North and South
anxious hesitation, as he noticed the filmy sorrow that came over her
eyes, and the sudden change in her complexion. But she recovered herself
immediately.
“Yes, papa, it had better be fixed soon and decidedly, as you say. Only
mamma to know nothing about it! It is that that is the great
perplexity.”
“Poor Maria!” replied Mr. Hale tenderly. “Poor, poor Maria! Oh, if I
were not married—if I were but myself in the world, how easy it would
be! As it is—Margaret, I dare not tell her!”
“No,” said Margaret, sadly, “I will do it. Give me till to-morrow
evening to choose my time. Oh, papa,” cried she with sudden passionate
entreaty, “say—tell me it is a nightmare—a horrid dream—not the real
waking truth! You cannot mean that you are really going to leave the
Church—to give up Helstone—to be for ever separate from me, from
mamma—led away by some delusion—some temptation! You do not really
mean it!”
Mr. Hale sat in rigid stillness while she spoke.
Then he looked her in the face, and said in a slow, hoarse, measured
way—“I do mean it, Margaret. You must not deceive yourself in doubting
the reality of my words—my fixed intention and resolve.” He looked at
her in the same steady, stony manner, for some moments after he had done
speaking. She, too, gazed back with pleading eyes before she would
believe it was irrevocable. Then she arose and went, without another
word or look, towards the door. As her fingers were on the handle he
called her back. He was standing by the fireplace, shrunk and stooping;
but as she came near he drew himself up to his full height, and, placing
his hands on her head, he said, solemnly:
“The blessing of God be upon thee, my child!”
“And may He restore you to His Church,” responded she, out of the
fulness of her heart. The next moment she feared lest this answer to his
blessing might be irreverent, wrong—might hurt him as coming from his
daughter, and she threw her arms round his neck. He held her to him for
a minute or two. She heard him murmur to himself, “The martyrs and
confessors had even more pain to bear—I will not shrink.”
They were startled by hearing Mrs. Hale inquiring for her daughter. They
started asunder in the full consciousness of all that was before them.
Mr. Hale hurriedly said, “Go, Margaret, go. I shall be out all to-morrow.
Before night you will have told your mother.”
“Yes,” she replied, and she returned to the drawing-room in a stunned
and dizzy state.
CHAPTER V.
DECISION.
“I ask Thee for a thoughtful love,
Through constant watching wise,
To meet the glad with joyful smiles,
And to wipe the weeping eyes;
And a heart at leisure from itself
To soothe and sympathise.”
ANON.
Margaret made a good listener to all her mother’s little plans for
adding some small comforts to the lot of the poorest parishioners. She
could not help listening, though each new project was a stab to her
heart. By the time the frost had set in, they should be far away from
Helstone. Old Simon’s rheumatism might be bad and his eyesight worse;
there would be no one to go and read to him, and comfort him with little
porringers of broth and good red flannel; or if there was, it would be a
stranger, and the old man would watch in vain for her. Mary Domville’s
little crippled boy would crawl in vain to the door and look for her
coming through the forest. These poor friends would never understand why
she had forsaken them; and there were many others besides. “Papa has
always spent the income he derived from his living in the parish. I am,
perhaps, encroaching upon the next dues, but the winter is likely to be
severe, and our poor people must be helped.”
“Oh, mamma, let us do all we can,” said Margaret eagerly, not seeing the
prudential side of the question, only grasping at the idea that they
were rendering such help for the last time; “we may not be here long.”
“Do you feel ill, my darling?” asks Mrs. Hale, anxiously,
misunderstanding Margaret’s hint of the uncertainty of their stay at
Helstone. “You look pale and tired. It is this soft, damp, unhealthy
air.”
“No—no, mamma, it is not that: it is delicious air. It smells of the
freshest, purest fragrance, after the smokiness of Harley Street. But I
am tired: it surely must be near bedtime.”
“Not far off—it is half-past nine. You had better go to bed at once,
dear. Ask Dixon for some gruel. I will come and see you as soon as you
are in bed. I am afraid you have taken cold; or the bad air from some of
the stagnant ponds—”
“Oh, mamma,” said Margaret, faintly smiling as she kissed her mother, “I
am quite well—don’t alarm yourself about me; I am only tired.”
Margaret went up stairs. To soothe her mother’s anxiety she submitted to
a basin of gruel. She was lying languidly in bed when Mrs. Hale came up
to make some last inquiries and kiss her before going to her own room
for the night. But the instant she heard her mother’s door locked, she
sprang out of bed, and throwing her dressing-gown on, she began to pace
up and down the room, until the creaking of one of the boards reminded
her that she must make no noise. She went and curled herself upon the
window-seat in the small, deeply-recessed window. That morning when she
had looked out, her heart had danced at seeing the bright clear lights
on the church tower, which foretold a fine and sunny day. This
evening—sixteen hours at most had past by—she sat down, too full of
sorrow to cry, but with a cold dull pain, which seemed to have pressed
the youth and buoyancy out of her heart, never to return. Mr. Henry
Lennox’s visit—his offer—was like a dream, a thing beside her actual
life. The hard reality was, that her father had so admitted tempting
doubts into his mind as to become a schismatic—an outcast; all the
changes consequent upon this grouped themselves around that one great
blighting fact.
She looked out upon the dark-grey lines of the church towers, square and
straight in the centre of the view, cutting against the deep blue
transparent depths beyond, into which she gazed, and felt that she might
gaze for ever, seeing at every moment some farther distance, and yet no
sign of God! It seemed to her at the moment, as if the earth was more
utterly desolate than if girt in by an iron dome, behind which there
might be the ineffaceable peace and glory of the Almighty: those
never-ending depths of space, in their still serenity, were more mocking
to her than any material bounds could be—shutting in the cries of
earth’s sufferers, which now might ascend into that infinite splendour
of vastness and be lost—lost for ever, before they reached His throne.
In this mood her father came in unheard. The moonlight was strong enough
to let him see his daughter in her unusual place and attitude. He came
to her and touched her shoulder before she was aware that he was there.
“Margaret, I heard you were up. I could not help coming in to ask you to
pray with me—to say the Lord’s Prayer; that will do good to both of
us.”
Mr. Hale and Margaret knelt by the window-seat—he looking up, she
bowed down in humble shame. God was there, close around them, hearing
her father’s whispered words. Her father might be a heretic; but had not
she, in her despairing doubts not five minutes before, shown herself a
far more utter sceptic? She spoke not a word, but stole to bed after her
father had left her, like a child ashamed of its fault. If the world was
full of perplexing problems she would trust, and only ask to see the one
step needful for the hour. Mr. Lennox—his visit, his proposal—the
remembrance of which had been so rudely pushed aside by the subsequent
events of the day—haunted her dreams that night. He was climbing up
some tree of fabulous height to reach the branch whereon was slung her
bonnet: he was falling and she was struggling to save him, but held back
by some invisible powerful hand. He was dead. And yet, with a shifting
of the scene, she was once more in the Harley Street drawing-room,
talking to him as of old, and still with a consciousness all the time
that she had seen him killed by that terrible fall.
Miserable, unresting night! Ill preparation for the coming day! She
awoke with a start, unrefreshed, and conscious of some reality worse
even than her feverish dreams. It all came back upon her; not merely the
sorrow, but the terrible discord in the sorrow. Where, to what distance
apart, had her father wandered, led by doubts which were to her
temptations of the Evil One? She longed to ask, and yet would not have
heard for all the world.
The fine crisp morning made her mother feel particularly well and happy
at breakfast-time. She talked on, planning village kindness, unheeding
the silence of her husband and the monosyllabic answers of Margaret.
Before the things were cleared away, Mr. Hale got up; he leaned one hand
on the table, as if to support himself:
“I shall not be home till evening. I am going to Bracy Common, and will
ask Farmer Dobson to give me something for dinner. I shall be back to
tea at seven.”
He did not look at either of them, but Margaret knew what he meant. By
seven the announcement must be made to her mother. Mr. Hale would have
delayed making it, but Margaret was of different stuff. She could not
bear the impending weight on her mind all day long: better get the worst
over; the day would be too short to comfort her mother. But while she
stood by the window, thinking how to begin, and waiting for the servant
to have left the room, her mother had gone up stairs to put on her
things to go to the school. She came down ready equipped, in a brisker
mood than usual.
“Mother, come round the garden with me this morning; just one turn,”
said Margaret, putting her arm round Mrs. Hale’s waist.
They passed through the open window. Mrs. Hale spoke—said
something—Margaret could not tell what. Her eye caught on a bee
entering a deep-belled flower: when that bee flew forth with his spoil
she would begin—that should be the sign. Out he came.
“Mamma! Papa is going to leave Helstone!” she blurted forth. “He’s going
to leave the Church, and live in Milton-Northern.” There were the three
hard facts hardly spoken.
“What makes you say so?” asked Mrs. Hale, in a surprised, incredulous
voice. “Who has been telling you such nonsense?”
“Papa himself,” said Margaret, longing to say something gentle and
consoling, but literally not knowing how. They were close to a
garden-bench. Mrs. Hale sat down and began to cry.
“I don’t understand you,” she said. “Either you have made some great
mistake, or I don’t quite understand you.”
“No, mother, I have made no mistake. Papa has written to the bishop,
saying that he has such doubts that he cannot conscientiously remain a
priest of the Church of England, and that he must give up Helstone. He
has also consulted Mr. Bell—Frederick’s godfather, you know, mamma; and
it is arranged that we go to live at Milton-Northern.” Mrs. Hale looked
up in Margaret’s face all the time she was speaking these words: the
shadow on her countenance told that she, at least, believed in the truth
of what she said.
“I don’t think it can be true,” said Mrs. Hale, at length. “He would
surely have told me before it came to this.”
It came strongly upon Margaret’s mind that her mother ought to have been
told: that whatever her faults of discontent and repining might have
been, it was an error in her father to have left her to learn his change
of opinion, and his approaching change of life, from her better-informed
child. Margaret sat down by her mother, and took her unresisting head on
her breast, bending her own soft cheeks down caressingly to touch her
face.
“Dear, darling mamma! we were so afraid of giving you pain. Papa felt so