The Beth Book
and every time she took a mouthful at table, she wiped her mouth.
The doctor came every day to dress the abscess on Mrs. Caldwell's
neck, and every day he said that if it had not burst of itself he
should have been obliged to make a deep incision in it in the form of
a cross. Mildred and Beth were always present on these occasions,
fighting to be allowed to hold the basin. Mrs. Ellis wanted to turn
them out, but Mrs. Caldwell said: "Let them stay, poor little bodies;
they like to be with me."
The poor lady, ill as she was, had neither peace nor quiet. The yard
was full of great stones now, and stone-masons hammered at them from
early morning till late at night, chipping them into shape for the
alterations and additions to be made to the house; the loft was full
of carpenters preparing boards for flooring; the yard-gates were
always open, and people came and went as they liked, so that there was
no more privacy for the family. Mildred stayed indoors with her mother
a good deal; but Beth, followed by Bernadine, who had become her
shadow, was continually in the yard among the men, listening,
questioning, and observing. To Beth, at this time, the grown-up people
of her race were creatures with a natural history other than her own,
which she studied with great intelligence and interest, and sometimes
also with disgust; for, although she was so much more with the common
people, as she had been taught to call them, than with her own class,
she did not adopt their standards, and shrank always with innate
refinement from everything gross. No one thought of shooting her now.
She had not only lived down her unpopularity, but, by dint of her
natural fearlessness, her cheerful audacity of speech, and quick
comprehension, had won back the fickle hearts of the people, who
weighed her words again superstitiously, and made much of her. The
workmen, with the indolent, inconsequent Irish temperament which makes
it irksome to follow up a task continuously, and easier to do anything
than the work in hand, would break off to amuse her at any time. One
young carpenter--lean, sallow, and sulky--who was working for her
mother, interested her greatly. He was making packing-cases, and the
first one was all wrong, and had to be pulled to pieces; and the way
he swore as he demolished it, ripping out oaths as he ripped up the
boards, impressed Beth as singularly silly.
There was another carpenter at work in the loft, a little wizened old
man. He always brought a peculiar kind of yellow bread, and shared it
with the children, who loved it, and took as much as they wanted
without scruple, so that the poor old man must have had short-commons
himself sometimes. He could draw all kinds of things--fish with
scales, ships in full sail, horses, coaches, people--and Beth often
made him get out his big broad pencil and do designs for her on the
new white boards. When he was within earshot, the people in the yard
were particular about what they said before the children; if they
forgot themselves he called them to order, and silenced them
instantly, which surprised Beth, because he was the smallest man
there. There was one man, however, whom the old carpenter could never
suppress. Beth did not know how this man got his living. He came from
the village to gossip, wore a tweed suit, not like a workman's, nor
was it the national Irish dress. He had a red nose and a wooden leg,
and, after she knew him, for a long time she always expected a man
with a wooden leg to have a red nose, but, somehow, she never expected
a man with a red nose to have a wooden leg. This man was always
cheery, and very voluble. He used the worst language possible in the
pleasantest way, and his impervious good-humour was proof against all
remonstrance. What he said was either blasphemous or obscene as a
rule, but in effect it was not at all like the same thing from the
other men, because, with them, such language was the expression of
anger and evil moods, while with him it was the vehicle of thought
from a mind habitually serene.
Mrs. Caldwell was being hurried out of the house with indecent haste,
considering the state of her health and all the arrangements she had
to make; but she bore up bravely. She was touched one day by an offer
of help from Beth, and begged her to take charge of Bernadine and be a
little mother to her. Beth promised to do her best. Accordingly, when
Bernadine was naughty, Beth beat her, in dutiful imitation. Bernadine,
however, invariably struck back. When other interests palled, Beth
would encourage Bernadine to risk her neck by persuading her to jump
down after her from high places. She was nearly as good a jumper as
Beth, the great difference being that Beth always lit on her feet,
while Bernadine was apt to come down on her head; but it was this
peculiarity that made her attempts so interesting.
The yard very soon became a sociable centre for the whole idle place.
Any one who chose came into it in a friendly way, and lounged about,
gossiping, and inspecting the works in progress. Women brought their
babies, and sat about on the stones suckling them and talking to the
men--a proceeding which filled Beth with disgust, she thought it so
peculiarly indelicate.
Beth stood with her mother at the sitting-room window one day to see
the last of poor Artless, as he was led away on a halter by a strange
man, his glossy chestnut coat showing dappled in the sunshine, but his
wild spirit much subdued for want of corn. The first time they had
seen him was on the day of their arrival, when Captain Caldwell had
ridden out on him to meet them. Mrs. Caldwell burst into tears at the
recollection.
"He was the first evidence of promotion and prosperity," she said.
"But the promotion has been to a higher sphere, and I much fear that
the prosperity, like Artless himself, has departed for ever."
Mrs. Caldwell had decided to return to her own people in England, and
a few days later they started. She took the children to see their
father's grave the last thing before they left Castletownrock, and
stood beside it for a long time in silence, her gloveless hand resting
caressingly on the cold tombstone, her eyes full of tears, and a
pained expression in her face. It was the real moment of separation
for her. She had to tear herself away from her beloved dead, to leave
him lonely, and to go out alone herself, unprotected, unloved,
uncomforted, into the cold world with her helpless children. Poverty
was in store for her; that she knew; and doubtless she foresaw many
another trouble, and, could she have chosen, would gladly have taken
her place there beside the one who, with all his faults, had been her
best friend on earth.
Her cold, formal religion was no comfort to her in moments like these.
She was a pagan at heart, and where she had laid her dead, there, to
her mind, he would rest for ever, far from her. The lonely grave on
the wild west coast was the shrine towards which her poor heart would
yearn thereafter at all times, always. She had erected a handsome
tombstone on the hallowed spot, and was going away in her shabby
clothes, the more at ease for the self-denial she had had to exercise
in order to beautify it. The radical difference between herself and
Beth, which was to keep them apart for ever, was never more apparent
than at this moment of farewell. The other children cried, but Beth
remained an unmoved spectator of her mother's emotion. She hated the
delay in that painful place; and what was the use of it when her
father would be with them just the same when they got into the yellow
coach which was waiting at the gate to take them away? Beth's beloved
was a spirit, near at hand always; her mother's was a corpse in a
coffin, buried in the ground.
A little way out of Castletownrock the coach was stopped, and Honor
and Kathleen Mayne from the inn came up to the window.
"We walked out to be the last to say good-bye to you, Mrs. Caldwell,
and to wish you good luck," Kathleen said. "We were among the first to
welcome you when you came. And we've brought a piece of music for Miss
Mildred, if she will accept it for a keepsake."
Mrs. Caldwell shook hands with them, but she could not speak; and the
coach drove on. The days when she had thought the two Miss Maynes
presumptuous for young women in their position seemed a long way off
to her as she sat there, sobbing, but grateful for this last act of
kindly feeling.
Beth had been eager to be off in the yellow coach, but they had not
long started before she began to suffer. The moving panorama of
desolate landscape, rocky coast, rough sea, moor and mountain, with
the motion of the coach, and the smell of stale tobacco and beer in
inn-parlours where they waited to change horses, nauseated her to
faintness. Her sensitive nervous system received too many vivid
impressions at once; the intense melancholy of the scenes they passed
through, the wretched hovels, the half-clad people, the lean cattle,
and all the evidences of abject poverty, amid dreadful bogs under a
gloomy sky, got hold of her and weighed upon her spirits, until at
last she shrunk into her corner, pale and still, and sat with her eyes
closed, and great tears running slowly down her cheeks. These were her
last impressions of Ireland, and they afterwards coloured all her
recollections of the country and the people.
But the travellers came to a railway station at last, and left the
coach. There was a long crowded train just about to start; and Mrs.
Caldwell, dragging Beth after her by the hand, because she knew she
would stand still and stare about her the moment she let her go,
hurried from carriage to carriage, trying to find seats.
"I saw some," Beth said. "You've passed them."
Mrs. Caldwell turned, and, some distance back, found a carriage with
only two people in it, a gentleman whom Beth did not notice
particularly, and a lady, doubtless a bride, dressed in light
garments, and a white bonnet, very high in front, the space between
the forehead and the top being filled with roses. She sat upright in
the middle of the compartment, and looked superciliously at the weary,
worried widow, and her helpless children, in their shabby black, when
they stopped at the carriage door. It was her cold indifference that
impressed Beth. She could not understand why, seeing how worn they all
were and the fix they were in, she did not jump up instantly and open
the door, overjoyed to be able to help them. There were just four
seats in the carriage, but she never moved. Beth had looked up
confidently into her face, expecting sympathy and help, but was
repelled by a disdainful glance. It was Beth's first experience of the
wealthy world that does not care, and she never forgot it.
"That carriage is engaged," her mother exclaimed, and dragged her
impatiently away.
In the hotel in Dublin where they slept a night, they had the use of a
long narrow sitting-room, with one large window at the end, hung with
handsome, heavy, dark green curtains, quite new. The valance at the
top ended in a deep fringe of thick cords, and at the end of each cord
there was a bright ornamental thing made of wood covered with silks of
various colours. Beth had never seen anything so lovely, and on the
instant she determined to have one. They were high out of her reach;
but that was nothing if only she could get a table and chair under
them, and the coast clear. Fortune favoured her during the evening,
and she managed to secure one, and carried it off in triumph; and so
great was her joy in the colour, that she took it out of her pocket
whenever she had a chance next day, and gazed at it enraptured. On
their way to the boat Mildred caught her looking at it, and asked her
where she got it.
Beth explained exactly.
"But it's stealing!" Mildred exclaimed.