 | CHAPTER XIV.
HUGH CLITHEROE. John Brent |  |
14. CHAPTER XIV.
HUGH CLITHEROE.
Mr. Clitheroe grew more and more communicative,
as we wandered about over the open. I
drew from him, or rather, with few words of
guidance now and then, let him impart, his
history. He seemed to feel that he had an explanation
to offer. Men whose life has been error
and catastrophe rarely have much pride of
reticence. Whatever friendly person will hear
their apology can hear it. That form of more
lamentable error called Guilt is shyer of the
confessional; but it also feels its need of telling
to brother man why it was born in the heart
in the form of some small sin.
Again Mr. Clitheroe talked of the scenes of
his youth and prosperity. He “babbled of green
fields,” and parks, and great country-houses, and
rural life. So he went on to talk of himself, and,
leaving certain blanks, which I afterward found
the means of filling, told me his story. A sad
story! A pitiful story! Sadder and more pitiful
to me because a filial feeling toward this hapless
my heart. I have already said that I was fatherless
from infancy. This has left a great want in
my life. I cannot find complete compensation
for the lack of a father's love in my premature
manhood and my toughening against the world
too young. I yearned greatly toward the feeble
old man, my companion in that night walk on
the plain of Fort Bridger. I longed to do by
him the duties of sonship; as, indeed, having no
such duties, I have often longed when I found
age weak and weary. And as I began to feel
son-like toward the father, a sentiment simply
brotherly took its place in my heart for the
daughter, whose love my friend, I believe, was
seeking.
A sad history was Mr. Clitheroe's. He was a
prosperous gentleman once, of one of the ancient
families of his country.
“We belong,” he said, “to the oldest gentry
of England. We have been living at Clitheroe
Hall, and where the Hall now stands, for centuries.
Our family history goes back into the
pre-historic times. We have never been very
famous; we have always sustained our dignity.
We might have had a dozen peerages; but we
were too much on the side of liberty, of free
speech and free thought, to act with the powers
that be.
“There was never a time, until my day, when
one of us was not in Parliament for Clitheroe.
Clitheroe had two members, and one of the old
family that gave its name to the town, and got
for it its franchises, was always chosen without
contest.
“It is a lovely region, sir, where the town, of
Clitheroe and the old manor-house of my family
stand, — the fairest part of Lancashire. If you
have only seen, as you say, the flat country
about Liverpool and Manchester, you do not
know at all what Lancashire can do in scenery.
Why, there is Pendle Hill, — it might better be
called a mountain, — Pendle Hill rises almost at
my door-step, at the door of Clitheroe Hall.
Pendle Hill, sir, is eighteen hundred and odd
feet high. And a beautiful hill it is. I talked
of the Wind River Mountains this afternoon;
they are very fine; but I never should have
learned to love heights, if my boyhood had not
been trained by the presence of Pendle Hill.
“And there is the Ribble, too. A lovely river,
coming from the hills; — such a stream as I have
not seen on this continent. I do not wish to
make harsh comparisons, but your Mississippi
and Missouri are more like ditches than rivers,
and as to the Platte, why, sir, it seems to me
no better than a chain of mud-pools. But the
Ribble is quite another thing. I suppose I love
bathed in it a man, and have seen it flow on
always a friend, whether I was rich or poor.
Nature, sir, does not look coldly on a poor man,
as humanity does. The river Ribble and Pendle
Hill have been faithful to me, — they and my
dear Ellen, always.
“Perhaps I tire you with this chat,” he said.
“O no!” replied I. “I should be a poor
American if I did not love to hear of Mother
England everywhere and always.”
“I almost fear to talk about home — our old
home, I mean — to my dear child. She might
grow a little homesick, you know. And how
could she understand, so young and a woman
too, that duty makes exile needful? Of course
I do not mean to suggest that we deem our new
home in the Promised Land an exile.”
And here he again gave the same anxious look
I had before observed; as if he dreaded that
I had the power to dissolve an unsubstantial
illusion.
“I wish I had thought,” he continued, “to
show you, when you were at tea, a picture of
Clitheroe Hall I have. It is my daughter Ellen's
work. She has a genius for art, really a genius.
We have been living in a cottage near there,
where she could see the Hall from her window, —
dear old place! — and she has made a capital
drawing of it.”
“You had left it?” I asked. He had paused,
commanded by his melancholy recollections.
“O yes! Did I not tell you about my losses?
I was a rich man and prosperous once. I kept
open house, sir, in my wife's lifetime. She was
a great beauty. My dear Ellen is like her, but
she has no beauty, — a good girl and daughter,
though, like all young people, she has a juvenile
wish to govern, — but no beauty. Perhaps she
will grow handsome when we grow rich again.”
“Few women are so attractive as Miss Clitheroe,”
I said, baldly enough.
“I have tried to be a good father to her, sir.
She should have had diamonds and pearls, and
everything that young ladies want, if I had succeeded.
But you ought to have seen Clitheroe
Hall, sir, in its best days. Such oaks as I had
in my park! One of those oaks is noticed in
Evelyn's Silva. One day, a great many years
ago, I found a young man sitting under that
oak writing verses. I was hospitable to him, and
gave him luncheon, which he ate with very good
appetite, if he was a poet. I did not ask his
name; but not three months after I received
a volume of poems, with a sonnet among them,
really very well done, very well done indeed,
inscribed to the Clitheroe Oak. The volume,
sir, was by Mr. Wordsworth, quite one of our
best poets, in his way, the founder of a new
school.”
“A very pleasant incident!”
“Yes indeed. The poet was fortunate, was
he not? But if you are fond of pictures, I
should have liked to show you my Vandykes.
We had the famous Clitheroe Beauty, an earl's
daughter, maid of honor to Queen Henrietta
Maria. She chose plain Hugh Clitheroe before
all the noblemen of the court; — we Clitheroes
have always been fortunate in that way. I said
plain Hugh, but he was as handsome a cavalier
as ever wore rapier. He might have been an
earl himself, but he took the part of liberty, and
was killed on the Parliament side at Edgemoor.
I had his portrait too, a Vandyke, and one of
the best pictures he ever painted, as I believe is
agreed by connoisseurs. You should have seen
the white horse, sir, in that picture, — full of
gentleness and spirit, and worthy the handsome
cavalier just ready to mount him.”
As the old gentleman talked of his heroic
ancestor, a name not unknown to history, he
revived a little, and I saw an evanescent look
of his daughter's vigor in his eye. It faded
instantly; he sighed, and went on.
“I should almost have liked to live in those
days. It is easier to die for a holy cause than
to find one's way along through life. I have
found it pretty hard, sir, — pretty hard, — and
I hope my day of peace is nearly come.”
How could I shatter his delusion, and thunder
in his ear that this hope was a lie?
“I had a happy time of it,” he continued,
“till after my Ellen's birth, and I ought to be
thankful for that. I had my dear wife and hosts
of friends, — so I thought them. To be sure
I spent too much money, and sometimes had
rather too gay an evening over the claret at
my old oak dining-table. But that was harmless
pleasure, sir. I was always a kind landlord.
I never could turn out a tenant nor arrest a
poacher. I suppose I was too kind. I might
better have saved some of the money I gave to
my people in beef and beer on holidays. But
it made them happy. I like to see everybody
happy. That was my chief pleasure. The people
were very poor in England then, sir, — not
that they are not poor now, — and I used to
be very glad when a good old English holiday,
or a birthday, gave me a chance to give them a
little festival.”
I could imagine him the gentle, genial host.
Fate should have left him there in the old
hall, dispensing frank hospitality all his sunny
days and bland seasons through, lunching young
poets, and showing his Vandykes with proper
pride to strangers. His story carried truth on
its face. In fact, the man was all the while an
illustration of his own tale. Every tone and
phrase convicted him of his own character.
“It sometimes makes me a little melancholy,”
he continued, “to speak of those happy days.
Not that I regret the result I have at last attained!
Ah, no! But the process was a hard
one. I have suffered, sir, suffered greatly on my
way to the peace and confidence I have attained.”
“You have attained these?” I said.
“Yes; thank God and this Latter-Day revelation
of his truth! I used to think rather
carelessly of religion in those times. I suppose
it is only the contact with sin and sorrow that
teaches a man to look from the transitory to
the eternal. Shade makes light precious, as an
artist would say. I was brought up, you know,
sir, in the Church of England; but when I began
to think, its formalism wearied me. I could
not understand what seemed to me then the
complex machinery of its theology. I thought,
sir, as no doubt many people of the poetic temperament
and little experience think, that God
deals with men without go-betweens; that he
acts directly on the character by the facts of
nature and the thoughts in every soul. It was
not until I grew old and sad that I began to
feel the need of something distinct and tangible
to rest my faith upon, and even then, sir,
I was sceptical of the need of revelations and
Messiahs and miracles, until I learnt through
the testimony of living witnesses — yes, of living
Latter Day. Yes, sir, the facts of what you call
Mormonism, its miracles, its revelations, which
do not cease, and its new Messiah, have proved
to me the necessity of other like supernatural
systems in the past, and given me faith in their
evidences, which before seemed scanty.”
“Ah! old Mother Church of England!” I
thought, “could you do no better by your son
than this? Whose fault is this credulity? How
is it that he needs phenomena to give him faith
in truth?”
“But I have not told you,” the old gentleman
went on, “about my disasters. Perhaps
you are getting tired of my prattle, sir, my old
man's talk. I am really not so very old, if
my hair is thin, and my beard gray, — barely
fifty, and after this journey I expect to be quite
a boy again. I suppose you were surprised this
afternoon, when I spoke of having worked in a
coal-mine, were you not?”
The old man seemed to have some little pride
in this singularity of fortune. I expressed the
proper interest in such a change of destiny.
“You shall hear how it happened,” he said.
“You remember, — no, you are too young to
remember, but you have heard how we all went
mad about mills and mines in Lancashire some
twenty years ago.”
“Yes,” said I, “it was then that steam and
cotton began to understand each other, and coal
and negroes became important.”
“What a panic of speculation we all rushed
into in Lancashire!” said the old gentleman.
“We all felt, we gentlemen, that we were mere
idlers, not doing our duty, as England expects
every man to do, unless we were building chimneys,
or digging pits. We were all either grubbing
down in the bowels of the earth for coal,
or rearing great chimneys up in the air to burn
it. I really think most of us began to like
smoke better than blue sky; certainly it tasted
sweeter to us than our good old English fog.
“Well, sir,” continued he, “I was like my
neighbors. I must dabble in milling and mining.
I was willing to be richer. Indeed, as soon
as I began to speculate, I thought myself richer.
I spent more money. I went deeper into my
operations. One can throw a great treasure into
a coal-mine without seeing any return, and can
send a great volume of smoke up a chimney before
the mill begins to pay. It is an old story.
I will not tire you with it. I was all at once a
ruined man.”
He paused a moment, and looked about the
dim, star-lit prairie, with the white wagons and
the low fort in the distance.
“Well,” said he, in the careless, airy manner
not been ruined, I should have stayed stupidly at
home, and never worked in a coal-mine, or travelled
on the plains, or had the pleasure of meeting
you and your friend here. It is all fresh and
novel. If it were not for my daughter and my
duties to the church, I should take my adventures
as lightly as you do when your gun misses
fire and you lose a dinner.
“The thing that troubled me most at the time
of my disasters,” he resumed, “was being defeated
for Parliament. There had always been a
Clitheroe there. When my father died, I took
his seat. I used to spend freely on elections; but
I thought they sent me because they liked me, or
for love of the old name. When I lost my fortune
there came a snob, sir, and stood against me.
He accused me of being a free-thinker, — as if
the Clitheroes had not always been liberal! He
got up a cry, and bought votes. My own tenants,
my old tenants, whom I had feasted out of pure
good-will a hundred times, turned against me.
I lost my election and my last shilling.
“It was just then, sir, that my dear wife died,
and my dear Ellen was born.”
He turned sadly around to look at his daughter.
She was walking at some distance with
Brent. The earnest murmur of their voices
came to us through the stillness. I felt what my
friend must be saying in that pleading tone.
“Everything went disastrously with me,” continued
Mr. Clitheroe. “I tried to recover my
fortunes, fairly and honestly, but it was too late.
My creditors took the old Hall. Hugh Clitheroe
in Harry the Eighth's time built it, on land
where the family had lived from before Egbert.
I lost it, sir. The family came to an end with
me. I found sheriff's officers making beer rings
on my old oak dining-table. The Vandykes
went. Hugh of Cromwell's days was divorced
from his wife, the Beauty. I tried to keep them
together; but scrubs bought them, and stuck
them up in their vulgar parlors. Sorry business!
Sorry business!”
“You kept a brave heart through it all.”
“Yes, until they accused me of dishonesty.
That I felt bitterly. And everybody gave me
the cold shoulder. I could get nothing to do.
There is not much that a broken-down gentleman
can do; but no one would trust me. I
grew poorer than you can conceive. I lost all
heart. Men are poor creatures, — as a desolate
man finds.”
“Not all, I hope,” was my protest.
“Truly not all. But the friends of prosperity
are birds that come to be fed, and fly away when
the crumbs give out. All are not base and time-serving;
but men are busy and careless, and
fancy that others can always take care of themselves.
starvation to me in Christian England, — to me
and my young daughter, within a year after my
misfortunes. Perhaps I was over-proud or over-vain;
but I grew tired of the slights of people
that had known me in my better days, and now
dodged me because I was shabby and poor. I
wanted to get out of sight of the ungrateful,
ungracious world. The blue sky grew hateful to
me. I must live, or, if life was nothing to me,
my daughter must not starve. I had a choice of
factory or coal-mine to hide myself in. I sank
into a coal-mine.”
“A strange contrast!” I said, after a pause.
“I am trying to make the whole history less
dreamy. Each seems unreal, — my luxurious
life at Clitheroe Hall, and my troglodyte life
down in the coal-pit. Idler and slave; either
extreme had its own special unhappiness and
unhealthiness.”
How much wisdom there was in the weakness
of the old man's character! The more I talked
with him, the more pitiable seemed his destiny.
“O John Brent!” I groaned in my heart, “plead
with the daughter as man never pleaded before.
We must save them from the dismal fate before
them. And if she cannot master her father, and
you, John Brent, cannot master her, there is no
hope.”
My friend made no sign that he was ready to
close his interview with the lady. The noise of
the ball still came to us with the puffs of the
evening wind. I prompted the communicative
old gentleman to renew his story.
“I have seen the interior of some of the Lancashire
mines; I have read the Blue Book upon
them,” I said. “You must have been in a
rough place, with company as rough.”
“It was hard for a man of delicate nurture.
But the men liked me. They were not brutes, —
not all, — if they were roughs. Brutes get away
from places where hard work is done. My mates
down in the mine made it easy for me. They
called me Gentleman Hugh. I was rather
proud, sir, I confess, to find myself liked and
respected for what I was, not for what I had. It
was a hard life and a rough life; but it was an
honest life, and my child was too young to miss
what her birth entitled her to.
“It was in our mine that I first knew of the
Latter-Day Church. For years I had drudged
there, and never thought, or in fact, for myself,
much cared, to come out. I had tried the pleasures
and friendships of gay life; they had nothing
new or good to give me. For years I had
toiled, when the first apostle came out and began
to make proselytes to the faith in our country.
They have never disdained the mean and the
and our brothers in the factories, listened to apostles
who came across seas and labored among us
as if they loved our souls. The false religions
and outgrown religions left us in the dark; but
the true light came to us. My mates in the
Lancashire mine joined the church by hundreds.
I was still blind an careless. It was not until
long afterwards that the time for my conversion
came.
“As my daughter grew up, I felt that I ought
to be by her. I had worked a long time in the
mine, and was known to have some education.
The company gave me a clerkship in their office,
and there I drudged again for years, asking no
help or favor. It was in another part of the
county from my old residence, where nobody
knew me. My dear child, — she has always been
a good child to me, except that she sometimes
wishes to rule a little too much, — my dear Ellen
became almost a woman, and all I lacked was
the means of giving her the position of her rank.
Education she got herself. We were not unhappy,
she and I together, lonely as we might be,
and out of place.”
The old gentleman had been talking of himself
in such a cheerful, healthy way, and showed
that he had borne such a brave heart through his
troubles, that I began to puzzle myself what
made of him the weakling I had recognized in
the interview with Sizzum.
“It is very kind of you,” he said, “to listen to
a garrulous old fellow. Your sympathy is very
pleasant; but I must not test it too far. I will
end my long story presently.
“I supposed myself entirely forgotten, as I
was quite willing to be. By and by I was remembered
and sought. A far-away kinsman
had left me a legacy. It was enough for a
quiet subsistence for us two, for Ellen and me.
I returned to the neighborhood of my old home.
I found a little cottage on the banks of Ribble,
within sight of my old friend, Pendle Hill.
There we lived.”
From this point Mr. Clitheroe's manner totally
changed. His voice grew peevish and complaining.
All the manly feeling he had showed in
briefly describing his day-laborer's life passed
away. He detailed to me how the new proprietor
at Clitheroe Hall patronized him insufferably;
how his old neighbors turned up their noses at
him, and insulted him by condescension. How
miserable he found it to cramp himself and save
shillings in a cottage, with the house in sight
where he had lavished pounds as Lord of the
Manor! How he longed to have his daughter as
well dressed as any of the young ladies about,
rival the Clitheroes' lineage. How he wished
himself back in his mine, in his industrious
clerkship, and how time hung drearily on his
hands, with nothing to do except dream of by-gone
glories. I saw that he had sighed to be a
great man again, and had a morbid sense of his
insignificance, and that this had made him
touchy, and alienated well-meaning people about
him. He spoke with some triumph of his arguments
with the rector of his parish, who endeavored
to check him when he lent what influence
he had, as a gentleman, to get the Mormons a
hearing about Clitheroe. He did not, as he said,
as yet feel any great interest in their doctrines;
but he remembered them with good-will from his
coal-pit days, and whenever an emissary of the
faith came by, he always found a friend in Hugh
Clitheroe. They had evidently flattered him.
It was rare, of course, to find a protector among
the gentry, and they made the most of the
chance.
Poor old man! I could trace the progress
of his disappointment, and his final fall into that
miserable superstition. He had been a free-thinker;
never industrious or self-possessed enough
to become a fundamental thinker. No man can
stand long on nothing, — he must think out a
religion, or accept a theology. Now that busy
Mr. Clitheroe began to be uneasy, and was ready
to listen to any scheme which promised peace.
If a Jesuit had happened to find him at this
period, Rome would have got a recruit without
difficulty. The Pope and Brigham Young
are the rival bidders for such weaklings in the
nineteenth century. Brigham with polygamy
is the complement of Pio with celibacy.
Instead of Jesuit, Sizzum arrived. Sizzum
was far abler than any of his Mormon compeers.
He was proselyting about Clitheroe,
where he found it not difficult to persuade the
poor slaves up in the mill and down in the
mine to accept a faith that offered at once a
broad range on earth, and, in good time, a high
seat in heaven.
Sizzum was the guest of the discontented and
decayed gentleman. He saw the opportunity.
There was an old name and a man of gentle
birth to rally followers about. It would be a
triumph for the Latter-Day Saints to march
away from Clitheroe, a thousand strong, headed
by the representative of the family who named
the place, and had once been in Parliament for
it. Here was a proselyte in a class which no
Mormon had dreamed of approaching. Here
too was some little property. And here was
a beautiful daughter.
I could divine the astute Sizzum's method
and success with his victim, enfeebled in body
and spirit. How, seeing his need of something
final and authoritative in religion, Sizzum showed
him the immanence of inspiration in his church.
How he threatened him with wrath to come,
unless he was gathered from among the Gentiles.
How he persuaded him that a man of his
education and station would be greater among
the saints than ever in his best days in England.
How he touched the old man's enthusiasm
with tales of caravan life, with the dust
of the desert and the pork of the pan quite
left out of view. How, with his national exaggeration
run riot, he depicted the valley of the
Great Salt Lake as a Paradise, and the City
as an apocalyptic wonder, all jasper and sardonyx,
all beryl and chrysoprase; and no mud
and no adobe. How he suggested that in a
new country, under his advice, the old man's
little capital would soon swell to a great inheritance
for his daughter.
By the light of that afternoon's scene, over
the tea, I could comprehend the close of Mr.
Clitheroe's dreary story, and see how at last
Sizzum had got him in his gripe, property, person,
and soul.
Did he wish to escape?
No. On! on! he must go on. Only some
him aside.
What was this force to be?
Nothing that I could say or do; that I saw
clearly. His illusions might be nearly gone;
but he would hate and distrust any one who
ventured to pull the scales from his eyes, and
show him his crazy folly. Indeed, I dreaded
lest any attempt to enlighten him would drive
him into actual madness by despair. If he
had given me a shadow of encouragement, I
was ready to follow out the hint I had dropped
when I said to Brent, “What a night for a
gallop!” My own risk I was willing to take.
But escape for the lady, without him, was barbarous,
and we could not treat him like a Sabine
damsel, and lug him off by the hair.
What could his daughter do? Clearly nothing.
He had evidently long ago revolted against
her. If I did not mistake her faithful face, she
would stand by her father to the last. Plead as
he might, John Brent would never win her to
save herself and lose her father; and indeed that
was a desertion he could never recommend.
A dark look for all parties.
Whence was the force to come that should
solve the difficulty?
| CHAPTER XIV.
HUGH CLITHEROE. John Brent | |