“Yes,” said George, “there is a nest of them in a hole in the barn-wall; we must suffocate them with brimstone-fumes at night. They are very destructive to fruit, and dangerous to the horses.”
“Suffocate a devil with brimstone!” said Betty. “That’s a good un. This harnet is for all the world like th’ owd enemy. He comes at you, and at you, as if he’d eat you.”
Whilst George was quietly smiling at Betty’s idea, there was a loud ringing of a poker and fire-shovel, and he saw Sam Davis, one of the labourers, crossing the garden beds, and looking up at the trees, as in search of something.
“There!” said Betty, “now the bees are swarming: this hot morning fetches them all out.”
George, Ann, Mrs. Woodburn, and Betty, as well as the other maids, all hurried out to witness the interesting process of charming the bees down. Loud rung Sam Davis’s music on the fire-shovel, and presently they saw a brown cluster of bees, as large as a man’s hat, and longer, hanging from the bough of an apple-tree.
The country people have various ways of accounting for the effect of this clangour on a fire-shovel in causing a swarm of bees to settle. Some think they like it, and so stop to hear it; others, that the young queen-bee, scared by the noise, settles on the first object she sees. Certain it is that the effect is general, and very marked. Others think this clangour must be made to claim your swarm, for if it settles on another man’s property without such loud claim, and close following, you cannot assert your right to them. Be that as it may, our friends of Woodburn Grange saw their swarm hanging before them. There was a quick running for a sheet and an empty hive. The inside of the hive was rubbed with a mixture of beer and crushed black-currant leaves, or balm, and Sam Davis quietly approached them, put down two bricks on the sheet, cut off carefully the bough on which the swarm hung; deposited it on the sheet between the two bricks; and then set the hive over it. The skill with which this was done, without irritating the bees, showed that Davis was an experienced hand at this operation. The bees seemed to settle themselves pretty tranquilly in their new home, but Mrs. Woodburn observed that a number of them continued to fly about the end of the bough whence the part covered with the swarm had been cut off. “Yes,” said Davis, “they will come and try to find it, and worship the place where the queen alighted several days yet.”
“Ay,” said Betty, who had generally some religious fancy to attach to every curious occurrence, “that’s just the way with many in their religion. They go and worship blindly for a few days; but it’s only for a few, and then it’s all over with them.”
George Woodburn often thought of Betty’s quaint remarks long after others had forgotten them, for he found something in them; and in the course of the following spring, after Thorsby’s conversion, he thought of these two occasions. “The harnet fled at me, and fled at me,” said Betty, “like the owd enemy.” “This is just as he seems to have done at Thorsby!” said George to himself. And then the bees worshipping the bough where the queen-bee sat, for a few days, and only for a few, as Betty said. How completely that applied to Thorsby! His career of pulpit eloquence and repentant zeal had been as brief as it had been dazzling. It was like the taking fire of dry furze on a common. It was an all-consuming flame for a brief period, and was gone, leaving a bare and blackened waste. Letty had watched with a sad terror the decrease and disappearance of this impetuous blaze of the soul. For a time there was a transition state in Thorsby, which, to a spectator only concerned to observe the singularities of character, would have been an interesting study. In a morning he would be up as early as three o’clock, would go down into the kitchen, where there was always a raking-coal burning, break it up, and commence reading the Bible aloud, and with a somewhat singing tone, accompanied by an occasional shake of the head, as from some very impressive thought, and often with gushing showers of tears. Before the servants came down, he would return to his bed, and to a sound sleep, which would continue till ten o’clock, or later. Letty, now accustomed to this habit, got a cup of coffee herself on going down, and then waited patiently for her husband’s appearance. He would come down sad and thoughtful, as it seemed, breakfast with few words, and away to his warehouse. At noon he would return all life and gaiety, and in the evening go off to his club. Yes, he was again an associate of his old associates!—the sow had returned to its wallowing in the mire! Yet this did not prevent him being up the following morning, and reading aloud in his Bible with tears and tones of pious feeling.
Such an incongruous condition could not last. The different elements of his strange character were in conflict. The religious sentiment was maintaining its last efforts against the levity and love of pleasure in that unstable heart. For awhile Thorsby was the wonder once more of his townsmen, but this time it was the wonder and the scorn. Sad was the heart and the life of poor Letty; sad was the mood of mind in the once happy Woodburn Grange. Thorsby had lost all power over his own actions, yet he had not lost all feeling. Many were the paroxysms of remorse and tears which his wife had to witness, at first with some faint hopes, at last only with anguish and despair. Thorsby avoided being seen in the streets as much as possible, stole by back ways to his warehouse, and at night renewed the orgies of his dissolute club.
George Woodburn spoke out his mind to the unfortunate man most indignantly, most sternly; and seeing that it had no effect, he entreated Letty to leave him, and return to Woodburn Grange. Mr. Woodburn, who had many things now to harass him, drove over in the day, while Thorsby was at the warehouse, and insisted that Letty should return with him, and leave the wretched man to his inevitable course. But Letty, worn and jaded as she now seemed by her constant wretchedness, refused positively to leave her husband. “No,” she said, “to the last moment I will stay by him, and try every means to save him.”