North and South
arrangements depended on this precision that Margaret resolved to ask
her father one evening, in spite of his evident fatigue and low spirits.
He answered:
“My dear! I have really had too much to think about to settle this. What
does your mother say? What does she wish? Poor Maria!”
He met with an echo even louder than his sigh. Dixon had just come into
the room for another cup of tea for Mrs. Hale, and catching Mr. Hale’s
last words, and protected by his presence from Margaret’s upbraiding
eyes, made bold to say, “My poor mistress!”
“You don’t think her worse to-day,” said Mr. Hale, turning hastily.
“I am sure I can’t say, sir. It’s not for me to judge. The illness seems
so much more on the mind than on the body.”
Mr. Hale looked infinitely distressed.
“You had better take mamma her tea while it is hot, Dixon,” said
Margaret, in a tone of quiet authority.
“Oh! I beg your pardon, Miss! My thoughts was otherwise occupied in
thinking of my poor—— of Mrs. Hale.”
“Papa!” said Margaret, “it is this suspense that is bad for you both. Of
course, mamma must feel your change of opinions: we can’t help that,”
she continued softly; “but now the course is clear, at least to a
certain point. And I think, papa, that I could get mamma to help me in
planning, if you could tell me what to plan for. She has never expressed
any wish in any way, and only thinks of what can’t be helped. Are we to
go straight to Milton? Have you taken a house there?”
“No,” he replied, “I suppose we must go into lodgings, and look about
for a house.”
“And pack up the furniture so that it can be left at the railway
station, till we have met with one?”
“I suppose so. Do what you think best. Only remember, we shall have much
less money to spend.”
They had never had much superfluity, as Margaret knew. She felt that it
was a great weight suddenly thrown upon her shoulders. Four months ago,
all the decisions she needed to make were what dress she would wear for
dinner, and to help Edith to draw out the lists of who should take down
whom in the dinner parties at home. Nor was the household in which she
lived one that called for much decision. Except in the one grand case of
Captain Lennox’s offer, everything went on with the regularity of
clockwork. Once a year, there was a long discussion between her aunt and
Edith as to whether they should go to the Isle of Wight, abroad, or to
Scotland; but at such times Margaret herself was secure of drifting,
without any exertion of her own, into the quiet harbour of home. Now,
since that day when Mr. Lennox came, and startled her into a decision,
every day brought some question, momentous to her, and to those whom she
loved, to be settled.
Her father went up after tea to sit with his wife. Margaret remained
alone in the drawing-room. Suddenly she took a candle and went into her
father’s study for a great atlas, and lugging it back into the
drawing-room, she began to pore over the map of England. She was ready
to look up brightly when her father came down stairs.
“I have hit upon such a beautiful plan. Look here—in Darkshire, hardly
the breadth of my finger from Milton, is Heston, which I have often
heard of from people living in the north as such a pleasant little
bathing-place. Now, don’t you think we could get mamma there with Dixon,
while you and I go and look at houses, and get one all ready for her in
Milton? She would get a breath of sea air to set her up for the winter,
and be spared all the fatigue, and Dixon would enjoy taking care of
her.”
“Is Dixon to go with us?” asked Mr. Hale, in a kind of helpless dismay.
“Oh, yes!” said Margaret. “Dixon quite intends it, and I don’t know what
mamma would do without her.”
“But we shall have to put up with a very different way of living, I am
afraid. Everything is so much dearer in a town. I doubt if Dixon can
make herself comfortable. To tell you the truth, Margaret, I sometimes
feel as if that woman gave herself airs.”
“To be sure she does, papa,” replied Margaret; “and if she has to put up
with a different style of living, we shall have to put up with her airs,
which will be worse. But she really loves us all, and would be miserable
to leave us, I am sure—especially in this change; so, for mamma’s sake,
and for the sake of her faithfulness, I do think she must go.”
“Very well, my dear. Go on. I am resigned. How far is Heston from
Milton? The breadth of one of your fingers does not give me a very clear
idea of distance.”
“Well, then, I suppose it is thirty miles; that is not much!”
“Not in distance, but in—. Never mind! If you really think it will do
your mother good, let it be fixed so.”
This was a great step. Now Margaret could work, and act, and plan in
good earnest. And now Mrs. Hale could rouse herself from her languor,
and forget her real suffering in thinking of the pleasure and the
delight of going to the sea-side. Her only regret was that Mr. Hale
could not be with her all the fortnight she was to be there, as he had
been for a whole fortnight once, when they were engaged, and she was
staying with Sir John and Lady Beresford at Torquay.
CHAPTER VI.
FAREWELL.
“Unwatch’d the garden bough shall sway,
The tender blossom flutter down,
Unloved that beech will gather brown,
The maple burn itself away;
Unloved, the sun-flower, shining fair,
Ray round with flames her disk of seed,
And many a rose-carnation feed
With summer spice the humming air;
* * * * *
Till from the garden and the wild
A fresh association blow
And year by year the landscape grow
Familiar to the stranger’s child;
As year by year the labourer tills
His wonted glebe, or lops the glades;
And year by year our memory fades
From all the circle of the hills.”
TENNYSON.
The last day came; the house was full of packing-cases, which were being
carted off at the front door, to the nearest railway station. Even the
pretty lawn at the side of the house, was made unsightly and untidy by
the straw that had been wafted upon it through the open door and
windows. The rooms had a strange echoing sound in them,—and the light
came harshly and strongly in through the uncurtained windows,—seeming
already unfamiliar and strange. Mrs. Hale’s dressing-room was left
untouched to the last; and there she and Dixon were packing up clothes,
and interrupting each other every now and then to exclaim at, and turn
over with fond regard, some forgotten treasure, in the shape of some
relic of the children while they were yet little. They did not make much
progress with their work. Down-stairs, Margaret stood calm and
collected, ready to counsel or advise the men who had been called in to
help the cook and Charlotte. These two last, crying between whiles,
wondered how the young lady could keep up so this last day, and settled
it between them that she was not likely to care much for Helstone,
having been so long in London. There she stood, very pale and quiet,
with her large grave eyes observing everything—up to every present
circumstance however small. They could not understand how her heart was
aching all the time, with a heavy pressure that no sighs could lift off
or relieve, and how constant exertion for her perceptive faculties was
the only way to keep herself from crying out with pain. Moreover, if she
gave way, who was to act? Her father was examining papers, books,
registers, what not, in the vestry with the clerk; and when he came in,
there were his own books to pack up, which no one but himself could do
to his satisfaction. Besides, was Margaret one to give way before
strange men, or even household friends like the cook and Charlotte? Not
she! But at last the four packers went into the kitchen to their tea;
and Margaret moved stiffly and slowly away from the place in the hall
where she had been standing so long, out through the bare echoing
drawing-room, into the twilight of an early November evening. There was
a filmy veil of soft dull mist obscuring, but not hiding, all objects,
giving them a lilac hue, for the sun had not yet fully set; a robin was
singing,—perhaps, Margaret thought, the very robin that her father had
so often talked of as his winter pet, and for which he had made, with
his own hands, a kind of robin-house by his study-window. The leaves
were more gorgeous than ever; the first touch of frost would lay them
all low on the ground. Already one or two kept constantly floating down,
amber and golden in the low slanting sun-rays.
Margaret went along the walk under the pear-tree wall. She had never
been along it since she paced it at Henry Lennox’s side. Here, at this
bed of thyme, he began to speak of what she must not think of now. Her
eyes were on that late-blowing rose as she was trying to answer; and she
had caught the idea of the vivid beauty of the feathery leaves of the
carrots in the very middle of his last sentence. Only a fortnight ago!
And all so changed! Where was he now? In London,—going through the old
round; dining with the old Harley Street set, or with gayer young
friends of his own. Even now, while she walked sadly through that damp
and drear garden in the dusk, with everything falling and fading, and
turning to decay around her, he might be gladly putting away his
law-books after a day of satisfactory toil, and freshening himself up,
as he had told her he often did, by a run in the Temple Gardens, taking
in the while the grand inarticulate mighty roar of tens of thousands of
busy men, nigh at hand, but not seen, and catching ever, at his quick
turns, glimpses of the lights of the city coming up out of the depths of
the river. He had often spoken to Margaret of these hasty walks,
snatched in the intervals between study and dinner. At his best times
and in his best moods had he spoken of them; and the thought of them had
struck upon her fancy. Here there was no sound. The robin had gone away
into the vast stillness of night. Now and then, a cottage door in the
distance was opened and shut, as if to admit the tired labourer to his
home; but that sounded very far away. A stealthy, creeping, cranching
sound among the crisp fallen leaves of the forest, beyond the garden,
seemed almost close at hand. Margaret knew it was some poacher. Sitting
up in her bedroom this past autumn, with the light of her candle
extinguished, and purely revelling in the solemn beauty of the heavens
and the earth, she had many a time seen the light noiseless leap of the
poachers over the garden-fence, their quick tramp across the dewy
moonlit lawn, their disappearance in the black still shadow beyond. The
wild adventurous freedom of their life had taken her fancy; she felt
inclined to wish them success; she had no fear of them. But to-night she
was afraid, she knew not why. She heard Charlotte shutting the windows,
and fastening up for the night, unconscious that any one had gone out
into the garden. A small branch—it might be of rotten wood, or it might
be broken by force—came heavily down in the nearest part of the forest;
Margaret ran, swift as Camilla, down to the window, and rapped at it
with a hurried tremulousness which startled Charlotte within.
“Let me in! Let me in! It is only me, Charlotte!” Her heart did not
still its fluttering till she was safe in the drawing-room, with the
windows fastened and bolted, and the familiar walls hemming her round,
and shutting her in. She had sate down upon a packing-case; cheerless,
chill was the dreary and dismantled room—no fire, nor other light, but
Charlotte’s long unsnuffed candle. Charlotte looked at Margaret with
surprise; and Margaret, feeling it rather than seeing it, rose up.