A WEDDING MORNING
In one particular at least the Bow Street runner was right. The
Government which ruled England in that year, 1819, was made up of brave
men; whether they were wise men or great men, or far-seeing men, is
another question. The peace which followed Waterloo had been welcomed
with enthusiasm. Men supposed that it would put an end to the enormous
taxation and the strain which the nation had borne so gallantly during
twenty years of war. The goddess of prosperity, with her wings of
silver and her feathers of gold, was to bless a people which had long
known only paper money. In a twinkling every trade was to flourish,
every class to be more comfortable, every man to have work and wage,
plenty and no taxes.
Instead, there ensued a period of want and misery almost without a
parallel. During the war the country had been self-supporting, wheat
had risen, land suitable and unsuitable had been enclosed and tilled.
Bread had been dear but work had been plentiful. Now, at the prospect
of open ports, wheat fell, land was left derelict, farmers were ruined,
labourers in thousands went on the rates. Nor among the whirling looms
of Lancashire or the furnaces of Staffordshire were things better.
Government orders ceased with the war, while the exhausted Continent
was too poor to buy. Here also thousands were cast out of work.
The cause of the country’s misfortunes might be this or that. Whatever
it was, the working classes suffered greater hardships than at any time
during the war; and finding no anxiety to sympathise in a Parliament
which represented their betters, began to form—ominous sign—clubs, and
clubs within clubs, and to seek redress by unlawful means. An open
rising broke out in the Fen country, and there was fighting at
Littleport and Ely. There were riots at Spa Fields in London, where
murder was committed; and there were riots again, which almost amounted
to a rebellion, in Derbyshire. At Stock-port and in Birmingham immense
mob meetings took place. In the northern counties the sky was reddened
night after night by incendiary fires. In the Midlands looms were
broken and furnaces extinguished. In Lancashire and Yorkshire the air
was sullen with strikes and secret plottings, and spies, and cold and
famine.
In the year 1819 things came to a kind of head. There was a meeting at
Manchester in August. It was such a meeting as had never been seen in
England. There were sixty thousand at it, there were eighty thousand,
there were ninety thousand—some said one, some said the other. It was
so large, at any rate, that it was difficult to say that it was not
dangerous; and beyond doubt many there would have snatched at the least
chance of rapine. Be that as it may, the magistrates, in the face of so
great a concourse, lost their heads. They ordered a small force of
yeomanry to disperse the gathering. The yeomanry became entangled—a
second charge was needful: the multitude fled every way. In ten minutes
the ground was clear; but six lives were lost and seventy persons were
injured.
At once all England was cleft into parties—that which upheld the
charge, and that which condemned it. Feelings which had been confined
to the lower orders spread to the upper; and while from this date the
section which was to pass the Reform Bill took new shape, underground
more desperate enterprises were breeding. Undismayed the people met at
Paisley and at Glasgow, and at each place there were collisions with
the soldiery.
Mr. Bishop had grounds, therefore, for his opinion of the Government of
which he shared the favour with the yeomanry—their country’s bulwark
and its pride. But it is a far cry to Windermere, and no offset from
the storm which was convulsing Lancashire stirred the face of the lake
when Henrietta opened her window next morning and looked out on the day
which was to change all for her. The air was still, the water grey and
smooth, no gleam of sun showed. Yet the general aspect was mild; and
would have been cheerful, if the more distant prospect which for the
first time broke upon Henrietta’s eyes had not raised it and her
thoughts to the sublime. Beyond the water, above the green slopes and
wooded knobs which fringed the lake, rose, ridge behind ridge, a wall
of mountains. It stretched from the Peak of Coniston on the left, by
the long snow-flecked screes of Bow Fell, to the icy points of the
Langdales on the right—a new world, remote, clear, beautiful, and
still: so still, so remote, that it seemed to preach a sermon—to calm
the hurry of her morning thoughts, and the tumult of youth within her.
She stood awhile in awe. But her hair was about her shoulders, she was
only half-dressed; and by-and-by, when her first surprise waned, she
bethought herself that _he_ might be below, and she drew back from the
window with a blush. What more likely, what more loverlike, than that
he should be below? Waiting—on this morning which was to crown his
hopes—for the first sight of her face, the first opening of her
lattice, the gleam of her white arm on the sill? Had it been summer,
and had the rose-tree which framed the window been in bloom, what joy
to drop with trembling fingers a bud to him, and to know that he would
treasure it all his life—her last maiden gift! And he? Surely he would
have sent her an armful to await her rising, that as she dressed she
might plunge her face into their perfume, and silently plighting her
troth to him, renew the pure resolves which she had made in the night
hours!
But when she peeped out shyly, telling herself that she was foolish to
blush, and that the time for blushing was past, she failed to discover
him. There was a girl—handsome after a dark fashion—seated on a low
wall on the farther side of the road; and a group of four or five men
were standing in front of the inn door, talking in excited tones.
Conceivably he might be one of the men, for she could hear them better
than she could see them—the door being a good deal to one side. But
when she had cautiously opened her window and put out her head—her hair
by this time being dressed—he was not among them.
She was drawing in her head, uncertain whether to pout or not, when her
eyes met those of the young woman on the wall; and the latter smiled.
Possibly she had noted the direction of Henrietta’s glance, and drawn
her inference. At any rate, her smile was so marked and so malicious
that Henrietta felt her cheek grow hot, and lost no time in drawing
back and closing the window.
“What a horrid girl!” she exclaimed.
Still, after the first flush of annoyance, she would have thought no
more of it—would indeed have laughed at herself for her fancy—if Mrs.
Gilson’s strident voice had not at that moment brought the girl to her
feet.
“Bess! Bess Hinkson!” the landlady cried, apparently from the doorway.
“Hast come with the milk? Then come right in and let me have it? What
are you gaping at there, you gaby? What has’t to do with thee? I do
think”—with venom—“the world is full of fools!”
The girl with a sullen air took up a milk-pail that stood beside her;
she wore the short linsey petticoat of the rustic of that day, and a
homespun bodice. Her hair, brilliantly black, and as thick as a horse’s
mane, was covered only by a handkerchief knotted under her chin.
“Bess Hinkson? What a horrid name!” Henrietta muttered as she watched
her cross the road. She did not dream that she would ever see the girl
again: the more as the men’s voices—she was nearly ready to
descend—fixed her attention next. She caught a word, then listened.
“The devil’s in it if he’s not gone Whitehaven way!” one said. “That’s
how he’s gone! Through Carlisle, say you? Not he!”
“But without a horse? He’d no horse.”
“And what if he’d not?” the first speaker retorted, with the impatience
of superior intellect. “It’s Tuesday, the day of the Man packet-boat,
and he’d be away in her.”
“But the packet don’t leave Whitehaven till noon,” a third struck in.
“And they’ll be there and nab him before that. S’help me, he has not
gone Whitehaven way!”
“Maybe he’d take a boat?”
“He’d lack the time”—with scorn.
“He’s took a boat here,” another maintained. “That’s what he has done.
He’s took a boat here and gone down in the dark to Newby Bridge.”
“But there’s not a boat gone!” another speaker retorted in triumph.
“What do you say to that?”
So far Henrietta’s ear followed the argument; but her mind lagged at
the point where the matter touched her.
“The Man packet-boat?” she thought, as she tied the last ribbon at her
neck and looked sideways at her appearance in the squat, filmy mirror.
“That must be the boat to the Isle of Man. It leaves Whitehaven the
same day as the Scotch boat, then. Perhaps there is but one, and it
goes on to the Isle of Man. And I shall go by it. And then—and then——”
A knock at the door severed the thread, and drove the unwonted languor
from her eyes. She cast a last look at her reflection in the glass, and
turned herself about that she might review her back-hair. Then she
swept the table with her eye, and began to stuff this and that into her
bandbox. The knock was repeated.
“I am coming,” she cried. She cast one very last look round the room,
and, certain that she had left nothing, took up her bonnet and a shawl
which she had used for a wrap over her riding-dress. She crossed the
room towards the door. As she raised her hand to the latch, a smile
lurked in the dimples of her cheeks. There was a gleam of fun in her
eyes; the lighter side of her was uppermost again.
It was not her lover, however, who stood waiting outside, but Modest
Ann—she went commonly by that name—the waiting-maid of the inn, who was
said to mould herself on her mistress and to be only a trifle less
formidable when roused. The two were something alike, for the maid was
buxom and florid; and fame told of battles between them whence no
ordinary woman, no ordinary tongue, no mortal save Mrs. Gilson, could
have issued victorious. Fame had it also that Modest Ann remained after
her defeat only by reason of an attachment, held by most to be
hopeless, to the head ostler. And for certain, severe as she was, she
permitted some liberty of speech on the subject.
Henrietta, however, did not know that here was another slave of love;
and her face fell.
“Is Mr. Stewart waiting?” she asked.
“No, miss,” the woman answered, civilly enough, but staring as if she
could never see enough of her. “But Mrs. Gilson will be glad if you’ll
speak to her.”
Henrietta raised her eyebrows. It was on the tip of her tongue to
answer, “Then let her come to me!” But she remembered that these people
did not know who she was—knew indeed nothing of her. And she answered
instead: “I will come. Where is she?”
“This way, miss. I’ll show you the way.”
Henrietta wondered, as the woman conducted her along several low-ceiled
passages, and up and down odd stairs, and past windows which disclosed
the hill rising immediately at the back of the house, what the landlady
wanted.
“She is an odious woman!” she thought, with impatience. “How horrid she
was to me last night! If ever there was a bully, she is one! And this
creature looks not much better!”
Modest Ann, turning her head at the moment, belied the ill opinion by
pointing out a step in a dark corner.
“There is a stair here, miss,” she said. “Take care.”
“Thank you,” Henrietta answered in her clear, girlish voice. “Is Mr.
Stewart with Mrs.—— What’s her name?”
“Mrs. Gilson? No, miss.”
And pausing, the woman opened a door, and made way for Henrietta to
enter.
At that instant—and strange to say, not before—a dreadful suspicion
leapt up in the girl’s brain. What if her brother had followed her, and
was there? Or worse still, Captain Clyne? What if she were summoned to
be confronted with them and to be taken home in shameful durance, after
the fashion of a naughty child that had behaved badly and was in
disgrace? The fire sprang to her eyes, her cheeks burnt. It was too
late to retreat; but her pretty head went up in the air, and her look
as she entered spoke flat rebellion. She swept the room with a glance
of flame.
However, there was no one to be burned up: no brother, no slighted,
abandoned suitor. In the room, a good-sized, pleasant room, looking on
the lake, were only Mrs. Gilson, who stood beside the table, which was
laid for breakfast, and a strange man. The man was gazing from the
window, but he turned abruptly, disclosing a red waistcoat, as her eye
fell on him. She looked from one to the other in great surprise, in
growing surprise. What did the man there?
“Where is Mr. Stewart?” she asked, her frigid tone expressing her
feelings. “Is he not here?”
Mrs. Gilson seemed about to answer, but the man forestalled her.
“No, miss,” he said, “he is not.”
“Where is he?”
She asked the question with undisguised sharpness.
Mr. Bishop nodded like a man well pleased.
“That is the point, miss,” he answered—“precisely. Where is he?”