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 95_s._ 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 the 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 are 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 He 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.