Adam Bede
love and tenderness towards you, for there is nothing I would not do
for you, if I knew it to be really for your happiness. I cannot bear to
think of my little Hetty shedding tears when I am not there to kiss
them away; and if I followed only my own inclinations, I should be with
her at this moment instead of writing. It is very hard for me to part
from her—harder still for me to write words which may seem unkind,
though they spring from the truest kindness.
“Dear, dear Hetty, sweet as our love has been to me, sweet as it would
be to me for you to love me always, I feel that it would have been
better for us both if we had never had that happiness, and that it is
my duty to ask you to love me and care for me as little as you can. The
fault has all been mine, for though I have been unable to resist the
longing to be near you, I have felt all the while that your affection
for me might cause you grief. I ought to have resisted my feelings. I
should have done so, if I had been a better fellow than I am; but now,
since the past cannot be altered, I am bound to save you from any evil
that I have power to prevent. And I feel it would be a great evil for
you if your affections continued so fixed on me that you could think of
no other man who might be able to make you happier by his love than I
ever can, and if you continued to look towards something in the future
which cannot possibly happen. For, dear Hetty, if I were to do what you
one day spoke of, and make you my wife, I should do what you yourself
would come to feel was for your misery instead of your welfare. I know
you can never be happy except by marrying a man in your own station;
and if I were to marry you now, I should only be adding to any wrong I
have done, besides offending against my duty in the other relations of
life. You know nothing, dear Hetty, of the world in which I must always
live, and you would soon begin to dislike me, because there would be so
little in which we should be alike.
“And since I cannot marry you, we must part—we must try not to feel
like lovers any more. I am miserable while I say this, but nothing else
can be. Be angry with me, my sweet one, I deserve it; but do not
believe that I shall not always care for you—always be grateful to
you—always remember my Hetty; and if any trouble should come that we do
not now foresee, trust in me to do everything that lies in my power.
“I have told you where you are to direct a letter to, if you want to
write, but I put it down below lest you should have forgotten. Do not
write unless there is something I can really do for you; for, dear
Hetty, we must try to think of each other as little as we can. Forgive
me, and try to forget everything about me, except that I shall be, as
long as I live, your affectionate friend,
“ARTHUR DONNITHORNE.”
Slowly Hetty had read this letter; and when she looked up from it there
was the reflection of a blanched face in the old dim glass—a white
marble face with rounded childish forms, but with something sadder than
a child’s pain in it. Hetty did not see the face—she saw nothing—she
only felt that she was cold and sick and trembling. The letter shook
and rustled in her hand. She laid it down. It was a horrible
sensation—this cold and trembling. It swept away the very ideas that
produced it, and Hetty got up to reach a warm cloak from her
clothes-press, wrapped it round her, and sat as if she were thinking of
nothing but getting warm. Presently she took up the letter with a
firmer hand, and began to read it through again. The tears came this
time—great rushing tears that blinded her and blotched the paper. She
felt nothing but that Arthur was cruel—cruel to write so, cruel not to
marry her. Reasons why he could not marry her had no existence for her
mind; how could she believe in any misery that could come to her from
the fulfilment of all she had been longing for and dreaming of? She had
not the ideas that could make up the notion of that misery.
As she threw down the letter again, she caught sight of her face in the
glass; it was reddened now, and wet with tears; it was almost like a
companion that she might complain to—that would pity her. She leaned
forward on her elbows, and looked into those dark overflooding eyes and
at the quivering mouth, and saw how the tears came thicker and thicker,
and how the mouth became convulsed with sobs.
The shattering of all her little dream-world, the crushing blow on her
new-born passion, afflicted her pleasure-craving nature with an
overpowering pain that annihilated all impulse to resistance, and
suspended her anger. She sat sobbing till the candle went out, and
then, wearied, aching, stupefied with crying, threw herself on the bed
without undressing and went to sleep.
There was a feeble dawn in the room when Hetty awoke, a little after
four o’clock, with a sense of dull misery, the cause of which broke
upon her gradually as she began to discern the objects round her in the
dim light. And then came the frightening thought that she had to
conceal her misery as well as to bear it, in this dreary daylight that
was coming. She could lie no longer. She got up and went towards the
table: there lay the letter. She opened her treasure-drawer: there lay
the ear-rings and the locket—the signs of all her short happiness—the
signs of the lifelong dreariness that was to follow it. Looking at the
little trinkets which she had once eyed and fingered so fondly as the
earnest of her future paradise of finery, she lived back in the moments
when they had been given to her with such tender caresses, such
strangely pretty words, such glowing looks, which filled her with a
bewildering delicious surprise—they were so much sweeter than she had
thought anything could be. And the Arthur who had spoken to her and
looked at her in this way, who was present with her now—whose arm she
felt round her, his cheek against hers, his very breath upon her—was
the cruel, cruel Arthur who had written that letter, that letter which
she snatched and crushed and then opened again, that she might read it
once more. The half-benumbed mental condition which was the effect of
the last night’s violent crying made it necessary to her to look again
and see if her wretched thoughts were actually true—if the letter was
really so cruel. She had to hold it close to the window, else she could
not have read it by the faint light. Yes! It was worse—it was more
cruel. She crushed it up again in anger. She hated the writer of that
letter—hated him for the very reason that she hung upon him with all
her love—all the girlish passion and vanity that made up her love.
She had no tears this morning. She had wept them all away last night,
and now she felt that dry-eyed morning misery, which is worse than the
first shock because it has the future in it as well as the present.
Every morning to come, as far as her imagination could stretch, she
would have to get up and feel that the day would have no joy for her.
For there is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first
moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it
is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and to have
recovered hope. As Hetty began languidly to take off the clothes she
had worn all the night, that she might wash herself and brush her hair,
she had a sickening sense that her life would go on in this way. She
should always be doing things she had no pleasure in, getting up to the
old tasks of work, seeing people she cared nothing about, going to
church, and to Treddleston, and to tea with Mrs. Best, and carrying no
happy thought with her. For her short poisonous delights had spoiled
for ever all the little joys that had once made the sweetness of her
life—the new frock ready for Treddleston Fair, the party at Mr.
Britton’s at Broxton wake, the beaux that she would say “No” to for a
long while, and the prospect of the wedding that was to come at last
when she would have a silk gown and a great many clothes all at once.
These things were all flat and dreary to her now; everything would be a
weariness, and she would carry about for ever a hopeless thirst and
longing.
She paused in the midst of her languid undressing and leaned against
the dark old clothes-press. Her neck and arms were bare, her hair hung
down in delicate rings—and they were just as beautiful as they were
that night two months ago, when she walked up and down this bed-chamber
glowing with vanity and hope. She was not thinking of her neck and arms
now; even her own beauty was indifferent to her. Her eyes wandered
sadly over the dull old chamber, and then looked out vacantly towards
the growing dawn. Did a remembrance of Dinah come across her mind? Of
her foreboding words, which had made her angry? Of Dinah’s affectionate
entreaty to think of her as a friend in trouble? No, the impression had
been too slight to recur. Any affection or comfort Dinah could have
given her would have been as indifferent to Hetty this morning as
everything else was except her bruised passion. She was only thinking
she could never stay here and go on with the old life—she could better
bear something quite new than sinking back into the old everyday round.
She would like to run away that very morning, and never see any of the
old faces again. But Hetty’s was not a nature to face difficulties—to
dare to loose her hold on the familiar and rush blindly on some unknown
condition. Hers was a luxurious and vain nature—not a passionate
one—and if she were ever to take any violent measure, she must be urged
to it by the desperation of terror. There was not much room for her
thoughts to travel in the narrow circle of her imagination, and she
soon fixed on the one thing she would do to get away from her old life:
she would ask her uncle to let her go to be a lady’s maid. Miss Lydia’s
maid would help her to get a situation, if she knew Hetty had her
uncle’s leave.
When she had thought of this, she fastened up her hair and began to
wash: it seemed more possible to her to go downstairs and try to behave
as usual. She would ask her uncle this very day. On Hetty’s blooming
health it would take a great deal of such mental suffering as hers to
leave any deep impress; and when she was dressed as neatly as usual in
her working-dress, with her hair tucked up under her little cap, an
indifferent observer would have been more struck with the young
roundness of her cheek and neck and the darkness of her eyes and
eyelashes than with any signs of sadness about her. But when she took
up the crushed letter and put it in her drawer, that she might lock it
out of sight, hard smarting tears, having no relief in them as the
great drops had that fell last night, forced their way into her eyes.
She wiped them away quickly: she must not cry in the day-time. Nobody
should find out how miserable she was, nobody should know she was
disappointed about anything; and the thought that the eyes of her aunt
and uncle would be upon her gave her the self-command which often
accompanies a great dread. For Hetty looked out from her secret misery
towards the possibility of their ever knowing what had happened, as the
sick and weary prisoner might think of the possible pillory. They would
think her conduct shameful, and shame was torture. That was poor little
Hetty’s conscience.
So she locked up her drawer and went away to her early work.
In the evening, when Mr. Poyser was smoking his pipe, and his
good-nature was therefore at its superlative moment, Hetty seized the
opportunity of her aunt’s absence to say, “Uncle, I wish you’d let me
go for a lady’s maid.”
Mr. Poyser took the pipe from his mouth and looked at Hetty in mild
surprise for some moments. She was sewing, and went on with her work
industriously.