PART III. CHAPTER VII.

It was a regular business now for three or four of the boys of Bleaburn to go up to the brow every morning to bring down the stores from O——, which were daily left there under the care of the watch. Mr. Kirby had great influence already with the boys of Bleaburn. He found plenty for them to do, and, when they were very hungry with running about, he gave them wholesome food to satisfy their healthy appetite. He said, he and Mrs. Kirby and the doctor worked hard, and they could not let anybody be idle but those who were ill: and, now that the regular work and wages of the place were suspended, he arranged matters 260after his own sense of the needs of the people. The boys who survived and were in health, formed a sort of regiment under his orders, and they certainly never liked work so well before. Every little fellow felt his own consequence, and was aware of his own responsibility. A certain number, as has been said, went up to the brow to bring down the stores. A certain number were to succeed each other at the doctor’s door, from hour to hour, to carry medicines, that the sick might neither be kept waiting, nor be liable to be served with the wrong medicine, from too many sorts being carried in a basket together. Others attended upon Warrender, with pail and brush, and helped him with his lime-washing. At first it was difficult, as has been said, to induce the lads to volunteer for this service, and Mr. Kirby directed much argument and persuasion towards their supposed fear of entering the cottages where people were lying sick. This was not the reason, however, as Warrender explained, with downcast eyes, when Mr. Kirby wondered what ailed the lads, that they ran all sorts of dangers all day long, and shirked this one.

“’Tis not the danger, I fancy, Sir,” said Warrender; “they are not so much afraid of the fever as of going with me, I’m sorry to say.”

“Afraid of you!” said Mr. Kirby, laughing. “What harm could you do them?”

“’Tis my temper, Sir, I’m afraid.”

“What is the matter with your temper? I see nothing amiss with it.”

“And I hope you never may, Sir: but I can’t answer for myself, though at this moment I know the folly of such passion as these lads have seen in me. Sir, it has been my way to be violent with them; and I don’t wonder they slink away from me. But—”

“I am really quite surprised,” said Mr. Kirby. “This is all news to me. I should have said you were a remarkably staid, quiet, persevering man; and, I am sure, very kind hearted.”

“You have seen us all at such a time, you know, Sir! It is not only the misfortunes of the time that sober us, but when there is so much to do for one’s neighbours, one’s mind does not want to be in a passion—so to speak.”

“Very true. The best part of us is roused, and puts down the worse. I quite agree with you, Warrender.”

The boys were not long in learning that there was nothing now to fear from Warrender. No one was sent staggering from a box on the ear. No hair was ever pulled; nor was any boy ever shaken in his jacket. Instead of doing such things, Warrender made companions of his young assistants, taught them to do well whatever they put their hands to, and made them willing and happy. While two or three thus waited on him, others carried home the clean linen that his daughter and a neighbour or two were frequently ready to send out: and they daily changed the water in the tubs where the foul linen was deposited. Others, again, swept and washed down the long steep street, making it look almost as clean as if it belonged to a Dutch village. After the autumn pig-killing, there were few or no more pigs. The poor sufferers could not attend to them; could not afford, indeed, to buy them; and had scarcely any food to give them. Though this was a token of poverty, it was hardly to be lamented in itself, under the circumstances; for there is no foulness whatever, no nastiness that is to be found among the abodes of men, so dangerous to health as that of pig-styes. There is mismanagement in this. People take for granted that the pig is a dirty animal, and give him no chance of being clean; whereas, if they would try the experiment of keeping his house swept, and putting his food always in one place, and washing him with soap and water once a week, they would find that he knows how to keep his pavement clean, and that he runs grunting to meet his washing with a satisfaction not to be mistaken. Such was the conclusion of the boys who undertook the purification of the two or three pigs that remained in Bleaburn. As for the empty styes, they were cleaner than many of the cottages. After a conversation with Mr. Kirby, Farmer Neale bought all the dirt-heaps for manure; and in a few days they were all trundled away in barrows—even to the stable-manure from the Plough and Harrow—and heaped together at the farm, and well shut down with a casing of earth, beat firm with spades. Boys really like such work as this, when they are put upon it in the right way. They were less dirty than they would have been with tumbling about and quarrelling and cuffing in the filthy street; in a finer glow of exercise; with a more wholesome appetite; and far more satisfaction in eating, because they had earned their food. Moreover, they began to feel themselves little friends of the grown people—of Mr. and Mrs. Kirby, and the Doctor, and the Warrenders—instead of a sort of reptiles, or other plague; and Mr. Kirby astonished them so by a bit of amusement now and then, when he had time, that they would have called him a conjuror, if he had not been a clergyman. He made a star—any star they pleased—as large as the comet, just by making them look at it through a tube; and he showed them how he took a drop of foul water from a stinking pool, and put it between glasses in a hole in his window-shutter; and how the drop became like a pond, and was found to be swarming with loathsome live creatures, swimming about, and trying to swallow each other. After these exhibitions, it is true the comet seemed much less wonderful and terrible than before; but then the drop of water was infinitely more so. The lads studied Mr. Kirby’s cistern—so carefully covered, and so regularly cleaned out; and they learned how the water he 261drank at dinner was filtered; and then they went and scoured out the few water-tubs there were in the village, and consulted their neighbours as to how the public of Bleaburn could be persuaded not to throw filth and refuse into the stream at the upper part, defiling it for those who lived lower down.

One morning at the beginning of December—on such a morning as was now sadly frequent, drizzly, and far too warm for the season—the lads who went up to the brow saw the same sight that had been visible in the same place one evening in the preceding August. There was a chaise, and an anxious post-boy, and a lady talking with one of the cordon. Mr. Kirby had learned what friends Mary Pickard had in England, and which of them lived nearest, and he had taken the liberty of writing to declare the condition of the Good Lady. His letter brought the friend, Mrs. Henderson, who came charged with affectionate messages to Mary from her young daughters, and a fixed determination not to return without the invalid.

“To think,” as she said to Mary when she appeared by the side of her mattress, “that you should be in England, suffering in this way, and we not have any idea what you were going through!”

Mary smiled, and said she had gone through nothing terrible on her own account. She might have been at Mr. Kirby’s for three weeks past, but that she really preferred being where she was.

“Do not ask her now, Madam, where she likes to be,” said Mr. Kirby, who had been brought down the street by the bustle of a stranger’s arrival. “Do not consult her at all, but take her away, and nurse her well.”

“Yes,” said the Doctor; “lay her in a good air, and let her sleep, and feed her well; and she will soon come round. She is better—even here.”

“Madam,” said Widow Johnson’s feeble but steady voice, “be to her what she has been to us; raise her up to what she was when I first heard her step upon those stairs, and we shall say you deserve to be her friend.”

“You will go, will not you?” whispered Mrs. Kirby to Mary. “You will let us manage it all for you?”

“Do what you please with me,” was the reply. “You know best how to get me well soonest. Only let me tell Aunty that I will come again, as soon as I am able.”

“Better not,” said the prudent Mrs. Kirby. “There is no saying what may be the condition of this place by the spring. And it might keep Mrs. Johnson in a state of expectation not fit for one so feeble. Better not.”

“Very well,” said Mary.

Mrs. Kirby thought of something that her husband had said of Mary; that he had never seen any one with such power of will and command so docile. She merely promised her aunt frequent news of her; agreed with those who doubted whether she could bear the jolting of any kind of carriage on the road up to the brow; admitted that, though she could now stand, she could not walk across the room; allowed herself to be carried on her mattress in a carpet, by four men, up to the chaise; and nodded in reply to a remark made by one little girl to another in the street, and which the doctor wished she had not heard, that she looked “rarely bad.”

The landlady at O—— seemed, by her countenance, to have much the same opinion of Mary’s looks, when she herself brought out the glass of wine, for which Mrs. Henderson stopped her chaise at the door of the Cross Keys. The landlady brought it herself, because none of her people would give as much as a glass of cold water, hand to hand with any one who came from Bleaburn. The landlady stood shaking her head, and saying she had done the best she could; she had warned the young lady in time.

“But you were quite out in your warning,” said Mary. “You were sure I should have the fever: but I have not.”

“You have not!”

“I have had no disease—no complaint whatever. I am only weak from fatigue.”

“It is quite true,” said Mrs. Henderson, as the hostess turned to her for confirmation. “Good wine like this, the fresh air of our moors, and the easy sleep that comes to Good Ladies like her, are the only medicines she wants.”

The landlady curtsied low—said the payment made should supply a glass of wine to somebody at Bleaburn, and bade the driver proceed. After a mile or two, he turned his head, touched his hat, and directed the ladies’ attention to a bottle of wine, with loosened cork, and a cup which the hostess had contrived to smuggle into the pocket of the chaise. She was sure the young lady would want some wine before they stopped.

“How kind every body is!” said Mary, with swimming eyes. Mrs. Henderson cleared her throat, and looked out of the window on her side.