第22章 CHAPTER V.(7)

And so, thrust from Hillsborough by the trades, and by his fears for Miss Carden, and also drawn from it by his mother's terrors, he felt himself a feather on the stream of Destiny; and left off struggling: beaten, heart-sick, and benumbed, he let the current carry him like any other dead thing that drifts.

He still plied the hammer, but in a dead-alive way.

He wrote a few cold lines to Mr. Jobson, to say that he thought it was time for a plain answer to be given to a business proposal.

But, as he had no great hope the reply would be favorable, he awaited it in a state bordering on apathy. And so passed a miserable week.

And all this time she, for whose sake he denied himself the joy and consolation of her company, though his heart ached and pined for it, had hard thoughts of him, and vented them too to Jael Dence.

The young are so hasty in all their judgments.

While matters were in this condition, Henry found, one morning, two fresh panes of glass broken in his window.

In these hardware works the windows seldom or never open: air is procured in all the rooms by the primitive method of breaking a pane here and a pane there; and the general effect is as unsightly as a human mouth where teeth and holes alternate. The incident therefore was nothing, if it had occurred in any other room; but it was not a thing to pass over in this room, secured by a Bramah lock, the key of which was in Henry's pocket: the panes must have been broken from the outside. It occurred to him directly that a stone had been thrown in with another threatening scrawl.

But, casting his eye all round, he saw nothing of the kind about.

Then, for a moment, a graver suspicion crossed his mind: might not some detonating substance of a nature to explode when trodden upon, have been flung in? Hillsborough excelled in deviltries of this kind.

Henry thought of his mother, and would not treat the matter lightly or unsuspiciously. He stood still till he had lighted a lucifer match, and examined the floor of his room. Nothing.

He lighted a candle, and examined all the premises. Nothing.

But, when he brought his candle to the window, he made a discovery: the window had two vertical iron uprights, about three-quarters of an inch in circumference: and one of these revealed to his quick eye a bright horizontal line. It had been sawed with a fine saw.

Apparently an attempt had been made to enter his room from outside.

The next question was, had that attempt succeeded.

He tried the bar; it was not quite cut through.

He locked the forge up directly, and went to his handling room.

There he remained till Mr. Cheetham entered the works; then he went to him, and begged him to visit his forge.

Mr. Cheetham came directly, and examined the place carefully.

He negatived, at once, the notion that any Hillsborough hand had been unable to saw through a bar of that moderate thickness. "No," said he, "they were disturbed, or else some other idea struck them all of a sudden; or else they hadn't given themselves time, and are coming again to-morrow. I hope they are. By six o'clock to-night, I'll have a common wooden shutter hung with six good hinges on each side, easy to open at the center; only, across the center, I'll fix a Waterloo cracker inside."

"A Waterloo cracker!"

"Ay, but such a one as you never saw. I shall make it myself. It shall be only four inches long, but as broad as my hand, and enough detonating powder in it to blow the shutter fifty feet into the air: and if there should be one of Jobson's lads behind the shutter at the time, why he'll learn flying, and naught to pay for wings."

"Why, sir, you are planning the man's death!"

"And what is HE planning? Light your forge, and leave the job to me. I'm Hillsborough too, and they've put my blood up at last."

While Henry lighted his forge, Mr. Cheetham whipped out a rule, and measured the window exactly. This done, he went down the stairs, and crossed the yard to go to his office.

But, before he could enter it, a horrible thing occurred in the room he had just left; so horrible, it made him, brave as he was, turn and scream like a woman.

Some miscreant, by a simple but ingenious means, which afterward transpired, had mixed a quantity of gunpowder with the smithy-slack or fine cinders of Henry's forge. The moment the forge was hot, the powder ignited with a tremendous thud, a huge mass of flame rushed out, driving the coals with it, like shot from a gun; Henry, scorched, blackened, and blinded, was swept, as by a flaming wind, against the opposite wall; then, yelling, and stark mad with fright (for nothing drives men out of their wits like an explosion in a narrow space), he sprang at the window, head foremost, and with such velocity that the sawed iron snapped like a stick of barley-sugar, and out he went head foremost; and this it was made Cheetham scream, to see him head downward, and the paving-stones below.

But the aperture was narrow: his body flew through, but his tight arm went round the unbroken upright, and caught it in the bend of the elbow.

Then Cheetham roared, "Hold on, Little! Hold on, I tell you!"

The scared brain of a man accustomed to obey received the command almost without the mind; and the grinders and forgers, running wildly into the yard, saw the obnoxious workman, black as a cinder from head to foot, bleeding at the face from broken glass, hanging up there by one hand, moaning with terror, and looking down with dilating eye, while thick white smoke rushed curling out, as if his body was burning. Death by suffocation was at his back, and broken bones awaited him below.