Shirley

“He is about to evacuate Fieldhead – so he says. He is now giving orders to his family. He has been in the schoolroom issuing commands in a manner which, I suppose, was a continuation of that with which he has harassed you.”

“Are you and Henry to go?”

“I believe, as far as Henry is concerned, that was the tenor of his scarcely intelligible directions; but he may change all tomorrow. He is just in that mood when you cannot depend on his consistency for two consecutive hours. I doubt whether he will leave you for weeks yet. To myself he addressed some words which will require a little attention and comment by-and-by, when I have time to bestow on them. At the moment he came in I was busied with a note I had got from Mr. Yorke – so fully busied that I cut short the interview with him somewhat abruptly. I left him raving. Here is the note. I wish you to see it. It refers to my brother Robert.” And he looked at Shirley.

“I shall be glad to hear news of him. Is he coming home?”

“He is come. He is in Yorkshire. Mr. Yorke went yesterday to Stilbro’ to meet him.”

“Mr. Moore, something is wrong”

“Did my voice tremble? He is now at Briarmains, and I am going to see him.”

“What has occurred?”

“If you turn so pale I shall be sorry I have spoken. It might have been worse. Robert is not dead, but much hurt.”

“O sir, it is you who are pale. Sit down near me.”

“Read the note. Let me open it.”

Miss Keeldar read the note. It briefly signified that last night Robert Moore had been shot at from behind the wall of Milldean plantation, at the foot of the Brow; that he was wounded severely, but it was hoped not fatally. Of the assassin, or assassins, nothing was known; they had escaped. “No doubt,” Mr. Yorke observed, “it was done in revenge. It was a pity ill-will had ever been raised; but that could not be helped now.”

“He is my only brother,” said Louis, as Shirley returned the note. “I cannot hear unmoved that ruffians have laid in wait for him, and shot him down, like some wild beast from behind a wall.”

“Be comforted; be hopeful. He will get better – I know he will.”

Shirley, solicitous to soothe, held her hand over Mr. Moore’s as it lay on the arm of the chair. She just touched it lightly, scarce palpably.

“Well, give me your hand,” he said. “It will be for the first time; it is in a moment of calamity. Give it me.”

Awaiting neither consent nor refusal, he took what he asked.

“I am going to Briarmains now,” he went on. “I want you to step over to the rectory and tell Caroline Helstone what has happened. Will you do this? She will hear it best from you.”

“Immediately,” said Shirley, with docile promptitude. “Ought I to say that there is no danger?”

“Say so.”

“You will come back soon, and let me know more?”

“I will either come or write.”

“Trust me for watching over Caroline. I will communicate with your sister too; but doubtless she is already with Robert?”

“Doubtless, or will be soon. Good morning now.”

“You will bear up, come what may.”

“We shall see that.”

Shirley’s fingers were obliged to withdraw from the tutor’s. Louis was obliged to relinquish that hand folded, clasped, hidden in his own.

“I thought I should have had to support her,” he said, as he walked towards Briarmains, “and it is she who has made me strong. That look of pity, that gentle touch! No down was ever softer, no elixir more potent! It lay like a snowflake; it thrilled like lightning. A thousand times I have longed to possess that hand – to have it in mine. I have possessed it; for five minutes I held it. Her fingers and mine can never be strangers more. Having met once they must meet again.”

Chapter XXXII

The Schoolboy and the Wood Nymph

Briarmains being nearer than the Hollow, Mr. Yorke had conveyed his young comrade there. He had seen him laid in the best bed of the house, as carefully as if he had been one of his own sons. The sight of his blood, welling from the treacherously inflicted wound, made him indeed the son of the Yorkshire gentleman’s heart. The spectacle of the sudden event, of the tall, straight shape prostrated in its pride across the road, of the fine southern head laid low in the dust, of that youth in prime flung at once before him pallid, lifeless, helpless – this was the very combination of circumstances to win for the victim Mr. Yorke’s liveliest interest.

No other hand was there to raise to aid, no other voice to question kindly, no other brain to concert measures; he had to do it all himself. This utter dependence of the speechless, bleeding youth (as a youth he regarded him) on his benevolence secured that benevolence most effectually. Well did Mr. Yorke like to have power, and to use it. He had now between his hands power over a fellow creature’s life. It suited him.

No less perfectly did it suit his saturnine better half. The incident was quite in her way and to her taste. Some women would have been terror-struck to see a gory man brought in over their threshold, and laid down in their hall in the “howe of the night.” There, you would suppose, was subject-matter for hysterics. No. Mrs. Yorke went into hysterics when Jessie would not leave the garden to come to her knitting, or when Martin proposed starting for Australia, with a view to realize freedom and escape the tyranny of Matthew; but an attempted murder near her door – a half-murdered man in her best bed – set her straight, cheered her spirits, gave her cap the dash of a turban.

Mrs. Yorke was just the woman who, while rendering miserable the drudging life of a simple maidservant, would nurse like a heroine a hospital full of plague patients. She almost loved Moore. Her tough heart almost yearned towards him when she found him committed to her charge – left in her arms, as dependent on her as her youngest-born in the cradle. Had she seen a domestic or one of her daughters give him a draught of water or smooth his pillow, she would have boxed the intruder’s ears. She chased Jessie and Rose from the upper realm of the house; she forbade the housemaids to set their foot in it.

Now, if the accident had happened at the rectory gates, and old Helstone had taken in the martyr, neither Yorke nor his wife would have pitied him. They would have adjudged him right served for his tyranny and meddling. As it was, he became, for the present, the apple of their eye.

Strange! Louis Moore was permitted to come – to sit down on the edge of the bed and lean over the pillow; to hold his brother’s hand, and press his pale forehead with his fraternal lips; and Mrs. Yorke bore it well. She suffered him to stay half the day there; she once suffered him to sit up all night in the chamber; she rose herself at five o’clock of a wet November morning, and with her own hands lit the kitchen fire, and made the brothers a breakfast, and served it to them herself. Majestically arrayed in a boundless flannel wrapper, a shawl, and her nightcap, she sat and watched them eat, as complacently as a hen beholds her chickens feed. Yet she gave the cook warning that day for venturing to make and carry up to Mr. Moore a basin of sago-gruel; and the housemaid lost her favour because, when Mr. Louis was departing, she brought him his surtout aired from the kitchen, and, like a “forward piece” as she was, helped him on with it, and accepted in return a smile, a “Thank you, my girl,” and a shilling. Two ladies called one day, pale and anxious, and begged earnestly, humbly, to be allowed to see Mr. Moore one instant. Mrs. Yorke hardened her heart, and sent them packing – not without opprobrium.

But how was it when Hortense Moore came? Not so bad as might have been expected. The whole family of the Moores really seemed to suit Mrs. Yorke so as no other family had ever suited her. Hortense and she possessed an exhaustless mutual theme of conversation in the corrupt propensities of servants. Their views of this class were similar; they watched them with the same suspicion, and judged them with the same severity. Hortense, too, from the very first showed no manner of jealousy of Mrs. Yorke’s attentions to Robert – she let her keep the post of nurse with little interference; and, for herself, found ceaseless occupation in fidgeting about the house, holding the kitchen under surveillance, reporting what passed there, and, in short, making herself generally useful. Visitors they both of them agreed in excluding sedulously from the sickroom. They held the young mill owner captive, and hardly let the air breathe or the sun shine on him.

Mr. MacTurk, the surgeon to whom Moore’s case had been committed, pronounced his wound of a dangerous, but, he trusted, not of a hopeless character. At first he wished to place with him a nurse of his own selection; but this neither Mrs. Yorke nor Hortense would hear of. They promised faithful observance of directions. He was left, therefore, for the present in their hands.

Doubtless they executed the trust to the best of their ability; but something got wrong. The bandages were displaced or tampered with; great loss of blood followed. MacTurk, being summoned, came with steed afoam. He was one of those surgeons whom it is dangerous to vex – abrupt in his best moods, in his worst savage. On seeing Moore’s state he relieved his feelings by a little flowery language, with which it is not necessary to strew the present page. A bouquet or two of the choicest blossoms fell on the unperturbed head of one Mr. Graves, a stony young assistant he usually carried about with him; with a second nosegay he gifted another young gentleman in his train – an interesting facsimile of himself, being indeed his own son; but the full corbeille of blushing bloom fell to the lot of meddling womankind, en masse.

For the best part of one winter night himself and satellites were busied about Moore. There at his bedside, shut up alone with him in his chamber, they wrought and wrangled over his exhausted frame. They three were on one side of the bed, and Death on the other. The conflict was sharp; it lasted till day broke, when the balance between the belligerents seemed so equal that both parties might have claimed the victory.

At dawn Graves and young MacTurk were left in charge of the patient, while the senior went himself in search of additional strength, and secured it in the person of Mrs. Horsfall, the best nurse on his staff. To this woman he gave Moore in charge, with the sternest injunctions respecting the responsibility laid on her shoulders. She took this responsibility stolidly, as she did also the easy chair at the bedhead. That moment she began her reign.

Mrs. Horsfall had one virtue – orders received from MacTurk she obeyed to the letter. The ten commandments were less binding in her eyes than her surgeon’s dictum. In other respects she was no woman, but a dragon. Hortense Moore fell effaced before her; Mrs. Yorke withdrew – crushed; yet both these women were personages of some dignity in their own estimation, and of some bulk in the estimation of others. Perfectly cowed by the breadth, the height, the bone, and the brawn of Mrs. Horsfall, they retreated to the back parlour. She, for her part, sat upstairs when she liked, and downstairs when she preferred it. She took her dram three times a day, and her pipe of tobacco four times.

As to Moore, no one now ventured to inquire about him. Mrs. Horsfall had him at dry-nurse. It was she who was to do for him, and the general conjecture now ran that she did for him accordingly.

Morning and evening MacTurk came to see him. His case, thus complicated by a new mischance, was become one of interest in the surgeon’s eyes. He regarded him as a damaged piece of clockwork, which it would be creditable to his skill to set agoing again. Graves and young MacTurk – Moore’s sole other visitors – contemplated him in the light in which they were wont to contemplate the occupant for the time being of the dissecting-room at Stilbro’ Infirmary.

Robert Moore had a pleasant time of it – in pain, in danger, too weak to move, almost too weak to speak, a sort of giantess his keeper, the three surgeons his sole society. Thus he lay through the diminishing days and lengthening nights of the whole drear month of November.

In the commencement of his captivity Moore used feebly to resist Mrs. Horsfall. He hated the sight of her rough bulk, and dreaded the contact of her hard hands; but she taught him docility in a trice. She made no account whatever of his six feet, his manly thews and sinews; she turned him in his bed as another woman would have turned a babe in its cradle. When he was good she addressed him as “my dear” and “honey,” and when he was bad she sometimes shook him. Did he attempt to speak when MacTurk was there, she lifted her hand and bade him “Hush!” like a nurse checking a forward child. If she had not smoked, if she had not taken gin, it would have been better, he thought; but she did both. Once, in her absence, he intimated to MacTurk that “that woman was a dram-drinker.”

“Pooh! my dear sir, they are all so,” was the reply he got for his pains. “But Horsfall has this virtue,” added the surgeon—“drunk or sober, she always remembers to obey me.”

At length the latter autumn passed; its fogs, its rains withdrew from England their mourning and their tears; its winds swept on to sigh over lands far away. Behind November came deep winter – clearness, stillness, frost accompanying.

A calm day had settled into a crystalline evening. The world wore a North Pole colouring; all its lights and tints looked like the reflets[1 - Find me an English word as good, reader, and I will gladly dispense with the French word. “Reflections” won’t do.]of white, or violet, or pale green gems. The hills wore a lilac blue; the setting sun had purple in its red; the sky was ice, all silvered azure; when the stars rose, they were of white crystal, not gold; gray, or cerulean, or faint emerald hues – cool, pure, and transparent – tinged the mass of the landscape.

What is this by itself in a wood no longer green, no longer even russet, a wood neutral tint – this dark blue moving object? Why, it is a schoolboy – a Briarfield grammar school boy – who has left his companions, now trudging home by the highroad, and is seeking a certain tree, with a certain mossy mound at its root, convenient as a seat. Why is he lingering here? The air is cold and the time wears late. He sits down. What is he thinking about? Does he feel the chaste charm Nature wears tonight? A pearl-white moon smiles through the gray trees; does he care for her smile?