along the meadow and plantation path to Fieldhead, they saw the distant highway already alive with an unwonted flow of equestrians and pedestrians, tending in the direction of the usually solitary Hollow. On reaching the hall, they found the backyard gates open, and the court and kitchen seemed crowded with excited milk-fetchers--men, women, and children--whom Mrs. Gill, the housekeeper, appeared vainly persuading to take their milk-cans and depart. (It is, or was, by-the-bye, the custom in the north of England for the cottagers on a country squire's estate to receive their supplies of milk and butter from the dairy of the manor house, on whose pastures a herd of milch kine was usually fed for the convenience of the neighbourhood. Miss Keeldar owned such a herd--all deep-dewlapped, Craven cows, reared on the sweet herbage and clear waters of bonny Airedale; and very proud she was of their sleek aspect and high condition.) Seeing now the state of matters, and that it was desirable to effect a clearance of the premises, Shirley stepped in amongst the gossiping groups. She bade them good-morning with a certain frank, tranquil ease--the natural characteristic of her manner when she addressed numbers, especially if those numbers belonged to the working-class; she was cooler amongst her equals, and rather proud to those above her. She then asked them if they had all got their milk measured out; and understanding that they had, she further observed that she "wondered what they were waiting for, then."

"We're just talking a bit over this battle there has been at your mill, mistress," replied a man.

"Talking a bit! Just like you!" said Shirley. "It is a queer thing all the world is so fond of talking over events. You talk if anybody dies suddenly; you talk if a fire breaks out; you talk if a mill-owner fails; you talk if he's murdered. What good does your talking do?"

There is nothing the lower orders like better than a little downright good-humoured rating. Flattery they scorn very much; honest abuse they enjoy. They call it speaking plainly, and take a sincere delight in being the objects thereof. The homely harshness of Miss Keeldar's salutation won her the ear of the whole throng in a second.

"We're no war nor some 'at is aboon us, are we?" asked a man, smiling.

"Nor a whit better. You that should be models of industry are just as gossip-loving as the idle. Fine, rich people that have nothing to do may be partly excused for trifling their time away; you who have to earn your bread with the sweat of your brow are quite inexcusable."

"That's queer, mistress. Suld we never have a holiday because we work hard?"

"Never," was the prompt answer; "unless," added the "mistress," with a smile that half belied the severity of her speech--"unless you knew how to make a better use of it than to get together over rum and tea if you are women, or over beer and pipes if you are men, and talk scandal at your neighbours' expense. Come, friends," she added, changing at once from bluntness to courtesy, "oblige me by taking your cans and going home. I expect several persons to call to-day, and it will be inconvenient to have the avenues to the house crowded."

Yorkshire people are as yielding to persuasion as they are stubborn against compulsion. The yard was clear in five minutes.

"Thank you, and good-bye to you, friends," said Shirley, as she closed the gates on a quiet court.

Now, let me hear the most refined of cockneys presume to find fault with Yorkshire manners. Taken as they ought to be, the majority of the lads and lasses of the West Riding are gentlemen and ladies, every inch of them. It is only against the weak affectation and futile pomposity of a would-be aristocrat they turn mutinous.

Entering by the back way, the young ladies passed through the kitchen (or house, as the inner kitchen is called) to the hall. Mrs. Pryor came running down the oak staircase to meet them. She was all unnerved; her naturally sanguine complexion was pale; her usually placid, though timid, blue eye was wandering, unsettled, alarmed. She did not, however, break out into any exclamations, or hurried narrative of what had happened. Her predominant feeling had been in the course of the night, and was now this morning, a sense of dissatisfaction with herself that she could not feel firmer, cooler, more equal to the demands of the occasion.

"You are aware," she began with a trembling voice, and yet the most conscientious anxiety to avoid exaggeration in what she was about to say, "that a body of rioters has attacked Mr. Moore's mill to-night. We heard the firing and confusion very plainly here; we none of us slept. It was a sad night. The house has been in great bustle all the morning with people coming and going. The servants have applied to me for orders and directions, which I really did not feel warranted in giving. Mr. Moore has, I believe, sent up for refreshments for the soldiers and others engaged in the defence, for some conveniences also for the wounded. I could not undertake the responsibility of giving orders or taking measures. I fear delay may have been injurious in some instances; but this is not my house. You were absent, my dear Miss Keeldar. What could I do?"

"Were no refreshments sent?" asked Shirley, while her countenance, hitherto so clear, propitious, and quiet, even while she was rating the milk-fetchers, suddenly turned dark and warm.

"I think not, my dear."

"And nothing for the wounded--no linen, no wine, no bedding?"

"I think not. I cannot tell what Mrs. Gill did; but it seemed impossible to me, at the moment, to venture to dispose of your property by sending supplies to soldiers. Provisions for a company of soldiers sounds formidable. How many there are I did not ask; but I could not think of allowing them to pillage the house, as it were. I intended to do what was right, yet I did not see the case quite clearly, I own."

"It lies in a nutshell, notwithstanding. These soldiers have risked their lives in defence of my property: I suppose they have a right to my gratitude. The wounded are our fellow-creatures: I suppose we should aid them.--Mrs. Gill!"

She turned, and called in a voice more clear than soft. It rang through the thick oak of the hall and kitchen doors more effectually than a bell's summons. Mrs. Gill, who was deep in bread-making, came with hands and apron in culinary case, not having dared to stop to rub the dough from the one or to shake the flour from the other. Her mistress had never called a servant in that voice save once before, and that was when she had seen from the window Tartar in full tug with two carriers' dogs, each of them a match for him in size, if not in courage, and their masters standing by, encouraging their animals, while hers was unbefriended. Then indeed she had summoned John as if the Day of Judgment were at hand. Nor had she waited for the said John's coming, but had walked out into the lane bonnetless, and after informing the carriers that she held them far less of men than the three brutes whirling and worrying in the dust before them, had put her hands round the thick neck of the largest of the curs, and given her whole strength to the essay of choking it from Tartar's torn and bleeding eye, just above and below which organ the vengeful fangs were inserted. Five or six men were presently on the spot to help her, but she never thanked one of them. "They might have come before if their will had been good," she said. She had not a word for anybody during the rest of the day, but sat near the hall fire till evening watching and tending Tartar, who lay all gory, stiff, and swelled on a mat at her feet. She wept furtively over him sometimes, and murmured the softest words of pity and endearment, in tones whose music the old, scarred, canine warrior acknowledged by licking her hand or her sandal alternately with his own red wounds. As to John, his lady turned a cold shoulder on him for a week afterwards.

Mrs. Gill, remembering this little episode, came "all of a tremble," as she said herself. In a firm, brief voice Miss Keeldar proceeded to put questions and give orders. That at such a time Fieldhead should have evinced the inhospitality of a miser's hovel stung her haughty spirit to the quick; and the revolt of its pride was seen in the heaving of her heart, stirred stormily under the lace and silk which veiled it.

"How long is it since that message came from the mill?"

"Not an hour yet, ma'am," answered the housekeeper soothingly.

"Not an hour! You might almost as well have said not a day. They will have applied elsewhere by this time. Send a man instantly down to tell them that everything this house contains is at Mr. Moore's, Mr. Helstone's, and the soldiers' service. Do that first."

While the order was being executed, Shirley moved away from her friends, and stood at the hall-window, silent, unapproachable. When Mrs. Gill came back, she turned. The purple flush which painful excitement kindles on a pale cheek glowed on hers; the spark which displeasure lights in a dark eye fired her glance.

"Let the contents of the larder and the wine-cellar be brought up, put into the hay-carts, and driven down to the Hollow. If there does not happen to be much bread or much meat in the house, go to the butcher and baker, and desire them to send what they have. But I will see for myself."

She moved off.

"All will be right soon; she will get over it in an hour," whispered Caroline to Mrs. Pryor. "Go upstairs, dear madam," she added affectionately, "and try to be as calm and easy as you can. The truth is, Shirley will blame herself more than you before the day is over."

By dint of a few more gentle assurances and persuasions, Miss Helstone contrived to soothe the agitated lady. Having accompanied her to her apartment, and promised to rejoin her there when things were settled, Caroline left her to see, as she said, "if she could be useful." She presently found that she could be very useful; for the retinue of servants at Fieldhead was by no means numerous, and just now their mistress found plenty of occupation for all the hands at her command, and for her own also. The delicate good-nature and dexterous activity which Caroline brought to the aid of the housekeeper and maids--all somewhat scared by their lady's unwonted mood--did a world of good at once; it helped the assistants and appeased the directress. A chance glance and smile from Caroline moved Shirley to an answering smile directly. The former was carrying a heavy basket up the cellar stairs.

"This is a shame!" cried Shirley, running to her. "It will strain your arm."

She took it from her, and herself bore it out into the yard. The cloud of temper was dispelled when she came back; the flash in her eye was melted; the shade on her forehead vanished. She resumed her usual cheerful and cordial manner to those about her, tempering her revived spirits with a little of the softness of shame at her previous unjust anger.

She was still superintending the lading of the cart, when a gentleman entered the yard and approached her ere she was aware of his presence.

"I hope I see Miss Keeldar well this morning?" he said, examining with rather significant scrutiny her still flushed face.

She gave him a look, and then again bent to her employment without reply. A pleasant enough smile played on her lips, but she hid it. The gentleman repeated his salutation, stooping, that it might reach her ear with more facility.

"Well enough, if she be good enough," was the answer; "and so is Mr. Moore too, I dare say. To speak truth, I am not anxious about him; some slight mischance would be only his just due. His conduct has been--we will say strange just now, till we have time to characterize it by a more exact epithet. Meantime, may I ask what brings him here?"

"Mr. Helstone and I have just received your message that everything at Fieldhead was at our service. We judged, by the unlimited wording of the gracious intimation, that you would be giving yourself too much trouble. I perceive our conjecture was correct. We are not a regiment, remember--only about half a dozen soldiers and as many civilians. Allow me to retrench something from these too abundant supplies."

Miss Keeldar blushed, while she laughed at her own over-eager generosity and most disproportionate calculations. Moore laughed too, very quietly though; and as quietly he ordered basket after basket to be taken from the cart, and remanded vessel after vessel to the cellar.

"The rector must hear of this," he said; "he will make a good story of it. What an excellent army contractor Miss Keeldar would have been!" Again he laughed, adding, "It is precisely as I conjectured."

"You ought to be thankful," said Shirley, "and not mock me. What could I do? How could I gauge your appetites or number your band? For aught I knew, there might have been fifty of you at least to victual. You told me nothing; and then an application to provision soldiers naturally suggests large ideas."

"It appears so," remarked Moore, levelling another of his keen, quiet glances at the discomfited Shirley.--"Now," he continued, addressing the carter, "I think you may take what remains to the Hollow. Your load will be somewhat lighter than the one Miss Keeldar destined you to carry."

As the vehicle rumbled out of the yard, Shirley, rallying her spirits, demanded what had become of the wounded.

"There was not a single man hurt on our side," was the answer.

"You were hurt yourself, on the temples," interposed a quick, low voice--that of Caroline, who, having withdrawn within the shade of the door, and behind the large person of Mrs. Gill, had till now escaped Moore's notice. When she spoke, his eye searched the obscurity of her retreat.

"Are you much hurt?" she inquired.

"As you might scratch your finger with a needle in sewing."

"Lift your hair and let us see."

He took his hat off, and did as he was bid, disclosing only a narrow slip of court-plaster. Caroline indicated, by a slight movement of the head, that she was satisfied, and disappeared within the clear obscure of the interior.

"How did she know I was hurt?" asked Moore.

"By rumour, no doubt. But it is too good in her to trouble herself about you. For my part, it was of your victims I was thinking when I inquired after the wounded. What damage have your opponents sustained?"

"One of the rioters, or victims as you call them, was killed, and six were hurt."

"What have you done with them?"

"What you will perfectly approve. Medical aid was procured immediately; and as soon as we can get a couple of covered wagons and some clean straw, they will be removed to Stilbro'."

"Straw! You must have beds and bedding. I will send my wagon directly, properly furnished; and Mr. Yorke, I am sure, will send his."

"You guess correctly; he has volunteered already. And Mrs. Yorke--who, like you, seems disposed to regard the rioters as martyrs, and me, and especially Mr. Helstone, as murderers--is at this moment, I believe, most assiduously engaged in fitting it up with feather-beds, pillows, bolsters, blankets, etc. The victims lack no attentions, I promise you. Mr. Hall, your favourite parson, has been with them ever since six o'clock, exhorting them, praying with them, and even waiting on them like any nurse; and Caroline's good friend, Miss Ainley, that very plain old maid, sent in a stock of lint and linen, something in the proportion of another lady's allowance of beef and wine."

"That will do. Where is your sister?"

"Well cared for. I had her securely domiciled with Miss Mann. This very morning the two set out for Wormwood Wells [a noted watering-place], and will stay there some weeks."

"So Mr. Helstone domiciled me at the rectory! Mighty clever you gentlemen think you are! I make you heartily welcome to the idea, and hope its savour, as you chew the cud of reflection upon it, gives you pleasure. Acute and astute, why are you not also omniscient? How is it that events transpire, under your very noses, of which you have no suspicion? It should be so, otherwise the exquisite gratification of outmanoeuvring you would be unknown. Ah, friend, you may search my countenance, but you cannot read it."

Moore, indeed, looked as if he could not.

"You think me a dangerous specimen of my sex. Don't you now?"

"A peculiar one, at least."

"But Caroline--is she peculiar?"

"In her way--yes."

"Her way! What is her way?"

"You know her as well as I do."

"And knowing her, I assert that she is neither eccentric nor difficult of control. Is she?"

"That depends----"

"However, there is nothing masculine about her?"

"Why lay such emphasis on her? Do you consider her a contrast, in that respect, to yourself?"

"You do, no doubt; but that does not signify. Caroline is neither masculine, nor of what they call the spirited order of women."

"I have seen her flash out."

"So have I, but not with manly fire. It was a short, vivid, trembling glow, that shot up, shone, vanished----"

"And left her scared at her own daring. You describe others besides Caroline."

"The point I wish to establish is, that Miss Helstone, though gentle, tractable, and candid enough, is still perfectly capable of defying even Mr. Moore's penetration."

"What have you and she been doing?" asked Moore suddenly.

"Have you had any breakfast?"

"What is your mutual mystery?"

"If you are hungry, Mrs. Gill will give you something to eat here. Step into the oak parlour, and ring the bell. You will be served as if at an inn; or, if you like better, go back to the Hollow."

"The alternative is not open to me; I must go back. Good-morning. The first leisure I have I will see you again."

XXI. MRS. PRYOR

While Shirley was talking with Moore, Caroline rejoined Mrs. Pryor upstairs. She found that lady deeply depressed. She would not say that Miss Keeldar's hastiness had hurt her feelings, but it was evident an inward wound galled her. To any but a congenial nature she would have seemed insensible to the quiet, tender attentions by which Miss Helstone sought to impart solace; but Caroline knew that, unmoved or slightly moved as she looked, she felt, valued, and was healed by them.

"I am deficient in self-confidence and decision," she said at last. "I always have been deficient in those qualities. Yet I think Miss Keeldar should have known my character well enough by this time to be aware that I always feel an even painful solicitude to do right, to act for the best. The unusual nature of the demand on my judgment puzzled me, especially following the alarms of the night. I could not venture to act promptly for another; but I trust no serious harm will result from my lapse of firmness."

A gentle knock was here heard at the door. It was half opened.

"Caroline, come here," said a low voice.

Miss Helstone went out. There stood Shirley in the gallery, looking contrite, ashamed, sorry as any repentant child.

"How is Mrs. Pryor?" she asked.

"Rather out of spirits," said Caroline.

"I have behaved very shamefully, very ungenerously, very ungratefully to her," said Shirley. "How insolent in me to turn on her thus for what, after all, was no fault--only an excess of conscientiousness on her part. But I regret my error most sincerely. Tell her so, and ask if she will forgive me."

Caroline discharged the errand with heartfelt pleasure. Mrs. Pryor rose, came to the door. She did not like scenes; she dreaded them as all timid people do. She said falteringly, "Come in, my dear."

Shirley did come in with some impetuosity. She threw her arms round her governess, and while she kissed her heartily she said, "You know you must forgive me, Mrs. Pryor. I could not get on at all if there was a misunderstanding between you and me."

"I have nothing to forgive," was the reply. "We will pass it over now, if you please. The final result of the incident is that it proves more plainly than ever how unequal I am to certain crises."

And that was the painful feeling which would remain on Mrs. Pryor's mind. No effort of Shirley's or Caroline's could efface it thence. She could forgive her offending pupil, not her innocent self.

Miss Keeldar, doomed to be in constant request during the morning, was presently summoned downstairs again. The rector called first. A lively welcome and livelier reprimand were at his service. He expected both, and, being in high spirits, took them in equally good part.

In the course of his brief visit he quite forgot to ask after his niece; the riot, the rioters, the mill, the magistrates, the heiress, absorbed all his thoughts to the exclusion of family ties. He alluded to the part himself and curate had taken in the defence of the Hollow.

"The vials of pharisaical wrath will be emptied on our heads for our share in this business," he said; "but I defy every calumniator. I was there only to support the law, to play my part as a man and a Briton; which characters I deem quite compatible with those of the priest and Levite, in their highest sense. Your tenant Moore," he went on, "has won my approbation. A cooler commander I would not wish to see, nor a more determined. Besides, the man has shown sound judgment and good sense--first, in being thoroughly prepared for the event which has taken place; and subsequently, when his well-concerted plans had secured him success, in knowing how to use without abusing his victory. Some of the magistrates are now well frightened, and, like all cowards, show a tendency to be cruel. Moore restrains them with admirable prudence. He has hitherto been very unpopular in the neighbourhood; but, mark my words, the tide of opinion will now take a turn in his favour. People will find out that they have not appreciated him, and will hasten to remedy their error; and he, when he perceives the public disposed to acknowledge his merits, will show a more gracious mien than that with which he has hitherto favoured us."

Mr. Helstone was about to add to this speech some half-jesting, half-serious warnings to Miss Keeldar on the subject of her rumoured partiality for her talented tenant, when a ring at the door, announcing another caller, checked his raillery; and as that other caller appeared in the form of a white-haired elderly gentleman, with a rather truculent countenance and disdainful eye--in short, our old acquaintance, and the rector's old enemy, Mr. Yorke--the priest and Levite seized his hat, and with the briefest of adieus to Miss Keeldar and the sternest of nods to her guest took an abrupt leave.

Mr. Yorke was in no mild mood, and in no measured terms did he express his opinion on the transaction of the night. Moore, the magistrates, the soldiers, the mob leaders, each and all came in for a share of his invectives; but he reserved his strongest epithets--and real racy Yorkshire Doric adjectives they were--for the benefit of the fighting parsons, the "sanguinary, demoniac" rector and curate. According to him, the cup of ecclesiastical guilt was now full indeed.

"The church," he said, "was in a bonny pickle now. It was time it came down when parsons took to swaggering amang soldiers, blazing away wi' bullet and gunpowder, taking the lives of far honester men than themselves."

"What would Moore have done if nobody had helped him?" asked Shirley.

"Drunk as he'd brewed, eaten as he'd baked."

"Which means you would have left him by himself to face that mob. Good! He has plenty of courage, but the greatest amount of gallantry that ever garrisoned one human breast could scarce avail against two hundred."

"He had the soldiers, those poor slaves who hire out their own blood and spill other folk's for money."

"You abuse soldiers almost as much as you abuse clergymen. All who wear red coats are national refuse in your eyes, and all who wear black are national swindlers. Mr. Moore, according to you, did wrong to get military aid, and he did still worse to accept of any other aid. Your way of talking amounts to this: he should have abandoned his mill and his life to the rage of a set of misguided madmen, and Mr. Helstone and every other gentleman in the parish should have looked on, and seen the building razed and its owner slaughtered, and never stirred a finger to save either."

"If Moore had behaved to his men from the beginning as a master ought to behave, they never would have entertained their present feelings towards him."

"Easy for you to talk," exclaimed Miss Keeldar, who was beginning to wax warm in her tenant's cause--"you, whose family have lived at Briarmains for six generations, to whose person the people have been accustomed for fifty years, who know all their ways, prejudices, and preferences--easy, indeed, for you to act so as to avoid offending them. But Mr. Moore came a stranger into the district; he came here poor and friendless, with nothing but his own energies to back him, nothing but his honour, his talent, and his industry to make his way for him. A monstrous crime indeed that, under such circumstances, he could not popularize his naturally grave, quiet manners all at once; could not be jocular, and free, and cordial with a strange peasantry, as you are with your fellow-townsmen! An unpardonable transgression that when he introduced improvements he did not go about the business in quite the most politic way, did not graduate his changes as delicately as a rich capitalist might have done! For errors of this sort is he to be the victim of mob outrage? Is he to be denied even the privilege of defending himself? Are those who have the hearts of men in their breasts (and Mr. Helstone, say what you will of him, has such a heart) to be reviled like malefactors because they stand by him, because they venture to espouse the cause of one against two hundred?"

"Come, come now, be cool," said Mr. Yorke, smiling at the earnestness with which Shirley multiplied her rapid questions.

"Cool! Must I listen coolly to downright nonsense--to dangerous nonsense? No. I like you very well, Mr. Yorke, as you know, but I thoroughly dislike some of your principles. All that cant--excuse me, but I repeat the word--all that cant about soldiers and parsons is most offensive in my ears. All ridiculous, irrational crying up of one class, whether the same be aristocrat or democrat--all howling down of another class, whether clerical or military--all exacting injustice to individuals, whether monarch or mendicant--is really sickening to me; all arraying of ranks against ranks, all party hatreds, all tyrannies disguised as liberties, I reject and wash my hands of. You think you are a philanthropist; you think you are an advocate of liberty; but I will tell you this--Mr. Hall, the parson of Nunnely, is a better friend both of man and freedom than Hiram Yorke, the reformer of Briarfield."

From a man Mr. Yorke would not have borne this language very patiently, nor would he have endured it from some women; but he accounted Shirley both honest and pretty, and her plain-spoken ire amused him. Besides, he took a secret pleasure in hearing her defend her tenant, for we have already intimated he had Robert Moore's interest very much at heart. Moreover, if he wished to avenge himself for her severity, he knew the means lay in his power: a word, he believed, would suffice to tame and silence her, to cover her frank forehead with the rosy shadow of shame, and veil the glow of her eye under down-drooped lid and lash.

"What more hast thou to say?" he inquired, as she paused, rather, it appeared, to take breath than because her subject or her zeal was exhausted.

"Say, Mr. Yorke!" was the answer, the speaker meantime walking fast from wall to wall of the oak parlour--"say? I have a great deal to say, if I could get it out in lucid order, which I never can do. I have to say that your views, and those of most extreme politicians, are such as none but men in an irresponsible position can advocate; that they are purely opposition views, meant only to be talked about, and never intended to be acted on. Make you Prime Minister of England to-morrow, and you would have to abandon them. You abuse Moore for defending his mill. Had you been in Moore's place you could not with honour or sense have acted otherwise than he acted. You abuse Mr. Helstone for everything he does. Mr. Helstone has his faults; he sometimes does wrong, but oftener right. Were you ordained vicar of Briarfield, you would find it no easy task to sustain all the active schemes for the benefit of the parish planned and persevered in by your predecessor. I wonder people cannot judge more fairly of each other and themselves. When I hear Messrs. Malone and Donne chatter about the authority of the church, the dignity and claims of the priesthood, the deference due to them as clergymen; when I hear the outbreaks of their small spite against Dissenters; when I witness their silly, narrow jealousies and assumptions; when their palaver about forms, and traditions, and superstitions is sounding in my ear; when I behold their insolent carriage to the poor, their often base servility to the rich--I think the Establishment is indeed in a poor way, and both she and her sons appear in the utmost need of reformation. Turning away distressed from minster tower and village spire--ay, as distressed as a churchwarden who feels the exigence of white-wash and has not wherewithal to purchase lime--I recall your senseless sarcasms on the 'fat bishops,' the 'pampered parsons,' 'old mother church,' etc. I remember your strictures on all who differ from you, your sweeping condemnation of classes and individuals, without the slightest allowance made for circumstances or temptations; and then, Mr. Yorke, doubt clutches my inmost heart as to whether men exist clement, reasonable, and just enough to be entrusted with the task of reform. I don't believe you are of the number."

"You have an ill opinion of me, Miss Shirley. You never told me so much of your mind before."

"I never had an opening. But I have sat on Jessy's stool by your chair in the back-parlour at Briarmains, for evenings together, listening excitedly to your talk, half admiring what you said, and half rebelling against it. I think you a fine old Yorkshireman, sir. I am proud to have been born in the same county and parish as yourself. Truthful, upright, independent you are, as a rock based below seas; but also you are harsh, rude, narrow, and merciless."

"Not to the poor, lass, nor to the meek of the earth; only to the proud and high-minded."

"And what right have you, sir, to make such distinctions? A prouder, a higher-minded man than yourself does not exist. You find it easy to speak comfortably to your inferiors; you are too haughty, too ambitious, too jealous to be civil to those above you. But you are all alike. Helstone also is proud and prejudiced. Moore, though juster and more considerate than either you or the rector, is still haughty, stern, and, in a public sense, selfish. It is well there are such men as Mr. Hall to be found occasionally--men of large and kind hearts, who can love their whole race, who can forgive others for being richer, more prosperous, or more powerful than they are. Such men may have less originality, less force of character than you, but they are better friends to mankind."

"And when is it to be?" said Mr. Yorke, now rising.

"When is what to be?"

"The wedding."

"Whose wedding?"

"Only that of Robert Gérard Moore, Esq., of Hollow's Cottage, with Miss Keeldar, daughter and heiress of the late Charles Cave Keeldar of Fieldhead Hall."

Shirley gazed at the questioner with rising colour. But the light in her eye was not faltering; it shone steadily--yes, it burned deeply.

"That is your revenge," she said slowly; then added, "Would it be a bad match, unworthy of the late Charles Cave Keeldar's representative?"

"My lass, Moore is a gentleman; his blood is pure and ancient as mine or thine."

"And we two set store by ancient blood? We have family pride, though one of us at least is a republican?"

Yorke bowed as he stood before her. His lips were mute, but his eye confessed the impeachment. Yes, he had family pride; you saw it in his whole bearing.

"Moore is a gentleman," echoed Shirley, lifting her head with glad grace. She checked herself. Words seemed crowding to her tongue. She would not give them utterance; but her look spoke much at the moment. What, Yorke tried to read, but could not. The language was there, visible, but untranslatable--a poem, a fervid lyric, in an unknown tongue. It was not a plain story, however, no simple gush of feeling, no ordinary love-confession--that was obvious. It was something other, deeper, more intricate than he guessed at. He felt his revenge had not struck home. He felt that Shirley triumphed. She held him at fault, baffled, puzzled. She enjoyed the moment, not he.

"And if Moore is a gentleman, you can be only a lady; therefore----"

"Therefore there would be no inequality in our union."

"None."

"Thank you for your approbation. Will you give me away when I relinquish the name of Keeldar for that of Moore?"

Mr. Yorke, instead of replying, gazed at her much puzzled. He could not divine what her look signified--whether she spoke in earnest or in jest. There were purpose and feeling, banter and scoff, playing, mingled, on her mobile lineaments.

"I don't understand thee," he said, turning away.

She laughed. "Take courage, sir; you are not singular in your ignorance. But I suppose if Moore understands me that will do, will it not?"

"Moore may settle his own matters henceforward for me; I'll neither meddle nor make with them further."

A new thought crossed her. Her countenance changed magically. With a sudden darkening of the eye and austere fixing of the features she demanded, "Have you been asked to interfere? Are you questioning me as another's proxy?"

"The Lord save us! Whoever weds thee must look about him! Keep all your questions for Robert; I'll answer no more on 'em. Good-day, lassie!"

* * * * *

The day being fine, or at least fair--for soft clouds curtained the sun, and a dim but not chill or waterish haze slept blue on the hills--Caroline, while Shirley was engaged with her callers, had persuaded Mrs. Pryor to assume her bonnet and summer shawl, and to take a walk with her up towards the narrow end of the Hollow.

Here the opposing sides of the glen, approaching each other and becoming clothed with brushwood and stunted oaks, formed a wooded ravine, at the bottom of which ran the mill-stream, in broken, unquiet course, struggling with many stones, chafing against rugged banks, fretting with gnarled tree-roots, foaming, gurgling, battling as it went. Here, when you had wandered half a mile from the mill, you found a sense of deep solitude--found it in the shade of unmolested trees, received it in the singing of many birds, for which that shade made a home. This was no trodden way. The freshness of the wood flowers attested that foot of man seldom pressed them; the abounding wild roses looked as if they budded, bloomed, and faded under the watch of solitude, as if in a sultan's harem. Here you saw the sweet azure of blue-bells, and recognized in pearl-white blossoms, spangling the grass, a humble type of some starlit spot in space.

Mrs. Pryor liked a quiet walk. She ever shunned high-roads, and sought byways and lonely lanes. One companion she preferred to total solitude, for in solitude she was nervous; a vague fear of annoying encounters broke the enjoyment of quite lonely rambles. But she feared nothing with Caroline. When once she got away from human habitations, and entered the still demesne of nature accompanied by this one youthful friend, a propitious change seemed to steal over her mind and beam in her countenance. When with Caroline--and Caroline only--her heart, you would have said, shook off a burden, her brow put aside a veil, her spirits too escaped from a restraint. With her she was cheerful; with her, at times, she was tender; to her she would impart her knowledge, reveal glimpses of her experience, give her opportunities for guessing what life she had lived, what cultivation her mind had received, of what calibre was her intelligence, how and where her feelings were vulnerable.

To-day, for instance, as they walked along, Mrs. Pryor talked to her companion about the various birds singing in the trees, discriminated their species, and said something about their habits and peculiarities. English natural history seemed familiar to her. All the wild flowers round their path were recognized by her; tiny plants springing near stones and peeping out of chinks in old walls--plants such as Caroline had scarcely noticed before--received a name and an intimation of their properties. It appeared that she had minutely studied the botany of English fields and woods. Having reached the head of the ravine, they sat down together on a ledge of gray and mossy rock jutting from the base of a steep green hill which towered above them. She looked round her, and spoke of the neighbourhood as she had once before seen it long ago. She alluded to its changes, and compared its aspect with that of other parts of England, revealing in quiet, unconscious touches of description a sense of the picturesque, an appreciation of the beautiful or commonplace, a power of comparing the wild with the cultured, the grand with the tame, that gave to her discourse a graphic charm as pleasant as it was unpretending.

The sort of reverent pleasure with which Caroline listened--so sincere, so quiet, yet so evident--stirred the elder lady's faculties to gentle animation. Rarely, probably, had she, with her chill, repellent outside, her diffident mien, and incommunicative habits, known what it was to excite in one whom she herself could love feelings of earnest affection and admiring esteem. Delightful, doubtless, was the consciousness that a young girl towards whom it seemed, judging by the moved expression of her eyes and features, her heart turned with almost a fond impulse, looked up to her as an instructor, and clung to her as a friend. With a somewhat more marked accent of interest than she often permitted herself to use, she said, as she bent towards her youthful companion, and put aside from her forehead a pale brown curl which had strayed from the confining comb, "I do hope this sweet air blowing from the hill will do you good, my dear Caroline. I wish I could see something more of colour in these cheeks; but perhaps you were never florid?"

"I had red cheeks once," returned Miss Helstone, smiling. "I remember a year--two years ago--when I used to look in the glass, I saw a different face there to what I see now--rounder and rosier. But when we are young," added the girl of eighteen, "our minds are careless and our lives easy."

"Do you," continued Mrs. Pryor, mastering by an effort that tyrant timidity which made it difficult for her, even under present circumstances, to attempt the scrutiny of another's heart--"do you, at your age, fret yourself with cares for the future? Believe me, you had better not. Let the morrow take thought for the things of itself."

"True, dear madam. It is not over the future I pine. The evil of the day is sometimes oppressive--too oppressive--and I long to escape it."

"That is--the evil of the day--that is--your uncle perhaps is not--you find it difficult to understand--he does not appreciate----"

Mrs. Pryor could not complete her broken sentences; she could not manage to put the question whether Mr. Helstone was too harsh with his niece. But Caroline comprehended.

"Oh, that is nothing," she replied. "My uncle and I get on very well. We never quarrel--I don't call him harsh--he never scolds me. Sometimes I wish somebody in the world loved me, but I cannot say that I particularly wish him to have more affection for me than he has. As a child, I should perhaps have felt the want of attention, only the servants were very kind to me; but when people are long indifferent to us, we grow indifferent to their indifference. It is my uncle's way not to care for women and girls, unless they be ladies that he meets in company. He could not alter, and I have no wish that he should alter, as far as I am concerned. I believe it would merely annoy and frighten me were he to be affectionate towards me now. But you know, Mrs. Pryor, it is scarcely living to measure time as I do at the rectory. The hours pass, and I get them over somehow, but I do not live. I endure existence, but I rarely enjoy it. Since Miss Keeldar and you came I have been--I was going to say happier, but that would be untrue." She paused.

"How untrue? You are fond of Miss Keeldar, are you not, my dear?"

"Very fond of Shirley. I both like and admire her. But I am painfully circumstanced. For a reason I cannot explain I want to go away from this place, and to forget it."

"You told me before you wished to be a governess; but, my dear, if you remember, I did not encourage the idea. I have been a governess myself great part of my life. In Miss Keeldar's acquaintance I esteem myself most fortunate. Her talents and her really sweet disposition have rendered my office easy to me; but when I was young, before I married, my trials were severe, poignant. I should not like a---- I should not like you to endure similar ones. It was my lot to enter a family of considerable pretensions to good birth and mental superiority, and the members of which also believed that 'on them was perceptible' an unusual endowment of the 'Christian graces;' that all their hearts were regenerate, and their spirits in a peculiar state of discipline. I was early given to understand that 'as I was not their equal,' so I could not expect 'to have their sympathy.' It was in no sort concealed from me that I was held a 'burden and a restraint in society.' The gentlemen, I found, regarded me as a 'tabooed woman,' to whom 'they were interdicted from granting the usual privileges of the sex,' and yet 'who annoyed them by frequently crossing their path.' The ladies too made it plain that they thought me 'a bore.' The servants, it was signified, 'detested me;' why, I could never clearly comprehend. My pupils, I was told, 'however much they might love me, and how deep soever the interest I might take in them, could not be my friends.' It was intimated that I must 'live alone, and never transgress the invisible but rigid line which established the difference between me and my employers.' My life in this house was sedentary, solitary, constrained, joyless, toilsome. The dreadful crushing of the animal spirits, the ever-prevailing sense of friendlessness and homelessness consequent on this state of things began ere long to produce mortal effects on my constitution. I sickened. The lady of the house told me coolly I was the victim of 'wounded vanity.' She hinted that if I did not make an effort to quell my 'ungodly discontent,' to cease 'murmuring against God's appointment,' and to cultivate the profound humility befitting my station, my mind would very likely 'go to pieces' on the rock that wrecked most of my sisterhood--morbid self-esteem--and that I should die an inmate of a lunatic asylum.

"I said nothing to Mrs. Hardman--it would have been useless; but to her eldest daughter I one day dropped a few observations, which were answered thus. There were hardships, she allowed, in the position of a governess. 'Doubtless they had their trials; but,' she averred, with a manner it makes me smile now to recall--'but it must be so. She' (Miss H.) 'had neither view, hope, nor wish to see these things remedied; for in the inherent constitution of English habits, feelings, and prejudices there was no possibility that they should be. Governesses,' she observed, 'must ever be kept in a sort of isolation. It is the only means of maintaining that distance which the reserve of English manners and the decorum of English families exact.'

"I remember I sighed as Miss Hardman quitted my bedside. She caught the sound, and turning, said severely, 'I fear, Miss Grey, you have inherited in fullest measure the worst sin of our fallen nature--the sin of pride. You are proud, and therefore you are ungrateful too. Mamma pays you a handsome salary, and if you had average sense you would thankfully put up with much that is fatiguing to do and irksome to bear, since it is so well made worth your while.'

"Miss Hardman, my love, was a very strong-minded young lady, of most distinguished talents. The aristocracy are decidedly a very superior class, you know, both physically, and morally, and mentally; as a high Tory I acknowledge that. I could not describe the dignity of her voice and mien as she addressed me thus; still, I fear she was selfish, my dear. I would never wish to speak ill of my superiors in rank, but I think she was a little selfish."

"I remember," continued Mrs. Pryor, after a pause, "another of Miss H.'s observations, which she would utter with quite a grand air. 'WE,' she would say--'WE need the imprudences, extravagances, mistakes, and crimes of a certain number of fathers to sow the seed from which WE reap the harvest of governesses. The daughters of trades-people, however well educated, must necessarily be underbred, and as such unfit to be inmates of OUR dwellings, or guardians of OUR children's minds and persons. WE shall ever prefer to place those about OUR offspring who have been born and bred with somewhat of the same refinement as OURSELVES.'"

"Miss Hardman must have thought herself something better than her fellow-creatures, ma'am, since she held that their calamities, and even crimes, were necessary to minister to her convenience. You say she was religious. Her religion must have been that of the Pharisee who thanked God that he was not as other men are, nor even as that publican."

"My dear, we will not discuss the point. I should be the last person to wish to instil into your mind any feeling of dissatisfaction with your lot in life, or any sentiment of envy or insubordination towards your superiors. Implicit submission to authorities, scrupulous deference to our betters (under which term I, of course, include the higher classes of society), are, in my opinion, indispensable to the well-being of every community. All I mean to say, my dear, is that you had better not attempt to be a governess, as the duties of the position would be too severe for your constitution. Not one word of disrespect would I breathe towards either Mrs. or Miss Hardman; only, recalling my own experience, I cannot but feel that, were you to fall under auspices such as theirs, you would contend a while courageously with your doom, then you would pine and grow too weak for your work; you would come home--if you still had a home--broken down. Those languishing years would follow of which none but the invalid and her immediate friends feel the heart-sickness and know the burden. Consumption or decline would close the chapter. Such is the history of many a life. I would not have it yours. My dear, we will now walk about a little, if you please."

They both rose, and slowly paced a green natural terrace bordering the chasm.

"My dear," ere long again began Mrs. Pryor, a sort of timid, embarrassed abruptness marking her manner as she spoke, "the young, especially those to whom nature has been favourable, often--frequently--anticipate--look forward to--to marriage as the end, the goal of their hopes."

And she stopped. Caroline came to her relief with promptitude, showing a great deal more self-possession and courage than herself on the formidable topic now broached.

"They do, and naturally," she replied, with a calm emphasis that startled Mrs. Pryor. "They look forward to marriage with some one they love as the brightest, the only bright destiny that can await them. Are they wrong?"

"Oh, my dear!" exclaimed Mrs. Pryor, clasping her hands; and again she paused. Caroline turned a searching, an eager eye on the face of her friend: that face was much agitated. "My dear," she murmured, "life is an illusion."

"But not love! Love is real--the most real, the most lasting, the sweetest and yet the bitterest thing we know."

"My dear, it is very bitter. It is said to be strong--strong as death! Most of the cheats of existence are strong. As to their sweetness, nothing is so transitory; its date is a moment, the twinkling of an eye. The sting remains for ever. It may perish with the dawn of eternity, but it tortures through time into its deepest night."

"Yes, it tortures through time," agreed Caroline, "except when it is mutual love."

"Mutual love! My dear, romances are pernicious. You do not read them, I hope?"

"Sometimes--whenever I can get them, indeed. But romance-writers might know nothing of love, judging by the way in which they treat of it."

"Nothing whatever, my dear," assented Mrs. Pryor eagerly, "nor of marriage; and the false pictures they give of those subjects cannot be too strongly condemned. They are not like reality. They show you only the green, tempting surface of the marsh, and give not one faithful or truthful hint of the slough underneath."

"But it is not always slough," objected Caroline. "There are happy 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.

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 seen that morning in a state of curious confusion; perhaps only to take a peep from a particular window at a particular view, whence Briarfield church and rectory are visible, pleasantly bowered in trees. She has scarcely returned, and again taken up the slip of cambric or square of half-wrought canvas, when Tartar's bold scrape and strangled whistle are heard at the porch door, and she must run to open it for him. It is a hot day; he comes in panting; she must convoy him to the kitchen, and see with her own eyes that his water-bowl is replenished. Through the open kitchen door the court is visible, all sunny and gay, and peopled with turkeys and their poults, peahens and their chicks, pearl-flecked Guinea-fowls, and a bright variety of pure white, and purple-necked, and blue and cinnamon plumed pigeons. Irresistible spectacle to Shirley! She runs to the pantry for a roll, and she stands on the door step scattering crumbs. Around her throng her eager, plump, happy feathered vassals. John is about the stables, and John must be talked to, and her mare looked at. She is still petting and patting it when the cows come in to be milked. This is important; Shirley must stay and take a review of them all. There are perhaps some little calves, some little new-yeaned lambs--it may be twins, whose mothers have rejected them. Miss Keeldar must be introduced to them by John, must permit herself the treat of feeding them with her own hand, under the direction of her careful foreman. Meantime John moots doubtful questions about the farming of certain "crofts," and "ings," and "holmes," and his mistress is necessitated to fetch her garden-hat--a gipsy straw--and accompany him, over stile and along hedgerow, to hear the conclusion of the whole agricultural matter on the spot, and with the said "crofts," "ings," and "holms" under her eye. Bright afternoon thus wears into soft evening, and she comes home to a late tea, and after tea she never sews.

After tea Shirley reads, and she is just about as tenacious of her book as she is lax of her needle. Her study is the rug, her seat a footstool, or perhaps only the carpet at Mrs. Pryor's feet: there she always learned her lessons when a child, and old habits have a strong power over her. The tawny and lionlike bulk of Tartar is ever stretched beside her, his negro muzzle laid on his fore paws--straight, strong, and shapely as the limbs of an Alpine wolf. One hand of the mistress generally reposes on the loving serf's rude head, because if she takes it away he groans and is discontented. Shirley's mind is given to her book. She lifts not her eyes; she neither stirs nor speaks--unless, indeed, it be to return a brief respectful answer to Mrs. Pryor, who addresses deprecatory phrases to her now and then.

"My dear, you had better not have that great dog so near you; he is crushing the border of your dress."

"Oh, it is only muslin. I can put a clean one on to-morrow."

"My dear, I wish you could acquire the habit of sitting to a table when you read."

"I will try, ma'am, some time; but it is so comfortable to do as one has always been accustomed to do."

"My dear, let me beg of you to put that book down. You are trying your eyes by the doubtful firelight."

"No, ma'am, not at all; my eyes are never tired."

At last, however, a pale light falls on the page from the window. She looks; the moon is up. She closes the volume, rises, and walks through the room. Her book has perhaps been a good one; it has refreshed, refilled, rewarmed her heart; it has set her brain astir, furnished her mind with pictures. The still parlour, the clean hearth, the window opening on the twilight sky, and showing its "sweet regent," new throned and glorious, suffice to make earth an Eden, life a poem, for Shirley. A still, deep, inborn delight glows in her young veins, unmingled, untroubled, not to be reached or ravished by human agency, because by no human agency bestowed--the pure gift of God to His creature, the free dower of Nature to her child. This joy gives her experience of a genii-life. Buoyant, by green steps, by glad hills, all verdure and light, she reaches a station scarcely lower than that whence angels looked down on the dreamer of Bethel, and her eye seeks, and her soul possesses, the vision of life as she wishes it. No, not as she wishes it; she has not time to wish. The swift glory spreads out, sweeping and kindling, and multiplies its splendours faster than Thought can effect his combinations, faster than Aspiration can utter her longings. Shirley says nothing while the trance is upon her--she is quite mute; but if Mrs. Pryor speaks to her now, she goes out quietly, and continues her walk upstairs in the dim gallery.

If Shirley were not an indolent, a reckless, an ignorant being, she would take a pen at such moments, or at least while the recollection of such moments was yet fresh on her spirit. She would seize, she would fix the apparition, tell the vision revealed. Had she a little more of the organ of acquisitiveness in her head, a little more of the love of property in her nature, she would take a good-sized sheet of paper and write plainly out, in her own queer but clear and legible hand, the story that has been narrated, the song that has been sung to her, and thus possess what she was enabled to create. But indolent she is, reckless she is, and most ignorant; for she does not know her dreams are rare, her feelings peculiar. She does not know, has never known, and will die without knowing, the full value of that spring whose bright fresh bubbling in her heart keeps it green.

Shirley takes life easily. Is not that fact written in her eye? In her good-tempered moments is it not as full of lazy softness as in her brief fits of anger it is fulgent with quick-flashing fire? Her nature is in her eye. So long as she is calm, indolence, indulgence, humour, and tenderness possess that large gray sphere; incense her, a red ray pierces the dew, it quickens instantly to flame.

Ere the month of July was past, Miss Keeldar would probably have started with Caroline on that northern tour they had planned; but just at that epoch an invasion befell Fieldhead. A genteel foraging party besieged Shirley in her castle, and compelled her to surrender at discretion. An uncle, an aunt, and two cousins from the south--a Mr., Mrs., and two Misses Sympson, of Sympson Grove, ----shire--came down upon her in state. The laws of hospitality obliged her to give in, which she did with a facility which somewhat surprised Caroline, who knew her to be prompt in action and fertile in expedient where a victory was to be gained for her will. Miss Helstone even asked her how it was she submitted so readily. She answered, old feelings had their power; she had passed two years of her early youth at Sympson Grove.

"How did she like her relatives?"

She had nothing in common with them, she replied. Little Harry Sympson, indeed, the sole son of the family, was very unlike his sisters, and of him she had formerly been fond; but he was not coming to Yorkshire--at least not yet.

The next Sunday the Fieldhead pew in Briarfield Church appeared peopled with a prim, trim, fidgety, elderly gentleman, who shifted his spectacles, and changed his position every three minutes; a patient, placid-looking elderly lady in brown satin; and two pattern young ladies, in pattern attire, with pattern deportment. Shirley had the air of a black swan or a white crow in the midst of this party, and very forlorn was her aspect. Having brought her into respectable society, we will leave her there a while, and look after Miss Helstone.

Separated from Miss Keeldar for the present, as she could not seek her in the midst of her fine relatives, scared away from Fieldhead by the visiting commotion which the new arrivals occasioned in the neighbourhood, Caroline was limited once more to the gray rectory, the solitary morning walk in remote by-paths, the long, lonely afternoon sitting in a quiet parlour which the sun forsook at noon, or in the garden alcove where it shone bright, yet sad, on the ripening red currants trained over the trellis, and on the fair monthly roses entwined between, and through them fell chequered on Caroline sitting in her white summer dress, still as a garden statue. There she read old books, taken from her uncle's library. The Greek and Latin were of no use to her, and its collection of light literature was chiefly contained on a shelf which had belonged to her aunt Mary--some venerable Lady's Magazines, that had once performed a sea-voyage with their owner, and undergone a storm, and whose pages were stained with salt water; some mad Methodist Magazines, full of miracles and apparitions, of preternatural warnings, ominous dreams, and frenzied fanaticism; the equally mad letters of Mrs. Elizabeth Rowe from the Dead to the Living; a few old English classics. From these faded flowers Caroline had in her childhood extracted the honey; they were tasteless to her now. By way of change, and also of doing good, she would sew--make garments for the poor, according to good Miss Ainley's direction. Sometimes, as she felt and saw her tears fall slowly on her work, she would wonder how the excellent woman who had cut it out and arranged it for her managed to be so equably serene in her solitude.

"I never find Miss Ainley oppressed with despondency or lost in grief," she thought; "yet her cottage is a still, dim little place, and she is without a bright hope or near friend in the world. I remember, though, she told me once she had tutored her thoughts to tend upwards to heaven. She allowed there was, and ever had been, little enjoyment in this world for her, and she looks, I suppose, to the bliss of the world to come. So do nuns, with their close cell, their iron lamp, their robe strait as a shroud, their bed narrow as a coffin. She says often she has no fear of death--no dread of the grave; no more, doubtless, had St. Simeon Stylites, lifted up terrible on his wild column in the wilderness; no more has the Hindu votary stretched on his couch of iron spikes. Both these having violated nature, their natural likings and antipathies are reversed; they grow altogether morbid. I do fear death as yet, but I believe it is because I am young. Poor Miss Ainley would cling closer to life if life had more charms for her. God surely did not create us and cause us to live with the sole end of wishing always to die. I believe in my heart we were intended to prize life and enjoy it so long as we retain it. Existence never was originally meant to be that useless, blank, pale, slow-trailing thing it often becomes to many, and is becoming to me among the rest.

"Nobody," she went on--"nobody in particular is to blame, that I can see, for the state in which things are; and I cannot tell, however much I puzzle over it, how they are to be altered for the better; but I feel there is something wrong somewhere. I believe single women should have more to do--better chances of interesting and profitable occupation than they possess now. And when I speak thus I have no impression that I displease God by my words; that I am either impious or impatient, irreligious or sacrilegious. My consolation is, indeed, that God hears many a groan, and compassionates much grief which man stops his ears against, or frowns on with impotent contempt. I say impotent, for I observe that to such grievances as society cannot readily cure it usually forbids utterance, on pain of its scorn, this scorn being only a sort of tinselled cloak to its deformed weakness. People hate to be reminded of ills they are unable or unwilling to remedy. Such reminder, in forcing on them a sense of their own incapacity, or a more painful sense of an obligation to make some unpleasant effort, troubles their ease and shakes their self-complacency. Old maids, like the houseless and unemployed poor, should not ask for a place and an occupation in the world; the demand disturbs the happy and rich--it disturbs parents. Look at the numerous families of girls in this neighbourhood--the Armitages, the Birtwhistles, the Sykeses. The brothers of these girls are every one in business or in professions; they have something to do. Their sisters have no earthly employment but household work and sewing, no earthly pleasure but an unprofitable visiting, and no hope, in all their life to come, of anything better. This stagnant state of things makes them decline in health. They are never well, and their minds and views shrink to wondrous narrowness. The great wish, the sole aim of every one of them is to be married, but the majority will never marry; they will die as they now live. They scheme, they plot, they dress to ensnare husbands. The gentlemen turn them into ridicule; they don't want them; they hold them very cheap. They say--I have heard them say it with sneering laughs many a time--the matrimonial market is overstocked. Fathers say so likewise, and are angry with their daughters when they observe their manœuvres--they order them to stay at home. What do they expect them to do at home? If you ask, they would answer, sew and cook. They expect them to do this, and this only, contentedly, regularly, uncomplainingly, all their lives long, as if they had no germs of faculties for anything else--a doctrine as reasonable to hold as it would be that the fathers have no faculties but for eating what their daughters cook or for wearing what they sew. Could men live so themselves? Would they not be very weary? And when there came no relief to their weariness, but only reproaches at its slightest manifestation, would not their weariness ferment in time to frenzy? Lucretia, spinning at midnight in the midst of her maidens, and Solomon's virtuous woman are often quoted as patterns of what 'the sex,' as they say, ought to be. I don't know. Lucretia, I dare say, was a most worthy sort of person, much like my cousin Hortense Moore; but she kept her servants up very late. I should not have liked to be amongst the number of the maidens. Hortense would just work me and Sarah in that fashion, if she could, and neither of us would bear it. The 'virtuous woman,' again, had her household up in the very middle of the night; she 'got breakfast over,' as Mrs. Sykes says, before one o'clock a.m.; but she had something more to do than spin and give out portions. She was a manufacturer--she made fine linen and sold it; she was an agriculturist--she bought estates and planted vineyards. That woman was a manager. She was what the matrons hereabouts call 'a clever woman.' On the whole, I like her a good deal better than Lucretia; but I don't believe either Mr. Armitage or Mr. Sykes could have got the advantage of her in a bargain. Yet I like her. 'Strength and honour were her clothing; the heart of her husband safely trusted in her. She opened her mouth with wisdom; in her tongue was the law of kindness; her children rose up and called her blessed; her husband also praised her.' King of Israel! your model of a woman is a worthy model! But are we, in these days, brought up to be like her? Men of Yorkshire! do your daughters reach this royal standard? Can they reach it? Can you help them to reach it? Can you give them a field in which their faculties may be exercised and grow? Men of England! look at your poor girls, many of them fading around you, dropping off in consumption or decline; or, what is worse, degenerating to sour old maids--envious, back-biting, wretched, because life is a desert to them; or, what is worst of all, reduced to strive, by scarce modest coquetry and debasing artifice, to gain that position and consideration by marriage which to celibacy is denied. Fathers! cannot you alter these things? Perhaps not all at once; but consider the matter well when it is brought before you, receive it as a theme worthy of thought; do not dismiss it with an idle jest or an unmanly insult. You would wish to be proud of your daughters, and not to blush for them; then seek for them an interest and an occupation which shall raise them above the flirt, the manœuvrer, the mischief-making tale-bearer. Keep your girls' minds narrow and fettered; they will still be a plague and a care, sometimes a disgrace to you. Cultivate them--give them scope and work; they will be your gayest companions in health, your tenderest nurses in sickness, your most faithful prop in age."

XXIII. AN EVENING OUT

One fine summer day that Caroline had spent entirely alone (her uncle being at Whinbury), and whose long, bright, noiseless, breezeless, cloudless hours (how many they seemed since sunrise!) had been to her as desolate as if they had gone over her head in the shadowless and trackless wastes of Sahara, instead of in the blooming garden of an English home, she was sitting in the alcove--her task of work on her knee, her fingers assiduously plying the needle, her eyes following and regulating their movements, her brain working restlessly--when Fanny came to the door, looked round over the lawn and borders, and not seeing her whom she sought, called out, "Miss Caroline!"

A low voice answered "Fanny!" It issued from the alcove, and thither Fanny hastened, a note in her hand, which she delivered to fingers that hardly seemed to have nerve to hold it. Miss Helstone did not ask whence it came, and she did not look at it; she let it drop amongst the folds of her work.

"Joe Scott's son, Harry, brought it," said Fanny.

The girl was no enchantress, and knew no magic spell; yet what she said took almost magical effect on her young mistress. She lifted her head with the quick motion of revived sensation; she shot, not a languid, but a lifelike, questioning glance at Fanny.

"Harry Scott! who sent him?"

"He came from the Hollow."

The dropped note was snatched up eagerly, the seal was broken--it was read in two seconds. An affectionate billet from Hortense, informing her young cousin that she was returned from Wormwood Wells; that she was alone to-day, as Robert was gone to Whinbury market; that nothing would give her greater pleasure than to have Caroline's company to tea, and the good lady added, she was quite sure such a change would be most acceptable and beneficial to Caroline, who must be sadly at a loss both for safe guidance and improving society since the misunderstanding between Robert and Mr. Helstone had occasioned a separation from her "meilleure amie, Hortense Gérard Moore." In a postscript she was urged to put on her bonnet and run down directly.

Caroline did not need the injunction. Glad was she to lay by the brown holland child's slip she was trimming with braid for the Jew's basket, to hasten upstairs, cover her curls with her straw bonnet, and throw round her shoulders the black silk scarf, whose simple drapery suited as well her shape as its dark hue set off the purity of her dress and the fairness of her face; glad was she to escape for a few hours the solitude, the sadness, the nightmare of her life; glad to run down the green lane sloping to the Hollow, to scent the fragrance of hedge flowers sweeter than the perfume of moss-rose or lily. True, she knew Robert was not at the cottage; but it was delight to go where he had lately been. So long, so totally separated from him, merely to see his home, to enter the room where he had that morning sat, felt like a reunion. As such it revived her; and then Illusion was again following her in Peri mask. The soft agitation of wings caressed her cheek, and the air, breathing from the blue summer sky, bore a voice which whispered, "Robert may come home while you are in his house, and then, at least, you may look in his face--at least you may give him your hand; perhaps, for a minute, you may sit beside him."

"Silence!" was her austere response; but she loved the comforter and the consolation.

Miss Moore probably caught from the window the gleam and flutter of Caroline's white attire through the branchy garden shrubs, for she advanced from the cottage porch to meet her. Straight, unbending, phlegmatic as usual, she came on. No haste or ecstasy was ever permitted to disorder the dignity of her movements; but she smiled, well pleased to mark the delight of her pupil, to feel her kiss and the gentle, genial strain of her embrace. She led her tenderly in, half deceived and wholly flattered. Half deceived! had it not been so she would in all probability have put her to the wicket, and shut her out. Had she known clearly to whose account the chief share of this childlike joy was to be placed, Hortense would most likely have felt both shocked and incensed. Sisters do not like young ladies to fall in love with their brothers. It seems, if not presumptuous, silly, weak, a delusion, an absurd mistake. They do not love these gentlemen--whatever sisterly affection they may cherish towards them--and that others should, repels them with a sense of crude romance. The first movement, in short, excited by such discovery (as with many parents on finding their children to be in love) is one of mixed impatience and contempt. Reason--if they be rational people--corrects the false feeling in time; but if they be irrational, it is never corrected, and the daughter or sister-in-law is disliked to the end.

"You would expect to find me alone, from what I said in my note," observed Miss Moore, as she conducted Caroline towards the parlour; "but it was written this morning: since dinner, company has come in."

And opening the door she made visible an ample spread of crimson skirts overflowing the elbow-chair at the fireside, and above them, presiding with dignity, a cap more awful than a crown. That cap had never come to the cottage under a bonnet; no, it had been brought in a vast bag, or rather a middle-sized balloon of black silk, held wide with whalebone. The screed, or frill of the cap, stood a quarter of a yard broad round the face of the wearer. The ribbon, flourishing in puffs and bows about the head, was of the sort called love-ribbon. There was a good deal of it, I may say, a very great deal. Mrs. Yorke wore the cap--it became her; she wore the gown also--it suited her no less.

That great lady was come in a friendly way to take tea with Miss Moore. It was almost as great and as rare a favour as if the queen were to go uninvited to share pot-luck with one of her subjects. A higher mark of distinction she could not show--she who in general scorned visiting and tea-drinking, and held cheap and stigmatized as "gossips" every maid and matron of the vicinage.

There was no mistake, however; Miss Moore was a favourite with her. She had evinced the fact more than once--evinced it by stopping to speak to her in the churchyard on Sundays; by inviting her, almost hospitably, to come to Briarmains; evinced it to-day by the grand condescension of a personal visit. Her reasons for the preference, as assigned by herself, were that Miss Moore was a woman of steady deportment, without the least levity of conversation or carriage; also that, being a foreigner, she must feel the want of a friend to countenance her. She might have added that her plain aspect, homely, precise dress, and phlegmatic, unattractive manner were to her so many additional recommendations. It is certain, at least, that ladies remarkable for the opposite qualities of beauty, lively bearing, and elegant taste in attire were not often favoured with her approbation. Whatever gentlemen are apt to admire in women, Mrs. Yorke condemned; and what they overlook or despise, she patronized.

Caroline advanced to the mighty matron with some sense of diffidence. She knew little of Mrs. Yorke, and, as a parson's niece, was doubtful what sort of a reception she might get. She got a very cool one, and was glad to hide her discomfiture by turning away to take off her bonnet. Nor, upon sitting down, was she displeased to be immediately accosted by a little personage in a blue frock and sash, who started up like some fairy from the side of the great dame's chair, where she had been sitting on a footstool, screened from view by the folds of the wide red gown, and running to Miss Helstone, unceremoniously threw her arms round her neck and demanded a kiss.

"My mother is not civil to you," said the petitioner, as she received and repaid a smiling salute, "and Rose there takes no notice of you; it is their way. If, instead of you, a white angel, with a crown of stars, had come into the room, mother would nod stiffly, and Rose never lift her head at all; but I will be your friend--I have always liked you."

"Jessie, curb that tongue of yours, and repress your forwardness!" said Mrs. Yorke.

"But, mother, you are so frozen!" expostulated Jessie. "Miss Helstone has never done you any harm; why can't you be kind to her? You sit so stiff, and look so cold, and speak so dry--what for? That's just the fashion in which you treat Miss Shirley Keeldar and every other young lady who comes to our house. And Rose there is such an aut--aut--I have forgotten the word, but it means a machine in the shape of a human being. However, between you, you will drive every soul away from Briarmains; Martin often says so."

"I am an automaton? Good! Let me alone, then," said Rose, speaking from a corner where she was sitting on the carpet at the foot of a bookcase, with a volume spread open on her knee.--"Miss Helstone, how do you do?" she added, directing a brief glance to the person addressed, and then again casting down her gray, remarkable eyes on the book and returning to the study of its pages.

Caroline stole a quiet gaze towards her, dwelling on her young, absorbed countenance, and observing a certain unconscious movement of the mouth as she read--a movement full of character. Caroline had tact, and she had fine instinct. She felt that Rose Yorke was a peculiar child--one of the unique; she knew how to treat her. Approaching quietly, she knelt on the carpet at her side, and looked over her little shoulder at her book. It was a romance of Mrs. Radcliffe's--"The Italian."

Caroline read on with her, making no remark. Presently Rose showed her the attention of asking, ere she turned the leaf, "Are you ready?"

Caroline only nodded.

"Do you like it?" inquired Rose ere long.

"Long since, when I read it as a child, I was wonderfully taken with it."

"Why?"

"It seemed to open with such promise--such foreboding of a most strange tale to be unfolded."

"And in reading it you feel as if you were far away from England--really in Italy--under another sort of sky--that blue sky of the south which travellers describe."

"You are sensible of that, Rose?"

"It makes me long to travel, Miss Helstone."

"When you are a woman, perhaps, you may be able to gratify your wish."

"I mean to make a way to do so, if one is not made for me. I cannot live always in Briarfield. The whole world is not very large compared with creation. I must see the outside of our own round planet, at least."

"How much of its outside?"

"First this hemisphere where we live; then the other. I am resolved that my life shall be a life. Not a black trance like the toad's, buried in marble; nor a long, slow death like yours in Briarfield rectory."

"Like mine! what can you mean, child?"

"Might you not as well be tediously dying as for ever shut up in that glebe-house--a place that, when I pass it, always reminds me of a windowed grave? I never see any movement about the door. I never hear a sound from the wall. I believe smoke never issues from the chimneys. What do you do there?"

"I sew, I read, I learn lessons."

"Are you happy?"

"Should I be happy wandering alone in strange countries as you wish to do?"

"Much happier, even if you did nothing but wander. Remember, however, that I shall have an object in view; but if you only went on and on, like some enchanted lady in a fairy tale, you might be happier than now. In a day's wandering you would pass many a hill, wood, and watercourse, each perpetually altering in aspect as the sun shone out or was overcast; as the weather was wet or fair, dark or bright. Nothing changes in Briarfield rectory. The plaster of the parlour ceilings, the paper on the walls, the curtains, carpets, chairs, are still the same."

"Is change necessary to happiness?"

"Yes."

"Is it synonymous with it?"

"I don't know; but I feel monotony and death to be almost the same."

Here Jessie spoke.

"Isn't she mad?" she asked.

"But, Rose," pursued Caroline, "I fear a wanderer's life, for me at least, would end like that tale you are reading--in disappointment, vanity, and vexation of spirit."

"Does 'The Italian' so end?"

"I thought so when I read it."

"Better to try all things and find all empty than to try nothing and leave your life a blank. To do this is to commit the sin of him who buried his talent in a napkin--despicable sluggard!"

"Rose," observed Mrs. Yorke, "solid satisfaction is only to be realized by doing one's duty."

"Right, mother! And if my Master has given me ten talents, my duty is to trade with them, and make them ten talents more. Not in the dust of household drawers shall the coin be interred. I will not deposit it in a broken-spouted teapot, and shut it up in a china closet among tea-things. I will not commit it to your work-table to be smothered in piles of woollen hose. I will not prison it in the linen press to find shrouds among the sheets. And least of all, mother" (she got up from the floor)--"least of all will I hide it in a tureen of cold potatoes, to be ranged with bread, butter, pastry, and ham on the shelves of the larder."

She stopped, then went on, "Mother, the Lord who gave each of us our talents will come home some day, and will demand from all an account. The teapot, the old stocking-foot, the linen rag, the willow-pattern tureen will yield up their barren deposit in many a house. Suffer your daughters, at least, to put their money to the exchangers, that they may be enabled at the Master's coming to pay Him His own with usury."

"Rose, did you bring your sampler with you, as I told you?"

"Yes, mother."

"Sit down, and do a line of marking."

Rose sat down promptly, and wrought according to orders. After a busy pause of ten minutes, her mother asked, "Do you think yourself oppressed now--a victim?"

"No, mother."

"Yet, as far as I understood your tirade, it was a protest against all womanly and domestic employment."

"You misunderstood it, mother. I should be sorry not to learn to sew. You do right to teach me, and to make me work."

"Even to the mending of your brothers' stockings and the making of sheets?"

"Yes."

"Where is the use of ranting and spouting about it, then?"

"Am I to do nothing but that? I will do that, and then I will do more. Now, mother, I have said my say. I am twelve years old at present, and not till I am sixteen will I speak again about talents. For four years I bind myself an industrious apprentice to all you can teach me."

"You see what my daughters are, Miss Helstone," observed Mrs. Yorke; "how precociously wise in their own conceits! 'I would rather this, I prefer that'--such is Jessie's cuckoo song; while Rose utters the bolder cry, 'I will, and I will not!'"

"I render a reason, mother; besides, if my cry is bold, it is only heard once in a twelvemonth. About each birthday the spirit moves me to deliver one oracle respecting my own instruction and management. I utter it and leave it; it is for you, mother, to listen or not."

"I would advise all young ladies," pursued Mrs. Yorke, "to study the characters of such children as they chance to meet with before they marry and have any of their own to consider well how they would like the responsibility of guiding the careless, the labour of persuading the stubborn, the constant burden and task of training the best."

"But with love it need not be so very difficult," interposed Caroline. "Mothers love their children most dearly--almost better than they love themselves."

"Fine talk! very sentimental! There is the rough, practical part of life yet to come for you, young miss."

"But, Mrs. Yorke, if I take a little baby into my arms--any poor woman's infant, for instance--I feel that I love that helpless thing quite peculiarly, though I am not its mother. I could do almost anything for it willingly, if it were delivered over entirely to my care--if it were quite dependent on me."

"You feel! Yes, yes! I dare say, now. You are led a great deal by your feelings, and you think yourself a very sensitive personage, no doubt. Are you aware that, with all these romantic ideas, you have managed to train your features into an habitually lackadaisical expression, better suited to a novel-heroine than to a woman who is to make her way in the real world by dint of common sense?"

"No; I am not at all aware of that, Mrs. Yorke."

"Look in the glass just behind you. Compare the face you see there with that of any early-rising, hard-working milkmaid."

"My face is a pale one, but it is not sentimental; and most milkmaids, however red and robust they may be, are more stupid and less practically fitted to make their way in the world than I am. I think more, and more correctly, than milkmaids in general do; consequently, where they would often, for want of reflection, act weakly, I, by dint of reflection, should act judiciously."

"Oh no! you would be influenced by your feelings; you would be guided by impulse."

"Of course I should often be influenced by my feelings. They were given me to that end. Whom my feelings teach me to love I must and shall love; and I hope, if ever I have a husband and children, my feelings will induce me to love them. I hope, in that case, all my impulses will be strong in compelling me to love."

Caroline had a pleasure in saying this with emphasis; she had a pleasure in daring to say it in Mrs. Yorke's presence. She did not care what unjust sarcasm might be hurled at her in reply. She flushed, not with anger but excitement, when the ungenial matron answered coolly, "Don't waste your dramatic effects. That was well said--it was quite fine; but it is lost on two women--an old wife and an old maid. There should have been a disengaged gentleman present.--Is Mr. Robert nowhere hid behind the curtains, do you think, Miss Moore?"

Hortense, who during the chief part of the conversation had been in the kitchen superintending the preparations for tea, did not yet quite comprehend the drift of the discourse. She answered, with a puzzled air, that Robert was at Whinbury. Mrs. Yorke laughed her own peculiar short laugh.

"Straightforward Miss Moore!" said she patronizingly. "It is like you to understand my question so literally and answer it so simply. Your mind comprehends nothing of intrigue. Strange things might go on around you without your being the wiser; you are not of the class the world calls sharp-witted."

These equivocal compliments did not seem to please Hortense. She drew herself up, puckered her black eyebrows, but still looked puzzled.

"I have ever been noted for sagacity and discernment from childhood," she returned; for, indeed, on the possession of these qualities she peculiarly piqued herself.

"You never plotted to win a husband, I'll be bound," pursued Mrs. Yorke; "and you have not the benefit of previous experience to aid you in discovering when others plot."

Caroline felt this kind language where the benevolent speaker intended she should feel it--in her very heart. She could not even parry the shafts; she was defenceless for the present. To answer would have been to avow that the cap fitted. Mrs. Yorke, looking at her as she sat with troubled, downcast eyes, and cheek burning painfully, and figure expressing in its bent attitude and unconscious tremor all the humiliation and chagrin she experienced, felt the sufferer was fair game. The strange woman had a natural antipathy to a shrinking, sensitive character--a nervous temperament; nor was a pretty, delicate, and youthful face a passport to her affections. It was seldom she met with all these obnoxious qualities combined in one individual; still more seldom she found that individual at her mercy, under circumstances in which she could crush her well. She happened this afternoon to be specially bilious and morose--as much disposed to gore as any vicious "mother of the herd." Lowering her large head she made a new charge.

"Your cousin Hortense is an excellent sister, Miss Helstone. Such ladies as come to try their life's luck here at Hollow's Cottage may, by a very little clever female artifice, cajole the mistress of the house, and have the game all in their own hands. You are fond of your cousin's society, I dare say, miss?"

"Of which cousin's?"

"Oh, of the lady's, of course."

"Hortense is, and always has been, most kind to me."

"Every sister with an eligible single brother is considered most kind by her spinster friends."

"Mrs. Yorke," said Caroline, lifting her eyes slowly, their blue orbs at the same time clearing from trouble, and shining steady and full, while the glow of shame left her cheek, and its hue turned pale and settled--"Mrs. Yorke, may I ask what you mean?"

"To give you a lesson on the cultivation of rectitude, to disgust you with craft and false sentiment."

"Do I need this lesson?"

"Most young ladies of the present day need it. You are quite a modern young lady--morbid, delicate, professing to like retirement; which implies, I suppose, that you find little worthy of your sympathies in the ordinary world. The ordinary world--every-day honest folks--are better than you think them, much better than any bookish, romancing chit of a girl can be who hardly ever puts her nose over her uncle the parson's garden wall."

"Consequently of whom you know nothing. Excuse me--indeed, it does not matter whether you excuse me or not--you have attacked me without provocation; I shall defend myself without apology. Of my relations with my two cousins you are ignorant. In a fit of ill-humour you have attempted to poison them by gratuitous insinuations, which are far more crafty and false than anything with which you can justly charge me. That I happen to be pale, and sometimes to look diffident, is no business of yours; that I am fond of books, and indisposed for common gossip, is still less your business; that I am a 'romancing chit of a girl' is a mere conjecture on your part. I never romanced to you nor to anybody you know. That I am the parson's niece is not a crime, though you may be narrow-minded enough to think it so. You dislike me. You have no just reason for disliking me; therefore keep the expression of your aversion to yourself. If at any time in future you evince it annoyingly, I shall answer even less scrupulously than I have done now."

She ceased, and sat in white and still excitement. She had spoken in the clearest of tones, neither fast nor loud; but her silver accents thrilled the ear. The speed of the current in her veins was just then as swift as it was viewless.

Mrs. Yorke was not irritated at the reproof, worded with a severity so simple, dictated by a pride so quiet. Turning coolly to Miss Moore, she said, nodding her cap approvingly, "She has spirit in her, after all.--Always speak as honestly as you have done just now," she continued, "and you'll do."

"I repel a recommendation so offensive," was the answer, delivered in the same pure key, with the same clear look. "I reject counsel poisoned by insinuation. It is my right to speak as I think proper; nothing binds me to converse as you dictate. So far from always speaking as I have done just now, I shall never address any one in a tone so stern or in language so harsh, unless in answer to unprovoked insult."

"Mother, you have found your match," pronounced little Jessie, whom the scene appeared greatly to edify. Rose had heard the whole with an unmoved face. She now said, "No; Miss Helstone is not my mother's match, for she allows herself to be vexed. My mother would wear her out in a few weeks. Shirley Keeldar manages better.--Mother, you have never hurt Miss Keeldar's feelings yet. She wears armour under her silk dress that you cannot penetrate."

Mrs. Yorke often complained that her children were mutinous. It was strange that with all her strictness, with all her "strong-mindedness," she could gain no command over them. A look from their father had more influence with them than a lecture from her.

Miss Moore--to whom the position of witness to an altercation in which she took no part was highly displeasing, as being an unimportant secondary post--now rallying her dignity, prepared to utter a discourse which was to prove both parties in the wrong, and to make it clear to each disputant that she had reason to be ashamed of herself, and ought to submit humbly to the superior sense of the individual then addressing her. Fortunately for her audience, she had not harangued above ten minutes when Sarah's entrance with the tea-tray called her attention, first to the fact of that damsel having a gilt comb in her hair and a red necklace round her throat, and secondly, and subsequently to a pointed remonstrance, to the duty of making tea. After the meal Rose restored her to good-humour by bringing her guitar and asking for a song, and afterwards engaging her in an intelligent and sharp cross-examination about guitar-playing and music in general.

Jessie, meantime, directed her assiduities to Caroline. Sitting on a stool at her feet, she talked to her, first about religion and then about politics. Jessie was accustomed at home to drink in a great deal of what her father said on these subjects, and afterwards in company to retail, with more wit and fluency than consistency or discretion, his opinions, antipathies, and preferences. She rated Caroline soundly for being a member of the Established Church, and for having an uncle a clergyman. She informed her that she lived on the country, and ought to work for her living honestly, instead of passing a useless life, and eating the bread of idleness in the shape of tithes. Thence Jessie passed to a review of the ministry at that time in office, and a consideration of its deserts. She made familiar mention of the names of Lord Castlereagh and Mr. Perceval. Each of these personages she adorned with a character that might have separately suited Moloch and Belial. She denounced the war as wholesale murder, and Lord Wellington as a "hired butcher."

Her auditress listened with exceeding edification. Jessie had something of the genius of humour in her nature. It was inexpressibly comic to hear her repeating her sire's denunciations in his nervous northern Doric; as hearty a little Jacobin as ever pent a free mutinous spirit in a muslin frock and sash. Not malignant by nature, her language was not so bitter as it was racy, and the expressive little face gave a piquancy to every phrase which held a beholder's interest captive.

Caroline chid her when she abused Lord Wellington; but she listened delighted to a subsequent tirade against the Prince Regent. Jessie quickly read, in the sparkle of her hearer's eye and the laughter hovering round her lips, that at last she had hit on a topic that pleased. Many a time had she heard the fat "Adonis of fifty" discussed at her father's breakfast-table, and she now gave Mr. Yorke's comments on the theme--genuine as uttered by his Yorkshire lips.

But, Jessie, I will write about you no more. This is an autumn evening, wet and wild. There is only one cloud in the sky, but it curtains it from pole to pole. The wind cannot rest; it hurries sobbing over hills of sullen outline, colourless with twilight and mist. Rain has beat all day on that church tower. It rises dark from the stony enclosure of its graveyard. The nettles, the long grass, and the tombs all drip with wet. This evening reminds me too forcibly of another evening some years ago--a howling, rainy autumn evening too--when certain who had that day performed a pilgrimage to a grave new-made in a heretic cemetery sat near a wood fire on the hearth of a foreign dwelling. They were merry and social, but they each knew that a gap, never to be filled, had been made in their circle. They knew they had lost something whose absence could never be quite atoned for so long as they lived; and they knew that heavy falling rain was soaking into the wet earth which covered their lost darling, and that the sad, sighing gale was mourning above her buried head. The fire warmed them; life and friendship yet blessed them; but Jessie lay cold, coffined, solitary--only the sod screening her from the storm.

* * * * *

Mrs. Yorke folded up her knitting, cut short the music lesson and the lecture on politics, and concluded her visit to the cottage, at an hour early enough to ensure her return to Briarmains before the blush of sunset should quite have faded in heaven, or the path up the fields have become thoroughly moist with evening dew.

The lady and her daughters being gone, Caroline felt that she also ought to resume her scarf, kiss her cousin's cheek, and trip away homeward. If she lingered much later dusk would draw on, and Fanny would be put to the trouble of coming to fetch her. It was both baking and ironing day at the rectory, she remembered--Fanny would be busy. Still, she could not quit her seat at the little parlour window. From no point of view could the west look so lovely as from that lattice with the garland of jessamine round it, whose white stars and green leaves seemed now but gray pencil outlines--graceful in form, but colourless in tint--against the gold incarnadined of a summer evening--against the fire-tinged blue of an August sky at eight o'clock p.m.

Caroline looked at the wicket-gate, beside which holly-oaks spired up tall. She looked at the close hedge of privet and laurel fencing in the garden; her eyes longed to see something more than the shrubs before they turned from that limited prospect. They longed to see a human figure, of a certain mould and height, pass the hedge and enter the gate. A human figure she at last saw--nay, two. Frederick Murgatroyd went by, carrying a pail of water; Joe Scott followed, dangling on his forefinger the keys of the mill. They were going to lock up mill and stables for the night, and then betake themselves home.

"So must I," thought Caroline, as she half rose and sighed.

"This is all folly--heart-breaking folly," she added. "In the first place, though I should stay till dark there will be no arrival; because I feel in my heart, Fate has written it down in to-day's page of her eternal book, that I am not to have the pleasure I long for. In the second place, if he stepped in this moment, my presence here would be a chagrin to him, and the consciousness that it must be so would turn half my blood to ice. His hand would, perhaps, be loose and chill if I put mine into it; his eye would be clouded if I sought its beam. I should look up for that kindling, something I have seen in past days, when my face, or my language, or my disposition had at some happy moment pleased him; I should discover only darkness. I had better go home."

She took her bonnet from the table where it lay, and was just fastening the ribbon, when Hortense, directing her attention to a splendid bouquet of flowers in a glass on the same table, mentioned that Miss Keeldar had sent them that morning from Fieldhead; and went on to comment on the guests that lady was at present entertaining, on the bustling life she had lately been leading; adding divers conjectures that she did not very well like it, and much wonderment that a person who was so fond of her own way as the heiress did not find some means of sooner getting rid of this cortége of relatives.

"But they say she actually will not let Mr. Sympson and his family go," she added. "They wanted much to return to the south last week, to be ready for the reception of the only son, who is expected home from a tour. She insists that her cousin Henry shall come and join his friends here in Yorkshire. I dare say she partly does it to oblige Robert and myself."

"How to oblige Robert and you?" inquired Caroline.

"Why, my child, you are dull. Don't you know--you must often have heard----"

"Please, ma'am," said Sarah, opening the door, "the preserves that you told me to boil in treacle--the congfiters, as you call them--is all burnt to the pan."

"Les confitures! Elles sont brûlées? Ah, quelle négligence coupable! Coquine de cuisinière, fille insupportable!"

And mademoiselle, hastily taking from a drawer a large linen apron, and tying it over her black apron, rushed éperdue into the kitchen, whence, to speak truth, exhaled an odour of calcined sweets rather strong than savoury.

The mistress and maid had been in full feud the whole day, on the subject of preserving certain black cherries, hard as marbles, sour as sloes. Sarah held that sugar was the only orthodox condiment to be used in that process; mademoiselle maintained--and proved it by the practice and experience of her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother--that treacle, "mélasse," was infinitely preferable. She had committed an imprudence in leaving Sarah in charge of the preserving-pan, for her want of sympathy in the nature of its contents had induced a degree of carelessness in watching their confection, whereof the result was--dark and cindery ruin. Hubbub followed; high upbraiding, and sobs rather loud than deep or real.

Caroline, once more turning to the little mirror, was shading her ringlets from her cheek to smooth them under her cottage bonnet, certain that it would not only be useless but unpleasant to stay longer, when, on the sudden opening of the back-door, there fell an abrupt calm in the kitchen. The tongues were checked, pulled up as with bit and bridle. "Was it--was it--Robert?" He often--almost always--entered by the kitchen way on his return from market. No; it was only Joe Scott, who, having hemmed significantly thrice--every hem being meant as a lofty rebuke to the squabbling womankind--said, "Now, I thowt I heerd a crack?"

None answered.

"And," he continued pragmatically, "as t' maister's comed, and as he'll enter through this hoyle, I _con_sidered it desirable to step in and let ye know. A household o' women is nivver fit to be comed on wi'out warning. Here he is.--Walk forrard, sir. They war playing up queerly, but I think I've quietened 'em."

Another person, it was now audible, entered. Joe Scott proceeded with his rebukes.

"What d'ye mean by being all i' darkness? Sarah, thou quean, canst t' not light a candle? It war sundown an hour syne. He'll brak his shins agean some o' yer pots, and tables, and stuff.--Tak tent o' this baking-bowl, sir; they've set it i' yer way, fair as if they did it i' malice."

To Joe's observations succeeded a confused sort of pause, which Caroline, though she was listening with both her ears, could not understand. It was very brief. A cry broke it--a sound of surprise, followed by the sound of a kiss; ejaculations, but half articulate, succeeded.

"Mon Dieu! mon Dieu! Est-ce que je m'y attendais?" were the words chiefly to be distinguished.

"Et tu te portes toujours bien, bonne sœur?" inquired another voice--Robert's, certainly.

Caroline was puzzled. Obeying an impulse the wisdom of which she had not time to question, she escaped from the little parlour, by way of leaving the coast clear, and running upstairs took up a position at the head of the banisters, whence she could make further observations ere presenting herself. It was considerably past sunset now; dusk filled the passage, yet not such deep dusk but that she could presently see Robert and Hortense traverse it.

"Caroline! Caroline!" called Hortense, a moment afterwards, "venez voir mon frère!"

"Strange," commented Miss Helstone, "passing strange! What does this unwonted excitement about such an every-day occurrence as a return from market portend? She has not lost her senses, has she? Surely the burnt treacle has not crazed her?"

She descended in a subdued flutter. Yet more was she fluttered when Hortense seized her hand at the parlour door, and leading her to Robert, who stood in bodily presence, tall and dark against the one window, presented her with a mixture of agitation and formality, as though they had been utter strangers, and this was their first mutual introduction.

Increasing puzzle! He bowed rather awkwardly, and turning from her with a stranger's embarrassment, he met the doubtful light from the window. It fell on his face, and the enigma of the dream (a dream it seemed) was at its height. She saw a visage like and unlike--Robert, and no Robert.

"What is the matter?" said Caroline. "Is my sight wrong? Is it my cousin?"

"Certainly it is your cousin," asserted Hortense.

Then who was this now coming through the passage--now entering the room? Caroline, looking round, met a new Robert--the real Robert, as she felt at once.

"Well," said he, smiling at her questioning, astonished face, "which is which?"

"Ah, this is you!" was the answer.

He laughed. "I believe it is me. And do you know who he is? You never saw him before, but you have heard of him."

She had gathered her senses now.

"It can be only one person--your brother, since it is so like you; my other cousin, Louis."

"Clever little Œdipus! you would have baffled the Sphinx! But now, see us together.--Change places; change again, to confuse her, Louis.--Which is the old love now, Lina?"

"As if it were possible to make a mistake when you speak! You should have told Hortense to ask. But you are not so much alike. It is only your height, your figure, and complexion that are so similar."

"And I am Robert, am I not?" asked the newcomer, making a first effort to overcome what seemed his natural shyness.

Caroline shook her head gently. A soft, expressive ray from her eye beamed on the real Robert. It said much.

She was not permitted to quit her cousins soon. Robert himself was peremptory in obliging her to remain. Glad, simple, and affable in her demeanour (glad for this night, at least), in light, bright spirits for the time, she was too pleasant an addition to the cottage circle to be willingly parted with by any of them. Louis seemed naturally rather a grave, still, retiring man; but the Caroline of this evening, which was not (as you know, reader) the Caroline of every day, thawed his reserve, and cheered his gravity soon. He sat near her and talked to her. She already knew his vocation was that of tuition. She learned now he had for some years been the tutor of Mr. Sympson's son; that he had been travelling with him, and had accompanied him to the north. She inquired if he liked his post, but got a look in reply which did not invite or license further question. The look woke Caroline's ready sympathy. She thought it a very sad expression to pass over so sensible a face as Louis's; for he had a sensible face, though not handsome, she considered, when seen near Robert's. She turned to make the comparison. Robert was leaning against the wall, a little behind her, turning over the leaves of a book of engravings, and probably listening, at the same time, to the dialogue between her and Louis.

"How could I think them alike?" she asked herself. "I see now it is Hortense Louis resembles, not Robert."

And this was in part true. He had the shorter nose and longer upper lip of his sister rather than the fine traits of his brother. He had her mould of mouth and chin--all less decisive, accurate, and clear than those of the young mill-owner. His air, though deliberate and reflective, could scarcely be called prompt and acute. You felt, in sitting near and looking up at him, that a slower and probably a more benignant nature than that of the elder Moore shed calm on your impressions.

Robert--perhaps aware that Caroline's glance had wandered towards and dwelt upon him, though he had neither met nor answered it--put down the book of engravings, and approaching, took a seat at her side. She resumed her conversation with Louis, but while she talked to him her thoughts were elsewhere. Her heart beat on the side from which her face was half averted. She acknowledged a steady, manly, kindly air in Louis; but she bent before the secret power of Robert. To be so near him--though he was silent, though he did not touch so much as her scarf-fringe or the white hem of her dress--affected her like a spell. Had she been obliged to speak to him only, it would have quelled, but, at liberty to address another, it excited her. Her discourse flowed freely; it was gay, playful, eloquent. The indulgent look and placid manner of her auditor encouraged her to ease; the sober pleasure expressed by his smile drew out all that was brilliant in her nature. She felt that this evening she appeared to advantage, and as Robert was a spectator, the consciousness contented her. Had he been called away, collapse would at once have succeeded stimulus.

But her enjoyment was not long to shine full-orbed; a cloud soon crossed it.

Hortense, who for some time had been on the move ordering supper, and was now clearing the little table of some books, etc., to make room for the tray, called Robert's attention to the glass of flowers, the carmine and snow and gold of whose petals looked radiant indeed by candlelight.

"They came from Fieldhead," she said, "intended as a gift to you, no doubt. We know who is the favourite there; not I, I'm sure."

It was a wonder to hear Hortense jest--a sign that her spirits were at high-water mark indeed.

"We are to understand, then, that Robert is the favourite?" observed Louis.

"Mon cher," replied Hortense, "Robert--c'est tout ce qu'il y a de plus précieux au monde; à côté de lui le reste du genre humain n'est que du rebut.--N'ai-je pas raison, mon enfant?" she added, appealing to Caroline.

Caroline was obliged to reply, "Yes," and her beacon was quenched. Her star withdrew as she spoke.

"Et toi, Robert?" inquired Louis.

"When you shall have an opportunity, ask herself," was the quiet answer. Whether he reddened or paled Caroline did not examine. She discovered that it was late, and she must go home. Home she would go; not even Robert could detain her now.