No other hand was there to raise—to aid, no other voice to question , no other brain to concert measures; he had to do it all himself. This utter of the speechless, bleeding youth (as a youth he regarded him) on his 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 did it suit his better half. The incident was quite in her way and to her taste. Some women would have been terror-struck to see a 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 the drudging life of a simple maid-servant, would492 nurse like a heroine a hospital full of plague patients. She almost loved Moore. Her tough heart almost 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 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 , neither Yorke nor his wife would have pitied him. They would have adjudged him right served for his tyranny and . 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 ; 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. arrayed in a wrapper, a shawl, and her nightcap, she sat and watched them eat, as as a hen 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, , to be allowed to see Mr. Moore one instant. Mrs. Yorke hardened her heart, and sent them packing—not without .
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 an exhaustless theme of conversation in the 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, from493 the very first showed no manner of 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 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 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 . On seeing Moore's state he relieved his feelings by a little flowery language, with which it is not necessary to the present page. A or two of the choicest blossoms fell on the unperturbed head of one Mr. Graves, a 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 and over his 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 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 respecting494 the responsibility laid on her shoulders. She took this responsibility , as she did also the easy-chair at the bedhead. That moment she began her .
Mrs. Horsfall had one virtue—orders received from MacTurk she obeyed to the letter. The ten commandments were less in her eyes than her surgeon's dictum. In other respects she was no woman, but a dragon. Hortense Moore fell 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 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 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— him in the light in which they were to 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 nights of the whole drear month of November.
In the commencement of his Moore used feebly to resist Mrs. Horsfall. He hated the sight of her rough bulk, and the contact of her hard hands; but she taught him in a trice. She made no account whatever of his six feet, his 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 "!" like495 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 looked like the reflets[A] of white, or violet, or pale green . The hills wore a lilac blue; the setting sun had purple in its red; the sky was ice, all silvered ; 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 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 home by the highroad, and is seeking a certain tree, with a certain mossy 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 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 does not speak. As yet it is no mirror to reflect sensation, but rather a mask to it. This boy is a stripling of fifteen—slight, and tall of his years. In his face there is as little of as of servility, his eye seems prepared to note any attempt to control or overreach him, and the rest of his features indicate alert for resistance. Wise avoid unnecessary interference with496 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) on the name of poetry. Talk sentiment to him, and you would be answered by . Here he is, wandering alone, waiting duteously on Nature, while she unfolds a page of stern, of silent, and of solemn poetry beneath his gaze.
Being seated, he takes from his a book—not the Latin grammar, but a 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 where he sits.
He reads. He is led into a mountain region; all round him is rude and , shapeless, and almost colourless. He hears bells
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