Part 11

"And she vanished in a flash o' fire and brimstone, did she, maister?" said Dolly to the pedlar, as she tendered her penny.

"That she did, pretty maid!" quickly answered the vender, with a look of roguish seriousness: "take the book home, and let your sweetheart read it to you, if you can't read it yourself; and you'll find that what I have said is all true."

"I hope it is, maister, for they're solemn things to joke about!" remarked a staid-looking matron, who was taking out her spectacles to read the veracious story.

"True as the Gospel!" exclaimed the ready pedlar: "I was born and brought up in the parish, and know every one of the creditable yeomen who have signed the young man's confession."

"Yo may ha' been born there," interjected a Sheffield huckster, with a satirical grin; "but it's many a moile off!"

The pedlar strode rapidly away to a distant part of the market.

"Why, you dooant doot what th' man says, do you, Roger?" asked a fair Axholmian butter-maiden of the huckster.

"Daht!" replied the Sheffielder, in his own dialect; "I al'ays daht loies, mun! But come, lass! tak t'other hawp'ny a pahnd, and bring t' basket along wi' thee!"

"Marcy on us!" exclaimed the butter-woman in spectacles, as the rude huckster left the market; "you Sheffield fellow'll hev to see a ghooast before he believes there is one! What an alarming accoont this is, to be sewer!"

"Would you be so kind," said Joe to the elderly dame who uttered this latter exclamation, "as to let me look at the account for a few minutes? I will return it to you again, very soon."

"Why, yes,--I'll let you look at it," answered the woman, scanning him from head to foot; "and I hope you'll take a lesson from the book, and never act so wickedly as this young man did."

It was not mere curiosity which prompted the lad to ask the loan of the pedlar's tract. He felt certain that he had glanced at a similar tale in a volume of old pamphlets on the bookseller's stall, but a few minutes before. After a short search, he found the volume again, and comparing the stories, saw that they were the same, to a letter, save that the copy on the stall affirmed the apparition to have taken place in Westmoreland, more than half-a-century before. While his thoughts were all in a tumult at this strange discovery, the bookseller, who was attentive to the behaviour of his customers, stept up, and addressed him in a whisper.

"You look surprised, young man," he said, while Joe gazed at the sinister expression in his countenance; "but I knew it was all an old story, though the fellow was making such a noise about it. Say nothing about it, however,--for all trades must live,--and most people would think one tale as good and as true as the other!"

The bookseller was only just in time with his precept of caution; for Joe's gathering indignation at the pedlar's imposture would have impelled him, the next moment, to break through his boyish bashfulness, and proclaim his discovery aloud, in the ears of the surrounding butter-women:--a proceeding which, in lieu of thanks, would have, no doubt, drawn down upon his head a storm of wrath from their disturbed superstition. Feeling unspeakably confused with his reflections, Joe now hastily returned the volume to its place on the stall; and thanking the kind butter-woman for her loan of the ghost-story, gave it carefully into her hands. He then hasted away towards the little inn where he was to meet Dame Deborah, partly under an impression that his hours of liberty were near their expiry,--but much more with the persuasion that he would be able, as he went along, being no longer surrounded with the market-din, to disentangle the web of conflicting thought into which the slight incidents just narrated had cast him.

The pedlar's falsehood and audacity,--and the whispered caution of the bookseller, whom Joe felt strongly inclined to characterise as an abettor of imposture and knavery,--the credulity of the butter-women,--and the gaping wonder manifested by the listening crowd,--formed a mass of striking corroborations,--a sort of powerful running commentary on what he had hastily read in the volume he had just purchased. The incidents in the little market, in fact, opened to the lad's inexperienced mind a glimpse of the melancholy truth that man and the multitude have been prone to superstition in all ages, and have eagerly received frauds which have been imposed upon them, throughout all time, by the craft of interested and organised parties; or, where these were wanting, that man has forged deceptions for himself, through the strength of his own wondering faculty. The end to which these incipient reasonings would lead him was not, and could not, then, be manifest to him; or Joe, scarcely rid of his fanatical incubus, would have revolted from them with horror. It was merely the dawn of thoughts which were waiting to break in upon his mind with all the power and effulgence of new truth. But, whatever might be the tendency of these commencing reasonings, the progress of them was speedily arrested by the beginning of the journey homewards.

Joe, with the good old dame behind him, rode as far as the Trent ferry, at Stockwith, in company with sundry rustic frequenters of the weekly market. The gossip chiefly consisted of a recapitulation of the prices of corn and flax, and poultry, and pigs, and butter,--until the re-introduction of the ghost-story, at what time Joe and his foster-mother, with the rest, were seated in the ferry-boat, and were recrossing the Trent.

"Well,--it's an awful accoont, Maister Gawky!" exclaimed Diggory Dowlson, the rough old ferryman, after an Axholmian farmer had briefly recounted the pedlar's tale; "but I've heeard many sich i' my time,--thof I nivver seed nowt mysen."

"And the Lord send I nivver may!" ejaculated Betty Bogglepeep, a tottering old wife of Owston, who had, the day before, as she said, in the course of her gossip, chopped off the head of her best black hen, because she crowed like a cock:--"the Lord send I nivver may, for it maks me queer to think a thowt o' sich things; and I'm sewer if I woz to see 'em, it would freeten me oot o' my wits!"

"Hold thy foolish tongue, prithee!" chimed in her loving husband, whose bravery seemed chiefly owing to his late fellowship with Sir John Barleycorn, at the market:--"why does ta talk aboot being freeten'd at shadows?"

"Nay, nay, Davy, it's to no use puttin' it off i' that way," interjected the old ferryman, taking up the cause of the old woman and the ghost, with the fervour of gallantry and faith united;--"depend on't, though deead folks may come like shadows, yet it's a fearful seeght to see 'em!"

"No doot, no doot, Diggory!" replied the farmer, "but seeing 'em's _all_--thoo knaws!"

The farmer meant this for an arch sally, but his companions in the boat were not in the vein to relish his humour.

"What do _you_ think aboot sich solemn things, Dame Thrumpkinson?" asked the old ferryman, turning to the corner of the boat where Deborah seemed buried in reflection;--"you sit and say not a word, all this time. Give us your thowts, dame, for ye've more sense than all of us, put together!"

"I don't give heed to every fool's tale about such things," replied Dame Deborah, in her usual grave tone; "but I've serious reason for believing that the dead often know what the living are doing."

"Why, did ye ivver see owt spirit'al, Dame Thrumpkinson?" instantly asked half-a-dozen voices, while twice as many eyes glared upon the aged Deborah with a gaze as wonder-stricken as that of a nest of owls suddenly awakened by daylight.

"Nay, neighbours, nay!" replied the dame, drooping her head, and speaking in a tone of melancholy tenderness;--"do not ask me further. I think we ought to keep sacred the secrets of the dead that have been near and precious to us!"

The manner of Dame Deborah's reply was so affecting, and its intimate meaning, though only guessed by her rude auditors, seemed to command so deep a respect from their simple feelings, that the subject was immediately dropped; and the whole party remained silent until the boat had touched the western bank of the river.

Some of the company now took a direction for Owston and Butterwick, and such parts of the country as lay on the banks of the Trent; while the remnant, who were bound for the more central parts of the isle, being more strongly mounted than Joe and his aged mistress, and many of them having a greater distance to reach ere night-fall, sped on before, after bidding their deeply-respected acquaintance, Dame Deborah, a hearty and kindly farewell. The journey home was nearly ended before the dame broke silence, her mind seeming deeply intent on thoughts which the conversation in the boat had awakened within her; and when she addressed her foster-son, it was but briefly, though kindly.

"I hope the ride will do thee no harm, bairn," she said, in a tone of the gentlest affection; "and how did ta spend the half-crown?"

"I bought a book with it, dame," Joe answered.

"A book!" said she, pleasantly:--"well, well, it's like thee: but, may be, thou could not ha' spent it better. And what sort of a book is it, bairn?"

"Quite on a new subject," Joe replied, scarcely knowing how to describe the book to the dame's plain understanding.

"A new subject!" she repeated, with a gentle laugh;--"well, well, I hope it will do thee more good than some of thy old subjects." And then, as if fearful of bringing back distressful thoughts to the heart of one over whom she yearned so tenderly, the good old dame permitted the journey to end without further remark. Joe would fain have entreated an explication of the mysterious conclusion given by his aged protectress to the conversation in the boat; but there was something too sombre in her mood of mind, at that time, he thought, to permit his hazarding any reference to such a subject.

Almost insensibly, to himself, Joe's opinions on religious matters began to undergo an entire change within a short period succeeding his acquaintance with the work of the French philosopher. The arguments of the book were conducted in too covert a mode for one, so little skilled in the arts of disguise, to be able to detect its real tendency in the outset. The blandishments of the writer's style captivated his taste; and the boldness with which he saw the doctrines of natural liberty asserted, took strong possession of his judgment. Degraded as his reason had felt itself to be while enslaved to the teachings of fanaticism, there was no wonder that he felt the awakening of a desire for mental independence, and listened willingly to the voice of an advocate for the native dignity of man's understanding. Appended to the volume, which now began to engross his leisure hours, was a treatise, entitled "The Law of Nature." Joe perused its precepts and digested its reasonings, until he believed he had committed a lamentable error by wearying his flesh and spirit with acts of ascetic devotion,--and resolved he would address himself to the practice of the elevated moral virtue which the French writer asserted to be easy and natural to man when brought within the influence of instruction.

The native activity of his intellect prevented a prolonged abidance on the mere threshold of opinion: a few months rolled over, and Joe's convictions took a current which they kept for some years. In truth, the formation of his conclusions was hastened by the very circumstance of his being compelled to pursue his doubts and inquiries in silence. No one around him understood the questions with which his mind was grappling; and the answers which his own judgment gradually gave them, would, he was sensible, create a general horror if broadly proclaimed in the hearing of the simple people by whom he was surrounded.

His faith once shaken in the rules of practice prescribed by the sectarian teachers, since he knew no other way of interpreting the experimental doctrines of the Scriptures than that they pursued,--his reason became gradually distasted with the Scriptures themselves,--and he easily adopted the arguments against the Bible contained in his favourite volume of French philosophy. He began to suspect, and, at length, boldly concluded, that the Jehovah of the Hebrews was, indeed, the mere mythological fiction of a rude and barbarous age,--a Deity scarcely more godlike in his character and attributes than the savage Moloch of the Ammonites. To class the garden of primeval innocence, and the forbidden fruit, and the tempting serpent, and the lapse of the first human pair, among the allegories which, he now learned, the ancient nations were wont to adopt in order to embody their conceptions of things otherwise difficult of narration, was a still easier step. The Prophecies, he thought, were evidently attributable to that prolific Oriental faculty which gave birth and authority to the pagan oracles; and the Miracles, as events opposed to general experience, were to be at once discarded from the catalogue of historic facts, by every true philosopher.

Amid these rapid and decided changes of sentiment, Joe sometimes wondered that he felt none of the inward terror and the "stings of conscience," which he had so perpetually been taught to regard as the sure avenging vicegerents of a Deity, in the breasts of those who dared to doubt revealed truth. That he was tormented by none of these appalling visitings, was another proof to his mind of the fallacy of his rejected teachers. He was conscious that, in his conclusions, whether right or wrong, he was sincere: he was satisfied that his new mental condition was far preferable to the spirit-degrading and wearisome slavery he had so recently shaken off; and he had not, yet, sufficiently probed the depths of his own heart to know that his self-gratulation was also aided by the pride of thinking diversely from the mass of his fellows. The ghost story at the market, and its accompanying circumstances, often ran through his memory, and served, not a little, to enforce his persuasion that the mass of mankind were the dupes of superstition; and, at the close of every similar train of reflection, he could not refrain from indulging a self-complacent feeling on his having, himself, thrown off what he gradually deemed to be a blind and implicit trust in fables under the delusive guise of Divine inspiration.

Glowing with the conception that he had hitherto been living in a dream of multiform illusions, but had now broken it, Joe resolved to "gird up the loins of his mind" for the laborious and persevering pursuit of solid knowledge; and said within himself,--"I will henceforth converse with experience, and not with imagination: I will cleave to fact and not to phantasy." The weekly journies to Gainsborough with his aged mistress, which were uninterruptedly kept up from their commencement, afforded him what he conceived to be ample means for carrying this resolve into successful practice. And so, in some measure, it proved; for, by an exchange of volumes with the travelling bookseller, and the casual assistance of a few shillings from his indulgent godmother, he reaped an unremitting supply for his intellectual appetite,--a faculty which rapidly "grew with what it fed on." He eagerly devoured whatever came within his reach in the shape of history or chronicle;--he sought industriously to acquire the rudiments of real science;--and strove to sharpen and fortify his reason by the perusal of ancient tomes of logic and philosophy. For records of travel he craved with an incontrollable passion: a feeling which was, in reality, but a revivification of the ardour awakened in his boyish mind by the adventures of the shipwrecked Crusoe. But the fervid desire he once cherished, to penetrate vast deserts and visit unknown realms, was now transmuted, by the influence of his more sober associations and habits of reflection, into a prevalent wish to see the world of men; and the prospect of a new and wider field of observation to be entered upon at the close of his humble servitude began thenceforth to pervade his daily musings, and, eventually, to take a shape in his purposes.

The secrecy which Joe was compelled to observe on religious subjects was a restraint through which he would gladly have broken; but there was not one to whom he could communicate his sceptical views without fear of an explosion of alarm. Observance of caution being repulsive to his feelings, it was, therefore, natural that his real sentiments should occasionally escape. Only, however, when the gross superstitions of his daily associates excited very strong disgust within him, did Joe utterly forget his rules of caution. His fellow-apprentices were in little danger of imbibing heretical opinions, from the fact of their understandings being too uninformed to apprehend the real drift of his thinkings when expressed. But Dame Deborah pondered on some of these hasty expressions of opinion, until her aged heart often ached with the suspicion that all was not right in the new religious state of her foster-son. Yet, when she marked the tenour of his daily conduct,--his inviolable regard for truth,--his steady rebuke of every thing coarse and unfeeling,--when she listened to the language in which his conceptions, even on ordinary subjects, were uttered,--and when she contrasted his manly cheerfulness with his former gloom and despondency, a confidence arose that dispelled her temporary doubts of the correctness of his heart, and her bosom glowed with pride at the remembrance that she had adopted him for her own.

During the concluding five years of his apprenticeship, Joe had piled together in his mind, though after no prescribed rule, much knowledge of a multifarious character. The acquirement of one of the noble languages of antiquity was his severest unassisted struggle during this probationary course; but it was a strife from which he reaped the richest after-pleasures. The facts he gleaned from history were stored up faithfully in his memory, not merely as chronological items, but as texts for fertile and profitable reflection; while he assiduously strove to catch the rays of such new truths as were perceptible in his more limited reading of ethics, and to evince their spirit in his thoughts and actions. Thus, without written pattern or oral instructor, the orphan apprentice endeavoured, by the selection of such materials as lay within his grasp, to build up, within himself, a mental fabric of seemly architecture. But, to cut short observations that are already too protracted,--Joe, with all his efforts after mental discipline, was, at twenty-one, what all the lonely self-educated must be at that age, often the slave of his own hypothesis when he believed himself to be following the most legitimate deductions from an authenticated fact,--oftener a visionary than a true philosopher.

On the evening preceding the day of Joe's freedom, the good old Deborah, sitting at her own door, presented a picture almost identical with the sketch attempted at the opening of this brief recital. Except the deeper furrows on her face, there was no token that age had strengthened its empire over her. The fine old woman sat as erect in her arm-chair as she had sat there sixteen years before. Her eyes also beamed with the same wakefulness and kindliness on her neighbours, as they passed by, from their labour, and tendered her a respectful recognition,--for she was at peace with all, and beloved by all; and while the light vapour curled and wreathed, as it floated slowly upward from her pipe, and then melted, above her head, into the invisibility of space, it seemed a type of the serene and healthful course she had trod in her uprightness, that was, in due time, to receive its quiet change into the unseen but felicitous future. The solicitude she had, for seventeen years, increasingly felt respecting the welfare of her foster-son,--now the youth was within a few hours of being at age,--filled her heart so completely, that she could do nothing as she sat in her customary seat, that evening, but con over the probable consequences of Joe's emancipation from the thraldom of apprenticeship, which was to take place the following noon.

"Well, I'm truly thankful," soliloquised the peaceful septuagenarian, puffing away the clouds from her pipe with growing energy, and now and then ending her sentences in an audible tone, through the strength of earnestness,--"that the Lord moved my heart to take care of this poor motherless and faytherless bairn. It's Him, I'm sensible, that inclines us to do any good,--for there's little that's good in us by natur'. I've no reason to repent what I did; for though the dear lad has a few whirligig notions, yet I'm sure there's a vast deal o' good in him. He doesn't like church over well,--but then the parson grows old and stupid, like me; and it's not likely that a young fellow that's grown so very book-larnt as our Joe, should be fond o' spending his time in listening to an old toothless parson's dull drawling. Neighbour Toby Lackpenny says that the lad's ower nat'ral; and not abstrac' enough, in his way o' thinking; but, for my part, I think he's far ower abstrac' already! At least, I hope he'll grow wiser, in a few years, than to say that the dead never appear to the living. He may talk in that way to green geese like himself, but not to me. Didn't I see my own dear Barachiah, for three nights together, stand in the moonlight, at the foot of my bed, while I was weeping sore for the loss of him?--The Lord forgive me, that I should have grieved so sinfully as to have disturbed his rest! But that's past and gone, and many a deep trouble besides, thank Heaven above! And now, here's this lad. I wished, often, that I had one o' my own;--but it was not God's will so to bless my poor Barachiah and me,--and how could I have loved a child of my own better than I do love this poor bairn? But I was thinking about what I must do for him before he leaves me,--for he's long talked o' seeing the world when he was out of his time;--and, I make no doubt, he'll want to be off to-morrow, as soon as noontide makes him free. I must say a few words to him about it, to-night,--and yet, I feel so chicken-hearted about his going, that I hardly know how to speak to him."

The good dame's irregular soliloquy was put an end to by the voices of her younger apprentices, who were drawing homewards for the night. Her foster-son soon afterwards made his appearance,--book in hand, as usual, at the end of his evening's walk at the conclusion of labour. The supper-table was spread,--the meal ended,--and Joe and the aged dame were speedily left the sole occupants of the little kitchen. Joe had retaken up his book, and had been buried for more than half-an-hour in deep attention to its contents,--the hour was growing late;--and Dame Deborah, after many inward struggles, began, in a very tremulous tone, to address her foster-child on the most important theme in her recent soliloquy.

"Joe," said she, "I was thinking, since you will be of age, and a freeman, to-morrow----" and there her emotion compelled her to hesitate; but although Joe had laid down his book to attend to his aged protectress, he felt too much agitated to take up the observation where the dame had left it.

"I reckon you are in the same mind about leaving me, Joe," resumed the aged woman, trembling with extreme feeling, and uttering the sentence with a cadence that sounded like the key-note of desolation;--"but I wish you to say what you are intending to do when I give you your indentures, to-morrow at noon."