“You’ve not seen enough of our county, yet, to tell us how it impresses you, Mr. Beaumont, and I don’t know anything of Yorkshire, except that it is mostly moors and mills. Huddersfield, I suppose, is all smoke and mills?”
“We’ve mills enough in and about the town, but we haven’t much to complain about in the matter of smoke. For one thing, the surrounding hills are so lofty, and the moors on their summits so extensive, that the breezes sweep down the valleys or over our heads, and of a summer day you can stand in the main street of the town and see above your head sky as blue and as little obscured by smoke as looks down upon your fat pastures and rustling cornfields. You must go to Sheffield for smoke, not Huddersfield.”
“But your people,” said the Squire. “They’re a rascally set of malcontents, I have always understood—Chartists, atheists, and Communists.”
Edward laughed pleasantly.
“I am by way of telling our people they are the most intelligent and the most independent in the world. I’ve no doubt, though, there are some Chartists among them, or those who were Chartists in their youth. As for Republicans, well, you know, we go in for practical measures up our way and leave Utopias to the dreamers. As Pat at Donnybrook Fair, if he sees a head he hits it; so we just hit the abuses we see.”
“But aren’t the mill-hands, generally speaking, a very godless set of men?” asked the Archdeacon. “I have always looked on my brother clergymen who accept livings or curacies in the West Riding more as missionaries than incumbents, and, indeed, they tell fearful tales of the irreverence and slackness of the common people in the manufacturing towns. Dissent, we know, is simply rampant in the West Riding.”
“I should scarcely have regarded dissent as a sign of want of spirituality,” said Edward, with a quiet smile. “I have always regarded it as a rather disagreeable sign of excessive spirituality—religion run mad.”
“But the mills, Mr. Beaumont,” interposed Miss St. Clair, who, perhaps, thought the conversation was tending in a direction best avoided. “One reads stories of the awful lives of the factories. It must be so wretched to live all the weary days amid the din of the wheels and the fluff and dirt and grease of the wool.”
“If you were to stand, Miss St. Clair, as I have often stood, of a dark and wintry night on the ridge of one of our valleys, and looked down upon the great mills, their windows all glowing with light, and heard from within the deep voices of the men, and the sweet, pure, trained notes of the women and the girls, blended in some well-known hymn, or even taking their parts in some familiar and more complex song, you would not think the weaver’s lot a very wretched one. Depend upon it, there’s a lot of poetry in a mill, only we haven’t yet been happy enough to produce a poet. But I profess it is strange to find you commiserating our mill-hands. We in the West Riding have always thought it was the poor hinds of the country who called for commiseration. I don’t know that we regard Huddersfield as an Athens of the North, but we certainly have thought of parts of Lincolnshire as a sort of Baotia. I’m afraid we have been wasting a lot of very genuine sympathy. Perhaps I don’t know much about Hodge. I hope to know more before I leave Lincolnshire. May I hope Miss St. Clair will be my instructress?”
“Confound his impudence!” thought the Squire. “Do you hunt, Mr. Beaumont?”