“Moore says so, and affirms he wants nobody: some one, however, he must have, if it were only to bear evidence in case anything should happen. I call him very careless. He sits in the counting-house with the shutters unclosed; he goes out here and there after dark, wanders right up the hollow, down Fieldhead-lane, among the plantations, just as if he were the darling of the neighbourhood, or—being, as he is, its detestation—bore a ‘charmed life’ as they say in tale-books. He takes no warning from the fate of Pearson, nor from that of Armitage—shot one in his own house and the other on the moor.”
“But he should take warning, sir, and use precautions too,” interposed Mr. Sweeting; “and I think he would, if he heard what I heard the other day.”
“What did you here, Davy?”
“You know Mike Hartley, sir?”
“The Antinomian weaver? Yes.”
“When Mike has been drinking for a few weeks together, he generally winds up by a visit to Nunnely vicarage, to tell Mr. Hall a piece of his mind about his sermons, to denounce the horrible tendency of his doctrine of works, and warn him that he and all his hearers are sitting in outer darkness.”
“Well—that has nothing to do with Moore.”
“Besides being an Antinomian, he is a violent Jacobin and leveller, sir.”
