The Complete Novels of Brontë Sisters. Эмили БронтеЧитать онлайн книгу.
into the house.”
“Oh no! The ladies are best alone, I never was a lady’s man. You don’t mistake me for my friend Sweeting, do you, Mr. Moore?”
“Sweeting! Which of them is that? The gentleman in the chocolate overcoat, or the little gentleman?”
“The little one — he of Nunnely; the cavalier of the Misses Sykes, with the whole six of whom he is in love, ha! ha!”
“Better be generally in love with all than specially with one, I should think, in that quarter.”
“But he is specially in love with one besides, for when I and Donne urged him to make a choice amongst the fair bevy, he named — which do you think?”
With a queer, quiet smile Mr. Moore replied, “Dora, of course, or Harriet.”
“Ha! ha! you’ve an excellent guess. But what made you hit on those two?”
“Because they are the tallest, the handsomest, and Dora, at least, is the stoutest; and as your friend Mr. Sweeting is but a little slight figure, I concluded that, according to a frequent rule in such cases, he preferred his contrast.”
“You are right; Dora it is. But he has no chance, has he, Moore?”
“What has Mr. Sweeting besides his curacy?”
This question seemed to tickle Malone amazingly. He laughed for full three minutes before he answered it.
“What has Sweeting? Why, David has his harp, or flute, which comes to the same thing. He has a sort of pinchbeck watch; ditto, ring; ditto, eyeglass. That’s what he has.”
“How would he propose to keep Miss Sykes in gowns only?”
“Ha! ha! Excellent! I’ll ask him that next time I see him. I’ll roast him for his presumption. But no doubt he expects old Christopher Sykes would do something handsome. He is rich, is he not? They live in a large house.”
“Sykes carries on an extensive concern.”
“Therefore he must be wealthy, eh?”
“Therefore he must have plenty to do with his wealth, and in these times would be about as likely to think of drawing money from the business to give dowries to his daughters as I should be to dream of pulling down the cottage there, and constructing on its ruins a house as large as Fieldhead.”
“Do you know what I heard, Moore, the other day?”
“No. Perhaps that I was about to effect some such change. Your Briarfield gossips are capable of saying that or sillier things.”
“That you were going to take Fieldhead on a lease (I thought it looked a dismal place, by-the-bye, tonight, as I passed it), and that it was your intention to settle a Miss Sykes there as mistress — to be married, in short, ha! ha! Now, which is it? Dora, I am sure. You said she was the handsomest.”
“I wonder how often it has been settled that I was to be married since I came to Briarfield. They have assigned me every marriageable single woman by turns in the district. Now it was the two Misses Wynns — first the dark, then the light one; now the red-haired Miss Armitage; then the mature Ann Pearson. At present you throw on my shoulders all the tribe of the Misses Sykes. On what grounds this gossip rests God knows. I visit nowhere; I seek female society about as assiduously as you do, Mr. Malone. If ever I go to Whinbury, it is only to give Sykes or Pearson a call in their counting-house, where our discussions run on other topics than matrimony, and our thoughts are occupied with other things than courtships, establishments, dowries. The cloth we can’t sell, the hands we can’t employ, the mills we can’t run, the perverse course of events generally, which we cannot alter, fill our hearts, I take it, pretty well at present, to the tolerably complete exclusion of such figments as love-making, etc.”
“I go along with you completely, Moore. If there is one notion I hate more than another, it is that of marriage — I mean marriage in the vulgar weak sense, as a mere matter of sentiment — two beggarly fools agreeing to unite their indigence by some fantastic tie of feeling. Humbug! But an advantageous connection, such as can be formed in consonance with dignity of views and permanency of solid interests, is not so bad — eh?”
“No,” responded Moore, in an absent manner. The subject seemed to have no interest for him; he did not pursue it. After sitting for some time gazing at the fire with a preoccupied air, he suddenly turned his head.
“Hark!” said he. “Did you hear wheels?”
Rising, he went to the window, opened it, and listened. He soon closed it. “It is only the sound of the wind rising,” he remarked, “and the rivulet a little swollen, rushing down the hollow. I expected those wagons at six; it is near nine now.”
“Seriously, do you suppose that the putting up of this new machinery will bring you into danger?” inquired Malone. “Helstone seems to think it will.”
“I only wish the machines — the frames — were safe here, and lodged within the walls of this mill. Once put up, I defy the frame-breakers. Let them only pay me a visit and take the consequences. My mill is my castle.”
“One despises such low scoundrels,” observed Malone, in a profound vein of reflection. “I almost wish a party would call upon you tonight; but the road seemed extremely quiet as I came along. I saw nothing astir.”
“You came by the Redhouse?”
“Yes.”
“There would be nothing on that road. It is in the direction of Stilbro’ the risk lies.”
“And you think there is risk?”
“What these fellows have done to others they may do to me. There is only this difference: most of the manufacturers seem paralyzed when they are attacked. Sykes, for instance, when his dressing-shop was set on fire and burned to the ground, when the cloth was torn from his tenters and left in shreds in the field, took no steps to discover or punish the miscreants: he gave up as tamely as a rabbit under the jaws of a ferret. Now I, if I know myself, should stand by my trade, my mill, and my machinery.”
“Helstone says these three are your gods; that the ‘Orders in Council’ are with you another name for the seven deadly sins; that Castlereagh is your Antichrist, and the war-party his legions.”
“Yes; I abhor all these things because they ruin me. They stand in my way. I cannot get on. I cannot execute my plans because of them. I see myself baffled at every turn by their untoward effects.”
“But you are rich and thriving, Moore?”
“I am very rich in cloth I cannot sell. You should step into my warehouse yonder, and observe how it is piled to the roof with pieces. Roakes and Pearson are in the same condition. America used to be their market, but the Orders in Council have cut that off.”
Malone did not seem prepared to carry on briskly a conversation of this sort. He began to knock the heels of his boots together, and to yawn.
“And then to think,” continued Mr. Moore who seemed too much taken up with the current of his own thoughts to note the symptoms of his guest’s ennui — “to think that these ridiculous gossips of Whinbury and Briarfield will keep pestering one about being married! As if there was nothing to be done in life but to ‘pay attention,’ as they say, to some young lady, and then to go to church with her, and then to start on a bridal tour, and then to run through a round of visits, and then, I suppose, to be ‘having a family.’ Oh, que le diable emporte!” He broke off the aspiration into which he was launching with a certain energy, and added, more calmly, “I believe women talk and think only of these things, and they naturally fancy men’s minds similarly occupied.”
“Of course — of course,” assented Malone; “but never mind them.” And he whistled, looked impatiently round, and seemed to feel a great want of something. This time Moore caught and, it appeared, comprehended his demonstrations.
“Mr. Malone,” said he, “you must require