Sophia thrived, and grew into an active little girl; and her blue eyes began to take a very definite view of the New House world.
It was not, perhaps, the kindliest possible view, for Sophia was under no illusions about her relations; they seemed to her a dull and undistinguished lot. There was her father: a stern elderly man, rather heavy in body, with hair growing out of his ears, of whom everyone was afraid except Sophia (and even she a little). He was, of course, the best cloth manufacturer in the Ire Valley, with the best mill, the first to be lighted by gas in the valley, equipped with the best machinery: so much Sophia took for granted. He also brought her presents every market day from Annotsfield, which was agreeable, and if anybody forbade her to do anything, she had only to run to her father and he would arrange things so that she could do it. But she was not really, not at the bottom of her heart, very fond of him; she respected him because from time to time he whipped her violently for naughtiness to her mother; she liked to ride on his shoulder, to be swung about in his strong arms, to receive tit-bits from his plate at table, to be displayed to admiring callers at the mill as her father’s clever little daughter, to know herself the queen of his heart. But it was only rarely that she had any deep feeling for him. When he was all dressed for market, very much washed and shaved, with his silver spurs and his watch and his signet ring and his fine new whip and his best coat, and sat astride his big new horse, looking very rich and commanding, then Sophia loved him, and ran about him as he rode off-getting much too close to the horse’s feet in her mother’s opinion, but never receiving any hurt, trust Sophia the lover of horses for that!—jumping up and down ecstatically, her blue eyes sparkling with admiration. But in his mill coat she did not like him nearly so well; she hated him to tell her she resembled his mother, and if he revealed any knowledge of the intimacies of a little girl’s clothes and personal life, she simply loathed him. In a word, Sophia did not like Will when he was homely with her; to her mind fathers should be majestic, godlike creatures, and any lapse from this ideal on her father’s part irritated Sophia intensely.
After her father there came her mother, and then her two brothers, Joth and Brigg. Oh! Of course there was old Grandpapa Brigg upstairs, poor old thing; but he was dying; he hardly counted, sometimes Sophia forgot him for days together. She knew he loved to see her, but he was so nasty to look at, she was sure father wouldn’t want her to go into his room; father would say so if he were here, protested Sophia, weeping and dragging back on the perplexed Mary’s hand. Sometimes, however, Joth would overhear one of these little scuffles, and then he came and took his little sister’s hand with a stern look and led her into the dying man’s room; Sophia at once became quite quiet and nice, and prattled charmingly. Yes, there was of course old Grandpapa Brigg, but he hardly counted; after father in the family came mother. Sophia was probably fonder of her mother than she would care to admit. Outwardly her manner to Mary was rough and careless; Mary’s mind and hands were much slower than her daughter’s, and Sophia found this very provoking. But it was impossible for anyone, and certainly for a bright forward child like Sophia, to live with Mary and not perceive the truth, the gentleness and the beauty of her character; so Sophia, though she was rude and naughty to her mother, sometimes even stamping at her and shouting, “Don’t you see?” in uncontrollable impatience, was yet very touchy if anyone else ventured to criticise her, and once threw a bowl of milk at a maid who muttered something sneering about one of Mary’s timid orders.
For Sophia had the Oldroyd temper in a quite alarming degree; she was wilful and high-spirited by nature, and made much more so by her father’s unwise spoiling of her. Everyone in Syke Mill knew that it was ill to thwart her; she was over free with her hands, the men said crossly, and they were rather sarcastic to her when Will was not by. On the other hand, she had a singular passion for maimed and damaged animals and insects; she would spend long minutes trying to rescue a silly fly which was dashing itself against the window-pane, or righting a fluffy caterpillar which had fallen upside down. Sometimes she screamed at them in pure rage at their stupidity in avoiding her when she was only trying to help them, but she usually completed their rescue and watched their subsequent careers with real tenderness. She kept a tame white mouse in a box of Brigg’s contriving; Sophia’s mouse was a most important personage in the Oldroyd household, and woe betide anyone who used him inconsiderately. Brigg happening, one evening when all the family was sitting together, to jar the animal’s cage with his arm—he was at all times rather a clumsy fellow—Sophia rushed at him, and with clenched teeth and fury in every line of her small face, struck him as hard as she could on the forearm, repeatedly. Poor Brigg was so taken aback and upset by blows from his darling little Sophia that he looked almost ready to cry, blushed to the ears and exclaimed “Sophy!” in reproachful wonder: whereupon Sophia, deeply ashamed of herself, fled under the table and wept bitterly. This disturbed Will, who looked up from his paper to ask crossly what they were doing to the child; and eventually the injured Brigg had to descend to hands and knees, pet her and caress her, and coax her to come out and sit on his knee by the promise of a lump of sugar. Joth of course disapproved of this; he told Brigg severely that he spoiled Sophia almost as much as their father did.
“Well, if I do?” said Brigg cheerfully, burying his chin in Sophia’s fuzzy mop of red-gold hair.
“Oh, don’t take any notice of Joth,” urged Sophia in her high childish voice, throwing her arms around Brigg’s neck: “He’s so supurior.”
Will laughed so heartily at this, quite rustling the paper in his glee, that Sophia perceived she had unwittingly made a hit, and repeated the word, and it presently became an acknowledged family joke to speak of Joth as “supurior,” even Mary mildly and fondly twitting her son with it at times. Joth always received this with a lofty smile; it was a pity, he said in his stately tones, that Sophia could not learn to pronounce her words better, but still, it was something gained that she knew so long a word at all, and for his part, he did not deny that there was a certain appropriateness in the epithet. (When Joth used long, eloquent words like this Mary and Brigg looked at him admiringly, Sophia fidgeted, and Will sniffed.)
Sophia’s shrewd little mind had a very clear notion of the differences between her two brothers. They both loved her, but they loved her in different ways; Brigg made tops for her, Joth taught her to read and write. Brigg, a lively bouncing lad with a broad, comical face which he could pull into the funniest shapes, was very good-natured; if Sophia did not want to go to sleep at night, and wailed just loud enough to disturb her father but not enough to anger him, Brigg would almost always be sent upstairs to see what was wrong, and then he and Sophia would have the jolliest times together; they pummelled each other and rolled about till Sophia was quite helpless with laughter; then Joth’s severe handsome face would appear in the doorway, and he would repeat gloomily his father’s command that Brigg was to come downstairs at once and let Sophia go to sleep. Brigg and Sophia then kissed long and rapturously, with many violent hugs, before they would consent to part; during these farewells Sophia sparkled over Brigg’s shoulder at Joth with some immature notion of making her elder brother jealous. Rarely could Joth resist that brilliant little face; he would smile in spite of himself, reluctantly but lovingly; then smooth Sophia’s tumbled cot, tuck her up with gentle hands, and place one solemn kiss in the middle of her forehead before going downstairs.
In the daytime Brigg was always to be found in the Syke Mill dyehouse, with clogs on his feet, clad in an enormous blue smock which reached to his very chin, and surrounded by big pans full of hot dye, into which he threatened to drop Sophia when she pulled the strings of his apron undone at the waist, playfully requesting her to choose her colour at once. Brigg was not nearly a man grown—though already very proud of some tentative black whiskers—when his father made him head of the dyehouse; Will was never gracious enough to put the matter into words, but there was a kind of feeling in New House that he thought highly of Brigg’s dyeing. Joth sometimes, when the family were at table together, magnanimously repeated some commendation of the Syke Mill dyeing which he had heard a merchant customer make; the perspiring and delighted Brigg looked eagerly at his father to see if it were true, and Will, sniffing, occasionally muttered a word or two of corroboration. Sophia was well aware that Brigg adored his father, and thought it rather silly of him; she also unconsciously despised Brigg because of his apron and his funny-coloured hands; what excited her, made her heart beat deliciously as she grew older, was to hear Brigg and his father having a row. Brigg had always been so much his father’s willing slave that the first time he ventured to contradict him the roof nearly flew off the mill in sheer astonishment, and all the men present at the scene stopped work and stood gaping. Will was so astonished himself that he coloured fierily, and shouted at his son, tapping the snippet of cloth he held with his second finger to emphasise his words. Brigg thereupon turned crimson and cried in his deep rough tones:
“It’s a lie! The man’s a fool! He doesn’t know what he’s talking about!”
Sophia flew off to New House to tell her mother that Brigg and father were having a row.
“Never!” cried Mary, almost dropping grandfather’s gruel in astonishment.
“Yes, they are,” persisted Sophia. “It’s about the dyeing of a piece.” Seeing her mother quite confounded, she went on eagerly: “Shall I go back and see how they’re going on?”
Mary gave a dubious assent, and Sophia rushed back across the yard.
Since then it had become understood that from time to time, when the grumblings of merchants about the dyeing of pieces reached a certain pitch, Will and Brigg were likely to have a row. Will, who heard the grumblers in person and had to smooth them down, would on his return from Annotsfield, his store of patience quite exhausted, sometimes rush into the dyehouse and storm at Brigg. On every other subject that Will chose to storm at Brigg—his love affairs in Marthwaite village, for example, to which the absence of any suitable society at New House sometimes drove him—Brigg was crushed by his father’s reprimands, and expressed a sincere penitence; but he simply could not endure to be stormed at about dyeing. There was a tale current in Syke Mill that he had once actually told his father that he, Brigg, understood dyeing better than anybody in the Ire Valley, whatever his name was; and Sophia, though she hardly dare believe this story, yet almost did so, for there was an element of violence in the good-natured Brigg, he was an Oldroyd after all. Besides, Brigg had once confidentially assured Sophia, with much repetition and fist-banging, that merchants didn’t know when cloth was dyed well and when it wasn’t; they were ignorant fools, he said, and merely objected to the dyeing or anything else they could think of to get a few shillings off the price. Sophia believed this too; it seemed to fit in with her notions of human nature. Besides, argued Sophia shrewdly, Syke Mill prospered, so the merchants evidently continued to buy cloth from there, so the dyeing couldn’t be bad. So it was only in the nature of things, and not alarming, that there should be these occasional rows between Brigg and his father; they were loud, hearty, jolly rows, with no malice borne when they were over; it seemed to Sophia that it was better to have a row like that than to go on snapping at each other bitterly like Joth and Will did, but Joth did not think so, Joth hated rows. He once made an allusion to this at table, saying scornfully that no man who professed to be a gentleman shouted at another.
“Well, I don’t profess to be a gentleman,” said Will grimly, taking the remark to himself, for whom it was certainly intended. “I’m a cloth manufacturer.”
“A good answer,” admitted Joth gravely.
“Damn you!” roared Will, spluttering over his ale: “Don’t begin to approve of me, you young whipper-snapper! It’s bad enough when you don’t, but I can’t stand it at any price when you do.”
Joth at once rose up and stalked from the room, leaving his supper half eaten on the table. Mary gave a soft exclamation of distress, but the others went on eating calmly—they were used to this sort of behaviour from Joth. The oddest things set him off: a paragraph read from the paper by his father, a complaint about one of the men from Brigg. One day a filthy old beggar came up to Will as he was crossing the yard with his two sons to New House for the midday meal; without much heeding him Will threw him a coin or two. Immediately Joth, his face as white as snow, flew into the house without a word for Sophia, who was standing in the doorway to greet them, and locked himself into his room at the top of the house. When Mary was told of this she went out into the yard to look at the beggar, who was wandering off up the lane, muttering; she too turned pale, and coming into the house told her husband with an expression of aversion that it was Ben Walker. Sophia naturally was all eagerness to know who Ben Walker was, but got such a scowl from her father, the vein pulsing in his forehead, that she gave up her question and applied herself to her spoon and platter instead. When the family were all well served Mary left them and went upstairs, and they could hear her appealing, presumably through the keyhole to her son.
“There’s a nice cooked dinner for you, Joth,” she pleaded in her rich loving tones.
“That might bring Brigg, but it won’t bring Joth,” thought Sophia shrewdly, and the event proved her right; before they had finished their meal they saw Joth, still very pale, limping across the yard to the mill, dinnerless.
There were other differences between Brigg and Joth. In the mill Joth did not wear an apron and stand amid coloured pools; he was always to be found in the counting-house, writing away in his beautiful slender pointed hand—Sophia would never be able to write like that, so it was no use trying—or adding up long columns of figures. It was perfectly understood in the mill and the house that Joth was exceedingly good at writing and figures, and his father relied on him absolutely. He worked very hard, too, early and late, and sometimes even brought big ledgers or masses of papers written in spidery hands to the house at night and toiled over them. Sophia liked to see Joth bending over papers; his fine head with the glossy dark waving hair looked its best then; his pale stern face had an air of content, his dark flashing eyes seemed happy. When he stood up Joth did not look so handsome; his body was rather puny, Sophia thought, and his limp was really a great pity. But sitting at his shining new table in the mill, surrounded by books and papers, replying with haughty accuracy when Will put his head round the door and shouted some complicated question at him—ah, Joth looked noble then! When he was reading to Grandfather Brigg, too, at night, or telling the old man of Brigg’s prowess in dyeing, or listening to his dull silly tales—yes, then too there was a lovely look in Joth’s fine eyes; he looked noble then. Joth was noble, reflected Sophia; yes, he was; but it seemed to her a dull kind of nobleness, just as Brigg’s seemed a dull kind of jollity. Everything at New House seemed to Sophia dull and homely, and it made her feel perverse and cross. It was all so disappointing. She loved her father and mother and Joth and Brigg and Syke Mill and New House and the Ire, of course, in the ordinary prosaic way; she could see that they were all really quite nice people and places, and noble and kind, in a way; but her restless mind wanted more than that; she wanted to adore somebody madly, to protect them fiercely (like she protected the mouse), to play a terrific part in tremendous scenes, to be a great personage, perhaps even a queen; life must be wild and gorgeous and exciting if it were to do justice to the brilliant, the beautiful, the witty, the dazzling, the immensely ambitious Sophia Oldroycd.
One dark, cold autumn night Jonathan, after locking the mill door behind the last of the men, instead of crossing the yard homeward went round the corner of the new gas house and stood by the old water-wheel, looking at the Ire. He had had a trying day, and felt that sick aversion to the circumstances of his life which since his mother’s marriage perennially attacked him. The Ire was in spate, and poured thunderously by him; now and again he caught the white flash of the cap of a wave. The wind was cold, there was a damp drizzle in the air and the wet grass soaked his feet; but Jonathan felt soothed and relieved; he threw up his head and sighed with pleasure as the rain damped his hair and brow. All the rest of the family, he mused with a scornful glance towards the lighted windows of New House, would think the night horrid and himself mad for staying out in it, for none of them had any poetry in their veins, they understood only the material things of life, comfortable chairs and good things to eat. Jonathan felt at one and the same time despairingly lonely because he was the only person of the household who could enjoy this wet wild night, and proud of his loneliness; he would not have sacrificed his spiritual isolation for any happiness New House could afford him; but yet he yearned for, craved, desired so much that the desire made his heart ache and burn, somebody to be friends with, somebody who would understand him and not think his ideas foolish and silly. That there were such men alive in Yorkshire, if only he had their acquaintance, he knew from the newspaper, which just then was full of Wilberforce’s campaign against West Indian slavery. There was a man for you! A man who endured obloquy and persecution gladly in order to further this great and noble cause. Oh, how Jonathan longed to know such men as he! Jonathan would have liked to go to some of the anti-slavery meetings which were being held all up and down the West Riding, but when he mentioned them tentatively to his father, Will stared, and gave it as his opinion that those sort of things could get on very well without Jonathan. So Jonathan remained at Marthwaite, lonely. But he was sure that the wind and the trees, the grass and the powerful stream, were on his side, and from them he drew strength and consolation. The drizzle thickened into rain, and came down heavily; Jonathan, frowning and tossing his head, obstinately stayed where he was until he was wet almost to the skin. He preferred this cold, dark loneliness where he could be himself to a comfort which was ruled by Will. At last he reluctantly admitted that to stay there longer would be foolish, and limped across to the shelter of his home with a heavy heart.
The family had eaten their supper without waiting for him, and Sophia was in bed, with Brigg, as usual, upstairs in his parents’ room supposed to be calming her and getting her to sleep. Will was reading the Leeds Mercury, Mary was knitting on the other side of the hearth. She smiled lovingly at her son, but Jonathan’s heart sank lower than ever at sight of this domestic interior; he felt even lonelier, less wanted, more out of tune with his home than before. He sat down to the tray of food which had been left for him, and reluctantly, without appetite, began to eat.
“You’re very wet, lad,” said Will in a kindly tone, looking at him over the top of the newspaper. “Is the rain as bad as that? Come near the fire.”
“Yes,” thought Jonathan in bitterness of spirit: “Food and warmth, that’s all they understand.” Aloud he said shortly: “I am quite comfortable here, thank you.”
“Have it your own way,” returned Will, irritated, as always, by his son’s aloofness. He turned the news-sheet over, making a few technical enquiries about the work which had kept Jonathan late, as he did so; then fell to reading again. Mary drew her chair nearer to her son, and smiled upon him as he ate; she did not, however, speak, because Will did not like interruptions while he read the paper. In the silence the gas jet flared and bubbled, Sophia’s commanding tones and Brigg’s obliging giggle drifted down the stairs, and Jonathan’s heart sank into an abyss. Even dear little Sophia, his own sister, preferrred Brigg to him, he thought; ah, he was lonely, lonely!
Something in the Mercury seemed to be irritating Will. He exclaimed “Pshaw!” loudly, and bent over the paper more earnestly, following the lines with his finger; every line seemed to please him less than the one before; he pished and tushed, his colour deepening all the while, and finally threw the paper violently from him, crying: “The man’s a fool!” The noise from upstairs happening to be rather loud at the moment, his irritation turned itself on this; rushing out of the room, he shouted furiously up the stairs:
“Brigg, will you make that child be quiet! She’s to go to sleep at once.”
“She says she isn’t sleepy, father,” replied Brigg from above, meekly.
“Sophia!” called Will in a stern voice, preparatory to a scolding. He could not, however, proceed further, for Sophia rushed joyously out of her little cot and down the stairs into her father’s arms. “You’re a naughty little girl,” said Will in his fondest and most loving tones, holding the child tightly to him: “You’re a bad lass. Do you hear?” Sophia, her face buried in his neck, merely laughed and gurgled. Will, kissing her bright hair, set her down on the stairs and began to command her to go to bed and sleep.
“Oh! It’s cold!” interrupted Sophia, lifting a delicious little foot from the wooden stair with an expression of distaste.
Will perforce took her up again. “You put me to bed, father,” urged Sophia.“ Well,” hesitated Will. “Yes! Yes!” said Sophia imperiously, casting her arms so tightly about his neck that she nearly choked him. “Well, say good night to your mother, then,” commanded Will, for Mary had come to the door of the room with her knitting in her hand and was watching them fondly.
Sophia leant out of her father’s arms over the banister to Mary, and kissed her.
Jonathan, hearing the sound of the kiss and in a rush of tenderness towards his little sister wanting a kiss himself, got up and limped to the door, but he was too late; the procession—Brigg, Will carrying Sophia, and Mary—had already started towards Sophia’s cot.
“Good night, Sophia,” called Jonathan in grave but wistful tones.
“Good night, Joth,” said his sister carelessly, without turning her head.
Jonathan, feeling even lonelier than before, turned back into the empty room. The newspaper which his father had thrown down was lying untidily on the floor: he mechanically picked it up and straightened it, and then idly wondered what item in it had vexed his father so. “Some rival’s success,” thought Jonathan with weary scorn. He turned the page; his eye fell on the heading: YORKSHIRE SLAVERY. “What!” exclaimed Jonathan, startled. He seized the sheet more eagerly, and read on. Beneath the heading came a letter.
To the Editor of the “Leeds Mercury.”
“It is the pride of Britain that a slave cannot exist on her soil; and if I read the genius of her constitution aright, I find that slavery is most abhorrent to it—that the air which Britons breathe is free—the ground on which they tread is sacred to liberty.” Rev. R. W. Hamilton’s speech at the Anti-Slavery Meeting held in The Cloth Hall Yard, Sept. 22nd, 1830.
“A very fine and proper sentiment,” thought Jonathan, his heart beating high in sympathy. “What has this letter-writer to say of it, pray?”
Gentlemen, he read:
No heart responded with truer accents to the sounds of liberty which were heard in the Leeds Cloth Hall Yard, on the 22nd instant, than did mine. One shade alone obscured my pleasure. The pious and able champions of negro liberty and colonial rights should, if I mistake not, before they had travelled so far as the West Indies, have sojourned in our own immediate neighbourhood, and have directed the attention of the meeting to scenes of misery, acts of oppression, and victims of slavery, even on the threshold of our homes.
Let truth speak out, appalling as the statement may appear. The fact is true. Thousands of our fellow-creatures and fellow-subjects, both male and female, the miserable inhabitants of Yorkshire towns, are this very moment existing in a state of slavery. Innocent victims at the accursed shrine of avarice, they are every morning compelled, not by the cart-whip of the negro slave-driver, but by the dread of the equally appalling thong or strap of the overlooker, to hasten, half-dressed, but not half fed, to those magazines of British infantile slavery—the worsted mills in the town and neighbourhood of Bradford!
Thousands of little children, both male and female, from seven to fourteen years of age, are daily compelled to labour from six o’clock in the morning to seven in the evening, with only—Britons, blush while you read it!—with only thirty minutes allowed for reading and recreation. Poor infants! Would that I had Brougham’s eloquence, that I might rouse the hearts of the nation, and make every Briton swear, “These innocents shall be free!”
“Ah!” cried Jonathan. Dropping the paper on the table, he covered his face with his hands, and burst into uncontrollable sobs. So he was right, he was right, he had always been right, about the wretchedness of the little pieceners, the bitter wrong of their long hours of toil; other people thought he was right, other people were taking up the cause of the oppressed; this noble writer, whoever he was, sounded a trumpet-call to action. To arms, to arms, thought Jonathan, his soul afire, his blood thrilling through his veins; there is a God in heaven, who will not for ever forget the injured and oppressed; there are noble men on the earth, who care for their brothers and will free them. Dear shall their blood be in His sight, thought Jonathan, and it shall be dear in mine. He snatched up the paper again; there was more in the letter, more! Wilt thou not resolve that Yorkshire children shall no more be slaves? “Aye, by God I will!” breathed Jonathan; “I swear it here and now.” Now he knew what was the matter with his life, why everything always seemed poisoned for him; it was because he had escaped from the mill, with no more damage than a bent leg, and left the other children in it to grow stunted and deformed. “But what can I do?” whispered Jonathan to himself, trembling with eagerness. “What can we do?” He turned to the paper again. Why should not children working in the worsted mills be protected by legislative enactments? demanded the writer of the letter, and signed himself Richard Oastler.
“That’s it!” cried Jonathan. “An Act of Parliament!” He felt uplifted, exalted, as though there were new hope in his life, new fire in his veins; he threw up his head as though he had heard a real trumpet-call instead of a spiritual one—and found that the other three had returned to the room, and Will had his eyes fixed suspiciously upon his son’s white and working face.
“Yon fellow wants to ruin the cloth trade, seemingly,” grumbled Will, with a nod of his head towards the offending paper.
“I don’t think so, father,” said Jonathan in his clear ringing tones.
Will’s eyes flashed. “You think!” he said cuttingly. “What does a young fellow like you know about it, I’d like to know?”
“I’ve been a piecener, father,” replied Jonathan.
Will coloured, and shot his son an angry glance. “And what are mills to do that run by water power, pray?” he demanded, turning to a more favouring aspect of his theme. “You know as well as I do that some days they’re lucky if they can run an hour, and then the children play all day; then there’s rain, and the mills can run eighteen hours, and even then they’ve not made up the time lost for drought.”
“Let them run on steam, as you do, father,” persisted Jonathan. If he had left the matter there all might have been well, but he was moved and excited, and could not help going on to voice what he really felt, what he had felt, without knowing it, for years. “Besides, better a little less cloth,” he declaimed with characteristic sententiousness: “if it means a happier people.”
“What!” cried Will, revolted. “Less cloth! I never heard such twaddle in my life. Less cloth! You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Father,” said Jonathan with solemn emphasis: “Would you like Sophia to be a piecener?”
Will crimsoned. “What in God’s name has Sophia to do with it?” he said angrily. “Leave Sophia alone.”
“If you were a poor man she’d be one,” persisted Jonathan.
“Well, I’m not a poor man,” roared his father.
“No,” cried Jonathan, suddenly losing his self-control: “You’ve become rich by oppressing little children.”
“By God!” shouted Will: “You shan’t say that twice.” He rushed at his son with uplifted fist; Jonathan folded his arms, and awaited his attack contemptuously.
“Will, Will!” screamed Mary, flinging herself between them. “Don’t strike him!”
“Well, take him away, then,” cried Will, allowing her to draw down his arm. “I’ve had as much as I can stand from him to-night, by God I have.”
“Joth!” pleaded Mary, turning to her son.
“You need not be troubled, mother,” said Jonathan loftily. “I will retire.”
He walked out of the room with his head in the air, and went upstairs. As he passed his parents’ door, he heard a little voice saying: “Joth!” He paused.
“What is it, Sophia?” he demanded gravely.
“What’s father shouting for?” asked Sophia in a gleeful whisper.
Jonathan gave an impatient exclamation and passed on.
When he reached his own room he found he was trembling with emotion. His teeth quite chattered. He was ashamed of this unmanly display, repressed it firmly, lighted his lanrp—gas had been installed on the ground floor only of New House—and, arranging his writing materials on a small table, sat down and began to compose a letter to the Leeds Mercury. Rich, emphatic, high-sounding sentences flew from his pen as he informed the editor of that paper that in the Ire Valley mills the children’s hours of labour were longer than those mentioned by Mr. Oastler, and in many of them no time at all was allowed for breakfast or tea. As this last item was not true of Syke Mill he added, with a great sense of doing his father every possible justice: There are some honourable exceptions. Every Christian—every man, he went on, must blush to see the degradation to which these children are brought by the avarice of their employers. He had got so far when Brigg stuck his head round the door, and after looking awkwardly about him for a moment, came in and sat down on his brother’s bed.
“Father is mad,” he proffered presently in a half sulky, half admiring tone.
“I am sorry for that,” said Jonathan.
“Not you,” said Brigg shrewdly.
As Jonathan made no reply to this, but sat gravely considering his next sentence, Brigg lolled back on his brother’s pillows, and threw his arms above his head. From this position he remarked: “I read that fellow Oastler’s letter.”
“Did you?” said Jonathan, turning eagerly. “What did you think of it?”
“Who is he, anyway?” demanded Brigg. “I never heard of him. I bet he’s never been in a mill in his life. He dates from Fixby Hall; father says he thinks he’s somebody’s steward. I bet he’s never touched a piece of cloth in his life.”
“What’s that got to do with it?” said Jonathan angrily.
“Well, Joth!” said Brigg, quite astounded by this perversity.
Jonathan, vexed, turned back to his letter. After a while the chimes of Marthwaite Church clock, striking an hour, floated to the brothers’ ears. Brigg sat up promptly.
“I must go,” he said.
“Where to?” demanded his brother sharply, laying down his pen.
“Those that ask fewest questions get told fewest lies,” returned Brigg cheerfully.
“Brigg!” exclaimed Jonathan, much distressed. “Another girl!” Brigg winked and laughed.
“Oh, Brigg, how can you?” cried his brother sorrowfully, following him to the door. “I do wish you wouldn’t.” As Brigg continued to wear a pleased smile on his broad high-coloured face, he added: “Father will be angry.”
“I shall be sorry for that,” said Brigg, mimicking what his brother had said a few moments earlier.
“It’s all very well mocking me,” said Jonathan sternly: “But you know father will be angry, and you will be sorry.”
It was on the tip of Brigg’s tongue to say that as far as he could see, his father had done pretty much the same as Brigg, in his young days; but he remembered who Joth was in time to stop himself. Instead he remarked: “Don’t be so squeamish, Joth. If I should be a bit late,” he added, “I’ll throw a stone up at your window, and you might come down and let me in.”
“I shall do nothing of the sort,” said Jonathan in his sternest tone.
Brigg, who knew perfectly well that his brother would let him in, and would make him pay for the accommodation only by a lecture, laughed and patted Joth’s shoulder affectionately.
“Promise me you won’t do anything you’re ashamed of,” anxiously pleaded Joth.
Brigg laughed again, and with a merry backward glance proceeded to slide down the banisters; then slipped out of the house by the back door to keep his appointment.
He had not returned two hours later, and Jonathan, his letter finished, lay awake in bed, listening for him, so that when the door of his room opened he naturally thought it was his brother come to announce his return, and starting up, said softly: “Brigg?”
“It’s me, Jonathan,” replied his mother.
She had not called him Jonathan for years, and his heart thrilled to it. “Mother!” he exclaimed. He put out his hand in the darkness and caught her sleeve, felt for her arm and drew her to him. Mary sat down on the bed and stroked his hair. It was like it used to be before her marriage, thought Jonathan, just the two of them together. A flood of memories rushed upon him: worn out by the emotional excitement of his quarrel with his father, he could not withstand them; he buried his face in the crook of his mother’s arm and kissed the soft hollow passionately. “Mother, mother!” he cried softly, and his hot tears scalded her flesh.
“Jonathan, Jonathan,” moaned Mary in her lovely voice: “I wish you wouldn’t anger your father so.”
Jonathan’s whole body stiffened. “Is that all you’ve come to say to me?” he demanded coldly.
“What’s this man Hoastler to you?” wept Mary.
“Oastler, mother,” Jonathan corrected her savagely. After a pause he went on: “I must do what my conscience tells me is right, mother. I’ve been a piecener and I know what their lives are. It’s only right to tell you,” he concluded sternly: “That I have written to the Leeds Mercury giving facts which support Mr. Oastler’s letter. I shall despatch my letter to-morrow.”
“Oh, Joth!” murmured the anguished Mary. “Whatever will your father say?”
“Whatever he says you won’t hear it, mother,” said Jonathan eagerly, his protective love reasserting itself. “You mustn’t tell him. I shall tell him; I’ll tell him to-morrow morning at the mill. There’s no need for you to be concerned in it at all.”
“Joth, Joth,” murmured Mary. She took his head between her hands and kissed him fondly. Not concerned in it! When her two dearest (for Sophia would never be as dear to her as Joth) were at war! And that Joth should think she was afraid of Will, needed protection from his anger! It struck her as strange, sad and yet somehow a little humorous, that a son should not be able to understand that his mother had known his father before he was born. Will was, after all, a prior acquaintance—she had heard Joth use that phrase once, and it came back to her now. She smiled a little over this thought, holding Joth’s head against her heart, where it had so often lain in those bad days before she was Will’s wife. But when she had kissed her son again she went away very sad, for she saw that what she had always feared had come to pass: her husband and her son had found a subject to quarrel on for which each deeply cared, which involved the deepest principles of their lives. Strike at the cloth trade, at Syke Mill, and you struck the thing which Will, after Sophia, perhaps even before Sophia, cared for most: while the poor, the injured, the oppressed, were dearest in Joth’s sight. Yes, nature had formed them to quarrel, and now they had found something to quarrel about, thought Mary; and as she lay at Will’s side, listening to his heavy breathing and the light murmur of Sophia, her gentle soul shrank in fear from the coming struggle.
Her forebodings were amply justified. There was a fearful scene when Joth coldly and calmly told his father that he had despatched the letter, then a period of uneasy suspense, then a more fearful scene when the next week’s issue of the Leeds Mercury proved to contain the fateful document, father and son glaring at each other with tense muscles and dilated eyes, like animals ready to spring at each other’s throats.
His son’s letter infuriated Will in a variety of ways. He thought it silly, high-flown and inaccurate in its facts, we well as treacherous to himself and Syke Mill; and he hardly knew whether to be more hurt because Jonathan had dated it from New House and thus revealed his identity, or because he had signed it Bamforth instead of Oldroyd, and thus partly concealed it. “Bamforth, forsooth!” exclaimed Will furiously, pointing out the offending word to Mary later. It had never occurred to him that Jonathan’s name was Bamforth; Jonathan was his eldest son; Will had married his mother—a little late, perhaps, but better late than never. “Bamforth, forsooth!” repeated Will, dashing away the paper irritably as he remembered that his wife could not read.
“It’s his real name, Will,” protested Mary, “after all.”
At this Will showed such a disposition to enquire from an attorney how Jonathan’s name could be altered, that the terrified Mary, who guessed how Jonathan would look on that, positively asked her husband about the contents of Joth’s letter in order to distract him from its signature. At this reminder of his wrongs Will stamped and swore, his face and neck swelling and crimson with rage; and fuming across the yard burst into the office where Jonathan sat over the Syke Mill accounts to inform him again, shaking the crumpled newspaper in his face the while, that he was the damnedest young fool in the Ire Valley, and that Will was not going to stand any nonsense of that kind and his son might as well know it. (In reality the impossibility of breaking Mary’s heart by doing anything too drastic to Jonathan held Will in an iron band, just as the impossibility of breaking his mother’s heart by leaving New House held Jonathan; both men were fretted by this obligation, which they did not consciously recognise, but it held them securely.)
Jonathan did not mind his father’s anger, which he expected, but he was surprised and deeply wounded by the unexpected attitude of Brigg. Brigg, who was not quick on the uptake about anything but dyeing, watched his father and brother raging at each other over the copy of the Mercury with a puzzled air; then he retired to a corner of the dyehouse with the paper, and slowly read the offending letter, pondering solemnly over every word. Next morning he came to Joth with a look of hurt bewilderment and reproach in his bright brown eyes, and enquired:
“Did you really write that letter, Joth?”
“Yes,” said Jonathan firmly.
Brigg gave him a look of deep reproach, shook his head and went away muttering. An hour later he came up to Joth again, and enquired in a hurt tone: “But why didn’t you say it was all right at Syke Mill?”
“Because it isn’t all right,” protested Jonathan, exasperated. “The children work thirteen or fourteen hours a day, you know they do.”
“They have time off for meals,” objected Brigg: “And anyway, it’s all right in Syke Mill. Father’s a good master. You shouldn’t have written that letter.”
This from Brigg simply amazed Jonathan, who was not accustomed to be criticised by his younger brother, and he replied hotly. Brigg looked at him doubtfully and went away; later in the day Jonathan heard him explaining the matter solemnly to Sophia as a dreadful blunder on poor Joth’s part. Sophia thought it all very vulgar; it would have been much better, she considered, if the Oldroyds had been dukes or princes or something aristocratic of that kind, and then these vulgar questions of hours and newspapers and mills would not arise. Jonathan, however, who did not know this, was unutterably hurt by Brigg’s attempt to alienate Sophia; what was Sophia to Brigg, after all? Sophia was Jonathan’s sister, not Brigg’s. Jonathan tried hard not to say anything to Sophia about the Oastler correspondence, but eventually his pride was melted by his love, and he drew her a lurid picture of the lives of the little pieceners. “You see, Sophia,” he informed her gravely: “You would be a piecener if father were a poor man.” Sophia, affronted, raised her voice and wept; Will of course was furious when he heard the cause of her tears, and Brigg said loudly that it was a shame to torment the poor little thing. It was now Jonathan’s turn to look at his brother reproachfully, but Brigg, though he coloured, simply turned aside his head and said nothing. That night he went off to Marthwaite without telling his brother, and when Jonathan, hearing his footsteps outside several hours later, went down to let him in, it appeared that Brigg had made other arrangements, for Jonathan met the maid servant on the stairs. Jonathan, angry and disgusted, told Brigg what he thought of him: it was bad enough, he said, to come in with one’s breath smelling of beer and that horrible look on one’s face—this referred to the sparkle which always dwelt in Brigg’s bright eyes when he had been making love—but to drag a maid out of her bed! The unkindness! The lack of consideration! (Joth refrained from dwelling on the moral dangers of the proceeding for fear of putting ideas into his brother’s head.) Formerly Brigg had borne these harangues with good-tempered meekness, but to-night he flared, up, and shouted at the top of his voice:
“Anyhow, it’s better than writing that letter!”
“Hush!” said Jonathan, with an apprehensive glance at his father’s door.
“Aye, you may well say hush!” threw out Brigg in a vindictive tone. He shouldered his brother aside and went off to his room without another word.
Jonathan, lonely and very miserable, collected the offending Mercury from the parlour and took it upstairs with him. He spread it out on the bed, and kneeling down, read his own cadences carefully through twice, not without some of the pride of the author who sees himself in print for the first time, which, however, he sternly repressed. When he had finished he struck the paper lightly with his outstretched hand.
“It’s a good letter!” he said. “Every word of it is true, and I shall not withdraw one single accusation.”
His handsome face was set, and the vein down the centre of his forehead pulsed with determination, as he climbed into bed.