With all her heart, Mrs. Skipper said; but she had an errand, though it was not to bring cider or hot bread. She had learned the secret of making potato-bread: not the doughy, distasteful stuff that many people were eating, but light, digestible, palatable bread. She would not tell the secret to everybody,—giving away her own trade; but when she saw a family of old friends eating potatoes, morning, noon, and night, she could not help telling them how they might get something better.
Mary thanked her, and observed that she did not know how she could put her gleaned corn to a better use than in making the experiment of a batch of mixed flour and potato-bread.
“Ah! do; and I will treat you to the baking, and look well to it myself. For my credit’s sake, you know; having set you to try. Come, let us have the corn beat out.”
They went to the back of the house to thresh and winnow, and then the widow’s first exclamation was about how sadly out of sorts Mrs. Kay seemed to be.
“These are not times for her,” replied Mary. “They bear harder upon such as she was than upon anybody. Who could have thought, you know, when she was an only child, brought up delicately for a poor man’s daughter, that she would come to loathe a potato breakfast, and have no other?”
“Bless you! I know,” whispered the widow, with a wise look. “People may take things over-night that leave them no sense, nor temper, nor appetite in the morning. My dear, I see how it is.”
Mary was apparently too busy with the wheat to take any notice of this intimation. The next thing she said was,
“Where are all the potatoes to come from that will be wanted if people take to this new sort of bread? and indeed whether they do or not; for potatoes they must eat, either by themselves or made into bread. How are we to get enough?”
“The price is rising, they say; faster than the price of anything else, except corn: and if you go up yonder towards the moors, you will see what a quantity of new ground is being taken up for growing potatoes. I have had half a mind to try what I could do with a bit of a field myself. Anderson knows what he is about, generally; and what he tries in a large way might be safe for such as we in a small.”
“I would not try,” replied Mary.
“No, not if you were me, because you think I fly from one thing to another, and do myself harm.”
“Besides,” said Mary, attempting no denial, “how will it be with you next year, if there should chance to be a fine wheat and barley crop? People do not live on potatoes when they can get bread; and I am sure it is not to be wished that they should. I hope there will be much less demand for potatoes next year; and it is likely there will. We have had so many bad seasons, it cannot be long before a good one comes.”
“And then what a pity it will be that so much money has been spent in fencing and managing these potato-grounds! It may chance to come to be worth while to turn the sheep on again. That would be a pity.”
“Say rather it is a pity they were ever turned off. The land on the moors is much more fit for them than for us to feed off; and leaving them there would leave the money that is spent on the land (more than it is worth, if matters went on in their usual course) to be used in a more profitable way.”
“In what way?”
“Why; take your own case. If you pay so much for hedging and ditching, and draining, and manuring the potato-ground you have a mind for, and the crop brings you no more next year than the same plot now brings as a sheep-feed, is not the money just lost that was laid out in making a field of it? My opinion is that it would bring less; and if it does not, it ought to do. Our people will be badly off indeed if food is so high next year as to make them take your potatoes at a price that would make your bargain a good one; and if they are obliged to do so, they will be eating up in those potatoes the money that should have set some of them to work at weaving or cutlery-employment. Better buy corn of Kirkland when we can, and let the sheep graze on.”
“Ay, when we can. There is the very thing. If we could always do that, as much as we pleased, we should not spend much of our money on the moors; but it is because it is all a chance whether we shall be buying of Kirkland next year, that one thinks of taking the chance of potatoes selling well.”
“I would not.”
“No, not you. You would spend your money, if you had any, in a little bargain of grindstones, for the sake of a certain person.”
“That would depend on the price of potatoes,” replied Mary, smiling, “for they would depend on the price of corn; and on the price of corn mainly depends the cutlery trade; and where is the use of grindstones unless the cutlery business flourishes?”
“There is another thing to be looked to; and that is, that those you help in cutting grindstones do not get themselves into trouble;—ay, by being abroad at night, and having the constables after them in the day. I would have you consider that, my dear. Mercy! how frightened you look,—as white as my apron! Now, don’t push me away because I let out a thing that made you frightened.”
“Angry—very angry,” said Mary.
“Not with me, to be sure; for I did not make it, be it true or not true; though I need not have cast it in your teeth as I did. It was Dick Rose told me; and he said he knew it from——”
“Do get me a little vinegar, Mrs. Skipper. I never pinched my finger so smartly before. I shall not be able to get my thimble on this week.”
“Well, now, it was that made you turn white, while you pretended to be so angry with me that you made my heart beat in my throat. I shall know you now another time, mistress Mary.”
“Not you,” thought Mary, as her giddy companion bustled into the house for vinegar.
“I don’t see your sister,” said she, returning, “but I guessed where to look for the vinegar. Is the pain going? Well, only do you ask Dick Rose about how the folks were seen creeping out of the quarry, one by one,—those that worked there, and some strangers that came to visit them; and how——”
“I shall not ask Dick Rose any such thing, when there is a person that can tell me so much better,” said Mary.
“Ay, if he will.”
“John, fetch me the large blue apron,” cried Mary; “and bring out Nanny with you. I promised she should lend a hand, and see the chaff fly.”
Before John could reach the door, a sharp scream,—the scream of a child,—was heard from within. Mary flew to see what had happened, but just as she was entering, her brother, seeing that some one was behind her, slammed the door in her face, and was heard to bolt it. Mrs. Skipper would not listen to what she had to say about the child having a fall, but exclaimed,
“Well, I should not have thought Mr. Kay could have behaved in that manner to you; and he looked at me quite fierce, so as I thought had not been in his nature.”
And she stepped to the window to tap, and ask an explanation: but she caught a glimpse of something that quieted her, and sent her to stoop down over the wheat again, without looking at Mary, or speaking another word. Kay was carrying his wife up stairs. The helpless arm, hanging over his shoulder, was just visible, and the awe-struck children, suspending their crying, moved Mrs. Skipper to concern too deep to be expressed in her usual giddy speech.
“Which way are you going?” asked Mary at length. “I am off for the mill, as soon as I can get in to take the children with me.”
“And I home; and you may depend on me, you know for what. My tongue does run too fast sometimes, I know; but you may depend on me, as it was only by a chance that I was here.”
“Thank you!” replied Mary, warmly. “And I will take it kindly of you to show me the way about the bread, as soon as my corn is ground.”
By the united resources of the children within, the door was unbolted, and the party allowed egress into the street, when Mrs. Skipper turned down, and Mary up; the children asking her, one to go out of the way for the sake of the pond on the heath, and another hoping to jump down five steps of the mill-ladder, four having been achieved last time. Mary would have been glad to forget their mother as easily as they.
When Warden saw her toiling up the slope on the top of which the mill stood, her bundle on her head, and a child tugging at each side of her gown, he civilly came down to relieve her, and told her that she was more welcome than on the occasion of her last visit. It was a fine breezy day, he observed, and perhaps she might like to look about her from the top of the mill, if she did not mind the shaking that there always was in a wind. Mary thanked him, but dared not leave the children, lest they should put themselves in the way of the sails. This difficulty was soon obviated by the miller’s taking the girl upon his shoulder, and calling to his man to bring up the boy, and let him play among the sacks in the first story, or climb higher, as he liked.
“I suppose you saw the fire finely from here, if you chanced to be looking out last night,” Mary observed.
“My man did, as he stayed to take advantage of the wind. He says it lighted up every turn of the river between this and Sheffield. You may see the smoke still, among the other smoke. Half the country has flocked there this morning, my father-in-law told me just now, as he passed on his way to pay his rent. It is a good time to choose to pay his rent, when every body is thinking of something else than emptying his pockets. Otherwise, it is not the safest and pleasantest thing in the world to be carrying money over the by-road between this and Fergusson’s. Yonder he goes,” continued the miller, stooping to the little girl whom he was keeping steady with his arm round her waist. “Yonder goes Mr. Anderson, on his black mare. You may see him trotting along the lane between those young oaks.”
“He will come back slower in the evening, when he has left his money behind him,” observed Mary.
“He will not wait till evening. He will just finish with the steward, and come home again, for the Mr. Fergussons are abroad over the country to-day; and besides, my father-in-law is wanted at home every hour of the day while the improvements are going on. Look how busy he is thereabouts.”
“I see; they drive the poor sheep higher and higher up the moors, with their walls and their ditches.”
“Yes, year by year. Before these many bad seasons, the sheep used to browse on this very slope where my mill stands. I used to come up among the bleaters every morning.”
“You speak as if the bad seasons were the cause of the change.”
“And so they are, mainly. Where numbers increase as they have done here in my time, more food will be wanted at all events, be the seasons what they may. But when the soil yields scantily, for years together, the inclosing will go on faster, from the cry for food. Yonder field, red even now with poppies, would never have been sown if the nine-acres in the bottom had yielded as they ought. The nine-acres used to yield as much as was reaped this year in itself and the poppy-field together.”
“And there has been all the cost of taking it in besides.”
“Yes; and my father-in-law does wisely to pay that cost (if he must pay it) before his rent is raised. He and the steward will have an argument about that rent to-day, I fancy. The lease will be up soon now, and rents are rising every where; and I suppose my father-in-law is content to let his mount up too. He would not otherwise be carrying on all these works.”
“I wonder at his being content to pay more rent after so many short harvests.”
“It is easier than after larger; for corn sells dear, more than in proportion to its scarcity. Nobody can tell you better than Anderson that a single short harvest makes a heavy pocket; much more a succession of short harvests.”
“Till the poor get a-head of the rate-payers, I suppose,—no longer. When Mr. Anderson has to maintain half of us down in the village, because we cannot buy food, he will find us lighten his pockets as fast as bad years can fill them.”
“The manufacturers must help him then. They must raise their people’s wages——”
“And so must Anderson.”
“They must raise their people’s wages, and maintain the poor in the towns, and in the working villages.”
“I wish the manufacturers joy of their good nature. They first pay dear for their own bread, and then pay dear for the labour which is to buy their workmen’s bread, and then spend what profits are left in supporting those whose labour they cannot employ; and all to make Anderson’s and other farmers’ pockets heavy for a little while after bad seasons. I wish them joy of their patience.”
“Anderson will want patience too, when his turn comes. Depend upon it, as soon as he gets fairly saddled with a high rent and high rates, there will come a fine crop or two to make prices as low in proportion as they now are high. He cannot bring down his men’s wages all in a day; much less can the rates be disburthened at once; and so it will be well if he makes ready beforehand for such a change.”
“I hope he does make ready; but what I see there looks little like it.”
“What, you mean the bay-window and balcony now making to my house, and the shrubbery he is laying out. All that was no wish of mine, for I thought the white house looked very neat as it was before; and the bit of garden behind was as much as my wife and I had time to attend to. But her father liked that his daughter’s house should be improving while he was adding so much to his own, and he made us accept of the alteration, whether we would or no. He said, that while he was sending my wife’s sister to Paris, and bringing up her brothers to look higher than he once thought of for them, he could not leave her neglected, as if he was ashamed of her having married more humbly than the other girls will do.”
“And his own house looks hardly like the same place. His having built up among all the rambling old parts gives it one face as a whole.”
“Yes; three more bad years, and it will look like a gentleman’s mansion. Yes, yes; these are the joyous rent-days, when the steward gets every farthing, and pretends to shake his head because it is no more; and when the farmers try to look dismal about the short crops, and then sing merry songs over their ale,—such of them as have not taken to port. Well, the millers’ day will come in time, it is to be hoped.”
“When will that be?”
“When the people are not setting their wits to work to make potato-bread, and eating every thing that grows rather than flour. We have had more going and coming, more watching and jealousy about waste, and more grumbling because we cannot grind for nothing,—more trouble of all sorts about a few trumpery bundles of gleanings this last week, than about fifty sacks when I first became a miller.”
“I will give you as little trouble as I can with mine,” said Mary; “but you must not call it a trumpery bundle, for it is worth much to me. If you knew how much, I might trust you not to waste any of it.”
“You would not dream of my wasting, if you saw how carefully I look to every grain. Why, I drive away the very birds themselves, if they light when the sails stop at any time. We do not leave the sweepings to them and the wind, as we used to do, but sift them as a housemaid sifts for pins. That is the reason why I do not offer your young master a handfull for the pigeons, as I used to do.”
“Don’t think of it, pray. He is going to play with the ducks on the pond as we go home, and that will do as well: besides, I hear him laughing now, merry enough without the pigeons.”
“Playing hide and seek with Jerry among the sacks, I fancy.”
“Where he must have done playing for to-day,” observed Mary. “How quiet every place looks for a working day!” she continued, giving one more glance round the horizon before she descended. “Except the sheep, creeping like mites on the uplands, and the labourers gathering like ants about the new inclosures, I see nobody stirring.”
“I seldom see it so quiet, except on a starlight night, when there is no noise but the whizzing of the sails when they go by starts; or perhaps an owl from my gable. But you see the people in the quarries stick to their work, as if they had no share in what was doing last night.” And the miller looked full at Mary as he spoke. “I see a man or two with his pick in yonder stone-pit, hewing away as if nothing had happened. Cannot you see them? Well, it is a wonder your head has stood the shaking in this breeze for so long. Many people can fix their sight on nothing after the first two minutes.”
Mary was determined to see more of the quarries before she went home than could be discerned from the mill-top. She let one child peep into the hopper to see how the corn ran down to be ground, and the other to exhibit his jump of five steps, with a topple at the end of it, and then walked quickly away towards the part of the heath where bilberries were to be found, and where she thought she might leave her charge safely employed while she looked into the quarry to see whether Chatham was really there, and whether or not he had had any transactions with the constables since she saw him last.
It took but a little time to show the children how to find bilberries, and not very much longer to teach them not to eat what they found; after which Mary was at liberty to walk round to the mouth of the stone-quarry, beside which the fashioning of grindstones went on, in subservience to the cutlery business of Sheffield. She avoided the sheds where the sawing and smoothing proceeded, and looked only among the men who were excavating the stone. But few were at work this day; Chatham was one of them. He was engaged high up, with his face to the rock, and having no glances to spare for the scene below him, or for the narrow, rough path by which his present position must be attained.
Mary had never been here before, and she lingered in hopes that Chatham might turn, and encourage her to go on. She gathered rag-wort from the moist recesses by the way, and paused to observe how the ivy was spreading over a portion of the stone face of the quarry which had been left untouched for some time, and to listen to the water trickling down among the weeds by a channel which it had worn for itself. As Chatham still did not turn, she proceeded to climb the path, being aware that children who were playing in the bottom had given notice of her presence, and that face after face peeped out from beneath the sheds to gaze, and then disappeared again. When at length she laid her hand on the arm of the toiling man, he started as if his tool had broken under his blow.
“Mary! what brought you here?”
“I heard that the constables were after you.”
“So did I; and here I am, if they choose to come.”
“And what next?”
“My words and deeds will be taken up against me, perhaps. Perhaps it may be found that I am a good friend to all the parties that were quarrelling last night. This last is what I wish to be.”
“And trying to be so, you will get blamed by all in turn.”
“By all at once, if they so please. As often as they choose to ask my opinion, as they did last night, they shall have it, though they themselves try to hoot me down. I do not want to meddle; but, being bid to speak out, I will speak, out of the fire or the water, if they bid me burn or drown. So it is not the notion of a constable that can frighten me.”
“Out of fire or water, would you? Then much more would you speak in a moonlight field. O, tell me if you were there.”
“How did you spend your thoughts, Mary, those nights that you sat by the spring, during the drought? What were you thinking about when your sister threw down the pitcher that you caught? That must have been a weary night to you both.”
“You saw us! Then it is true; and you are one that hopes to get food by night-arming?”
“Not I. If the question of stinting food or getting plenty of it were waiting to be decided by arms,—the hungry on one side and the full on the other,—I would take up my pike with a hopeful heart, however sorry I might be that blood should be shed in settling so plain a matter. But what could a little band of pale complainers do, creeping under the shadows of yonder walls, with limbs as trembling as their hearts are firm? How should they be champions of the right while they are victims of the wrong? They must be fed before they can effectually struggle for perpetual food.”
“Poor wretches! they did look, it seemed to me, as if they had no life nor spirit in them.”
“The spirit goes from the sunk eye to swell the heart, Mary; and those that have not strength of arm this day, may prove, many a day hence, what their strength of purpose has been. This is what the authorities ought to look to. Instead of scouring the country to wake up a wretch from the noon-day sleep which he seeks because he has had no morning meal, they should provide against the time when his arm will be strong to make his hungry dreams come true. Instead of carrying one man in disgrace from his loom, and another from the forge, and another from the quarry, to tell the old story—‘We have been patient long, and can endure no longer,’ our rulers should be satisfying themselves whether this is one of the stories which is to have no end. It cannot be very pleasing to their ears. The wonder is, that if they are weary of it, they go on from century to century to cry, ‘Tell us this story again.’”
“They cannot yet be so weary of it as we.”
“No; for they hear others in turn with it,—tales of victories abroad, and of rejoicings at home in places where no poor man sets his foot. Their painters show them pictures of jolly rent-days, and the music they hear is triumphant and spirit-stirring. If they go abroad in the day, they laugh to see their enemies made mirth of in the streets; and if at night, they glorify themselves and one another in the light of illuminations. Thus they can forget our story for a while.”
“I would rather they should come here than go myself among them, to be the merriest of the merry.”
“Ay; if we could set each of them down in this vale as one of ourselves, they would be surprised to find how dismal night-lights are when they shine upon scowling brows and hollow cheeks; and how little spirit war-music has when it cannot drown the moans of the famished, and the cries of mothers weeping for their children.”
“It seems to me that their very religion helps to deceive them about us. Last Sunday, the clergyman looked comfortably about him, and spoke very steadily when he read about the springing corn in the furrows, and that the little hills rejoice on every side. I thought of the red poppies and the stones in Fergusson’s new fields, and the scanty gleanings on the uplands, and my heart turned back from my Bible.”
“It should not have done that, Mary. It is not that the Bible is in fault, but that some people read it wrong. There is never any day of any year when there are not springing grains and ripening harvests on God’s earth.”
“You ought to be able to speak to that, having gone so far round the world when you were a boy at sea.”
“I can speak to it. If there are angels hovering over the fields, as ’tis said there once were, and if the earth lies stretched beneath them as in a map, they may point to one fruitful place or another, and never cease their song, ‘Thou visitest the earth and waterest it. The pastures are clothed with flocks, and the valleys are covered over with corn. Thou crownest the year with thy goodness.’”
“But of what use is it to us that there is corn somewhere, if we have it not? Are we to bless God that he feeds some people somewhere, while there are still poppies and stones where we look for bread?”
“You might as well ask ‘of what use is the fruit on the tree to him who sits hungering at its foot?’ And, ‘is not a parched traveller to repine at his thirst, when a well is springing in the neighbouring shade?’ What would you say to hungering and thirsty men like these?”
“‘Bless God that there is fruit, and climb to reach it. Be thankful that there is water, and go down to take your fill.’”
“We are required by our rulers to do one half of this reasonable thanksgiving, and to forego the remainder. We are bidden to thank God for his gifts, but forbidden to reach and take.—How great is the folly of this, you would see at a glance, if you could go where I have been.”
“To see how perfectly happy people are in the fruitful places, while so many are suffering here? To see how unequal is the lot of dwellers in different countries?”
“Not so; but worse. There is but too much equality in the lot of dwellers in fruitful and on barren soils; between those who are too many for their food, and those who bury their spare corn out of their way. If some were satisfied while others suffer, the sufferers might be the more patient because all were not afflicted like themselves; but it is when all suffer, and might yield mutual relief, if they were not prevented, that patience is impossible. I would ask no man to have patience with our state who had seen the state of many others, striving after patience as painfully as we.”
“What others?”
“Why, there is the labouring man of Poland, for one. He creeps out of his log hut, shivering, half naked, in the first cold of autumn, to feed his pigs with the grain——”
“Grain! What sort of grain?”
“Wheat, or rye, as may happen; whichever happens to be rotting the fastest. Between him and the black forests on the horizon are plains, stretching away for leagues upon leagues, some sprinkled with a few cattle, and some showing a stubble that you would be glad to have the gleaning of; and others lying waste, though richer as soil than many a field of Anderson’s.”
“O, but that is a shame, with the people so poor.”
“It would make the people no richer to till those wastes, unless the crops could sell. The people there do not want food——”
“So I think, if they feed their beasts on wheat and rye.”
“They want clothes, and good houses, and all that makes a dwelling comfortable; and yet, though our warehouses are overfull of broad cloth, and we could furnish twice as much metal-work as we do, if we had bread for the workmen, it is only by fits and starts that we will let Poland sell us corn, and clothe her sons. Then, again, near the Black Sea——”
“Is that sea really blacker than other seas?”
“The sun glitters there as bright as on the heaving Indian bays, and it is as blue when the sky is clear as any tarn in yonder hills. God has done all to make it beautiful, not only from above, but by spreading fertile tracts all along its shores. If man would do his part, sending ships upon its bosom, and leaving no spot desolate around, it might be made the happy place that, in my opinion, the whole earth might be made, and will be, some time or other.”
“The people are not happy there now, then?”
“Not what we should call happy, though they may like better than we should the flitting from plain to plain to gather corn, as bees flit from blossom to blossom for honey. They reap for three seasons from a field, and then move to another, leaving an exhausted soil and a desolate place behind them.”
“We might teach them husbandry, if they would let us have some of the fruits of it.”
“And then they might learn to live a little more like Christians than they do, and have some of the pleasures that we have, in the midst of all our hardships, in growing up from the state of brute beasts into that of thinking men. There are other parts,—in America,—where thinking men live who fret in the impossibility of making their children wiser and more civilized than themselves,—which should be every man’s aim for his children. They can give them work,—but what is it all for?—food. They can give them wealth,—but what does it all consist of?—food. They can hold out a prospect of increase,—but of what?—food. They long for a thousand comforts, if they could but convert their corn into these comforts. They perceive that there are a thousand advantages and blessings over the sea, if they could but stretch out a long arm to throw corn into our lap, and reach home—things which we can now use no more than they, because we have too little bread, and they have too much. Though their sons are thus condemned to be clowns, and ours to be paupers, we must hope that they will learn from our follies so to deal together as that the clown may become a wise man, and the pauper take his stand on the rights of his industry.”
“But why, if so many countries are fruitful, is England alone barren?”
“England is fruitful in corn; but yet more so in men, and in arts which she chooses to make barren of food. England has corn on her hills, corn in her valleys, corn waving over her plains; yet this corn is not enough, or not always enough, for the multitudes who gather together in her villages, and throng her cities, and multiply about her workhouses. If this corn is not enough, England’s duty is,—not to starve hundreds, or half-starve thousands of her children, but to bring out corn from all the apparatus of her arts. She should bring out corn from her looms, corn from her forges, corn from her mines; and when more than all this is wanted, let her multiply her looms and her forges, and sink new mines from which other millions may derive their bread.”
“You dig bread from this hard rock, I suppose, when you furnish grindstones on which the cutlery is to be prepared which may be exchanged with the Russian and the American for corn.”
“I do: and to limit this exchange is not only to limit the comforts of us workmen, but to forbid that there shall be more lives in our borders than the fruits of our own soil can support. There is room for myriads more of us, and for a boundless improvement of our resources; these resources are forbidden to improve, and these myriads to exist. Whence rulers derive their commission thus to limit that to which God has placed no perceivable bound, let them declare.”
“Then there are not too many of us, if all were wise.”
“By no means. If all were permitted to be as happy as God bids them be, there would be neither the recklessness of those who multiply without thought, nor the forced patience of those who have a conscience and listen to it. If all were wise, they would proportion their numbers to their food; but then that food would not be stinted by arbitrary laws which issue in evil to all. Our rulers turn away, if perchance they see in the streets infants that pine for a while, only to die; and pronounce that such children should never have been born. And it may be true; but it is not for our rulers to pronounce, except with shame; for it is only while waiting for their becoming just that it behoves the people to be as self-denying as they require.”
“Strangers that pass this way for their pleasure,” observed Mary, “wonder at the hardness of our shepherds in turning their tender lambs exposed upon the moors, where, if some thrive, many pine. Do not they themselves (as many of them as have to do with making laws) turn out the young of our cities into stony fields, where they pine like starving lambs? There is small use in pitying—small kindness in saying that such should never have been born, if there are indeed fields where for stones they may gather bread.”
“When I see money buried in the furrows of such fields,” replied Chatham, “I feel that it is taken twice from those whose due it is;—from the mechanic who, instead of standing idle, would fain be producing corn on his anvil; and from the spiritless boor abroad, who would as willingly exchange his superfluity to supply his need. When I see the harrow pass over such fields, I see it harrow human souls; and voices cry out from the ground, however little the whistling husbandman may heed them.”
“The husbandman will not long whistle, if all must at length scramble for food. His turn to see his infants pine must come at last.”
“At last! It comes early, for there are more to follow. There is the farmer to swear that it is hard upon him that his labourers must live, as it is upon his substance that they must live. Then comes he for whom the farmer labours in his turn. He complains that, let the sunshine be as bright, the dews as balmy as they may, he can reap scarcely half the harvest of his gains, and that he is pressed upon by the crowds who come to him for bread.”
“He can hardly wonder at this, when it is he himself who forbids their going elsewhere. To what third party would he commend them?”
“Perhaps he would quote Scripture, as may be done for all purposes, and tell them that the clouds drop fatness, and bid them look up and await the promised manna. Till it comes, however, or till he and his tribe have unlocked the paths of the seas, he has no more right to complain of the importunity which disturbs him than the child who debars the thrush from its native woods has to be angry when it will not plume itself and sing, but beats against its wires because its fountain is no longer filled.”
“I could not but think something like this when I saw even so good a man as our Mr. Fergusson on rough terms with some of the people he met on the way, when he went out to view the harvest-home.”
“The harvest-home which used to be a merry feast when it was clear that its golden fruits were to be wealth to all! Now, there is no knowing what is to become of it; whether it shall be divided and consumed in peace, or scrambled for by men possessed by the demon of want, or burned by those who cannot share, and are therefore resolved that none others shall enjoy. It is said, and no one contradicts, that the harvest-moon rose clear, and lighted up alike every mansion and cottage in the dale; but I was abroad to see her rise; and I declare that with my mind’s eye I beheld her eclipsed, shedding a sickly light, maybe, upon the manor and the farm, but blight and darkness into the dwellings of the poor.”
“It has ever been God’s hand that has drawn a shadow over sun and moon, but now——”
“Now man has usurped the office, and uses his power, not once and again to make the people quail, but day by day. To none is the sun so dark as to the dim-eyed hungerer. To none is the moon so sickly as to the watcher over a pining infant’s cradle. Let man remove the shadow of social tyranny, let him disperse the mists which rise from a deluge of tears, and God’s sun and moon will be found to make the dew-drops glitter as bright as ever on the lowliest thatch, and to shine mildly into humble chambers where those who are not kneeling in thanksgiving are blessing God as well by the soundness of their repose.”
“Are those whom you meet at midnight of the same mind with you? Do they go to church on Sunday to bring away this sort of religion for the week?”
“They do not go to church,—partly because they know themselves to be squalid,—partly because, as you say, their hearts turn back from their Bible. They are slow to believe that their soul-sickness will be pitied somewhere, if not by man. They no doubt feel also some of the unwillingness of guilt; but I can tell,—I will tell those whom it may concern,—that the way to bring these men from their unlawful drill into the church aisle is to preach to them full, and not hungering, that God giveth to all living things food in its season. This, like all other words of God, is true; but with his vicegerents rests the blasphemy if shrunken lips whisper that it is a lie.—Such sufferers, if they did make Sabbath, have not the leisure that I have to work out their religion by themselves, during the week, making it and toil lighten each other.”
“So that is what you do in this place,—high up on the face of the stone, with no moving thing near you but these dancing weeds overhead, and no sound but the dull shock of your own blows! So your religion is what you think over all day!”
“In some form or other; but you know religion takes many forms;—all forms, or religion would be good for little. I am not always thinking of the church and the sermon; but sometimes of how I am to advise the people that come to me, and sometimes of what I could tell the powerful if I could get their ear; and oftener than all, Mary, of what was said between you and me the evening before, and what will be said this evening, and of what we may dare to look to in a future time.”
“With so much to think about, you could do without me,” said Mary, smiling. “You would hardly miss me much, if I was drowned to-morrow, till the country is quiet, and there is nothing more to be complained of.”
“Meanwhile, Mary, you want nothing more, I suppose, than to clean trenchers and wash and mend stockings. To do this would make you perfectly happy for evermore, would it?”
“It is light work cleaning trenchers for a half-starved family,” replied Mary; “and as for the stockings, the children are going barefoot, one by one. So, no light jesting, Chatham; but tell me—”
“Who these men are just at your shoulder? They are constables, and come for me, I rather think.”
“And what next?” inquired Mary, as she had done half an hour before.
“I know no more than when you asked me last; but I suppose they will either let me come back here to think over the matters we have been talking about, or put me where I may consider them at more leisure still, not having my tools with me wherewith to hew down stone walls. You well know, in that case, Mary, what I shall be thinking about and doing; and so you will not trouble yourself or be frightened about me. Promise me.”
“Certainly: what should I be frightened about?” asked Mary, with white lips. “You cannot have done wrong,—you cannot have joined in——”
She stopped short, as the constable was within hearing. His office was an easy one, as Chatham cheerfully surrendered himself; and Mary turned to descend, as soon as he had flung on his coat and disposed of his tools. They were permitted to walk arm-in-arm, and to talk, if they chose to do it so as to be overheard. Not being at liberty in heart and mind for such conversation as the constable might share, they passed in silence the groups of workpeople, some of whom grinned with nervousness or mirth, and others gazed with countenances of grave concern; while a very few showed their sympathy by carefully taking no notice of what must be considered the disgrace of their companion. In a little while, Mary was told she must go no farther; and, presently after, she was at the door of her own home, with a child in each hand,—one talking of bilberries, and the other telling a story of a duckling in the pool, which had billed a worm larger than it knew what to do with; and how it ended with dropping the worm in deep water, and, after a vain poke in pursuit of it, had scuttled after the rest of the brood. All this Mary was, or seemed to be, listening to, when her brother looked out from the door, and told her impatiently that he had been watching for her this half-hour. His wife was asleep at present; but he had not liked to leave her alone in the house, much as he wished to go out and see what sort of a net the constables were drawing in.
“Have you heard of anybody that they have taken?” he inquired.
“Yes.”
“Well! Anybody that we know?”
“Yes; Chatham.”
Kay looked at her for a moment, sent the children different ways, and then looked at her again.
“You are not down-hearted, Mary?”
“No.”
“He will come out clear, depend upon it: my life upon it, it will turn out well. Oh! it will turn out a good thing,—a real good thing!”
“Everything does.”
“Ay, ay, in the end; but I mean——But come, sit you down. I am in no hurry to go out; and I will get you something after your long walk.”
“Pray do not; I do not wish it, indeed. I will help myself when I am hungry.”
As she seemed not to want him, Kay thought perhaps he had better go. Before he closed the door behind him, he saw that Mary was taking a long, deep draught of cold water.
As there was sufficient evidence, in the magistrate’s opinion, of Chatham’s having been once present at the midnight drill, and active among the crowd by the river-side the night before, he was committed to prison, it being left to himself to prove, at the time of trial, for what purposes he had mixed himself up with the rioters. As he was a very important personage in his village, his jeopardy excited much speculation and interest. For the first two or three days, there was much curiosity among the neighbours to see Mary, in order to observe how she took it. Mary was somehow always busy with her sister and the children; but when a gossip or two had become qualified to testify to her aspect—that she looked just as usual,—and when the children were found to have nothing particular to tell about her, everybody was vexed at having been troubled on behalf of a person who was never put out, happen what might.
Times were so flat this autumn that there was abundance of leisure for talking about whatever might turn up, and no lack of tongues to treat thereof. Some of the foundry-men were turned off, as it had been necessary to raise the wages of those who remained. As there was no increase of business at the time this rise of wages took place, and as Oliver himself was living at a larger expense as provisions became dearer, there was no alternative for him but to turn off some of his men, contract his business, and be as content as he could with smaller profits than he had ever before made. By the rise of wages, his remaining men were, for a short time, relieved from the extreme of misery they had endured in the interval between the great increase in the cost of provisions and the raising of their wages; but they were no richer than they had formerly been with two-thirds of the nominal amount of the present recompense of their labour. Want still pressed, and must still press, up to the point of Oliver having no more wages to give, unless the deficiencies of the harvest might be supplied by large importations from abroad. In the uncertainty whether this would be done, and with the certainty before their eyes that there had not been food enough in the country for three years past, Anderson and the neighbouring farmers took in more and more land, and flung about the abundance of money they received for their dear corn.
This money was not the less buried in the inferior new land for its being passed from hand to hand among the labourers. The guinea that came out of Anderson’s profits of the preceding year, to be paid to Kay as wages, was spent in buying a third less bread of Mrs. Skipper than might have been had in better years. The baker, in her turn, bought less flour of Warden with it than in former times; and Warden used it for a dear bargain with Kirkland, and Kirkland with Anderson for wheat. Anderson paid it to the ploughman of his new fields, for less labour than the same sum had procured for better land, and with the prospect of a less return to the labour employed. The guinea would then go again into Mrs. Skipper’s till for still less bread than before; while Anderson was making answer to all complaints about this waste, that he should not long be the better for it, as the taking in of every new field would oblige him to pay his landlord more of the produce of every superior field at the expiration of his lease.
The circulation of this morsel of wealth, dwindling on every transfer, was easily traceable in a small society like that of the village. The waste could be detected in every direction, and the landlord stood marked as the focus of it. Whether Mr. Fergusson was the better for the waste incurred on his account was a separate question; and, till it was decided, he stood in a remarkable relation to the people about him: he was their injurer and their benefactor;—their injurer, in as far as he was one of the persons for whose sake a bad system was upheld;—their benefactor, in his capacity of a wealthy and benevolent resident among them. He was taunted with being the landowner, and was offered obeisance as Mr. Fergusson. All were complaining that he received an unconscionable share of the fruits of their labour; but there was not one who would not have grieved at any misfortune that might befall him. They talked loudly against him and his class for narrowing the field of their exertions, and praised the pains and good-nature with which he devised employment for those who were perpetually being turned out of work.
The fact that he must have supported these extra labourers as paupers, if he had not rather chosen to get some work out of them in return for the cost of their subsistence, made no difference in the kindness with which Mr. Fergusson attended to their interests, and endeavoured to preserve in them a spirit of independence till better times. The effort was vain under a system which authorized men to say that they had not surrendered their independence, but that it had been taken from them, and that those who took it away might make the best they could of its absence. Notwithstanding all that Fergusson could do, paupers increased in the parish; and while a few stout men, who were turned off from the various works in the neighbourhood, were taken on by Anderson, to try their hands at a new kind of labour, many more lay about asleep on the moors, or gathered in knots to gossip, in the intervals of being worse employed.
No place could be obtained for Kay’s boy, John, who pleased himself with looking about him while he had no business to do, and amusing himself as he best could. The less objection was made to this at home, as it was hoped that his curiosity might now and then make him forget the time, and justify his going without a meal—a consideration which was becoming of more and more importance in Kay’s family. It happened that Bill Hookey, the shepherd-lad, was one day leaning against the door of a cutler’s workshop, when his old companion, John, ran up, pushing back his hair from his hot forehead.
“I’d be glad to be as cool as you,” said John, “standing gaping here. I have been at the forge: crept in when they did not see me, and got behind the bellows. I gave them such a puff when they were not expecting it,—I nearly got flogged. They let me off for blowing for them till there was no more breath in my body than in the empty bellows. But I don’t half like standing here: come to the other side; you will see just as well.”
Bill stuck out his legs colossus-fashion, and yawned again.
“’Twas just where you are standing that Brett was when the grindstone flew; and those grindstones make ugly splinters, I can tell you.”
“I a’n’t afraid.”
“No, because you’ve been in the moors all your days, and have not seen mishaps with grindstones and such. You should have seen Duncan. The knife he was grinding flew up, and it was a done thing before he knew what he was about. The cut was only across the wrist; but the whole arm was perished, and good for nothing, just in that minute. The Duncans are all off to Scotland, with nothing to look to, after having had fine wages all this time—for he was a capital workman; but, as Anderson says, we have too many folks out of work here already to be expected to keep a Scotchman. What accidents do happen to people, to be sure!”
“Aye, they do.”
“Then I wonder you put yourself in the way of one, when you would be quite safe by just crossing over.”
“Oh! grindstones very often don’t fly, nor knives either.”
“But they very often do.”
“He a’n’t afraid,” observed Bill, nodding towards the cutler.
“No, because he is paid high for the risk. Well, I wonder any wages will tempt a man to have such a cough as that. I suppose, however, he don’t believe where it will end, as we do. I often think, if several were to take turns, and change their work about, there would be a better chance. If ever I am a cutler, I will try that way, if I can get anybody else of the same mind.”
“Not you,” said Bill; “you will do like the people before you.”
“Perhaps I may, when the time comes. I may no more like to try my hand at a new thing than you. Have you asked anybody for work hereabouts?”
“The flock is all sold, higher up the country,” replied Bill. “They would not let me stay on the walk when the flock was gone.”
“I know that; and how you got it into your head that you might go on sleeping in the hut just the same when the place was a field as when it was a sheep-walk. They say they had to take you neck and heels to turn you out, if you would not have the roof down over your head. Why did not you bestir yourself in time, and get work from Anderson, before others stepped before you?”
“There are no sheep now for anybody to keep.”
“Well; if you have no mind to do anything but keep sheep, cannot you go higher up, among the graziers, and offer yourself?”
“I don’t know anybody thereabouts, nor yet the walks.”
“No, nor ever will, of your own accord,” thought John. “What would you be now, Bill, if you might never be a shepherd again?”
Bill only rubbed his hand over the back of his head, and shifted his weight from both legs to one. Few things could daunt John’s love of talk.
“What became of the poor little lamb you were nursing that night that I was on the moors? It was too tender, surely, to walk up into the hills with the rest.”
“It be well if he be not dead by this time,” replied Bill. “I carried him full two miles myself, and I told ’em how to feed him and when; and, for all I could say, they minded no more when he complained—O, they don’t understand him no more than if he was a puppy-dog. When I bid him good-bye, he looked up at me, though he could scarce speak to me. He did speak, though; but he would not so much as look at the new shepherd, and if it was not for the ewe——”
“What’s coming?” cried John, interrupting his companion’s new loquacity. “Let us go and see. I dare say it is somebody fresh taken up. Do you know, I went to see Chatham’s jail, the other day. Father locked doors against me because I came home so late; but I had a mind to see what sort of a place it was. I may be in it some day. I should not mind being anywhere that Chatham has been.”
“You that can’t stand being flogged!”
“Chatham is not going to be flogged. They say it will be ‘Death Recorded.’”
“What’s that?”
“Transportation.”
“Why can’t they say so at once?”
“I don’t know: but they often speak in the same way. I have heard Chatham say that they talk of ‘agriculture,’ and nobody means just the same as they do by it. Some say ’tis farmers, and some say ’tis landlords, and some that ’tis having corn.”
“I think it is keeping sheep.”
“No, no; the Parliament does not meddle with keeping sheep. When they are asked to ‘protect agriculture,’ Chatham says, Anderson understands, ‘take care of the farmer;’ and Mr. Fergusson, ‘have an eye to the landlords,’ and all the rest of us,—except you, you say,—let us have corn.’”corn.’”
Bill yawned, and supposed it was all one. John being of a different opinion, and seeing that a very knowing personage of the village, who vouchsafed him a word or two on occasion, was flourishing a newspaper out of the window of the public-house, ran off to try whether the doubtful definition was likely to be mended by the wise men of the Cock and Gun.
He found that there was a grand piece of news going from mouth to mouth, and that everybody seemed much pleased at it. He did not know, when he had heard it, what it meant; but as the hand which held the newspaper shook very much, and two or three men waved their hats, and women came running from their doors, and even the little children clapped their hands and hugged one another, he had no doubt of its being a very fine piece of news indeed. Bill had slowly followed, and was now watching what John meant to do next.
“I don’t believe they have heard it at the foundry yet,” thought John. “I’ll be the first to tell it them.”
And off he ran, followed by Bill, and gradually gained upon by him. Now, Bill’s legs were some inches longer than little John’s, and, if he had the mind, there was no doubt he might be the first at the foundry to tell the news. This would have been very provoking, and the little runner put out all his strength, looking back fearfully over his shoulder, stumbling in consequence, and falling; rising as cold with the shock as he was warm when he fell, and running on again, rubbing his knee, and thinking how far he should be from hobbling like Bill, (with head hung back, bent knees, and dangling arms,) if he had Bill’s capacity of limb. What Bill wanted was the heart to use his capacities. He soon gave over the race, even against his little friend John, first slackening his speed, and then contriving to miss the bustle both before and behind him by stopping to lean over a rail which looked convenient for a lounge.
John snapped his fingers triumphantly at the lazy shepherd-boy on reaching the foundry gate. He rushed in, disregarding all the usual decorums about obtaining entrance. Through the paved yard ran John, and into the huge vault where the furnaces were roaring, and where all the workmen looked so impish that it was no wonder he did not immediately discover his father among them. He nearly ran foul of one who was bearing a ladle of molten metal of a white heat, and set his foot on the exquisitely levelled sand-bed which was prepared to form the plate. Scolded on one side, jostled on another, the breathless boy could only ask eagerly for his father.
“Let go the lad’s collar,” cried one of the workmen to another, adding in a low voice, “’Tis some mishap about his poor mother. Can’t ye help him to find his father?”
Kay was roasting and fuming in the red glare of one of the furnaces when his boy’s wide eyes looked up in his face, while he cried,
“There’s such news, father! The greatest news there has been this many a day. There’s an Order in Council, father; and the people are all about the Cock and Gun, and the newspaper is being read, and everybody coming out of their houses. Only think, father! It is certainly true. There is an Order in Council.”
“An Order in Council! Well, what of that? What is the Order about?”
“About? O, they did not say what it is about,—at least, nobody that I heard speaking. But I’ll run back and ask, directly.”
“You will do no such thing. You would bring back only half your story. What should a child know about an Order in Council?” he asked of his fellow-workmen, who began to gather round. “Can’t one of you go and learn what it is he means?—for I suppose some news is really come; and I can’t leave the furnace just now.”
John slunk away mortified to a corner where he could spread wet sand, in case any passing workman should be bountiful enough to spare him the brimmings of some overflowing ladle. It was very odd that his father did not seem to understand his news when everybody, down to the very babies, seemed to be so glad of it at the Cock and Gun.
The messenger soon returned, and then the tidings produced all the effects that the veriest newsmonger could have desired. John ceased his sand-levelling to creep near and listen how there had been issued an Order in Council for opening the ports, and allowing the importation of foreign grain. There was a great buzz of voices, and that of the furnace was the loudest of all.
“Now you hear, lad,” said one of the boy’s tormentors. “The Order is for the importation of foreign grain.”
“Just as if I did not know that half-an-hour ago,” said John solemnly. “Why, I was at the Cock and Gun the minute after the news came.”
And the lad rescued himself from the man’s grasp; and went in search of some one else whom he might throw into a state of admiration. He met Mr. Oliver himself, saying,
“What is all this about? The people stand in the heat as if it was no more than a warm bath; and my work is spoiling all the time, I suppose.”
“They are talking about the news, sir,—the great news that is just come.”
“News? What news?”
“The King is going to unbar the forts, sir; and he allows the importance of foreign grain.”
“It is high time he should. Your father and I have seen the importance you speak of, this long while.”
“I’ll warrant you have, sir. And now, perhaps, father will let me go and see it, if you speak a word to him.”
Mr. Oliver laughed, and told him he would probably see more of it than he liked as he grew up. John thought he had rather not wait till then to see the sight; besides that he thought it hardly likely that the King should go on unlocking forts all that time. The fort that he could just remember to have seen, when his grandfather once took him a journey, might, he believed, be unlocked in five minutes. The young politician proceeded on his rounds, hoping to find a dull person here and there, who had rather go on with his castings, and be talked to, than flock with the rest round the main furnace.
“Well, good fellows,” said Mr. Oliver, “what is your opinion of this news?”
“That it is good, sir, as far as it goes; and that it will be better, if it teaches some folks to make such laws as will not starve people first, and then have to be broken at last.”
“The laws chop and change so that it seems to me overhard to punish a man for breaking them,” observed another. “That law against buying corn when it is wanted is bad enough in the best times, as we can all tell; but if you want damning proof, look to the fact that they are obliged to contradict it upon occasion;—not once only, but many times;—as often as it has wrought so well as to produce starvation.”
Kay thought, that putting out a little temporary law upon a great lasting one, was like sending a messenger after a kite,—which proves it ill-made and unlikely to sustain itself. Somebody wondered what Fergusson would think of the news.
“What matters it to us what he thinks?” answered another. “He has stood too long between us and our food;—not knowingly, perhaps; but not the less certainly for that.”
Mr. Oliver wished that his men could talk over their own case without abusing their neighbours. He would not stand and hear a word against Mr. Fergusson on these premises.
“Then let us say nothing about Mr. Fergusson, sir, for whom, as is due, I have a high respect. When I mentioned him, I meant him as the receiver of a very high rent; and I maintain that if we make corn by manufacturing, with fire and water, what will buy corn, we are robbed if we have not bread. Deny that who can.”
And the speaker brandished his brawny arm, and thrust forward his shining face in the glowing light, to see if any one accepted his challenge. But all were of the same mind.
Mr. Oliver, however, observed that, though he had as little cause as any one to relish the disproportionate prosperity of the landlords in a time of general distress, he wished not to forget that they were brought up to look to their rent as he to look to the returns of his capital, and his men to their wages.
“That is the very thing I complain of,” said Kay; “that is, I complain of the amount of rent thus looked for. In as far as a landowner’s property is the natural fruit of his own and his ancestors’ labour and services,—or accidents of war and state, if you will,—let him have it and enjoy it, so long as it interferes with no other man’s property, held on as good a claim. But if by a piece of management this rent is increased out of another man’s funds, the increase is not ‘property,’—I take it,—but stolen goods. If a man has a shopkeeping business, with the capital, left him, the whole is his property, as long as he deals fairly; but if he uses any power he may have to prevent people buying of his neighbours, and thus puts any price he pleases upon his goods, do you mean to say that his customers may not get leave if they can to buy at other shops, without any remorse as to how the great shopkeeper may take such meddling with his ‘property?’ Give us a free trade in corn, and our landowners shall be heartily welcome to the best rents they can get. But, till that is done, we will not pretend to agree in making them a present of more of the fruits of our labour the more we want ourselves. The fruits of our labour are as much our property as their rents are theirs, to say the least; and if it was anything but food that was in question we would not be long in proving it; but food is just the thing we cannot do without, and we cannot hold out long enough to prove our point.”
“They will find it all out soon,” replied Mr. Oliver. “Whatever is ruinous for many of us must be bad for all; and such men as Fergusson will see this before long.”
“They will not see it, sir, till they feel it; and what a pass we must have come to before they will feel enough to give up a prejudice some hundred years old!”
“Before we can ask them to give up the point entirely, we must relieve them of some of the taxes which bear particularly upon them. Their great cry is about the weight of their taxation. They must first be relieved in that respect.”
“With all my heart. Let them go free of taxation as great folks, in the same way that my wife and Mary are let off free at cards on Christmas night, because they are women. This was the case with the old French nobility, I have heard. They paid no taxes; and so let it be with our landowners, if they choose to accept the favour of having their burdens borne by the sweating people to whom they would not own themselves obliged in respect of money matters if they met in the churchyard, though the time may not be far off when they must lie side by side under the sod.”
“Their pride must be pretty well humbled before they would accept of that kind of obligation. They had need go to church, in those days, to learn to bear the humiliation.”
“Perhaps that is what they go to church for now, sir; for they are now taking much more from us than they would in the case I have mentioned. I don’t say they all do it knowingly,—nor half of them. There are many of our rich men who would be offended enough at being told, ‘Your eldest son’s bills at Eton were paid last year by contributions from three hedgers, and five brass-founders, and seven weavers, all of whom have families only half-fed.’ ‘Miss Isabella’s beautiful bay mare was bought for her by the knife-grinder, who has gone to bed supperless, and the work-woman who will have no fire next winter, and the thirty little children who are kept from school that Miss Isabella’s bay mare may be bought.’ O yes; there are many who are too proud to bear this being said to them, true though it be.”
“They would call you a leveller, Kay, if they could hear you.”
“Then I should beg leave to contradict them; for a leveller I am not.—I have no objection on earth to young gentlemen going to Eton, or young ladies riding bay mares, if these things are paid for by the natural rent which a free trade in corn would leave. If we have that free trade, and workpeople still go to bed supperless and sit up without fire, still let young gentlemen go to Eton, and young ladies ride bay mares. In that case, the landlords will be absolved, and the hardship must go to the account of imprudence in some other quarter. O, I am no leveller! Let the rich keep their estates, as long as they will let them find their own value in comparison with labour. It is the making and keeping up laws which make land of more and more value, and labour of less and less, that I complain of.”
“But you did not really mean, Kay,” said a bystander, “that you would let off every man that has land from paying taxes? It is the most unfair thing I ever heard of.”
“It is unfair enough, but much less unfair and ruinous than the present plan. It is better worth our while to pay the landowners’ taxes than to lose ten times the amount to enable the landowners to pay them; and that is what we are doing now.”
“Ten times as much as the landlords pay in taxes?”