North and South
Bessy seemed much quieter to-day, but fearfully languid and exhausted.
As she finished speaking, she looked so faint and weary that Margaret
became alarmed.
“It’s nout,” said Bessy. “It’s not death yet. I had a fearfu’ night wi’
dreams—or somewhat like dreams, for I were wide awake—and I’m all in a
swounding daze to-day,—only yon poor chap made me alive again. No! it’s
not death yet, but death is not far off. Ay. Cover me up, and I’ll may
be sleep, if th’ cough will let me. Good night—good afternoon, m’appen
I should say—but th’ light is dim an’ misty to-day.”
CHAPTER XX.
MEN AND GENTLEMEN.
“Old and young, boy, let ’em all eat, I have it;
Let ’em have ten tire of teeth a-piece, I care not.”
ROLLO, DUKE OF NORMANDY.
Margaret went home so painfully occupied with what she had heard and
seen that she hardly knew how to rouse herself up to the duties which
awaited her; the necessity for keeping up a constant flow of cheerful
conversation for her mother, who, now that she was unable to go out,
always looked to Margaret’s return from the shortest walk as bringing in
some news.
“And can your factory friend come on Thursday to see you dressed?”
“She was so ill I never thought of asking her,” said Margaret,
dolefully.
“Dear! Everybody is ill now, I think,” said Mrs. Hale, with a little of
the jealousy which one invalid is apt to feel of another. “But it must
be very sad to be ill in one of those little back streets.” (Her kindly
nature prevailing, and the old Helstone habits of thought returning.)
“It’s bad enough here. What could you do for her, Margaret? Mr. Thornton
has sent me some of his old port wine since you went out. Would a bottle
of that do her good, think you?”
“No, mamma! I don’t believe they are very poor,—at least, they don’t
speak as if they were; and, at any rate, Bessy’s illness is
consumption—she won’t want wine. Perhaps, I might take her a little
preserve, made of our dear Helstone fruit. No! there’s another family to
whom I should like to give—Oh mamma, mamma! how am I to dress up in my
finery, and go off and away to smart parties, after the sorrow I’ve seen
to-day?” exclaimed Margaret, bursting the bounds she had preordained for
herself before she came in, and telling her mother what she had seen and
heard at Higgins’s cottage.
It distressed Mrs. Hale excessively. It made her restlessly irritated
till she could do something. She directed Margaret to pack up a basket
in the very drawing-room, to be sent there and then to the family; and
was almost angry with her for saying, that it would not signify if it
did not go till morning, as she knew Higgins had provided for their
immediate wants, and she herself had left money with Bessy. Mrs. Hale
called her unfeeling for saying this; and never gave herself
breathing-time till the basket was sent out of the house. Then she said:
“After all, we may have been doing wrong. It was only the last time Mr.
Thornton was here that he said, those were no true friends who helped to
prolong the struggle by assisting the turn-outs. And this Boucher-man
was a turn-out, was he not?”
The question was referred to Mr. Hale by his wife, when he came
upstairs, fresh from giving a lesson to Mr. Thornton, which had ended in
conversation, as was their wont. Margaret did not care if their gifts
had prolonged the strife; she did not think far enough for that, in her
present excited state.
Mr. Hale listened, and tried to be as calm as a judge; he recalled all
that had seemed so clear not half-an-hour before, as it came out of Mr.
Thornton’s lips; and then he made an unsatisfactory compromise. His wife
and daughter had not only done quite right in this instance, but he did
not see for a moment how they could have done otherwise. Nevertheless,
as a general rule, it was very true what Mr. Thornton said, that as the
strike, if prolonged, must end in the masters bringing hands from a
distance (if, indeed, the final result were not, as it had often been
before, the invention of some machine which would diminish the need of
hands at all), why, it was clear enough that the kindest thing was to
refuse all help which might bolster them up in their folly. But as to
this Boucher, he would go and see him the first thing in the morning,
and try and find out what could be done for him.
Mr. Hale went the next morning, as he proposed. He did not find Boucher
at home, but he had a long talk with his wife; promised to ask for an
Infirmary order for her; and, seeing the plenty provided by Mrs. Hale, and
somewhat lavishly used by the children, who were masters downstairs in
their father’s absence, he came back with a more consoling and cheerful
account than Margaret had dared to hope for; indeed, what she had said
the night before had prepared her father for so much worse a state of
things that, by a re-action of his imagination, he described all as
better than it really was.
“But I will go again, and see the man himself,” said Mr. Hale. “I hardly
know as yet how to compare one of these houses with our Helstone
cottages. I see furniture here which our labourers would never have
thought of buying, and food commonly used which they would consider
luxuries; yet for these very families there seems no other resource now
that their weekly wages are stopped, but the pawn-shop. One had need to
learn a different standard, up here in Milton.”
Bessy, too, was rather better this day. Still she was so weak that she
seemed to have entirely forgotten her wish to see Margaret dressed—if,
indeed, that had not been the feverish desire of a half delirious state.
Margaret could not help comparing this strange dressing of hers, to go
where she did not care to be—her heart heavy with various
anxieties—with the old, merry, girlish toilettes that she and Edith had
performed scarcely more than a year ago. Her only pleasure now in
decking herself out was in thinking that her mother would take delight
in seeing her dressed. She blushed when Dixon, throwing the drawing-room
door open, made an appeal for admiration.
“Miss Hale looks well, ma’am,—doesn’t she? Mrs. Shaw’s coral couldn’t
have come in better. It just gives the right touch of colour, ma’am.
Otherwise, Miss Margaret, you would have been too pale.”
Margaret’s black hair was too thick to be plaited; it needed rather to
be twisted round and round, and have its fine silkiness compressed into
massive coils, that encircled her head like a crown, and then were
gathered into a large spiral knot behind. She kept its weight together
by two large coral pins, like small arrows for length. Her white silk
sleeves were looped up with strings of the same material, and on her
neck, just below the base of her curved and milk-white throat, there lay
heavy coral beads.
“Oh, Margaret! how I should like to be going with you to one of the old
Barrington assemblies,—taking you as Lady Beresford used to take me.”
Margaret kissed her mother for this little burst of maternal vanity; but
she could hardly smile at it, she felt so much out of spirits.
“I would rather stay at home with you,—much rather, mamma.”
“Nonsense, darling! Be sure you notice the dinner well. I shall like to
hear how they manage these things in Milton. Particularly the second
course, dear. Look what they have instead of game.”
Mrs. Hale would have been more than interested,—she would have been
astonished, if she had seen the sumptuousness of the dinner-table and
its appointments. Margaret, with her London cultivated taste, felt the
number of delicacies to be oppressive; one half of the quantity would
have been enough, and the effect tighter and more elegant. But it was
one of Mrs. Thornton’s rigorous laws of hospitality, that of each
separate dainty enough should be provided for all the guests to partake,
if they felt inclined. Careless to abstemiousness in her daily habits,
it was part of her pride to set a feast before such of her guests as
cared for it. Her son shared this feeling. He had never known—though he
might have imagined, and had the capability to relish—any kind of
society but that which depended on an exchange of superb meals: and even
now, though he was denying himself the personal expenditure of an
unnecessary sixpence, and had more than once regretted that the
invitations for this dinner had been sent out, still, as it was to be,
he was glad to see the old magnificence of preparation.
Margaret and her father were the first to arrive. Mr. Hale was anxiously
punctual to the time specified. There was no one upstairs in the
drawing-room but Mrs. Thornton and Fanny. Every cover was taken off, and
the apartment blazed forth in yellow silk damask and a brilliantly
flowered carpet. Every corner seemed filled up with ornament, until it
became a weariness to the eye, and presented a strange contrast to the
bald ugliness of the look-out into the great mill-yard, where wide
folding gates were thrown open for the admission of carriages. The mill
loomed high on the left-hand side of the windows, casting a shadow down
from its many stories, which darkened the summer evening before its
time.
“My son was engaged up to the last moment on business. He will be here
directly, Mr. Hale. May I beg you to take a seat?”
Mr. Hale was standing at one of the windows as Mrs. Thornton spoke. He
turned away, saying,
“Don’t you find such close neighbourhood to the mill rather unpleasant
at times?”
She drew herself up:
“Never. I am not become so fine as to desire to forget the source of my
son’s wealth and power. Besides, there is not such another factory in
Milton. One room alone is two hundred and twenty square yards.”
“I meant that the smoke and the noise—the constant going out and coming
in of the workpeople, might be annoying!”
“I agree with you, Mr. Hale!” said Fanny. “There is a continual smell of
steam and oily machinery—and the noise is perfectly deafening.”
“I have heard noise that was called music far more deafening. The
engine-room is at the street-end of the factory; we hardly hear it,
except in summer weather, when all the windows are open; and as for the
continual murmur of the workpeople, it disturbs me no more than the
humming of a hive of bees. If I think of it at all, I connect it with my
son, and feel how all belongs to him, and that his is the head that
directs it. Just now, there are no sounds to come from the mill; the
hands have been ungrateful enough to turn out, as perhaps you have
heard. But the very business (of which I spoke when you entered), had
reference to the steps he is going to take to make them learn their
place.” The expression on her face, always stern, deepened into dark
anger, as she said this. Nor did it clear away when Mr. Thornton entered
the room; for she saw in an instant, the weight of care and anxiety
which he could not shake off, although his guests received from him a
greeting that appeared both cheerful and cordial. He shook hands with
Margaret. He knew it was the first time their hands had met, though she
was perfectly unconscious of the fact. He inquired after Mrs. Hale, and
heard Mr. Hale’s sanguine, hopeful account; and, glancing to Margaret,
to understand how far she agreed with her father, he saw that no
dissenting shadow crossed her face. And as he looked with this
intention, he was struck anew with her great beauty. He had never seen
her in such dress before; and yet now it appeared that such elegance of
attire was so befitting her noble figure and lofty serenity of
countenance that she ought to go always thus apparelled. She was talking
to Fanny; about what he could not hear; but he saw his sister’s restless
way of continually arranging some part of her gown, her wandering eyes,
now glancing here, now there, but without any purpose in her