IN THREE PARTS.—CHAPTER I.

It was not often that anything happened to enliven the village of Bleaburn, in Yorkshire: but there was a day in the summer of 1811, when the inhabitants were roused from their apathy, and hardly knew themselves. A stranger was once heard to say, after some accident had compelled him to pass through Bleaburn, that he saw nothing there but a blacksmith asleep, and a couple of rabbits hung up by the heels. That the blacksmith was wholly asleep at midday might indicate that there was a public house in the place; but, even there, in that liveliest and most intellectual spot in a country village of those days,—the ale-house kitchen—the people sat half asleep. Sodden with beer, and almost without ideas and interests, the men of the place let indolence creep over them; and there they sat, as quiet a set of customers as ever landlord had to deal with. For one thing, they were almost all old or elderly men. The boys were out after the rabbits on the neighbouring moor; and the young men were far away. A recruiting party had met with unusual success, for two successive years—(now some time since)—in inducing the men of Bleaburn to enter the king’s service. In a place where nobody was very wise, and everybody was very dull, the drum and fife, the soldierly march, the scarlet coats, the gay ribbons, the drink and the pay, had charms which can hardly be conceived of by dwellers in towns, to whose eyes and ears something new is presented every day. Several men went from Bleaburn to be soldiers, and Bleaburn was declared to be a loyal place; and many who had never before heard of its existence, spoke of it now as a bright example of attachment and devotion to the throne in a most disloyal age. While, throughout the manufacturing districts, the people were breaking machinery—while on these very Yorkshire hills they were drilling their armed forces—while the moneyed men were grumbling at the taxes, and at the war in Spain, whence, for a long time, they had heard of many disasters and no victories; and while the hungry labourers in town and country were asking how they were to buy bread when wheat was selling at 95s. the quarter, and while there were grave apprehensions of night-burnings of the corn magazines, the village of Bleaburn, which could not be seen without being expressly sought, was sending up strong men out of its cleft of the hills, to fight the battles of their country.

Perhaps the chief reason of the loyalty, as well as the quietness of Bleaburn, was its lying in a cleft of the hills; in a fissure so deep and narrow, that a traveller in a chaise might easily pass near it without perceiving that there was any settlement at all, unless it was in the morning when the people were lighting their fires, or on the night of such a day as that on which our story opens. In the one case, the smoke issuing from the cleft might hint of habitations: in the other, the noise and ruddy light would leave no doubt of there being somebody there. There was, at last, a victory in Spain. The news of the battle of Albuera had arrived; and it spread abroad over the kingdom, lighting up bonfires in the streets, and millions of candles in windows, before people had time to learn at what cost this victory was obtained, and how very nearly it had been a fatal defeat, or anything about it, in short. If they had known the fact that while our allies, the Spaniards, Portuguese, and Germans, suffered but moderately, the British were slaughtered as horribly as they could have been under defeat: so that, out of six thousand men who went up the hill, only fifteen hundred were left standing at the top, the people might have let their bonfires burn out as soon as they would, and might have put out their candles that mourners might weep in darkness. But they burst into rejoicing first, and learned details afterwards.

Every boy in Bleaburn forgot the rabbits that day. All were busy getting in wood for the bonfire. Not a swinging shutter, not a loose pale, not a bit of plank, or ricketty gate, or shaking footbridge escaped their clutches. Where they hid their stock during the day, nobody knew; but there was a mighty pile at dusk. It was then that poor Widow Slaney, stealing out to close her shutter, because she could not bear the sound of rejoicing, nor the sight of her neighbours abroad in the ruddy light, found that her shutter was gone. All day, she had been in 194the loft, lest she should see anybody; for the clergyman had been to tell her that her son Harry had been shot as a deserter. She had refused to believe it at first; but Mr. Finch had explained to her that the soldiers in Spain had suffered so cruelly from hunger, and want of shoes and of every comfort, that hundreds of them had gone into the towns to avoid starvation; and then, when the towns were taken by the allies, such British soldiers as were found, and were declared to have no business there, were treated as deserters, for an example. It was some comfort that Mr. Finch did not think that Harry had done any thing very wicked; but Mrs. Slaney could not meet any one, nor bear the flaring light on her ceiling; so she went up to the loft again, and cried all night in the dark. Farmer Neale was the wonder of the place this evening. He was more gracious than anybody, though there was nobody who was not, at all times, afraid of him. When he was seen striding down the steep narrow street, the little boys hid themselves. They had not been able to resist altogether the temptation of dry thorns in his fences, and of the chips which had still lain about where his winter felling had been done, and they concluded he was come now to give them a rough handling: but they found themselves mistaken. He was in high good-humour, sending such boys as he could catch with orders upon his people at home for a tar-barrel and a whole load of faggots.

“’Tis hardly natural, though, is it?” said Mrs. Billiter to Ann Warrender. “It does not seem natural for any father to rejoice in a victory when his own son has lost his best leg there.”

“Has Jack Neale lost his leg? O! what a thing!” exclaimed Ann Warrender. She was going on, but she perceived that the farmer had heard her.

“Yes,” said he, without any sound of heart-pain in his voice. “Jack has lost his right leg, Mr. Finch tells me. And I tell Mr. Finch, it is almost a pity the other did not go after it. He deserved no more good of either of them when he had let them do such a thing as carry him off from his home and his duty.”

“How can you, Mr. Neale?” burst out both the women.

“How can I do what, my dears? One thing I can do; and that is, see when an undutiful son is properly punished. He must live on his pension, however: he can be of no use to me, now; and I can’t be burdened with a cripple at home.”

“I don’t think he will ask you,” Mrs. Billiter said. “He was none so happy there before as to want to come again.”

Ann Warrender told this speech to her father afterwards as the severest she had ever heard from Mrs. Billiter; and they agreed that it was very bold, considering that Billiter was one of Farmer Neale’s labourers. But they also agreed that it was enough to stir up flesh and blood to see a man made hearty and good-humoured by misfortune having befallen a son who had offended him. After all, poor Jack Neale had run away only because he could not bear his father’s tyranny. Two more of the Bleaburn recruits had suffered—had been killed outright; one a widower, who, in his first grief, had left his babes with their grandmother, and gone to the wars; and the other, an ignorant lout, who had been entrapped because he was tall and strong; had been fuddled with beer, flattered with talk of finery, and carried off before he could recover his slow wits. He was gone, and would soon be forgotten.

“I say, Jem,” said Farmer Neale, when he met the village idiot, Jem Johnson, shuffling along the street, staring at the lights: “you’re the wise man, after all: you’re the best off, my man.”

Widow Johnson, who was just behind, put her arm in poor Jem’s, and tried to make him move on. She was a stern woman; but she was as much disgusted at Farmer Neale’s hardness as her tender-hearted daughter, Mrs. Billiter, or anyone else.

“Good day, Mrs. Johnson,” said Neale. “You are better off for a son than I am, after all. Yours is not such a fool as to go and get his leg shot off, like my precious son.”

Mrs. Johnson looked him hard in the face, as she would a madman or a drunken man whom she meant to intimidate; and compelled her son to pass on. In truth, Farmer Neale was drunk with evil passions; in such high spirits, that, when he found that the women—mothers of sons—would have nothing to say to him to-day, he went to the public house, where he was pretty sure of being humoured by the men who depended on his employment for bread, and on his temper for much of the peace of their lives.

On his way he met the clergyman, and proposed to him to make a merry evening of it. “If you will just step in at the Plough and Harrow, Sir,” said he, “and tell us all you have heard about the victory, it will be the finest thing—just what the men want. And we will drink your health, and the King’s, and Marshal Beresford’s, who won the victory. It is a fine occasion, Sir; an occasion to confirm the loyalty of the people. You will come with me, Sir?”

“No,” replied Mr. Finch, “I have to go among another sort of people, Neale. If you have spirits to make merry to-night, I own to you I have not. Victories that cost so much, do not make me very merry.”

“Oh, fie, Mr. Finch! How are we to keep up our character for loyalty, if you fail us—if you put on a black face in the hour of rejoicing?”

“Just come with me,” said Mr. Finch, “and I can show you cause enough for heaviness of heart. In our small village, there is mourning in many houses. Three of our late neighbours 195are dead, and one of them in such a way as will break his mother’s heart.”

“And another has lost a leg, you are thinking. Out with it, Sir, and don’t be afraid of my feelings about it. Well, it is certain that Bleaburn has suffered more than is the fair share of one place; but we must be loyal.”

“And so,” said Mr. Finch, “you are going to prepare more of your neighbours to enlist, the next time a recruiting party comes this way. Oh, I don’t say that men are not to be encouraged to serve their king and country: but it seems to me that our place has done its duty well enough for the present. I wonder that you, as a farmer, do not consider the rates, and dread the consequences of having the women and children on our hands, if our able men get killed and maimed in the wars. I should have thought that the price of bread—”

“There, now, don’t let us talk about that!” said Neale; “You know that is a subject that we never agree about. We will let alone the price of bread for to-day.”

Neale might easily forget this sore subject, and every other that was disagreeable to other people, in the jollity at the Plough and Harrow, where there was an uproar of tipsy mirth for the greater part of the night. But Mr. Finch found little mirth among the people left at home in the cottages. The poor women, who lived hardly, knitting for eighteen hours out of the twenty-four, and finding themselves less and less able to overtake the advancing prices of the necessaries of life, had no great store of spirits to spend in rejoicing over victories, or anything else; and among them there was one who loved Jack Neale, and was beloved by him; and others, who respected Widow Slaney, and could not countenance noisy mirth while she was sunk in horror and grief. They were hungry enough, too, to look upon young Slaney’s death as something of an outrage. If hunger and nakedness had driven him into the shelter of a town, to avoid dying by the roadside, it seemed to them that being shot was a hard punishment for the offence. Mr. Finch endeavoured to show, in hackneyed language, what the dereliction of duty really was, and how intolerable during warfare; but the end of it was that the neighbours pitied the poor young man the more, the more they dwelt upon his fate.

As it turned out, Bleaburn made more sacrifices to the war than those of the Battle of Albuera, even before drum or fife was again heard coming over the moor. The place had not been healthy before; and illness set in somewhat seriously after the excitements of the bonfire night. The cold and wet spring had discouraged the whole kingdom about the harvest; and in Bleaburn it had done something more. Where there are stone houses, high winds aggravate the damage of wet weather. The driven rain had been sucked in by the stone; and more wet was absorbed from the foundations, when the swollen stream had rushed down the hollow, and overflowed into the houses, and the pigstyes, and every empty place into which it could run. Where there were glass windows and fires in the rooms, the panes were dewy, and the walls shiny with trickling drops; and in the cottages where there were no fires, the inhabitants were so chilly, that they stuffed up every broken window-pane, and closed all chinks by which air might enter, in hopes of keeping themselves warm; but the floors were never really dry that summer, and even the beds had a chilly feel. The best shoes showed mould between one Sunday and another; and the meal in the bin (of those who were so fortunate as to have a meal-bin) did not keep well. Mr. Finch had talked a great deal about what was to be expected from summer weather and the harvest; but as the weeks went on, there were graver doubts about the harvest than there had been even while people were complaining at Easter, and shaking their heads at Whitsuntide; and when a few days of hot weather came at last, the people of Bleaburn did not know how to bear them at all. The dead rats and decaying matter which had been deposited by the spring overflow, made such a stench that people shut their windows closer than ever. Their choice now was between being broiled in the heat which was reflected from the sides of the cleft in which they lived, and being shut into houses where the walls, floors, and windows were reeking with steam. The women, who sat still all day, knitting, had little chance for health in such abodes; and still less had such of the men as, already weakened by low diet, had surfeited themselves with beer on the night of the rejoicing, and broiled themselves in the heat of the bonfire, and fevered mind and body with shouting, and singing, and brawling, and been brought home to be laid upon musty straw, under a somewhat damp blanket. This excess was hardly more pernicious to some than depression was to others. Those of the people at Bleaburn that had received heart-wounds from the Battle of Albuera, thought they could never care again for any personal troubles or privations; but they were not long in learning that they now suffered more than before from low diet and every sort of discomfort. They blamed themselves for being selfish; but this self-blame again made the matter worse. They had lost a hope which had kept them up. They were not only in grief, but thoroughly discouraged. Their gloom was increased by seeing that a change had come over Mr. Finch. On Sundays he looked so anxious, that it was enough to lower people’s spirits to go to church. His very voice was dismal, as he read the service; his sermon grew shorter almost every Sunday: and it was about everything that the people cared least about 196He gave them discussions of doctrine, or dry moral essays, which were as stones to them when they wanted the bread of consolation and the wine of hope. Here and there, women said it really was too much for their spirits to go to church, and they staid away; and the boys and girls took the opportunity to go spying upon the rabbits. It was such boys and girls that gave news of Mr. Finch during the week. Every morning, he was so busy over his books in his study, that it was no easy matter to get a sight of him; and every fine afternoon he went quietly, by a bye-path, to a certain spot on the moor, where an ostler from the Cross Keys at O—— was awaiting him with the horse on which he took long rides over the hills. Mr. Finch was taking care of his health.