Collected Works of Frances Trollope

by Frances Milton Trollope

  But years wore away, and the stout-hearted young prisoner of the Deep Valley began again to think that he had better have died of the fever, than have lived so long, hoping for some happy chance to set him free, and hoping for ever and for ever in vain.

  “I am a fool,” argued Michael at fourteen, “I am a fool for thinking so very much of one who it is quite plain has never thought of me — nor of mother — nor of my poor Edward either; she never gave a thought to either of us! I was a fool to dream it! The fine folks that carried her away, took her far enough from sight and sound of factory-people. And who can blame her if she never turned her head back again to inquire about any of them? Poor little Fanny! She was very kind to roe once — and she was the very prettiest little girl that ever I happened to see. But other people may have found that out by this time, as well as I. Fanny Fletcher is a whole year older than me! I will try with all my might and main never to think of her any more!”

  This resolution was not very steadily adhered to; but the struggle to do it, which was perfectly sincere, made the poor boy moody, and more miserable than ever. His dreams perpetually represented to him his mother and helpless brother, suffering from some unkindness from Fanny, whom he saw superlatively beautiful, and superlatively rich, but more superlatively hard-hearted still. These nervous and irritating visitations brought his mother and brother so vividly before him, that for weeks he could never, whether waking or sleeping, get them out of his head. He fancied himself again running at full speed from Dowling Lodge, with Martha’s basket on his arm; his mother’s little room, decent and orderly in spite of poverty, came back upon his mind as if he had left it but yesterday. He saw the soft expression of her faded countenance, and felt the welcome of her fond embrace.

  “Oh, fool! oh, proud and wicked fool!” he murmured to his tear-stained pillow, as these, and a thousand other tender recollections pressed upon him. “Why could I not endure the tyrant’s cruelty? I might have kissed her now! I might have comforted poor Teddy!” The sound of his own voice as he pronounced this dear familiar name, though in a whisper too low to awaken the weary sleepers round him, wrung his very heart by the vivid recollections which it brought, and though he was now beyond fourteen years old, he cried himself to sleep.

  Fitful and feverish were the transitions of his mind at this period. Sometimes he persuaded himself that his mother was no more, that the loss of him had broken her heart, and that she had died, believing him to have gone before her. At other times it was Edward whom he wept as dead. His shattered health, his feeble limbs were, as he thought, sure evidence that nature meant him not to struggle long against the misery of his lot, and there were moments in which this persuasion even soothed him.

  “Sweet fellow!” thought he. “How calm and beautiful he must have looked in death! Even in suffering, even in agony, his countenance was lovely — so patient, and so heavenly mild! Better, far better he should die, than live a factory-boy like me!”

  And then again his mood would change, and he had for ever before him images of the most fearful destitution — his mother starving, and Edward slowly perishing beside her, because he had been too proud and too impatient to endure sundry buffetings and other indignities, which, when put in competition with the thought of having injured them, dwindled into petty injuries, which he deserved eternal shame for shrinking from.

  Dreadful were the hours he thus spent! and, fearful to think of, was the hopeless, helpless, joyless, comfortless existence by which he held to earth! His very soul sickened as he looked around him, and read in every withered melancholy face the history of blasted youth, and the prophecy of premature death.

  But there are spirits which sorrow and suffering cannot quench, and Michael Armstrong’s was one of them. Nature and accident together had been stronger than the tendency of his employment to cripple his limbs, and he was neither deformed nor stunted. This happy exemption from the common lot, was doubtless greatly owing to the pertinacity of Molly Bing, in proving to Messrs. Woodcomb and Poulet that she was no fool, and knew well enough what she was about. This steadfastness on her part, acting in unison with the superintendent’s judicious objections to Michael’s being buried at that particular time, had certainly given a very critical and efficient impulse to the vigour of a frame of great natural strength and comeliness. The energetic self-sustaining soul within it, had also much to do in defying the paralyzing influence of his miserable situation. It was rarely that Michael could be seen to drag his limbs along, even in the last hours of long-protracted labour, with the same crippled, dipping gait as his companions. A broken-spirited child, when his knees are aching, permits them to bend under him; and not one in fifty, perhaps, of the half-starved, over-worked apprentices of the Deep Valley, reached the term of their captivity, without carrying away with them some species of bodily weakness or deformity. But let the reason be what it might, Michael was saved from this, and though exhibiting a fabric, composed of little besides skin, bone, and sinew, he was, at the age of fourteen years and six months, both tall and straight. —

  But it seemed as if the inward strength of mental suffering kept pace with this vigour of frame; for day by day the bitter consciousness of his own wretched and degraded state increased upon him — and day by day his swelling heart grew more indignant as he looked around him, and watched the exercise of lawless power and coward tyranny upon his miserable companions.

  It was after a peculiarly hateful display of this power, by an act of insult too disgustiug to relate, upon the unresisting person of a little fellow who seemed crawling (only too slowly!) to the grave, that Michael, when every other sufferer in the chamber was fast asleep, set himself to meditate gravely and deliberately upon his own situation. He had that day been so near trying the power of his bony arms, by flying at the throat of the ruffian who had so revoltingly outraged his companion, that with more than boyish judgment he became conscious of the growing danger that beset him. Though he had felt almost to suffocation the boiling rage which nothing but injustice, and the pitiful abuse of adventitious power can generate, he was not such a Quixote as to hope that his arm could effectually redress the wrongs he witnessed, yet he thought with a sort of trembling exultation, that if he had seized the craven overlooker, as he kicked from him the helpless object of his tyranny, he might have held him with a grasp that would have stopped his breath for ever!

  It was a horrid and a murderous thought! and poor Michael, once the gentlest, fondest little heart, that ever nestled to a mother’s bosom, did penance for it by a pang of self-condemnation, that made him grind his teeth in agony. Yet even then the goaded spirit seemed to rise in rebellion against its own remorse.

  “I cannot bear it!” he exclaimed in smothered accents, as he turned his face towards his bed of straw. “I know I cannot bear it long! I have seen two attempting to escape, who have been brought back to frightful tortures — to I know not what! A solitary cell? the whip? the knotted thong? What matters? Would they could slaughter me at once! All would be over then.”

  For a long still hour of that feverish night, the boy lay sleepless. A terrible conviction that there was something within him which might prove stronger than himself — stronger than all his mother’s precepts, and the holy fear of God which they had left upon his mind — made him feel sick with horror, and shudder in abhorrence of his own wickedness. He prayed to God to give him power to turn his thoughts from this; and soothed to calmness by the healing act, he meditated without passion, and with great acuteness for his years, upon the probable result of attempting to escape.

  The difficulties of the enterprise were greater than any can imagine who know not the locality, and the intricate network of security which surround the imprisoned apprentices of Deep Valley on all sides. Of this the elder children, and the few who lived to approach their majority, were by no means ignorant. Considerable pains were indeed taken to impress upon their minds the certainty of their being caught if they succeeded in clearing the walls; together with the importa
nt fact that, as apprentices, it was illegal to assist them in running away from their master, and that it was the duty of every justice of peace to assist in securing and sending them back to complete the term fixed in their indentures.

  All this Michael knew perfectly well; neither was he at all sanguine in his hope of avoiding the toils from which he had never heard that any had escaped. Yet he determined to make the attempt, assuring himself, that no change in the treatment he received could render him more miserable, and sincerely thinking that it would be better and safer for him, should the failure of this desperate attempt lead to such a degree of restraint as would render the yielding to such violence of emotion, as had that day seized upon him, impossible.

  Having come to this conclusion, and firmly pledged his young spirit to the attempt, his feverish restlessness subsided, and he dropped asleep.

  The waking of the next morning was unlike any he had ever known before. He no longer felt as one among a miserable crew, sharing in common with them starvation, labour, and indignity; he felt himself to be one alone, and apart from ail. He was on the eve of doing that which would involve him in difficulties and dangers altogether new and strange to him, and the only termination he could be really said to expect was the being dragged back to his prison to suffer all that it was in the power of his tyrants to inflict. These were strange materials for meditation which was decidedly agreeable; yet such Michael felt it to be, in spite of reason. A sensation of active, dauntless courage swelled his breast, which, with all the danger it threatened, was well worth the heavy monotony of his ordinary existence. At times, too, a gleam of hope would dart across the stern and steady gloom of the prospects and during the moment that the flash lasted, he saw himself restored to his mother and Edward. He could hardly be said to hope this, yet the feeling that it was possible sufficed to sustain his spirits through the days and nights which preceded the attempt.

  It was exactly by the same exit that poor crazy Sally had made use of some fifty years before, that Michael determined to leave the premises. The month or two during which he had been employed in cleaning the yard and its appurtenances, had made him thoroughly well acquainted with the outward door, and also with the region immediately beyond it, for it was thither that he was accustomed to convey all the rubbish which it was his office to remove — an office which might have been attended with some danger of the escape of him who performed it, had not those in authority taken care to inform him that no celerity of step could avail against the watchfulness of certain eyes about the factory, which were always on the alert to reconnoitre that door, and never far distant from the commodious windows which gave them power to do so.

  Poor Sally had found this but too surely in making her attempts, and Michael had more than once listened to the merry tradition, which was a favourite story with the overlookers; of how the silly girl had run in full sight of a dozen watchful eyes, till her strength failed, and she sank down among the bushes and was taken, like a bird that having been long confined, has no strength of wing left to bear him beyond Teach of the first hand extended to recapture him.

  Yet this open postern was the only one by which it was possible to pass; but the very extremity of the danger of passing it, made the attempt easy; for though it was always carefully locked at night, and the key placed, together with those of every external door on the premises, under the pillow of Mr. Woodcomb, the manager had more than once seen a miserable little head peeping through it when left open for the passage of the wheelbarrow, without testifying the least alarm.

  The time chosen by Michael for passing this terrible door, was that during which the dirty herd were commanded to expose their faces and hands for a short moment to such cleansing as might be obtained in a huge trough, in company with a score or two of competitors. It was constantly a moment of great noise, bustle, and hustling; and it was in the midst of this that the young adventurer contrived, unobserved, to push back the only bolt which secured the door during the day, leaving it in a position to yield noiselessly to a very slight touch. At the sound of a bell, which rang about ten minutes after the children were turned out into the court to wash themselves, the whole troop hurried back again to the apprentice-house for their breakfast. It was then that Michael, often the last to finish the too-short operation of washing, remained for a moment behind the rest, and in that moment, opening the door just wide enough for his slender figure to pass, he slipped through, and closed it after him.

  The interval which elapsed before his departure was suspected, certainly did not exceed two minutes; and before the expiration of ten, the fact was completely ascertained and known to nearly every inmate of the mill.

  Mr. Poulet’s second wife, to whom he had then been married about three years, was in appearance the very reverse of the first, being as remarkably small, as the other was large. But what she wanted in muscle, was made up in watchfulness. Nothing escaped her restless and malignant little eyes, and either from the incessant danger of her spying sharpness, or the propensity of the human mind to think present suffering worse than every other, there were many who declared they would be glad to have her brutal predecessor back again. It was this woman who first descried the absence of Michael from the board.

  “Hollo! where is No. 57?” she cried.

  No one could answer; and No. 57 was sought for in vain from one end of the premises to the other.

  “He is gone through the yard-door!” proclaimed the active and intelligent Mrs. Poulet, after discovering that the bolt was withdrawn. “Off with you, you stupid old fool!” she added, addressing her husband; “what d’ye stand staring there for? If you had the wit of a jackass, you might trace him by his feet on the dew — for there are the marks plain enough to any body, that has sense enough to look for ’em.”

  And so in truth there were. A continuous track of footmarks, were easily traced from the door to the steep bank behind the factory, where they were lost in the covert of bushes, which had of late years been coaxed to clothe sides for the purpose of furnishing fagots. That some one had recently broken through these bushes was equally evident, from many boughs having been torn, and the soil beneath them trampled. This was enough to direct the pursuit, with so much certainty of being right, that Mr. Woodcomb laughed as he gave the orders for it.

  “The bushes last for about half a mile,” said be, “and then he must take over the hills, of course. Fine fellow; isn’t he? It will be mighty hard to take him again, won’t it? There’s only three justices of peace for him to be handed to, and only every man he meets ready to introduce him. The worst misfortune is, that I don’t quite see where he is to get his dinner.”

  Two stout overlookers started accordingly upon the track thus easily hit upon, and Mr. Woodcomb awaited the result of their exertions without the slightest anxiety, or any irritation of nerves whatever; albeit he knew that, favourite as he was, he might run no small risk of losing his place, should one of the apprentices really escape — but the thing was impossible; no one could live without eating, not even one who had served his apprenticeship to starving as well as piecing at the Deep Valley Mill. So Mr. Woodcomb slept soundly, although in ignorance of the fact that Michael Armstrong was already within a few feet of his premises.

  CHAPTER XXVI.

  A DISMAL ENTERPRISE» AND ITS MELANCHOLY RESULT — MARTHA DOWLING PUNISHED MORE SEVERELY THAN SHE DESERVED — VERT WILD PROJECTS CONCEIVED BY MISS BROTHERTON, AND SPEEDILY PUT IN EXECUTION.

  IT is now necessary that the narrative should briefly return to the period of Miss Brotherton’s arrival at Milford Park, after her unsuccessful expedition in pursuit of Michael.

  There was no needless delay between this return to her home, and the communication to Mrs. Armstrong and Edward of the dismal news of which she was the bearer; nor was there any consultation on this occasion, concerning the mode of her reaching Hoxley-lane. Poor Mary had greatly advanced in independence of spirit within the last few months; and had she encountered all the military quartered within t
wenty miles, with the Dowling family marching in procession at their head, she would have quietly driven through them all, with the carriage-windows up, perhaps, but with no greater precaution — except, indeed, an order to the coachman to drive on without stopping, let them meet who they would.

  The carriage was at the door the morning after their return, and Miss Brotherton had not yet named her intended expedition to Mrs. Tremlett.

  “You are going out without me, my dear?” said the old lady on hearing it announced.

  “I am going to the widow Armstrong’s, dear nurse,” replied the heiress. “Your presence cannot help me through this dreaded visit. Then why should I make you share the pain of it?”

  “Why? my dear! because I am of no earthly use, and had better die at once if I cannot be of some little comfort to you at such a time as this. Why, don’t I know all about it, and how you must feel at this very moment, just as well as you do yourself, Mary? Sure it was a foolish notion to leave me here enjoying the arm-chair and the footstool, and the flowers, while you are having your heart broken by telling that poor pale body, that the child she loved so dearly is dead and gone for ever.”

  “If you could save either her or me a pang, nurse Tremlett, I would not thus have spared you,” replied Miss Brotherton. ‘However, you shall go with me, dear friend. It is quite like yourself to wish it — and in truth, I might have guessed that you could not have remained easy and quiet at home while I was so engaged. And poor Fanny! — I have left her very busy with Martin, assisting in arranging the little room I have assigned her near my own. Shall we tell her where we are going, in case she should come in here to look for us?”

  “My dear Mary! If you will take my advice, you will let her go too. If you do not, the whole of this terrible talk will have to begin all over again; for of course, when Mrs. Armstrong hears that you have got with you the only person who can tell any thing about her boy, she will be restless and anxious to see her — and then won’t it be all over again, Mary?”