That evening, mother and son sat silent by the fire: Henry had his own sad and bitter thoughts; and Mrs. Little was now brooding over the words Henry had spoken in the afternoon; and presently her maternal anxieties found a copious vent. She related to him, one after another, all the outrages that had been perpetrated in Hillsborough, while he was a child, and had been, each in its turn, the town talk.
It was a subject on which, if her son had been older, and more experienced in her s.e.x, he would have closed her mouth promptly, she being a woman whose own nerves had received so frightful a shock by the manner of her husband"s death. But, inadvertently, he let her run on, till she told him how a poor grinder had been carried home to his wife, blinded and scorched with gunpowder, and another had been taken home, all bleeding, to his mother, so beaten and bruised with life-preservers, that he had laid between life and death for nine days, and never uttered one word all that time, in reply to all her prayers and tears.
Now Mrs. Little began these horrible narratives with a forced and unnatural calmness; but, by the time she got to the last; she had worked herself up to a paroxysm of sympathy with other wretched women in Hillsborough, and trembled all over, like one in an ague, for herself: and at last stretched out her shaking hands, and screamed to him, "Oh, Harry, Harry, have pity on your miserable mother! Think what these eyes of mine have seen--bleeding at my feet--there--there--I see it now"--(her eyes dilated terribly at the word)--"oh, promise me, for pity"s sake, that these--same--eyes--shall never see YOU brought and laid down bleeding like HIM!" With this she went into violent hysterics, and frightened her son more than all the ruffians in the town had ever frightened him.
She was a long time in this pitiable condition, and he nursed her: but at last her convulsion ceased, and her head rested on her son"s shoulder in a pitiable languor.
Henry was always a good son: but he never loved his mother so tenderly as he did this night. His heart yearned over this poor panting soul, so stately in form, yet so weak, so womanly, and lovable; his playmate in childhood; his sweet preceptor in boyhood; the best friend and most unselfish lover he had, or could ever hope to have, on earth; dear to him by her long life of loving sacrifice, and sacred by that their great calamity, which had fallen so much heavier on her than on him.
He soothed her, he fondled her, he kneeled at her feet, and promised her most faithfully he would never be brought home to her bruised or bleeding. No; if the Unions rejected his offer he would go back to London with her at once.
And so, thrust from Hillsborough by the trades, and by his fears for Miss Carden, and also drawn from it by his mother"s terrors, he felt himself a feather on the stream of Destiny; and left off struggling: beaten, heart-sick, and benumbed, he let the current carry him like any other dead thing that drifts.
He still plied the hammer, but in a dead-alive way.
He wrote a few cold lines to Mr. Jobson, to say that he thought it was time for a plain answer to be given to a business proposal. But, as he had no great hope the reply would be favorable, he awaited it in a state bordering on apathy. And so pa.s.sed a miserable week.
And all this time she, for whose sake he denied himself the joy and consolation of her company, though his heart ached and pined for it, had hard thoughts of him, and vented them too to Jael Dence.
The young are so hasty in all their judgments.
While matters were in this condition, Henry found, one morning, two fresh panes of gla.s.s broken in his window.
In these hardware works the windows seldom or never open: air is procured in all the rooms by the primitive method of breaking a pane here and a pane there; and the general effect is as unsightly as a human mouth where teeth and holes alternate. The incident therefore was nothing, if it had occurred in any other room; but it was not a thing to pa.s.s over in this room, secured by a Bramah lock, the key of which was in Henry"s pocket: the panes must have been broken from the outside. It occurred to him directly that a stone had been thrown in with another threatening scrawl.
But, casting his eye all round, he saw nothing of the kind about.
Then, for a moment, a graver suspicion crossed his mind: might not some detonating substance of a nature to explode when trodden upon, have been flung in? Hillsborough excelled in deviltries of this kind.
Henry thought of his mother, and would not treat the matter lightly or unsuspiciously. He stood still till he had lighted a lucifer match, and examined the floor of his room. Nothing.
He lighted a candle, and examined all the premises. Nothing.
But, when he brought his candle to the window, he made a discovery: the window had two vertical iron uprights, about three-quarters of an inch in circ.u.mference: and one of these revealed to his quick eye a bright horizontal line. It had been sawed with a fine saw.
Apparently an attempt had been made to enter his room from outside.
The next question was, had that attempt succeeded.
He tried the bar; it was not quite cut through.
He locked the forge up directly, and went to his handling room. There he remained till Mr. Cheetham entered the works; then he went to him, and begged him to visit his forge.
Mr. Cheetham came directly, and examined the place carefully.
He negatived, at once, the notion that any Hillsborough hand had been unable to saw through a bar of that moderate thickness. "No," said he, "they were disturbed, or else some other idea struck them all of a sudden; or else they hadn"t given themselves time, and are coming again to-morrow. I hope they are. By six o"clock to-night, I"ll have a common wooden shutter hung with six good hinges on each side, easy to open at the center; only, across the center, I"ll fix a Waterloo cracker inside."
"A Waterloo cracker!"
"Ay, but such a one as you never saw. I shall make it myself. It shall be only four inches long, but as broad as my hand, and enough detonating powder in it to blow the shutter fifty feet into the air: and if there should be one of Jobson"s lads behind the shutter at the time, why he"ll learn flying, and naught to pay for wings."
"Why, sir, you are planning the man"s death!"
"And what is HE planning? Light your forge, and leave the job to me. I"m Hillsborough too, and they"ve put my blood up at last."
While Henry lighted his forge, Mr. Cheetham whipped out a rule, and measured the window exactly. This done, he went down the stairs, and crossed the yard to go to his office.
But, before he could enter it, a horrible thing occurred in the room he had just left; so horrible, it made him, brave as he was, turn and scream like a woman.
Some miscreant, by a simple but ingenious means, which afterward transpired, had mixed a quant.i.ty of gunpowder with the smithy-slack or fine cinders of Henry"s forge. The moment the forge was hot, the powder ignited with a tremendous thud, a huge ma.s.s of flame rushed out, driving the coals with it, like shot from a gun; Henry, scorched, blackened, and blinded, was swept, as by a flaming wind, against the opposite wall; then, yelling, and stark mad with fright (for nothing drives men out of their wits like an explosion in a narrow s.p.a.ce), he sprang at the window, head foremost, and with such velocity that the sawed iron snapped like a stick of barley-sugar, and out he went head foremost; and this it was made Cheetham scream, to see him head downward, and the paving-stones below.
But the aperture was narrow: his body flew through, but his tight arm went round the unbroken upright, and caught it in the bend of the elbow.
Then Cheetham roared, "Hold on, Little! Hold on, I tell you!"
The scared brain of a man accustomed to obey received the command almost without the mind; and the grinders and forgers, running wildly into the yard, saw the obnoxious workman, black as a cinder from head to foot, bleeding at the face from broken gla.s.s, hanging up there by one hand, moaning with terror, and looking down with dilating eye, while thick white smoke rushed curling out, as if his body was burning. Death by suffocation was at his back, and broken bones awaited him below.
CHAPTER VI.
At sight of this human cinder, hanging by one hand between two deaths, every sentiment but humanity vanished from the ruggedest bosom, and the skilled workmen set themselves to save their unpopular comrade with admirable quickness and judgment: two new wheel-bands, that had just come into the works, were caught up in a moment, and four workmen ran with them and got below the suspended figure: they then turned back to back, and, getting the bands over their shoulders, pulled hard against each other. This was necessary to straighten the bands: they weighed half a hundred weight each. Others stood at the center of the bands, and directed Little where to drop, and stood ready to catch him should he bound off them.
But now matters took an unexpected turn. Little, to all appearance, was blind and deaf. He hung there, moaning, and glaring, and his one sinewy arm supported his muscular but light frame almost incredibly. He was out of his senses, or nearly.
"Let thyself come, lad," cried a workman, "we are all right to catch thee."
He made no answer, but hung there glaring and moaning.
"The man will drop noane, till he swouns," said another, watching him keenly.
"Then get you closer to the wall, men," cried Cheetham, in great anxiety. "He"ll come like a stone, when he does come." This injunction was given none too soon; the men had hardly shifted their positions, when Little"s hand opened, and he came down like lead, with his hands all abroad, and his body straight; but his knees were slightly bent, and he caught the bands just below the knee, and bounded off them into the air, like a cricket-ball. But many hands grabbed at him, and the grinder Reynolds caught him by the shoulder, and they rolled on the ground together, very little the worse for that tumble. "Well done! well done!"
cried Cheetham. "Let him lie, lads, he is best there for a while; and run for a doctor, one of you."
"Ay, run for Jack Doubleface," cried several voices at once.
"Now, make a circle, and give him air, men." Then they all stood in a circle, and eyed the blackened and quivering figure with pity and sympathy, while the canopy of white smoke bellied overhead. Nor were those humane sentiments silent; and the rough seemed to be even more overcome than the others: no brains were required to pity this poor fellow now; and so strong an appeal to their hearts, through their senses, roused their good impulses and rare sensibilities. Oh, it was strange to hear good and kindly sentiments come out in the Dash dialect.
"It"s a ---- shame!"
"There lies a good workman done for by some ---- thief, that wasn"t fit to blow his bellows, ---- him!"
"Say he WAS a c.o.c.kney, he was always ---- civil."
"And life"s as sweet to him as to any man in Hillsborough."