Adam Bede
for us both; but it seems it was only meant for my trial. Perhaps I
feel more for you than I ought to feel for any creature, for I often
can’t help saying of you what the hymn says—
In darkest shades if she appear,
My dawning is begun;
She is my soul’s bright morning-star,
And she my rising sun.
That may be wrong, and I am to be taught better. But you wouldn’t be
displeased with me if things turned out so as I could leave this
country and go to live at Snowfield?”
“No, Seth; but I counsel you to wait patiently, and not lightly to
leave your own country and kindred. Do nothing without the Lord’s clear
bidding. It’s a bleak and barren country there, not like this land of
Goshen you’ve been used to. We mustn’t be in a hurry to fix and choose
our own lot; we must wait to be guided.”
“But you’d let me write you a letter, Dinah, if there was anything I
wanted to tell you?”
“Yes, sure; let me know if you’re in any trouble. You’ll be continually
in my prayers.”
They had now reached the yard-gate, and Seth said, “I won’t go in,
Dinah, so farewell.” He paused and hesitated after she had given him
her hand, and then said, “There’s no knowing but what you may see
things different after a while. There may be a new leading.”
“Let us leave that, Seth. It’s good to live only a moment at a time, as
I’ve read in one of Mr. Wesley’s books. It isn’t for you and me to lay
plans; we’ve nothing to do but to obey and to trust. Farewell.”
Dinah pressed his hand with rather a sad look in her loving eyes, and
then passed through the gate, while Seth turned away to walk
lingeringly home. But instead of taking the direct road, he chose to
turn back along the fields through which he and Dinah had already
passed; and I think his blue linen handkerchief was very wet with tears
long before he had made up his mind that it was time for him to set his
face steadily homewards. He was but three-and-twenty, and had only just
learned what it is to love—to love with that adoration which a young
man gives to a woman whom he feels to be greater and better than
himself. Love of this sort is hardly distinguishable from religious
feeling. What deep and worthy love is so, whether of woman or child, or
art or music. Our caresses, our tender words, our still rapture under
the influence of autumn sunsets, or pillared vistas, or calm majestic
statues, or Beethoven symphonies all bring with them the consciousness
that they are mere waves and ripples in an unfathomable ocean of love
and beauty; our emotion in its keenest moment passes from expression
into silence, our love at its highest flood rushes beyond its object
and loses itself in the sense of divine mystery. And this blessed gift
of venerating love has been given to too many humble craftsmen since
the world began for us to feel any surprise that it should have existed
in the soul of a Methodist carpenter half a century ago, while there
was yet a lingering after-glow from the time when Wesley and his
fellow-labourer fed on the hips and haws of the Cornwall hedges, after
exhausting limbs and lungs in carrying a divine message to the poor.
That afterglow has long faded away; and the picture we are apt to make
of Methodism in our imagination is not an amphitheatre of green hills,
or the deep shade of broad-leaved sycamores, where a crowd of rough men
and weary-hearted women drank in a faith which was a rudimentary
culture, which linked their thoughts with the past, lifted their
imagination above the sordid details of their own narrow lives, and
suffused their souls with the sense of a pitying, loving, infinite
Presence, sweet as summer to the houseless needy. It is too possible
that to some of my readers Methodism may mean nothing more than
low-pitched gables up dingy streets, sleek grocers, sponging preachers,
and hypocritical jargon—elements which are regarded as an exhaustive
analysis of Methodism in many fashionable quarters.
That would be a pity; for I cannot pretend that Seth and Dinah were
anything else than Methodists—not indeed of that modern type which
reads quarterly reviews and attends in chapels with pillared porticoes,
but of a very old-fashioned kind. They believed in present miracles, in
instantaneous conversions, in revelations by dreams and visions; they
drew lots, and sought for Divine guidance by opening the Bible at
hazard; having a literal way of interpreting the Scriptures, which is
not at all sanctioned by approved commentators; and it is impossible
for me to represent their diction as correct, or their instruction as
liberal. Still—if I have read religious history aright—faith, hope, and
charity have not always been found in a direct ratio with a sensibility
to the three concords, and it is possible—thank Heaven!—to have very
erroneous theories and very sublime feelings. The raw bacon which
clumsy Molly spares from her own scanty store that she may carry it to
her neighbour’s child to “stop the fits,” may be a piteously
inefficacious remedy; but the generous stirring of neighbourly kindness
that prompted the deed has a beneficent radiation that is not lost.
Considering these things, we can hardly think Dinah and Seth beneath
our sympathy, accustomed as we may be to weep over the loftier sorrows
of heroines in satin boots and crinoline, and of heroes riding fiery
horses, themselves ridden by still more fiery passions.
Poor Seth! He was never on horseback in his life except once, when he
was a little lad, and Mr. Jonathan Burge took him up behind, telling
him to “hold on tight”; and instead of bursting out into wild accusing
apostrophes to God and destiny, he is resolving, as he now walks
homewards under the solemn starlight, to repress his sadness, to be
less bent on having his own will, and to live more for others, as Dinah
does.
Chapter IV
Home and Its Sorrows
A green valley with a brook running through it, full almost to
overflowing with the late rains, overhung by low stooping willows.
Across this brook a plank is thrown, and over this plank Adam Bede is
passing with his undoubting step, followed close by Gyp with the
basket; evidently making his way to the thatched house, with a stack of
timber by the side of it, about twenty yards up the opposite slope.
The door of the house is open, and an elderly woman is looking out; but
she is not placidly contemplating the evening sunshine; she has been
watching with dim eyes the gradually enlarging speck which for the last
few minutes she has been quite sure is her darling son Adam. Lisbeth
Bede loves her son with the love of a woman to whom her first-born has
come late in life. She is an anxious, spare, yet vigorous old woman,
clean as a snowdrop. Her grey hair is turned neatly back under a pure
linen cap with a black band round it; her broad chest is covered with a
buff neckerchief, and below this you see a sort of short bedgown made
of blue-checkered linen, tied round the waist and descending to the
hips, from whence there is a considerable length of linsey-woolsey
petticoat. For Lisbeth is tall, and in other points too there is a
strong likeness between her and her son Adam. Her dark eyes are
somewhat dim now—perhaps from too much crying—but her broadly marked
eyebrows are still black, her teeth are sound, and as she stands
knitting rapidly and unconsciously with her work-hardened hands, she
has as firmly upright an attitude as when she is carrying a pail of
water on her head from the spring. There is the same type of frame and
the same keen activity of temperament in mother and son, but it was not
from her that Adam got his well-filled brow and his expression of
large-hearted intelligence.
Family likeness has often a deep sadness in it. Nature, that great
tragic dramatist, knits us together by bone and muscle, and divides us
by the subtler web of our brains; blends yearning and repulsion; and
ties us by our heart-strings to the beings that jar us at every
movement. We hear a voice with the very cadence of our own uttering the
thoughts we despise; we see eyes—ah, so like our mother’s!—averted from
us in cold alienation; and our last darling child startles us with the
air and gestures of the sister we parted from in bitterness long years
ago. The father to whom we owe our best heritage—the mechanical
instinct, the keen sensibility to harmony, the unconscious skill of the
modelling hand—galls us and puts us to shame by his daily errors; the
long-lost mother, whose face we begin to see in the glass as our own
wrinkles come, once fretted our young souls with her anxious humours
and irrational persistence.
It is such a fond anxious mother’s voice that you hear, as Lisbeth
says, “Well, my lad, it’s gone seven by th’ clock. Thee’t allays stay
till the last child’s born. Thee wants thy supper, I’ll warrand.
Where’s Seth? Gone arter some o’s chapellin’, I reckon?”
“Aye, aye, Seth’s at no harm, mother, thee mayst be sure. But where’s
father?” said Adam quickly, as he entered the house and glanced into
the room on the left hand, which was used as a workshop. “Hasn’t he
done the coffin for Tholer? There’s the stuff standing just as I left
it this morning.”
“Done the coffin?” said Lisbeth, following him, and knitting
uninterruptedly, though she looked at her son very anxiously. “Eh, my
lad, he went aff to Treddles’on this forenoon, an’s niver come back. I
doubt he’s got to th’ ‘Waggin Overthrow’ again.”
A deep flush of anger passed rapidly over Adam’s face. He said nothing,
but threw off his jacket and began to roll up his shirt-sleeves again.
“What art goin’ to do, Adam?” said the mother, with a tone and look of
alarm. “Thee wouldstna go to work again, wi’out ha’in thy bit o’
supper?”
Adam, too angry to speak, walked into the workshop. But his mother
threw down her knitting, and, hurrying after him, took hold of his arm,
and said, in a tone of plaintive remonstrance, “Nay, my lad, my lad,
thee munna go wi’out thy supper; there’s the taters wi’ the gravy in
’em, just as thee lik’st ’em. I saved ’em o’ purpose for thee. Come an’
ha’ thy supper, come.”
“Let be!” said Adam impetuously, shaking her off and seizing one of the
planks that stood against the wall. “It’s fine talking about having
supper when here’s a coffin promised to be ready at Brox’on by seven
o’clock to-morrow morning, and ought to ha’ been there now, and not a
nail struck yet. My throat’s too full to swallow victuals.”
“Why, thee canstna get the coffin ready,” said Lisbeth. “Thee’t work
thyself to death. It ’ud take thee all night to do’t.”
“What signifies how long it takes me? Isn’t the coffin promised? Can
they bury the man without a coffin? I’d work my right hand off sooner
than deceive people with lies i’ that way. It makes me mad to think
on’t. I shall overrun these doings before long. I’ve stood enough of
’em.”
Poor Lisbeth did not hear this threat for the first time, and if she
had been wise she would have gone away quietly and said nothing for the
next hour. But one of the lessons a woman most rarely learns is never
to talk to an angry or a drunken man. Lisbeth sat down on the chopping
bench and began to cry, and by the time she had cried enough to make
her voice very piteous, she burst out into words.
“Nay, my lad, my lad, thee wouldstna go away an’ break thy mother’s
heart, an’ leave thy feyther to ruin. Thee wouldstna ha’ ’em carry me
to th’ churchyard, an’ thee not to follow me. I shanna rest i’ my grave
if I donna see thee at th’ last; an’ how’s they to let thee know as I’m
a-dyin’, if thee’t gone a-workin’ i’ distant parts, an’ Seth belike
gone arter thee, and thy feyther not able to hold a pen for’s hand
shakin’, besides not knowin’ where thee art? Thee mun forgie thy
feyther—thee munna be so bitter again’ him. He war a good feyther to