THE SCHOOLBOY AND THE WOOD-NYMPH.
Briarmains being nearer than the Hollow, Mr. Yorke had conveyed his
young comrade there. He had seen him laid in the best bed of the house,
as carefully as if he had been one of his own sons. The sight of his
blood, welling from the treacherously inflicted wound, made him indeed
the son of the Yorkshire gentleman's heart. The spectacle of the sudden
event, of the tall, straight shape prostrated in its pride across the
road, of the fine southern head laid low in the dust, of that youth in
prime flung at once before him pallid, lifeless, helpless--this was the
very combination of circumstances to win for the victim Mr. Yorke's
liveliest interest.
No other hand was there to raise--to aid, no other voice to question
kindly, no other brain to concert measures; he had to do it all himself.
This utter dependence of the speechless, bleeding youth (as a youth he
regarded him) on his benevolence secured that benevolence most
effectually. Well did Mr. Yorke like to have power, and to use it. He
had now between his hands power over a fellow-creature's life. It suited
him.
No less perfectly did it suit his saturnine better half. The incident
was quite in her way and to her taste. Some women would have been
terror-struck to see a gory man brought in over their threshold, and
laid down in their hall in the "howe of the night." There, you would
suppose, was subject-matter for hysterics. No. Mrs. Yorke went into
hysterics when Jessie would not leave the garden to come to her
knitting, or when Martin proposed starting for Australia, with a view to
realize freedom and escape the tyranny of Matthew; but an attempted
murder near her door--a half-murdered man in her best bed--set her
straight, cheered her spirits, gave her cap the dash of a turban.
Mrs. Yorke was just the woman who, while rendering miserable the
drudging life of a simple maid-servant, would nurse like a heroine a
hospital full of plague patients. She almost loved Moore. Her tough
heart almost yearned towards him when she found him committed to her
charge--left in her arms, as dependent on her as her youngest-born in
the cradle. Had she seen a domestic or one of her daughters give him a
draught of water or smooth his pillow, she would have boxed the
intruder's ears. She chased Jessie and Rose from the upper realm of the
house; she forbade the housemaids to set their foot in it.
Now, if the accident had happened at the rectory gates, and old Helstone
had taken in the martyr, neither Yorke nor his wife would have pitied
him. They would have adjudged him right served for his tyranny and
meddling. As it was, he became, for the present, the apple of their eye.
Strange! Louis Moore was permitted to come--to sit down on the edge of
the bed and lean over the pillow; to hold his brother's hand, and press
his pale forehead with his fraternal lips; and Mrs. Yorke bore it well.
She suffered him to stay half the day there; she once suffered him to
sit up all night in the chamber; she rose herself at five o'clock of a
wet November morning, and with her own hands lit the kitchen fire, and
made the brothers a breakfast, and served it to them herself.
Majestically arrayed in a boundless flannel wrapper, a shawl, and her
nightcap, she sat and watched them eat, as complacently as a hen beholds
her chickens feed. Yet she gave the cook warning that day for venturing
to make and carry up to Mr. Moore a basin of sago-gruel; and the
housemaid lost her favour because, when Mr. Louis was departing, she
brought him his surtout aired from the kitchen, and, like a "forward
piece" as she was, helped him on with it, and accepted in return a
smile, a "Thank you, my girl," and a shilling. Two ladies called one
day, pale and anxious, and begged earnestly, humbly, to be allowed to
see Mr. Moore one instant. Mrs. Yorke hardened her heart, and sent them
packing--not without opprobrium.
But how was it when Hortense Moore came? Not so bad as might have been
expected. The whole family of the Moores really seemed to suit Mrs.
Yorke so as no other family had ever suited her. Hortense and she
possessed an exhaustless mutual theme of conversation in the corrupt
propensities of servants. Their views of this class were similar; they
watched them with the same suspicion, and judged them with the same
severity. Hortense, too, from the very first showed no manner of
jealousy of Mrs. Yorke's attentions to Robert--she let her keep the post
of nurse with little interference; and, for herself, found ceaseless
occupation in fidgeting about the house, holding the kitchen under
surveillance, reporting what passed there, and, in short, making herself
generally useful. Visitors they both of them agreed in excluding
sedulously from the sickroom. They held the young mill-owner captive,
and hardly let the air breathe or the sun shine on him.
Mr. MacTurk, the surgeon to whom Moore's case had been committed,
pronounced his wound of a dangerous, but, he trusted, not of a hopeless
character. At first he wished to place with him a nurse of his own
selection; but this neither Mrs. Yorke nor Hortense would hear of. They
promised faithful observance of directions. He was left, therefore, for
the present in their hands.
Doubtless they executed the trust to the best of their ability; but
something got wrong. The bandages were displaced or tampered with; great
loss of blood followed. MacTurk, being summoned, came with steed afoam.
He was one of those surgeons whom it is dangerous to vex--abrupt in his
best moods, in his worst savage. On seeing Moore's state he relieved his
feelings by a little flowery language, with which it is not necessary to
strew the present page. A bouquet or two of the choicest blossoms fell
on the unperturbed head of one Mr. Graves, a stony young assistant he
usually carried about with him; with a second nosegay he gifted another
young gentleman in his train--an interesting fac-simile of himself,
being indeed his own son; but the full _corbeille_ of blushing bloom
fell to the lot of meddling womankind, _en masse_.
For the best part of one winter night himself and satellites were busied
about Moore. There at his bedside, shut up alone with him in his
chamber, they wrought and wrangled over his exhausted frame. They three
were on one side of the bed, and Death on the other. The conflict was
sharp; it lasted till day broke, when the balance between the
belligerents seemed so equal that both parties might have claimed the
victory.
At dawn Graves and young MacTurk were left in charge of the patient,
while the senior went himself in search of additional strength, and
secured it in the person of Mrs. Horsfall, the best nurse on his staff.
To this woman he gave Moore in charge, with the sternest injunctions
respecting the responsibility laid on her shoulders. She took this
responsibility stolidly, as she did also the easy-chair at the bedhead.
That moment she began her reign.
Mrs. Horsfall had one virtue--orders received from MacTurk she obeyed to
the letter. The ten commandments were less binding in her eyes than her
surgeon's dictum. In other respects she was no woman, but a dragon.
Hortense Moore fell effaced before her; Mrs. Yorke withdrew--crushed;
yet both these women were personages of some dignity in their own
estimation, and of some bulk in the estimation of others. Perfectly
cowed by the breadth, the height, the bone, and the brawn of Mrs.
Horsfall, they retreated to the back parlour. She, for her part, sat
upstairs when she liked, and downstairs when she preferred it. She took
her dram three times a day, and her pipe of tobacco four times.
As to Moore, no one now ventured to inquire about him. Mrs. Horsfall had
him at dry-nurse. It was she who was to do for him, and the general
conjecture now ran that she did for him accordingly.
Morning and evening MacTurk came to see him. His case, thus complicated
by a new mischance, was become one of interest in the surgeon's eyes. He
regarded him as a damaged piece of clockwork, which it would be
creditable to his skill to set agoing again. Graves and young
MacTurk--Moore's sole other visitors--contemplated him in the light in
which they were wont to contemplate the occupant for the time being of
the dissecting-room at Stilbro' Infirmary.
Robert Moore had a pleasant time of it--in pain, in danger, too weak to
move, almost too weak to speak, a sort of giantess his keeper, the three
surgeons his sole society. Thus he lay through the diminishing days and
lengthening nights of the whole drear month of November.
In the commencement of his captivity Moore used feebly to resist Mrs.
Horsfall. He hated the sight of her rough bulk, and dreaded the contact
of her hard hands; but she taught him docility in a trice. She made no
account whatever of his six feet, his manly thews and sinews; she turned
him in his bed as another woman would have turned a babe in its cradle.
When he was good she addressed him as "my dear" and "honey," and when he
was bad she sometimes shook him. Did he attempt to speak when MacTurk
was there, she lifted her hand and bade him "Hush!" like a nurse
checking a forward child. If she had not smoked, if she had not taken
gin, it would have been better, he thought; but she did both. Once, in
her absence, he intimated to MacTurk that "that woman was a
dram-drinker."
"Pooh! my dear sir, they are all so," was the reply he got for his
pains. "But Horsfall has this virtue," added the surgeon--"drunk or
sober, she always remembers to obey _me_."
* * * * *
At length the latter autumn passed; its fogs, its rains withdrew from
England their mourning and their tears; its winds swept on to sigh over
lands far away. Behind November came deep winter--clearness, stillness,
frost accompanying.
A calm day had settled into a crystalline evening. The world wore a
North Pole colouring; all its lights and tints looked like the
_reflets_[A] of white, or violet, or pale green gems. The hills wore a
lilac blue; the setting sun had purple in its red; the sky was ice, all
silvered azure; when the stars rose, they were of white crystal, not
gold; gray, or cerulean, or faint emerald hues--cool, pure, and
transparent--tinged the mass of the landscape.
[A] Find me an English word as good, reader, and I will gladly
dispense with the French word. "Reflections" won't do.
What is this by itself in a wood no longer green, no longer even russet,
a wood neutral tint--this dark blue moving object? Why, it is a
schoolboy--a Briarfield grammar-school boy--who has left his companions,
now trudging home by the highroad, and is seeking a certain tree, with a
certain mossy mound at its root, convenient as a seat. Why is he
lingering here? The air is cold and the time wears late. He sits down.
What is he thinking about? Does he feel the chaste charm Nature wears
to-night? A pearl-white moon smiles through the gray trees; does he care
for her smile?
Impossible to say; for he is silent, and his countenance does not speak.
As yet it is no mirror to reflect sensation, but rather a mask to
conceal it. This boy is a stripling of fifteen--slight, and tall of his
years. In his face there is as little of amenity as of servility, his
eye seems prepared to note any incipient attempt to control or overreach
him, and the rest of his features indicate faculties alert for
resistance. Wise ushers avoid unnecessary interference with that lad.
To break him in by severity would be a useless attempt; to win him by
flattery would be an effort worse than useless. He is best let alone.
Time will educate and experience train him.
Professedly Martin Yorke (it is a young Yorke, of course) tramples on
the name of poetry. Talk sentiment to him, and you would be answered by
sarcasm. Here he is, wandering alone, waiting duteously on Nature, while
she unfolds a page of stern, of silent, and of solemn poetry beneath his
attentive gaze.
Being seated, he takes from his satchel a book--not the Latin grammar,
but a contraband volume of fairy tales. There will be light enough yet
for an hour to serve his keen young vision. Besides, the moon waits on
him; her beam, dim and vague as yet, fills the glade where he sits.
He reads. He is led into a solitary mountain region; all round him is
rude and desolate, shapeless, and almost colourless. He hears bells
tinkle on the wind. Forth-riding from the formless folds of the mist
dawns on him the brightest vision--a green-robed lady, on a snow-white
palfrey. He sees her dress, her gems, and her steed. She arrests him
with some mysterious question. He is spell-bound, and must follow her
into fairyland.
A second legend bears him to the sea-shore. There tumbles in a strong
tide, boiling at the base of dizzy cliffs. It rains and blows. A reef of
rocks, black and rough, stretches far into the sea. All along, and
among, and above these crags dash and flash, sweep and leap, swells,
wreaths, drifts of snowy spray. Some lone wanderer is out on these
rocks, treading with cautious step the wet, wild seaweed; glancing down
into hollows where the brine lies fathoms deep and emerald clear, and
seeing there wilder and stranger and huger vegetation than is found on
land, with treasure of shells--some green, some purple, some
pearly--clustered in the curls of the snaky plants. He hears a cry.
Looking up and forward, he sees, at the bleak point of the reef, a tall,
pale thing--shaped like man, but made of spray--transparent, tremulous,
awful. It stands not alone. They are all human figures that wanton in
the rocks--a crowd of foam-women--a band of white, evanescent Nereids.
Hush! Shut the book; hide it in the satchel. Martin hears a tread. He
listens. No--yes. Once more the dead leaves, lightly crushed, rustle on
the wood path. Martin watches; the trees part, and a woman issues
forth.
She is a lady dressed in dark silk, a veil covering her face. Martin
never met a lady in this wood before--nor any female, save, now and
then, a village girl come to gather nuts. To-night the apparition does
not displease him. He observes, as she approaches, that she is neither
old nor plain, but, on the contrary, very youthful; and, but that he now
recognizes her for one whom he has often wilfully pronounced ugly, he
would deem that he discovered traits of beauty behind the thin gauze of
that veil.
She passes him and says nothing. He knew she would. All women are proud
monkeys, and he knows no more conceited doll than that Caroline
Helstone. The thought is hardly hatched in his mind when the lady
retraces those two steps she had got beyond him, and raising her veil,
reposes her glance on his face, while she softly asks, "Are you one of
Mr. Yorke's sons?"
No human evidence would ever have been able to persuade Martin Yorke
that he blushed when thus addressed; yet blush he did, to the ears.
"I am," he said bluntly, and encouraged himself to wonder,
superciliously, what would come next.
"You are Martin, I think?" was the observation that followed.
It could not have been more felicitous. It was a simple sentence--very
artlessly, a little timidly, pronounced; but it chimed in harmony to the
youth's nature. It stilled him like a note of music.
Martin had a keen sense of his personality; he felt it right and
sensible that the girl should discriminate him from his brothers. Like
his father, he hated ceremony. It was acceptable to hear a lady address
him as "Martin," and not Mr. Martin or Master Martin, which form would
have lost her his good graces for ever. Worse, if possible, than
ceremony was the other extreme of slipshod familiarity. The slight tone
of bashfulness, the scarcely perceptible hesitation, was considered
perfectly in place.
"I am Martin," he said.
"Are your father and mother well?" (it was lucky she did not say _papa_
and _mamma_; that would have undone all); "and Rose and Jessie?"
"I suppose so."
"My cousin Hortense is still at Briarmains?"
"Oh yes."
Martin gave a comic half-smile and demi-groan. The half-smile was
responded to by the lady, who could guess in what sort of odour Hortense
was likely to be held by the young Yorkes.
"Does your mother like her?"
"They suit so well about the servants they can't help liking each
other."
"It is cold to-night."
"Why are you out so late?"
"I lost my way in this wood."
Now, indeed, Martin allowed himself a refreshing laugh of scorn.
"Lost your way in the mighty forest of Briarmains! You deserve never
more to find it."
"I never was here before, and I believe I am trespassing now. You might
inform against me if you chose, Martin, and have me fined. It is your
father's wood."
"I should think I knew that. But since you are so simple as to lose your
way, I will guide you out."
"You need not. I have got into the track now. I shall be right. Martin"
(a little quickly), "how is Mr. Moore?"
Martin had heard certain rumours; it struck him that it might be amusing
to make an experiment.
"Going to die. Nothing can save him. All hope flung overboard!"
She put her veil aside. She looked into his eyes, and said, "To die!"
"To die. All along of the women, my mother and the rest. They did
something about his bandages that finished everything. He would have got
better but for them. I am sure they should be arrested, cribbed, tried,
and brought in for Botany Bay, at the very least."
The questioner, perhaps, did nor hear this judgment. She stood
motionless. In two minutes, without another word, she moved forwards; no
good-night, no further inquiry. This was not amusing, nor what Martin
had calculated on. He expected something dramatic and demonstrative. It
was hardly worth while to frighten the girl if she would not entertain
him in return. He called, "Miss Helstone!"
She did not hear or turn. He hastened after and overtook her.
"Come; are you uneasy about what I said?"
"You know nothing about death, Martin; you are too young for me to talk
to concerning such a thing."
"Did you believe me? It's all flummery! Moore eats like three men. They
are always making sago or tapioca or something good for him. I never go
into the kitchen but there is a saucepan on the fire, cooking him some
dainty. I think I will play the old soldier, and be fed on the fat of
the land like him."
"Martin! Martin!" Here her voice trembled, and she stopped.
"It is exceedingly wrong of you, Martin. You have almost killed me."
Again she stopped. She leaned against a tree, trembling, shuddering, and
as pale as death.
Martin contemplated her with inexpressible curiosity. In one sense it
was, as he would have expressed it, "nuts" to him to see this. It told
him so much, and he was beginning to have a great relish for discovering
secrets. In another sense it reminded him of what he had once felt when
he had heard a blackbird lamenting for her nestlings, which Matthew had
crushed with a stone, and that was not a pleasant feeling. Unable to
find anything very appropriate to _say_ in order to comfort her, he
began to cast about in his mind what he could _do_. He smiled. The lad's
smile gave wondrous transparency to his physiognomy.
"Eureka!" he cried. "I'll set all straight by-and-by. You are better
now, Miss Caroline. Walk forward," he urged.
Not reflecting that it would be more difficult for Miss Helstone than
for himself to climb a wall or penetrate a hedge, he piloted her by a
short cut which led to no gate. The consequence was he had to help her
over some formidable obstacles, and while he railed at her for
helplessness, he perfectly liked to feel himself of use.
"Martin, before we separate, assure me seriously, and on your word of
honour, that Mr. Moore is better."
"How very much you think of that Moore!"
"No--but--many of his friends may ask me, and I wish to be able to give
an authentic answer."
"You may tell them he is well enough, only idle. You may tell them that
he takes mutton chops for dinner, and the best of arrowroot for supper.
I intercepted a basin myself one night on its way upstairs, and ate half
of it."
"And who waits on him, Martin? who nurses him?"
"Nurses him? The great baby! Why, a woman as round and big as our
largest water-butt--a rough, hard-favoured old girl. I make no doubt
she leads him a rich life. Nobody else is let near him. He is chiefly in
the dark. It is my belief she knocks him about terribly in that chamber.
I listen at the wall sometimes when I am in bed, and I think I hear her
thumping him. You should see her fist. She could hold half a dozen hands
like yours in her one palm. After all, notwithstanding the chops and
jellies he gets, I would not be in his shoes. In fact, it is my private
opinion that she eats most of what goes up on the tray to Mr. Moore. I
wish she may not be starving him."
Profound silence and meditation on Caroline's part, and a sly
watchfulness on Martin's.
"You never see him, I suppose, Martin?"
"I? No. I don't care to see him, for my own part."
Silence again.
"Did not you come to our house once with Mrs. Pryor, about five weeks
since, to ask after him?" again inquired Martin.
"Yes."
"I dare say you wished to be shown upstairs?"
"We _did_ wish it. We entreated it; but your mother declined."
"Ay! she declined. I heard it all. She treated you as it is her pleasure
to treat visitors now and then. She behaved to you rudely and harshly."
"She was not kind; for you know, Martin, we are relations, and it is
natural we should take an interest in Mr. Moore. But here we must part;
we are at your father's gate."
"Very well, what of that? I shall walk home with you."
"They will miss you, and wonder where you are."
"Let them. I can take care of myself, I suppose."
Martin knew that he had already incurred the penalty of a lecture, and
dry bread for his tea. No matter; the evening had furnished him with an
adventure. It was better than muffins and toast.
He walked home with Caroline. On the way he promised to see Mr. Moore,
in spite of the dragon who guarded his chamber, and appointed an hour on
the next day when Caroline was to come to Briarmains Wood and get
tidings of him. He would meet her at a certain tree. The scheme led to
nothing; still he liked it.
Having reached home, the dry bread and the lecture were duly
administered to him, and he was dismissed to bed at an early hour. He
accepted his punishment with the toughest stoicism.
Ere ascending to his chamber he paid a secret visit to the dining-room,
a still, cold, stately apartment, seldom used, for the family
customarily dined in the back parlour. He stood before the mantelpiece,
and lifted his candle to two pictures hung above--female heads: one, a
type of serene beauty, happy and innocent; the other, more lovely, but
forlorn and desperate.
"She looked like _that_," he said, gazing on the latter sketch, "when
she sobbed, turned white, and leaned against the tree."
"I suppose," he pursued, when he was in his room, and seated on the edge
of his pallet-bed--"I suppose she is what they call '_in love_'--yes,
_in love_ with that long thing in the next chamber. Whisht! is that
Horsfall clattering him? I wonder he does not yell out. It really sounds
as if she had fallen on him tooth and nail; but I suppose she is making
the bed. I saw her at it once. She hit into the mattresses as if she was
boxing. It is queer, Zillah (they call her Zillah)--Zillah Horsfall is a
woman, and Caroline Helstone is a woman; they are two individuals of the
same species--not much alike though. Is she a pretty girl, that
Caroline? I suspect she is; very nice to look at--something so clear in
her face, so soft in her eyes. I approve of her looking at me; it does
me good. She has long eyelashes. Their shadow seems to rest where she
gazes, and to instil peace and thought. If she behaves well, and
continues to suit me as she has suited me to-day, I may do her a good
turn. I rather relish the notion of circumventing my mother and that
ogress old Horsfall. Not that I like humouring Moore; but whatever I do
I'll be paid for, and in coin of my own choosing. I know what reward I
will claim--one displeasing to Moore, and agreeable to myself."
He turned into bed.