Shirley E-Book

Charlotte Bronte

• Herausgeber: BertaBooks
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

Shirley is an 1849 social novel by the English novelist Charlotte Brontë. It was Brontë's second published novel after Jane Eyre. The novel is set in Yorkshire in the period 1811–12, during the industrial depression resulting from the Napoleonic Wars and the War of 1812. The novel is set against a backdrop of the Luddite uprisings in the Yorkshire textile industry.  The novel's popularity led to Shirley's becoming a woman's name. The title character was given the name that her father had intended to give a son. Before the publication of the novel, Shirley was an uncommon - but distinctly male - name and would have been an unusual name for a woman. Today it is regarded as a distinctly female name and an uncommon male name.  Robert Moore is a mill owner noted for apparent ruthlessness towards his employees - more than any other mill owner in town. He has laid off many of them, apparently indifferent to their consequent impoverishment. In fact he had no choice, since the mill is deeply in debt. The mill was inefficiently run by his late father and is already mortgaged. His elder brother became a private tutor, leaving Robert to return the mill to profitability. He is determined to restore his family's honour and fortune.  As the novel opens, Robert awaits delivery of new labour-saving machinery for the mill which will enable him to lay off additional employees. Together with some friends he watches all night, but the machinery is destroyed on the way to the mill by angry millworkers. Robert's business difficulties continue, due in part to continuing labour unrest, but even more so to the Napoleonic Wars and the accompanying Orders in Council which forbid British merchants from trading in American markets.  Robert is very close to Caroline Helstone, who comes to his house to be taught French by his sister, Hortense. Caroline worships Robert and he likes her. Caroline’s father is dead and her mother had abandoned her, leaving her to be brought up by her uncle, the local parson, Rev. Helstone. Caroline is penniless, and so to keep himself from falling in love with her, Robert keeps his distance since he cannot afford to marry for pleasure or for love. He has to marry for money if he is to restore his mill to profitability.

Leseprobe

SHIRLEY

Illustrated

charlotte bronte

Copyright © 2017 Charlotte Bronte

Amazing Classics

All rights reserved.

SHIRLEY

Moore placed his hand on his cousin's shoulder, stooped, and left a kiss on her forehead.

SHIRLEY

with an Introduction by

Mrs. Humphry Ward

NEW YORK AND LONDON

1899, by Harper & Brothers

United States of America

INTRODUCTION

“SHIRLEY” was published in the autumn of 1849, two years after the appearance of ' Jane Eyre.' No book was ever written under more pathetic, more torturing conditions. It was begun very soon after the publication of ' Jane Eyre,' amid the first rushings of the blast of fame ; it was continued all through those miserable and humiliating months of 1848, when the presence of Branwell at the parsonage was a perpetual shadow on his sisters' lives, when they never knew what a day might bring forth and would lie trembling and wakeful at night, listening for sounds from their father's room where Branwell slept Branwell who had often threatened them in the delirium of an opium-eater and a drunkard that either his father or he would be dead by the morning.

'Wuthering Heights' and ‘Agnes Grey' had appeared in December 1847, a few weeks after 'Jane Eyre.' During 1848 they seem to have been generally regarded as earlier efforts from the pen of the writer of ' Jane Eyre ‘; and it was this misconception, in fact, which led to the first hurried visit of Charlotte and Anne to London in July, when Charlotte put into the hands of her astonished publisher the letter from himself, addressed to Currer Bell, which had reached liaworth Parsonage the day before, and so, nine months after its publication, disclosed the secret of 'Jane Eyre.'

In these first interviews with her publisher thenceforward her friend also she was able to tell him that 4 Shirley,' her second story, was well advanced. The second volume, indeed, was nearly finished by September, when Bran well died. The end of the year, or the beginning of the next, should have seen its publication. The poor sisters may well have hoped, now that Branwell's vices and sufferings distracted them no more, to pass into quieter and happier hours, hours of home peace and fruitful work.

Alas ! one needs only to put down the bare dates and facts of the six months that followed, to realise the havoc that they made at once in Charlotte's heart, and in the history of English genius. Emily, the strong, indomitable Emily who had borne with Bran well throughout more patiently, more indulgently than the other twodeveloped tuberculosis, the family scourge, at the very moment of Bran well's last struggle, and she left the house only once after his death. The tragic, the unbearable story of those three months, during which Emily fought with death and would let no one help her, has been often told. The memory of them haunts any visitor to the little parsonage to-day. As one mounts the stone staircase, witli one's hand on the old rail, suddenly ghosts are there. Emily mounts before one, clinging to the rail, dragging her wasted frame from step to step. The laboured breath sounds once more through the small, quiet house, and the sisters in the dining-room below turn to each other in misery as they hear it. For it is Emily's spirit that still holds the parsonage ; amid all the memories of the house hers, fierce, passionate, inscrutable is still pre-eminent. For she is the mystery. The others ' abide our question.' We can know Charlotte and understand poor Anne ; we shall never either know or understand Emily.

For three months she battled for her life, in her own cruel way. The sisters, -vho saw her perishing, were helpless. She would accept nothing at their hands, and when the last whisper came ' If you send for a doctor I will see him now' it was too late. The suffering of the elder sister has left many piteous traces in her letters, and in 'Shirley ' itself. 'Moments so dark as these I have never known,' she writes on the very morning of Emily's death 'I think Emily seems the nearest thing to my heart in the world.' And when Emily is gone, and Anne also has set her feet upon the road that leads to the last shadow, Charlotte's poor heart is crushed between longing for the dead and fear for the living. She talks in March 1849 three months after Emily's death, two months before Anne's of the 'intense attachment' with which 'our hearts clung to Emily,' and then she adds : ' she was scarce buried when Anne's health failed her decline is gradual and fluctuating, but its nature is not doubtful.' Yet in these spring days, between the two deaths, she has taken up her pen again. And she is cheered by the praise given to the early volumes of ' Shirley ' by Mr. Smith and Mr. Williams. 'Oh! if Anne were well,' she cries, 'if the void death has left were a little closed up, if the dreary word nevermore would cease sounding in my ears, I think I could yet do something.'

But May comes, and Charlotte takes Anne to Scarborough, thinks no more of her book hangs day by day, and hour by hour, on tne last looks and words of this gentle creature, this ardent Christian, who yet is of the indomitable Broiite clay like the rest of them, and leaves behind her no record of soft and pious imaginings, but a warning tale of drunkenness and profligacy, steadily carried out through all its bitter truth. By the end of May, Anne is in her grave, and Charlotte stays on a while by the sea, waiting for the mere passage of the days that may give her strength to go home and take up her work again.

By the beginning of July, however, she had returned to Haworth. She writes to her friend in words that paint the very heart of grief:

' All received me with an affection that should have consoled. The dogs were in strange ecstasy. I am certain they regarded me as the harbinger of others. The dumb creatures thought that as I was returned, those who had been so long absent were not far behind.

'I left papa soon, and went into the dining-room: I shut the door I tried to be glad that I was come home. . . But ... I felt that the house was all silent the rooms were all empty. I remembered where the three were laid in what narrow dark dwellings never more to reappear on earth. . . . The agony that was to be undergone, and was not to be avoided, came on. I underwent it, and passed a dreary evening and night, and a mournful morrow. To-day I am better.'

During the weeks that followed she resolutely set herself to finish 'Shirley,' and some months later she beurs passionate testimony to the supporting, stimulating power of her great gift. ' The faculty of imagination,' she says to Mr. Williams, 'lifted me when I was sinking, three months ago (i.e. immediately after the death of Anne); its active exercise has kept my head above water since.'

It was at the 24th chapter of her story that she began again ; it was with the description of Caroline's wrestle with death, Caroline's discovery of her mother, Caroline's rescue from the destroyer at the hands of Tenderness and Hope, that the poor forsaken sister filled her first lonely hours, cheating her grief by dreams, by ' making out,' as she had often consoled the physical and moral trouble of her girlhood. Mrs. Pryor's agony of nursing and of dread is Charlotte's.

Not always do those who dare such divine conflict prevail. Night after night the sweat of agony may burst dark on the forehead ; the supplicant may cry for mercy with that soundless voice the soul utters when its appeal is to the Invisible. ' Spare my beloved/ it may implore. ' Heal my life's life. Rend not from me what long affection entwines with my whole nature. God of heaven bend hear be clement !' And after this cry and strife, the sun may rise and see him worsted. That opening morn which used to salute him with the whisper of zephyrs, the carol of skylarks, may breathe as its first accents, from the dear lips which colour and heat have quitted ' Oh ! I have had a suffering night. This morning I am worse. I have tried to rise. I cannot. Dreams I am unused to have troubled me.”

Then the watcher approaches the patient's pillow, and sees a new and strange moulding of the familiar features, feels at once that the insufferable moment draws nigh, knows that it is God's will his idol shall be broken, and bends his head, and subdues his soul to the sentence he cannot avert, and scarce can bear.

Happy Mrs. Pryor ! She was still praying, unconscious that the summer sun hung above the hills, when her child softly woke in her arms. No piteous unconscious moaning sound which so wastes onr strength that, even if we have sworn to be firm, a rush of unconquerable fears sweeps away the oath, preceded her waking. No space of deaf apathy followed. The first words spoken were not those of one becoming estranged from this world, and already permitted to stray at times into realms foreign to the living. Caroline evidently remembered with clearness what had happened.

Thus did poor Charlotte, dreaming alone, make use of her own pain for the imagining of joy ; thus, sitting in her ' lonely room the clock ticking loud in a still house,' did she comfort her own desolation by this exquisite and tender picture of mother and daughter reunited, made known to each other, after years of separation and under the shadow of death. Caroline Helstone shall not be left in darkness and forlorn! Charlotte will bring her to the light place her in loving shelter.

Mrs. Pryor held Caroline to her bosom ; she cradled her in her arms ; she rocked her softly, as if lulling a young child to sleep.

'My mother ! My own mother!' The offspring nestled to the parent : that parent, feeling the endearment and hearing the appeal, gathered her closer still. She covered her with noiseless kisses : she murmured love over her, like a cushat fostering its young.

Then from the ecstasy of mother and child, the ' maker' passed on to the love-story of Shirley and Louis Moore Shirley who stood in Charlotte's mind, as she herself tells us, for Emity. Emily lay under the floor of the old church, a stone's throw from Charlotte, as she wrote ; and Charlotte, looking up at each passing sound, would be clutched anew, hour after hour, by the thought of Emily's pain, Emily's death-anguish, the waste of Emily's genius. But as the small writing covered the advancing page, Emily lived again grown rich, beautiful, happy. Her dog, old Tartar, rambled beside her; the glow of health is on her cheek ; she has a lover, and a weddingdress ; length of days and of joy both are secured to her. One may say what one will of these last chapters of ' Shirley.' Louis Moore is no favourite with any reader of the Brontes ; his courting of Shirley has nothing to do with the realities either of love or of the male human being; his very creation involves a certain dulling and weakening of Charlotte's faculty a certain morbidness also. But those who recall the circumstances of 'Shirley's' composition will for ever forgive him; they will remember how tired and trembling was the hand that drew him ; how he stood in Charlotte's sad fancy for protecting strength, and passionate homage, for all that Emily would never know, and all that the woman in Charlotte, at that desolate moment of her life, most yearned to know.

II

There can be no question, however, that 'Shirley,' from a literary point of view, suffered seriously from the tension and distraction of mind amid which it was composed. It was neither the unity, the agreeable oldfashioned unity of 'Jane Eyre,' nor, as a whole, the passionate truth of ' Villette.' In the very centre of the book, the story suddenly gives way. The love-story of Kobert and Caroline has somehow to be delayed ; and one divines that the writer --for whom life has temporarily made impossible that fiery concentration of soul, in which a year or two later she wrote ' Villette ' hesitates as to the love-story of Shirley and Louis. She does not see her way ; she gropes a little ; and that angel of imagination, to which she pays so many a glowing tribute in the course of her work, seems to droop its wing beside her, and move listlessly through two or three chapters, which do little more than mark time till the divine breath returns. These are the chapters headed ' Shirley seeks to be saved by works,' ' Whitsuntide,' * The School Feast.' They are really scene -shifting chapters while the new act is preparing ; and the interval is long and the machinery a little clumsy. ' Villette' also passes from one motive to another, from Lucy's first love for Graham Bretton, to her second love for Paul Eraanuel. But in. ' Villette ' the transition is made with admirable swiftness. As Graham Bretton recedes, parri passu, Paul Emanuel advances. The two themes are interwoven ; the book never ceases to be an organism ; there is no faltering in the writer, no uncertainty in the touch.

Invention full and warm flows through it in a never slackening tide ; there are few or none of the cold and superfluous passages that disfigure the middle region of Signs of the same momentary failure in the artist's fusing and vivifying power are numerous also in the style of ' Shirley,' as compared with the style of ' Yillette.' Commonplaces writ large; a tendency to produce pages of ' copy,' pages that any ' descriptive reporter' could do as well ; an Extravagance which is not power, but rather a kind of womanish violence ; and a humour j\lso that sometimes leaves the scene on which it is turned colder and more laboured than it found it these are some of the faults that attach especially to the central scenes of ' Shirley,' to the many pages devoted to Shirley's charitable plans, to the school-treat, to the curates, to the old maids. Take these sentences, for instance, from the account of Miss Ainley : ' Sincerity is never ludicrous ; it is always respectable. Whether truth be it religious or moral truth speak eloquently and in well -chosen language or not, its voice should be heard with reverence. Let those who cannot nicely, and with certainty, discern the difference between those of hypocrisy and those of sincerity, never presume to laugh at all, lest they should have the miserable misfortune to laugh in the wrong place and commit impiety when they think they are achieving wit.'

A great creative artist, an artist capable of writing a “ Villette' does not drop into surplusage of this kind, unless there is some sterilising and hostile influence overshadowing her. In her happy hour she will fall upon sentences like this and sweep them from the page, or rather she will never conceive them. Humble truth, modest piety, the scorner to be scorned no need then to talk or prate about them. She sees them in act as they live, and move, and walk ; and she records the vision not any personal opinion about them.

III

Nevertheless, it may be argued, and with truth, that even these slacker and more diffuse chapters of the story have a real and abiding interest for the student of English manners that this clerical, middle-class, country life was intimately known to Charlotte Bronte, and that the portraits of Mr. Helstone, Cyril Hall, the Curates, and the rest, have at least an historical interest. And indeed the matter, the subject, is rich enough ; it is the matter of Jane Austen, of 'Middlemareh,' and the 'Scenes from Clerical Life,' of Trollope and Mrs. Gaskell, of half the eminent and most of the readable novels of English life. Charlotte Bronte presents it with force and knowledge, often with bursts of poetic or satiric observation, but without either the humour or the charm that other English hands have been able to give it. This country and clerical life, though as a human being she was part of it, was not her subject in literature ; let anyone compare the relative failure of 'Shirley' with the unwavering power and mastery of 'Villette.' It was in the play of personal passion, set amid the foreign scenes of 'Villette' scenes that stirred her curiosity, her wrath, her fancy, as novelty and change must always stir the poetic, as distinguished from the critical or humorous genius, that Charlotte at last found her best, her crowning opportunity.

The men, for instance, of * Shirley,' on their first appearance roused a protest among readers and reviewers that can only be repeated now. Among them Mr. Helstone makes, on the whole, the best impression. Miss Bronte drew him from experience, or at least from a germ of reality sufficient to give life and persuasiveness to the creation that sprang from it. Mr. Robersou, of Heald's Hall, the indomitable fighting parson of the thirties, who was the original of Helstone, little knew to whom he was preaching, when at the consecration of a church near Haworth in 1826 he numbered among his hearers a child of ten years old, small, sharp-faced, with bright dreamy eyes. ' I never saw him but that once,' Miss Bronte said later to Mr. Williams. But he was known to her father; his character and exploits made an impression in her neighbourhood ; she heard much of him, and probably his truculent Tory virtues raised him to hero -height in the fancy of an infant worshipper of Wellington and hater of Lord Grey. This was not much foundation, but it was enough. Helstone has life and truth ; his hardness or violence, his courtesies and his scorns, his rare tendernesses, his unconquerable reserves, his smaller habits and gestures are finely studied, finely rendered. But he alone and Martin Yorke have any convincing veracious quality among the men of the book. Mr. Yorke also was studied from life, but the writer has reproduced only the incongruities and oddities of the character, not the unity of the man. Robert Moore is ingeniously imagined and often interesting. But at the critical moment of the book the cloud of sorrow and bewilderraent that descended on the mind of the writer, dulling nerve and vision, blurs him also, so that he seems to dissolve and break up, to be no longer a man and an entity.

And Louis Moore! When her friendly critics in Cornhill, Mr. Williams and Mr. Taylor, sent her during the progress of the book which they were allowed to see in manuscript some 'complaints' of her heroes, Charlotte answered in much depression, that her critics were probably justified. ' When I write about women I am sure of my ground in the other case I am not so sure.' Anrl once or twice, in meeting criticisms on 'Jane E}Te' or 'Shirley,' she says with perfect frankness that it may all be very true. She has seen too little of society ; known too little of men. Yet all the time she had within her that store of passionate and complete observation, whence, later on, Paul Eraanuel was to rise and have his being. And she was by no means meek in her general estimate of the power of women to describe and penetrate men in fiction. There is a passage in ' Shirley ' where Miss Keeldar, after pouring scorn on some of the well-known heroines of men's novels, maintains, with warmth, that in fiction women read men more truly than men are able to read women ; and one hears through her animated talk the voice of Charlotte herself.

That Charlotte Bronte, under adequate stimulus, could draw a living man with truth, humour and variety, Paul Emanuel is there to testify. No single atom of true experience was ever lost upon her genius. But her shyness; and silence allowed her too little of this experience, and in the pure play of imagination she was inferior, in dealing with character, to her sister Emily. Emily knew less of men personally than Charlotte. But she had no illusions about them, and Charlotte had many. Emily is the true creator, using the most limited material in the puissant, detached impersonal way that belongs only to the highest gifts the way of Shakespeare. Charlotte is often parochial, womanish, and morbid in her imagination of men and their relation to women ; Emily who has known two men only, her father and her brother, and derives all other knowledge of the sex from books, from Tabby's talk in the kitchen, from the forms and features she passes in the village street, or on the moors Emily can create a Heathcliff, a Hareton Earnshaw, a Joseph, an Edgar Linton, with equal force, passion, and indifference. All of them up to a certain point, owing to the fact that she knows nothing of certain ground-truths of life, are equally false ; but beyond that point all have the same magnificent, careless truth of imagination. She never bowed before her creatures, in a sort of personal subjection to them, as Charlotte did.

Again, nothing is more curious than to compare Charlotte Bronte's conceptions of Rochester and the two Moores, her painting of the relations between these heroes and the women of the piece, with the ideas and conceptions of George Sand in almost all her earlier stories. To Jane Eyre, Rochester is ' my master ' from first to last; Louis Moore is the tutor and the tyrant even in love-making; Paul Emanuel, for all his foibles and tempers that make him so welcome and so real, is still in relation to the woman he loves, the captor, the teacher, the breaker-in. And there is plenty of evidence in Miss Bronte's letters, and in what is known of her married life, to show that this, in fact, was her own personal ideal. She had battled with the world, and she dreamed of rest ; she had been forced to exercise her own will with so strong and unceasing an effort, that the thought of dropping the tension for ever, of handing all judgment, all choice, over to another's will, became delight ; and, last and most important, what she did not know she glorified. But George Sand, alas! knew too much, and knew too well. No schoolroom imaginations are possible to her. The men she creates are handled with a large indulgence, half maternal, half poetic, that may turn to irony or to reproach, never to the mere woman's selfsurrender. In general, as M. Faguet says, 'elle aime les types de femmes energiques et d'hommes faibles,' and this preference is the unconscious reflection of her own personal history. In her various love affairs she had always found herself in the end the better man; she had shaken herself free from fettering claims because the artist in her was much stronger than the woman, and the man of the present, seen in his actuality, had come to seem to her but a poor creature. She dreamed of a man of the future, and a marriage of the future. Meanwhile, the men she imagines and describes in so large a number of her novels, the relations she draws between them and the women they love, betray her own secret consciousness of power and ascendency. Hence Lelia and Stenio, Edrne and Mauprat, Andre, Simon, and many more.

The personal contrast, indeed, between the two writers, the two women, can hardly be conceived too sharply. We shall realise it a little, perhaps, if we try to imagine George Sand, after her early successes, and in the first glow of fame, marrying a country curate, without a tinge of letters, who encouraged his wife to give up the practice of novel-writing, and in return * often found a little work for her to do ' in his study or the parish ; if we endeavour to think of her as submitting without a murmur, and finding in the quiet happiness of the simplest domestic life reward enough for the suppression of her gift and the taming of her soul.

IV

On the other hand in compensation could George Sand have imagined or drawn a Caroline Helstone? In all her work, did she ever penetrate as close to the ' very pulse of the machine' as Charlotte Bronte has done in this picture of Caroline? 1 think not. For delicacy, poetry, divination, charm, Caroline stands supreme among the women of Miss Bronte's gallery. She is as true as Lucy Snowe, but infinitely more delightful ; she has the same flower-like purity and fragrance as Frances in the 4 Professor,' but she is more tangible, more varied ; she can love with the same intensity as 'Jane Eyre,' but to intensity she adds an therial and tender grace that Jane must do without. The exquisite quality in her she shares indeed with Paulina in ' Villette'; but Paulina is a mere sketch compared to her. From the moment when in her ' soft bloom ' she first enters the Moores' sittingroom, to the final scene when Robert graciously rewards her faith and affection with a heart far below her deserts, she is all woman and all love. It is conceivable that she, being what she is, should have felt no jealousy of Shirley; that she should have drooped without complaining; that she should have preferred rather to die than hate ; to slip out of the struggle rather than make a selfish claim. Yet she is no mere bundle of virtues; hers is no insipid or eclectic goodness like that of Thackeray's Lauras and Amelias. What fortitude and courage even in her despair what tenderness in her relation to her new-found mother what daring in the dove, when the heart and its rights are to be upheld!

'Love a crime ! No, Shirley: love is a divine virtue obtrusiveness is a crime ; forwardness is a crime ; and both disgust : but love ! no purest angel need blnsh to love ! And when I see or hear either man or woman oonple shame with love, I know their minds are coarse, their associations debased.'

' You sacrifice three-fourths of the world, Caroline.’

' They are cold they are cowardly they are stupid, on the subject, Shirley ! They never loved they never were loved !'

' Thou art right, Lina ! And in their dense ignorance they blaspheme living fire, seraph -brought from a divine altar.'

* They confound it with sparks mounting from Tophet!'

Shirley Keeldar, too, is full of charm, though, as a conception, she has hardly the roundness, the full and delicate truth of Caroline. But the two complete each other, and Charlotte Bronte has expressed in the picture of Shirley that wilder and more romantic element of her own being, which found a little later far richer and stronger utterance in ' Yillette.' Caroline, Shirley, Mrs. Pry or delicacy, wildness, family affection these indeed are the three aspects of Charlotte's personality, Charlotte's genius. So that they are children of her own heart's blood, spirits born of her own essence, and warm with her own life.

Thus again we return once more to the central claim, the redeeming spell of all Charlotte Bronte's work which lies, not so much in the thing written, to speak in paradoxes, as in the temper and heart of the writer. If ' Shirley,' wherever the women of the story are chiefly concerned, is richer even than ' Jane Eyre' in poetry and unexpectedness, in a sort of fresh and sparkling charm like that of a moor in sunshine, it is because Charlotte Bronte herself has grown and mellowed in the interval ; because she has thought more, felt more, trembled still more deeply under the pain and beauty of the world. Untoward circumstance indeed makes 'Shirley' less than a masterpiece, distracts the thinking brain and patient hand, is the parent here and there of blurs and inequalities. But this is, so to speak, an accident. Grief and weariness of spirit dim the clear eyes, or mar the utterance of the story-teller from time to time. But the steady growth of genius is there all the same. ' Shirley ' is not so good a stor}', not so remarkable an achievement as ' Jane Eyre,' but it contains none the less the promise and potency of higher things than 'Jane Eyre' of the brilliant, the imperishable ' Villette.'

MARY A. WAED.

CHAPTER I. LEVITICAL.

Of late years an abundant shower of curates has fallen upon the north of England: they lie very thick on the hills; every parish has one or more of them; they are young enough to be very active, and ought to be doing a great deal of good. But not of late years are we about to speak; we are going back to the beginning of this century: late years—present years are dusty, sunburnt, hot, arid; we will evade the noon, forget it in siesta, pass the midday in slumber, and dream of dawn.

If you think, from this prelude, that anything like a romance is preparing for you, reader, you never were more mistaken. Do you anticipate sentiment, and poetry, and reverie? Do you expect passion, and stimulus, and melodrama? Calm your expectations; reduce them to a lowly standard. Something real, cool, and solid lies before you; something unromantic as Monday morning, when all who have work wake with the consciousness that they must rise and betake themselves thereto. It is not positively affirmed that you shall not have a taste of the exciting, perhaps towards the middle and close of the meal, but it is resolved that the first dish set upon the table shall be one that a Catholic—ay, even an Anglo-Catholic—might eat on Good Friday in Passion Week: it shall be cold lentils and vinegar without oil; it shall be unleavened bread with bitter herbs, and no roast lamb.

Of late years, I say, an abundant shower of curates has fallen upon the north of England; but in eighteen-hundred-eleven-twelve that affluent rain had not descended.  Curates were scarce then: there was no Pastoral Aid—no Additional Curates' Society to stretch a helping hand to worn-out old rectors and incumbents, and give them the wherewithal to pay a vigorous young colleague from Oxford or Cambridge. The present successors of the apostles, disciples of Dr. Pusey and tools of the Propaganda, were at that time being hatched under cradle-blankets, or undergoing regeneration by nursery-baptism in wash-hand basins. You could not have guessed by looking at any one of them that the Italian-ironed double frills of its net-cap surrounded the brows of a preordained, specially-sanctified successor of St. Paul, St. Peter, or St. John; nor could you have foreseen in the folds of its long night-gown the white surplice in which it was hereafter cruelly to exercise the souls of its parishioners, and strangely to nonplus its old-fashioned vicar by flourishing aloft in a pulpit the shirt-like raiment which had never before waved higher than the reading-desk.

Yet even in those days of scarcity there were curates: the precious plant was rare, but it might be found. A certain favoured district in the West Riding of Yorkshire could boast three rods of Aaron blossoming within a circuit of twenty miles. You shall see them, reader. Step into this neat garden-house on the skirts of Whinbury, walk forward into the little parlour. There they are at dinner. Allow me to introduce them to you: Mr. Donne, curate of Whinbury; Mr. Malone, curate of Briarfield; Mr. Sweeting, curate of Nunnely. These are Mr. Donne's lodgings, being the habitation of one John Gale, a small clothier. Mr. Donne has kindly invited his brethren to regale with him. You and I will join the party, see what is to be seen, and hear what is to be heard. At present, however, they are only eating; and while they eat we will talk aside.

These gentlemen are in the bloom of youth; they possess all the activity of that interesting age—an activity which their moping old vicars would fain turn into the channel of their pastoral duties, often expressing a wish to see it expended in a diligent superintendence of the schools, and in frequent visits to the sick of their respective parishes. But the youthful Levites feel this to be dull work; they prefer lavishing their energies on a course of proceeding which, though to other eyes it appear more heavy with ennui, more cursed with monotony, than the toil of the  weaver at his loom, seems to yield them an unfailing supply of enjoyment and occupation.

I allude to a rushing backwards and forwards, amongst themselves, to and from their respective lodgings—not a round, but a triangle of visits, which they keep up all the year through, in winter, spring, summer, and autumn. Season and weather make no difference; with unintelligible zeal they dare snow and hail, wind and rain, mire and dust, to go and dine, or drink tea, or sup with each other. What attracts them it would be difficult to say. It is not friendship, for whenever they meet they quarrel. It is not religion—the thing is never named amongst them; theology they may discuss occasionally, but piety—never. It is not the love of eating and drinking: each might have as good a joint and pudding, tea as potent, and toast as succulent, at his own lodgings, as is served to him at his brother's. Mrs. Gale, Mrs. Hogg, and Mrs. Whipp—their respective landladies—affirm that "it is just for naught else but to give folk trouble." By "folk" the good ladies of course mean themselves, for indeed they are kept in a continual "fry" by this system of mutual invasion.

Mr. Donne and his guests, as I have said, are at dinner; Mrs. Gale waits on them, but a spark of the hot kitchen fire is in her eye. She considers that the privilege of inviting a friend to a meal occasionally, without additional charge (a privilege included in the terms on which she lets her lodgings), has been quite sufficiently exercised of late. The present week is yet but at Thursday, and on Monday Mr. Malone, the curate of Briarfield, came to breakfast and stayed dinner; on Tuesday Mr. Malone and Mr. Sweeting of Nunnely came to tea, remained to supper, occupied the spare bed, and favoured her with their company to breakfast on Wednesday morning; now, on Thursday, they are both here at dinner, and she is almost certain they will stay all night. "C'en est trop," she would say, if she could speak French.

Mr. Sweeting is mincing the slice of roast beef on his plate, and complaining that it is very tough; Mr. Donne says the beer is flat. Ay, that is the worst of it: if they would only be civil Mrs. Gale wouldn't mind it so much, if they would only seem satisfied with what they get she wouldn't care; but "these young parsons is so high and so scornful, they set everybody beneath their 'fit.' They treat her with less than civility, just because she doesn't keep a servant, but does the work of the house herself, as her mother did afore her; then they are always speaking against Yorkshire ways and Yorkshire folk," and by that very token Mrs. Gale does not believe one of them to be a real gentleman, or come of gentle kin. "The old parsons is worth the whole lump of college lads; they know what belongs to good manners, and is kind to high and low."

"More bread!" cries Mr. Malone, in a tone which, though prolonged but to utter two syllables, proclaims him at once a native of the land of shamrocks and potatoes. Mrs. Gale hates Mr. Malone more than either of the other two; but she fears him also, for he is a tall, strongly-built personage, with real Irish legs and arms, and a face as genuinely national—not the Milesian face, not Daniel O'Connell's style, but the high-featured, North-American-Indian sort of visage, which belongs to a certain class of the Irish gentry, and has a petrified and proud look, better suited to the owner of an estate of slaves than to the landlord of a free peasantry. Mr. Malone's father termed himself a gentleman: he was poor and in debt, and besottedly arrogant; and his son was like him.

Mrs. Gale offered the loaf.

"Cut it, woman," said her guest; and the "woman" cut it accordingly. Had she followed her inclinations, she would have cut the parson also; her Yorkshire soul revolted absolutely from his manner of command.

The curates had good appetites, and though the beef was "tough," they ate a great deal of it. They swallowed, too, a tolerable allowance of the "flat beer," while a dish of Yorkshire pudding, and two tureens of vegetables, disappeared like leaves before locusts. The cheese, too, received distinguished marks of their attention; and a "spice-cake," which followed by way of dessert, vanished like a vision, and was no more found. Its elegy was chanted in the kitchen by Abraham, Mrs. Gale's son and heir, a youth of six summers; he had reckoned upon the reversion thereof, and when his mother brought down the empty platter, he lifted up his voice and wept sore.

The curates, meantime, sat and sipped their wine, a liquor of unpretending vintage, moderately enjoyed. Mr. Malone, indeed, would much rather have had whisky; but Mr. Donne, being an Englishman, did not keep the beverage. While they sipped they argued, not on politics, nor on philosophy, nor on literature—these topics were now, as ever, totally without interest for them—not even on theology, practical or doctrinal, but on minute points of ecclesiastical discipline, frivolities which seemed empty as bubbles to all save themselves. Mr. Malone, who contrived to secure two glasses of wine, when his brethren contented themselves with one, waxed by degrees hilarious after his fashion; that is, he grew a little insolent, said rude things in a hectoring tone, and laughed clamorously at his own brilliancy.

Each of his companions became in turn his butt. Malone had a stock of jokes at their service, which he was accustomed to serve out regularly on convivial occasions like the present, seldom varying his wit; for which, indeed, there was no necessity, as he never appeared to consider himself monotonous, and did not at all care what others thought. Mr. Donne he favoured with hints about his extreme meagreness, allusions to his turned-up nose, cutting sarcasms on a certain threadbare chocolate surtout which that gentleman was accustomed to sport whenever it rained or seemed likely to rain, and criticisms on a choice set of cockney phrases and modes of pronunciation, Mr. Donne's own property, and certainly deserving of remark for the elegance and finish they communicated to his style.

Mr. Sweeting was bantered about his stature—he was a little man, a mere boy in height and breadth compared with the athletic Malone; rallied on his musical accomplishments—he played the flute and sang hymns like a seraph, some young ladies of his parish thought; sneered at as "the ladies' pet;" teased about his mamma and sisters, for whom poor Mr. Sweeting had some lingering regard, and of whom he was foolish enough now and then to speak in the presence of the priestly Paddy, from whose anatomy the bowels of natural affection had somehow been omitted.

The victims met these attacks each in his own way: Mr. Donne with a stilted self-complacency and half-sullen phlegm, the sole props of his otherwise somewhat rickety dignity; Mr. Sweeting with the indifference of a light, easy disposition, which never professed to have any dignity to maintain.

When Malone's raillery became rather too offensive, which it soon did, they joined, in an attempt to turn the tables on him by asking him how many boys had shouted "Irish Peter!" after him as he came along the road that day (Malone’s name was Peter  Malone----the Rev. Peter Augustus Malone); requesting to be informed whether it was the mode in Ireland for clergymen to carry loaded pistols in their pockets, and a shillelah in their hands, when they made pastoral visits; inquiring the signification of such words as vele, firrum, hellum, storrum (so Mr. Malone invariably pronounced veil, firm, helm, storm), and employing such other methods of retaliation as the innate refinement of their minds suggested.

This, of course, would not do. Malone, being neither good-natured nor phlegmatic, was presently in a towering passion. He vociferated, gesticulated; Donne and Sweeting laughed. He reviled them as Saxons and snobs at the very top pitch of his high Celtic voice; they taunted him with being the native of a conquered land. He menaced rebellion in the name of his "counthry," vented bitter hatred against English rule; they spoke of rags, beggary, and pestilence. The little parlour was in an uproar; you would have thought a duel must follow such virulent abuse; it seemed a wonder that Mr. and Mrs. Gale did not take alarm at the noise, and send for a constable to keep the peace. But they were accustomed to such demonstrations; they well knew that the curates never dined or took tea together without a little exercise of the sort, and were quite easy as to consequences, knowing that these clerical quarrels were as harmless as they were noisy, that they resulted in nothing, and that, on whatever terms the curates might part to-night, they would be sure to meet the best friends in the world to-morrow morning.

As the worthy pair were sitting by their kitchen fire, listening to the repeated and sonorous contact of Malone's fist with the mahogany plane of the parlour table, and to the consequent start and jingle of decanters and glasses following each assault, to the mocking laughter of the allied English disputants, and the stuttering declamation of the isolated Hibernian—as they thus sat, a foot was heard on the outer door-step, and the knocker quivered to a sharp appeal.

Mr. Gale went and opened.

"Whom have you upstairs in the parlour?" asked a voice—a rather remarkable voice, nasal in tone, abrupt in utterance.

"O Mr. Helstone, is it you, sir? I could hardly see you for the darkness; it is so soon dark now. Will you walk in, sir?"

"I want to know first whether it is worth my while walking in. Whom have you upstairs?"

"The curates, sir."

"What! all of them?"

"Yes, sir."

"Been dining here?"

"Yes, sir."

"That will do."

With these words a person entered—a middle-aged man, in black. He walked straight across the kitchen to an inner door, opened it, inclined his head forward, and stood listening. There was something to listen to, for the noise above was just then louder than ever.

"Hey!" he ejaculated to himself; then turning to Mr. Gale—"Have you often this sort of work?"

Mr. Gale had been a churchwarden, and was indulgent to the clergy.

"They're young, you know, sir—they're young," said he deprecatingly.

"Young! They want caning. Bad boys—bad boys! And if you were a Dissenter, John Gale, instead of being a good Churchman, they'd do the like—they'd expose themselves; but I'll——"

By way of finish to this sentence, he passed through the inner door, drew it after him, and mounted the stair. Again he listened a few minutes when he arrived at the upper room. Making entrance without warning, he stood before the curates.

And they were silent; they were transfixed; and so was the invader. He—a personage short of stature, but straight of port, and bearing on broad shoulders a hawk's head, beak, and eye, the whole surmounted by a Rehoboam, or shovel hat, which he did not seem to think it necessary to lift or remove before the presence in which he then stood—he folded his arms on his chest and surveyed his young friends, if friends they were, much at his leisure.

"What!" he began, delivering his words in a voice no longer nasal, but deep—more than deep—a voice made purposely hollow and cavernous—"what! has the miracle of Pentecost been renewed? Have the cloven tongues come down again? Where are they? The sound filled the whole house just now. I heard the seventeen languages in full action: Parthians, and Medes, and Elamites, Cappadocia, in Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, in Egypt and in the parts of Libya about Cyrene, strangers of Rome, Jews and proselytes, Cretes and Arabians; every one of these must have had its representative in this room two minutes since."

"I beg your pardon, Mr. Helstone," began Mr. Donne; "take a seat, pray, sir. Have a glass of wine?"

His civilities received no answer. The falcon in the black coat proceeded,—

"What do I talk about the gift of tongues? Gift, indeed! I mistook the chapter, and book, and Testament—gospel for law, Acts for Genesis, the city of Jerusalem for the plain of Shinar. It was no gift but the confusion of tongues which has gabbled me deaf as a post. You, apostles? What! you three? Certainly not; three presumptuous Babylonish masons—neither more nor less!"

"I assure you, sir, we were only having a little chat together over a glass of wine after a friendly dinner—settling the Dissenters!"

"Oh! settling the Dissenters, were you? Was Malone settling the Dissenters? It sounded to me much more like settling his co-apostles. You were quarrelling together, making almost as much noise—you three alone—as Moses Barraclough, the preaching tailor, and all his hearers are making in the Methodist chapel down yonder, where they are in the thick of a revival. I know whose fault it is.—It is yours, Malone."

"Mine, sir?"

"Yours, sir. Donne and Sweeting were quiet before you came, and would be quiet if you were gone. I wish, when you crossed the Channel, you had left your Irish habits behind you. Dublin student ways won't do here. The proceedings which might pass unnoticed in a wild bog and mountain district in Connaught will, in a decent English parish, bring disgrace on those who indulge in them, and, what is far worse, on the sacred institution of which they are merely the humble appendages."

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

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

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

"Have you any arms about you?"

"Arms, sir?—yes, and legs." And he advanced the mighty members.

"Bah! weapons I mean."

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

"Very good. Will you go to Hollow's Mill?"

"What is stirring at Hollow's Mill?"

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

"I am none of his well-wishers, sir. I don't care for him."

"Soh! Malone, you are afraid."

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

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

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

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

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

"What did you hear, Davy?"

"You know Mike Hartley, sir?"

"The Antinomian weaver? Yes."

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

"Well, that has nothing to do with Moore."

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

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

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

"Can't tell, Davy. He may be crazed, or he may be only crafty, or perhaps a little of both."

"He talks of seeing visions, sir."

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

"Tell it, sir. What was it?" urged Sweeting.

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

"Saph! Who was Saph, sir?"

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

"But the vision, sir?"

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

"Where did they go, sir?"

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

"Do you credit it, sir?" asked Sweeting.

"Do you, Davy?—But come, Malone; why are you not off?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

"No, sir; no, Mr. Helstone. My mother wouldn't like it," pleaded Sweeting.

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

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

CHAPTER II. THE WAGONS.