MR. YORKE (_continued_).
A Yorkshire gentleman he was, _par excellence_, in every point; about
fifty-five years old, but looking at first sight still older, for his
hair was silver white. His forehead was broad, not high; his face fresh
and hale; the harshness of the north was seen in his features, as it was
heard in his voice; every trait was thoroughly English--not a Norman
line anywhere; it was an inelegant, unclassic, unaristocratic mould of
visage. Fine people would perhaps have called it vulgar; sensible people
would have termed it characteristic; shrewd people would have delighted
in it for the pith, sagacity, intelligence, the rude yet real
originality marked in every lineament, latent in every furrow. But it
was an indocile, a scornful, and a sarcastic face--the face of a man
difficult to lead, and impossible to drive. His stature was rather tall,
and he was well made and wiry, and had a stately integrity of port;
there was not a suspicion of the clown about him anywhere.
I did not find it easy to sketch Mr. Yorke's person, but it is more
difficult to indicate his mind. If you expect to be treated to a
Perfection, reader, or even to a benevolent, philanthropic old gentleman
in him, you are mistaken. He has spoken with some sense and with some
good feeling to Mr. Moore, but you are not thence to conclude that he
always spoke and thought justly and kindly.
Mr. Yorke, in the first place, was without the organ of veneration--a
great want, and which throws a man wrong on every point where veneration
is required. Secondly, he was without the organ of comparison--a
deficiency which strips a man of sympathy; and thirdly, he had too
little of the organs of benevolence and ideality, which took the glory
and softness from his nature, and for him diminished those divine
qualities throughout the universe.
The want of veneration made him intolerant to those above him--kings and
nobles and priests, dynasties and parliaments and establishments, with
all their doings, most of their enactments, their forms, their rights,
their claims, were to him an abomination, all rubbish; he found no use
or pleasure in them, and believed it would be clear gain, and no damage
to the world, if its high places were razed, and their occupants crushed
in the fall. The want of veneration, too, made him dead at heart to the
electric delight of admiring what is admirable; it dried up a thousand
pure sources of enjoyment; it withered a thousand vivid pleasures. He
was not irreligious, though a member of no sect; but his religion could
not be that of one who knows how to venerate. He believed in God and
heaven; but his God and heaven were those of a man in whom awe,
imagination, and tenderness lack.
The weakness of his powers of comparison made him inconsistent; while he
professed some excellent general doctrines of mutual toleration and
forbearance, he cherished towards certain classes a bigoted antipathy.
He spoke of "parsons" and all who belonged to parsons, of "lords" and
the appendages of lords, with a harshness, sometimes an insolence, as
unjust as it was insufferable. He could not place himself in the
position of those he vituperated; he could not compare their errors with
their temptations, their defects with their disadvantages; he could not
realize the effect of such and such circumstances on himself similarly
situated, and he would often express the most ferocious and tyrannical
wishes regarding those who had acted, as he thought, ferociously and
tyrannically. To judge by his threats, he would have employed arbitrary,
even cruel, means to advance the cause of freedom and equality.
Equality! yes, Mr. Yorke talked about equality, but at heart he was a
proud man--very friendly to his workpeople, very good to all who were
beneath him, and submitted quietly to be beneath him, but haughty as
Beelzebub to whomsoever the world deemed (for he deemed no man) his
superior. Revolt was in his blood: he could not bear control; his
father, his grandfather before him, could not bear it, and his children
after him never could.
The want of general benevolence made him very impatient of imbecility,
and of all faults which grated on his strong, shrewd nature; it left no
check to his cutting sarcasm. As he was not merciful, he would sometimes
wound and wound again, without noticing how much he hurt, or caring how
deep he thrust.
As to the paucity of ideality in his mind, that can scarcely be called a
fault: a fine ear for music, a correct eye for colour and form, left him
the quality of taste; and who cares for imagination? Who does not think
it a rather dangerous, senseless attribute, akin to weakness, perhaps
partaking of frenzy--a disease rather than a gift of the mind?
Probably all think it so but those who possess, or fancy they possess,
it. To hear them speak, you would believe that their hearts would be
cold if that elixir did not flow about them, that their eyes would be
dim if that flame did not refine their vision, that they would be lonely
if this strange companion abandoned them. You would suppose that it
imparted some glad hope to spring, some fine charm to summer, some
tranquil joy to autumn, some consolation to winter, which you do not
feel. An illusion, of course; but the fanatics cling to their dream, and
would not give it for gold.
As Mr. Yorke did not possess poetic imagination himself, he considered
it a most superfluous quality in others. Painters and musicians he could
tolerate, and even encourage, because he could relish the results of
their art; he could see the charm of a fine picture, and feel the
pleasure of good music; but a quiet poet--whatever force struggled,
whatever fire glowed, in his breast--if he could not have played the man
in the counting-house, of the tradesman in the Piece Hall, might have
lived despised, and died scorned, under the eyes of Hiram Yorke.
And as there are many Hiram Yorkes in the world, it is well that the
true poet, quiet externally though he may be, has often a truculent
spirit under his placidity, and is full of shrewdness in his meekness,
and can measure the whole stature of those who look down on him, and
correctly ascertain the weight and value of the pursuits they disdain
him for not having followed. It is happy that he can have his own bliss,
his own society with his great friend and goddess Nature, quite
independent of those who find little pleasure in him, and in whom he
finds no pleasure at all. It is just that while the world and
circumstances often turn a dark, cold side to him--and properly, too,
because he first turns a dark, cold, careless side to them--he should be
able to maintain a festal brightness and cherishing glow in his bosom,
which makes all bright and genial for him; while strangers, perhaps,
deem his existence a Polar winter never gladdened by a sun. The true
poet is not one whit to be pitied, and he is apt to laugh in his sleeve
when any misguided sympathizer whines over his wrongs. Even when
utilitarians sit in judgment on him, and pronounce him and his art
useless, he hears the sentence with such a hard derision, such a broad,
deep, comprehensive, and merciless contempt of the unhappy Pharisees who
pronounce it, that he is rather to be chidden than condoled with. These,
however, are not Mr. Yorke's reflections, and it is with Mr. Yorke we
have at present to do.
I have told you some of his faults, reader: as to his good points, he
was one of the most honourable and capable men in Yorkshire; even those
who disliked him were forced to respect him. He was much beloved by the
poor, because he was thoroughly kind and very fatherly to them. To his
workmen he was considerate and cordial. When he dismissed them from an
occupation, he would try to set them on to something else, or, if that
was impossible, help them to remove with their families to a district
where work might possibly be had. It must also be remarked that if, as
sometimes chanced, any individual amongst his "hands" showed signs of
insubordination, Yorke--who, like many who abhor being controlled, knew
how to control with vigour--had the secret of crushing rebellion in the
germ, of eradicating it like a bad weed, so that it never spread or
developed within the sphere of his authority. Such being the happy state
of his own affairs, he felt himself at liberty to speak with the utmost
severity of those who were differently situated, to ascribe whatever was
unpleasant in their position entirely to their own fault, to sever
himself from the masters, and advocate freely the cause of the
operatives.
Mr. Yorke's family was the first and oldest in the district; and he,
though not the wealthiest, was one of the most influential men. His
education had been good. In his youth, before the French Revolution, he
had travelled on the Continent. He was an adept in the French and
Italian languages. During a two years' sojourn in Italy he had collected
many good paintings and tasteful rarities, with which his residence was
now adorned. His manners, when he liked, were those of a finished
gentleman of the old school; his conversation, when he was disposed to
please, was singularly interesting and original; and if he usually
expressed himself in the Yorkshire dialect, it was because he chose to
do so, preferring his native Doric to a more refined vocabulary, "A
Yorkshire burr," he affirmed, "was as much better than a cockney's lisp
as a bull's bellow than a raton's squeak."
Mr. Yorke knew every one, and was known by every one, for miles round;
yet his intimate acquaintances were very few. Himself thoroughly
original, he had no taste for what was ordinary: a racy, rough
character, high or low, ever found acceptance with him; a refined,
insipid personage, however exalted in station, was his aversion. He
would spend an hour any time in talking freely with a shrewd workman of
his own, or with some queer, sagacious old woman amongst his cottagers,
when he would have grudged a moment to a commonplace fine gentleman or
to the most fashionable and elegant, if frivolous, lady. His preferences
on these points he carried to an extreme, forgetting that there may be
amiable and even admirable characters amongst those who cannot be
original. Yet he made exceptions to his own rule. There was a certain
order of mind, plain, ingenuous, neglecting refinement, almost devoid of
intellectuality, and quite incapable of appreciating what was
intellectual in him, but which, at the same time, never felt disgust at
his rudeness, was not easily wounded by his sarcasm, did not closely
analyze his sayings, doings, or opinions, with which he was peculiarly
at ease, and, consequently, which he peculiarly preferred. He was lord
amongst such characters. They, while submitting implicitly to his
influence, never acknowledged, because they never reflected on, his
superiority; they were quite tractable, therefore, without running the
smallest danger of being servile; and their unthinking, easy, artless
insensibility was as acceptable, because as convenient, to Mr. Yorke as
that of the chair he sat on, or of the floor he trod.
It will have been observed that he was not quite uncordial with Mr.
Moore. He had two or three reasons for entertaining a faint partiality
to that gentleman. It may sound odd, but the first of these was that
Moore spoke English with a foreign, and French with a perfectly pure,
accent; and that his dark, thin face, with its fine though rather wasted
lines, had a most anti-British and anti-Yorkshire look. These points
seem frivolous, unlikely to influence a character like Yorke's; but the
fact is they recalled old, perhaps pleasurable, associations--they
brought back his travelling, his youthful days. He had seen, amidst
Italian cities and scenes, faces like Moore's; he had heard, in Parisian
cafés and theatres, voices like his. He was young then, and when he
looked at and listened to the alien, he seemed young again.
Secondly, he had known Moore's father, and had had dealings with him.
That was a more substantial, though by no means a more agreeable tie;
for as his firm had been connected with Moore's in business, it had
also, in some measure, been implicated in its losses.
Thirdly, he had found Robert himself a sharp man of business. He saw
reason to anticipate that he would, in the end, by one means or another,
make money; and he respected both his resolution and acuteness--perhaps,
also, his hardness. A fourth circumstance which drew them together was
that of Mr. Yorke being one of the guardians of the minor on whose
estate Hollow's Mill was situated; consequently Moore, in the course of
his alterations and improvements, had frequent occasion to consult him.
As to the other guest now present in Mr. Yorke's parlour, Mr. Helstone,
between him and his host there existed a double antipathy--the antipathy
of nature and that of circumstances. The free-thinker hated the
formalist; the lover of liberty detested the disciplinarian. Besides, it
was said that in former years they had been rival suitors of the same
lady.
Mr. Yorke, as a general rule, was, when young, noted for his preference
of sprightly and dashing women: a showy shape and air, a lively wit, a
ready tongue, chiefly seemed to attract him. He never, however, proposed
to any of these brilliant belles whose society he sought; and all at
once he seriously fell in love with and eagerly wooed a girl who
presented a complete contrast to those he had hitherto noticed--a girl
with the face of a Madonna; a girl of living marble--stillness
personified. No matter that, when he spoke to her, she only answered him
in monosyllables; no matter that his sighs seemed unheard, that his
glances were unreturned, that she never responded to his opinions,
rarely smiled at his jests, paid him no respect and no attention; no
matter that she seemed the opposite of everything feminine he had ever
in his whole life been known to admire. For him Mary Cave was perfect,
because somehow, for some reason--no doubt he had a reason--he loved
her.
Mr. Helstone, at that time curate of Briarfield, loved Mary too--or, at
any rate, he fancied her. Several others admired her, for she was
beautiful as a monumental angel; but the clergyman was preferred for his
office's sake--that office probably investing him with some of the
illusion necessary to allure to the commission of matrimony, and which
Miss Cave did not find in any of the young wool-staplers, her other
adorers. Mr. Helstone neither had, nor professed to have, Mr. Yorke's
absorbing passion for her. He had none of the humble reverence which
seemed to subdue most of her suitors; he saw her more as she really was
than the rest did. He was, consequently, more master of her and himself.
She accepted him at the first offer, and they were married.
Nature never intended Mr. Helstone to make a very good husband,
especially to a quiet wife. He thought so long as a woman was silent
nothing ailed her, and she wanted nothing. If she did not complain of
solitude, solitude, however continued, could not be irksome to her. If
she did not talk and put herself forward, express a partiality for this,
an aversion to that, she had no partialities or aversions, and it was
useless to consult her tastes. He made no pretence of comprehending
women, or comparing them with men. They were a different, probably a
very inferior, order of existence. A wife could not be her husband's
companion, much less his confidante, much less his stay. _His_ wife,
after a year or two, was of no great importance to him in any shape; and
when she one day, as he thought, suddenly--for he had scarcely noticed
her decline--but, as others thought, gradually, took her leave of him
and of life, and there was only a still, beautiful-featured mould of
clay left, cold and white, in the conjugal couch, he felt his
bereavement--who shall say how little? Yet, perhaps, more than he seemed
to feel it; for he was not a man from whom grief easily wrung tears.
His dry-eyed and sober mourning scandalized an old housekeeper, and
likewise a female attendant, who had waited upon Mrs. Helstone in her
sickness, and who, perhaps, had had opportunities of learning more of
the deceased lady's nature, of her capacity for feeling and loving, than
her husband knew. They gossiped together over the corpse, related
anecdotes, with embellishments of her lingering decline, and its real or
supposed cause. In short, they worked each other up to some indignation
against the austere little man, who sat examining papers in an adjoining
room, unconscious of what opprobrium he was the object.
Mrs. Helstone was hardly under the sod when rumours began to be rife in
the neighbourhood that she had died of a broken heart. These magnified
quickly into reports of hard usage, and, finally, details of harsh
treatment on the part of her husband--reports grossly untrue, but not
the less eagerly received on that account. Mr. Yorke heard them, partly
believed them. Already, of course, he had no friendly feeling to his
successful rival. Though himself a married man now, and united to a
woman who seemed a complete contrast to Mary Cave in all respects, he
could not forget the great disappointment of his life; and when he heard
that what would have been so precious to him had been neglected, perhaps
abused, by another, he conceived for that other a rooted and bitter
animosity.
Of the nature and strength of this animosity Mr. Helstone was but half
aware. He neither knew how much Yorke had loved Mary Cave, what he had
felt on losing her, nor was he conscious of the calumnies concerning his
treatment of her, familiar to every ear in the neighbourhood but his
own. He believed political and religious differences alone separated him
and Mr. Yorke. Had he known how the case really stood, he would hardly
have been induced by any persuasion to cross his former rival's
threshold.
* * * * *
Mr. Yorke did not resume his lecture of Robert Moore. The conversation
ere long recommenced in a more general form, though still in a somewhat
disputative tone. The unquiet state of the country, the various
depredations lately committed on mill-property in the district, supplied
abundant matter for disagreement, especially as each of the three
gentlemen present differed more or less in his views on these subjects.
Mr. Helstone thought the masters aggrieved, the workpeople unreasonable;
he condemned sweepingly the widespread spirit of disaffection against
constituted authorities, the growing indisposition to bear with patience
evils he regarded as inevitable. The cures he prescribed were vigorous
government interference, strict magisterial vigilance; when necessary,
prompt military coercion.
Mr. Yorke wished to know whether this interference, vigilance, and
coercion would feed those who were hungry, give work to those who wanted
work, and whom no man would hire. He scouted the idea of inevitable
evils. He said public patience was a camel, on whose back the last atom
that could be borne had already been laid, and that resistance was now a
duty; the widespread spirit of disaffection against constituted
authorities he regarded as the most promising sign of the times; the
masters, he allowed, were truly aggrieved, but their main grievances had
been heaped on them by a "corrupt, base, and bloody" government (these
were Mr. Yorke's epithets). Madmen like Pitt, demons like Castlereagh,
mischievous idiots like Perceval, were the tyrants, the curses of the
country, the destroyers of her trade. It was their infatuated
perseverance in an unjustifiable, a hopeless, a ruinous war, which had
brought the nation to its present pass. It was their monstrously
oppressive taxation, it was the infamous "Orders in Council"--the
originators of which deserved impeachment and the scaffold, if ever
public men did--that hung a millstone about England's neck.
"But where was the use of talking?" he demanded. "What chance was there
of reason being heard in a land that was king-ridden, priest-ridden,
peer-ridden; where a lunatic was the nominal monarch, an unprincipled
debauchee the real ruler; where such an insult to common sense as
hereditary legislators was tolerated; where such a humbug as a bench of
bishops, such an arrogant abuse as a pampered, persecuting established
church was endured and venerated; where a standing army was maintained,
and a host of lazy parsons and their pauper families were kept on the
fat of the land?"
Mr. Helstone, rising up and putting on his shovel-hat, observed in
reply, "that in the course of his life he had met with two or three
instances where sentiments of this sort had been very bravely maintained
so long as health, strength, and worldly prosperity had been the allies
of him who professed them; but there came a time," he said, "to all men,
'when the keepers of the house should tremble; when they should be
afraid of that which is high, and fear should be in the way;' and that
time was the test of the advocate of anarchy and rebellion, the enemy of
religion and order. Ere now," he affirmed, "he had been called upon to
read those prayers our church has provided for the sick by the miserable
dying-bed of one of her most rancorous foes; he had seen such a one
stricken with remorse, solicitous to discover a place for repentance,
and unable to find any, though he sought it carefully with tears. He
must forewarn Mr. Yorke that blasphemy against God and the king was a
deadly sin, and that there was such a thing as 'judgment to come.'"
Mr. Yorke "believed fully that there was such a thing as judgment to
come. If it were otherwise, it would be difficult to imagine how all the
scoundrels who seemed triumphant in this world, who broke innocent
hearts with impunity, abused unmerited privileges, were a scandal to
honourable callings, took the bread out of the mouths of the poor,
browbeat the humble, and truckled meanly to the rich and proud, were to
be properly paid off in such coin as they had earned. But," he added,
"whenever he got low-spirited about such-like goings-on, and their
seeming success in this mucky lump of a planet, he just reached down t'
owd book" (pointing to a great Bible in the bookcase), "opened it like
at a chance, and he was sure to light of a verse blazing wi' a blue
brimstone low that set all straight. He knew," he said, "where some folk
war bound for, just as weel as if an angel wi' great white wings had
come in ower t' door-stone and told him."
"Sir," said Mr. Helstone, collecting all his dignity--"sir, the great
knowledge of man is to know himself, and the bourne whither his own
steps tend."
"Ay, ay. You'll recollect, Mr. Helstone, that Ignorance was carried away
from the very gates of heaven, borne through the air, and thrust in at a
door in the side of the hill which led down to hell."
"Nor have I forgotten, Mr. Yorke, that Vain-Confidence, not seeing the
way before him, fell into a deep pit, which was on purpose there made by
the prince of the grounds, to catch vainglorious fools withal, and was
dashed to pieces with his fall."
"Now," interposed Mr. Moore, who had hitherto sat a silent but amused
spectator of this worldly combat, and whose indifference to the party
politics of the day, as well as to the gossip of the neighbourhood, made
him an impartial, if apathetic, judge of the merits of such an
encounter, "you have both sufficiently blackballed each other, and
proved how cordially you detest each other, and how wicked you think
each other. For my part, my hate is still running in such a strong
current against the fellows who have broken my frames that I have none
to spare for my private acquaintance, and still less for such a vague
thing as a sect or a government. But really, gentlemen, you both seem
very bad by your own showing--worse than ever I suspected you to be.--I
dare not stay all night with a rebel and blasphemer like you, Yorke; and
I hardly dare ride home with a cruel and tyrannical ecclesiastic like
Mr. Helstone."
"I am going, however, Mr. Moore," said the rector sternly. "Come with me
or not, as you please."
"Nay, he shall not have the choice; he _shall_ go with you," responded
Yorke. "It's midnight, and past; and I'll have nob'dy staying up i' my
house any longer. Ye mun all go."
He rang the bell.
"Deb," said he to the servant who answered it, "clear them folk out o'
t' kitchen, and lock t' doors, and be off to bed.--Here is your way,
gentlemen," he continued to his guests; and, lighting them through the
passage, he fairly put them out at his front door.
They met their party hurrying out pell-mell by the back way. Their
horses stood at the gate; they mounted, and rode off, Moore laughing at
their abrupt dismissal, Helstone deeply indignant thereat.