Adam Bede
acted and reacted habitually, each heightening the other. She felt a
deep longing to go now and pour into Hetty’s ear all the words of
tender warning and appeal that rushed into her mind. But perhaps Hetty
was already asleep. Dinah put her ear to the partition and heard still
some slight noises, which convinced her that Hetty was not yet in bed.
Still she hesitated; she was not quite certain of a divine direction;
the voice that told her to go to Hetty seemed no stronger than the
other voice which said that Hetty was weary, and that going to her now
in an unseasonable moment would only tend to close her heart more
obstinately. Dinah was not satisfied without a more unmistakable
guidance than those inward voices. There was light enough for her, if
she opened her Bible, to discern the text sufficiently to know what it
would say to her. She knew the physiognomy of every page, and could
tell on what book she opened, sometimes on what chapter, without seeing
title or number. It was a small thick Bible, worn quite round at the
edges. Dinah laid it sideways on the window ledge, where the light was
strongest, and then opened it with her forefinger. The first words she
looked at were those at the top of the left-hand page: “And they all
wept sore, and fell on Paul’s neck and kissed him.” That was enough for
Dinah; she had opened on that memorable parting at Ephesus, when Paul
had felt bound to open his heart in a last exhortation and warning. She
hesitated no longer, but, opening her own door gently, went and tapped
on Hetty’s. We know she had to tap twice, because Hetty had to put out
her candles and throw off her black lace scarf; but after the second
tap the door was opened immediately. Dinah said, “Will you let me come
in, Hetty?” and Hetty, without speaking, for she was confused and
vexed, opened the door wider and let her in.
What a strange contrast the two figures made, visible enough in that
mingled twilight and moonlight! Hetty, her cheeks flushed and her eyes
glistening from her imaginary drama, her beautiful neck and arms bare,
her hair hanging in a curly tangle down her back, and the baubles in
her ears. Dinah, covered with her long white dress, her pale face full
of subdued emotion, almost like a lovely corpse into which the soul has
returned charged with sublimer secrets and a sublimer love. They were
nearly of the same height; Dinah evidently a little the taller as she
put her arm round Hetty’s waist and kissed her forehead.
“I knew you were not in bed, my dear,” she said, in her sweet clear
voice, which was irritating to Hetty, mingling with her own peevish
vexation like music with jangling chains, “for I heard you moving; and
I longed to speak to you again to-night, for it is the last but one
that I shall be here, and we don’t know what may happen to-morrow to
keep us apart. Shall I sit down with you while you do up your hair?”
“Oh yes,” said Hetty, hastily turning round and reaching the second
chair in the room, glad that Dinah looked as if she did not notice her
ear-rings.
Dinah sat down, and Hetty began to brush together her hair before
twisting it up, doing it with that air of excessive indifference which
belongs to confused self-consciousness. But the expression of Dinah’s
eyes gradually relieved her; they seemed unobservant of all details.
“Dear Hetty,” she said, “It has been borne in upon my mind to-night
that you may some day be in trouble—trouble is appointed for us all
here below, and there comes a time when we need more comfort and help
than the things of this life can give. I want to tell you that if ever
you are in trouble, and need a friend that will always feel for you and
love you, you have got that friend in Dinah Morris at Snowfield, and if
you come to her, or send for her, she’ll never forget this night and
the words she is speaking to you now. Will you remember it, Hetty?”
“Yes,” said Hetty, rather frightened. “But why should you think I shall
be in trouble? Do you know of anything?”
Hetty had seated herself as she tied on her cap, and now Dinah leaned
forwards and took her hands as she answered, “Because, dear, trouble
comes to us all in this life: we set our hearts on things which it
isn’t God’s will for us to have, and then we go sorrowing; the people
we love are taken from us, and we can joy in nothing because they are
not with us; sickness comes, and we faint under the burden of our
feeble bodies; we go astray and do wrong, and bring ourselves into
trouble with our fellow-men. There is no man or woman born into this
world to whom some of these trials do not fall, and so I feel that some
of them must happen to you; and I desire for you, that while you are
young you should seek for strength from your Heavenly Father, that you
may have a support which will not fail you in the evil day.”
Dinah paused and released Hetty’s hands that she might not hinder her.
Hetty sat quite still; she felt no response within herself to Dinah’s
anxious affection; but Dinah’s words uttered with solemn pathetic
distinctness, affected her with a chill fear. Her flush had died away
almost to paleness; she had the timidity of a luxurious
pleasure-seeking nature, which shrinks from the hint of pain. Dinah saw
the effect, and her tender anxious pleading became the more earnest,
till Hetty, full of a vague fear that something evil was some time to
befall her, began to cry.
It is our habit to say that while the lower nature can never understand
the higher, the higher nature commands a complete view of the lower.
But I think the higher nature has to learn this comprehension, as we
learn the art of vision, by a good deal of hard experience, often with
bruises and gashes incurred in taking things up by the wrong end, and
fancying our space wider than it is. Dinah had never seen Hetty
affected in this way before, and, with her usual benignant hopefulness,
she trusted it was the stirring of a divine impulse. She kissed the
sobbing thing, and began to cry with her for grateful joy. But Hetty
was simply in that excitable state of mind in which there is no
calculating what turn the feelings may take from one moment to another,
and for the first time she became irritated under Dinah’s caress. She
pushed her away impatiently, and said, with a childish sobbing voice,
“Don’t talk to me so, Dinah. Why do you come to frighten me? I’ve never
done anything to you. Why can’t you let me be?”
Poor Dinah felt a pang. She was too wise to persist, and only said
mildly, “Yes, my dear, you’re tired; I won’t hinder you any longer.
Make haste and get into bed. Good-night.”
She went out of the room almost as quietly and quickly as if she had
been a ghost; but once by the side of her own bed, she threw herself on
her knees and poured out in deep silence all the passionate pity that
filled her heart.
As for Hetty, she was soon in the wood again—her waking dreams being
merged in a sleeping life scarcely more fragmentary and confused.
Chapter XVI
Links
Arthur Donnithorne, you remember, is under an engagement with himself
to go and see Mr. Irwine this Friday morning, and he is awake and
dressing so early that he determines to go before breakfast, instead of
after. The rector, he knows, breakfasts alone at half-past nine, the
ladies of the family having a different breakfast-hour; Arthur will
have an early ride over the hill and breakfast with him. One can say
everything best over a meal.
The progress of civilization has made a breakfast or a dinner an easy
and cheerful substitute for more troublesome and disagreeable
ceremonies. We take a less gloomy view of our errors now our father
confessor listens to us over his egg and coffee. We are more distinctly
conscious that rude penances are out of the question for gentlemen in
an enlightened age, and that mortal sin is not incompatible with an
appetite for muffins. An assault on our pockets, which in more
barbarous times would have been made in the brusque form of a
pistol-shot, is quite a well-bred and smiling procedure now it has
become a request for a loan thrown in as an easy parenthesis between
the second and third glasses of claret.
Still, there was this advantage in the old rigid forms, that they
committed you to the fulfilment of a resolution by some outward deed:
when you have put your mouth to one end of a hole in a stone wall and
are aware that there is an expectant ear at the other end, you are more
likely to say what you came out with the intention of saying than if
you were seated with your legs in an easy attitude under the mahogany
with a companion who will have no reason to be surprised if you have
nothing particular to say.
However, Arthur Donnithorne, as he winds among the pleasant lanes on
horseback in the morning sunshine, has a sincere determination to open
his heart to the rector, and the swirling sound of the scythe as he
passes by the meadow is all the pleasanter to him because of this
honest purpose. He is glad to see the promise of settled weather now,
for getting in the hay, about which the farmers have been fearful; and
there is something so healthful in the sharing of a joy that is general
and not merely personal, that this thought about the hay-harvest reacts
on his state of mind and makes his resolution seem an easier matter. A
man about town might perhaps consider that these influences were not to
be felt out of a child’s story-book; but when you are among the fields
and hedgerows, it is impossible to maintain a consistent superiority to
simple natural pleasures.
Arthur had passed the village of Hayslope and was approaching the
Broxton side of the hill, when, at a turning in the road, he saw a
figure about a hundred yards before him which it was impossible to
mistake for any one else than Adam Bede, even if there had been no
grey, tailless shepherd-dog at his heels. He was striding along at his
usual rapid pace, and Arthur pushed on his horse to overtake him, for
he retained too much of his boyish feeling for Adam to miss an
opportunity of chatting with him. I will not say that his love for that
good fellow did not owe some of its force to the love of patronage: our
friend Arthur liked to do everything that was handsome, and to have his
handsome deeds recognized.
Adam looked round as he heard the quickening clatter of the horse’s
heels, and waited for the horseman, lifting his paper cap from his head
with a bright smile of recognition. Next to his own brother Seth, Adam
would have done more for Arthur Donnithorne than for any other young
man in the world. There was hardly anything he would not rather have
lost than the two-feet ruler which he always carried in his pocket; it
was Arthur’s present, bought with his pocket-money when he was a
fair-haired lad of eleven, and when he had profited so well by Adam’s
lessons in carpentering and turning as to embarrass every female in the
house with gifts of superfluous thread-reels and round boxes. Adam had
quite a pride in the little squire in those early days, and the feeling
had only become slightly modified as the fair-haired lad had grown into
the whiskered young man. Adam, I confess, was very susceptible to the
influence of rank, and quite ready to give an extra amount of respect
to every one who had more advantages than himself, not being a
philosopher or a proletaire with democratic ideas, but simply a
stout-limbed clever carpenter with a large fund of reverence in his
nature, which inclined him to admit all established claims unless he
saw very clear grounds for questioning them. He had no theories about
setting the world to rights, but he saw there was a great deal of
damage done by building with ill-seasoned timber—by ignorant men in
fine clothes making plans for outhouses and workshops and the like