North and South
“Yo’ spoke of my wisdom this morning. I reckon I may bring it wi’ me; or
would yo’ rayther have me ’bout my brains?”
“’Bout your brains if you use them for meddling with my business; with
your brains if you can keep to your own.”
“I shall need a deal o’ brains to settle where my business ends and
yo’rs begins.”
“Your business has not begun yet, and mine stands still for me. So good
afternoon.”
Just before Mr. Thornton came up to Mrs. Boucher’s door, Margaret came
out of it. She did not see him; and he followed her for several yards,
admiring her light and easy walk, and her tall and graceful figure. But,
suddenly, this simple emotion of pleasure was tainted, poisoned by
jealousy. He wished to overtake her, and speak to her, to see how she
would receive him, now she must know he was aware of some other
attachment. He wished too, but of this wish he was rather ashamed, that
she should know that he had justified her wisdom in sending Higgins to
him to ask for work, and had repented him of his morning’s decision. He
came up to her. She started.
“Allow me to say, Miss Hale, that you were rather premature in
expressing your disappointment. I have taken Higgins on.”
“I am glad of it,” said she coldly.
“He tells me, he repeated to you, what I said this morning about—,” Mr.
Thornton hesitated. Margaret took it up:
“About women not meddling. You had a perfect right to express your
opinion, which was a very correct one, I have no doubt. But,” she went
on a little more eagerly, “Higgins did not quite tell you the exact
truth.” The word “truth,” reminded her of her own untruth, and she
stopped short, feeling exceedingly uncomfortable.
Mr. Thornton at first was puzzled to account for her silence; and then
he remembered the lie she had told, and all that was foregone. “The
exact truth!” said he. “Very few people do speak the exact truth. I have
given up hoping for it. Miss Hale, have you no explanation to give me?
You must perceive what I cannot but think.”
Margaret was silent. She was wondering whether an explanation of any
kind would be consistent with her loyalty to Frederick.
“Nay,” said he, “I will ask no farther. I may be putting temptation in
your way. At present, believe me, your secret is safe with me. But you
run great risks, allow me to say, in being so indiscreet. I am only
speaking as a friend of your father’s: if I had any other thought or
hope, of course that is at an end. I am quite disinterested.”
“I am aware of that,” said Margaret, forcing herself to speak in an
indifferent, careless way. “I am aware of what I must appear to you, but
the secret is another person’s, and I cannot explain it without doing
him harm.”
“I have not the slightest wish to pry into the gentleman’s secrets,” he
said, with growing anger. “My own interest in you is—simply that of a
friend. You may not believe me, Miss Hale, but it is—in spite of the
persecution I’m afraid I threatened you with at one time—but that is
all given up; all passed away. You believe me, Miss Hale?”
“Yes,” said Margaret, quietly and sadly.
“Then, really, I don’t see any reason for us to go on walking together.
I thought, perhaps, you might have had something to say, but I see we
are nothing to each other. If you’re quite convinced, that any foolish
passion on my part is entirely over, I wish you good afternoon.” He
walked off very hastily.
“What can he mean?” thought Margaret,—“what could he mean by speaking
so, as if I were always thinking that he cared for me, when I know he
does not; he cannot. His mother will have said all those cruel things
about me to him. But I won’t care for him. I surely am mistress enough
of myself to control this wild, strange, miserable feeling, which
tempted me even to betray my own dear Frederick, so that I might but
regain his good opinion—the good opinion of a man who takes such pains
to tell me that I am nothing to him. Come! poor little heart! be cheery
and brave. We’ll be a great deal to one another, if we are thrown off
and left desolate.”
Her father was almost startled by her merriment this morning. She talked
incessantly, and forced her natural humour to an unusual pitch; and if
there was a tinge of bitterness in much of what she said; if her
accounts of the old Harley Street set were a little sarcastic, her
father could not bear to check her, as he would have done at another
time—for he was glad to see her shake off her cares. In the middle of
the evening, she was called down to speak to Mary Higgins; and when she
came back, Mr. Hale imagined that he saw traces of tears on her cheeks.
But that could not be, for she brought good news—that Higgins had got
work at Mr. Thornton’s mill. Her spirits were damped, at any rate, and
she found it very difficult to go on talking at all, much more in the
wild way that she had done. For some days her spirits varied strangely;
and her father was beginning to be anxious about her, when news arrived
from one or two quarters that promised some change and variety for her.
Mr. Hale received a letter from Mr. Bell, in which that gentleman
volunteered a visit to them; and Mr. Hale imagined that the promised
society of his old Oxford friend would give as agreeable a turn to
Margaret’s ideas as it did to his own. Margaret tried to take an
interest in what pleased her father; but she was too languid to care
about any Mr. Bell, even though he were twenty times her godfather. She
was more roused by a letter from Edith, full of sympathy about her
aunt’s death; full of details about herself, her husband, and child; and
at the end saying, that as the climate did not suit the baby, and as
Mrs. Shaw was talking of returning to England, she thought it probable
that Captain Lennox might sell out, and that they might all go and live
again in the old Harley Street house; which, however, would seem very
incomplete without Margaret. Margaret yearned after that old house, and
the placid tranquility of that well-ordered, monotonous life. She had
found it occasionally tiresome while it lasted; but since then she had
been buffeted about, and felt so exhausted by this recent struggle with
herself, that she thought that even stagnation would be a rest and a
refreshment. So she began to look towards a long visit to the Lennoxes,
on their return to England, as to a point—no, not of hope—but of
leisure, in which she could regain her power and command over herself.
At present it seemed to her as if all subjects tended towards Mr.
Thornton; as if she could not forget him with all her endeavours. If she
went to see the Higginses, she heard of him there; her father had
resumed their readings together, and quoted his opinions perpetually;
even Mr. Bell’s visit brought his tenant’s name upon the tapis; for he
wrote word, that he believed he must be occupied some great part of his
time with Mr. Thornton, as a new lease was in preparation, and the terms
of it must be agreed upon.
CHAPTER XL.
OUT OF TUNE.
“I have no wrong, where I can claim no right,
Naught ta’en me fro, where I have nothing had,
Yet of my woe I cannot so be quite;
Namely, since that another may be glad
With that, that thus in sorrow makes me sad.”
WYATT.
Margaret had not expected much pleasure to herself from Mr. Bell’s
visit—she had only looked forward to it on her father’s account, but
when her godfather came, she at once fell into the most natural position
of friendship in the world. He said she had no merit in being what she
was, a girl so entirely after his own heart: it was an hereditary power
which she had, to walk in and take possession of his regard; while she,
in reply, gave him much credit for being so fresh and young under his
Fellow’s cap and gown.
“Fresh and young in warmth and kindness, I mean. I’m afraid I must own,
that I think your opinions are the oldest and mustiest I have met with
this long time.”
“Hear this daughter of yours, Hale! Her residence in Milton has quite
corrupted her. She’s a democrat, a red republican, a member of the Peace
Society, a socialist—”
“Papa, it’s all because I’m standing up for the progress of commerce.
Mr. Bell would have had it keep still at exchanging wild-beast skins for
acorns.”
“No, no. I’d dig the ground and grow potatoes. And I’d shave the
wild-beast skin and make the wool into broadcloth. Don’t exaggerate,
missy. But I’m tired of this bustle. Everybody rushing over everybody,
in their hurry to get rich.”
“It is not everyone who can sit comfortably in a set of college rooms
and let his riches grow without any exertion of his own. No doubt there
is many a man here who would be thankful if his property would increase
as yours has done, without his taking any trouble about it,” said Mr.
Hale.
“I don’t believe they would. It’s the bustle and the struggle they like.
As for sitting still, and learning from the past, or shaping out the
future by faithful work done in a prophetic spirit—Why! Pooh! I don’t
believe there’s a man in Milton who knows how to sit still; and it is a
great art.”
“Milton people, I suspect, think Oxford men don’t know how to move. It
would be a very good thing if they mixed a little more.”
“It might be good for the Miltoners. Many things might be good for them
which would be very disagreeable for other people.”
“Are you not a Milton man yourself?” asked Margaret. “I should have
thought you would have been proud of your town.”
“I confess, I don’t see what there is to be proud of. If you’ll only
come to Oxford, Margaret, I will show you a place to glory in.”
“Well!” said Mr. Hale, “Mr. Thornton is coming to drink tea with us
to-night, and he is as proud of Milton as you of Oxford. You two must
try and make each other a little more liberal-minded.”
“I don’t want to be more liberal-minded, thank you,” said Mr. Bell.
“Is Mr. Thornton coming to tea, papa!” asked Margaret in a low voice.
“Either to tea or soon after. He could not tell. He told us not to
wait.”
Mr. Thornton had determined that he would make no inquiry of his mother
as to how far she had put her project into execution of speaking to
Margaret about the impropriety of her conduct. He felt pretty sure that,
if this interview took place, his mother’s account of what passed at it
would only annoy and chagrin him, though he would all the time be aware
of the colouring which it received by passing through her mind. He
shrank from hearing Margaret’s very name mentioned; he, while he blamed
her—while he was jealous of her—while he renounced her—he loved her
sorely, in spite of himself. He dreamt of her; he dreamt she came
dancing towards him with outspread arms, and with a lightness and gaiety
which made him loathe her, even while it allured him. But the impression
of this figure of Margaret—with all Margaret’s character taken out of
it, as completely as if some evil spirit had got possession of her
form—was so deeply stamped upon his imagination, that when he wakened
he felt hardly able to separate the Una from the Duessa; and the dislike
he had to the latter seemed to envelop and disfigure the former. Yet he
was too proud to acknowledge his weakness by avoiding the sight of her.
He would neither seek an opportunity of being in her company nor avoid
it. To convince himself of his power of self-control, he lingered over
every piece of business this afternoon; he forced every movement into
unnatural slowness and deliberation; and it was consequently past eight
o’clock before he reached Mr. Hale’s. Then there were business
arrangements to be transacted in the study with Mr. Bell; and the latter
kept on, sitting over the fire, and talking wearily, long after all
business was transacted, and when they might just as well have gone