My friend made no sign that he was ready to close his interview with the lady. The noise of the ball still came to us with the puffs of the evening wind. I prompted the communicative old gentleman to renew his story.
“I have seen the interior of some of the Lancashire mines; I have read the Blue Book upon them,” I said. “You must have been in a rough place, with company as rough.”
“It was hard for a man of delicate nurture. But the men liked me. They were not brutes,—not all,—if they were roughs. Brutes get away from places where hard work is done. My mates down in the mine made it easy for me. They called me Gentleman Hugh. I was rather proud, sir, I confess, to find myself liked and respected for what I was, not for what I had. It was a hard life and a rough life; but it was an honest life, and my child was too young to miss what her birth entitled her to.
“It was in our mine that I first knew of the Latter-Day Church. For years I had drudged there, and never thought, or in fact, for myself, much cared, to come out. I had tried the pleasures and friendships of gay life; they had nothing new or good to give me. For years I had toiled, when the first apostle came out and began to make proselytes to the faith in our country. They have never disdained the mean and the lowly. I tell you, sir, that we in our coal-pit, and our brothers in the factories, listened to apostles who came across seas and labored among us as if they loved our souls. The false religions and outgrown religions left us in the dark; but the true light came to us. My mates in the Lancashire mine joined the church by hundreds. I was still blind and careless. It was not until long afterwards that the time for my conversion came.
“As my daughter grew up, I felt that I ought to be by her. I had worked a long time in the mine, and was known to have some education. The company gave me a clerkship in their office, and there I drudged again for years, asking no help or favor. It was in another part of the county from my old residence, where nobody knew me. My dear child,—she has always been a good child to me, except that she sometimes wishes to rule a little too much,—my dear Ellen became almost a woman, and all I lacked was the means of giving her the position of her rank. Education she got herself. We were not unhappy, she and I together, lonely as we might be, and out of place.”
The old gentleman had been talking of himself in such a cheerful, healthy way, and showed that he had borne such a brave heart through his troubles, that I began to puzzle myself what could have again changed his character, and made of him the weakling I had recognized in the interview with Sizzum.
“It is very kind of you,” he said, “to listen to a garrulous old fellow. Your sympathy is very pleasant; but I must not test it too far. I will end my long story presently.
“I supposed myself entirely forgotten, as I was quite willing to be. By and by I was remembered and sought. A far-away kinsman had left me a legacy. It was enough for a quiet subsistence for us two, for Ellen and me. I returned to the neighborhood of my old home. I found a little cottage on the banks of Ribble, within sight of my old friend, Pendle Hill. There we lived.”
From this point Mr. Clitheroe’s manner totally changed. His voice grew peevish and complaining. All the manly feeling he had showed in briefly describing his day-laborer’s life passed away. He detailed to me how the new proprietor at Clitheroe Hall patronized him insufferably; how his old neighbors turned up their noses at him, and insulted him by condescension. How miserable he found it to cramp himself and save shillings in a cottage, with the house in sight where he had lavished pounds as Lord of the Manor! How he longed to have his daughter as well dressed as any of the young ladies about, her inferiors in blood,—for no one there could rival the Clitheroes’ lineage. How he wished himself back in his mine, in his industrious clerkship, and how time hung drearily on his hands, with nothing to do except dream of bygone glories. I saw that he had sighed to be a great man again, and had a morbid sense of his insignificance, and that this had made him touchy, and alienated well-meaning people about him. He spoke with some triumph of his arguments with the rector of his parish, who endeavored to check him when he lent what influence he had, as a gentleman, to get the Mormons a hearing about Clitheroe. He did not, as he said, as yet feel any great interest in their doctrines; but he remembered them with good-will from his coal-pit days, and whenever an emissary of the faith came by, he always found a friend in Hugh Clitheroe. They had evidently flattered him. It was rare, of course, to find a protector among the gentry, and they made the most of the chance.
Poor old man! I could trace the progress of his disappointment, and his final fall into that miserable superstition. He had been a free-thinker; never industrious or self-possessed enough to become a fundamental thinker. No man can stand long on nothing,—he must think out a religion, or accept a theology. Now that busy days were over, and careless youth gone by, Mr. Clitheroe began to be uneasy, and was ready to listen to any scheme which promised peace. If a Jesuit had happened to find him at this period, Rome would have got a recruit without difficulty. The Pope and Brigham Young are the rival bidders for such weaklings in the nineteenth century. Brigham with polygamy is the complement of Pio with celibacy.