North and South
Page 129'I will go. Perhaps I may ask you to accompany me downstairs, and
bar the door behind me; my mother and sister will need that
protection.' 'Oh! Mr. Thornton! I do not know--I may be wrong--only--' But he was gone; he was downstairs in the hall; he had unbarred
the front door; all she could do, was to follow him quickly, and
fasten it behind him, and clamber up the stairs again with a sick
heart and a dizzy head. Again she took her place by the farthest
window. He was on the steps below; she saw that by the direction
of a thousand angry eyes; but she could neither see nor hear
any-thing save the savage satisfaction of the rolling angry
murmur. She threw the window wide open. Many in the crowd were
mere boys; cruel and thoughtless,--cruel because they were
thoughtless; some were men, gaunt as wolves, and mad for prey.
children at home--relying on ultimate success in their efforts to
get higher wages, and enraged beyond measure at discovering that
Irishmen were to be brought in to rob their little ones of bread.
Margaret knew it all; she read it in Boucher's face, forlornly
desperate and livid with rage. If Mr. Thornton would but say
something to them--let them hear his voice only--it seemed as if
it would be better than this wild beating and raging against the
stony silence that vouchsafed them no word, even of anger or
reproach. But perhaps he was speaking now; there was a momentary
hush of their noise, inarticulate as that of a troop of animals.
She tore her bonnet off; and bent forwards to hear. She could
speak, the momentary instinct to listen to him was past and gone,
and the people were raging worse than ever. He stood with his
arms folded; still as a statue; his face pale with repressed
excitement. They were trying to intimidate him--to make him
flinch; each was urging the other on to some immediate act of
personal violence. Margaret felt intuitively, that in an instant
all would be uproar; the first touch would cause an explosion, in
which, among such hundreds of infuriated men and reckless boys,
even Mr. Thornton's life would be unsafe,--that in another
instant the stormy passions would have passed their bounds, and
swept away all barriers of reason, or apprehension of
back-ground stooping to take off their heavy wooden clogs--the
readiest missile they could find; she saw it was the spark to the
gunpowder, and, with a cry, which no one heard, she rushed out of
the room, down stairs,--she had lifted the great iron bar of the
door with an imperious force--had thrown the door open wide--and
was there, in face of that angry sea of men, her eyes smiting
them with flaming arrows of reproach. The clogs were arrested in
the hands that held them--the countenances, so fell not a moment
before, now looked irresolute, and as if asking what this meant.
For she stood between them and their enemy. She could not speak,
but held out her arms towards them till she could recover breath.