IN THE HOME NEAR THE THACKBUSK
THE cottage near the Thackbusk was closed to visitors--Jenny said that
her daughter was ill, and must be quiet. The statement was supposed to
be intended as a protection against intruders, but at the same time
there may have been truth in it. For, from the moment when Annie had
been carried from the door-step, she had lain in her room upstairs, too
weak to move. Jenny went about quietly, and was upstairs or below, and
her light foot-fall was the only sound that could be heard.
Poor Jenny! If those who made free with her name could have kept their
eyes on her through those silent hours they would not have seen her
give way to lamentation, or leave off her employments to indulge
herself in grief. Working people have little leisure for idleness--not
even for the idleness that calls itself despair--and the habits of life
are not easily discarded, even in the midst of overwhelming bitterness.
Jenny went about quietly, and filled her pail with water, or prepared
Nat’s breakfast, or cleared the meal away, her blue working-apron above
her neat black dress, and a red handkerchief on her head to
protect it from the dust. A stranger, setting eyes for the first time
on Mrs Salter, would have been pleased with her quiet movements, her
slim, girlish form; he would have had keen eyes to have been able to
discover also the traces of a sorrow that was not a girlish grief. For
that only showed itself in a little more pallor than usual, a little
more compression of what was still a pretty mouth. Mrs Salter was not
likely to have the sorrow that makes outcries; but the grief that is
silent is the grief that kills.
Poor Jenny! If she was not quite forgiving she was yet very pitiful,
and her pride was little more than the outcome of her reserve; she had
shown no want of a mother’s tenderness, although she had scarcely
spoken to her child. Annie lay in her room upstairs, and was gently
watched and cared for; little dainties were set by the side of the bed
for her to eat; the beautiful hair that had hung loose on the door-step
was now plaited loosely, and gently brushed and smoothed. She lay on
her pillows, her eyes bright with fever, and one hand hanging languidly
on the counterpane; it was the left hand, on which shone the
wedding-ring. Now and then, as she lay, there would pass across her
features a convulsive spasm as of sudden pain or fear; but with the
determination that still belonged to her she would make an attempt to
check it, although such attempts almost always resulted in terrible
shudderings that shook the bed-clothes under which she lay. These
shudderings must have been evidence of some internal conflict; but, if
it were so, she would not express it in words. The little circle of
gold was her mother’s consolation; but it was a desperate consolation
to which even the mother dared not cling.
Ah! do they know much of the feeling of a mother who imagine that at
such a time it is composed of injured pride, of the dread of gossipping
voices and a tarnished name? Is not its worst grief the knowledge,
owned in silence, that the daughter, once close, is now distant, far
away; that some unfathomable gulf has intervened between the souls of
the mother and the child? Jenny had felt that gulf widening through the
summer months, when she knew that her son and daughter had secrets of
which they would not speak to her--and now, on one side at least, the
ruin had come, and her daughter lay silent on her bed, whilst the
village talked outside. Ah! what could she do, poor Jenny, the Jenny we
have known, the gentle, upright, the timid, shrinking soul, but fulfil
her house-duties with eyes too tired for tears, and surround her child
with proofs of a mother’s tenderness? The authority that can rouse and
awe the sinner is not for the affection that is strong in feebleness;
the clarion voice that pierces and subdues finds no note in the accents
of such a mother’s love. Yet Jenny had some strength in her calamity;
her child was not left untended, or her house-work undone. It may be
said that she should have trusted in religion, but then she had
not been educated to understand such trust--to do her day’s duty well
and carefully had, until now, made the chief part of the religion of
her life.
Yet something stirred in her like religious bitterness, as she stood in
the evening by the Thackbusk gate, with her eyes on the wide fields and
the mellow light, and the sore pain pressing its heavy weight on her
life. It is not always easy for those who have breadth of knowledge to
escape from the point of vision of an individual pain; and the
uneducated, with their narrower sympathies, see little clearly beyond
the limits of their lives. To poor Jenny life seemed a hard thing at
that moment, an irremediable, inexorable doom.
‘The Lord is hard on us working folk, He’s hard,’ a low voice was
murmuring within her heart; ‘He knows as we’ve nothing but work an’
trouble left, when He lets there be no comfort in t’ husband or t’
child. T’ rich folk can buy themselves a heap o’ pleasures; I’ve nought
but t’ lad an’ lass, an’ they bring grief to me.’
But the gentle nature had only risen for a moment; the echo of
rebellion died away immediately into a murmur of the pitiful patience
which from her childhood upwards had been the keynote of poor Jenny’s
life.
‘I’m stupid--I’ve allays been so,’--she whispered to herself. ‘T’ lad
an’ t’ girl would ha’ done well eno’ if they’d had another woman for a
mother instead o’ me.’
The pathetic words were just audible in the evening stillness, but
there was no one near enough to hear them. For one moment she stood
leaning on the gate, looking with sore eyes at the wide fields, the
evening light; and then, with a little sigh, she took up her burden of
vegetables, and turned away from the gate towards her home. For her
daughter might be wanting to have her evening meal; and oh! she must do
her best to take care of Annie now. The time might come when she would
resent the silence of her daughter, but as yet she could have no
feeling towards her but that of a mother’s tenderness--the tenderness
which still clings when all else has departed.