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 [1] 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.
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 tonight? 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 seashore. 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. Tonight 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.