Soon afterwards Nathan Blyth began to find that he was being made the victim of a series of annoying and harmful persecutions. His flower-beds were crushed and trampled on; his fruit-trees were hacked and hewed; his limited store of live stock were stolen or poisoned. Roused to the utmost pitch of indignation, the stalwart blacksmith sat up o’ nights to watch his premises and guard his property; but in vain, as far as the discovery of the perpetrators was concerned, though it broadened the intervals between the visits of his unknown and malicious foes. Then he found that the most cruel rumours were afloat affecting the character of his darling, coupling her name with that of the young squire in a way that was utterly unwarrantable and untrue; rumours which were innocuous as far as her friends were concerned, but which were greedily seized on by a godless and unprincipled few, who were glad to seize any occasion to bespatter the “Methodies.”
Poor Lucy had to drink of the bitterest cup that can be lifted to the lips of virtuous and sensitive modesty. The roses left her cheek and the light forsook her eye, and Nathan sorrowed because he knew not how to shield his girl from the poisoned arrows shot by an unseen hand.
At length, however, “the wicked that rose up against them” overshot the mark, and an event transpired that opened the eyes of the villagers to the fierce and vindictive plot which had gathered round Nathan and his darling child, and turned the full flood-tide of their sympathies toward those who had been so cruelly aspersed.
One morning, when Nathan went into his shop, he began to make the smithy fire, but had scarcely applied the match when a loud explosion followed, his face was scorched by the blinding flame, and his eyes were filled with fine, sharp particles of dust from the smithy hearth. Groping in darkness and pain, he found his way to the slake-trough and plunged his head into the water. The sense of relief was brief, and Natty, still unable to see, was compelled to feel his way indoors, and present his scorched locks, blackened face, and fiery eyes, to his distressed and startled daughter.
In a case like this, however, Lucy showed her remarkable tact and skill—characteristics which made her presence and assistance invaluable by every sick-bed in Nestleton. Calm, firm, and skilful, she applied oil and flour and cotton wool to the burns, and then dispatched her little maid to Farmer Houston’s. In a few moments a messenger had ridden off post-haste to Kesterton to fetch Dr. Jephson, the most noted medico in all the country-side. Lucy’s resources, meanwhile, were tested to the utmost, for her father was suffering the severest pain, especially in the eyes. At length the doctor arrived, made careful examination of his injuries, and cheered them and Mrs. Houston and Judith Olliver, who had come to render what help they could, with the gratifying announcement that his eyesight was uninjured, and that no permanent harm was done. A few days of bandaging and darkness, of embrocation and patience, would put him to rights, the doctor said, especially with such a nurse as Lucy by his side. It was a narrow escape, however, and the wonder was that he had not been blinded for life.
“Thank God,” said Blithe Natty, who was blind Natty too for a season, “thank God for sparing us that sorrow. Things are never so bad but they might be worse!” and even in his pain Blithe Natty could joke about Guy Fawkes and the gunpowder plot, for we may depend upon it he was not called Blithe Natty for nought.
Tenderly, lovingly, patiently, Lucy nursed her father night and day. Tenderly, lovingly, patiently, Nathan bore his pain and enforced blindness for her sake, and went so far as to say, though it must be taken cum grano salis, that it would be worth while for Guy Fawkes to come again, that he might have another course of nursing and syllabubs from the same gentle hands.
When Nathan appeared again in public, with his scars not yet healed, and a large green shade over both eyes, he was met with universal congratulations on his escape, and universal anathemas on the dastardly villains who had done the shameful deed.
Now, Nathan Blyth and his daughter were quite persuaded that the rough and cruel treatment which they had received was the result of the malice and jealousy of Black Morris. So far they were right; at the same time it is fair to him to say that he was innocent of this crowning outrage. The fact is, that in his first fierce and unrestrained paroxysm of vexation he had enlisted his alehouse chums in his wicked crusade of vengeance; and in the hope of more fully winning him over to their bad confederacy, and partly out of sheer love of mischief, they had espoused his cause with an energy that surpassed all that in his cooler moments he desired to inflict. His disreputable cronies enjoyed the surreptitious “fun” of “taking a rise” out of “Parson Blyth,” as they called him; their horse-play grew on what it fed on, and hence the shameful extremes I have had to chronicle. The gunpowder was secreted by Bill Buckley, a beetle-browed rascal, with whom we shall have to make a closer acquaintance by and bye. He inserted it in the nozzle of the smithy bellows not only without Black Morris’s permission, but utterly without his knowledge, and so far, although it grew out of his conduct, he must be acquitted of so vile and cowardly a deed. It is far easier to set the ball rolling down hill than to stop it on its course; and spirits like those which he had called from the vasty deep to serve his purpose, were not to be laid again, without doing a little extra devilry on their own account.
When Black Morris heard of Nathan Blyth’s misfortune he was not only genuinely sorry, but, suspecting it was some of his set who had done it, he went off straightway into a frenzy of rage against them, altogether as hot as that which had been directed against Nathan Blyth himself. This man was an oddity, and it took all the power and subtlety of the devil to spoil him—whether he succeeded remains to be seen.