Moreover a village is not as accommodating as a town; and the farther it is removed from industrial influences the less likely is it to view any sudden change with the philosophic calm which lowers its voice to whisper “The King is dead!” and forthwith raises it to shout “Long live the King!”
Mawm furnished an illustration of both these facts. Baldwin Briggs had been a fixture in the village: a piece of grit hewn out of the side of their own bleak hills and therefore naturally rough and unyielding—even coarse. Nobody had cared for him very much, for there had been in his nature none of the kindliness that either begets or responds to kindliness; yet there had been no marked aversion on the part of his neighbours, who were aware that all sorts of natures like all sorts of rock enter into the composition of a world.
If the truth may be told most of his acquaintances were secretly pleased when news came that Baldwin had lost a considerable portion of his money; and even when it was seen that the disaster was of greater magnitude than they had realised their attitude suffered little change. He had always made them uneasily conscious of his superiority as a man of means; the crash brought down the millstone grit from its proud position among the clouds to the level of the humbler and commoner limestone, and gave to every villager whom he had cursed or snubbed a comfortable sense of nearer equality. Providence was avenging these insults: it was not for them to find fault with Providence.
When, however, the shock developed into an earthquake: when Providence took the unwelcome shape of this foreigner, Inman; Mawm scowled and muttered. To be driven from the devil he knew to the deep sea he distrusted was an experience no man had bargained for; and when the devil was such a broken-spirited boggart as Baldwin, the villagers’ sympathies warmed towards the man who was bone of their bone; for after all there is a vast difference between a devil and a poor devil.
Baldwin, then, found not only Maniwel, but the bulk of his neighbours well-disposed when with the foundering of his ship he lost all that he had, and was so utterly beggared that even heart and hope—salvage which many ship-wrecked souls manage to bear away with them, and with which they find life still worth living—went with the rest. They greeted him in friendly fashion when they met (which was indeed seldom for he shunned society) but he responded with a scarcely perceptible nod and kept his eyes on the ground until they had passed.
“It’ll go agen t’ grain, having to take his orders thro’ Maniwel and Jagger, an’ living on their charity, as you mud say”—this was the universal opinion, freely expressed and with much wise head-shaking: a very natural conclusion.
It was incorrect. In the hour of his calamity Baldwin came to himself and clung with a pitiful and almost childish sense of security to the friend of his youth. Like the seeds in Arctic soil which have been quickened into life by the warmth of some explorer’s camp fire and have forced their tender shoots through the hard crust of earth, an unsuspected virtue quickened in Baldwin, who by his actions—for words failed him—showed himself grateful.
The dog-like look in his eyes made Maniwel uneasy and Jagger irritable.
“Come, come!” the father would say, “Tha owes us naught! Tha’rt working for thi’ living, aren’t tha?” and the young man would growl out that it pleased him to think they had taken the wind out of “yon beggar’s” sails.
It was indeed a thought that comforted Jagger and compensated for much that was not agreeable, that by his ungenerous and even brutal action Inman had over-reached himself, alienating the sympathies of those who had been growing more favourably disposed towards him and deepening the dislike of the rest, so that he was left for a while almost without customers. Inman himself recognised his mistake, and was vexed and disconcerted, though he turned an unperturbed face to the world, saving his ill-humour for his wife, whom he made to suffer vicariously for this cunning move of Maniwel’s as he chose to regard it.