North and South
been to enjoin me to keep his visit a secret from all. You see, papa
never told, even you. No! I could bear the shame—I thought I could at
least. I did bear it. Mr. Thornton has never respected me since.”
“He respects you, I am sure,” said Mr. Bell. “To be sure it accounts a
little for——. But he always speaks of you with regard and esteem,
though now I understand certain reservations in his manner.”
Margaret did not speak; did not attend to what Mr. Bell had to say; lost
all sense of it. By-and-by she said:
“Will you tell me what you refer to about ‘reservations’ in his manner
of speaking to me?”
“Oh! simply he has annoyed me by not joining in my praises of you. Like
an old fool, I thought that every one would have the same opinion as I
had; and he evidently could not agree with me. I was puzzled at the
time. But he must be perplexed, if the affair has never been in the
least explained. There was first your walking out with a young man in
the dark——”
“But it was my brother!” said Margaret, surprised.
“True. But how was he to know that?”
“I don’t know. I never thought anything of that kind,” said Margaret,
reddening, and looking hurt and offended.
“And perhaps he never would, but for the lie,—which, under the
circumstances, I maintain, was necessary.”
“It was not. I know it now. I bitterly repent it.”
There was a long pause of silence. Margaret was the first to speak.
“I am not likely ever to see Mr. Thornton again,”—and there she
stopped.
“There are many things more unlikely, I should say,” replied Mr. Bell.
“But I believe I never shall. Still, somehow one does not like to have
sunk so low in—in a friend’s opinion as I have done in his.” Her eyes
were full of tears, but her voice was steady, and Mr. Bell was not
looking at her. “And now that Frederick has given up all hope, and
almost all wish of ever clearing himself, and returning to England, it
would be only doing myself justice to have all this explained. If you
please, and if you can, if there is a good opportunity, (don’t force an
explanation upon him, pray,) but if you can, will you tell him the whole
circumstances, and tell him also that I gave you leave to do so, because
I felt that for poor papa’s sake I should not like to lose his respect,
though we may never be likely to meet again?”
“Certainly. I think he ought to know. I do not like you to rest even
under a shadow of an impropriety; he would not know what to think of
seeing you alone with a young man.”
“As for that,” said Margaret, rather haughtily, “I hold it is ‘Honi soit
qui mal y pense,’ Yet still I should choose to have it explained, if any
natural opportunity for easy explanation occurs. But it is not to clear
myself of any suspicion of improper conduct that I wish to have him
told—if I thought that he had suspected me, I should not care for his
good opinion—no! it is that he may learn how I was tempted, and how I
fell into the snare; why I told that falsehood, in short.”
“Which I don’t blame you for. It is no partiality of mine, I assure
you.”
“What other people may think of the rightness or wrongness is nothing in
comparison to my own deep knowledge, my innate conviction that it was
wrong. But we will not talk of that any more, if you please. It is
done—my sin is sinned. I have now to put it behind me, and be truthful
for evermore, if I can.”
“Very well. If you like to be uncomfortable and morbid, be so. I always
keep my conscience as tight shut up as a jack-in-a-box, for when it
jumps into existence it surprises me by its size. So I coax it down
again, as the fisherman coaxed the genii. ‘Wonderful,’ says I, ‘to think
that you have been concealed so long, and in so small a compass, that I
really did not know of your existence. Pray, sir, instead of growing
larger and larger every instant, and bewildering me with your misty
outlines, would you once more compress yourself into your former
dimensions?’ And when I’ve got him down, don’t I clap the seal on the
vase, and take good care how I open it again, and how I go against
Solomon, wisest of men, who confined him there.”
But it was no smiling matter to Margaret. She hardly attended to what
Mr. Bell was saying. Her thoughts ran upon the idea, before entertained,
but which now had assumed the strength of a conviction, that Mr.
Thornton no longer held his former good opinion of her—that he was
disappointed in her. She did not feel as if any explanation could ever
reinstate her—not in his love, for that and any return on her part she
had resolved never to dwell upon, and she kept rigidly to her
resolution—but in the respect and high regard which she had hoped would
have ever made him willing, in the spirit of Gerald Griffin’s beautiful
lines,
“To turn and look back when thou hearest
The sound of my name.”
She kept choking and swallowing all the time that she thought about it.
She tried to comfort herself with the idea, that what he imagined her to
be, did not alter the fact of what she was. But it was a truism, a
phantom, and broke down under the weight of her regret. She had twenty
questions on the tip of her tongue to ask Mr. Bell, but not one of them
did she utter. Mr. Bell thought that she was tired, and sent her early
to her room, where she sate long hours by the open window, gazing out on
the purple dome above, where the stars arose, and twinkled and
disappeared behind the great umbrageous trees before she went to bed.
All night long too, there burnt a little light on earth; a candle in her
old bedroom, which was the nursery with the present inhabitants of the
parsonage, until the new one was built. A sense of change, of individual
nothingness, of perplexity and disappointment, overpowered Margaret.
Nothing had been the same; and this slight, all-pervading instability,
had given her greater pain than if all had been too entirely changed for
her to recognise it.
“I begin to understand now what heaven must be—and, oh! the grandeur
and repose of the words—‘The same yesterday, to-day, and for ever.’
Everlasting! ‘From everlasting to everlasting, Thou art God.’ That
beautiful sky above me looks as though it could not change, and yet it
will. I am so tired—so tired of being whirled on through all these
phases of my life, in which nothing abides by me, no creature, no place;
it is like the circle in which the victims of earthly passion eddy
continually. I am in the mood in which women of another religion take
the veil. I seek heavenly steadfastness in earthly monotony. If I were a
Roman Catholic and could deaden my heart, stun it with some great blow,
I might become a nun. But I should pine after my kind; no, not my kind,
for love for my species could never fill my heart to the utter exclusion
of love for individuals. Perhaps it ought to be so, perhaps not; I
cannot decide to-night.”
Wearily she went to bed, wearily she arose in four or five hours’ time.
But with the morning came hope, and a brighter view of things.
“After all it is right,” said she, hearing the voices of children at
play while she was dressing. “If the world stood still, it would
retrograde and become corrupt, if that is not Irish. Looking out of
myself and my own painful sense of change, the progress of all around me
is right and necessary. I must not think so much of how circumstances
affect me myself, but how they affect others, if I wish to have a right
judgment, or a hopeful trustful heart.” And with a smile ready in her
eyes to quiver down to her lips, she went into the parlour and greeted
Mr. Bell.
“Ah, Missy! you were up late last night, and so you’re late this
morning. Now I’ve got a little piece of news for you. What do you think
of an invitation to dinner? a morning call, literally in the dewy
morning. Why, I’ve had the Vicar here already, on his way to the school.
How much the desire of giving our hostess a teetotal lecture for the
benefit of the hay-makers, had to do with his earliness, I don’t know;
but here he was, when I came down just before nine; and we are asked to
dine there to-day.”
“But Edith expects me back—I cannot go,” said Margaret, thankful to
have so good an excuse.
“Yes! I know; so I told him. I thought you would not want to go. Still
it is open, if you would like it.”
“Oh, no!” said Margaret. “Let us keep to our plan. Let us start at
twelve. It is very good and kind of them; but indeed I could not go.”
“Very well. Don’t fidget yourself, and I’ll arrange it all.”
Before they left, Margaret stole round to the back of the Vicarage
garden, and gathered a little straggling piece of honeysuckle. She would
not take a flower the day before, for fear of being observed, and her
motives and feelings commented upon. But as she returned across the
common, the place was reinvested with the old enchanting atmosphere. The
common sounds of life were more musical there than anywhere else in the
whole world, the light more golden, the life more tranquil and full of
dreamy delight. As Margaret remembered her feelings yesterday, she said
to herself:
“And I too change perpetually—now this, now that—now disappointment
and peevish because all is not exactly as I had pictured it, and now
suddenly discovering that the reality is far more beautiful than I had
imagined it. Oh, Helstone! I shall never love any place like you.”
A few days afterwards, she had found her level, and decided that she was
very glad to have been there, and that she had seen it again, and that
to her it would always be the prettiest spot in the world, but that it
was so full of associations with former days, and especially with her
father and mother, that if it were all to come over again, she should
shrink back from such another visit as that which she had paid with Mr.
Bell.
CHAPTER XLVII.
SOMETHING WANTING.
“Experience, like a pale musician, holds
A dulcimer of patience in his hand;
Whence harmonies we cannot understand,
Of God’s will in His worlds, the strain unfolds
In sad, perplexed minors.”
MRS. BROWNING.
About this time Dixon returned from Milton, and assumed her post as
Margaret’s maid. She brought endless pieces of Milton gossip: How Martha
had gone to live with Miss Thornton, on the latter’s marriage; with an
account of the bridesmaids, dresses and breakfasts, at that interesting
ceremony; how people thought that Mr. Thornton had made too grand a
wedding of it, considering he had lost a deal by the strike, and had had
to pay so much for the failure of his contracts; how little money
articles of furniture—long cherished by Dixon—had fetched at the sale,
which was a shame considering how rich folks were at Milton; how Mrs.
Thornton had come one day and got two or three good bargains, and Mr.
Thornton had come the next, and in his desire to obtain one or two
things, had bid against himself, much to the enjoyment of the
bystanders, so as Dixon observed, that made things even; if Mrs.
Thornton paid too little, Mr. Thornton paid too much. Mr. Bell had sent
all sorts of orders about the books; there was no understanding him, he
was so particular; if he had come himself it would have been all right,
but letters always were and always will be more puzzling than they are
worth. Dixon had not much to tell about the Higginses. Her memory had an
aristocratic bias, and was very treacherous whenever she tried to recall
any circumstance connected with those below her in life. Nicholas was
very well she believed. He had been several times at the house asking
for news of Miss Margaret—the only person who ever did ask, except once
Mr. Thornton. And Mary? oh! of course she was very well, a great, stout,
slatternly thing! She did hear, or perhaps it was only a dream of hers,
though it would be strange if she had dreamt of such people as the