Adam Bede
himself being virtuously tender to her, because the poor thing is so
clingingly fond of him. God made these dear women so—and it is a
convenient arrangement in case of sickness.
After all, I believe the wisest of us must be beguiled in this way
sometimes, and must think both better and worse of people than they
deserve. Nature has her language, and she is not unveracious; but we
don’t know all the intricacies of her syntax just yet, and in a hasty
reading we may happen to extract the very opposite of her real meaning.
Long dark eyelashes, now—what can be more exquisite? I find it
impossible not to expect some depth of soul behind a deep grey eye with
a long dark eyelash, in spite of an experience which has shown me that
they may go along with deceit, peculation, and stupidity. But if, in
the reaction of disgust, I have betaken myself to a fishy eye, there
has been a surprising similarity of result. One begins to suspect at
length that there is no direct correlation between eyelashes and
morals; or else, that the eyelashes express the disposition of the fair
one’s grandmother, which is on the whole less important to us.
No eyelashes could be more beautiful than Hetty’s; and now, while she
walks with her pigeon-like stateliness along the room and looks down on
her shoulders bordered by the old black lace, the dark fringe shows to
perfection on her pink cheek. They are but dim ill-defined pictures
that her narrow bit of an imagination can make of the future; but of
every picture she is the central figure in fine clothes; Captain
Donnithorne is very close to her, putting his arm round her, perhaps
kissing her, and everybody else is admiring and envying her—especially
Mary Burge, whose new print dress looks very contemptible by the side
of Hetty’s resplendent toilette. Does any sweet or sad memory mingle
with this dream of the future—any loving thought of her second
parents—of the children she had helped to tend—of any youthful
companion, any pet animal, any relic of her own childhood even? Not
one. There are some plants that have hardly any roots: you may tear
them from their native nook of rock or wall, and just lay them over
your ornamental flower-pot, and they blossom none the worse. Hetty
could have cast all her past life behind her and never cared to be
reminded of it again. I think she had no feeling at all towards the old
house, and did not like the Jacob’s Ladder and the long row of
hollyhocks in the garden better than other flowers—perhaps not so well.
It was wonderful how little she seemed to care about waiting on her
uncle, who had been a good father to her—she hardly ever remembered to
reach him his pipe at the right time without being told, unless a
visitor happened to be there, who would have a better opportunity of
seeing her as she walked across the hearth. Hetty did not understand
how anybody could be very fond of middle-aged people. And as for those
tiresome children, Marty and Tommy and Totty, they had been the very
nuisance of her life—as bad as buzzing insects that will come teasing
you on a hot day when you want to be quiet. Marty, the eldest, was a
baby when she first came to the farm, for the children born before him
had died, and so Hetty had had them all three, one after the other,
toddling by her side in the meadow, or playing about her on wet days in
the half-empty rooms of the large old house. The boys were out of hand
now, but Totty was still a day-long plague, worse than either of the
others had been, because there was more fuss made about her. And there
was no end to the making and mending of clothes. Hetty would have been
glad to hear that she should never see a child again; they were worse
than the nasty little lambs that the shepherd was always bringing in to
be taken special care of in lambing time; for the lambs _were_ got rid
of sooner or later. As for the young chickens and turkeys, Hetty would
have hated the very word “hatching,” if her aunt had not bribed her to
attend to the young poultry by promising her the proceeds of one out of
every brood. The round downy chicks peeping out from under their
mother’s wing never touched Hetty with any pleasure; that was not the
sort of prettiness she cared about, but she did care about the
prettiness of the new things she would buy for herself at Treddleston
Fair with the money they fetched. And yet she looked so dimpled, so
charming, as she stooped down to put the soaked bread under the
hen-coop, that you must have been a very acute personage indeed to
suspect her of that hardness. Molly, the housemaid, with a turn-up nose
and a protuberant jaw, was really a tender-hearted girl, and, as Mrs.
Poyser said, a jewel to look after the poultry; but her stolid face
showed nothing of this maternal delight, any more than a brown
earthenware pitcher will show the light of the lamp within it.
It is generally a feminine eye that first detects the moral
deficiencies hidden under the “dear deceit” of beauty, so it is not
surprising that Mrs. Poyser, with her keenness and abundant opportunity
for observation, should have formed a tolerably fair estimate of what
might be expected from Hetty in the way of feeling, and in moments of
indignation she had sometimes spoken with great openness on the subject
to her husband.
“She’s no better than a peacock, as ’ud strut about on the wall and
spread its tail when the sun shone if all the folks i’ the parish was
dying: there’s nothing seems to give her a turn i’ th’ inside, not even
when we thought Totty had tumbled into the pit. To think o’ that dear
cherub! And we found her wi’ her little shoes stuck i’ the mud an’
crying fit to break her heart by the far horse-pit. But Hetty never
minded it, I could see, though she’s been at the nussin’ o’ the child
ever since it was a babby. It’s my belief her heart’s as hard as a
pebble.”
“Nay, nay,” said Mr. Poyser, “thee mustn’t judge Hetty too hard. Them
young gells are like the unripe grain; they’ll make good meal by and
by, but they’re squashy as yet. Thee’t see Hetty ’ll be all right when
she’s got a good husband and children of her own.”
“_I_ don’t want to be hard upo’ the gell. She’s got cliver fingers of
her own, and can be useful enough when she likes and I should miss her
wi’ the butter, for she’s got a cool hand. An’ let be what may, I’d
strive to do my part by a niece o’ yours—an’ that I’ve done, for I’ve
taught her everything as belongs to a house, an’ I’ve told her her duty
often enough, though, God knows, I’ve no breath to spare, an’ that
catchin’ pain comes on dreadful by times. Wi’ them three gells in the
house I’d need have twice the strength to keep ’em up to their work.
It’s like having roast meat at three fires; as soon as you’ve basted
one, another’s burnin’.”
Hetty stood sufficiently in awe of her aunt to be anxious to conceal
from her so much of her vanity as could be hidden without too great a
sacrifice. She could not resist spending her money in bits of finery
which Mrs. Poyser disapproved; but she would have been ready to die
with shame, vexation, and fright if her aunt had this moment opened the
door, and seen her with her bits of candle lighted, and strutting about
decked in her scarf and ear-rings. To prevent such a surprise, she
always bolted her door, and she had not forgotten to do so to-night. It
was well: for there now came a light tap, and Hetty, with a leaping
heart, rushed to blow out the candles and throw them into the drawer.
She dared not stay to take out her ear-rings, but she threw off her
scarf, and let it fall on the floor, before the light tap came again.
We shall know how it was that the light tap came, if we leave Hetty for
a short time and return to Dinah, at the moment when she had delivered
Totty to her mother’s arms, and was come upstairs to her bedroom,
adjoining Hetty’s.
Dinah delighted in her bedroom window. Being on the second story of
that tall house, it gave her a wide view over the fields. The thickness
of the wall formed a broad step about a yard below the window, where
she could place her chair. And now the first thing she did on entering
her room was to seat herself in this chair and look out on the peaceful
fields beyond which the large moon was rising, just above the hedgerow
elms. She liked the pasture best where the milch cows were lying, and
next to that the meadow where the grass was half-mown, and lay in
silvered sweeping lines. Her heart was very full, for there was to be
only one more night on which she would look out on those fields for a
long time to come; but she thought little of leaving the mere scene,
for, to her, bleak Snowfield had just as many charms. She thought of
all the dear people whom she had learned to care for among these
peaceful fields, and who would now have a place in her loving
remembrance for ever. She thought of the struggles and the weariness
that might lie before them in the rest of their life’s journey, when
she would be away from them, and know nothing of what was befalling
them; and the pressure of this thought soon became too strong for her
to enjoy the unresponding stillness of the moonlit fields. She closed
her eyes, that she might feel more intensely the presence of a Love and
Sympathy deeper and more tender than was breathed from the earth and
sky. That was often Dinah’s mode of praying in solitude. Simply to
close her eyes and to feel herself enclosed by the Divine Presence;
then gradually her fears, her yearning anxieties for others, melted
away like ice-crystals in a warm ocean. She had sat in this way
perfectly still, with her hands crossed on her lap and the pale light
resting on her calm face, for at least ten minutes when she was
startled by a loud sound, apparently of something falling in Hetty’s
room. But like all sounds that fall on our ears in a state of
abstraction, it had no distinct character, but was simply loud and
startling, so that she felt uncertain whether she had interpreted it
rightly. She rose and listened, but all was quiet afterwards, and she
reflected that Hetty might merely have knocked something down in
getting into bed. She began slowly to undress; but now, owing to the
suggestions of this sound, her thoughts became concentrated on
Hetty—that sweet young thing, with life and all its trials before
her—the solemn daily duties of the wife and mother—and her mind so
unprepared for them all, bent merely on little foolish, selfish
pleasures, like a child hugging its toys in the beginning of a long
toilsome journey in which it will have to bear hunger and cold and
unsheltered darkness. Dinah felt a double care for Hetty, because she
shared Seth’s anxious interest in his brother’s lot, and she had not
come to the conclusion that Hetty did not love Adam well enough to
marry him. She saw too clearly the absence of any warm, self-devoting
love in Hetty’s nature to regard the coldness of her behaviour towards
Adam as any indication that he was not the man she would like to have
for a husband. And this blank in Hetty’s nature, instead of exciting
Dinah’s dislike, only touched her with a deeper pity: the lovely face
and form affected her as beauty always affects a pure and tender mind,
free from selfish jealousies. It was an excellent divine gift, that
gave a deeper pathos to the need, the sin, the sorrow with which it was
mingled, as the canker in a lily-white bud is more grievous to behold
than in a common pot-herb.
By the time Dinah had undressed and put on her night-gown, this feeling
about Hetty had gathered a painful intensity; her imagination had
created a thorny thicket of sin and sorrow, in which she saw the poor
thing struggling torn and bleeding, looking with tears for rescue and
finding none. It was in this way that Dinah’s imagination and sympathy