“I am going with a good man, at any rate,” he answered, “the freest-minded gentleman that ever came to these parts. Squire Carne, of Carne Castle, if you please, miss.”
“Mr. Caryl Carne!” cried Faith, in a tone which made Daniel look at her with some surprise. “Is he going away? Oh, I am so glad!”
“No, miss; not Squire Carne himself. Only to provide for me work far away, and not to be beholden any more to my own people. And work where a man may earn and keep his own money, and hold up his head while adoing of it.”
“Oh, Dan, you know more of such things than I do. And every man has a right to be independent, and ought to be so, and I should despise him otherwise. But don't be driven by it into the opposite extreme of disliking the people in a different rank—”
“No, miss, there is no fear of that—the only fear is liking some of them too much.”
“And then,” continued Faith, who was now upon one of her favourite subjects past interruption, “you must try to remember that if you work hard, so do we, or nearly all of us. From the time my father gets up in the morning, to the time when he goes to bed at night, he has not got five minutes—as he tells us every day—for attending to anything but business. Even at dinner, when you get a good hour, and won't be disturbed—now will you?”
“No, miss; not if all the work was tumbling down. No workman as respects himself would take fifty-nine minutes for sixty.”
“Exactly so; and you are right. You stand up for your rights. Your dinner you have earned, and you will have it. And the same with your breakfast, and your supper too, and a good long night to get over it. Do you jump up in bed, before you have shut both eyes, hearing or fancying you have heard the bell, that calls you out into the cold, and the dark, and a wet saddle, from a warm pillow? And putting that by, as a trouble of the war, and the chance of being shot at by dark tall men”—here Faith shuddered at her own presentment, as the image of Caryl Carne passed before her—“have you to consider, at every turn, that whatever you do—though you mean it for the best—will be twisted and turned against you by some one, and made into wickedness that you never dreamed of, by envious people, whose grudge against you is that they fancy you look down on them? Though I am sure of one thing, and that is that my father, instead of looking down upon any honest man because he is poor, looks up to him; and so do I; and so does every gentleman or lady. And any one who goes about to persuade the working-people—as they are called, because they have to use their hands more—that people like my father look down upon them, and treat them like dogs, and all those wicked stories—all I can say is, any man who does it deserves to be put in the stocks, or the pillory, or even to be transported as an enemy to his country.”
Dan looked at the lady with great surprise. He had always known her to be kind and gentle, and what the old people called “mannersome,” to every living body that came near her. But to hear her put, better than he could put them, his own budding sentiments (which he thought to be new, with the timeworn illusion of young Liberals), and to know from her bright cheeks, and brighter eyes, that her heart was in every word of it, and to feel himself rebuked for the evil he had thought, and the mischief he had given ear to—all this was enough to make him angry with himself, and uncertain how to answer.
“I am certain that you never thought of such things,” Miss Darling continued, with her gentle smile returning; “you are much too industrious and sensible for that. But I hear that some persons are now in our parish who make it their business, for some reason of their own, to spread ill-will and jealousy and hatred everywhere, to make us all strangers and foes to one another, and foreigners to our own country. We have enemies enough, by the will of the Lord (as Mr. Twemlow says), for a sharp trial to us, and a lesson to our pride, and a deep source of gratitude, and charity, and good-will—though I scarcely understand how they come in—and, above all, a warning to us to stick together, and not exactly hate, but still abhor, everybody who has a word to say against his own country at a time like this. And ten thousand times as much, if he is afraid to say it, but crawls with crafty poison into simple English bosoms.”