Adam Bede
“Why, what’s put that into your head, my wench?” he said at last, after
he had given one conservative puff.
“I should like it—I should like it better than farm-work.”
“Nay, nay; you fancy so because you donna know it, my wench. It
wouldn’t be half so good for your health, nor for your luck i’ life.
I’d like you to stay wi’ us till you’ve got a good husband: you’re my
own niece, and I wouldn’t have you go to service, though it was a
gentleman’s house, as long as I’ve got a home for you.”
Mr. Poyser paused, and puffed away at his pipe.
“I like the needlework,” said Hetty, “and I should get good wages.”
“Has your aunt been a bit sharp wi’ you?” said Mr. Poyser, not noticing
Hetty’s further argument. “You mustna mind that, my wench—she does it
for your good. She wishes you well; an’ there isn’t many aunts as are
no kin to you ’ud ha’ done by you as she has.”
“No, it isn’t my aunt,” said Hetty, “but I should like the work
better.”
“It was all very well for you to learn the work a bit—an’ I gev my
consent to that fast enough, sin’ Mrs. Pomfret was willing to teach
you. For if anything was t’ happen, it’s well to know how to turn your
hand to different sorts o’ things. But I niver meant you to go to
service, my wench; my family’s ate their own bread and cheese as fur
back as anybody knows, hanna they, Father? You wouldna like your
grand-child to take wage?”
“Na-a-y,” said old Martin, with an elongation of the word, meant to
make it bitter as well as negative, while he leaned forward and looked
down on the floor. “But the wench takes arter her mother. I’d hard work
t’ hould _her_ in, an’ she married i’ spite o’ me—a feller wi’ on’y two
head o’ stock when there should ha’ been ten on’s farm—she might well
die o’ th’ inflammation afore she war thirty.”
It was seldom the old man made so long a speech, but his son’s question
had fallen like a bit of dry fuel on the embers of a long
unextinguished resentment, which had always made the grandfather more
indifferent to Hetty than to his son’s children. Her mother’s fortune
had been spent by that good-for-nought Sorrel, and Hetty had Sorrel’s
blood in her veins.
“Poor thing, poor thing!” said Martin the younger, who was sorry to
have provoked this retrospective harshness. “She’d but bad luck. But
Hetty’s got as good a chance o’ getting a solid, sober husband as any
gell i’ this country.”
After throwing out this pregnant hint, Mr. Poyser recurred to his pipe
and his silence, looking at Hetty to see if she did not give some sign
of having renounced her ill-advised wish. But instead of that, Hetty,
in spite of herself, began to cry, half out of ill temper at the
denial, half out of the day’s repressed sadness.
“Hegh, hegh!” said Mr. Poyser, meaning to check her playfully, “don’t
let’s have any crying. Crying’s for them as ha’ got no home, not for
them as want to get rid o’ one. What dost think?” he continued to his
wife, who now came back into the house-place, knitting with fierce
rapidity, as if that movement were a necessary function, like the
twittering of a crab’s antennæ.
“Think? Why, I think we shall have the fowl stole before we are much
older, wi’ that gell forgetting to lock the pens up o’ nights. What’s
the matter now, Hetty? What are you crying at?”
“Why, she’s been wanting to go for a lady’s maid,” said Mr. Poyser. “I
tell her we can do better for her nor that.”
“I thought she’d got some maggot in her head, she’s gone about wi’ her
mouth buttoned up so all day. It’s all wi’ going so among them servants
at the Chase, as we war fools for letting her. She thinks it ’ud be a
finer life than being wi’ them as are akin to her and ha’ brought her
up sin’ she war no bigger nor Marty. She thinks there’s nothing belongs
to being a lady’s maid but wearing finer clothes nor she was born to,
I’ll be bound. It’s what rag she can get to stick on her as she’s
thinking on from morning till night, as I often ask her if she wouldn’t
like to be the mawkin i’ the field, for then she’d be made o’ rags
inside and out. I’ll never gi’ my consent to her going for a lady’s
maid, while she’s got good friends to take care on her till she’s
married to somebody better nor one o’ them valets, as is neither a
common man nor a gentleman, an’ must live on the fat o’ the land, an’s
like enough to stick his hands under his coat-tails and expect his wife
to work for him.”
“Aye, aye,” said Mr. Poyser, “we must have a better husband for her nor
that, and there’s better at hand. Come, my wench, give over crying and
get to bed. I’ll do better for you nor letting you go for a lady’s
maid. Let’s hear no more on’t.”
When Hetty was gone upstairs he said, “I canna make it out as she
should want to go away, for I thought she’d got a mind t’ Adam Bede.
She’s looked like it o’ late.”
“Eh, there’s no knowing what she’s got a liking to, for things take no
more hold on her than if she was a dried pea. I believe that gell,
Molly—as is aggravatin’ enough, for the matter o’ that—but I believe
she’d care more about leaving us and the children, for all she’s been
here but a year come Michaelmas, nor Hetty would. But she’s got this
notion o’ being a lady’s maid wi’ going among them servants—we might
ha’ known what it ’ud lead to when we let her go to learn the fine
work. But I’ll put a stop to it pretty quick.”
“Thee’dst be sorry to part wi’ her, if it wasn’t for her good,” said
Mr. Poyser. “She’s useful to thee i’ the work.”
“Sorry? Yes, I’m fonder on her nor she deserves—a little hard-hearted
hussy, wanting to leave us i’ that way. I can’t ha’ had her about me
these seven year, I reckon, and done for her, and taught her everything
wi’out caring about her. An’ here I’m having linen spun, an’ thinking
all the while it’ll make sheeting and table-clothing for her when she’s
married, an’ she’ll live i’ the parish wi’ us, and never go out of our
sights—like a fool as I am for thinking aught about her, as is no
better nor a cherry wi’ a hard stone inside it.”
“Nay, nay, thee mustna make much of a trifle,” said Mr. Poyser,
soothingly. “She’s fond on us, I’ll be bound; but she’s young, an’ gets
things in her head as she can’t rightly give account on. Them young
fillies ’ull run away often wi’out knowing why.”
Her uncle’s answers, however, had had another effect on Hetty besides
that of disappointing her and making her cry. She knew quite well whom
he had in his mind in his allusions to marriage, and to a sober, solid
husband; and when she was in her bedroom again, the possibility of her
marrying Adam presented itself to her in a new light. In a mind where
no strong sympathies are at work, where there is no supreme sense of
right to which the agitated nature can cling and steady itself to quiet
endurance, one of the first results of sorrow is a desperate vague
clutching after any deed that will change the actual condition. Poor
Hetty’s vision of consequences, at no time more than a narrow fantastic
calculation of her own probable pleasures and pains, was now quite shut
out by reckless irritation under present suffering, and she was ready
for one of those convulsive, motiveless actions by which wretched men
and women leap from a temporary sorrow into a lifelong misery.
Why should she not marry Adam? She did not care what she did, so that
it made some change in her life. She felt confident that he would still
want to marry her, and any further thought about Adam’s happiness in
the matter had never yet visited her.
“Strange!” perhaps you will say, “this rush of impulse towards a course
that might have seemed the most repugnant to her present state of mind,
and in only the second night of her sadness!”
Yes, the actions of a little trivial soul like Hetty’s, struggling
amidst the serious sad destinies of a human being, _are_ strange. So
are the motions of a little vessel without ballast tossed about on a
stormy sea. How pretty it looked with its parti-coloured sail in the
sunlight, moored in the quiet bay!
“Let that man bear the loss who loosed it from its moorings.”
But that will not save the vessel—the pretty thing that might have been
a lasting joy.
Chapter XXXII
Mrs. Poyser “Has Her Say Out”
The next Saturday evening there was much excited discussion at the
Donnithorne Arms concerning an incident which had occurred that very
day—no less than a second appearance of the smart man in top-boots said
by some to be a mere farmer in treaty for the Chase Farm, by others to
be the future steward, but by Mr. Casson himself, the personal witness
to the stranger’s visit, pronounced contemptuously to be nothing better
than a bailiff, such as Satchell had been before him. No one had
thought of denying Mr. Casson’s testimony to the fact that he had seen
the stranger; nevertheless, he proffered various corroborating
circumstances.
“I see him myself,” he said; “I see him coming along by the Crab-tree
Meadow on a bald-faced hoss. I’d just been t’ hev a pint—it was half
after ten i’ the fore-noon, when I hev my pint as reg’lar as the
clock—and I says to Knowles, as druv up with his waggon, ‘You’ll get a
bit o’ barley to-day, Knowles,’ I says, ‘if you look about you’; and
then I went round by the rick-yard, and towart the Treddles’on road,
and just as I come up by the big ash-tree, I see the man i’ top-boots
coming along on a bald-faced hoss—I wish I may never stir if I didn’t.
And I stood still till he come up, and I says, ‘Good morning, sir,’ I
says, for I wanted to hear the turn of his tongue, as I might know
whether he was a this-country man; so I says, ‘Good morning, sir: it
’ll ’old hup for the barley this morning, I think. There’ll be a bit
got hin, if we’ve good luck.’ And he says, ‘Eh, ye may be raight,
there’s noo tallin’,’ he says, and I knowed by that”—here Mr. Casson
gave a wink—“as he didn’t come from a hundred mile off. I daresay he’d
think me a hodd talker, as you Loamshire folks allays does hany one as
talks the right language.”
“The right language!” said Bartle Massey, contemptuously. “You’re about
as near the right language as a pig’s squeaking is like a tune played
on a key-bugle.”
“Well, I don’t know,” answered Mr. Casson, with an angry smile. “I
should think a man as has lived among the gentry from a by, is likely
to know what’s the right language pretty nigh as well as a
schoolmaster.”
“Ay, ay, man,” said Bartle, with a tone of sarcastic consolation, “you
talk the right language for _you_. When Mike Holdsworth’s goat says
ba-a-a, it’s all right—it ’ud be unnatural for it to make any other
noise.”
The rest of the party being Loamshire men, Mr. Casson had the laugh
strongly against him, and wisely fell back on the previous question,
which, far from being exhausted in a single evening, was renewed in the
churchyard, before service, the next day, with the fresh interest
conferred on all news when there is a fresh person to hear it; and that
fresh hearer was Martin Poyser, who, as his wife said, “never went
boozin’ with that set at Casson’s, a-sittin’ soakin’ in drink, and
looking as wise as a lot o’ cod-fish wi’ red faces.”
It was probably owing to the conversation she had had with her husband
on their way from church concerning this problematic stranger that Mrs.
Poyser’s thoughts immediately reverted to him when, a day or two
afterwards, as she was standing at the house-door with her knitting, in
that eager leisure which came to her when the afternoon cleaning was
done, she saw the old squire enter the yard on his black pony, followed
by John the groom. She always cited it afterwards as a case of
prevision, which really had something more in it than her own
remarkable penetration, that the moment she set eyes on the squire she
said to herself, “I shouldna wonder if he’s come about that man as is