Chapter 27

CHAPTER XXVII - FRUIT-PIECE

'For never any thing can be amiss

When simpleness and duty tender it.'

MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM.

Mr. Thornton went straight and clear into all the interests of
the following day. There was a slight demand for finished goods;
and as it affected his branch of the trade, he took advantage of
it, and drove hard bargains. He was sharp to the hour at the
meeting of his brother magistrates,--giving them the best
assistance of his strong sense, and his power of seeing
consequences at a glance, and so coming to a rapid decision.
Older men, men of long standing in the town, men of far greater
wealth--realised and turned into land, while his was all floating
capital, engaged in his trade--looked to him for prompt, ready
wisdom. He was the one deputed to see and arrange with the
police--to lead in all the requisite steps. And he cared for
their unconscious deference no more than for the soft west wind,
that scarcely made the smoke from the great tall chimneys swerve
in its straight upward course. He was not aware of the silent
respect paid to him. If it had been otherwise, he would have felt
it as an obstacle in his progress to the object he had in view.
As it was, he looked to the speedy accomplishment of that alone.
It was his mother's greedy ears that sucked in, from the
women-kind of these magistrates and wealthy men, how highly Mr.
This or Mr. That thought of Mr. Thornton; that if he had not been
there, things would have gone on very differently,--very badly,
indeed. He swept off his business right and left that day. It
seemed as though his deep mortification of yesterday, and the
stunned purposeless course of the hours afterwards, had cleared
away all the mists from his intellect. He felt his power and
revelled in it. He could almost defy his heart. If he had known
it, he could have sang the song of the miller who lived by the
river Dee:--

'I care for nobody--Nobody cares for me.'

The evidence against Boucher, and other ringleaders of the riot,
was taken before him; that against the three others, for
conspiracy, failed. But he sternly charged the police to be on
the watch; for the swift right arm of the law should be in
readiness to strike, as soon as they could prove a fault. And
then he left the hot reeking room in the borough court, and went
out into the fresher, but still sultry street. It seemed as
though he gave way all at once; he was so languid that he could
not control his thoughts; they would wander to her; they would
bring back the scene,--not of his repulse and rejection the day
before but the looks, the actions of the day before that. He went
along the crowded streets mechanically, winding in and out among
the