“I wus ye may get it,’ said Peter Hoggarth, one of William’s own shepherds, who was standing unexpectedly near his master; ‘I shall be satisfied with your bonny holmes of Grey Goosthwaite, which I think I can farm quite as well as my master!’
“William Tyson was evidently by no means pleased with this intrusion of his own shepherd’s; for it was clear that he had no manner of intention of resigning Grey Goosthwaite to his herdsman when he took possession himself of the broad acres of Coniston Hall. So true is it, that all men would level up to those above them, none down to those below them!
“The speaker now turned to the religious part of his subject, on which he expressed himself with great fluency and plausibility. He stated that much, which was mistaken for religion, was in reality nothing more than early prejudice and weak superstition. He instanced this, by ridiculing the strange belief in ghosts and spirits which was once so prevalent in these valleys, but was now fast disappearing before the light of advancing knowledge and science. ‘The miner,’ said he, ‘used to hear the mysterious knocking, and the supernatural signals of the rock-demon, where he now only listens to the echoes of the strokes of his own pick-axe.’
“‘True,’ said a brawny miner, leaning upon his spade, ‘I used to be afraid of evil spirits in these dark holes of ours, and was driven to say my prayers in a morning before I came to work, to keep them away; but I am grown wiser now; and, for my part, I will never believe that there is a devil at all, until I see him.’
“‘You may see him NOW, then!’ exclaimed a voice from the lower end of the cave. ‘There are two of them!’ cried another; upon which the whole assembly rose in the utmost terror, and rushed out of the cave, tumbling one over another into the darkness without, and some not recovering their feet till they had rolled to the very bottom of the hill. The stranger was the last to lose his presence of mind; but even he, it seems, had some latent suspicions that there might be such a being as the devil, for he soon rushed after his audience towards the mouth of the cave, and was lost in the gloom. This absurd termination of the meeting is easily accounted for. The stone on which Gawen Braithwaite was standing had been gradually sinking under his weight, and at last gave way altogether, rolling half way down the upper part of the cave towards where the audience were assembled. Gawen, of course, gave way with it, and in his fall dragged me after him. The sight of two human beings making their entrance into the cave with such a clatter in a place where no entrance was known to exist, and the fiendish-looking figures which we had made ourselves by besmearing our faces with the ruddle and coal, were too much for the nerves of the valorous audience, who suspected, from what they heard and saw, that the devil was really looking after his own; and so they disappeared like magic, relieving us from the terror which we felt at making so untimely an entrance into the assembly, as we had reason to expect a by no means civil reception had we been discovered. Having quite forgotten the disguised state of our faces, it was not till we approached the light of their fire that we found out the cause of their sudden terror; and you can well imagine how we enjoyed the success of our very involuntary exploit. Yet there was indeed much to grieve my own heart in what I had learned, for the first time, that night. My poor sister Martha was, it now appeared, engaged, probably heart and hand, certainly in her young affections, to one who was an enemy to God and man, a disbeliever of the truth of the Gospel, a disturber of the peace of his country! What course lay before me I knew not. I would not, for my poor sister’s sake, mention the sad truth to my father and mother; for I well knew that their indignation would know no bounds, and that they would probably at once expel her from her home, thus driving her directly into the arms of him, who would certainly be her ruin, both in body and soul. I shrunk from mentioning the subject to my sister herself, for I recollected that I was younger than she, and felt that I had no authority to control her will, if, after knowing the character of the stranger, she should still resolve to cling faithfully to his fortunes. At last, after a sleepless night, and much inward prayer for light to guide me, I determined to take the course which I am sure you will say was a wise one—I resolved to lay the whole case before my best friend and natural adviser, Robert Walker.”
CHAPTER XIII.
—An unlessoned Girl, unschool’d, unpractis’d;
Happy in this she is not yet so old
But she may learn; and happier than this,
She is not bred so dull but she can learn;
Happiest of all, is, that her gentle spirit
Commits itself to yours, to be directed.Shakspere.
“Robert Walker was less surprised at my history (which it took me a long time to tell) than I had expected him to be. In fact he knew almost every thing that was going on in his parish, and people often wondered how he came to know so intimately matters concerning themselves, which they had supposed were closely locked up in their own breasts alone. When I told him of the pestilent doctrines which the stranger was spreading among the miners and others of his flock, he immediately reminded me that he had darkly hinted at this in the sermon which he preached to us before our confirmation; the substance of which I have just related to you. I thought he would have split his sides with laughing when I told him of the way in which Gawen Braithwaite and I had dispersed the assembly by our sudden and unintentional intrusion into their councils; and tapping me playfully on the cheek, while his eyes ran over with tears of mirth, he said, ‘Take care, my good lad, as long as you live, that you never play the devil in any other character than you did last night! He is a kittle customer to deal with, and generally has the best of it in the end with those who meddle too much with his concerns. Resist the devil,’ said he solemnly, ‘resist the devil and he will flee from you—aye,’ he added, smiling once more at the recollection, quite as fast as silly Willie Tyson and his man Peter!’
“‘And so they ran, did they?’ continued he, for he could not get the amusing notion out of his head, ‘very fast, eh?’