"There"s iron, they say, in all our blood,And a grain or two perhaps is good;But his, he makes me harshly feel,Has got a little too much of steel."
ANON.
"Margaret!" said Mr. Hale, as he returned from showing his guestdownstairs; "I could not help watching your face with some anxiety,when Mr. Thornton made his confession of having been a shop-boy. Iknew it all along from Mr. Bell; so I was aware of what was coming;but I half expected to see you get up and leave the room."
"Oh, papa! you don"t mean that you thought me so silly? I really likedthat account of himself better than anything else he said. Everythingelse revolted me, from its hardness; but he spoke about himself sosimply--with so little of the pretence that makes the vulgarity of shop-people, and with such tender respect for his mother, that I was lesslikely to leave the room then than when he was boasting about Milton,as if there was not such another place in the world; or quietly professingto despise people for careless, wasteful improvidence, without everseeming to think it his duty to try to make them different,--to give themanything of the training which his mother gave him, and to which heevidently owes his position, whatever that may be. No! his statement ofhaving been a shop-boy was the thing I liked best of all."
"I am surprised at you, Margaret," said her mother. "You who werealways accusing people of being shoppy at Helstone! I don"t I think, Mr.
Hale, you have done quite right in introducing such a person to uswithout telling us what he had been. I really was very much afraid ofshowing him how much shocked I was at some parts of what he said.
His father "dying in miserable circumstances." Why it might have beenin the workhouse."
"I am not sure if it was not worse than being in the workhouse," repliedher husband. "I heard a good deal of his previous life from Mr. Bellbefore we came here; and as he has told you a part, I will fill up what heleft out. His father speculated wildly, failed, and then killed himself,because he could not bear the disgrace. All his former friends shrunkfrom the disclosures that had to be made of his dishonest gambling-wild,hopeless struggles, made with other people"s money, to regain hisown moderate portion of wealth. No one came forwards to help themother and this boy. There was another child, I believe, a girl; tooyoung to earn money, but of course she had to be kept. At least, nofriend came forwards immediately, and Mrs. Thornton is not one, Ifancy, to wait till tardy kindness comes to find her out. So they leftMilton. I knew he had gone into a shop, and that his earnings, withsome fragment of property secured to his mother, had been made tokeep them for a long time. Mr. Bell said they absolutely lived uponwater-porridge for years--how, he did not know; but long after thecreditors had given up hope of any payment of old Mr. Thornton"s debts(if, indeed, they ever had hoped at all about it, after his suicide,) thisyoung man returned to Milton, and went quietly round to each creditor,paying him the first instalment of the money owing to him. No noise-nogathering together of creditors--it was done very silently and quietly,but all was paid at last; helped on materially by the circumstance of oneof the creditors, a crabbed old fellow (Mr. Bell says), taking in Mr.
Thornton as a kind of partner."
"That really is fine," said Margaret. "What a pity such a nature should betainted by his position as a Milton manufacturer."
"How tainted?" asked her father.
"Oh, papa, by that testing everything by the standard of wealth. When hespoke of the mechanical powers, he evidently looked upon them only asnew ways of extending trade and making money. And the poor menaround him--they were poor because they were vicious--out of the paleof his sympathies because they had not his iron nature, and thecapabilities that it gives him for being rich."
"Not vicious; he never said that. Improvident and self-indulgent were hiswords."
Margaret was collecting her mother"s working materials, and preparingto go to bed. Just as she was leaving the room, she hesitated--she wasinclined to make an acknowledgment which she thought would pleaseher father, but which to be full and true must include a little annoyance.
However, out it came.
"Papa, I do think Mr. Thornton a very remarkable man; but personally Idon"t like him at all."
"And I do!" said her father laughing. "Personally, as you call it, and all. Idon"t set him up for a hero, or anything of that kind. But good night,child. Your mother looks sadly tired to-night, Margaret."
Margaret had noticed her mother"s jaded appearance with anxiety forsome time past, and this remark of her father"s sent her up to bed with adim fear lying like a weight on her heart. The life in Milton was sodifferent from what Mrs. Hale had been accustomed to live in Helstone,in and out perpetually into the fresh and open air; the air itself was sodifferent, deprived of all revivifying principle as it seemed to be here;the domestic worries pressed so very closely, and in so new and sordida form, upon all the women in the family, that there was good reason tofear that her mother"s health might be becoming seriously affected.
There were several other signs of something wrong about Mrs. Hale.