LITERATURE.

Globe, Volume XXII, Issue 1873, 24 February 1880, Page 3

LITERATURE.

THE SILVER HORSE-SHOE. Chapter I. We had been bo sure that the troubles that were overwhelming others in the manufacturing world would never touch ns. We had been so sure that the delegates from the unions might prowl about among onr “ hands ” and never gain one single adherent. I thought our safety founded on a rock. 1 thought we could calmly and sympathisingly look down upon the troubles of our neighbors. Now, when I say “ we ” I mean John and I. This sounds “strong-minded,” you are ready to say. Well, I don’t know what other people may choose to call it, but in truth I have been very proud and glad that ever since the day I married the owner of Otway mills he has liked mo to take an interest in his work and in his people. I don’t mean to say that he talks to me about the price of yarn*, or tells me of the rises and falls in the cotton market, though I think that if any great anxiety came upon him, even of that kind, Jack would give me a hint of it, and I’m sure 1 should try to look as wise as a young owl, and see if the ins and outs of the trade were familiar subjects to my enlightened mind. Yon see, I have had such an example In John’s mother ; and then —well, my family thought that I ought to have done better than marry a Lancashire mill-owner, and they said a good many bitter things. Aunt Denison used to give her shoulders the least little shrug, and draw her shawl about her as if she shivered slightly when I alluded to my future home ; and when she shook hands with John she always managed to convey to mo an affected misgiving that she rather feared her delicate fingers might be soiled by the contract. These things hurt at the time ; though they lost their sting quickly enough when I got him all to myself, and he held me close in his arms, and told me how hard he would strive to make me happy. Happy! well, well, I wonder does there live a happier woman than John’s wife in all the length and breadth of England ? Yet no life is without its days of trial, and the story I am going to tell you now is of one of those dark times that come to ns all sooner or later.

I had never seen Mrs Ralph Otway, John’s mother, until I came to the land of smoke and tall chimneys, for she had not come South to our wedding. Her delicate health was the excuse put forward, but my own private opinion is that John was afraid of auntie. He could put up calmly enough with that shiver and shrug when directed against himself ; but both he and I had once inadvertently heard her say that “ she believed all Lancashire ladies spoke in a loud voice, and had very red hands," and I think that was enough for John. When I first saw Mrs Ralph Otway, this saying at once darted into my mind, for never, among all the grand London ladies that visited at my guardian’s house, had I seen a woman so completely, beautifully refined in look, voice and manner. Then her hands! Why, they were such soft, white, womanly things, and closed over one’s own with such a tender, faithful clasp, that once, sitting by her knee, I could not help bending down and kissing them them as they lay upon her lap. t-he used to tell me stories of Jack’s boyish days ; stories that she never tired of telling, or I of listening to; and sometimes she spoke of her dead husband, and of how he had been revered and looked up to by everybody, until at last his name became a sort of proverb, and people in the business world had been heard to speak of him as * honest Ralph Otway.’ Yon could hear a tremor in her voice when she spoke of things like these, and see a faint flush, like the pint in the inner side of a sea-shell, rise to her delicate cheek,

1 It is a great responsibility to have so many bauds under one head, and to be answerable for the welfare of them all; it needs wisdom to rule them well,’ she would say to me, speaking of the great mills where the machinery whirred and buzzed all day long, and the hands came rushing out when the dinner bell clanged its noisy summons, like bees swarming from their hive. Listening to her wise and tender words, it was borne in upon me that from his early boyhood John had been trained in the best school to make a man good and true. He had wanted his mother to live with ns —and you may be sure I had no will apart from his—but she said : ‘No ; married folks are best left to themselves.’ She had her way ; but we would not let her go far from us ; only a ‘ step or two,’ as John said, so that we could run across of an evening, and she could come to us without fatigue. By the end of the first year of my married life I seemed to have forgotten the fact of being a south country woman. I found that there were plenty of art-lovers and music-lovers among the people whom Aunt Denison once told me went into society with little fluffy bits of cotton sticking to their dress-coats ; while, as for honest warmth of heart, and true, ungrudging hospitality, I soon came to the conclusion that the South couldn’t hold a candle to the North.

I was very happy during that strange new year ; happier still during the one that followed, when I held John’s son in my arms, and saw the clear grey eyes that had won my girlish heart look up at me from my lap. At first motherhood seemed to me such a sweet, new, precious joy that I was ready to be over-anxious. I might have fallen into the mistake that so many young wives make, and in my love for baby let the even dearer possession of my husband’s companionship slip from my hold. However dearly a man loves his children he does not want to be alwaj s hearing about them, least of all when he comes home tired with a day’s work ; nor yet does he like to see his wife gradually become little better than a nnrse-maid. I know all these things now ; but in all those early days I might have lost the freshness of John’s sympathy for me, and mine for him, if it had not been for the gentle word in season that fell from his mother’s lips, and made, as it were, scales to fall from my eyes. She spoke with her hand on my shoulder, and her dear, beautiful face all a-quiver in the dread lest I should be ready to resent her connsel.

‘ Don't let the baby keep you from being the heart of John’s life, child,’ she said ‘ Let no one ever have the power of taking that from you.’ Then I remembered how the night before I had been chattering away about baby’s remarkable feats and marvellous doings, and how weary John looked—nay, how I had caught him in the loving hiding-away of a yawn that would not be wholly repressed, and wisdom came to me as I pondered. Times were bad ; trouble was around us everywhere in the mercantile world; evil counsel was leading honest men astray, and wanton hands were sowing the seeds of dissatisfaction In the hope of reaping harvests of advantage to themselves. First one class of operatives went on a strike, and then another. The ‘hands’ at this mill or that refused to go on working except under the spur of higher wages, and so the busy whirrwhirr of the machinery was silent until stranger hands could be found to set it going again. Darker shadows crept into the picture after this ; men, an hour ago hale and hearty, were maimed, blinded, beaten almost out ot life; and these crimes were done in the dark. The masters did not escape; one was fired at—the cowardly bullet coming from no one knew whither. I grew fearful, and in spite of struggles after courage, more than once I had to turn away my head after John’s good-by kiss had pressed my lips, as he set off for Otway mills.

Oar hands seemed all right as yet. \ et 1 saw, day by day, how the cloud deepened on my husband’s face. I used to sit very quiet, just within reach of his

hand, of an evening, or we would stroll down to Mrs Otway’s—John very quiet, hut yet I kr < w, by the magnetism of touch, happy in the feeling of my hand resting on hia arm. The mother and son spoke ea neatly together of the state of trade, and the dark mists hanging over the north country, and well typified by the black smoke that came from the big chimneys and hung like a ctnopy above the town. v ‘ ho shall tell of the tribute paid in pain and tears by the wonra and children in those troublous days? Surely no bitter pang can thtrs be than the sharp stab that goes through a mother’s heart as the cry of her child for “Bread! bread!” has to be smothered against her breast, lest Its sound drive the brooding man by the tireless hearth to madness and violence.

This is what being “cn strike” means to the wives and little ones of our mill hands. Isay “our” because—alas! that I should have to write it —the day came when John returned from town looking as I had never seen him—as the mother who bore him had never seen him.

Otway mills were stopped. The men, whose relations with their masters had been a proverb in the trade, were on a strike. John did not say much. He was never a man of words, and silence is natural to men as a refuge from possible tears. * Our turn has come at last; it is hardly the men’s fault. This sort of thing is as catching as the plague. They know they have been always fairly dealt with. That blackguard Jim Stevens is at the bottom of it; he was seen talking to one of the delegates from the union.’ ‘That was all John said.’ His mother and I listened; and noting the set line of hia lips and the stern look of hia eyes, we knew that, let the men of Otway mills be as stubborn as they might, the master would not yield an inch. Our home, the dearest spot on earth to me—the fairest, too, in spite of its nearness to a manufacturing centre —was some three miles out of the town.

John used generally to drive in and out, to and from the mills, but sometimes he rode his big black horse, King Cole, and now and again 1 would ride by him on my pretty little bay mare, Lassie, returning with the groom. Well, the night [after he told me of the strike, I lay wide-eyed through all the long, long hours, hearing e ich one strike below stairs, and thinking those thoughts of mingled love and fear that gather about a woman’s heart like a flock of ill-omened birds when her nearest and dearest are threatened with danger. The stillness of night is a terrible magnifying medium; possibi Ities take gieantic proportions, seen through its voiceless quiet. How glad I was when faint lines of light began to creep into the room.

It was past—that night of thoughts that were almost prayers—and prayers that were only like thoughts that I trusted|God to read the meaning of. Breakfast over, the passionate protest in my heart bubbled up to my lips, like a spring that must well up to the light. ‘Jack! oh Jack! yon will not go to the mills to-day ?’ The answer came, calm and clear, smiting me with a bitter despair. * I did not think my wife would try to make a coward of me.’

He did not speak harshly, I could have borne it better if he had. Ho kissed me a moment after—held me very fast and close—then, before he went, he kissed me again. * That is for the youngster upstairs,’ he said, with a tender smile softening the set look of his mouth ; ‘ give it him when he wakes.’

The groom, an old and faithful servant of the Otways, looked grave as he led up King Cole, and gave the bridle into his master’s hand. Then John rode away and I went into the house, seeing nothing for the mist that gathered round me, not even the baby’s faoe, as nnrse met me with him at the foot of the stairs.

That night and morning formed the initial letter of anxious foreboding that seemed long to me, though in reality its duration was scarcely a fortnight. Threatening letters—missives of that most cowardly character called anonymous came at intervals. Many husbands would have hidden such things from a wife, but I. think that John knew that of all trials I could have least endured the thought that he kept a trouble from me.

Mrs Otway’s faoe grew pallid with a more transparent whiteness every day ; her eyes, always tearless, had a fixed look that comes from grief restrained from outward show by miirht or will.

At length negotiations for the employment of alien “hands”—men willing to work for the wages that was all the masters could give in those biting times—were spoken of. Wrath that had simmered now seethed; scowling men gathered in groups about the narrow streets that surrounded the mills like a labyrinth ; muttered curses made starved and frightened women hurry by; clenched fists threatened the world for grievances brought about by the bad counsel of wicked men and the brute resolve and stubbornness of uncultured natures.

Many cases of low fever, the result of insufficient food and fuel, occurred among the wives and children of our rebellious operatives, and my time was soon taken up by ministering to the necessities of the sick. In this worn John never strove to hinder me; nor yet, in the want-stricken homes of the people, was one word of reference to the strike ever uttered in my hearing. The people were kindly and grateful to me in their own rough way, and I crossed no tnreshold that a welcome did not greet me. {To do continued.)