Adam Bede
but producing a pleasant narcotic effect, making her tread the ground
and go about her work in a sort of dream, unconscious of weight or
effort, and showing her all things through a soft, liquid veil, as if
she were living not in this solid world of brick and stone, but in a
beatified world, such as the sun lights up for us in the waters. Hetty
had become aware that Mr. Arthur Donnithorne would take a good deal of
trouble for the chance of seeing her; that he always placed himself at
church so as to have the fullest view of her both sitting and standing;
that he was constantly finding reason for calling at the Hall Farm, and
always would contrive to say something for the sake of making her speak
to him and look at him. The poor child no more conceived at present the
idea that the young squire could ever be her lover than a baker’s
pretty daughter in the crowd, whom a young emperor distinguishes by an
imperial but admiring smile, conceives that she shall be made empress.
But the baker’s daughter goes home and dreams of the handsome young
emperor, and perhaps weighs the flour amiss while she is thinking what
a heavenly lot it must be to have him for a husband. And so, poor Hetty
had got a face and a presence haunting her waking and sleeping dreams;
bright, soft glances had penetrated her, and suffused her life with a
strange, happy languor. The eyes that shed those glances were really
not half so fine as Adam’s, which sometimes looked at her with a sad,
beseeching tenderness, but they had found a ready medium in Hetty’s
little silly imagination, whereas Adam’s could get no entrance through
that atmosphere. For three weeks, at least, her inward life had
consisted of little else than living through in memory the looks and
words Arthur had directed towards her—of little else than recalling the
sensations with which she heard his voice outside the house, and saw
him enter, and became conscious that his eyes were fixed on her, and
then became conscious that a tall figure, looking down on her with eyes
that seemed to touch her, was coming nearer in clothes of beautiful
texture with an odour like that of a flower-garden borne on the evening
breeze. Foolish thoughts! But all this happened, you must remember,
nearly sixty years ago, and Hetty was quite uneducated—a simple
farmer’s girl, to whom a gentleman with a white hand was dazzling as an
Olympian god. Until to-day, she had never looked farther into the
future than to the next time Captain Donnithorne would come to the
Farm, or the next Sunday when she should see him at church; but now she
thought, perhaps he would try to meet her when she went to the Chase
to-morrow—and if he should speak to her, and walk a little way, when
nobody was by! That had never happened yet; and now her imagination,
instead of retracing the past, was busy fashioning what would happen
to-morrow—whereabout in the Chase she should see him coming towards
her, how she should put her new rose-coloured ribbon on, which he had
never seen, and what he would say to her to make her return his
glance—a glance which she would be living through in her memory, over
and over again, all the rest of the day.
In this state of mind, how could Hetty give any feeling to Adam’s
troubles, or think much about poor old Thias being drowned? Young
souls, in such pleasant delirium as hers are as unsympathetic as
butterflies sipping nectar; they are isolated from all appeals by a
barrier of dreams—by invisible looks and impalpable arms.
While Hetty’s hands were busy packing up the butter, and her head
filled with these pictures of the morrow, Arthur Donnithorne, riding by
Mr. Irwine’s side towards the valley of the Willow Brook, had also
certain indistinct anticipations, running as an undercurrent in his
mind while he was listening to Mr. Irwine’s account of
Dinah—indistinct, yet strong enough to make him feel rather conscious
when Mr. Irwine suddenly said, “What fascinated you so in Mrs. Poyser’s
dairy, Arthur? Have you become an amateur of damp quarries and skimming
dishes?”
Arthur knew the rector too well to suppose that a clever invention
would be of any use, so he said, with his accustomed frankness, “No, I
went to look at the pretty butter-maker Hetty Sorrel. She’s a perfect
Hebe; and if I were an artist, I would paint her. It’s amazing what
pretty girls one sees among the farmers’ daughters, when the men are
such clowns. That common, round, red face one sees sometimes in the
men—all cheek and no features, like Martin Poyser’s—comes out in the
women of the family as the most charming phiz imaginable.”
“Well, I have no objection to your contemplating Hetty in an artistic
light, but I must not have you feeding her vanity and filling her
little noddle with the notion that she’s a great beauty, attractive to
fine gentlemen, or you will spoil her for a poor man’s wife—honest
Craig’s, for example, whom I have seen bestowing soft glances on her.
The little puss seems already to have airs enough to make a husband as
miserable as it’s a law of nature for a quiet man to be when he marries
a beauty. Apropos of marrying, I hope our friend Adam will get settled,
now the poor old man’s gone. He will only have his mother to keep in
future, and I’ve a notion that there’s a kindness between him and that
nice modest girl, Mary Burge, from something that fell from old
Jonathan one day when I was talking to him. But when I mentioned the
subject to Adam he looked uneasy and turned the conversation. I suppose
the love-making doesn’t run smooth, or perhaps Adam hangs back till
he’s in a better position. He has independence of spirit enough for two
men—rather an excess of pride, if anything.”
“That would be a capital match for Adam. He would slip into old Burge’s
shoes and make a fine thing of that building business, I’ll answer for
him. I should like to see him well settled in this parish; he would be
ready then to act as my grand-vizier when I wanted one. We could plan
no end of repairs and improvements together. I’ve never seen the girl,
though, I think—at least I’ve never looked at her.”
“Look at her next Sunday at church—she sits with her father on the left
of the reading-desk. You needn’t look quite so much at Hetty Sorrel
then. When I’ve made up my mind that I can’t afford to buy a tempting
dog, I take no notice of him, because if he took a strong fancy to me
and looked lovingly at me, the struggle between arithmetic and
inclination might become unpleasantly severe. I pique myself on my
wisdom there, Arthur, and as an old fellow to whom wisdom had become
cheap, I bestow it upon you.”
“Thank you. It may stand me in good stead some day though I don’t know
that I have any present use for it. Bless me! How the brook has
overflowed. Suppose we have a canter, now we’re at the bottom of the
hill.”
That is the great advantage of dialogue on horseback; it can be merged
any minute into a trot or a canter, and one might have escaped from
Socrates himself in the saddle. The two friends were free from the
necessity of further conversation till they pulled up in the lane
behind Adam’s cottage.
Chapter X
Dinah Visits Lisbeth
At five o’clock Lisbeth came downstairs with a large key in her hand:
it was the key of the chamber where her husband lay dead. Throughout
the day, except in her occasional outbursts of wailing grief, she had
been in incessant movement, performing the initial duties to her dead
with the awe and exactitude that belong to religious rites. She had
brought out her little store of bleached linen, which she had for long
years kept in reserve for this supreme use. It seemed but
yesterday—that time so many midsummers ago, when she had told Thias
where this linen lay, that he might be sure and reach it out for her
when _she_ died, for she was the elder of the two. Then there had been
the work of cleansing to the strictest purity every object in the
sacred chamber, and of removing from it every trace of common daily
occupation. The small window, which had hitherto freely let in the
frosty moonlight or the warm summer sunrise on the working man’s
slumber, must now be darkened with a fair white sheet, for this was the
sleep which is as sacred under the bare rafters as in ceiled houses.
Lisbeth had even mended a long-neglected and unnoticeable rent in the
checkered bit of bed-curtain; for the moments were few and precious now
in which she would be able to do the smallest office of respect or love
for the still corpse, to which in all her thoughts she attributed some
consciousness. Our dead are never dead to us until we have forgotten
them: they can be injured by us, they can be wounded; they know all our
penitence, all our aching sense that their place is empty, all the
kisses we bestow on the smallest relic of their presence. And the aged
peasant woman most of all believes that her dead are conscious. Decent
burial was what Lisbeth had been thinking of for herself through years
of thrift, with an indistinct expectation that she should know when she
was being carried to the churchyard, followed by her husband and her
sons; and now she felt as if the greatest work of her life were to be
done in seeing that Thias was buried decently before her—under the
white thorn, where once, in a dream, she had thought she lay in the
coffin, yet all the while saw the sunshine above and smelt the white
blossoms that were so thick upon the thorn the Sunday she went to be
churched after Adam was born.
But now she had done everything that could be done to-day in the
chamber of death—had done it all herself, with some aid from her sons
in lifting, for she would let no one be fetched to help her from the
village, not being fond of female neighbours generally; and her
favourite Dolly, the old housekeeper at Mr. Burge’s, who had come to
condole with her in the morning as soon as she heard of Thias’s death,
was too dim-sighted to be of much use. She had locked the door, and now
held the key in her hand, as she threw herself wearily into a chair
that stood out of its place in the middle of the house floor, where in
ordinary times she would never have consented to sit. The kitchen had
had none of her attention that day; it was soiled with the tread of
muddy shoes and untidy with clothes and other objects out of place. But
what at another time would have been intolerable to Lisbeth’s habits of
order and cleanliness seemed to her now just what should be: it was
right that things should look strange and disordered and wretched, now
the old man had come to his end in that sad way; the kitchen ought not
to look as if nothing had happened. Adam, overcome with the agitations
and exertions of the day after his night of hard work, had fallen
asleep on a bench in the workshop; and Seth was in the back kitchen
making a fire of sticks that he might get the kettle to boil, and
persuade his mother to have a cup of tea, an indulgence which she
rarely allowed herself.
There was no one in the kitchen when Lisbeth entered and threw herself
into the chair. She looked round with blank eyes at the dirt and
confusion on which the bright afternoon’s sun shone dismally; it was
all of a piece with the sad confusion of her mind—that confusion which
belongs to the first hours of a sudden sorrow, when the poor human soul
is like one who has been deposited sleeping among the ruins of a vast
city, and wakes up in dreary amazement, not knowing whether it is the
growing or the dying day—not knowing why and whence came this
illimitable scene of desolation, or why he too finds himself desolate
in the midst of it.
At another time Lisbeth’s first thought would have been, “Where is
Adam?” but the sudden death of her husband had restored him in these
hours to that first place in her affections which he had held