A Blow and Its Consequences

Mrs. Thornton came in with a look of black sternness on her face,
which made Margaret feel she had arrived at a bad time to trouble
her with her request. However, it was only in compliance with
Mrs. Thornton's expressed desire, that she would ask for whatever
they might want in the progress of her mother's illness. Mrs.
Thornton's brow contracted, and her mouth grew set, while
Margaret spoke with gentle modesty of her mother's restlessness,
and Dr. Donaldson's wish that she should have the relief of a
water-bed. She ceased. Mrs. Thornton did not reply immediately.
Then she started up and exclaimed-

'They're at the gates! Call John, Fanny,--call him in from the
mill! They're at the gates! They'll batter them in! Call John, I
say!' And simultaneously, the gathering tramp--to which she had been
listening, instead of heeding Margaret's words--was heard just
right outside the wall, and an increasing din of angry voices
raged behind the wooden barrier, which shook as if the unseen
maddened crowd made battering-rams of their bodies, and retreated
a short space only to come with more united steady impetus
against it, till their great beats made the strong gates quiver,
like reeds before the wind. The women gathered round the windows,
fascinated to look on the scene which terrified them. Mrs.
Thornton, the women-servants, Margaret,--all were there. Fanny
had returned, screaming up-stairs as if pursued at every step,
and had thrown herself in hysterical sobbing on the sofa. Mrs.
Thornton watched for her son, who was still in the mill. He came
out, looked up at them--the pale cluster of faces--and smiled
good courage to them, before he locked the factory-door. Then he
called to one of the women to come down and undo his own door,
which Fanny had fastened behind her in her mad flight. Mrs.
Thornton herself went. And the sound of his well-known and
commanding voice, seemed to have been like the taste of blood to
the infuriated multitude outside. Hitherto they had been
voiceless, wordless, needing all their breath for their
hard-labouring efforts to break down the gates. But now, hearing
him speak inside, they set up such a fierce unearthly groan, that
even Mrs. Thornton was white with fear as she preceded him into
the room. He came in a little flushed, but his eyes gleaming, as
in answer to the trumpet-call of danger, and with a proud look of
defiance on his face, that made him a noble, if not a handsome
man. Margaret had always dreaded lest her courage should fail her
in any emergency, and she should be proved to be, what she
dreaded lest she was--a coward. But now, in this real great time
of reasonable fear and nearness of terror, she forgot herself,
and felt only an intense sympathy--intense to painfulness--in the
interests of the moment.