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North and South

by Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell · English · Gutenberg #4276 · 1,010,609 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: North and South

Author: Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell


        
Release date: July 1, 2003 [eBook #4276]
                Most recently updated: January 16, 2025

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NORTH AND SOUTH ***




                           NORTH AND SOUTH.

       [Illustration: “SHE LAY CURLED UPON THE SOFA IN THE BACK
                         DRAWING-ROOM.”—P. 1.

                          _North and South._]




                            NORTH AND SOUTH

                                  BY

                             MRS. GASKELL

                    [Illustration: text decoration]

                                LONDON
                         WALTER SCOTT, LIMITED
                          PATERNOSTER SQUARE




                    [Illustration: text decoration]

                           NORTH AND SOUTH.




CHAPTER I.

“HASTE TO THE WEDDING.”

    “Wooed and married and a’.”


“Edith!” said Margaret, gently, “Edith!”

But as Margaret half suspected, Edith had fallen asleep. She lay curled
up on the sofa in the back drawing-room in Harley Street looking very
lovely in her white muslin and blue ribbons. If Titania had ever been
dressed in white muslin and blue ribbons, and had fallen asleep on a
crimson damask sofa in a back drawing-room, Edith might have been taken
for her. Margaret was struck afresh by her cousin’s beauty. They had
grown up together from childhood, and all along Edith had been remarked
upon by every one, except Margaret, for her prettiness; but Margaret had
never thought about it until the last few days, when the prospect of
soon losing her companion seemed to give force to every sweet quality
and charm which Edith possessed. They had been talking about wedding
dresses and wedding ceremonies; and Captain Lennox, and what he had told
Edith about her future life at Corfu, where his regiment was stationed;
and the difficulty of keeping a piano in good tune (a difficulty which
Edith seemed to consider as one of the most formidable that could befall
her in her married life), and what gowns she should want in the visits
to Scotland, which would immediately succeed her marriage; but the
whispered tone had latterly become more drowsy; and Margaret, after a
pause of a few minutes, found, as she fancied, that in spite of the buzz
in the next room, Edith had rolled herself up into a soft ball of muslin
and ribbon, and silken curls, and gone off into a peaceful little
after-dinner nap.

Margaret had been on the point of telling her cousin of some of the
plans and visions which she entertained as to her future life in the
country parsonage, where her father and mother lived; and where her
bright holidays had always been passed, though for the last ten years
her aunt Shaw’s house had been considered as her home. But in default of
a listener, she had to brood over the change in her life silently as
heretofore. It was a happy brooding, although tinged with regret at
being separated for an indefinite time from her gentle aunt and dear
cousin. As she thought of the delight of filling the important post of
only daughter in Helstone parsonage, pieces of the conversation out of
the next room came upon her ears. Her aunt Shaw was talking to the five
or six ladies who had been dining there, and whose husbands were still
in the dining-room. They were the familiar acquaintances of the house;
neighbours whom Mrs. Shaw called friends, because she happened to dine
with them more frequently than with any other people, and because if she
or Edith wanted anything from them, or they from her, they did not
scruple to make a call at each other’s houses before luncheon. These
ladies and their husbands were invited in their capacity of friends, to
eat a farewell dinner in honour of Edith’s approaching marriage. Edith
had rather objected to this arrangement, for Captain Lennox was expected
to arrive by a late train this very evening; but, although she was a
spoiled child, she was too careless and idle to have a very strong will
of her own, and gave way when she found that her mother had absolutely
ordered those extra delicacies of the season which are always supposed
to be efficacious against immoderate grief at farewell dinners. She
contented herself by leaning back in her chair, merely playing with the
food on her plate, and looking grave and absent; while all around her
were enjoying the mots of Mr. Grey, the gentleman who always took the
bottom of the table at Mrs. Shaw’s dinner parties, and asked Edith to
give them some music in the drawing-room. Mr. Grey was particularly
agreeable over this farewell dinner, and the gentlemen staid downstairs
longer than usual. It was very well they did—to judge from the
fragments of conversation which Margaret overheard.

“I suffered too much myself; not that I was not extremely happy with the
poor dear General, but still disparity of age is a drawback; one that I
was resolved Edith should not have to encounter. Of course, without any
maternal partiality, I foresaw that the dear child was likely to marry
early; indeed, I had often said that I was sure she would be married
before she was nineteen. I had quite prophetic feeling when Captain
Lennox”—and here the voice dropped into a whisper, but Margaret could
easily supply the blank. The course of true love in Edith’s case had run
remarkably smooth. Mrs. Shaw had given way to the presentiment, as she
expressed it; and had rather urged on the marriage, although it was
below the expectations which many of Edith’s acquaintances had formed
for her, a young and pretty heiress. But Mrs. Shaw said that her only
child should marry for love,—and sighed emphatically, as if love had
not been her motive for marrying the General. Mrs. Shaw enjoyed the
romance of the present engagement rather more than her daughter. Not but
that Edith was very thoroughly and properly in love; still she would
certainly have preferred a good house in Belgravia, to all the
picturesqueness of the life which Captain Lennox described at Corfu. The
very parts which made Margaret glow as she listened, Edith pretended to
shiver and shudder at; partly for the pleasure she had in being coaxed
out of her dislike by her fond lover, and partly because anything of a
gipsy or make-shift life was really distasteful to her. Yet had any one
come with a fine house, and a fine estate, and a fine title to boot,
Edith would still have clung to Captain Lennox while the temptation
lasted; when it was over, it is possible she might have had little
qualms of ill-concealed regret that Captain Lennox could not have united
in his person everything that was desirable. In this she was but her
mother’s child; who, after deliberately marrying General Shaw with no
warmer feeling than respect for his character and establishment, was
constantly, though quietly, bemoaning her hard lot in being united to
one whom she could not love.

“I have spared no expense in her trousseau,” were the next words
Margaret heard. “She has all the beautiful Indian shawls and scarfs the
General gave to me, but which I shall never wear again.”

“She is a lucky girl,” replied another voice, which Margaret knew to be
that of Mrs. Gibson, a lady who was taking a double interest in the
conversation, from the fact of one of her daughters having been married
within the last few weeks. “Helen had set her heart upon an Indian
shawl, but really when I found what an extravagant price was asked, I
was obliged to refuse her. She will be quite envious when she hears of
Edith having Indian shawls. What kind are they? Delhi? with the lovely
little borders?”

Margaret heard her aunt’s voice again, but this time it was as if she
had raised herself up from her half-recumbent position, and were looking
into the more dimly lighted back drawing-room. “Edith! Edith!” cried
she; and then she sank as if wearied by the exertion. Margaret stepped
forward.

“Edith is asleep, Aunt Shaw. Is it anything I can do?”

All the ladies said “poor child!” on receiving this distressing
intelligence about Edith; and the minute lap-dog in Mrs. Shaw’s arms
began to bark, as if excited by the burst of pity.

“Hush, Tiny! you naughty little girl! you will waken your mistress. It
was only to ask Edith if she would tell Newton to bring down her shawls;
perhaps you would go, Margaret dear?”

Margaret went up into the old nursery at the very top of the house,
where Newton was busy getting up some laces which were required for the
wedding. While Newton went (not without a muttered grumbling) to undo
the shawls, which had already been exhibited four or five times that
day, Margaret looked round upon the nursery; the first room in that
house with which she had become familiar nine years ago, when she was
brought, all untamed from the forest, to share the home, the play, and
the lessons of her cousin Edith. She remembered the dark, dim look of
the London nursery, presided over by an austere and ceremonious nurse,
who was terribly particular about clean hands and torn frocks. She
recollected the first tea up there—separate from her father and aunt,
who were dining somewhere down below, an infinite depth of stairs; for
unless she were up in the sky (the child thought), they must be deep
down in the bowels of the earth. At home—before she came to live in
Harley Street—her mother’s dressing-room had been her nursery; and as
they kept early hours in the country parsonage, Margaret had always had
her meals with her father and mother. Oh! well did the tall stately girl
of eighteen remember the tears shed with such wild passion of grief by
the little girl of nine, as she hid her face under the bed-clothes in
that first night; and how she was bidden not to cry by the nurse,
because it would disturb Miss Edith; and how she had cried as bitterly,
but more quietly, till her newly-seen, grand, pretty aunt had come
softly upstairs with Mr. Hale to show him his little sleeping daughter.
Then the little Margaret had hushed her sobs, and tried to lie quiet as
if asleep, for fear of making her father unhappy by her grief, which she
dared not express before her aunt, and which she rather thought it was
wrong to feel at all after the long hoping, and planning, and contriving
they had gone through at home, before her wardrobe could be arranged to
suit her grander circumstances, and before papa could leave his parish
to come up to London, even for a few days.

Now she had got to love the old nursery, though it was but a dismantled
place; and she looked all round with a kind of cat-like regret, at the
idea of leaving it for ever in three days.

“Ah Newton!” said she, “I think we shall all be sorry to leave this dear
old room.”

“Indeed, miss, I shan’t for one. My eyes are not so good as they were,
and the light here is so bad that I can’t see to mend laces except just
at the window, where there’s always a shocking draught—enough to give
one one’s death of cold.”

“Well, I dare say you will have both good light and plenty of warmth at
Naples. You must keep as much of your darning as you can till then.
Thank you, Newton, I can take them down—you’re busy.”

So Margaret went down laden with shawls, and snuffing up their spicy
Eastern smell. Her aunt asked her to stand as a sort of lay figure on
which to display them, as Edith was still asleep. No one thought about
it; but Margaret’s tall, finely made figure, in the black silk dress
which she was wearing as mourning for some distant relative of her
father’s, set off the long beautiful folds of the gorgeous shawls that
would have half-smothered Edith. Margaret stood right under the
chandelier, quite silent and passive, while her aunt adjusted the
draperies. Occasionally, as she was turned round, she caught a glimpse
of herself in the mirror over the chimney-piece, and smiled at her own
appearance there—the familiar features in the usual garb of a princess.
She touched the shawls gently as they hung around her, and took a
pleasure in their soft feel and their brilliant colours, and rather
liked to be dressed in such splendour—enjoying it much as a child would
do, with a quiet pleased smile on her lips. Just then the door opened,
and Mr. Henry Lennox was suddenly announced. Some of the ladies started
back, as if half-ashamed of their feminine interest in dress. Mrs. Shaw
held out her hand to the new-comer; Margaret stood perfectly still,
thinking she might be yet wanted as a sort of block for the shawls; but
looking at Mr. Lennox with a bright, amused face, as if sure of his
sympathy in her sense of the ludicrousness at being thus surprised.

Her aunt was so much absorbed in asking Mr. Henry Lennox—who had not
been able to come to dinner—all sorts of questions about his brother
the bridegroom, his sister the bridesmaid (coming with the Captain from
Scotland for the occasion), and various other members of the Lennox
family, that Margaret saw she was no more wanted as shawl-bearer, and
devoted herself to the amusement of the other visitors, whom her aunt
had for the moment forgotten. Almost immediately, Edith came in from the
back drawing-room, winking and blinking her eyes at the stronger light,
shaking back her slightly-ruffled curls, and altogether looking like the
Sleeping Beauty just startled from her dreams. Even in her slumber she
had instinctively felt that a Lennox was worth rousing herself for; and
she had a multitude of questions to ask about dear Janet, the future,
unseen sister-in-law, for whom she professed so much affection, that if
Margaret had not been very proud she might have almost felt jealous of
the mushroom rival. As Margaret sank rather more into the background on
her aunt’s joining the conversation, she saw Henry Lennox directing his
look towards a vacant seat near her; and she knew perfectly well that as
soon as Edith released him from her questioning, he would take
possession of that chair. She had not been quite sure, from her aunt’s
rather confused account of his engagements, whether he would come that
night; it was almost a surprise to see him; and now she was sure of a
pleasant evening. He liked and disliked pretty nearly the same things
that she did. Margaret’s face was lightened up into an honest, open
brightness. By-and-by he came. She received him with a smile which had
not a tinge of shyness or self-consciousness in it.

“Well, I suppose you are all in the depth of business—ladies’ business,
I mean. Very different to my business, which is the real true law
business. Playing with shawls is very different work to drawing up
settlements.”

“Ah, I knew how you would be amused to find us all so occupied in
admiring finery. But really Indian shawls are very perfect things of
their kind.”

“I have no doubt they are. Their prices are very perfect, too. Nothing
wanting.”

The gentlemen came dropping in one by one, and the buzz and noise
deepened in tone.

“This is your last dinner-party, is it not? There are no more before
Thursday?”

“No. I think after this evening we shall feel at rest, which I am sure I
have not done for many weeks; at least, that kind of rest when the hands
have nothing more to do, and all the arrangements are complete for an
event which must occupy one’s head and heart. I shall be glad to have
time to think, and I am sure Edith will.”

“I am not so sure about her, but I can fancy that you will. Whenever I
have seen you lately, you have been carried away by a whirlwind of some
other person’s making.”

“Yes,” said Margaret, rather sadly, remembering the never-ending
commotion about trifles that had been going on for more than a month
past: “I wonder if a marriage must always be preceded by what you call a
whirlwind, or whether in some cases there might not rather be a calm and
peaceful time just before it.”

“Cinderella’s godmother ordering the trousseau, the wedding-breakfast,
writing the notes of invitation, for instance,” said Mr. Lennox,
laughing.

“But are all these quite necessary troubles?” asked Margaret, looking up
straight at him for an answer. A sense of indescribable weariness of all
the arrangements for a pretty effect, in which Edith had been busied as
supreme authority for the last six weeks, oppressed her just now; and
she really wanted some one to help her to a few pleasant, quiet ideas
connected with a marriage.

“Oh, of course,” he replied with a change to gravity in his tone. “There
are forms and ceremonies to be gone through, not so much to satisfy
oneself, as to stop the world’s mouth, without which stoppage there
would be very little satisfaction in life. But how would you have a
wedding arranged?”

“Oh, I have never thought much about it; only I should like it to be a
very fine summer morning; and I should like to walk to church through
the shade of trees; and not to have so many bridesmaids, and to have no
wedding-breakfast. I dare say I am resolving against the very things
that have given me the most trouble just now.”

“No, I don’t think you are. The idea of stately simplicity accords well
with your character.”

Margaret did not quite like this speech; she winced away from it more,
from remembering former occasions on which he had tried to lead her into
a discussion (in which he took the complimentary part) about her own
character and ways of going on. She cut his speech rather short by
saying:

“It is natural for me to think of Helstone church, and the walk to it,
rather than of driving up to a London church in the middle of a paved
street.”

“Tell me about Helstone. You have never described it to me. I should
like to have some idea of the place you will be living in, when
ninety-six Harley Street will be looking dingy and dirty, and dull, and
shut up. Is Helstone a village, or a town, in the first place?”

“Oh, only a hamlet; I don’t think I could call it a village at all.
There is the church and a few houses near it on the green—cottages,
rather—with roses growing all over them.”

“And flowering all the year round, especially at Christmas—make your
picture complete,” said he.

“No,” replied Margaret, somewhat annoyed, “I am not making a picture. I
am trying to describe Helstone as it really is. You should not have said
that.”

“I am penitent,” he answered. “Only it really sounded like a village in
a tale rather than in real life.”

“And so it is,” replied Margaret, eagerly. “All the other places in
England that I have seen seem so hard and prosaic-looking, after the New
Forest. Helstone is like a village in a poem—in one of Tennyson’s
poems. But I won’t try and describe it any more. You would only laugh at
me if I told you what I think of it—what it really is.”

“Indeed, I would not. But I see you are going to be very resolved. Well,
then, tell me that which I should like still better to know: what the
parsonage is like.”

“Oh, I can’t describe my home. It is home, and I can’t put its charm
into words.”

“I submit. You are rather severe to-night, Margaret.”

“How?” said she, turning her large soft eyes round full upon him. “I did
not know I was.”

“Why, because I made an unlucky remark, you will neither tell me what
Helstone is like, nor will you say anything about your home, though I
have told you how much I want to hear about both, the latter
especially.”

“But indeed I cannot tell you about my own home. I don’t quite think it
is a thing to be talked about, unless you knew it.”

“Well, then”—pausing for a moment—“tell me what you do there. Here you
read, or have lessons, or otherwise improve your mind, till the middle
of the day; take a walk before lunch, go a drive with your aunt after,
and have some kind of engagement in the evening. There, now fill up your
day at Helstone. Shall you ride, drive, or walk?”

“Walk, decidedly. We have no horse, not even for papa. He walks to the
very extremity of his parish. The walks are so beautiful, it would be a
shame to drive—almost a shame to ride.”

“Shall you garden much? That, I believe, is a proper employment for
young ladies in the country.”

“I don’t know. I am afraid I shan’t like such hard work.”

“Archery parties—picnics—race balls—hunt balls?”

“Oh no!” said she, laughing. “Papa’s living is very small; and even if
we were near such things, I doubt if I should go to them.”

“I see, you won’t tell me anything. You will only tell me that you are
not going to do this and that. Before the vacation ends, I think I shall
pay you a call, and see what you really do employ yourself in.”

“I hope you will. Then you will see for yourself how beautiful Helstone
is. Now I must go. Edith is sitting down to play, and I just know enough
of music to turn over the leaves for her; and, besides, Aunt Shaw won’t
like us to talk.”

Edith played brilliantly. In the middle of the piece the door
half-opened, and Edith saw Captain Lennox hesitating whether to come in.
She threw down her music, and rushed out of the room, leaving Margaret
standing confused and blushing to explain to the astonished guests what
vision had shown itself to cause Edith’s sudden flight. Captain Lennox
had come earlier than was expected; or was it really so late? They
looked at their watches, were duly shocked, and took their leave.

Then Edith came back, glowing with pleasure, half-shyly, half-proudly
leading in her tall handsome Captain. His brother shook hands with him,
and Mrs. Shaw welcomed him in her gentle kindly way, which had always
something plaintive in it, arising from the long habit of considering
herself a victim to an uncongenial marriage. Now that, the General being
gone, she had every good of life, with as few drawbacks as possible, she
had been rather perplexed to find an anxiety, if not a sorrow. She had,
however, of late settled upon her own health as a source of
apprehension; she had a nervous little cough whenever she thought about
it; and some complaisant doctor ordered her just what she desired—a
winter in Italy. Mrs. Shaw had as strong wishes as most people, but she
never liked to do anything from the open and acknowledged motive of her
own good will and pleasure; she preferred being compelled to gratify
herself by some other person’s command or desire. She really did
persuade herself that she was submitting to some hard external
necessity; and thus she was able to moan and complain in her soft
manner, all the time she was in reality doing just what she liked.

It was in this way she began to speak of her own journey to Captain
Lennox, who assented, as in duty bound, to all his future mother-in-law
said, while his eyes sought Edith, who was busying herself in
re-arranging the tea-table, and ordering up all sorts of good things in
spite of his assurances that he had dined within the last two hours.

Mr. Henry Lennox stood leaning against the chimney-piece, amused with
the family scene. He was close by his handsome brother; he was the plain
one in a singularly good-looking family; but his face was intelligent,
keen, and mobile; and now and then Margaret wondered what it was that he
could be thinking about, while he kept silence, but was evidently
observing, with an interest that was slightly sarcastic, all that Edith
and she were doing. The sarcastic feeling was called out by Mrs. Shaw’s
conversation with his brother; it was separate from the interest which
was excited by what he saw. He thought it a pretty sight to see the two
cousins so busy in their little arrangements about the table. Edith
chose to do most herself. She was in a humour to enjoy showing her lover
how well she could behave as a soldier’s wife. She found out that the
water in the urn was cold, and ordered up the great kitchen tea-kettle;
the only consequence of which was that when she met it at the door, and
tried to carry it in, it was too heavy for her, and she came in pouting,
with a black mark on her muslin gown, and a little round white hand
indented by the handle, which she took to show to Captain Lennox, just
like a hurt child, and, of course, the remedy was the same in both
cases. Margaret’s quickly-adjusted spirit-lamp was the most efficacious
contrivance, though not so like the gypsy-encampment which Edith, in
some of her moods, chose to consider the nearest resemblance to a
barrack-life.

After this evening all was bustle till the wedding was over.




CHAPTER II.

ROSES AND THORNS.

    “By the soft green light in the woody glade,
    On the banks of moss where thy childhood played
    By the household tree, thro’ which thine eye
    First looked in love to the summer sky.”
                  MRS. HEMANS.


Margaret was once more in her morning dress, travelling quietly home
with her father, who had come up to assist at the wedding. Her mother
had been detained at home by a multitude of half-reasons, none of which
anybody fully understood, except Mr. Hale, who was perfectly aware that
all his arguments in favour of a grey satin gown, which was midway
between oldness and newness, had proved unavailing; and that, as he had
not the money to equip his wife afresh, from top to toe, she would not
show herself at her only sister’s only child’s wedding. If Mrs. Shaw had
guessed at the real reason why Mrs. Hale did not accompany her husband,
she would have showered down gowns upon her; but it was nearly twenty
years since Mrs. Shaw had been the poor pretty Miss Beresford, and she
had really forgotten all grievances except that of the unhappiness
arising from disparity of age in married life, on which she could
descant by the half-hour. Dearest Maria had married the man of her
heart, only eight years older than herself, with the sweetest temper,
and that blue black hair one so seldom sees. Mr. Hale was one of the
most delightful preachers she had ever heard, and a perfect model of a
parish priest. Perhaps it was not quite a logical deduction from all
these premises, but it was still Mrs. Shaw’s characteristic conclusion,
as she thought over her sister’s lot: “Married for love, what can
dearest Maria have to wish for in this world?” Mrs. Hale, if she spoke
truth, might have answered with a ready-made list, “a silver-grey glacé
silk, a white chip bonnet, oh! dozens of things for the wedding, and
hundreds of things for the house.”

Margaret only knew that her mother had not found it convenient to come,
and she was not sorry to think that their meeting and greeting would
take place at Helstone parsonage, rather than, during the confusion of
the last two or three days, in the house in Harley Street, where she
herself had had to play the part of Figaro, and was wanted everywhere at
one and the same time. Her mind and body ached now with the recollection
of all she had done and said within the last forty-eight hours. The
farewells so hurriedly taken, amongst all the other good-byes, of those
she had lived with so long, oppressed her now with a sad regret for the
times that were no more; it did not signify what those times had been,
they were gone never to return. Margaret’s heart felt more heavy than
she could ever have thought it possible in going to her own dear home,
the place and the life she had longed for for years—at that time of all
times for yearning and longing, just before the sharp senses lose their
outlines in sleep. She took her mind away with a wrench from the
recollection of the past to the bright serene contemplation of the
hopeful future. Her eyes began to see, not visions of what had been, but
the sight actually before her; her dear father leaning back asleep in
the railway carriage. His blue-black hair was grey now, and lay thinly
over his brows. The bones of his face were plainly to be seen—too
plainly for beauty, if his features had been less finely cut; as it was,
they had a grace if not a comeliness of their own. The face was in
repose; but it was rather rest after weariness than the serene calm of
the countenance of one who led a placid, contented life. Margaret was
painfully struck by the worn, anxious expression; and she went back over
the open and avowed circumstances of her father’s life, to find the
cause for the lines that spoke so plainly of habitual distress and
depression.

“Poor Frederick!” thought she, sighing. “Oh! if Frederick had but been a
clergyman, instead of going into the navy, and being lost to us all! I
wish I knew all about it. I never understood it from Aunt Shaw; I only
knew he could not come back to England because of that terrible affair.
Poor dear papa! how sad he looks! I am so glad I am going home, to be at
hand to comfort him and mamma.”

She was ready with a bright smile, in which there was not a trace of
fatigue, to greet her father when he awakened. He smiled back again, but
faintly, as if it were an unusual exertion. His face returned into its
lines of habitual anxiety. He had a trick of half-opening his mouth as
if to speak, which constantly unsettled the form of the lips, and gave
the face an undecided expression. But he had the same large, soft eyes
as his daughter,—eyes which moved slowly and almost grandly round in
their orbits, and were well veiled by their transparent white eyelids.
Margaret was more like him than like her mother. Sometimes people
wondered that parents so handsome should have a daughter who was so far
regularly beautiful; not beautiful at all, was occasionally said. Her
mouth was wide; no rosebud that could only open just enough to let out a
“yes” and “no,” and “an’t please you, sir.” But the wide mouth was one
soft curve of rich red lips; and the skin, if not white and fair, was of
an ivory smoothness and delicacy. If the look on her face was, in
general, too dignified and reserved for one so young, now, talking to
her father, it was bright as the morning,—full of dimples, and glances
that spoke of childish gladness, and boundless hope in the future.

It was the latter part of July when Margaret returned home. The forest
trees were all one dark, full, dusky green; the fern below them caught
all the slanting sunbeams; the weather was sultry and broodingly still.
Margaret used to tramp along by her father’s side, crushing down the
fern with a cruel glee, as she felt it yield under her light foot, and
send up the fragrance peculiar to it—out on the broad commons into the
warm scented light, seeing multitudes of wild, free, living creatures,
revelling in the sunshine, and the herbs and flowers it called forth.
This life—at least these walks—realised all Margaret’s anticipations.
She took a pride in her forest. Its people were her people. She made
hearty friends with them; learned and delighted in using their peculiar
words; took up her freedom amongst them; nursed their babies; talked or
read with slow distinctness to their old people; carried dainty messes
to their sick; resolved before long to teach at the school where her
father went regularly every day as to an appointed task, but she was
continually tempted off to go and see some individual friend—man,
woman, or child—in some cottage in the green shade of the forest. Her
out-of-doors life was perfect. Her in-doors life had its drawbacks. With
the healthy shame of a child, she blamed herself for her keenness of
sight in perceiving that all was not as it should be there. Her
mother—her mother always so kind and tender towards her—seemed now and
then so much discontented with their situation; thought that the bishop
strangely neglected his episcopal duties, in not giving Mr. Hale a
better living; and almost reproached her husband because he could not
bring himself to say that he wished to leave the parish, and undertake
the charge of a larger. He would sigh aloud as he answered, that if he
could do what he ought in little Helstone, he should be thankful; but
every day he was more overpowered; the world became more bewildering. At
each repeated urgency of his wife, that he would put himself in the way
of seeking some preferment, Margaret saw that her father shrank more and
more; and she strove at such times to reconcile her mother to Helstone.
Mrs. Hale said that the near neighbourhood of so many trees affected her
health; and Margaret would try to tempt her forth on to the beautiful,
broad, upland, sun-streaked, cloud-shadowed common; for she was sure
that her mother had accustomed herself too much to an in-doors life,
seldom extending her walks beyond the church, the school, and the
neighbouring cottages. This did good for a time; but when the autumn
drew on, and the weather became more changeable, her mother’s idea of
the unhealthiness of the place increased; and she repined even more
frequently that her husband, who was more learned than Mr. Hume, a
better parish priest than Mr. Houldsworth, should not have met with the
preferment that these two former neighbours of theirs had done.

This marring of the peace of home, by long hours of discontent, was what
Margaret was unprepared for. She knew, and had rather revelled in the
idea, that she should have to give up many luxuries, which had only been
troubles and trammels to her freedom in Harley Street. Her keen
enjoyment of every sensuous pleasure was balanced finely, if not
overbalanced, by her conscious pride in being able to do without them
all, if need were. But the cloud never comes in that quarter of the
horizon from which we watch for it. There had been slight complaints and
passing regrets on her mother’s part, over some trifle connected with
Helstone, and her father’s position there, when Margaret had been
spending her holidays at home before; but in the general happiness of
the recollection of those times, she had forgotten the small details
which were not so pleasant.

In the latter half of September, the autumnal rains and storms came on,
and Margaret was obliged to remain more in the house than she had
hitherto done. Helstone was at some distance from any neighbours of
their own standard of cultivation.

“It is undoubtedly one of the most out-of-the-way places in England,”
said Mrs. Hale, in one of her plaintive moods. “I can’t help regretting
constantly that papa has really no one to associate with here; he is so
thrown away; seeing no one but farmers and labourers from week’s end to
week’s end. If we only lived at the other side of the parish, it would
be something; there we should be almost within walking distance of the
Stansfields; certainly the Gormons would be within a walk.”

“Gormons,” said Margaret, “Are those the Gormons who made their fortunes
in trade at Southampton? Oh! I’m glad we don’t visit them. I don’t like
shoppy people. I think we are far better off, knowing only cottagers
and labourers, and people without pretence.”

“You must not be so fastidious, Margaret, dear!” said her mother,
secretly thinking of a young and handsome Mr. Gormon whom she had once
met at Mr. Hume’s.

“No! I call mine a very comprehensive taste; I like all people whose
occupations have to do with land; I like soldiers and sailors, and the
three learned professions, as they call them. I’m sure you don’t want me
to admire butchers and bakers, and candlestick-makers, do you, mamma?”

“But the Gormons were neither butchers nor bakers, but very respectable
coach-builders.”

“Very well. Coach-building is a trade all the same, and I think a much
more useless one than that of butchers or bakers. Oh! how tired I used
to be of the drives every day in Aunt Shaw’s carriage, and how I longed
to walk!”

And walk Margaret did, in spite of the weather. She was so happy out of
doors, at her father’s side, that she almost danced; and with the soft
violence of the west wind behind her, as she crossed some heath, she
seemed to be borne onwards, as lightly and easily as the fallen leaf
that was wafted along by the autumnal breeze. But the evenings were
rather difficult to fill up agreeably. Immediately after tea her father
withdrew into his small library, and she and her mother were left alone.
Mrs. Hale had never cared much for books, and had discouraged her
husband, very early in their married life, in his desire of reading
aloud to her, while she worked. At one time they had tried backgammon as
a resource; but as Mr. Hale grew to take an increasing interest in his
school and his parishioners, he found that the interruptions which arose
out of these duties were regarded as hardships by his wife, not to be
accepted as the natural conditions of his profession, but to be
regretted and struggled against by her as they severally arose. So he
withdrew, while the children were yet young, into his library, to spend
his evenings (if he were at home), in reading the speculative and
metaphysical books which were his delight.

When Margaret had been here before, she had brought down with her a
great box of books, recommended by masters or governess, and had found
the summer’s day all too short to get through the reading she had to do
before her return to town. Now there were only the well-bound,
little-read English Classics, which were weeded out of her father’s
library to fill up the small book-shelves in the drawing-room. Thomson’s
Season’s, Hayley’s Cowper, Middleton’s Cicero, were by far the lightest,
newest, and most amusing. The book-shelves did not afford much resource.
Margaret told her mother every particular of her London life, to all of
which Mrs. Hale listened with interest, sometimes amused and
questioning, at others a little inclined to compare her sister’s
circumstances of ease and comfort with the narrower means at Helstone
Vicarage. On such evenings Margaret was apt to stop talking rather
abruptly, and listen to the drip-drip of the rain upon the leads of the
little bow window. Once or twice Margaret found herself mechanically
counting the repetition of the monotonous sound, while she wondered if
she might venture to put a question on a subject very near to her heart,
and ask where Frederick was now; what he was doing; how long it was
since they had heard from him. But a consciousness that her mother’s
delicate health and positive dislike to Helstone, all dated from the
time of the mutiny in which Frederick had been engaged—the full account
of which Margaret had never heard, and which now seemed doomed to be
buried in sad oblivion,—made her pause and turn away from the subject
each time she approached it. When she was with her mother, her father
seemed the best person to apply to for information; and when with him,
she thought that she could speak more easily to her mother. Probably
there was nothing much to be heard that was new. In one of the letters
she had received before leaving Harley Street, her father had told her
that they had heard from Frederick; he was still at Rio, and very well
in health, and sent his best love to her; which was dry bones, but not
the living intelligence she longed for. Frederick was always spoken of,
in the rare times when his name was mentioned, as “Poor Frederick.” His
room was kept exactly as he had left it; and was regularly dusted, and
put into order by Dixon, Mrs. Hale’s maid, who touched no other part of
the household work, but always remembered the day when she had been
engaged by Lady Beresford as ladies’ maid to Sir John’s wards, the
pretty Miss Beresfords, the belles of Rutlandshire. Dixon had always
considered Mr. Hale as the blight which had fallen upon her young lady’s
prospects in life. If Miss Beresford had not been in such a hurry to
marry a poor country clergyman there was no knowing what she might have
become. But Dixon was too loyal to desert her in her affliction and
downfall (alas, her married life). She remained with her, and was
devoted to her interests; always considering herself as the good and
protecting fairy, whose duty it was to baffle the malignant giant, Mr.
Hale. Master Frederick had been her favourite and pride; and it was with
a little softening of her dignified look and manner, that she went in
weekly to arrange the chamber as carefully as if he might be coming home
that very evening.

Margaret could not help believing that there had been some late
intelligence of Frederick, unknown to her mother, which was making her
father anxious and uneasy. Mrs. Hale did not seem to perceive any
alteration in her husband’s looks or ways. His spirits were tender and
gentle, readily affected by any small piece of intelligence concerning
the welfare of others. He would be depressed for many days after
witnessing a death-bed, or hearing of any crime. But now Margaret
noticed an absence of mind, as if his thoughts were pre-occupied by some
subject, the oppression of which could not be relieved by any daily
action, such as comforting the survivors, or teaching at the school in
hope of lessening the evils in the generation to come. Mr. Hale did not
go out among his parishioners as much as usual; he was more shut up in
his study; was anxious for the village postman, whose summons to the
household was a rap on the back-kitchen window shutter—a signal which
at one time had often to be repeated before any one was sufficiently
alive to the hour of the day to understand what it was, and attend to
him. Now Mr. Hale loitered about the garden if the morning was fine, and
if not, stood dreamily by the study window until the postman had called,
or gone down the lane, giving a half-respectful, half-confidential shake
of the head to the parson, who watched him away from the sweet-briar
hedge, and past the great arbutus, before he turned into the room to
begin his day’s work, with all the signs of a heavy heart and an
occupied mind.

But Margaret was at an age when any apprehension, not absolutely based
on a knowledge of facts, is easily banished for a time by a bright sunny
day, or some happy outward circumstance. And when the brilliant fourteen
fine days of October came on, her cares were all blown away as lightly
as thistledown, and she thought of nothing but the glories of the
forest. The fern-harvest was over; and now that the rain was gone, many
a deep glade was accessible, into which Margaret had only peeped in July
and August weather. She had learnt drawing with Edith; and she had
sufficiently regretted, during the gloom of the bad weather, her idle
revelling in the beauty of the woodlands, while it had yet been fine, to
make her determined to sketch what she could before winter fairly set
in. Accordingly, she was busy preparing her board one morning, when
Sarah, the housemaid, threw wide open the drawing-room door, and
announced, “Mr. Henry Lennox.”




CHAPTER III.

“THE MORE HASTE THE WORSE SPEED.”

    “Learn to win a lady’s faith
      Nobly, as the thing is high;
    Bravely, as for life and death—
      With a loyal gravity.

    Lead her from the festive boards,
      Point her to the starry skies,
    Guard her, by your truthful words,
      Pure from courtship’s flatteries.”
                       MRS. BROWNING.


“Mr. Henry Lennox.” Margaret had been thinking of him only a moment
before, and remembering his inquiry into her probable occupations at
home. It was “parler du soleil et l’on en voit les rayons”; and the
brightness of the sun came over Margaret’s face as she put down her
board, and went forward to shake hands with him. “Tell mamma, Sarah,”
said she. “Mamma and I want to ask you so many questions about Edith; I
am so much obliged to you for coming.”

“Did not I say that I should?” asked he, in a lower tone than that in
which he had spoken.

“But I heard of you so far away in the Highlands that I never thought
Hampshire could come in.”

“Oh!” said he, more lightly, “our young couple were playing such foolish
pranks, running all sorts of risks, climbing this mountain, sailing on
that lake, that I really thought they needed a Mentor to take care of
them. And indeed they did: they were quite beyond my uncle’s management,
and kept the old gentleman in a panic for sixteen hours out of the
twenty-four. Indeed, when I once saw how unfit they were to be trusted
alone, I thought it my duty not to leave them till I had seen them
safely embarked at Plymouth.”

“Have you been at Plymouth? Oh! Edith never named that. To be sure, she
has written in such a hurry lately. Did they really sail on Tuesday?”

“Really sailed, and relieved me from many responsibilities. Edith gave
me all sorts of messages for you. I believe I have a little diminutive
note somewhere; yes, here it is.”

“Oh! thank you,” exclaimed Margaret; and then, half wishing to read it
alone and unwatched, she made the excuse of going to tell her mother
again (Sarah surely had made some mistake) that Mr. Lennox was there.

When she had left the room, he began in his scrutinising way to look
about him. The little drawing-room was looking its best in the streaming
light of the morning sun. The middle window in the bow was opened, and
clustering roses and the scarlet honeysuckle came peeping round the
corner; the small lawn was gorgeous with verbenas and geraniums of all
bright colours. But the very brightness outside made the colours within
seem poor and faded. The carpet was far from new; the chintz had been
often washed; the whole apartment was smaller and shabbier than he had
expected, as back-ground and frame-work for Margaret, herself so
queenly. He took up one of the books lying on the table; it was the
Paradise of Dante, in the proper old Italian binding of white vellum and
gold; by it lay a dictionary, and some words copied out in Margaret’s
handwriting. They were a dull list of words, but somehow he liked
looking at them. He put them down with a sigh.

“The living is evidently as small as she said. It seems strange, for the
Beresfords belong to a good family.”

Margaret meanwhile had found her mother. It was one of Mrs. Hale’s
fitful days, when everything was a difficulty and a hardship: and Mr.
Lennox’s appearance took this shape, although secretly she felt
complimented by his thinking it worth while to call.

“It is most unfortunate! We are dining early to-day, and having nothing
but cold meat, in order that the servants may get on with their ironing;
and yet, of course, we must ask him to dinner—Edith’s brother-in-law
and all. And your papa is in such low spirits this morning about
something—I don’t know what. I went into the study just now, and he had
his face on the table, covering it with his hands. I told him I was sure
Helstone air did not agree with him any more than with me, and he
suddenly lifted up his head, and begged me not to speak a word more
against Helstone, he could not bear it; if there was one place he loved
on earth it was Helstone. But I am sure, for all that, it is the damp
and relaxing air.”

Margaret felt as if a thin cold cloud had come between her and the sun.
She had listened patiently, in hopes that it might be some relief to her
mother to unburden herself; but now it was time to draw her back to Mr.
Lennox.

“Papa likes Mr. Lennox; they got on together famously at the wedding
breakfast. I daresay his coming will do papa good. And never mind the
dinner, dear mamma. Cold meat will do capitally for a lunch, which is
the light in which Mr. Lennox will most likely look upon a two o’clock
dinner.”

“But what are we to do with him till then? It is only half-past ten
now.”

“I’ll ask him to go out sketching with me. I know he draws, and that
will take him out of your way, mamma. Only do come in now; he will think
it so strange if you don’t.”

Mrs. Hale took off her black silk apron, and smoothed her face. She
looked a very pretty lady-like woman, as she greeted Mr. Lennox with the
cordiality due to one who was almost a relation. He evidently expected
to be asked to spend the day, and accepted the invitation with a glad
readiness that made Mrs. Hale wish she could add something to the cold
beef. He was pleased with everything; delighted with Margaret’s idea of
going out sketching together; would not have Mr. Hale disturbed for the
world, with the prospect of so soon meeting him at dinner. Margaret
brought out her drawing materials for him to choose from; and after the
paper and brushes had been duly selected, the two set out in the
merriest spirits in the world.

“Now, please, just stop here for a minute or two,” said Margaret. “These
are the cottages that haunted me so during the rainy fortnight,
reproaching me for not having sketched them.”

“Before they tumbled down and were no more seen. Truly, if they are to
be sketched—and they are very picturesque—we had better not put it off
till next year. But where shall we sit?”

“Oh! You might have come straight from chambers in the Temple, instead
of having been two months in the Highlands! Look at this beautiful trunk
of a tree, which the woodcutters have left just in the right place for
the light. I will put my plaid over it, and it will be a regular forest
throne.”

“With your feet in that puddle for a regal footstool! Stay, I will move,
and then you can come nearer this way. Who lives in these cottages?”

“They were built by squatters fifty or sixty years ago. One is
uninhabited; the foresters are going to take it down, as soon as the
other is dead, poor old fellow! Look—there he is—I must go and speak
to him. He is so deaf you will hear all our secrets.”

The old man stood bareheaded in the sun, leaning on his stick at the
front of his cottage. His stiff features relaxed into a slow smile as
Margaret went up and spoke to him. Mr. Lennox hastily introduced the two
figures into his sketch, and finished up the landscape with a
subordinate reference to them—as Margaret perceived, when the time came
for getting up, putting away water, and scraps of paper, and exhibiting
to each other their sketches. She laughed and blushed: Mr. Lennox
watched her countenance.

“Now, I call that treacherous,” said she. “I little thought that you
were making old Isaac and me into subjects, when you told me to ask him
the history of these cottages.”

“It was irresistible. You can’t know how strong a temptation it was. I
hardly dare tell you how much I shall like this sketch.”

He was not quite sure whether she heard this latter sentence before she
went to the brook to wash her palette. She came back rather flushed, but
looking perfectly innocent and unconscious. He was glad of it, for the
speech had slipped from him unawares—a rare thing in the case of a man
who premeditated his actions so much as Henry Lennox.

The aspect of home was all right and bright when they reached it. The
clouds on her mother’s brow had cleared off under the propitious
influence of a brace of carp, most opportunely presented by a neighbour.
Mr. Hale had returned from his morning’s round, and was awaiting his
visitor just outside the wicket gate that led into the garden. He looked
a complete gentleman in his rather threadbare coat and well-worn hat.
Margaret was proud of her father; she had always a fresh and tender
pride in seeing how favourably he impressed every stranger; still her
quick eye sought over his face and found there traces of some unusual
disturbance, which was only put aside, not cleared away.

Mr. Hale asked to look at their sketches.

“I think you have made the tints on the thatch too dark, have you not?”
as he returned Margaret’s to her, and held out his hand for Mr.
Lennox’s, which was withheld from him one moment, no more.

“No, papa! I don’t think I have. The house-leek and stone-crop have
grown so much darker in the rain. Is it not like, papa?” said she,
peeping over his shoulder, as he looked at the figures in Mr. Lennox’s
drawing.

“Yes, very like. Your figure and way of holding yourself is capital. And
it is just poor old Isaac’s stiff way of stooping his long rheumatic
back. What is this hanging from the branch of the tree? Not a bird’s
nest, surely.”

“Oh no! that is my bonnet. I never can draw with my bonnet on; it makes
my head so hot. I wonder if I could manage figures. There are so many
people about here whom I should like to sketch.”

“I should say that a likeness you very much wish to take you would
always succeed in,” said Mr. Lennox. “I have great faith in the power of
will. I think myself I have succeeded pretty well in yours.” Mr. Hale
had preceded them into the house, while Margaret was lingering to pluck
some roses, with which to adorn her morning gown for dinner.

“A regular London girl would understand the implied meaning of that
speech,” thought Mr. Lennox. “She would be up to looking through every
speech that a young man made her for the _arrière-pensée_ of a compliment.
But I don’t believe Margaret,—Stay!” exclaimed he, “Let me help you”;
and he gathered for her some velvety cramoisy roses that were above her
reach, and then dividing the spoil he placed two in his button-hole, and
sent her in, pleased and happy, to arrange her flowers.

The conversation at dinner flowed on quietly and agreeably. There were
plenty of questions to be asked on both sides—the latest intelligence
which each could give of Mrs. Shaw’s movements in Italy to be exchanged;
and in the interest of what was said, the unpretending simplicity of the
parsonage-ways—above all in the neighbourhood of Margaret, Mr. Lennox
forgot the little feeling of disappointment with which he had at first
perceived that she had spoken but the simple truth when she had
described her father’s living as very small.

“Margaret, my child, you might have gathered us some pears for our
dessert,” said Mr. Hale, as the hospitable luxury of a freshly-decanted
bottle of wine was placed on the table.

Mrs. Hale was hurried. It seemed as if desserts were impromptu and
unusual things at the parsonage; whereas, if Mr. Hale would only have
looked behind him, he would have seen biscuits and marmalade, and what
not, all arranged in formal order on the side-board. But the idea of
pears had taken possession of Mr. Hale’s mind, and was not to be got rid
of.

“There are a few brown beurrés against the south wall which are worth
all foreign fruits and preserves. Run, Margaret, and gather some.”

“I propose that we adjourn into the garden, and eat them there,” said
Mr. Lennox. “Nothing is so delicious as to set one’s teeth into the
crisp, juicy fruit, warm and scented by the sun. The worst is, the wasps
are impudent enough to dispute it with one, even at the very crisis and
summit of enjoyment.”

He rose, as if to follow Margaret, who had disappeared through the
window: he only awaited Mrs. Hale’s permission. She would rather have
wound up the dinner in the proper way, and with all the ceremonies which
had gone on so smoothly hitherto, especially as she and Dixon had got
out the finger-glasses from the store-room on purpose to be as correct
as became General Shaw’s widow’s sister; but as Mr. Hale got up
directly, and prepared to accompany his guest, she could only submit.

“I shall arm myself with a knife,” said Mr. Hale: “the days of eating
fruit so primitively as you describe are over with me. I must pare it
and quarter it before I can enjoy it.”

Margaret made a plate for the pears out of a beet-root leaf, which threw
up their brown gold colour admirably. Mr. Lennox looked more at her than
at the pears; but her father, inclined to cull fastidiously the very
zest and perfection of the hour he had stolen from his anxiety, chose
daintily the ripest fruit, and sat down on the garden bench to enjoy it
at his leisure. Margaret and Mr. Lennox strolled along the little
terrace-walk under the south wall, where the bees still hummed and
worked busily in their hives.

“What a perfect life you seem to live here! I have always felt rather
contemptuously towards the poets before, with their wishes, ‘Mine be a
cot beside a hill,’ and that sort of thing; but now I am afraid that the
truth is, I have been nothing better than a Cockney. Just now I feel as
if twenty years’ hard study of law would be amply rewarded by one year
of such an exquisite serene life as this—such skies!” looking up—“such
crimson and amber foliage, so perfectly motionless as that!” pointing to
some of the great forest trees which shut in the garden as if it were a
nest.

“You must please to remember that our skies are not always as deep a
blue as they are now. We have rain, and our leaves do fall, and get
sodden: though I think Helstone is about as perfect a place as any in
the world. Recollect how you rather scorned my description of it one
evening in Harley Street: ‘a village in a tale.’”

“Scorned, Margaret! That is rather a hard word.”

“Perhaps it is. Only I know I should have liked to have talked to you of
what I was very full at the time, and you—what must I call it
then?—spoke disrespectfully of Helstone as a mere village in a tale.”

“I will never do so again,” said he, warmly. They turned the corner of
the walk.

“I could almost wish, Margaret——” he stopped and hesitated. It was so
unusual for the fluent lawyer to hesitate that Margaret looked up at
him, in a little state of questioning wonder; but in an instant—from
what about him she could not tell—she wished herself back with her
mother—her father—anywhere away from him, for she was sure he was
going to say something to which she should not know what to reply. In
another moment the strong pride that was in her came to conquer her
sudden agitation, which she hoped he had not perceived. Of course she
could answer, and answer the right thing; and it was poor and despicable
of her to shrink from hearing any speech, as if she had not power to put
an end to it with her high maidenly dignity.

“Margaret,” said he, taking her by surprise, and getting sudden
possession of her hand, so that she was forced to stand still and
listen, despising herself for the fluttering at her heart all the time;
“Margaret, I wish you did not like Helstone so much—did not seem so
perfectly calm and happy here. I have been hoping for these three months
past to find you regretting London—and London friends, a little—enough
to make you listen more kindly” (for she was quietly, but firmly,
striving to extricate her hand from his grasp) “to one who has not much
to offer, it is true—nothing but prospects in the future—but who does
love you, Margaret, almost in spite of himself. Margaret, have I
startled you too much? Speak!” For he saw her lips quivering almost as
if she were going to cry. She made a strong effort to be calm; she would
not speak till she had succeeded in mastering her voice, and then she
said:

“I was startled. I did not know that you cared for me in that way. I
have always thought of you as a friend; and, please, I would rather go
on thinking of you so. I don’t like to be spoken to as you have been
doing. I cannot answer you as you want me to do, and yet I should feel
so sorry if I vexed you.”

“Margaret,” said he, looking into her eyes, which met his with their
open, straight look, expressive of the utmost good faith and reluctance
to give pain, “Do you”—he was going to say—“love any one else?” But it
seemed as if this question would be an insult to the pure serenity of
those eyes. “Forgive me! I have been too abrupt. I am punished. Only let
me hope. Give me the poor comfort of telling me you have never seen any
one whom you could——” Again a pause. He could not end his sentence.
Margaret reproached herself acutely as the cause of his distress.

“Ah! if you had but never got this fancy into your head! It was such a
pleasure to think of you as a friend.”

“But I may hope, may I not, Margaret, that some time you will think of
me as a lover? Not yet, I see—there is no hurry—but some time——”

She was silent for a minute or two, trying to discover the truth as it
was in her own heart, before replying, then she said:

“I have never thought of—you, but as a friend. I like to think of you
so; but I am sure I could never think of you as anything else. Pray let
us both forget that all this” (“disagreeable,” she was going to say, but
stopped short) “conversation has taken place.”

He paused before he replied. Then, in his habitual coldness of tone, he
answered:

“Of course, as your feelings are so decided, and as this conversation
has been so evidently unpleasant to you, it had better not be
remembered. That is all very fine in theory, that plan of forgetting
whatever is painful, but it will be somewhat difficult for me, at least,
to carry it into execution.”

“You are vexed,” said she, sadly; “yet how can I help it?”

She looked so truly grieved as she said this, that he struggled for a
moment with his real disappointment, and then answered more cheerfully,
but still with a little hardness in his tone:

“You should make allowances for the mortification, not only of a lover,
Margaret, but of a man not given to romance in general—prudent,
worldly, as some people call me—who has been carried out of his usual
habits by the force of a passion—well, we will say no more of that; but
in the one outlet which he has formed for the deeper and better feelings
of his nature, he meets with rejection and repulse. I shall have to
console myself with scorning my own folly. A struggling barrister to
think of matrimony!”

Margaret could not answer this. The whole tone of it annoyed her. It
seemed to touch on and call out all the points of difference which had
often repelled her in him; while yet he was the pleasantest man, the
most sympathising friend, the person of all others who understood her
best in Harley Street. She felt a tinge of contempt mingle itself with
her pain at having refused him. Her beautiful lip curled in a slight
disdain. It was well that, having made the round of the garden, they
came suddenly upon Mr. Hale, whose whereabouts had been quite forgotten
by them. He had not yet finished the pear, which he had delicately
peeled in one long strip of silver-paper thinness, and which he was
enjoying in a deliberate manner. It was like the story of the eastern
king, who dipped his head into a basin of water, at the magician’s
command, and ere he instantly took it out went through the experience of
a lifetime. Margaret felt stunned, and unable to recover her
self-possession enough to join in the trivial conversation that ensued
between her father and Mr. Lennox. She was grave, and little disposed to
speak; full of wonder when Mr. Lennox would go, and allow her to relax
into thought on the events of the last quarter of an hour. He was almost
as anxious to take his departure as she was for him to leave; but a few
minutes light and careless talking, carried on at whatever effort, was a
sacrifice which he owed to his mortified vanity, or his self-respect. He
glanced from time to time at her sad and pensive face.

“I am not so indifferent to her as she believes,” thought he to himself.
“I do not give up hope.”

Before a quarter of an hour was over, he had fallen into a way of
conversing with quiet sarcasm; speaking of life in London and life in
the country, as if he were conscious of his second mocking self, and
afraid of his own satire. Mr. Hale was puzzled. His visitor was a
different man to what he had seen him before at the wedding-breakfast,
and at dinner to-day; a lighter, cleverer, more worldly man, and, as
such, dissonant to Mr. Hale. It was a relief to all three when Mr.
Lennox said that he must go directly if he meant to catch the five
o’clock train. They proceeded to the house to find Mrs. Hale, and wish
her good-bye. At the last moment, Henry Lennox’s real self broke through
the crust.

“Margaret, don’t despise me; I have a heart, notwithstanding all this
good-for-nothing way of talking. As a proof of it, I believe I love you
more than ever—if I do not hate you—for the disdain with which you
have listened to me during this last half-hour. Good-bye,
Margaret—Margaret!”




CHAPTER IV.

DOUBTS AND DIFFICULTIES.

    “Cast me upon some naked shore,
    Where I may tracke
    Only the print of some sad wracke,
    If thou be there though the seas roare,
    I shall no gentler calm implore.”
              HABINGTON.


He was gone. The house was shut up for the evening. No more deep blue
skies or crimson and amber tints. Margaret went up to dress for the
early tea, finding Dixon in a pretty temper from the interruption which
a visitor had naturally occasioned on a busy day. She showed it by
brushing away viciously at Margaret’s hair, under pretence of being in a
great hurry to go to Mrs. Hale. Yet, after all, Margaret had to wait a
long time in the drawing-room before her mother came down. She sat by
herself at the fire, with unlighted candles on the table behind her,
thinking over the day, the happy walk, happy sketching, cheerful
pleasant dinner, and the uncomfortable, miserable walk in the garden.

How different men were to women! Here was she disturbed and unhappy,
because her instinct had made anything but a refusal impossible; while
he, not many minutes after he had met with a rejection of what ought to
have been the deepest, holiest proposal of his life, could speak as if
briefs, success, and all its superficial consequences of a good house,
clever and agreeable society, were the sole avowed objects of his
desires. Oh dear! how she could have loved him if he had but been
different, with a difference which she felt, on reflection, to be one
that went low—deep down. Then she took it into her head that, after
all, his lightness might be but assumed, to cover a bitterness of
disappointment which would have been stamped on her own heart if she had
loved and been rejected.

Her mother came into the room before this whirl of thoughts was adjusted
into anything like order. Margaret had to shake off the recollections of
what had been done and said through the day, and turn a sympathising
listener to the account of how Dixon had complained that the
ironing-blanket had been burnt again; and how Susan Lightfoot had been
seen with artificial flowers in her bonnet, thereby giving evidence of a
vain and giddy character. Mr. Hale sipped his tea in abstracted silence;
Margaret had the responses all to herself. She wondered how her father
and mother could be so forgetful, so regardless of their companion
through the day, as never to mention his name. She forgot that he had
not made them an offer.

After tea Mr. Hale got up, and stood with his elbow on the
chimney-piece, leaning his head on his hand, musing over something, and
from time to time sighing deeply. Mrs. Hale went out to consult with
Dixon about some winter clothing for the poor. Margaret was preparing
her mother’s worsted work, and rather shrinking from the thought of the
long evening, and wishing bed-time were come that she might go over the
events of the day again.

“Margaret!” said Mr. Hale, at last, in a sort of sudden desperate way,
that made her start. “Is that tapestry thing of immediate consequence? I
mean, can you leave it and come into my study? I want to speak to you
about something very serious to us all.”

“Very serious to us all.” Mr. Lennox had never had the opportunity of
having any private conversation with her father after her refusal, or
else that would indeed be a very serious affair. In the first place,
Margaret felt guilty and ashamed of having grown so much into a woman as
to be thought of in marriage; and secondly, she did not know if her
father might not be displeased that she had taken upon herself to
decline Mr. Lennox’s proposal. But she soon felt it was not about
anything, which having only lately and suddenly occurred, could have
given rise to any complicated thoughts, that her father wished to speak
to her. He made her take a chair by him; he stirred the fire, snuffed
the candles, and sighed once or twice before he could make up his mind
to say—and it came out with a jerk after all—“Margaret! I am going to
leave Helstone.”

“Leave Helstone, papa! But why?”

Mr. Hale did not answer for a minute or two. He played with some papers
on the table in a nervous and confused manner, opening his lips to speak
several times, but closing them again without having the courage to
utter a word. Margaret could not bear the sight of the suspense, which
was even more distressing to her father than to herself.

“But why, dear papa? Do tell me!”

He looked up at her suddenly, and then said with a slow and enforced
calmness,

“Because I must no longer be a minister in the Church of England.”

Margaret had imagined nothing less than that some of the preferments
which her mother had so much desired had befallen her father at
last—something that would force him to leave beautiful, beloved
Helstone, and perhaps compel him to go and live in some of the stately
and silent Closes which Margaret had seen from time to time in Cathedral
towns. They were grand and imposing places, but if, to go there, it was
necessary to leave Helstone as a home for ever, that would have been a
sad, long, lingering pain. But nothing to the shock she received from
Mr. Hale’s last speech. What could he mean? It was all the worse for
being so mysterious. The aspect of piteous distress on his face, almost
imploring a merciful and kind judgment from his child, gave her a sudden
sickening. Could he have become implicated in anything Frederick had
done? Frederick was an outlaw. Had her father, out of a natural love for
his son, connived at any—

“Oh! what is it? do speak, papa! tell me all! Why can you no longer be a
clergyman? Surely, if the bishop were told all we know about Frederick,
and the hard unjust—”

“It is nothing about Frederick; the bishop would have nothing to do with
that. It is all myself. Margaret, I will tell you about it. I will
answer any questions this once, but after to-night let us never speak of
it again. I can meet the consequences of my painful, miserable doubts;
but it is an effort beyond me to speak of what has caused me so much
suffering.”

“Doubts, papa! Doubts as to religion?” asked Margaret, more shocked than
ever.

“No! not doubts as to religion; not the slightest injury to that.”

He paused. Margaret sighed, as if standing on the verge of some new
horror. He began again, speaking rapidly, as if to get over a set task:

“You could not understand it all, if I told you—my anxiety, for years
past, to know whether I had any right to hold my living—my efforts to
quench my smouldering doubts by the authority of the Church. Oh!
Margaret, how I love the holy Church from which I am to be shut out!” He
could not go on for a moment or two. Margaret could not tell what to
say; it seemed to her as terribly mysterious as if her father were about
to turn Mahometan.

“I have been reading to-day of the two thousand who were ejected from
their churches,”—continued Mr. Hale, smiling faintly,—“trying to steal
some of their bravery; but it is of no use—no use—I cannot help
feeling it acutely.”

“But, papa, have you well considered? Oh! it seems so terrible, so
shocking,” said Margaret, suddenly bursting into tears. The one staid
foundation of her home, of her idea of her beloved father, seemed
reeling and rocking. What could she say? What was to be done? The sight
of her distress made Mr. Hale nerve himself, in order to try and comfort
her. He swallowed down the dry choking sobs which had been heaving up
from his heart hitherto, and going to his bookcase he took down a
volume, which he had often been reading lately, and from which he
thought he had derived strength to enter upon the course in which he was
now embarked.

“Listen, dear Margaret,” said he, putting one arm round her waist. She
took his hand in hers and grasped it tight, but she could not lift up
her head; nor indeed could she attend to what he read, so great was her
internal agitation.

“This is the soliloquy of one who was once a clergyman in a country
parish, like me; it was written by Mr. Oldfield, minister of Carsington,
in Derbyshire, a hundred and sixty years ago, or more. His trials are
over. He fought the good fight.” These last two sentences he spoke low,
as if to himself. Then he read aloud,—

“When thou canst no longer continue in thy work without dishonour to
God, discredit to religion, foregoing thy integrity, wounding
conscience, spoiling thy peace, and hazarding the loss of thy salvation;
in a word, when the conditions upon which thou must continue (if thou
wilt continue) in thy employments are sinful, and unwarranted by the
word of God, thou mayest, yea, thou must believe that God will turn thy
very silence, suspension, deprivation, and laying aside, to His glory,
and the advancement of the Gospel’s interest. When God will not use thee
in one kind, yet He will in another. A soul that desires to serve and
honour Him shall never want opportunity to do it; nor must thou so limit
the Holy One of Israel, as to think He hath but one way in which He can
glorify Himself by thee. He can do it by thy silence as well as by thy
preaching; the laying aside as well as thy continuance in thy work. It
is not pretence of doing God the greatest service, or performing the
weightiest duty, that will excuse the least sin, though that sin
capacitated or gave us the opportunity for doing that duty. Thou wilt
have little thanks, O my soul! if, when thou art charged with corrupting
God’s worship, falsifying thy vows, thou pretendest a necessity for it
in order to a continuance in the ministry.”

As he read this, and glanced at much more which he did not read, he
gained resolution for himself, and felt as if he too could be brave and
firm in doing what he believed to be right; but as he ceased he heard
Margaret’s low convulsive sob; and his courage sank down under the keen
sense of suffering.

“Margaret, dear!” said he, drawing her closer, “think of the early
martyrs; think of the thousands who have suffered.”

“But, father,” said she, suddenly lifting up her flushed, tear-wet face,
“the early martyrs suffered for the truth, while you—oh! dear, dear
papa!”

“I suffer for conscience’ sake, my child,” said he, with a dignity that
was only tremulous from the acute sensitiveness of his character; “I
must do what my conscience bids. I have borne long with self-reproach
that would have roused any mind less torpid and cowardly than mine.” He
shook his head as he went on. “Your poor mother’s fond wish, gratified
at last in the mocking way in which over-fond wishes are too often
fulfilled—Sodom apples as they are—has brought on this crisis, for
which I ought to be, and I hope I am thankful. It is not a month since
the bishop offered me another living; if I had accepted it, I should
have had to make a fresh declaration of conformity to the Liturgy at my
institution. Margaret, I tried to do it; I tried to content myself with
simply refusing the additional preferment, and stopping quietly
here,—strangling my conscience now, as I had strained it before. God
forgive me!”

He rose and walked up and down the room, speaking low words of
self-reproach and humiliation, of which Margaret was thankful to hear
but few. At last he said,

“Margaret, I return to the old sad burden: we must leave Helstone.”

“Yes! I see. But when?”

“I have written to the bishop—I dare say I have told you so, but I
forget things just now,” said Mr. Hale, collapsing into his depressed
manner as soon as he came to talk of hard matter-of-fact details,
“informing him of my intention to resign this vicarage. He has been most
kind; he has used arguments and expostulations, all in vain—in vain.
They are but what I have tried upon myself, without avail. I shall have
to take my deed of resignation, and wait upon the bishop myself, to bid
him farewell. That will be a trial. But worse, far worse, will be the
parting from my dear people. There is a curate appointed to read
prayers—a Mr. Brown. He will come to stay with us to-morrow. Next
Sunday I preach my farewell sermon.”

Was it to be so sudden then? thought Margaret; and yet perhaps it was as
well. Lingering would only add stings to the pain; it was better to be
stunned into numbness by hearing of all these arrangements, which seemed
to be nearly completed before she had been told. “What does mamma say?”
asked she, with a deep sigh.

To her surprise, her father began to walk about again before he
answered. At length he stopped and replied:

“Margaret, I am a poor coward after all. I cannot bear to give pain. I
know so well your mother’s married life has not been all she hoped—all
she had a right to expect—and this will be such a blow to her, that I
have never had the heart, the power to tell her. She must be told
though, now,” said he, looking wistfully at his daughter. Margaret was
almost overpowered with the idea that her mother knew nothing of it all,
and yet the affair was so far advanced!

“Yes, indeed she must,” said Margaret. “Perhaps, after all, she may
not—Oh yes! she will, she must be shocked”—as the force of the blow
returned upon herself in trying to realise how another would take it.
“Where are we to go to?” said she at last, struck with a fresh wonder as
to their future plans, if plans indeed her father had.

“To Milton-Northern,” he answered, with a dull indifference, for he had
perceived that, although his daughter’s love had made her cling to him,
and for a moment strive to soothe him with her love, yet the keenness of
the pain was as fresh as ever in her mind.

“Milton-Northern! The manufacturing town in Darkshire?”

“Yes,” said he, in the same despondent, indifferent way.

“Why there, papa?” asked she.

“Because there I can earn bread for my family. Because I know no one
there, and no one knows Helstone, or can ever talk to me about it.”

“Bread for your family! I thought you and mamma had”—and then she
stopped, checking her natural interest regarding their future life, as
she saw the gathering gloom on her father’s brow. But he, with his quick
intuitive sympathy, read in her face, as in a mirror, the reflections of
his own moody depression, and turned it off with an effort.

“You shall be told all, Margaret. Only help me to tell your mother. I
think I could do anything but that: the idea of her distress turns me
sick with dread. If I tell you all, perhaps you could break it to her
to-morrow. I am going out for the day, to bid farmer Dobson and the poor
people on Bracy Common good-bye. Would you dislike breaking it to her
very much, Margaret?”

Margaret did dislike it, did shrink from it more than from anything she
had ever had to do in her life before. She could not speak, all at once.
Her father said, “You dislike it very much don’t you, Margaret?” Then
she conquered herself, and said, with a bright strong look on her face:

“It is a painful thing, but it must be done, and I will do it as well as
ever I can. You must have many painful things to do.”

Mr. Hale shook his head despondingly: he pressed her hand in token of
gratitude. Margaret was nearly upset again into a burst of crying. To
turn her thoughts, she said: “Now tell me, papa, what our plans are.
You and mamma have some money, independent of the income from the
living, have you not? Aunt Shaw has, I know.”

“Yes. I suppose we have about a hundred and twenty pounds a year of our
own. Seventy of that has always gone to Frederick, since he has been
abroad. I don’t know if he wants it all,” he continued in a hesitating
manner. “He must have some pay for serving with the Spanish army.”

“Frederick must not suffer,” said Margaret, decidedly; “in a foreign
country; so unjustly treated by his own. A hundred is left. Could not
you, and I, and mamma live on a hundred a year in some very cheap—very
quiet part of England? Oh! I think we could.”

“No!” said Mr. Hale. “That would not answer. I must do something! I must
make myself busy, to keep off morbid thoughts. Besides, in a country
parish I should be so painfully reminded of Helstone, and my duties
here. I could not bear it, Margaret. And a hundred a year would go a
very little way, after the necessary wants of housekeeping are met,
towards providing your mother with all the comforts she has been
accustomed to, and ought to have. No: we must go to Milton. That is
settled. I can always decide better by myself, and not influenced by
those whom I love,” said he, as a half apology for having arranged so
much before he had told any one of his family of his intentions. “I
cannot stand objections. They make me so undecided.”

Margaret resolved to keep silence. After all, what did it signify where
they went, compared to the one terrible change?

Mr. Hale continued: “A few months ago, when my misery of doubt became
more than I could bear without speaking, I wrote to Mr. Bell—you
remember Mr. Bell, Margaret?”

“No; I never saw him, I think. But I know who he is. Frederick’s
godfather—your old tutor at Oxford, don’t you mean?”

“Yes. He is a Fellow of Plymouth College there. He is a native of
Milton-Northern, I believe. At any rate he has property there, which has
very much increased in value since Milton has become such a large
manufacturing town. Well; I had reason to suspect—to imagine—I had
better say nothing about it, however. But I felt sure of sympathy from
Mr. Bell. I don’t know that he gave me much strength. He has lived an
easy life in his college all his days. But he has been as kind as can
be. And it is owing to him we are going to Milton.”

“How?” said Margaret.

“Why he has tenants, and houses, and mills there; so, though he dislikes
the place—too bustling for one of his habits—he is obliged to keep up
some sort of connection; and he tells me that he hears there is a good
opening for a private tutor there.”

“A private tutor!” said Margaret, looking scornful: “What in the world
do manufacturers want with the classics, or literature, or the
accomplishments of a gentleman?”

“Oh,” said her father, “some of them really seem to be fine fellows,
conscious of their own deficiencies, which is more than many a man at
Oxford is. Some want resolutely to learn, though they have come to man’s
estate. Some want their children to be better instructed than they
themselves have been. At any rate, there is an opening, as I have said,
for a private tutor. Mr. Bell has recommended me to a Mr. Thornton, a
tenant of his, and a very intelligent man, as far as I can judge from
his letters. And in Milton, Margaret, I shall find a busy life, if not a
happy one, and people and scenes so different that I shall never be
reminded of Helstone.”

There was the secret motive, as Margaret knew from her own feelings. It
would be different. Discordant as it was—with almost a detestation for
all she had ever heard of the North of England, the manufacturers,
the people, the wild and bleak country—there was this one
recommendation—it would be different to Helstone, and could never
remind them of that beloved place.

“When do we go?” asked Margaret, after a short silence.

“I do not know exactly. I wanted to talk it over with you. You see, your
mother knows nothing about it yet: but I think, in a fortnight;—after
my deed of resignation is sent in, I shall have no right to remain.”

Margaret was almost stunned.

“In a fortnight!”

“No—no, not exactly to a day. Nothing is fixed,” said her father, with
anxious hesitation, as he noticed the filmy sorrow that came over her
eyes, and the sudden change in her complexion. But she recovered herself
immediately.

“Yes, papa, it had better be fixed soon and decidedly, as you say. Only
mamma to know nothing about it! It is that that is the great
perplexity.”

“Poor Maria!” replied Mr. Hale tenderly. “Poor, poor Maria! Oh, if I
were not married—if I were but myself in the world, how easy it would
be! As it is—Margaret, I dare not tell her!”

“No,” said Margaret, sadly, “I will do it. Give me till to-morrow
evening to choose my time. Oh, papa,” cried she with sudden passionate
entreaty, “say—tell me it is a nightmare—a horrid dream—not the real
waking truth! You cannot mean that you are really going to leave the
Church—to give up Helstone—to be for ever separate from me, from
mamma—led away by some delusion—some temptation! You do not really
mean it!”

Mr. Hale sat in rigid stillness while she spoke.

Then he looked her in the face, and said in a slow, hoarse, measured
way—“I do mean it, Margaret. You must not deceive yourself in doubting
the reality of my words—my fixed intention and resolve.” He looked at
her in the same steady, stony manner, for some moments after he had done
speaking. She, too, gazed back with pleading eyes before she would
believe it was irrevocable. Then she arose and went, without another
word or look, towards the door. As her fingers were on the handle he
called her back. He was standing by the fireplace, shrunk and stooping;
but as she came near he drew himself up to his full height, and, placing
his hands on her head, he said, solemnly:

“The blessing of God be upon thee, my child!”

“And may He restore you to His Church,” responded she, out of the
fulness of her heart. The next moment she feared lest this answer to his
blessing might be irreverent, wrong—might hurt him as coming from his
daughter, and she threw her arms round his neck. He held her to him for
a minute or two. She heard him murmur to himself, “The martyrs and
confessors had even more pain to bear—I will not shrink.”

They were startled by hearing Mrs. Hale inquiring for her daughter. They
started asunder in the full consciousness of all that was before them.
Mr. Hale hurriedly said, “Go, Margaret, go. I shall be out all to-morrow.
Before night you will have told your mother.”

“Yes,” she replied, and she returned to the drawing-room in a stunned
and dizzy state.




CHAPTER V.

DECISION.

    “I ask Thee for a thoughtful love,
      Through constant watching wise,
    To meet the glad with joyful smiles,
      And to wipe the weeping eyes;
    And a heart at leisure from itself
      To soothe and sympathise.”
                  ANON.


Margaret made a good listener to all her mother’s little plans for
adding some small comforts to the lot of the poorest parishioners. She
could not help listening, though each new project was a stab to her
heart. By the time the frost had set in, they should be far away from
Helstone. Old Simon’s rheumatism might be bad and his eyesight worse;
there would be no one to go and read to him, and comfort him with little
porringers of broth and good red flannel; or if there was, it would be a
stranger, and the old man would watch in vain for her. Mary Domville’s
little crippled boy would crawl in vain to the door and look for her
coming through the forest. These poor friends would never understand why
she had forsaken them; and there were many others besides. “Papa has
always spent the income he derived from his living in the parish. I am,
perhaps, encroaching upon the next dues, but the winter is likely to be
severe, and our poor people must be helped.”

“Oh, mamma, let us do all we can,” said Margaret eagerly, not seeing the
prudential side of the question, only grasping at the idea that they
were rendering such help for the last time; “we may not be here long.”

“Do you feel ill, my darling?” asks Mrs. Hale, anxiously,
misunderstanding Margaret’s hint of the uncertainty of their stay at
Helstone. “You look pale and tired. It is this soft, damp, unhealthy
air.”

“No—no, mamma, it is not that: it is delicious air. It smells of the
freshest, purest fragrance, after the smokiness of Harley Street. But I
am tired: it surely must be near bedtime.”

“Not far off—it is half-past nine. You had better go to bed at once,
dear. Ask Dixon for some gruel. I will come and see you as soon as you
are in bed. I am afraid you have taken cold; or the bad air from some of
the stagnant ponds—”

“Oh, mamma,” said Margaret, faintly smiling as she kissed her mother, “I
am quite well—don’t alarm yourself about me; I am only tired.”

Margaret went up stairs. To soothe her mother’s anxiety she submitted to
a basin of gruel. She was lying languidly in bed when Mrs. Hale came up
to make some last inquiries and kiss her before going to her own room
for the night. But the instant she heard her mother’s door locked, she
sprang out of bed, and throwing her dressing-gown on, she began to pace
up and down the room, until the creaking of one of the boards reminded
her that she must make no noise. She went and curled herself upon the
window-seat in the small, deeply-recessed window. That morning when she
had looked out, her heart had danced at seeing the bright clear lights
on the church tower, which foretold a fine and sunny day. This
evening—sixteen hours at most had past by—she sat down, too full of
sorrow to cry, but with a cold dull pain, which seemed to have pressed
the youth and buoyancy out of her heart, never to return. Mr. Henry
Lennox’s visit—his offer—was like a dream, a thing beside her actual
life. The hard reality was, that her father had so admitted tempting
doubts into his mind as to become a schismatic—an outcast; all the
changes consequent upon this grouped themselves around that one great
blighting fact.

She looked out upon the dark-grey lines of the church towers, square and
straight in the centre of the view, cutting against the deep blue
transparent depths beyond, into which she gazed, and felt that she might
gaze for ever, seeing at every moment some farther distance, and yet no
sign of God! It seemed to her at the moment, as if the earth was more
utterly desolate than if girt in by an iron dome, behind which there
might be the ineffaceable peace and glory of the Almighty: those
never-ending depths of space, in their still serenity, were more mocking
to her than any material bounds could be—shutting in the cries of
earth’s sufferers, which now might ascend into that infinite splendour
of vastness and be lost—lost for ever, before they reached His throne.
In this mood her father came in unheard. The moonlight was strong enough
to let him see his daughter in her unusual place and attitude. He came
to her and touched her shoulder before she was aware that he was there.

“Margaret, I heard you were up. I could not help coming in to ask you to
pray with me—to say the Lord’s Prayer; that will do good to both of
us.”

Mr. Hale and Margaret knelt by the window-seat—he looking up, she
bowed down in humble shame. God was there, close around them, hearing
her father’s whispered words. Her father might be a heretic; but had not
she, in her despairing doubts not five minutes before, shown herself a
far more utter sceptic? She spoke not a word, but stole to bed after her
father had left her, like a child ashamed of its fault. If the world was
full of perplexing problems she would trust, and only ask to see the one
step needful for the hour. Mr. Lennox—his visit, his proposal—the
remembrance of which had been so rudely pushed aside by the subsequent
events of the day—haunted her dreams that night. He was climbing up
some tree of fabulous height to reach the branch whereon was slung her
bonnet: he was falling and she was struggling to save him, but held back
by some invisible powerful hand. He was dead. And yet, with a shifting
of the scene, she was once more in the Harley Street drawing-room,
talking to him as of old, and still with a consciousness all the time
that she had seen him killed by that terrible fall.

Miserable, unresting night! Ill preparation for the coming day! She
awoke with a start, unrefreshed, and conscious of some reality worse
even than her feverish dreams. It all came back upon her; not merely the
sorrow, but the terrible discord in the sorrow. Where, to what distance
apart, had her father wandered, led by doubts which were to her
temptations of the Evil One? She longed to ask, and yet would not have
heard for all the world.

The fine crisp morning made her mother feel particularly well and happy
at breakfast-time. She talked on, planning village kindness, unheeding
the silence of her husband and the monosyllabic answers of Margaret.
Before the things were cleared away, Mr. Hale got up; he leaned one hand
on the table, as if to support himself:

“I shall not be home till evening. I am going to Bracy Common, and will
ask Farmer Dobson to give me something for dinner. I shall be back to
tea at seven.”

He did not look at either of them, but Margaret knew what he meant. By
seven the announcement must be made to her mother. Mr. Hale would have
delayed making it, but Margaret was of different stuff. She could not
bear the impending weight on her mind all day long: better get the worst
over; the day would be too short to comfort her mother. But while she
stood by the window, thinking how to begin, and waiting for the servant
to have left the room, her mother had gone up stairs to put on her
things to go to the school. She came down ready equipped, in a brisker
mood than usual.

“Mother, come round the garden with me this morning; just one turn,”
said Margaret, putting her arm round Mrs. Hale’s waist.

They passed through the open window. Mrs. Hale spoke—said
something—Margaret could not tell what. Her eye caught on a bee
entering a deep-belled flower: when that bee flew forth with his spoil
she would begin—that should be the sign. Out he came.

“Mamma! Papa is going to leave Helstone!” she blurted forth. “He’s going
to leave the Church, and live in Milton-Northern.” There were the three
hard facts hardly spoken.

“What makes you say so?” asked Mrs. Hale, in a surprised, incredulous
voice. “Who has been telling you such nonsense?”

“Papa himself,” said Margaret, longing to say something gentle and
consoling, but literally not knowing how. They were close to a
garden-bench. Mrs. Hale sat down and began to cry.

“I don’t understand you,” she said. “Either you have made some great
mistake, or I don’t quite understand you.”

“No, mother, I have made no mistake. Papa has written to the bishop,
saying that he has such doubts that he cannot conscientiously remain a
priest of the Church of England, and that he must give up Helstone. He
has also consulted Mr. Bell—Frederick’s godfather, you know, mamma; and
it is arranged that we go to live at Milton-Northern.” Mrs. Hale looked
up in Margaret’s face all the time she was speaking these words: the
shadow on her countenance told that she, at least, believed in the truth
of what she said.

“I don’t think it can be true,” said Mrs. Hale, at length. “He would
surely have told me before it came to this.”

It came strongly upon Margaret’s mind that her mother ought to have been
told: that whatever her faults of discontent and repining might have
been, it was an error in her father to have left her to learn his change
of opinion, and his approaching change of life, from her better-informed
child. Margaret sat down by her mother, and took her unresisting head on
her breast, bending her own soft cheeks down caressingly to touch her
face.

“Dear, darling mamma! we were so afraid of giving you pain. Papa felt so
acutely—you know you are not strong, and there must have been such
terrible suspense to go through.”

“When did he tell you, Margaret?”

“Yesterday, only yesterday,” replied Margaret, detecting the jealousy
which prompted the inquiry. “Poor papa!”—trying to divert her mother’s
thoughts into compassionate sympathy for all her father had gone
through. Mrs. Hale raised her head.

“What does he mean by having doubts?” she asked. “Surely, he does not
mean that he thinks differently—that he knows better than the Church.”

Margaret shook her head, and the tears came into her eyes, as her mother
touched the bare nerve of her own regret.

“Can’t the bishop set him right?” asked Mrs. Hale half impatiently.

“I’m afraid not,” said Margaret. “But I did not ask. I could not bear to
hear what he might answer. It is all settled at any rate. He is going to
leave Helstone in a fortnight. I am not sure if he did not say he had
sent in his deed of resignation.”

“In a fortnight!” exclaimed Mrs. Hale, “I do think this is very
strange—not at all right. I call it very unfeeling,” said she,
beginning to take relief in tears. “He has doubts you say, and gives up
his living, and all without consulting me. I dare say, if he had told me
his doubts at the first I could have nipped them in the bud.”

Mistaken as Margaret felt her father’s conduct to have been, she could
not bear to hear it blamed by her mother. She knew that his very
reserve had originated in a tenderness for her, which might be cowardly,
but was not unfeeling.

“I almost hoped you might be glad to leave Helstone, mamma,” said she,
after a pause. “You have never been well in this air, you know.”

“You can’t think the smoky air of a manufacturing town, all chimneys and
dirt like Milton-Northern, would be better than this air, which is pure
and sweet, if it is too soft and relaxing. Fancy living in the middle of
factories, and factory people! Though, of course, if your father leaves
the Church, we shall not be admitted into society anywhere. It will be
such a disgrace to us! Poor dear Sir John! It is well he is not alive to
see what your father has come to! Every day after dinner, when I was a
girl, living with your Aunt Shaw, at Beresford Court, Sir John used to
give for the first toast—‘Church and King, and down with the Rump.’”

Margaret was glad that her mother’s thoughts were turned away from the
fact of her husband’s silence to her on the point which must have been
so near his heart. Next to the serious vital anxiety as to the nature of
her father’s doubts, this was the one circumstance of the case that gave
Margaret the most pain.

“You know, we have very little society here, mamma. The Gormans, who are
our nearest neighbours (to call society—and we hardly ever see them),
have been in trade just as much as these Milton-Northern people.”

“Yes,” says Mrs. Hale, almost indignantly, “but at any rate, the Gormans
made carriages for half the gentlemen of the county, and were brought
into some kind of intercourse with them; but these factory people, who
on earth wears cotton that can afford linen?”

“Well, mamma, I give up the cotton-spinners; I am not standing up for
them, any more than for any other trades-people. Only we shall have
little enough to do with them.”

“Why on earth has your father fixed on Milton-Northern to live in?”

“Partly,” said Margaret, sighing, “because it is so very different from
Helstone—partly because Mr. Bell says there is an opening there for a
private tutor.”

“Private tutor in Milton! Why can’t he go to Oxford, and be a tutor to
gentlemen?”

“You forget, mamma! He is leaving the Church on account of his
opinions—his doubts would do him no good at Oxford.”

Mrs. Hale was silent for some time, quietly crying. At last she said:—

“And the furniture—How in the world are we to manage the removal? I
never removed in my life, and only a fortnight to think about it!”

Margaret was inexpressibly relieved to find that her mother’s anxiety
and distress was lowered to this point, so insignificant to herself, and
on which she could do so much to help. She planned and promised, and led
her mother on to arrange fully as much as could be fixed before they
knew somewhat more definitely what Mr. Hale intended to do. Throughout
the day Margaret never left her mother; bending her whole soul to
sympathise in all the various turns her feelings took; towards evening
especially, as she became more and more anxious that her father should
find a soothing welcome home awaiting him, after his return from his day
of fatigue and distress. She dwelt upon what he must have borne in
secret for long; her mother only replied coldly that he ought to have
told her, and that then at any rate he would have had an adviser to give
him counsel; and Margaret turned faint at heart when she heard her
father’s step in the hall. She dared not go to meet him, and tell him
what she had done all day, for fear of her mother’s jealous annoyance.
She heard him linger, as if awaiting her, or some sign of her; and she
dared not stir; she saw by her mother’s twitching lips, and changing
colour, that she too was aware that her husband had returned. Presently
he opened the room-door, and stood there uncertain whether to come in.
His face was gray and pale; he had a timid fearful look in his eyes;
something almost pitiful to see in a man’s face; but that look of
despondent uncertainty, of mental and bodily languor, touched his wife’s
heart. She went to him, and threw herself on his breast, crying out:—

“Oh! Richard, Richard, you should have told me sooner!”

And then, in tears, Margaret left her, as she rushed up stairs to throw
herself on her bed, and hide her face in the pillows to stifle the
hysteric sobs that would force their way out at last, after the rigid
self-control of the whole day.

How long she lay thus she could not tell. She heard no noise, though the
housemaid came in to arrange the room. The affrighted girl stole out
again on tip-toe, and went and told Mrs. Dixon that Miss Hale was crying
as if her heart would break: she was sure she would make herself deadly
ill if she went on at that rate. In consequence of this, Margaret felt
herself touched, and started up into a sitting posture; she saw the
accustomed room, the figure of Dixon in shadow, as the latter stood
holding a candle a little behind her, for fear of the effect on Miss
Hale’s startled eyes, swollen and blinded as they were.

“Oh, Dixon! I did not hear you come into the room!” said Margaret,
resuming her trembling self-restraint. “Is it very late?” continued she,
lifting herself languidly off the bed, yet letting her feet touch the
ground without fairly standing down, as she shaded her wet ruffled hair
off her face, and tried to look as though nothing were the matter; as if
she had been asleep.

“I can hardly tell what time it is,” replied Dixon in an aggrieved tone
of voice. “Since your mamma told me this terrible news, when I dressed
her for tea, I’ve lost all count of time. I’m sure I don’t know what is
to become of us all. When Charlotte told me just now you were sobbing,
Miss Hale, I thought, no wonder, poor thing! And master thinking of
turning Dissenter at his time of life, when, if it is not to be said
he’s done well in the Church, he’s not done badly after all. I had a
cousin, miss, who turned Methodist preacher after he was fifty years of
age, and a tailor all his life; but then he had never been able to make
a pair of trousers to fit, for as long as he had been in the trade, so
it was no wonder; but for master! as I said to missus, ‘What would poor
Sir John have said? he never liked your marrying Mr. Hale, but if he
could have known it would have come to this, he would have sworn worse
oaths than ever, if that was possible!’”

Dixon had been so much accustomed to comment upon Mr. Hale’s proceedings
to her mistress (who listened to her, or not, as she was in the humour),
that she never noticed Margaret’s flashing eye and dilating nostril. To
hear her father talked of in this way by a servant to her face!

“Dixon,” she said, in the low tone she always used when much excited,
which had a sound in it as of some distant turmoil, or threatening storm
breaking far away. “Dixon! you forget to whom you are speaking.” She
stood upright and firm on her feet now, confronting the waiting-maid,
and fixing her with her steady discerning eye. “I am Mr. Hale’s
daughter. Go! You have made a strange mistake, and one that I am sure
your own good feeling will make you sorry for when you think about it.”

Dixon hung irresolutely about the room for a minute or two. Margaret
repeated, “You may leave me, Dixon. I wish you to go.” Dixon did not
know whether to resent these decided words or to cry; either course
would have suited her mistress: but as she said to herself, “Miss
Margaret has a touch of the old gentleman about her, as well as poor
Master Frederick; I wonder where they get it from?” and she, who would
have resented such words from any one less haughty and determined in
manner, was subdued enough to say, in a half humble, half injured tone:

“Mayn’t I unfasten your gown, miss, and do your hair?”

“No! not to-night, thank you.” And Margaret gravely lighted her out of
the room, and bolted the door. From henceforth Dixon obeyed and admired
Margaret. She said it was because she was so like poor Master Frederick;
but the truth was, that Dixon, as do many others, liked to feel herself
ruled by a powerful and decided nature.

Margaret needed all Dixon’s help in action, and silence in words; for,
for some time, the latter thought it her duty to show her sense of
affront by saying as little as possible to her young lady; so the energy
came out in doing rather than in speaking. A fortnight was a very short
time to make arrangements for so serious a removal; as Dixon said,
“Anyone but a gentleman—indeed almost any other gentleman—” but
catching a look at Margaret’s straight, stern brow just here, she
coughed the remainder of the sentence away, and meekly took the
horehound drop that Margaret offered her, to stop the “little tickling
at my chest, miss.” But almost any one but Mr. Hale would have had
practical knowledge enough to see, that in so short a time it would be
difficult to fix on any house in Milton-Northern, or indeed elsewhere,
to which they could remove the furniture that had of necessity been
taken out of Helstone Vicarage.

Mrs. Hale, overpowered by all the troubles and necessities for
immediate household decisions that seemed to come upon her at once,
became really ill, and Margaret almost felt it as a relief when her
mother fairly took to her bed, and left the management of affairs to
her. Dixon, true to her post of body-guard, attended most faithfully to
her mistress, and only emerged from Mrs. Hale’s bedroom to shake her
head, and murmur to herself in a manner which Margaret did not choose to
hear. For, the one thing clear and straight before her, was the
necessity for leaving Helstone. Mr. Hale’s successor in the living was
appointed; and, at any rate, after her father’s decision, there must be
no lingering now, for his sake, as well as from every other
consideration. For he came home every evening more and more depressed,
after the necessary leave-taking which he had resolved to have with
every individual parishioner. Margaret, inexperienced as she was in all
the necessary matter-of-fact business to be got through, did not know to
whom to apply for advice. The cook and Charlotte worked away with
willing arms and stout hearts at all the moving and packing; and as far
as that went, Margaret’s admirable sense enabled her to see what was
best, and to direct how it should be done. But where were they to go to?
In a week they must be gone. Straight to Milton, or where? So many
arrangements depended on this precision that Margaret resolved to ask
her father one evening, in spite of his evident fatigue and low spirits.
He answered:

“My dear! I have really had too much to think about to settle this. What
does your mother say? What does she wish? Poor Maria!”

He met with an echo even louder than his sigh. Dixon had just come into
the room for another cup of tea for Mrs. Hale, and catching Mr. Hale’s
last words, and protected by his presence from Margaret’s upbraiding
eyes, made bold to say, “My poor mistress!”

“You don’t think her worse to-day,” said Mr. Hale, turning hastily.

“I am sure I can’t say, sir. It’s not for me to judge. The illness seems
so much more on the mind than on the body.”

Mr. Hale looked infinitely distressed.

“You had better take mamma her tea while it is hot, Dixon,” said
Margaret, in a tone of quiet authority.

“Oh! I beg your pardon, Miss! My thoughts was otherwise occupied in
thinking of my poor—— of Mrs. Hale.”

“Papa!” said Margaret, “it is this suspense that is bad for you both. Of
course, mamma must feel your change of opinions: we can’t help that,”
she continued softly; “but now the course is clear, at least to a
certain point. And I think, papa, that I could get mamma to help me in
planning, if you could tell me what to plan for. She has never expressed
any wish in any way, and only thinks of what can’t be helped. Are we to
go straight to Milton? Have you taken a house there?”

“No,” he replied, “I suppose we must go into lodgings, and look about
for a house.”

“And pack up the furniture so that it can be left at the railway
station, till we have met with one?”

“I suppose so. Do what you think best. Only remember, we shall have much
less money to spend.”

They had never had much superfluity, as Margaret knew. She felt that it
was a great weight suddenly thrown upon her shoulders. Four months ago,
all the decisions she needed to make were what dress she would wear for
dinner, and to help Edith to draw out the lists of who should take down
whom in the dinner parties at home. Nor was the household in which she
lived one that called for much decision. Except in the one grand case of
Captain Lennox’s offer, everything went on with the regularity of
clockwork. Once a year, there was a long discussion between her aunt and
Edith as to whether they should go to the Isle of Wight, abroad, or to
Scotland; but at such times Margaret herself was secure of drifting,
without any exertion of her own, into the quiet harbour of home. Now,
since that day when Mr. Lennox came, and startled her into a decision,
every day brought some question, momentous to her, and to those whom she
loved, to be settled.

Her father went up after tea to sit with his wife. Margaret remained
alone in the drawing-room. Suddenly she took a candle and went into her
father’s study for a great atlas, and lugging it back into the
drawing-room, she began to pore over the map of England. She was ready
to look up brightly when her father came down stairs.

“I have hit upon such a beautiful plan. Look here—in Darkshire, hardly
the breadth of my finger from Milton, is Heston, which I have often
heard of from people living in the north as such a pleasant little
bathing-place. Now, don’t you think we could get mamma there with Dixon,
while you and I go and look at houses, and get one all ready for her in
Milton? She would get a breath of sea air to set her up for the winter,
and be spared all the fatigue, and Dixon would enjoy taking care of
her.”

“Is Dixon to go with us?” asked Mr. Hale, in a kind of helpless dismay.

“Oh, yes!” said Margaret. “Dixon quite intends it, and I don’t know what
mamma would do without her.”

“But we shall have to put up with a very different way of living, I am
afraid. Everything is so much dearer in a town. I doubt if Dixon can
make herself comfortable. To tell you the truth, Margaret, I sometimes
feel as if that woman gave herself airs.”

“To be sure she does, papa,” replied Margaret; “and if she has to put up
with a different style of living, we shall have to put up with her airs,
which will be worse. But she really loves us all, and would be miserable
to leave us, I am sure—especially in this change; so, for mamma’s sake,
and for the sake of her faithfulness, I do think she must go.”

“Very well, my dear. Go on. I am resigned. How far is Heston from
Milton? The breadth of one of your fingers does not give me a very clear
idea of distance.”

“Well, then, I suppose it is thirty miles; that is not much!”

“Not in distance, but in—. Never mind! If you really think it will do
your mother good, let it be fixed so.”

This was a great step. Now Margaret could work, and act, and plan in
good earnest. And now Mrs. Hale could rouse herself from her languor,
and forget her real suffering in thinking of the pleasure and the
delight of going to the sea-side. Her only regret was that Mr. Hale
could not be with her all the fortnight she was to be there, as he had
been for a whole fortnight once, when they were engaged, and she was
staying with Sir John and Lady Beresford at Torquay.




CHAPTER VI.

FAREWELL.

    “Unwatch’d the garden bough shall sway,
        The tender blossom flutter down,
        Unloved that beech will gather brown,
    The maple burn itself away;

    Unloved, the sun-flower, shining fair,
        Ray round with flames her disk of seed,
        And many a rose-carnation feed
    With summer spice the humming air;

        *       *       *       *       *

    Till from the garden and the wild
        A fresh association blow
        And year by year the landscape grow
    Familiar to the stranger’s child;

    As year by year the labourer tills
        His wonted glebe, or lops the glades;
        And year by year our memory fades
    From all the circle of the hills.”
              TENNYSON.


The last day came; the house was full of packing-cases, which were being
carted off at the front door, to the nearest railway station. Even the
pretty lawn at the side of the house, was made unsightly and untidy by
the straw that had been wafted upon it through the open door and
windows. The rooms had a strange echoing sound in them,—and the light
came harshly and strongly in through the uncurtained windows,—seeming
already unfamiliar and strange. Mrs. Hale’s dressing-room was left
untouched to the last; and there she and Dixon were packing up clothes,
and interrupting each other every now and then to exclaim at, and turn
over with fond regard, some forgotten treasure, in the shape of some
relic of the children while they were yet little. They did not make much
progress with their work. Down-stairs, Margaret stood calm and
collected, ready to counsel or advise the men who had been called in to
help the cook and Charlotte. These two last, crying between whiles,
wondered how the young lady could keep up so this last day, and settled
it between them that she was not likely to care much for Helstone,
having been so long in London. There she stood, very pale and quiet,
with her large grave eyes observing everything—up to every present
circumstance however small. They could not understand how her heart was
aching all the time, with a heavy pressure that no sighs could lift off
or relieve, and how constant exertion for her perceptive faculties was
the only way to keep herself from crying out with pain. Moreover, if she
gave way, who was to act? Her father was examining papers, books,
registers, what not, in the vestry with the clerk; and when he came in,
there were his own books to pack up, which no one but himself could do
to his satisfaction. Besides, was Margaret one to give way before
strange men, or even household friends like the cook and Charlotte? Not
she! But at last the four packers went into the kitchen to their tea;
and Margaret moved stiffly and slowly away from the place in the hall
where she had been standing so long, out through the bare echoing
drawing-room, into the twilight of an early November evening. There was
a filmy veil of soft dull mist obscuring, but not hiding, all objects,
giving them a lilac hue, for the sun had not yet fully set; a robin was
singing,—perhaps, Margaret thought, the very robin that her father had
so often talked of as his winter pet, and for which he had made, with
his own hands, a kind of robin-house by his study-window. The leaves
were more gorgeous than ever; the first touch of frost would lay them
all low on the ground. Already one or two kept constantly floating down,
amber and golden in the low slanting sun-rays.

Margaret went along the walk under the pear-tree wall. She had never
been along it since she paced it at Henry Lennox’s side. Here, at this
bed of thyme, he began to speak of what she must not think of now. Her
eyes were on that late-blowing rose as she was trying to answer; and she
had caught the idea of the vivid beauty of the feathery leaves of the
carrots in the very middle of his last sentence. Only a fortnight ago!
And all so changed! Where was he now? In London,—going through the old
round; dining with the old Harley Street set, or with gayer young
friends of his own. Even now, while she walked sadly through that damp
and drear garden in the dusk, with everything falling and fading, and
turning to decay around her, he might be gladly putting away his
law-books after a day of satisfactory toil, and freshening himself up,
as he had told her he often did, by a run in the Temple Gardens, taking
in the while the grand inarticulate mighty roar of tens of thousands of
busy men, nigh at hand, but not seen, and catching ever, at his quick
turns, glimpses of the lights of the city coming up out of the depths of
the river. He had often spoken to Margaret of these hasty walks,
snatched in the intervals between study and dinner. At his best times
and in his best moods had he spoken of them; and the thought of them had
struck upon her fancy. Here there was no sound. The robin had gone away
into the vast stillness of night. Now and then, a cottage door in the
distance was opened and shut, as if to admit the tired labourer to his
home; but that sounded very far away. A stealthy, creeping, cranching
sound among the crisp fallen leaves of the forest, beyond the garden,
seemed almost close at hand. Margaret knew it was some poacher. Sitting
up in her bedroom this past autumn, with the light of her candle
extinguished, and purely revelling in the solemn beauty of the heavens
and the earth, she had many a time seen the light noiseless leap of the
poachers over the garden-fence, their quick tramp across the dewy
moonlit lawn, their disappearance in the black still shadow beyond. The
wild adventurous freedom of their life had taken her fancy; she felt
inclined to wish them success; she had no fear of them. But to-night she
was afraid, she knew not why. She heard Charlotte shutting the windows,
and fastening up for the night, unconscious that any one had gone out
into the garden. A small branch—it might be of rotten wood, or it might
be broken by force—came heavily down in the nearest part of the forest;
Margaret ran, swift as Camilla, down to the window, and rapped at it
with a hurried tremulousness which startled Charlotte within.

“Let me in! Let me in! It is only me, Charlotte!” Her heart did not
still its fluttering till she was safe in the drawing-room, with the
windows fastened and bolted, and the familiar walls hemming her round,
and shutting her in. She had sate down upon a packing-case; cheerless,
chill was the dreary and dismantled room—no fire, nor other light, but
Charlotte’s long unsnuffed candle. Charlotte looked at Margaret with
surprise; and Margaret, feeling it rather than seeing it, rose up.

“I was afraid you were shutting me out altogether, Charlotte,” said she,
half-smiling. “And then you would never have heard me in the kitchen,
and the doors into the lane and churchyard are locked long ago.”

“Oh, miss, I should have been sure to have missed you soon. The men
would have wanted you to tell them how to go on. And I have put tea in
master’s study, as being the most comfortable room, so to speak.”

“Thank you, Charlotte. You are a kind girl. I shall be sorry to leave
you. You must try and write to me, if I can ever give you any little
help or good advice. I shall always be glad to get a letter from
Helstone, you know. I shall be sure and send you my address when I know
it.”

The study was all ready for tea. There was a good blazing fire, and
unlighted candles on the table. Margaret sat down on the rug, partly to
warm herself, for the dampness of the evening hung about her dress, and
over-fatigue had made her chilly. She kept herself balanced by clasping
her hands together round her knees; her head dropped a little towards
her chest; the attitude was one of despondency, whatever her frame of
mind might be. But when she heard her father’s step on the gravel
outside, she started up, and hastily shaking her heavy black hair back,
and wiping a few tears away that had come on her cheeks she knew not
how, she went out to open the door for him. He showed far more
depression than she did. She could hardly get him to talk, although she
tried to speak on subjects that would interest him, at the cost of an
effort every time which she thought would be her last.

“Have you been a very long walk to-day?” asked she, on seeing his
refusal to touch food of any kind.

“As far as Fordham Beeches. I went to see Widow Maltby; she is sadly
grieved at not having wished you good-bye. She says little Susan has
kept watch down the lane for days past.—Nay, Margaret, what is the
matter, dear?” The thought of the little child watching for her, and
continually disappointed—from no forgetfulness on her part, but from
sheer inability to leave home—was the last drop in poor Margaret’s cup,
and she was sobbing away as if her heart would break. Mr. Hale was
distressingly perplexed. He rose, and walked nervously up and down the
room. Margaret tried to check herself, but would not speak until she
could do so with firmness. She heard him talking, as if to himself.

“I cannot bear it. I cannot bear to see the sufferings of others. I
think I could go through my own with patience. Oh, is there no going
back?”

“No, father,” said Margaret, looking straight at him, and speaking low
and steadily. “It is bad to believe you in error. It would be infinitely
worse to have known you a hypocrite.” She dropped her voice at the last
few words, as if entertaining the idea of hypocrisy for a moment in
connection with her father savoured of irreverence.

“Besides,” she went on, “it is only that I am tired to-night; don’t
think that I am suffering from what you have done, dear papa. We can’t
either of us talk about it to-night, I believe,” said she, finding that
tears and sobs would come in spite of herself. “I had better go and take
mamma up this cup of tea. She had hers very early, when I was too busy
to go to her, and I am sure she will be glad of another now.”

Railroad time inexorably wrenched them away from lovely, beloved
Helstone, the next morning. They were gone; they had seen the last of
the long low parsonage home, half-covered with China-roses and
pyracanthus—more homelike than ever in the morning sun that glittered
on its windows, each belonging to some well-loved room. Almost before
they had settled themselves into the car, sent from Southampton to fetch
them to the station, they were gone away to return no more. A sting at
Margaret’s heart made her strive to look out to catch the last glimpse
of the old church tower at the turn where she knew it might be seen
above a wave of the forest trees; but her father remembered this too,
and she silently acknowledged his greater right to the one window from
which it could be seen. She leant back and shut her eyes, and the tears
welled forth, and hung glittering for an instant on the shadowing
eyelashes before rolling slowly down her cheeks, and dropping, unheeded,
on her dress.

They were to stop in London all night at some quiet hotel. Poor Mrs.
Hale had cried in her way nearly all day long; and Dixon showed her
sorrow by extreme crossness, and a continual irritable attempt to keep
her petticoats from even touching the unconscious Mr. Hale, whom she
regarded as the origin of all this suffering.

They went through the well-known streets, past houses which they had
often visited, past shops in which she had lounged, impatient, by her
aunt’s side, while that lady was making some important and interminable
decision—nay, absolutely passed acquaintances in the streets; for
though the morning had been of an incalculable length to them, and they
felt as if it ought long ago to have closed in for the repose of
darkness, it was the very busiest time of a London afternoon in November
when they arrived there. It was long since Mrs. Hale had been in London;
and she roused up, almost like a child, to look about her at the
different streets, and to gaze after and exclaim at the shops and
carriages,—

“Oh, there’s Harrison’s, where I bought so many of my wedding things.
Dear! how altered! They’ve got immense plate-glass windows, larger than
Crawford’s in Southampton. Oh, and there, I declare—no, it is not—yes,
it is—Margaret, we have just passed Mr. Henry Lennox. Where can he be
going, among all these shops?”

Margaret started forwards, and as quickly fell back, half-smiling at
herself for the sudden motion. They were a hundred yards away by this
time; but he seemed like a relic of Helstone—he was associated with a
bright morning, an eventful day, and she should have liked to have seen
him, without his seeing her,—without the chance of their speaking.

The evening, without employment, passed in a room high up in an hotel,
was long and heavy. Mr. Hale went out to his bookseller’s, and to call
on a friend or two. Every one they saw, either in the house or out in
the streets, appeared hurrying to some appointment, expected by, or
expecting somebody. They alone seemed strange and friendless, and
desolate. Yet within a mile, Margaret knew of house after house, where
she for her own sake, and her mother for her aunt Shaw’s, would be
welcomed, if they came in gladness, or even in peace of mind. If they
came sorrowing, and wanting sympathy in a complicated trouble like the
present, then they would be felt as a shadow in all these houses of
intimate acquaintances, not friends. London life is too whirling and
full to admit of even an hour of that deep silence of feeling which the
friends of Job showed, when “they sat with him on the ground seven days
and seven nights, and none spake a word unto him; for they saw that his
grief was very great.”




CHAPTER VII.

NEW SCENES AND FACES.

        “Mist clogs the sunshine,
        Smoky dwarf houses
        Hem me round everywhere.”
                     MATTHEW ARNOLD.


The next afternoon, about twenty miles from Milton-Northern, they
entered on the little branch railway that led to Heston. Heston itself
was one long straggling street, running parallel to the seashore. It
had a character of its own, as different from the little bathing-places
in the south of England as they again from those of the continent. To
use a Scotch word, everything looked more “purpose-like.” The country
carts had more iron, and less wood and leather about the horse-gear; the
people in the streets, although on pleasure bent, had yet a busy mind.
The colours looked grayer—more enduring, not so gay and pretty. There
were no smock-frocks, even among the country-folk; they retarded motion,
and were apt to catch on machinery, and so the habit of wearing them had
died out. In such towns in the south of England, Margaret had seen the
shopmen, when not employed in their business, lounging a little at their
doors, enjoying the fresh air, and the look up and down the street.
Here, if they had any leisure from customers, they made themselves
business in the shop—even, Margaret fancied, to the unnecessary
unrolling and re-rolling of ribbons. All these differences struck upon
her mind, as she and her mother went out next morning to look for
lodgings.

Their two nights at hotels had cost more than Mr. Hale had anticipated,
and they were glad to take the first clean, cheerful rooms they met with
that were at liberty to receive them. There, for the first time for many
days, did Margaret feel at rest. There was a dreaminess in the rest,
too, which made it still more perfect and luxurious to repose in. The
distant sea, lapped the sandy shore with measured sound; the nearer
cries of the donkey-boys; the unusual scenes moving before her like
pictures, which she cared not in her laziness to have fully explained
before they passed away; the stroll down to the beach to breathe the
sea-air, soft and warm on that sandy shore even to the end of November;
the great long misty sea-line touching the tender-coloured sky; the
white sail of a distant boat turning silver in some pale sunbeam:—it
seemed as if she could dream her life away in such luxury of
pensiveness, in which she made her present all in all, from not daring
to think of the past, or wishing to contemplate the future.

But the future must be met, however stern and iron it be. One evening it
was arranged that Margaret and her father should go the next day to
Milton-Northern, and look out for a house. Mr. Hale had received several
letters from Mr. Bell, and one or two from Mr. Thornton, and he was
anxious to ascertain at once a good many particulars respecting his
position and chances of success there, which he could only do by an
interview with the latter gentleman. Margaret knew that they ought to be
removing; but she had a repugnance to the idea of a manufacturing town,
and believed that her mother was receiving benefit from Heston air, so
she would willingly have deferred the expedition to Milton.

For several miles before they reached Milton, they saw a deep
lead-coloured cloud hanging over the horizon in the direction in which
it lay. It was all the darker from contrast with the pale gray-blue of
the wintry sky; for in Heston there had been the earliest signs of
frost. Nearer to the town, the air had a faint taste and smell of smoke;
perhaps, after all, more a loss of the fragrance of grass and herbage
than any positive taste or smell. Quick they were whirled over long,
straight, hopeless streets of regularly-built houses, all small and of
brick. Here and there a great oblong many-windowed factory stood up,
like a hen among her chickens, puffing out black “unparliamentary”
smoke, and sufficiently accounting for the cloud which Margaret had
taken to foretell rain. As they drove through the larger and wider
streets, from the station to the hotel, they had to stop constantly;
great loaded lurries blocked up the not over-wide thoroughfares.
Margaret had now and then been into the city in her drives with her
aunt. But there the heavy lumbering vehicles seemed various in their
purposes and intent; here every van, every waggon and truck, bore
cotton, either in the raw shape in bags, or the woven shape in bales of
calico. People thronged the footpaths, most of them well-dressed as
regarded the material, but with a slovenly looseness which struck
Margaret as different from the shabby, threadbare smartness of a similar
class in London.

“New Street,” said Mr. Hale. “This, I believe, is the principal street
in Milton. Bell has often spoken to me about it. It was the opening of
this street from a lane into a great thoroughfare, thirty years ago,
which has caused his property to rise so much in value. Mr. Thornton’s
mill must be somewhere not very far off, for he is Mr. Bell’s tenant.
But I fancy he dates from his warehouse.”

“Where is our hotel, papa?”

“Close to the end of this street, I believe. Shall we have lunch before
or after we have looked at the houses we marked in the Milton Times?”

“Oh, let us get our work done first.”

“Very well. Then I will only see if there is any note or letter for me
from Mr. Thornton, who said he would let me know anything he might hear
about these houses, and then we will set off. We will keep the cab; it
will be safer than losing ourselves, and being too late for the train
this afternoon.”

There were no letters awaiting him. They set out on their house-hunting.
Thirty pounds a-year was all they could afford to give, but in Hampshire
they could have met with a roomy house and pleasant garden for the
money. Here, even the necessary accommodation of two sitting-rooms and
four bed-rooms seemed unattainable. They went through their list,
rejecting each as they visited it. They then looked at each other in
dismay.

“We must go back to the second, I think. That one,—in Crampton, don’t
they call the suburb? There were three sitting-rooms; don’t you remember
how we laughed at the number compared with the three bed-rooms? But I
have planned it all. The front room down-stairs is to be your study and
our dining-room (poor papa!), for you know, we settled mamma is to have
as cheerful a sitting-room as we can get; and that front room up-stairs,
with the atrocious blue and pink paper and heavy cornice, had really a
pretty view over the plain, with a great bend of river, or canal, or
whatever it is, down below. Then I could have the little bed-room
behind, in that projection at the head of the first flight of stairs
over the kitchen, you know—and you and mamma the room behind the
drawing-room, and that closet in the roof will make you a splendid
dressing-room.”

“But Dixon, and the girl we are to have to help?”

“Oh, wait a minute. I am overpowered by the discovery of my own genius
for management. Dixon is to have—let me see, I had it once—the back
sitting-room. I think she will like that. She grumbles so much about the
stairs at Heston; and the girl is to have that sloping attic over your
room and mamma’s. Won’t that do?”

“I dare say it will. But the papers. What taste! And the over-loading
such a house with colour and such heavy cornices!”

“Never mind, papa! Surely you can charm the landlord into re-papering
one or two of the rooms—the drawing-room and your bed-room—for mamma
will come most in contact with them; and your book-shelves will hide a
great deal of that gaudy pattern in the dining-room.”

“Then you think it the best? If so, I had better go at once and call on
this Mr. Donkin, to whom the advertisement refers me. I will take you
back to the hotel, where you can order lunch, and rest, and by the time
it is ready, I shall be with you. I hope I shall be able to get new
papers.”

Margaret hoped so too, though she said nothing. She had never come
fairly in contact with the taste that loves ornament, however bad, more
than the plainness and simplicity which are of themselves the framework
of elegance.

Her father took her through the entrance of the hotel, and leaving her
at the foot of the staircase, went to the address of the landlord of the
house they had fixed upon. Just as Margaret had her hand on the door of
their sitting-room, she was followed by a quick-stepping waiter:

“I beg your pardon, ma’am. The gentleman was gone so quickly, I had no
time to tell him. Mr. Thornton called almost directly after you left;
and as I understood, from what the gentleman said, you would be back in
an hour, I told him so, and he came again about five minutes ago, and
said he would wait for Mr. Hale. He is in your room now, ma’am.”

“Thank you. My father will return soon, and then you can tell him.”

Margaret opened the door and went in with the straight, fearless,
dignified presence habitual to her. She felt no awkwardness; she had too
much the habits of society for that. Here was a person come on business
to her father; and, as he was one who had shown himself obliging, she
was disposed to treat him with a full measure of civility. Mr. Thornton
was a good deal more surprised and discomfited than she. Instead of a
quiet, middle-aged clergyman, a young lady came forward with frank
dignity,—a young lady of a different type to most of those he was in
the habit of seeing. Her dress was very plain: a close straw bonnet of
the best material and shape, trimmed with white ribbon; a large Indian
shawl, which hung about her in long heavy folds, and which she wore as
an empress wears her drapery. He did not understand who she was, as he
caught the simple, straight, unabashed look, which showed that his
being there was of no concern to the beautiful countenance, and called
up no flush of surprise to the pale ivory of the complexion. He had
heard that Mr. Hale had a daughter, but he had imagined that she was a
little girl.

“Mr. Thornton, I believe!” said Margaret, after a half-instant’s pause,
during which his unready words would not come. “Will you sit down. My
father brought me to the door not a minute ago, but unfortunately he was
not told that you were here, and he has gone away on some business. But
he will come back almost directly. I am sorry you have had the trouble
of calling twice.”

Mr. Thornton was in habits of authority himself, but she seemed to
assume some kind of rule over him at once. He had been getting impatient
at the loss of his time on a market-day, the moment before she appeared,
yet now he calmly took a seat at her bidding.

“Do you know where it is that Mr. Hale has gone to? Perhaps I might be
able to find him.”

“He has gone to a Mr. Donkin in Canute Street. He is the landlord of the
house my father wishes to take in Crampton.”

Mr. Thornton knew the house. He had seen the advertisement, and been to
look at it, in compliance with a request of Mr. Bell’s that he would
assist Mr. Hale to the best of his power: and also instigated by his own
interest in the case of a clergyman who had given up his living under
circumstances such as those of Mr. Hale. Mr. Thornton had thought that
the house in Crampton was really just the thing; but now that he saw
Margaret, with her superb ways of moving and looking, he began to feel
ashamed of having imagined that it would do very well for the Hales, in
spite of a certain vulgarity in it which had struck him at the time of
his looking it over.

Margaret could not help her looks; but the short curled upper lip, the
round, massive up-turned chin, the manner of carrying her head, her
movements, full of a soft feminine defiance, always gave strangers the
impression of haughtiness. She was tired now, and would much rather have
remained silent, and taken the rest her father had planned for her; but,
of course, she owed to herself to be a gentlewoman, and to speak
courteously from time to time to this stranger; not over-brushed, nor
over-polished, it must be confessed, after his rough encounter with
Milton streets and crowds. She wished that he would go, as he had once
spoken of doing, instead of sitting there, answering with curt sentences
all the remarks she made. She had taken off her shawl, and hung it over
the back of her chair. She sat facing him and facing the light; her full
beauty met his eye; her round white flexile throat rising out of the
full, yet lithe figure; her lips moving so slightly as she spoke, not
breaking the cold serene look of her face with any variation from the
one lovely haughty curve; her eyes, with their soft gloom, meeting his
with quiet maiden freedom. He almost said to himself that he did not
like her, before their conversation ended; he tried so to compensate
himself for the mortified feeling, that while he looked upon her with
an admiration he could not repress, she looked at him with proud
indifference, taking him, he thought, for what, in his irritation, he
told himself he was—a great rough fellow, with not a grace or a
refinement about him. Her quiet coldness of demeanour he interpreted
into contemptuousness, and resented it in his heart to the pitch of
almost inclining him to get up and go away, and have nothing more to do
with these Hales, and their superciliousness.

Just as Margaret had exhausted her last subject of conversation—and yet
conversation that could hardly be called which consisted of so few and
such short speeches—her father came in, and with his pleasant
gentlemanly courteousness of apology, reinstated his name and family in
Mr. Thornton’s good opinion.

Mr. Hale and his visitor had a good deal to say respecting their mutual
friend, Mr. Bell; and Margaret, glad that her part of entertaining the
visitor was over, went to the window to try and make herself more
familiar with the strange aspect of the street. She got so much absorbed
in watching what was going on outside that she hardly heard her father
when he spoke to her, and he had to repeat what he said:

“Margaret! the landlord will persist in admiring that hideous paper, and
I am afraid we must let it remain.”

“Oh dear! I am sorry!” she replied, and began to turn over in her mind
the possibility of hiding part of it, at least, by some of her sketches,
but gave up the idea at last, as likely only to make bad worse. Her
father, meanwhile, with his kindly country hospitality, was pressing Mr.
Thornton to stay to luncheon with them. It would have been very
inconvenient to him to do so, yet he felt that he should have yielded,
if Margaret by word or look had seconded her father’s invitation; he was
glad she did not, and yet he was irritated at her for not doing so. She
gave him a low, grave bow when he left, and he felt more awkward and
self-conscious in every limb than he had ever done in his life before.

“Well, Margaret, now to luncheon as fast as we can. Have you ordered
it?”

“No, papa; that man was here when I came home, and I have never had an
opportunity.”

“Then we must take anything we can get. He must have been waiting a long
time I’m afraid.”

“It seemed exceedingly long to me. I was just at the last gasp when you
came in. He never went on with any subject, but gave little, short,
abrupt answers.”

“Very much to the point though, I should think. He is a clear-headed
fellow. He said (did you hear?) that Crampton is on gravelly soil, and
by far the most healthy suburb in the neighbourhood of Milton.”

When they returned to Heston, there was the day’s account to be given to
Mrs. Hale, who was full of questions, which they answered in the
intervals of tea-drinking.

“And what is your correspondent, Mr. Thornton, like?”

“Ask Margaret,” said her husband. “She and he had a long attempt at
conversation, while I was away speaking to the landlord.”

“Oh! I hardly know what he is like,” said Margaret, lazily; too tired to
tax her powers of description much. And then rousing herself, she said,
“He is a tall, broad-shouldered man, about—how old, papa?”

“I should guess about thirty.”

“About thirty—with a face that is neither exactly plain, nor yet
handsome, nothing remarkable—not quite a gentleman; but that was hardly
to be expected.”

“Not vulgar or common though,” put in her father, rather jealous of any
disparagement of the sole friend he had in Milton.

“Oh, no!” said Margaret. “With such an expression of resolution and
power, no face, however plain in feature, could be either vulgar or
common. I should not like to have to bargain with him; he looks very
inflexible. Altogether a man who seems made for his niche, mamma;
sagacious, and strong, as becomes a great tradesman.”

“Don’t call the Milton manufacturers tradesmen, Margaret,” said her
father. “They are very different.”

“Are they? I apply the word to all who have something tangible to sell;
but if you think the term is not correct, papa, I won’t use it. But, oh
mamma! speaking of vulgarity and commonness, you must prepare yourself
for our drawing-room paper. Pink and blue roses, with yellow leaves! And
such a heavy cornice round the room!”

But when they removed to their new house in Milton, the obnoxious papers
were gone. The landlord received their thanks very composedly; and let
them think, if they liked, that he had relented from his expressed
determination not to repaper. There was no particular need to tell them,
that what he did not care to do for a Reverend Mr. Hale, unknown in
Milton, he was only too glad to do at the one short sharp remonstrance
of Mr. Thornton, the wealthy manufacturer.




CHAPTER VIII.

HOME SICKNESS.

    “And it’s hame, hame, hame,
    Hame fain wad I be.”


It needed the pretty light papering of the rooms to reconcile them to
Milton. It needed more—more that could not be had. The thick yellow
November fogs had come on; and the view of the plain in the valley, made
by the sweeping bend of the river, was all shut out when Mrs. Hale
arrived at her new home.

Margaret and Dixon had been at work two days, unpacking and arranging,
but everything inside the house still looked in disorder; and outside a
thick fog crept up to the very windows, and was driven in to every open
door in choking white wreaths of unwholsome mist.

“Oh, Margaret! are we to live here?” asked Mrs. Hale in blank dismay.

Margaret’s heart echoed the dreariness of the tone in which this
question was put. She could scarcely command herself enough to say, “Oh,
the fogs in London are sometimes far worse!”

“But then you knew that London itself, and friends lay behind it.
Here—well! we are desolate. Oh Dixon, what a place this is!”

“Indeed, ma’am, I’m sure it will be your death before long, and then I
know who’ll—stay! Miss Hale, that’s far too heavy for you to lift.”

“Not at all, thank you, Dixon,” replied Margaret coldly. “The best thing
we can do for mamma is to get her room quite ready for her to go to bed,
while I go and bring her a cup of coffee.”

Mr. Hale was equally out of spirits, and equally came upon Margaret for
sympathy.

“Margaret, I do believe this is an unhealthy place. Only suppose that
your mother’s health or yours should suffer. I wish I had gone into some
country place in Wales; this is really terrible,” said he, going up to
the window.

There was no comfort to be given. They were settled in Milton, and must
endure smoke and fogs for a season; indeed, all other life seemed shut
out from them by as thick a fog of circumstance. Only the day before,
Mr. Hale had been reckoning up with dismay how much their removal and
fortnight at Heston had cost, and he found it had absorbed nearly all
his little stock of ready money. No! here they were, and here they must
remain.

At night when Margaret realised this, she felt inclined to sit down in a
stupor of despair. The heavy smoky air hung about her bedroom, which
occupied the long narrow projection at the back of the house. The
window, placed at the side of the oblong, looked at the blank wall of a
similar projection, not above ten feet distant. It loomed through the
fog like a great barrier to hope. Inside the room everything was in
confusion. All their efforts had been directed to make her mother’s room
comfortable. Margaret sat down on a box, the direction card upon which
struck her as having been written at Helstone—beautiful, beloved
Helstone! She lost herself in dismal thought: but at last she determined
to take her mind away from the present; and suddenly remembered that she
had a letter from Edith which she had only half read in the bustle of
the morning. It was to tell of their arrival at Corfu; their voyage
along the Mediterranean—their music, and dancing on board ship; the gay
new life opening upon her; her house with its trellised balcony, and its
views over white cliffs and deep blue sea.

Edith wrote fluently and well, if not graphically. She could not only
seize the salient and characteristic points of a scene, but she could
enumerate enough of indiscriminate particular for Margaret to make it
out for herself. Captain Lennox and another lately married officer
shared a villa, high up on the beautiful precipitous rocks overhanging
the sea. Their days, late as it was in the year, seemed spent in boating
or land-picnics; all out-of-doors, pleasure-seeking and glad, Edith’s
life seemed like the deep vault of blue sky above her, free—utterly
free from fleck or cloud. Her husband had to attend drill, and she, the
most musical officer’s wife there, had to copy the new and popular tunes
out of the most recent English music, for the benefit of the bandmaster;
those seemed their most severe and arduous duties. She expressed an
affectionate hope that, if the regiment stopped another year at Corfu,
Margaret might come out and pay her a long visit. She asked Margaret if
she remembered the day twelve-month on which she, Edith, wrote—how it
rained all day long in Harley Street; and how she would not put on her
new gown to go to a stupid dinner, and get it all wet and splashed in
going to the carriage; and how at that very dinner they had first met
Captain Lennox.

Yes! Margaret remembered it well. Edith and Mrs. Shaw had gone to
dinner. Margaret had joined the party in the evening. The recollection
of the plentiful luxury of all arrangements, the stately handsomeness of
the furniture, the size of the house, the peaceful, untroubled ease of
the visitors—all came vividly before her, in strange contrast to the
present time. The smooth sea of that old life closed up, without a mark
left to tell where they had all been. The habitual dinners, the calls,
the dancing evenings, were all going on, going on for ever, though her
Aunt Shaw and Edith were no longer there; and she, of course, was even
less missed. She doubted if any one of that old set ever thought of her,
except Henry Lennox. He too, she knew, would strive to forget her,
because of the pain she had caused him. She had heard him often boast of
his power of putting any disagreeable thought far away from him. Then
she penetrated farther into what might have been. If she had cared for
him as a lover, and had accepted him, and this change in her father’s
opinions and consequent station had taken place, she could not doubt but
that it would have been impatiently received by Mr. Lennox. It was a
bitter mortification to her in one sense; but she could bear it
patiently, because she knew her father’s purity of purpose, and that
strengthened her to endure his errors, grave and serious though in her
estimation they were. But the fact of the world esteeming her father
degraded, in its rough wholesale judgment, would have oppressed and
irritated Mr. Lennox. As she realised what might have been, she grew to
be thankful for what was. They were at the lowest now; they could not be
worse. Edith’s astonishment and her Aunt Shaw’s dismay would have to be
met bravely, when their letters came. So Margaret rose up and began
slowly to undress herself, feeling the full luxury of acting leisurely,
late as it was, after all the past hurry of the day. She fell asleep,
hoping for some brightness, either internal or external. But if she had
known how long it would be before the brightness came, her heart would
have sunk low down. The time of the year was most unpropitious to health
as well as to spirits. Her mother caught a severe cold, and Dixon
herself was evidently not well, although Margaret could not insult her
more than by trying to save her, or by taking any care of her. They
could hear of no girl to assist her; all were at work in the factories;
at least, those who applied were well scolded by Dixon, for thinking
that such as they could ever be trusted to work in a gentleman’s house.
So they had to keep a charwoman in almost constant employ. Margaret
longed to send for Charlotte; but besides the objection of her being a
better servant than they now could afford to keep, the distance was too
great.

Mr. Hale met with several pupils, recommended to him by Mr. Bell, or by
the more immediate influence of Mr. Thornton. They were mostly of the
age when many boys would be still at school, but, according to the
prevalent, and, apparently well-founded notions of Milton, to make a lad
into a good tradesman he must be caught young, and acclimated to the
life of the mill, or office, or warehouse. If he were sent to even the
Scotch Universities, he came back unsettled for commercial pursuits: how
much more so if he went to Oxford or Cambridge, where he could not be
entered till he was eighteen? So most of the manufacturers placed their
sons in situations at from fourteen or fifteen years of age, unsparingly
cutting away all off-shoots in the direction of literature or high
mental cultivation, in hopes of throwing the whole strength and vigour
of the plant into commerce. Still there were some wiser parents; and
some who had sense enough to perceive their own deficiencies, and strive
to remedy them. Nay, there were a few no longer youths, but men in the
prime of life, who had the stern wisdom to acknowledge their own
ignorance, and to learn late what they should have learnt early. Mr.
Thornton was perhaps the oldest of Mr. Hale’s pupils. He was certainly
the favourite. Mr. Hale got into the habit of quoting his opinions so
frequently, and with such regard, that it became a little domestic joke
to wonder what time, during the hour appointed for instruction, could be
given to absolute learning, so much of it appeared to have been spent in
conversation.

Margaret rather encouraged this light, merry way of viewing her father’s
acquaintance with Mr. Thornton, because she felt that her mother was
inclined to look upon this new friendship of her husband’s with jealous
eyes. As long as his time had been solely occupied with his books and
his parishioners, as at Helstone, she had appeared to care little
whether she saw much of him or not; but now that he looked eagerly
forward to each renewal of his intercourse with Mr. Thornton, she seemed
hurt and annoyed, as if he were slighting her companionship for the
first time. Mr. Hale’s over-praise had the usual effect of over-praise
upon his auditors; they were a little inclined to rebel against
Aristides being always called the Just.

After a quiet life in a country parsonage for more than twenty years,
there was something dazzling to Mr. Hale in the energy which conquered
immense difficulties with ease; the power of the machinery of Milton,
the power of the men of Milton, impressed him with a sense of grandeur,
which he yielded to without caring to inquire into the details of its
exercise. But Margaret went less abroad, among machinery and men; saw
less of power in its public effect, and, as it happened, she was thrown
with one or two of those who, in all measures affecting masses of
people, must be acute sufferers for the good of many. The question
always is, has everything been done to make the sufferings of these
exceptions as small as possible? or, in the triumph of the crowded
procession, have the helpless been trampled on, instead of being gently
lifted aside out of the roadway of the conqueror, whom they have no
power to accompany on his march?

It fell to Margaret’s share to have to look out for a servant to assist
Dixon, who had at first undertaken to find just the person she wanted to
do all the rough work of the house. But Dixon’s ideas of helpful girls
were founded on the recollection of tidy elder scholars at Helstone
school, who were only too proud to be allowed to come to the parsonage
on a busy day, and treated Mrs. Dixon with all the respect, and a good
deal more of fright, which they paid to Mr. and Mrs. Hale. Dixon was not
unconscious of this awed reverence which was given to her; nor did she
dislike it: it flattered her much as Louis the Fourteenth was flattered
by his courtiers shading their eyes from the dazzling light of his
presence. But nothing short of her faithful love for Mrs. Hale could
have made her endure the rough independent way in which all the Milton
girls, who made application for the servant’s place, replied to her
inquiries respecting their qualifications. They even went the length of
questioning her back again; having doubts and fears of their own, as to
the solvency of a family who lived in a house of thirty pounds a-year,
and yet gave themselves airs, and kept two servants, one of them so very
high and mighty. Mr. Hale was no longer looked upon as Vicar of
Helstone, but as a man who only spent at a certain rate. Margaret was
weary and impatient of the accounts which Dixon perpetually brought to
Mrs. Hale of the behaviour of these would-be servants. Not but what
Margaret was repelled by the rough uncourteous manners of these people;
not but what she shrunk with fastidious pride from their hail-fellow
accost, and severely resented their unconcealed curiosity as to the
means and position of any family who lived in Milton, and yet were not
engaged in trade of some kind. But the more Margaret felt impertinence,
the more likely she was to be silent on the subject; and, at any rate,
if she took upon herself to make inquiry for a servant, she could spare
her mother the recital of all her disappointments and fancied or real
insults.

Margaret accordingly went up and down to butchers and grocers, seeking
for a nonpareil of a girl; and lowering her hopes and expectations every
week, as she found the difficulty of meeting with any one in a
manufacturing town who did not prefer the better wages and greater
independence of working in a mill. It was something of a trial to
Margaret to go out by herself in this busy bustling place. Mrs. Shaw’s
ideas of propriety and her own helpless dependence on others, had always
made her insist that a footman should accompany Edith and Margaret, if
they went beyond Harley Street or the immediate neighbourhood. The
limits by which this rule of her aunt’s had circumscribed Margaret’s
independence had been silently rebelled against at the time: and she had
doubly enjoyed the free walks and rambles of her forest life from the
contrast which they presented. She went along there with a boundless
fearless step, that occasionally broke out into a run, if she were in a
hurry, and occasionally was stilled into perfect repose, as she stood
listening to, or watching any of the wild creatures who sang in the
leafy courts, or glanced out with their keen bright eyes from the low
brushwood or tangled furze. It was a trial to come down from such motion
or such stillness, only guided by her own sweet will, to the even and
decorous pace necessary in streets. But she could have laughed at
herself for minding this change, if it had not been accompanied by what
was a more serious annoyance.

The side of the town on which Crampton lay was especially a thoroughfare
for the factory people. In the back streets around them there were many
mills, out of which poured streams of men and women two or three times a
day. Until Margaret had learnt the times of their ingress and egress,
she was very unfortunate in constantly falling in with them. They came
rushing along, with bold, fearless faces, and loud laughs and jests,
particularly aimed at all those who appeared to be above them in rank or
station. The tones of their unrestrained voices, and their carelessness
of all common rules of street politeness, frightened Margaret a little
at first. The girls, with their rough, but not unfriendly freedom, would
comment on her dress, even touch her shawl or gown to ascertain the
exact material; nay, once or twice she was asked questions relative to
some article which they particularly admired. There was such a simple
reliance on her womanly sympathy with their love of dress, and on her
kindliness, that she gladly replied to these inquiries, as soon as she
understood them; and half smiled back at their remarks. She did not mind
meeting any number of girls, loud spoken and boisterous though they
might be. But she alternately dreaded and fired up against the workmen,
who commented not on her dress, but on her looks, in the same open,
fearless manner. She, who had hitherto felt that even the most refined
remark on her personal appearance was an impertinence, had to endure
undisguised admiration from these outspoken men. But the very
outspokenness marked their innocence of any intention to hurt her
delicacy, as she would have perceived if she had been less frightened by
the disorderly tumult. Out of her fright came a flash of indignation
which made her face scarlet, and her dark eyes gather flame, as she
heard some of their speeches. Yet there were other sayings of theirs,
which, when she reached the quiet safety of home, amused her even while
they irritated her.

For instance, one day, after she had passed a number of men, several of
whom had paid her the not unusual compliment of wishing she was their
sweetheart, one of the lingerers added, “Your bonny face, my lass, makes
the day look brighter.” And another day, as she was unconsciously
smiling at some passing thought, she was addressed by a poorly-dressed,
middle-aged workman, with, “You may well smile, my lass; many a one
would smile to have such a bonny face.” This man looked so careworn that
Margaret could not help giving him an answering smile, glad to think
that her looks, such as they were, should have had the power to call up
a pleasant thought. He seemed to understand her acknowledging glance,
and a silent recognition was established between them whenever the
chances of the day brought them across each other’s paths. They had
never exchanged a word; nothing had been said but that first compliment;
yet somehow Margaret looked upon this man with more interest than upon
any one else in Milton. Once or twice, on Sundays, she saw him walking
with a girl, evidently his daughter, and, if possible, still more
unhealthy than he was himself.

One day Margaret and her father had been as far as the fields that lay
around the town; it was early spring, and she had gathered some of the
hedge and ditch flowers, dog-violets, lesser celandines, and the like,
with an unspoken lament in her heart for the sweet profusion of the
South. Her father had left her to go into Milton upon some business; and
on the road home she met her humble friends. The girl looked wistfully
at the flowers, and, acting on a sudden impulse, Margaret offered them
to her. Her pale blue eyes lightened up as she took them, and her father
spoke for her.

“Thank yo, Miss. Bessy’ll think a deal o’ them flowers; that hoo will;
and I shall think a deal o’ yor kindness. Yo’re not of this country, I
reckon?”

“No!” said Margaret, half sighing. “I come from the South—from
Hampshire,” she continued, a little afraid of wounding his consciousness
of ignorance, if she used a name which he did not understand.

“That’s beyond London, I reckon? And I come fro’ Burnleyways, and forty
miles to th’ North. And yet, yo see, North and South has both met and
made kind o’ friends in this big smoky place.”

Margaret had slackened her pace to a walk alongside of the man and his
daughter, whose steps were regulated by the feebleness of the latter.
She now spoke to the girl, and there was a sound of tender pity in the
tone of her voice as she did so that went right to the heart of the
father.

“I’m afraid you are not very strong.”

“No,” said the girl, “nor never will be.”

“Spring is coming,” said Margaret, as if to suggest pleasant, hopeful
thoughts.

“Spring nor summer will do me good,” said the girl quietly.

Margaret looked up at the man, almost expecting some contradiction from
him, or at least some remark that would modify his daughter’s utter
hopelessness. But instead, he added—

“I’m afeared hoo speaks the truth. I’m afeared hoo’s too far gone in a
waste.”

“I shall have a spring where I am boun’ to, and flowers, and amaranths,
and shining robes besides.”

“Poor lass, poor lass!” said her father in a low tone. “I’m none so sure
o’ that; but it’s a comfort to thee, poor lass, poor lass. Poor father!
it’ll be soon.”

Margaret was shocked by his words—shocked but not repelled; rather
attracted and interested.

“Where do you live? I think we must be neighbours, we meet so often on
this road.”

“We put up at nine Frances Street, second turn to th’ left at after
yo’ve past th’ Goulden Dragon.”

“And your name? I must not forget that.”

“I’m none ashamed o’ my name. It’s Nicholas Higgins. Hoo’s called Bessy
Higgins. Whatten yo’ asking for?”

Margaret was surprised at this last question, for at Helstone it would
have been an understood thing, after the enquiries she had made, that
she intended to come and call upon any poor neighbour whose name and
habitation she had asked for.

“I thought—I meant to come and see you.” She suddenly felt rather shy
of offering the visit, without having any reason to give for her wish to
make it, beyond a kindly interest in a stranger. It seemed all at once
to take the shape of an impertinence on her part; she read this meaning
too in the man’s eyes.

“I’m none so fond of having strange folk in my house.” But then
relenting, as he saw her heightened colour, he added, “Yo’re a foreigner,
as one may say, and maybe don’t know many folk here, and yo’ve given my
wench here flowers out of yo’r own hand;—yo may come if yo like.”

Margaret was half amused, half-nettled at this answer. She was not sure
if she would go where permission was given so like a favour conferred.
But when they came to the turn into Frances Street, the girl stopped a
minute, and said,

“Yo’ll not forget yo’re to come and see us.”

“Aye, aye,” said the father, impatiently, “hoo’ll come. Hoo’s a bit set
up now, because hoo thinks I might ha’ spoken more civilly; but hoo’ll
think better on it, and come. I can read her proud bonny face like a
book. Come along, Bess; there’s the mill bell ringing.”

Margaret went home, wondering at her new friends, and smiling at the
man’s insight into what had been passing in her mind. From that day
Milton became a brighter place to her. It was not the long, bleak sunny
days of spring, nor yet was it that time was reconciling her to the town
of her habitation. It was that in it she had found a human interest.




CHAPTER IX.

DRESSING FOR TEA.

    “Let China’s earth, enriched with coloured stains,
    Pencil’d with gold, and streaked with azure veins,
    The grateful flavour of the Indian leaf,
    Or Mocha’s sunburnt berry glad receive.”
              MRS. BARBOULD.


The day after this meeting with Higgins and his daughter Mr. Hale came
upstairs into the little drawing-room at an unusual hour. He went up to
different objects in the room, as if examining them, but Margaret saw
that it was merely a nervous trick—a way of putting off something he
wished, yet feared to say. Out it came at last—

“My dear! I’ve asked Mr. Thornton to come to tea to-night.”

Mrs. Hale was leaning back in her easy chair, with her eyes shut, and an
expression of pain on her face which had become habitual to her of late.
But she roused up into querulousness at this speech of her husband’s.

“Mr. Thornton!—and to-night! What in the world does the man want to
come here for? And Dixon is washing my muslins and laces, and there is
no soft water with these horrid east winds, which I suppose we shall
have all the year round in Milton.”

“The wind is veering round, my dear,” said Mr. Hale, looking out at the
smoke, which drifted right from the east, only he did not yet understand
the points of the compass, and rather arranged them ad libitum according
to circumstances.

“Don’t tell me!” said Mrs. Hale, shuddering up, and wrapping her shawl
about her still more closely. “But, east or west wind, I suppose this
man comes.”

“Oh mamma, that shows you never saw Mr. Thornton. He looks like a person
who would enjoy battling with every adverse thing he could meet
with—enemies, winds, or circumstances. The more it rains and blows, the
more certain we are to have him. But I’ll go and help Dixon. I’m getting
to be a famous clear-starcher. And he won’t want any amusement beyond
talking to Papa. Papa, I am really longing to see the Pythias to your
Damon. You know I never saw him but once, and then we were so puzzled to
know what to say to each other that we did not get on particularly
well.”

“I don’t know that you would ever like him, or think him agreeable,
Margaret. He is not a lady’s man.”

Margaret wreathed her throat in a scornful curve.

“I don’t particularly admire ladies’ men, papa. But Mr. Thornton comes
here as your friend—as one who has appreciated you”—

“The only person in Milton,” said Mrs. Hale.

“So we will give him a welcome, and some cocoa-nut cakes. Dixon will be
flattered if we ask her to make some; and I will undertake to iron your
caps, mamma.”

Many a time that morning did Margaret wish Mr. Thornton far enough away.
She had planned other employments for herself: a letter to Edith, a good
piece of Dante, a visit to the Higginses. But, instead, she ironed away,
listening to Dixon’s complaints, and only hoping that by an excess of
sympathy she might prevent her from carrying the recital of her sorrows
to Mrs. Hale. Every now and then, Margaret had to remind herself of her
father’s regard for Mr. Thornton, to subdue the irritation of weariness
that was stealing over her, and bringing on one of the bad headaches to
which she had lately become liable. She could hardly speak when she sat
down at last, and told her mother that she was no longer Peggy the
laundry-maid, but Margaret Hale the lady. She meant this speech for a
little joke, and was vexed enough with her busy tongue when she found
her mother taking it seriously.

“Yes! if any one had told me, when I was Miss Beresford, and one of the
belles of the country, that a child of mine would have to stand half a
day, in a little poky kitchen, working away like any servant, that we
might prepare properly for the reception of a tradesman, and that this
tradesman should be the only”—

“Oh, mamma!” said Margaret, lifting herself up, “don’t punish me for so
careless a speech. I don’t mind ironing, or any kind of work for you and
papa. I am myself a born and bred lady through it all, even though it
comes to scouring a floor, or washing dishes. I am tired now, just for a
little while; but in half an hour I shall be ready to do the same over
again. And as to Mr. Thornton’s being in trade, why he can’t help that
now, poor fellow. I don’t suppose his education would fit him for much
else.” Margaret lifted herself slowly up, and went to her own room; for
just now she could not bear much more.

In Mr. Thornton’s house, at this very same time, a similar, yet
different scene was going on. A large-boned lady, long past middle age,
sat at work in a grim handsomely-furnished dining-room. Her features,
like her frame, were strong and massive, rather than heavy. Her face
moved slowly from one decided expression to another equally decided.
There was no great variety in her countenance; but those who looked at
it once, generally looked at it again; even the passers by in the
street, half-turned their heads to gaze an instant longer at the firm,
severe, dignified woman, who never gave way in street-courtesy, or
paused in her straight-onward course to the clearly defined end which
she proposed to herself.

She was handsomely dressed in stout black silk, of which not a thread
was worn or discoloured. She was mending a large, long table-cloth of
the finest texture, holding it up against the light occasionally to
discover thin places, which required her delicate care. There was not a
book about in the room, with the exception of Matthew Henry’s Bible
commentaries, six volumes of which lay in the centre of the massive
side-board, flanked by a tea-urn on one side, and a lamp on the other.
In some remote apartment, there was exercise upon the piano going on.
Someone was practising up a morceau de salon, playing it very rapidly,
every third note, on an average, being either indistinct, or wholly
missed out, and the loud chords at the end being half of them false, but
not the less satisfactory to the performer. Mrs. Thornton heard a step,
like her own in its decisive character, pass the dining-room door.

“John! Is that you?”

Her son opened the door, and showed himself.

“What has brought you home so early? I thought you were going to tea
with that friend of Mr. Bell’s; that Mr. Hale?”

“So I am, mother. I am come home to dress!”

“Dress! humph! When I was a girl, young men were satisfied with dressing
once in a day. Why should you dress to go and take a cup of tea with an
old parson?”

“Mr. Hale is a gentleman, and his wife and daughter are ladies.”

“Wife and daughter! Do they teach too? What do they do? You have never
mentioned them.”

“No! mother, because I have never seen Mrs. Hale; I have only seen Miss
Hale for half an hour.”

“Take care you don’t get caught by a penniless girl, John.”

“I am not easily caught, mother, as I think you know. But I must not
have Miss Hale spoken of in that way, which, you know, is offensive to
me. I never was aware of any young lady trying to catch me yet, nor do I
believe that any one has ever given themselves that useless trouble.”

Mrs. Thornton did not choose to yield the point to her son; or else she
had, in general, pride enough for her sex.

“Well! I only say, take care. Perhaps our Milton girls have too much
spirit and good feeling to go angling after husbands; but this Miss Hale
comes out of the aristocratic counties, where, if all tales be true,
rich husbands are reckoned prizes.”

Mr. Thornton’s brow contracted, and he came a step forward into the
room.

“Mother” (with a short scornful laugh), “you will make me confess. The
only time I saw Miss Hale, she treated me with a haughty civility which
had a strong flavour of contempt in it. She held herself aloof from me
as if she had been a queen, and I her humble, unwashed vassal. Be easy,
mother.”

“No! I am not easy nor content either. What business had she, a renegade
clergyman’s daughter, to turn up her nose at you! I would dress for none
of them—a saucy set! if I were you.” As he was leaving the room he
said:—

“Mr. Hale is good, and gentle, and learned. He is not saucy. As for Mrs.
Hale, I will tell you what she is like to-night, if you care to hear.”
He shut the door, and was gone.

“Despise my son! treat him as her vassal, indeed! Humph! I should like
to know where she could find such another! Boy and man, he’s the
noblest, stoutest heart I ever knew. I don’t care if I am his mother; I
can see what’s what, and not be blind. I know what Fanny is; and I know
what John is. Despise him! I hate her!”




CHAPTER X.

WROUGHT IRON AND GOLD.

    “We are the trees whom shaking fastens more.”
              GEORGE HERBERT.


Mr. Thornton left the house without coming into the dining-room again.
He was rather late, and walked rapidly out to Crampton. He was anxious
not to slight his new friend by any disrespectful unpunctuality. The
church-clock struck half-past seven as he stood at the door awaiting
Dixon’s slow movements; always doubly tardy when she had to degrade
herself by answering the door-bell. He was ushered into the little
drawing-room, and kindly greeted by Mr. Hale, who led him up to his
wife, whose pale face, and shawl-draped figure made a silent excuse for
the cold languor of her greeting. Margaret was lighting the lamp when he
entered, for the darkness was coming on. The lamp threw a pretty light
into the centre of the dusky room, from which, with country habits, they
did not exclude the night-skies, and the outer darkness of air. Somehow,
that room contrasted itself with the one he had lately left; handsome,
ponderous, with no sign of female habitation, except in the one spot
where his mother sate, and no convenience for any other employment than
eating and drinking. To be sure, it was a dining-room; his mother
preferred to sit in it; and her will was a household law. But the
drawing-room was not like this. It was twice—twenty times as fine; not
one quarter as comfortable. Here were no mirrors, not even a scrap of
glass to reflect the light, and answer the same purpose as water in a
landscape; no gilding; a warm, sober breadth of colouring, well relieved
by the dear old Helstone chintz-curtains and chair covers. An open
davenport stood in the window opposite the door; in the other there was
a stand, with a tall white china vase, from which drooped wreaths of
English ivy, pale green birch, and copper-coloured beech-leaves. Pretty
baskets of work stood about in different places: and books, not cared
for on account of their binding solely, lay on one table, as if recently
put down. Behind the door was another table decked out for tea, with a
white table-cloth, on which flourished the cocoa-nut cakes, and a basket
piled with oranges and ruddy American apples, heaped on leaves.

It appeared to Mr. Thornton that all these graceful cares were habitual
to the family; and especially of a piece with Margaret. She stood by the
tea-table in a light-coloured muslin gown, which had a good deal of pink
about it. She looked as if she was not attending to the conversation,
but solely busy with the tea-cups, among which her round ivory hands
moved with pretty, noiseless, daintiness. She had a bracelet on one
taper arm, which would fall down over her round wrist. Mr. Thornton
watched the replacing of this troublesome ornament with far more
attention than he listened to her father. It seemed as if it fascinated
him to see her push it up impatiently until it tightened her soft flesh;
and then to mark the loosening—the fall. He could almost have
exclaimed—“There it goes again!” There was so little left to be done
after he arrived at the preparation for tea, that he was almost sorry
the obligation of eating and drinking came so soon to prevent him
watching Margaret. She handed him his cup of tea with the proud air of
an unwilling slave; but her eye caught the moment when he was ready for
another cup; and he almost longed to ask her to do for him what he saw
her compelled to do for her father, who took her little finger and thumb
in his masculine hand, and made them serve as sugar-tongues. Mr.
Thornton saw her beautiful eyes lifted to her father, full of light,
half-laughter, and half-love, as this bit of pantomime went on between
the two, unobserved as they fancied, by any. Margaret’s head still
ached, as the paleness of her complexion, and her silence might have
testified; but she was resolved to throw herself into the breach, if
there was any long untoward pause, rather than that her father’s friend,
pupil, and guest should have cause to think himself in any way
neglected. But the conversation went on; and Margaret drew into a
corner, near her mother, with her work, after the tea-things were taken
away; and felt that she might let her thoughts roam, without fear of
being suddenly wanted to fill up a gap.

Mr. Thornton and Mr. Hale were both absorbed in the continuation of some
object which had been started at their last meeting. Margaret was
recalled to a sense of the present by some trivial, low-spoken remark of
her mother’s; and on suddenly looking up from her work, her eye was
caught by the difference of outward appearance between her father and
Mr. Thornton, as betokening such distinctly opposite natures. Her father
was of slight figure, which made him appear taller than he really was,
when not contrasted, as at this time, with the tall, massive frame of
another. The lines in her father’s face were soft and waving, with a
frequent undulating kind of trembling movement passing over them,
showing every fluctuating emotion; the eyelids were large and arched,
giving to the eyes a peculiar languid beauty which was almost feminine.
The brows were finely arched, but were by the very size of the dreamy
lids, raised to a considerable distance from the eyes. Now, in Mr.
Thornton’s face the straight brows fell low over the clear, deep-set,
earnest eyes, which without being unpleasantly sharp, seemed intent
enough to penetrate into the very heart and core of what he was looking
at. The lines in the face were few but firm, as if they were carved in
marble, and lay principally about the lips, which were slightly
compressed, over a set of teeth so faultless and beautiful as to give
the effect of sudden sunlight when the rare bright smile, coming in an
instant and shining out of the eyes, changed the whole look from the
severe and resolved expression of a man ready to do and dare everything,
to the keen, honest, enjoyment of the moment, which is seldom shown so
fearlessly and instantaneously except by children. Margaret liked this
smile; it was the first thing she had admired in this new friend of her
father’s; and the opposition of character, shown in all these details
of appearance she had just been noticing, seemed to explain the
attraction they evidently felt towards each other.

She rearranged her mother’s worsted-work, and fell back into her own
thoughts—as completely forgotten by Mr. Thornton as if she had not been
in the room, so thoroughly was he occupied in explaining to Mr. Hale the
magnificent power, yet delicate adjustment of the might of the
steam-hammer, which was recalling to Mr. Hale some of the wonderful
stories of subservient genii in the Arabian Nights—one moment
stretching from earth to sky and filling all the width of the horizon,
at the next obediently compressed into a vase small enough to be borne
in the hand of a child.

“And this imagination of power, this practical realisation of a gigantic
thought, came out of one man’s brain in our good town. That very man has
it within him to mount, step by step, on each wonder he achieves to
higher marvels still. And I’ll be bound to say, we have many among us
who, if he were gone, could spring into the breach and carry on the war
which compels, and shall compel, all material power to yield to
science.”

“Your boast reminds me of the old lines—

    ‘I’ve a hundred captains in England,’ he said,
      ‘As good as ever was he.’”

At her father’s quotation Margaret looked suddenly up, with inquiring
wonder in her eyes. How in the world had they got from the cog-wheels to
Chevy Chace?

“It is no boast of mine,” replied Mr. Thornton; “it is plain
matter-of-fact. I won’t deny that I am proud of belonging to a town—or
perhaps I should rather say a district—the necessities of which give
birth to such grandeur of conception. I would rather be a man toiling,
suffering—nay, failing and successless—here, than lead a dull
prosperous life in the old worn grooves of what you call more
aristocratic society down in the South, with their slow days of careless
ease. One may be clogged with honey and unable to rise and fly.”

“You are mistaken,” said Margaret, roused by the aspersion on her
beloved South to a fond vehemence of defence, that brought the colour
into her cheeks and the angry tears into her eyes. “You do not know
anything about the South. If there is less adventure or less progress—I
suppose I must not say less excitement—from the gambling spirit of
trade, which seems requisite to force out these wonderful inventions,
there is less suffering also. I see men here going about in the streets
who look ground down by some pinching sorrow or care—who are not only
sufferers but haters. Now, in the South we have our poor, but there is
not that terrible expression in their countenances of a sullen sense of
injustice which I see here. You do not know the South, Mr. Thornton,”
she concluded, collapsing into a determined silence, and angry with
herself for having said so much.

“And may I say you do not know the North?” asked he, with an
inexpressible gentleness in his tone, as he saw that he had really hurt
her. She continued resolutely silent; yearning after the lovely haunts
she had left far away in Hampshire, with a passionate longing that made
her feel her voice would be unsteady and trembling if she spoke.

“At any rate, Mr. Thornton,” said Mrs. Hale, “you will allow that Milton
is a much more smoky, dirty town than you will ever meet with in the
South.”

“I’m afraid I must give up its cleanliness,” said Mr. Thornton, with the
quick gleaming smile. “But we are bidden by parliament to burn our own
smoke; so I suppose, like good little children, we shall do as we are
bid—some time.”

“But I think you told me you had altered your chimneys so as to consume
the smoke, did you not?” asked Mr. Hale.

“Mine were altered by my own will, before parliament meddled with the
affair. It was an immediate outlay, but it repays me in the saving of
coal. I’m not sure whether I should have done it, if I had waited until
the act was passed. At any rate, I should have waited to be informed
against and fined, and given all the trouble in yielding that I legally
could. But all laws which depend for their enforcement upon informers
and fines, become inert from the odiousness of the machinery. I doubt if
there has been a chimney in Milton informed against for five years past,
although some are constantly sending out one-third of their coal in what
is called here unparliamentary smoke.”

“I only know it is impossible to keep the muslin blinds clean here above
a week together; and at Helstone we have had them up for a month or
more, and they have not looked dirty at the end of that time. And as for
hands—Margaret, how many times did you say you had washed your hands
this morning before twelve o’clock? Three times, was it not?”

“Yes, mamma.”

“You seem to have a strong objection to acts of parliament and all
legislation affecting your mode of management down here at Milton,” said
Mr. Hale.

“Yes, I have; and many others have as well. And with justice, I think.
The whole machinery—I don’t mean the wood and iron machinery now—of
the cotton trade is so new that it is no wonder if it does not work well
in every part all at once. Seventy years ago what was it? And now what
it is not? Raw, crude materials came together; men of the same level, as
regarded education and station, took suddenly the different position of
masters and men, owing to the motherwit, as regarded opportunities and
probabilities, which distinguished some, and made them far-seeing as to
what great future lay concealed in that rude model of Sir Richard
Arkwright’s. The rapid development of what might be called a new trade,
gave those early masters enormous power of wealth and command. I don’t
mean merely over the workmen; I mean over purchasers—over the whole
world’s market. Why, I may give you, as an instance, an advertisement,
inserted not fifty years ago in a Milton paper, that so-and-so (one of
the half-dozen calico-printers of the time) would close his warehouse at
noon each day; therefore, that all purchasers must come before that
hour. Fancy a man dictating in this manner the time when he would sell
and when he would not sell. Now, I believe, if a good customer chose to
come at midnight, I should get up, and stand hat in hand to receive his
orders.”

Margaret’s lip curled, but somehow she was compelled to listen; she
could no longer abstract herself in her own thoughts.

“I only name such things to show what almost unlimited power the
manufacturers had about the beginning of this century. The men were
rendered dizzy by it. Because a man was successful in his ventures,
there was no reason that in all other things his mind should be
well-balanced. On the contrary, his sense of justice, and his
simplicity, were often utterly smothered under the glut of wealth that
came down upon him; and they tell strange tales of the wild extravagance
of living indulged in on gala-days by those early cotton-lords. There
can be no doubt, too, of the tyranny they exercised over their
work-people. You know the proverb, Mr. Hale, ‘Set a beggar on horseback,
and he’ll ride to the devil,’—well, some of these early manufacturers
did ride to the devil in a magnificent style—crushing human bone and
flesh under their horses’ hoofs without remorse. But by-and-by came a
reaction; there were more factories, more masters; more men were wanted.
The power of masters and men became more evenly balanced; and now the
battle is pretty fairly waged between us. We will hardly submit to the
decision of an umpire, much less to the interference of a meddler with
only a smattering of the knowledge of the real facts of the case, even
though that meddler be called the High Court of Parliament.”

“Is there necessity for calling it a battle between the two classes?”
asked Mr. Hale. “I know, from your using the term, it is one which gives
a true idea of the real state of things to your mind.”

“It is true; and I believe it to be as much a necessity as that prudent
wisdom and good conduct are always opposed to, and doing battle with
ignorance and improvidence. It is one of the great beauties of our
system, that a working-man may raise himself into the power and position
of a master by his own exertions and behaviour; that, in fact, every one
who rules himself to decency and sobriety of conduct, and attention to
his duties, comes over to our ranks; it may not be always as a master,
but as an overlooker, a cashier, a book-keeper, a clerk, one on the side
of authority and order.”

“You consider all who are unsuccessful in raising themselves in the
world, from whatever cause, as your enemies, then, if I understand you
rightly,” said Margaret, in a clear, cold voice.

“As their own enemies, certainly,” said he, quickly, not a little
piqued by the haughty disapproval her form of expression and tone of
speaking implied. But, in a moment, his straightforward honesty made him
feel that his words were but a poor and quibbling answer to what she had
said, and, be she as scornful as she liked, it was a duty he owed to
himself to explain, as truly as he could, what he did mean. Yet it was
very difficult to separate her interpretation, and keep it distinct from
his meaning. He could best have illustrated what he wanted to say by
telling them something of his own life; but was it not too personal a
subject to speak about to strangers? Still, it was the simple
straightforward way of explaining his meaning; so, putting aside the
touch of shyness that brought a momentary flush of colour into his dark
cheek, he said:

“I am not speaking without book. Sixteen years ago, my father died under
very miserable circumstances. I was taken from school, and had to become
a man (as well as I could) in a few days. I had such a mother as few are
blest with; a woman of strong power, and firm resolve. We went into a
small country town, where living was cheaper than in Milton, and where I
got employment in a draper’s shop (a capital place, by the way, for
obtaining a knowledge of goods). Week by week, our income came to
fifteen shillings, out of which three people had to be kept. My mother
managed so that I put by three out of these fifteen shillings regularly.
This made the beginning; this taught me self-denial. Now that I am able
to afford my mother such comforts as her age, rather than her own wish,
requires, I thank her silently on each occasion for the early training
she gave me. Now when I feel that in my own case it is no good luck, nor
merit, nor talent,—but simply the habits of life which taught me to
despise indulgences not thoroughly earned,—indeed, never to think twice
about them,—I believe that this suffering, which Miss Hale says is
impressed on the countenances of the people of Milton, is but the
natural punishment of dishonestly-enjoyed pleasure, at some former
period of their lives. I do not look on self-indulgent, sensual people
as worthy of my hatred; I simply look upon them with contempt for their
poorness of character.”

“But you have the rudiments of a good education,” remarked Mr. Hale.
“The quick zest with which you are now reading Homer, shows me that you
do not come to it as an unknown book: you have read it before, and are
only recalling your old knowledge.”

“That is true,—I had blundered along it at school; I dare say, I was
even considered a pretty fair classic in those days, though my Latin and
Greek have slipt away from me since. But I ask you, what preparation
were they for such a life as I had to lead? None at all. Utterly none at
all. On the point of education, any man who can read and write starts
fair with me in the amount of really useful knowledge that I had at that
time.”

“Well! I don’t agree with you. But there I am perhaps somewhat of a
pedant. Did not the recollection of the heroic simplicity of the Homeric
life nerve you up?”

“Not one bit!” exclaimed Mr. Thornton, laughing. “I was too busy to
think about any dead people, with the living pressing alongside of me,
neck to neck, in the struggle for bread. Now that I have my mother safe
in the quiet peace that becomes her age, and duly rewards her former
exertions, I can turn to all that old narration and thoroughly enjoy
it.”

“I dare say, my remark came from the professional feeling of there being
nothing like leather,” replied Mr. Hale.

When Mr. Thornton rose up to go away, after shaking hands with Mr. and
Mrs. Hale, he made an advance to Margaret to wish her good-bye in a
similar manner. It was the frank familiar custom of the place; but
Margaret was not prepared for it. She simply bowed her farewell;
although the instant she saw the hand, half put out, quickly drawn back,
she was sorry she had not been aware of the intention. Mr. Thornton,
however, knew nothing of her sorrow, and, drawing himself up to his full
height, walked off, muttering as he left the house—

“A more proud, disagreeable girl I never saw. Even her great beauty is
blotted out of one’s memory by her scornful ways.”




CHAPTER XI.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS.

    “There’s iron, they say, in all our blood,
    And a grain or two perhaps is good;
    But his, he makes me harshly feel,
    Has got a little too much of steel.”
              ANON.


“Margaret!” said Mr. Hale as he returned from showing his guest
downstairs; “I could not help watching your face with some anxiety, when
Mr. Thornton made his confession of having been a shop-boy. I knew it
all along from Mr. Bell; so I was aware of what was coming; but I half
expected to see you get up and leave the room.”

“Oh, papa! you don’t mean that you thought me so silly? I really liked
that account of himself better than anything else he said. Everything
else revolted me, from its hardness; but he spoke about himself so
simply—with so little of the pretence that makes the vulgarity of
shop-people, and with such tender respect for his mother, that I was
less likely to leave the room then than when he was boasting about
Milton, as if there was not such another place in the world; or quietly
professing to despise people for careless, wasteful improvidence,
without ever seeming to think it his duty to try to make them
different,—to give them anything of the training which his mother gave
him, and to which he evidently owes his position, whatever that may be.
No! his statement of having been a shop-boy was the thing I liked best
of all.”

“I am surprised at you, Margaret,” said her mother. “You who were always
accusing people of being shoppy at Helstone! I don’t think, Mr. Hale,
you have done quite right in introducing such a person to us without
telling us what he had been. I really was very much afraid of showing
him how much shocked I was at some parts of what he said. His father
‘dying in miserable circumstances.’ Why it might have been in the
workhouse.”

“I am not sure it was not worse than being in the workhouse,” replied
her husband. “I heard a good deal of his previous life from Mr. Bell
before we came here; and as he has told you a part, I will fill up what
he left out. His father speculated wildly, failed, and then killed
himself, because he could not bear the disgrace. All his former friends
shrunk from the disclosures that had to be made of his dishonest
gambling—wild, hopeless struggles, made with other people’s money, to
regain his own moderate portion of wealth. No one came forward to help
the mother and this boy. There was another child, I believe, a girl; too
young to earn money, but of course she had to be kept. At least, no
friend came forward immediately, and Mrs. Thornton is not one, I fancy,
to wait till tardy kindness comes to find her out. So they left Milton.
I knew he had gone into a shop, and that his earnings, with some
fragment of property secured to his mother, had been made to keep them
for a long time. Mr. Bell said they absolutely lived upon water-porridge
for years—how, he did not know; but long after the creditors had given
up hope of any payment of old Mr. Thornton’s debts (if, indeed, they
ever had hoped at all about it, after his suicide), this young man
returned to Milton, and went quietly round to each creditor, paying him
the first instalment of the money owing to him. No noise—no gathering
together of creditors—it was done very silently and quietly, but all
was paid at last; helped on materially by the circumstance of one of the
creditors, a crabbed old fellow (Mr. Bell says), taking in Mr. Thornton
as a kind of partner.”

“That really is fine,” said Margaret. “What a pity such a nature should
be tainted by his position as a Milton manufacturer.”

“How tainted?” asked her father.

“Oh, papa, by that testing everything by the standard of wealth. When he
spoke of the mechanical powers, he evidently looked upon them only as
new ways of extending trade and making money. And the poor men around
him—they were poor because they were vicious—out of the pale of his
sympathies because they had not his iron nature, and the capabilities
that it gives him for being rich.”

“Not vicious; he never said that. Improvident and self-indulgent were
his words.”

Margaret was collecting her mother’s working materials, and preparing to
go to bed. Just as she was leaving the room, she hesitated—she was
inclined to make an acknowledgment which she thought would please her
father, but which to be full and true must include a little annoyance.
However, out it came.

“Papa, I do think Mr. Thornton a very remarkable man; but personally I
don’t like him at all.”

“And I do!” said her father laughing. “Personally, as you call it, and
all. I don’t set him up for a hero, or anything of that kind. But
good-night, child. Your mother looks sadly tired to-night, Margaret.”

Margaret had noticed her mother’s jaded appearance with anxiety for some
time past, and this remark of her father’s sent her up to bed with a dim
fear lying like a weight on her heart. The life in Milton was so
different from what Mrs. Hale had been accustomed to live in Helstone,
in and out perpetually into the fresh and open air; the air itself was
so different, deprived of all revivifying principle as it seemed to be
here; the domestic worries pressed so very closely, and in so new and
sordid a form, upon all the women in the family, that there was good
reason to fear that her mother’s health might be becoming seriously
affected. There were several other signs of something wrong about Mrs.
Hale. She and Dixon held mysterious consultations in her bedroom, from
which Dixon would come out crying and cross, as was her custom when any
distress of her mistress called upon her sympathy. Once Margaret had
gone into the chamber soon after Dixon left it, and found her mother on
her knees, and as Margaret stole out she caught a few words which were
evidently a prayer for strength and patience to endure severe bodily
suffering. Margaret yearned to re-unite the bond of intimate confidence
which had been broken by her long residence at her aunt Shaw’s, and
strove by gentle caresses and softened words to creep into the warmest
place in her mother’s heart. But though she received caresses and fond
words back again, in such profusion as would have gladdened her
formerly, yet she felt that there was a secret withheld from her, and
she believed it bore serious reference to her mother’s health. She lay
awake very long this night, planning how to lessen the evil influence of
their Milton life on her mother. A servant to give Dixon permanent
assistance should be got, if she gave up her whole time to the search;
and then, at any rate, her mother might have all the personal attention
she required, and had been accustomed to her whole life.

Visiting register offices, seeing all manner of unlikely people, and
very few in the least likely, absorbed Margaret’s time and thoughts for
several days. One afternoon she met Bessy Higgins in the street, and
stopped to speak to her.

“Well, Bessy, how are you? Better, I hope, now the wind has changed.”

“Better and not better, if yo’ know what that means.”

“Not exactly,” replied Margaret, smiling.

“I’m better in not being torn to pieces by coughing o’ nights, but I’m
weary and tired o’ Milton, and longing to get away to the land o’
Beulah? and when I think I’m farther and farther off, my heart sinks,
and I’m no better; I’m worse.”

Margaret turned round to walk alongside of the girl in her feeble
progress homeward. But for a minute or two she did not speak. At last
she said in a low voice,

“Bessy, do you wish to die?” For she shrank from death herself, with all
the clinging to life so natural to the young and healthy.

Bessy was silent in her turn for a minute or two. Then she replied,

“If yo’d led the life I have, and getten as weary of it as I have, and
thought at times, ‘maybe it’ll last for fifty or sixty years—it does
wi’ some,’—and got dizzy and dazed, and sick, as each of them sixty
years seemed to spin about me, and mock me with its length of hours and
minutes, and endless bits o’ time—oh, wench! I tell thee thou’d been
glad enough when th’ doctor sa

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