Shirley, Charlotte Brontë [free children's ebooks online .txt] 📗

but he reserved his strongest epithets⁠—and real racy Yorkshire Doric adjectives they were⁠—for the benefit of the fighting parsons, the “sanguinary, demoniac” rector and curate. According to him, the cup of ecclesiastical guilt was now full indeed.

“The church,” he said, “was in a bonny pickle now. It was time it came down when parsons took to swaggering amang soldiers, blazing away wi’ bullet and gunpowder, taking the lives of far honester men than themselves.”

“What would Moore have done if nobody had helped him?” asked Shirley.

“Drunk as he’d brewed, eaten as he’d baked.”

“Which means you would have left him by himself to face that mob. Good! He has plenty of courage, but the greatest amount of gallantry that ever garrisoned one human breast could scarce avail against two hundred.”

“He had the soldiers, those poor slaves who hire out their own blood and spill other folk’s for money.”

“You abuse soldiers almost as much as you abuse clergymen. All who wear red coats are national refuse in your eyes, and all who wear black are national swindlers. Mr. Moore, according to you, did wrong to get military aid, and he did still worse to accept of any other aid. Your way of talking amounts to this: he should have abandoned his mill and his life to the rage of a set of misguided madmen, and Mr. Helstone and every other gentleman in the parish should have looked on, and seen the building razed and its owner slaughtered, and never stirred a finger to save either.”

“If Moore had behaved to his men from the beginning as a master ought to behave, they never would have entertained their present feelings towards him.”

“Easy for you to talk,” exclaimed Miss Keeldar, who was beginning to wax warm in her tenant’s cause⁠—“you, whose family have lived at Briarmains for six generations, to whose person the people have been accustomed for fifty years, who know all their ways, prejudices, and preferences⁠—easy, indeed, for you to act so as to avoid offending them. But Mr. Moore came a stranger into the district; he came here poor and friendless, with nothing but his own energies to back him, nothing but his honour, his talent, and his industry to make his way for him. A monstrous crime indeed that, under such circumstances, he could not popularize his naturally grave, quiet manners all at once; could not be jocular, and free, and cordial with a strange peasantry, as you are with your fellow-townsmen! An unpardonable transgression that when he introduced improvements he did not go about the business in quite the most politic way, did not graduate his changes as delicately as a rich capitalist might have done! For errors of this sort is he to be the victim of mob outrage? Is he to be denied even the privilege of defending himself? Are those who have the hearts of men in their breasts (and Mr. Helstone, say what you will of him, has such a heart) to be reviled like malefactors because they stand by him, because they venture to espouse the cause of one against two hundred?”

“Come, come now, be cool,” said Mr. Yorke, smiling at the earnestness with which Shirley multiplied her rapid questions.

“Cool! Must I listen coolly to downright nonsense⁠—to dangerous nonsense? No. I like you very well, Mr. Yorke, as you know, but I thoroughly dislike some of your principles. All that cant⁠—excuse me, but I repeat the word⁠—all that cant about soldiers and parsons is most offensive in my ears. All ridiculous, irrational crying up of one class, whether the same be aristocrat or democrat⁠—all howling down of another class, whether clerical or military⁠—all exacting injustice to individuals, whether monarch or mendicant⁠—is really sickening to me; all arraying of ranks against ranks, all party hatreds, all tyrannies disguised as liberties, I reject and wash my hands of. You think you are a philanthropist; you think you are an advocate of liberty; but I will tell you this⁠—Mr. Hall, the parson of Nunnely, is a better friend both of man and freedom than Hiram Yorke, the reformer of Briarfield.”

From a man Mr. Yorke would not have borne this language very patiently, nor would he have endured it from some women; but he accounted Shirley both honest and pretty, and her plainspoken ire amused him. Besides, he took a secret pleasure in hearing her defend her tenant, for we have already intimated he had Robert Moore’s interest very much at heart. Moreover, if he wished to avenge himself for her severity, he knew the means lay in his power: a word, he believed, would suffice to tame and silence her, to cover her frank forehead with the rosy shadow of shame, and veil the glow of her eye under down-drooped lid and lash.

“What more hast thou to say?” he inquired, as she paused, rather, it appeared, to take breath than because her subject or her zeal was exhausted.

“Say, Mr. Yorke!” was the answer, the speaker meantime walking fast from wall to wall of the oak parlour⁠—“say? I have a great deal to say, if I could get it out in lucid order, which I never can do. I have to say that your views, and those of most extreme politicians, are such as none but men in an irresponsible position can advocate; that they are purely opposition views, meant only to be talked about, and never intended to be acted on. Make you Prime Minister of England tomorrow, and you would have to abandon them. You abuse Moore for defending his mill. Had you been in Moore’s place you could not with honour or sense have acted otherwise than he acted. You abuse Mr. Helstone for everything he does. Mr. Helstone has his faults; he sometimes does wrong, but oftener right. Were you ordained vicar of Briarfield, you would find it no easy task to sustain all the active schemes for the benefit of the parish planned and persevered in by your predecessor. I wonder people cannot judge more fairly of each other and themselves. When I hear Messrs. Malone