“He is a tyrant,” he said, “and she has learned it already; but I do think she loves him. Fancy my mother coming to be the slave of a man like this! I suppose,” he laughed bitterly, “it's the story of 'a woman, a dog, and a walnut tree, the more you thrash them the better they will be.' My father spent his whole life in making hers easy, and in sparing her from every care and trouble, and I don't believe she cared half as much for him as she does for this man who is her master.”
For some months Mr. Mulready was very busy at his mill. A steam engine was being erected, new machinery brought in, and he was away the greater part of his time superintending it.
One day at breakfast, a short time before all was in readiness for a start with the new plant, Mr. Mulready opened a letter directed in a sprawling and ill written hand which lay at the top of the pile by his plate. Ned happened to notice his face, and saw the color fade out from it as he glanced at the contents. The mouth remained as usual, set in a smile, but the rest of the face expressed agitation and fear. The hand which held the letter shook. Mrs. Mulready, whose eyes seldom left her husband's face when he was in the room, also noticed the change.
“Is anything the matter, William?”
“Oh! nothing,” he said with an unnatural laugh, “only a little attempt to frighten me.”
“An attempt which has succeeded,” Ned said to himself, “whatever it is.”
Mr. Mulready passed the letter over to his wife. It was a rough piece of paper; at the top was scrawled the outline of a coffin underneath which was written:
“MR. MULREADY: Sir, this is to give you warning that if you uses the new machinery you are a dead man. You have been a marked man for a long time for your tyrannical ways, but as long as you didn't get the new machinery we let you live; but we has come to the end of it now; the day as you turns on steam we burns your mill to the ground and shoots you, so now you knows it.”
At the bottom of this was signed the words “Captain Lud.”
“Oh! William,” Mrs. Mulready cried, “you will never do it! You will never risk your life at the hands of these terrible people!”