North and South
got employment in a draper’s shop (a capital place, by the way, for
obtaining a knowledge of goods). Week by week, our income came to
fifteen shillings, out of which three people had to be kept. My mother
managed so that I put by three out of these fifteen shillings regularly.
This made the beginning; this taught me self-denial. Now that I am able
to afford my mother such comforts as her age, rather than her own wish,
requires, I thank her silently on each occasion for the early training
she gave me. Now when I feel that in my own case it is no good luck, nor
merit, nor talent,—but simply the habits of life which taught me to
despise indulgences not thoroughly earned,—indeed, never to think twice
about them,—I believe that this suffering, which Miss Hale says is
impressed on the countenances of the people of Milton, is but the
natural punishment of dishonestly-enjoyed pleasure, at some former
period of their lives. I do not look on self-indulgent, sensual people
as worthy of my hatred; I simply look upon them with contempt for their
poorness of character.”
“But you have the rudiments of a good education,” remarked Mr. Hale.
“The quick zest with which you are now reading Homer, shows me that you
do not come to it as an unknown book: you have read it before, and are
only recalling your old knowledge.”
“That is true,—I had blundered along it at school; I dare say, I was
even considered a pretty fair classic in those days, though my Latin and
Greek have slipt away from me since. But I ask you, what preparation
were they for such a life as I had to lead? None at all. Utterly none at
all. On the point of education, any man who can read and write starts
fair with me in the amount of really useful knowledge that I had at that
time.”
“Well! I don’t agree with you. But there I am perhaps somewhat of a
pedant. Did not the recollection of the heroic simplicity of the Homeric
life nerve you up?”
“Not one bit!” exclaimed Mr. Thornton, laughing. “I was too busy to
think about any dead people, with the living pressing alongside of me,
neck to neck, in the struggle for bread. Now that I have my mother safe
in the quiet peace that becomes her age, and duly rewards her former
exertions, I can turn to all that old narration and thoroughly enjoy
it.”
“I dare say, my remark came from the professional feeling of there being
nothing like leather,” replied Mr. Hale.
When Mr. Thornton rose up to go away, after shaking hands with Mr. and
Mrs. Hale, he made an advance to Margaret to wish her good-bye in a
similar manner. It was the frank familiar custom of the place; but
Margaret was not prepared for it. She simply bowed her farewell;
although the instant she saw the hand, half put out, quickly drawn back,
she was sorry she had not been aware of the intention. Mr. Thornton,
however, knew nothing of her sorrow, and, drawing himself up to his full
height, walked off, muttering as he left the house—
“A more proud, disagreeable girl I never saw. Even her great beauty is
blotted out of one’s memory by her scornful ways.”
CHAPTER XI.
FIRST IMPRESSIONS.
“There’s iron, they say, in all our blood,
And a grain or two perhaps is good;
But his, he makes me harshly feel,
Has got a little too much of steel.”
ANON.
“Margaret!” said Mr. Hale as he returned from showing his guest
downstairs; “I could not help watching your face with some anxiety, when
Mr. Thornton made his confession of having been a shop-boy. I knew it
all along from Mr. Bell; so I was aware of what was coming; but I half
expected to see you get up and leave the room.”
“Oh, papa! you don’t mean that you thought me so silly? I really liked
that account of himself better than anything else he said. Everything
else revolted me, from its hardness; but he spoke about himself so
simply—with so little of the pretence that makes the vulgarity of
shop-people, and with such tender respect for his mother, that I was
less likely to leave the room then than when he was boasting about
Milton, as if there was not such another place in the world; or quietly
professing to despise people for careless, wasteful improvidence,
without ever seeming to think it his duty to try to make them
different,—to give them anything of the training which his mother gave
him, and to which he evidently owes his position, whatever that may be.
No! his statement of having been a shop-boy was the thing I liked best
of all.”
“I am surprised at you, Margaret,” said her mother. “You who were always
accusing people of being shoppy at Helstone! I don’t think, Mr. Hale,
you have done quite right in introducing such a person to us without
telling us what he had been. I really was very much afraid of showing
him how much shocked I was at some parts of what he said. His father
‘dying in miserable circumstances.’ Why it might have been in the
workhouse.”
“I am not sure it was not worse than being in the workhouse,” replied
her husband. “I heard a good deal of his previous life from Mr. Bell
before we came here; and as he has told you a part, I will fill up what
he left out. His father speculated wildly, failed, and then killed
himself, because he could not bear the disgrace. All his former friends
shrunk from the disclosures that had to be made of his dishonest
gambling—wild, hopeless struggles, made with other people’s money, to
regain his own moderate portion of wealth. No one came forward to help
the mother and this boy. There was another child, I believe, a girl; too
young to earn money, but of course she had to be kept. At least, no
friend came forward immediately, and Mrs. Thornton is not one, I fancy,
to wait till tardy kindness comes to find her out. So they left Milton.
I knew he had gone into a shop, and that his earnings, with some
fragment of property secured to his mother, had been made to keep them
for a long time. Mr. Bell said they absolutely lived upon water-porridge
for years—how, he did not know; but long after the creditors had given
up hope of any payment of old Mr. Thornton’s debts (if, indeed, they
ever had hoped at all about it, after his suicide), this young man
returned to Milton, and went quietly round to each creditor, paying him
the first instalment of the money owing to him. No noise—no gathering
together of creditors—it was done very silently and quietly, but all
was paid at last; helped on materially by the circumstance of one of the
creditors, a crabbed old fellow (Mr. Bell says), taking in Mr. Thornton
as a kind of partner.”
“That really is fine,” said Margaret. “What a pity such a nature should
be tainted by his position as a Milton manufacturer.”
“How tainted?” asked her father.
“Oh, papa, by that testing everything by the standard of wealth. When he
spoke of the mechanical powers, he evidently looked upon them only as
new ways of extending trade and making money. And the poor men around
him—they were poor because they were vicious—out of the pale of his
sympathies because they had not his iron nature, and the capabilities
that it gives him for being rich.”
“Not vicious; he never said that. Improvident and self-indulgent were
his words.”
Margaret was collecting her mother’s working materials, and preparing to
go to bed. Just as she was leaving the room, she hesitated—she was
inclined to make an acknowledgment which she thought would please her
father, but which to be full and true must include a little annoyance.
However, out it came.
“Papa, I do think Mr. Thornton a very remarkable man; but personally I
don’t like him at all.”
“And I do!” said her father laughing. “Personally, as you call it, and
all. I don’t set him up for a hero, or anything of that kind. But
good-night, child. Your mother looks sadly tired to-night, Margaret.”
Margaret had noticed her mother’s jaded appearance with anxiety for some
time past, and this remark of her father’s sent her up to bed with a dim
fear lying like a weight on her heart. The life in Milton was so
different from what Mrs. Hale had been accustomed to live in Helstone,
in and out perpetually into the fresh and open air; the air itself was
so different, deprived of all revivifying principle as it seemed to be
here; the domestic worries pressed so very closely, and in so new and
sordid a form, upon all the women in the family, that there was good
reason to fear that her mother’s health might be becoming seriously
affected. There were several other signs of something wrong about Mrs.
Hale. She and Dixon held mysterious consultations in her bedroom, from
which Dixon would come out crying and cross, as was her custom when any
distress of her mistress called upon her sympathy. Once Margaret had
gone into the chamber soon after Dixon left it, and found her mother on
her knees, and as Margaret stole out she caught a few words which were
evidently a prayer for strength and patience to endure severe bodily
suffering. Margaret yearned to re-unite the bond of intimate confidence
which had been broken by her long residence at her aunt Shaw’s, and
strove by gentle caresses and softened words to creep into the warmest
place in her mother’s heart. But though she received caresses and fond
words back again, in such profusion as would have gladdened her
formerly, yet she felt that there was a secret withheld from her, and
she believed it bore serious reference to her mother’s health. She lay
awake very long this night, planning how to lessen the evil influence of
their Milton life on her mother. A servant to give Dixon permanent
assistance should be got, if she gave up her whole time to the search;
and then, at any rate, her mother might have all the personal attention
she required, and had been accustomed to her whole life.
Visiting register offices, seeing all manner of unlikely people, and
very few in the least likely, absorbed Margaret’s time and thoughts for
several days. One afternoon she met Bessy Higgins in the street, and
stopped to speak to her.
“Well, Bessy, how are you? Better, I hope, now the wind has changed.”
“Better and not better, if yo’ know what that means.”
“Not exactly,” replied Margaret, smiling.
“I’m better in not being torn to pieces by coughing o’ nights, but I’m
weary and tired o’ Milton, and longing to get away to the land o’
Beulah? and when I think I’m farther and farther off, my heart sinks,
and I’m no better; I’m worse.”
Margaret turned round to walk alongside of the girl in her feeble
progress homeward. But for a minute or two she did not speak. At last
she said in a low voice,
“Bessy, do you wish to die?” For she shrank from death herself, with all
the clinging to life so natural to the young and healthy.
Bessy was silent in her turn for a minute or two. Then she replied,
“If yo’d led the life I have, and getten as weary of it as I have, and
thought at times, ‘maybe it’ll last for fifty or sixty years—it does
wi’ some,’—and got dizzy and dazed, and sick, as each of them sixty
years seemed to spin about me, and mock me with its length of hours and
minutes, and endless bits o’ time—oh, wench! I tell thee thou’d been
glad enough when th’ doctor said he feared thou’d never see another
winter.”
“Why, Bessy, what kind of a life has yours been?”
“Nought worse than many others’, I reckon. Only I fretted against it,
and they didn’t.”
“But what was it? You know, I’m a stranger here, so perhaps I’m not so
quick at understanding what you mean as if I’d lived all my life at
Milton.”
“If yo’d ha’ come to our house when yo’ said yo’ would, I could maybe
ha’ told you. But father says yo’re just like th’ rest on ’em; its out
o’ sight out o’ mind wi’ you.”
“I don’t know who the rest are; and I’ve been very busy; and, to tell
the truth, I had forgotten my promise—”
“Yo’ offered it; we asked none of it.”