and I’d best be gone, and leave you to think it over. I’ll not deny
they are hard words to hear, but there’s sense in them, as I take it;
and I reckon you’ll have to come to ’em. Anyhow, it’s a bad way of
thanking me for my pains, and I don’t take it well in you, Susan,” said
he, getting up, as if offended.
“Michael, I’m beside myself with sorrow. Don’t blame me if I speak
sharp. He and me is the only ones, you see. And mother did so charge me
to have a care of him! And this is what he’s come to, poor lile chap!”
She began to cry, and Michael to comfort her with caresses.
“Don’t,” said she. “It’s no use trying to make me forget poor Willie is
a natural. I could hate myself for being happy with you, even for just
a little minute. Go away, and leave me to face it out.”
“And you’ll think it over, Susan, and remember what the doctor says?”
“I can’t forget,” said she. She meant she could not forget what the
doctor had said about the hopelessness of her brother’s case; Michael
had referred to the plan of sending Willie to an asylum, or madhouse,
as they were called in that day and place. The idea had been gathering
force in Michael’s mind for some time; he had talked it over with his
father, and secretly rejoiced over the possession of the farm and land
which would then be his in fact, if not in law, by right of his wife.
He had always considered the good penny her father could give her in
his catalogue of Susan’s charms and attractions. But of late he had
grown to esteem her as the heiress of Yew Nook. He, too, should have
land like his brother—land to possess, to cultivate, to make profit
from, to bequeath. For some time he had wondered that Susan had been so
much absorbed in Willie’s present, that she had never seemed to look
forward to his future, state. Michael had long felt the boy to be a
trouble; but of late he had absolutely loathed him. His gibbering, his
uncouth gestures, his loose, shambling gait, all irritated Michael
inexpressibly. He did not come near the Yew Nook for a couple of days.
He thought that he would leave her time to become anxious to see him
and reconciled to his plan. They were strange lonely days to Susan.
They were the first she had spent face to face with the sorrows that
had turned her from a girl into a woman; for hitherto Michael had never
let twenty-four hours pass by without coming to see her since she had
had the fever. Now that he was absent, it seemed as though some cause
of irritation was removed from Will, who was much more gentle and
tractable than he had been for many weeks. Susan thought that she
observed him making efforts at her bidding, and there was something
piteous in the way in which he crept up to her, and looked wistfully in
her face, as if asking her to restore him the faculties that he felt to
be wanting.
“I never will let thee go, lad. Never! There’s no knowing where they
would take thee to, or what they would do with thee. As it says in the
Bible, ‘Nought but death shall part thee and me!’”
The country-side was full, in those days, of stories of the brutal
treatment offered to the insane; stories that were, in fact, but too
well founded, and the truth of one of which only would have been a
sufficient reason for the strong prejudice existing against all such
places. Each succeeding hour that Susan passed, alone, or with the poor
affectionate lad for her sole companion, served to deepen her solemn
resolution never to part with him. So, when Michael came, he was
annoyed and surprised by the calm way in which she spoke, as if
following Dr. Preston’s advice was utterly and entirely out of the
question. He had expected nothing less than a consent, reluctant it
might be, but still a consent; and he was extremely irritated. He could
have repressed his anger, but he chose rather to give way to it;
thinking that he could thus best work upon Susan’s affection, so as to
gain his point. But, somehow, he over-reached himself; and now he was
astonished in his turn at the passion of indignation that she burst
into.
“Thou wilt not bide in the same house with him, say’st thou? There’s no
need for thy biding, as far as I can tell. There’s solemn reason why I
should bide with my own flesh and blood and keep to the word I pledged
my mother on her death-bed; but, as for thee, there’s no tie that I
know on to keep thee fro’ going to America or Botany Bay this very
night, if that were thy inclination. I will have no more of your
threats to make me send my bairn away. If thou marry me, thou’lt help
me to take charge of Willie. If thou doesn’t choose to marry me on
those terms—why, I can snap my fingers at thee, never fear. I’m not so
far gone in love as that. But I will not have thee, if thou say’st in
such a hectoring way that Willie must go out of the house—and the house
his own too—before thoul’t set foot in it. Willie bides here, and I
bide with him.”
“Thou hast may-be spoken a word too much,” said Michael, pale with
rage. “If I am free, as thou say’st, to go to Canada, or Botany Bay, I
reckon I’m free to live where I like, and that will not be with a
natural who may turn into a madman some day, for aught I know. Choose
between him and me, Susy, for I swear to thee, thou shan’t have both.”
“I have chosen,” said Susan, now perfectly composed and still.
“Whatever comes of it, I bide with Willie.”
“Very well,” replied Michael, trying to assume an equal composure of
manner. “Then I’ll wish you a very good night.” He went out of the
house door, half-expecting to be called back again; but, instead, he
heard a hasty step inside, and a bolt drawn.
“Whew!” said he to himself, “I think I must leave my lady alone for a
week or two, and give her time to come to her senses. She’ll not find
it so easy as she thinks to let me go.”
So he went past the kitchen-window in nonchalant style, and was not
seen again at Yew Nook for some weeks. How did he pass the time? For
the first day or two, he was unusually cross with all things and people
that came athwart him. Then wheat-harvest began, and he was busy, and
exultant about his heavy crop. Then a man came from a distance to bid
for the lease of his farm, which, by his father’s advice, had been
offered for sale, as he himself was so soon likely to remove to the Yew
Nook. He had so little idea that Susan really would remain firm to her
determination, that he at once began to haggle with the man who came
after his farm, showed him the crop just got in, and managed skilfully
enough to make a good bargain for himself. Of course, the bargain had
to be sealed at the public-house; and the companions he met with there
soon became friends enough to tempt him into Langdale, where again he
met with Eleanor Hebthwaite.
How did Susan pass the time? For the first day or so, she was too angry
and offended to cry. She went about her household duties in a quick,
sharp, jerking, yet absent way; shrinking one moment from Will,
overwhelming him with remorseful caresses the next. The third day of
Michael’s absence, she had the relief of a good fit of crying; and
after that, she grew softer and more tender; she felt how harshly she
had spoken to him, and remembered how angry she had been. She made
excuses for him. “It was no wonder,” she said to herself, “that he had
been vexed with her; and no wonder he would not give in, when she had
never tried to speak gently or to reason with him. She was to blame,
and she would tell him so, and tell him once again all that her mother
had bade her to be to Willie, and all the horrible stories she had
heard about madhouses, and he would be on her side at once.”
And so she watched for his coming, intending to apologise as soon as
ever she saw him. She hurried over her household work, in order to sit
quietly at her sewing, and hear the first distant sound of his
well-known step or whistle. But even the sound of her flying needle
seemed too loud—perhaps she was losing an exquisite instant of
anticipation; so she stopped sewing, and looked longingly out through
the geranium leaves, in order that her eye might catch the first stir
of the branches in the wood-path by which he generally came. Now and
then a bird might spring out of the covert; otherwise the leaves were
heavily still in the sultry weather of early autumn. Then she would
take up her sewing, and, with a spasm of resolution, she would
determine that a certain task should be fulfilled before she would
again allow herself the poignant luxury of expectation. Sick at heart
was she when the evening closed in, and the chances of that day
diminished. Yet she stayed up longer than usual, thinking that if he
were coming—if he were only passing along the distant road—the sight of
a light in the window might encourage him to make his appearance even
at that late hour, while seeing the house all darkened and shut up
might quench any such intention.
Very sick and weary at heart, she went to bed; too desolate and
despairing to cry, or make any moan. But in the morning hope came
afresh. Another day—another chance! And so it went on for weeks. Peggy
understood her young mistress’s sorrow full well, and respected it by
her silence on the subject. Willie seemed happier now that the
irritation of Michael’s presence was removed; for the poor idiot had a
sort of antipathy to Michael, which was a kind of heart’s echo to the
repugnance in which the latter held him. Altogether, just at this time,
Willie was the happiest of the three.
As Susan went into Coniston, to sell her butter, one Saturday, some
inconsiderate person told her that she had seen Michael Hurst the night
before. I said inconsiderate, but I might rather have said unobservant;
for any one who had spent half-an-hour in Susan Dixon’s company might
have seen that she disliked having any reference made to the subjects
nearest her heart, were they joyous or grievous. Now she went a little
paler than usual (and she had never recovered her colour since she had
had the fever), and tried to keep silence. But an irrepressible pang
forced out the question—
“Where?”
“At Thomas Applethwaite’s, in Langdale. They had a kind of
harvest-home, and he were there among the young folk, and very thick
wi’ Nelly Hebthwaite, old Thomas’s niece. Thou’lt have to look after
him a bit, Susan!”
She neither smiled nor sighed. The neighbour who had been speaking to
her was struck with the gray stillness of her face. Susan herself felt
how well her self-command was obeyed by every little muscle, and said
to herself in her Spartan manner, “I can bear it without either wincing
or blenching.” She went home early, at a tearing, passionate pace,
trampling and breaking through all obstacles of briar or bush. Willie
was moping in her absence—hanging listlessly on the farm-yard gate to
watch for her. When he saw her, he set up one of his strange,
inarticulate cries, of which she was now learning the meaning, and came
towards her with his loose, galloping run, head and limbs all shaking
and wagging with pleasant excitement. Suddenly she turned from him, and
burst into tears. She sat down on a stone by the wayside, not a hundred
yards from home, and buried her face in her hands, and gave way to a
passion of pent-up sorrow; so terrible and full of agony were her low
cries, that the idiot stood by her, aghast and silent. All his joy gone
for the time, but not, like her joy, turned into ashes. Some thought
struck him. Yes! the sight of her woe made him think, great as the
exertion was. He ran, and stumbled, and shambled home, buzzing with his
lips all the time. She never missed him. He came back in a trice,
bringing with him his cherished paper windmill, bought on that fatal
day when Michael had taken him into Kendal to have his doom of
perpetual idiocy pronounced. He thrust it into Susan’s face, her hands,
her lap, regardless of the injury his frail plaything thereby received.
He leapt before her to think how he had cured all heart-sorrow, buzzing
louder than ever. Susan looked up at him, and that glance of her sad
eyes sobered him. He began to whimper, he knew not why: and she now,
comforter in her turn, tried to soothe him by twirling his windmill.
But it was broken; it made no noise; it would not go round. This seemed
to afflict Susan more than him. She tried to make it right, although
she saw the task was hopeless; and while she did so, the tears rained
down unheeded from her bent head on the paper toy.
“It won’t do,” said she, at last. “It will never do again.” And,
somehow, she took the accident and her words as omens of the love that
was broken, and that she feared could never be pieced together more.
She rose up and took Willie’s hand, and the two went slowly into the
house.
To her surprise, Michael Hurst sat in the house-place. House-place is a
sort of better kitchen, where no cookery is done, but which is reserved
for state occasions. Michael had gone in there because he was
accompanied by his only sister, a woman older than himself, who was
well married beyond Keswick, and who now came for the first time to
make acquaintance with Susan. Michael had primed his sister with his
wishes regarding Will, and the position in which he stood with Susan;
and arriving at Yew Nook in the absence of the latter, he had not
scrupled to conduct his sister into the guest-room, as he held Mrs.
Gale’s worldly position in respect and admiration, and therefore wished
her to be favourably impressed with all the signs of property which he
was beginning to consider as Susan’s greatest charms. He had secretly
said to himself, that if Eleanor Hebthwaite and Susan Dixon were equal
in point of riches, he would sooner have Eleanor by far. He had begun
to consider Susan as a termagant; and when he thought of his
intercourse with her, recollections of her somewhat warm and hasty
temper came far more readily to his mind than any remembrance of her
generous, loving nature.
And now she stood face to face with him; her eyes tear-swollen, her
garments dusty, and here and there torn in consequence of her rapid
progress through the bushy by-paths. She did not make a favourable
impression on the well-clad Mrs. Gale, dressed in her best silk gown,
and therefore unusually susceptible to the appearance of another. Nor
were Susan’s manners gracious or cordial. How could they be, when she
remembered what had passed between Michael and herself the last time
they met? For her penitence had faded away under the daily
disappointment of these last weary weeks.
But she was hospitable in substance. She bade Peggy hurry on the
kettle, and busied herself among the tea-cups, thankful that the
presence of Mrs. Gale, as a stranger, would prevent the immediate
recurrence to the one subject which she felt must be present in
Michael’s mind as well as in her own. But Mrs. Gale was withheld by no
such feelings of delicacy. She had come ready-primed with the case, and
had undertaken to bring the girl to reason. There was no time to be
lost. It had been prearranged between the brother and sister that he
was to stroll out into the farm-yard before his sister introduced the
subject; but she was so confident in the success of her arguments, that
she must needs have the triumph of a victory as soon as possible; and,
accordingly, she brought a hail-storm of good reasons to bear upon
Susan. Susan did not reply for a long time; she was so indignant at
this intermeddling of a stranger in the deep family sorrow and shame.
Mrs. Gale thought she was gaining the day, and urged her arguments more
pitilessly. Even Michael winced for Susan, and wondered at her silence.
He shrank out of sight, and into the shadow, hoping that his sister
might prevail, but annoyed at the hard way in which she kept putting
the case.
Suddenly Susan turned round from the occupation she had pretended to be
engaged in, and said to him in a low voice, which yet not only vibrated
itself, but made its hearers thrill through all their obtuseness:
“Michael Hurst! does your sister speak truth, think you?”
Both women looked at him for his answer; Mrs. Gale without anxiety, for
had she not said the very words they had spoken together before? had
she not used the very arguments that he himself had suggested? Susan,
on the contrary, looked to his answer as settling her doom for life;
and in the gloom of her eyes you might have read more despair than
hope.
He shuffled his position. He shuffled in his words.
“What is it you ask? My sister has said many things.”
“I ask you,” said Susan, trying to give a crystal clearness both to her
expressions and her pronunciation, “if, knowing as you do how Will is
afflicted, you will help me to take that charge of him which I promised
my mother on her death-bed that I would do; and which means, that I
shall keep him always with me, and do all in my power to make his life
happy. If you will do this, I will be your wife; if not, I remain
unwed.”
“But he may get dangerous; he can be but a trouble; his being here is a
pain to you, Susan, not a pleasure.”
“I ask you for either yes or no,” said she, a little contempt at his
evading her question mingling with her tone. He perceived it, and it
nettled him.
“And I have told you. I answered your question the last time I was
here. I said I would ne’er keep house with an idiot; no more I will. So
now you’ve gotten your answer.”
“I have,” said Susan. And she sighed deeply.
“Come, now,” said Mrs. Gale, encouraged by the sigh; “one would think
you don’t love Michael, Susan, to be so stubborn in yielding to what
I’m sure would be best for the lad.”
“Oh! she does not care for me,” said Michael. “I don’t believe she ever
did.”
“Don’t I? Haven’t I?” asked Susan, her eyes blazing out fire. She left
the room directly, and sent Peggy in to make the tea; and catching at
Will, who was lounging about in the kitchen, she went up-stairs with
him and bolted herself in, straining the boy to her heart, and keeping
almost breathless, lest any noise she made might cause him to break out
into the howls and sounds which she could not bear that those below
should hear.
A knock at the door. It was Peggy.
“He wants for to see you, to wish you good-bye.”
“I cannot come. Oh, Peggy, send them away.”
It was her only cry for sympathy; and the old servant understood it.
She sent them away, somehow; not politely, as I have been given to
understand.
“Good go with them,” said Peggy, as she grimly watched their retreating
figures. “We’re rid of bad rubbish, anyhow.” And she turned into the
house, with the intention of making ready some refreshment for Susan,
after her hard day at the market, and her harder evening. But in the
kitchen, to which she passed through the empty house-place, making a
face of contemptuous dislike at the used tea-cups and fragments of a
meal yet standing there, she found Susan, with her sleeves tucked up
and her working apron on, busied in preparing to make clap-bread, one
of the hardest and hottest domestic tasks of a Daleswoman. She looked
up, and first met, and then avoided Peggy’s eye; it was too full of
sympathy. Her own cheeks were flushed, and her own eyes were dry and
burning.
“Where’s the board, Peggy? We need clap-bread; and, I reckon, I’ve time
to get through with it to-night.” Her voice had a sharp, dry tone in
it, and her motions a jerking angularity about them.
Peggy said nothing, but fetched her all that she needed. Susan beat her
cakes thin with vehement force. As she stooped over them, regardless
even of the task in which she seemed so much occupied, she was
surprised by a touch on her mouth of something—what she did not see at
first. It was a cup of tea, delicately sweetened and cooled, and held
to her lips, when exactly ready, by the faithful old woman. Susan held
it off a hand’s breath, and looked into Peggy’s eyes, while her own
filled with the strange relief of tears.
“Lass!” said Peggy, solemnly, “thou hast done well. It is not long to
bide, and then the end will come.”
“But you are very old, Peggy,” said Susan, quivering.
“It is but a day sin’ I were young,” replied Peggy; but she stopped the
conversation by again pushing the cup with gentle force to Susan’s dry
and thirsty lips. When she had drunken she fell again to her labour,
Peggy heating the hearth, and doing all that she knew would be
required, but never speaking another word. Willie basked close to the
fire, enjoying the animal luxury of warmth, for the autumn evenings
were beginning to be chilly. It was one o’clock before they thought of
going to bed on that memorable night.
CHAPTER IV.
The vehemence with which Susan Dixon threw herself into occupation
could not last for ever. Times of languor and remembrance would
come—times when she recurred with a passionate yearning to bygone days,
the recollection of which was so vivid and delicious, that it seemed as
though it were the reality, and the present bleak bareness the dream.
She smiled anew at the magical sweetness of some touch or tone which in
memory she felt and heard, and drank the delicious cup of poison,
although at the very time she knew what the consequences of racking
pain would be.
“This time, last year,” thought she, “we went nutting together—this
very day last year; just such a day as to-day. Purple and gold were the
lights on the hills; the leaves were just turning brown; here and there
on the sunny slopes the stubble-fields looked tawny; down in a cleft of
yon purple slate-rock the beck fell like a silver glancing thread; all
just as it is to-day. And he climbed the slender, swaying nut-trees,
and bent the branches for me to gather; or made a passage through the
hazel copses, from time to time claiming a toll. Who could have thought
he loved me so little?—who?—who?”
Or, as the evening closed in, she would allow herself to imagine that
she heard his coming step, just that she might recall time feeling of
exquisite delight which had passed by without the due and passionate
relish at the time. Then she would wonder how she could have had
strength, the cruel, self-piercing strength, to say what she had done;
to stab himself with that stern resolution, of which the sear would
remain till her dying day. It might have been right; but, as she
sickened, she wished she had not instinctively chosen the right. How
luxurious a life haunted by no stern sense of duty must be! And many
led this kind of life; why could not she? O, for one hour again of his
sweet company! If he came now, she would agree to whatever he proposed.
It was a fever of the mind. She passed through it, and came out
healthy, if weak. She was capable once more of taking pleasure in
following an unseen guide through briar and brake. She returned with
tenfold affection to her protecting care of Willie. She acknowledged to
herself that he was to be her all-in-all in life. She made him her
constant companion. For his sake, as the real owner of Yew Nook, and
she as his steward and guardian, she began that course of careful
saving, and that love of acquisition, which afterwards gained for her
the reputation of being miserly. She still thought that he might regain
a scanty portion of sense—enough to require some simple pleasures and
excitement, which would cost money. And money should not be wanting.
Peggy rather assisted her in the formation of her parsimonious habits
than otherwise; economy was the order of the district, and a certain
degree of respectable avarice the characteristic of her age. Only
Willie was never stinted nor hindered of anything that the two women
thought could give him pleasure, for want of money.
There was one gratification which Susan felt was needed for the
restoration of her mind to its more healthy state, after she had passed
through the whirling fever, when duty was as nothing, and anarchy
reigned; a gratification that, somehow, was to be her last burst of
unreasonableness; of which she knew and recognised pain as the sure
consequence. She must see him once more,—herself unseen.
The week before the Christmas of this memorable year, she went out in
the dusk of the early winter evening, wrapped close in shawl and cloak.
She wore her dark shawl under her cloak, putting it over her head in
lieu of a bonnet; for she knew that she might have to wait long in
concealment. Then she tramped over the wet fell-path, shut in by misty
rain for miles and miles, till she came to the place where he was
lodging; a farm-house in Langdale, with a steep, stony lane leading up
to it: this lane was entered by a gate out of the main road, and by the
gate were a few bushes—thorns; but of them the leaves had fallen, and
they offered no concealment: an old wreck of a yew-tree grew among
them, however, and underneath that Susan cowered down, shrouding her
face, of which the colour might betray her, with a corner of her shawl.
Long did she wait; cold and cramped she became, too damp and stiff to
change her posture readily. And after all, he might never come! But,
she would wait till daylight, if need were; and she pulled out a crust,
with which she had providently supplied herself. The rain had ceased,—a
dull, still, brooding weather had succeeded; it was a night to hear
distant sounds. She heard horses’ hoofs striking and splashing in the
stones, and in the pools of the road at her back. Two horses; not
well-ridden, or evenly guided, as she could tell.
Michael Hurst and a companion drew near: not tipsy, but not sober. They
stopped at the gate to bid each other a maudlin farewell. Michael
stooped forward to catch the latch with the hook of the stick which he
carried; he dropped the stick, and it fell with one end close to
Susan,—indeed, with the slightest change of posture she could have
opened the gate for him. He swore a great oath, and struck his horse
with his closed fist, as if that animal had been to blame; then he
dismounted, opened the gate, and fumbled about for his stick. When he
had found it (Susan had touched the other end) his first use of it was
to flog his horse well, and she had much ado to avoid its kicks and
plunges. Then, still swearing, he staggered up the lane, for it was
evident he was not sober enough to remount.
By daylight Susan was back and at her daily labours at Yew Nook. When
the spring came, Michael Hurst was married to Eleanor Hebthwaite.
Others, too, were married, and christenings made their firesides merry
and glad; or they travelled, and came back after long years with many
wondrous tales. More rarely, perhaps, a Dalesman changed his dwelling.
But to all households more change came than to Yew Nook. There the
seasons came round with monotonous sameness; or, if they brought
mutation, it was of a slow, and decaying, and depressing kind. Old
Peggy died. Her silent sympathy, concealed under much roughness, was a
loss to Susan Dixon. Susan was not yet thirty when this happened, but
she looked a middle-aged, not to say an elderly woman. People affirmed
that she had never recovered her complexion since that fever, a dozen
years ago, which killed her father, and left Will Dixon an idiot. But
besides her gray sallowness, the lines in her face were strong, and
deep, and hard. The movements of her eyeballs were slow and heavy; the
wrinkles at the corners of her mouth and eyes were planted firm and
sure; not an ounce of unnecessary flesh was there on her bones—every
muscle started strong and ready for use. She needed all this bodily
strength, to a degree that no human creature, now Peggy was dead, knew
of: for Willie had grown up large and strong in body, and, in general,
docile enough in mind; but, every now and then, he became first moody,
and then violent. These paroxysms lasted but a day or two; and it was
Susan’s anxious care to keep their very existence hidden and unknown.
It is true, that occasional passers-by on that lonely road heard sounds
at night of knocking about of furniture, blows, and cries, as of some
tearing demon within the solitary farm-house; but these fits of
violence usually occurred in the night; and whatever had been their
consequence, Susan had tidied and redded up all signs of aught unusual
before the morning. For, above all, she dreaded lest some one might
find out in what danger and peril she occasionally was, and might
assume a right to take away her brother from her care. The one idea of
taking charge of him had deepened and deepened with years. It was
graven into her mind as the object for which she lived. The sacrifice
she had made for this object only made it more precious to her.
Besides, she separated the idea of the docile, affectionate, loutish,
indolent Will, and kept it distinct from the terror which the demon
that occasionally possessed him inspired her with. The one was her
flesh and her blood—the child of her dead mother; the other was some
fiend who came to torture and convulse the creature she so loved. She
believed that she fought her brother’s battle in holding down those
tearing hands, in binding whenever she could those uplifted restless
arms prompt and prone to do mischief. All the time she subdued him with
her cunning or her strength, she spoke to him in pitying murmurs, or
abused the third person, the fiendish enemy, in no unmeasured tones.
Towards morning the paroxysm was exhausted, and he would fall asleep,
perhaps only to waken with evil and renewed vigour. But when he was
laid down, she would sally out to taste the fresh air, and to work off
her wild sorrow in cries and mutterings to herself. The early labourers
saw her gestures at a distance, and thought her as crazed as the
idiot-brother who made the neighbourhood a haunted place. But did any
chance person call at Yew Nook later on in the day, he would find Susan
Dixon cold, calm, collected; her manner curt, her wits keen.
Once this fit of violence lasted longer than usual. Susan’s strength
both of mind and body was nearly worn out; she wrestled in prayer that
somehow it might end before she, too, was driven mad; or, worse, might
be obliged to give up life’s aim, and consign Willie to a madhouse.
From that moment of prayer (as she afterwards superstitiously thought)
Willie calmed—and then he drooped—and then he sank—and, last of all, he
died in reality from physical exhaustion.
But he was so gentle and tender as he lay on his dying bed; such
strange, child-like gleams of returning intelligence came over his
face, long after the power to make his dull, inarticulate sounds had
departed, that Susan was attracted to him by a stronger tie than she
had ever felt before. It was something to have even an idiot loving her
with dumb, wistful, animal affection; something to have any creature
looking at her with such beseeching eyes, imploring protection from the
insidious enemy stealing on. And yet she knew that to him death was no
enemy, but a true friend, restoring light and health to his poor
clouded mind. It was to her that death was an enemy; to her, the
survivor, when Willie died; there was no one to love her.
Worse doom still, there was no one left on earth for her to love.
You now know why no wandering tourist could persuade her to receive him
as a lodger; why no tired traveller could melt her heart to afford him
rest and refreshment; why long habits of seclusion had given her a
moroseness of manner, and how care for the interests of another had
rendered her keen and miserly.
But there was a third act in the drama of her life.
CHAPTER V.
In spite of Peggy’s prophecy that Susan’s life should not seem long, it
did seem wearisome and endless, as the years slowly uncoiled their
monotonous circles. To be sure, she might have made change for herself,
but she did not care to do it. It was, indeed, more than “not caring,”
which merely implies a certain degree of _vis inertiæ_ to be subdued
before an object can be attained, and that the object itself does not
seem to be of sufficient importance to call out the requisite energy.
On the contrary, Susan exerted herself to avoid change and variety. She
had a morbid dread of new faces, which originated in her desire to keep
poor dead Willie’s state a profound secret. She had a contempt for new
customs; and, indeed, her old ways prospered so well under her active
hand and vigilant eye, that it was difficult to know how they could be
improved upon. She was regularly present in Coniston market with the
best butter and the earliest chickens of the season. Those were the
common farm produce that every farmer’s wife about had to sell; but
Susan, after she had disposed of the more feminine articles, turned to
on the man’s side. A better judge of a horse or cow there was not in
all the country round. Yorkshire itself might have attempted to jockey
her, and would have failed. Her corn was sound and clean; her potatoes
well preserved to the latest spring. People began to talk of the hoards
of money Susan Dixon must have laid up somewhere; and one young
ne’er-do-weel of a farmer’s son undertook to make love to the woman of
forty, who looked fifty-five, if a day. He made up to her by opening a
gate on the road-path home, as she was riding on a bare-backed horse,
her purchase not an hour ago. She was off before him, refusing his
civility; but the remounting was not so easy, and rather than fail she
did not choose to attempt it. She walked, and he walked alongside,
improving his opportunity, which, as he vainly thought, had been
consciously granted to him. As they drew near Yew Nook, he ventured on
some expression of a wish to keep company with her. His words were
vague and clumsily arranged. Susan turned round and coolly asked him to
explain himself, he took courage, as he thought of her reputed wealth,
and expressed his wishes this second time pretty plainly. To his
surprise, the reply she made was in a series of smart strokes across
his shoulders, administered through the medium of a supple
hazel-switch.
“Take that!” said she, almost breathless, “to teach thee how thou
darest make a fool of an honest woman old enough to be thy mother. If
thou com’st a step nearer the house, there’s a good horse-pool, and
there’s two stout fellows who’ll like no better fun than ducking thee.
Be off wi’ thee!”
And she strode into her own premises, never looking round to see
whether he obeyed her injunction or not.
Sometimes three or four years would pass over without her hearing
Michael Hurst’s name mentioned. She used to wonder at such times
whether he were dead or alive. She would sit for hours by the dying
embers of her fire on a winter’s evening, trying to recall the scenes
of her youth; trying to bring up living pictures of the faces she had
then known—Michael’s most especially. She thought it was possible, so
long had been the lapse of years, that she might now pass by him in the
street unknowing and unknown. His outward form she might not recognize,
but himself she should feel in the thrill of her whole being. He could
not pass her unawares.
What little she did hear about him, all testified a downward tendency.
He drank—not at stated times when there was no other work to be done,
but continually, whether it was seed-time or harvest. His children were
all ill at the same time; then one died, while the others recovered,
but were poor sickly things. No one dared to give Susan any direct
intelligence of her former lover; many avoided all mention of his name
in her presence; but a few spoke out either in indifference to, or
ignorance of, those bygone days. Susan heard every word, every whisper,
every sound that related to him. But her eye never changed, nor did a
muscle of her face move.
Late one November night she sat over her fire; not a human being
besides herself in the house; none but she had ever slept there since
Willie’s death. The farm-labourers had foddered the cattle and gone
home hours before. There were crickets chirping all round the warm
hearth-stones; there was the clock ticking with the peculiar beat Susan
had known from her childhood, and which then and ever since she had
oddly associated within the idea of a mother and child talking
together, one loud tick, and quick—a feeble, sharp one following.
The day had been keen, and piercingly cold. The whole lift of heaven
seemed a dome of iron. Black and frost-bound was the earth under the
cruel east wind. Now the wind had dropped, and as the darkness had
gathered in, the weather-wise old labourers prophesied snow. The sounds
in the air arose again, as Susan sat still and silent. They were of a
different character to what they had been during the prevalence of the
east wind. Then they had been shrill and piping; now they were like low
distant growling; not unmusical, but strangely threatening. Susan went
to the window, and drew aside the little curtain. The whole world was
white—the air was blinded with the swift and heavy fall of snow. At
present it came down straight, but Susan knew those distant sounds in
the hollows and gulleys of the hills portended a driving wind and a
more cruel storm. She thought of her sheep; were they all folded? the
new-born calf, was it bedded well? Before the drifts were formed too
deep for her to pass in and out—and by the morning she judged that they
would be six or seven feet deep—she would go out and see after the
comfort of her beasts. She took a lantern, and tied a shawl over her
head, and went out into the open air. She had tenderly provided for all
her animals, and was returning, when, borne on the blast as if some
spirit-cry—for it seemed to come rather down from the skies than from
any creature standing on earth’s level—she heard a voice of agony; she
could not distinguish words; it seemed rather as if some bird of prey
was being caught in the whirl of the icy wind, and torn and tortured by
its violence. Again up high above! Susan put down her lantern, and
shouted loud in return; it was an instinct, for if the creature were
not human, which she had doubted but a moment before, what good could
her responding cry do? And her cry was seized on by the tyrannous wind,
and borne farther away in the opposite direction to that from which the
call of agony had proceeded. Again she listened; no sound: then again
it rang through space; and this time she was sure it was human. She
turned into the house, and heaped turf and wood on the fire, which,
careless of her own sensations, she had allowed to fade and almost die
out. She put a new candle in her lantern; she changed her shawl for a
maud, and leaving the door on latch, she sallied out. Just at the
moment when her ear first encountered the weird noises of the storm, on
issuing forth into the open air, she thought she heard the words, “O
God! O help!” They were a guide to her, if words they were, for they
came straight from a rock not a quarter of a mile from Yew Nook, but
only to be reached, on account of its precipitous character, by a
round-about path. Thither she steered, defying wind and snow; guided by
here a thorn-tree, there an old, doddered oak, which had not quite lest
their identity under the whelming mask of snow. Now and then she
stopped to listen; but never a word or sound heard she, till right from
where the copse-wood grew thick and tangled at the base of the rock,
round which she was winding, she heard a moan. Into the brake—all snow
in appearance—almost a plain of snow looked on from the little eminence
where she stood—she plunged, breaking down the bush, stumbling,
bruising herself, fighting her way; her lantern held between her teeth,
and she herself using head as well as hands to butt away a passage, at
whatever cost of bodily injury. As she climbed or staggered, owing to
the unevenness of the snow-covered ground, where the briars and weeds
of years were tangled and matted together, her foot felt something
strangely soft and yielding. She lowered her lantern; there lay a man,
prone on his face, nearly covered by the fast-falling flakes; he must
have fallen from the rock above, as, not knowing of the circuitous
path, he had tried to descend its steep, slippery face. Who could tell?
it was no time for thinking. Susan lifted him up with her wiry
strength; he gave no help—no sign of life; but for all that he might be
alive: he was still warm; she tied her maud round him; she fastened the
lantern to her apron-string; she held him tight: half-carrying,
half-dragging—what did a few bruises signify to him, compared to dear
life, to precious life! She got him through the brake, and down the
path. There, for an instant, she stopped to take breath; but, as if
stung by the Furies, she pushed on again with almost superhuman
strength. Clasping him round the waist, and leaning his dead weight
against the lintel of the door, she tried to undo the latch; but now,
just at this moment, a trembling faintness came over her, and a fearful
dread took possession of her—that here, on the very threshold of her
home, she might be found dead, and buried under the snow, when the
farm-servants came in the morning. This terror stirred her up to one
more effort. Then she and her companion were in the warmth of the quiet
haven of that kitchen; she laid him on the settle, and sank on the
floor by his side. How long she remained in this swoon she could not
tell; not very long she judged by the fire, which was still red and
sullenly glowing when she came to herself. She lighted the candle, and
bent over her late burden to ascertain if indeed he were dead. She
stood long gazing. The man lay dead. There could be no doubt about it.
His filmy eyes glared at her, unshut. But Susan was not one to be
affrighted by the stony aspect of death. It was not that; it was the
bitter, woeful recognition of Michael Hurst!
She was convinced he was dead; but after a while she refused to believe
in her conviction. She stripped off his wet outer-garments with
trembling, hurried hands. She brought a blanket down from her own bed;
she made up the fire. She swathed him in fresh, warm wrappings, and
laid him on the flags before the fire, sitting herself at his head, and
holding it in her lap, while she tenderly wiped his loose, wet hair,
curly still, although its colour had changed from nut-brown to
iron-gray since she had seen it last. From time to time she bent over
the face afresh, sick, and fain to believe that the flicker of the
fire-light was some slight convulsive motion. But the dim, staring eyes
struck chill to her heart. At last she ceased her delicate, busy cares:
but she still held the head softly, as if caressing it. She thought
over all the possibilities and chances in the mingled yarn of their
lives that might, by so slight a turn, have ended far otherwise. If her
mother’s cold had been early tended, so that the responsibility as to
her brother’s weal or woe had not fallen upon her; if the fever had not
taken such rough, cruel hold on Will; nay, if Mrs. Gale, that hard,
worldly sister, had not accompanied him on his last visit to Yew
Nook—his very last before this fatal, stormy might; if she had heard
his cry,—cry uttered by these pale, dead lips with such wild,
despairing agony, not yet three hours ago!—O! if she had but heard it
sooner, he might have been saved before that blind, false step had
precipitated him down the rock! In going over this weary chain of
unrealized possibilities, Susan learnt the force of Peggy’s words. Life
was short, looking back upon it. It seemed but yesterday since all the
love of her being had been poured out, and run to waste. The
intervening years—the long monotonous years that had turned her into an
old woman before her time—were but a dream.
The labourers coming in the dawn of the winter’s day were surprised to
see the fire-light through the low kitchen-window. They knocked, and
hearing a moaning answer, they entered, fearing that something had
befallen their mistress. For all explanation they got these words
“It is Michael Hurst. He was belated, and fell down the Raven’s Crag.
Where does Eleanor, his wife, live?”
How Michael Hurst got to Yew Nook no one but Susan ever knew. They
thought he had dragged himself there, with some sore internal bruise
sapping away his minuted life. They could not have believed the
superhuman exertion which had first sought him out, and then dragged
him hither. Only Susan knew of that.
She gave him into the charge of her servants, and went out and saddled
her horse. Where the wind had drifted the snow on one side, and the
road was clear and bare, she rode, and rode fast; where the soft,
deceitful heaps were massed up, she dismounted and led her steed,
plunging in deep, with fierce energy, the pain at her heart urging her
onwards with a sharp, digging spur.
The gray, solemn, winter’s noon was more night-like than the depth of
summer’s night; dim-purple brooded the low skies over the white earth,
as Susan rode up to what had been Michael Hurst’s abode while living.
It was a small farm-house carelessly kept outside, slatternly tended
within. The pretty Nelly Hebthwaite was pretty still; her delicate face
had never suffered from any long-enduring feeling. If anything, its
expression was that of plaintive sorrow; but the soft, light hair had
scarcely a tinge of gray; the wood-rose tint of complexion yet
remained, if not so brilliant as in youth; the straight nose, the small
mouth were untouched by time. Susan felt the contrast even at that
moment. She knew that her own skin was weather-beaten, furrowed,
brown,—that her teeth were gone, and her hair gray and ragged. And yet
she was not two years older than Nelly,—she had not been, in youth,
when she took account of these things. Nelly stood wondering at the
strange-enough horse-woman, who stopped and panted at the door, holding
her horse’s bridle, and refusing to enter.
“Where is Michael Hurst?” asked Susan, at last.
“Well, I can’t rightly say. He should have been at home last night, but
he was off, seeing after a public-house to be let at Ulverstone, for
our farm does not answer, and we were thinking—”
“He did not come home last night?” said Susan, cutting short the story,
and half-affirming, half-questioning, by way of letting in a ray of the
awful light before she let it full in, in its consuming wrath.
“No! he’ll be stopping somewhere out Ulverstone ways. I’m sure we’ve
need of him at home, for I’ve no one but lile Tommy to help me tend the
beasts. Things have not gone well with us, and we don’t keep a servant
now. But you’re trembling all over, ma’am. You’d better come in, and
take something warm, while your horse rests. That’s the stable-door, to
your left.”
Susan took her horse there; loosened his girths, and rubbed him down
with a wisp of straw. Then she hooked about her for hay; but the place
was bare of feed, and smelt damp and unused. She went to the house,
thankful for the respite, and got some clap-bread, which she mashed up
in a pailful of lukewarm water. Every moment was a respite, and yet
every moment made her dread the more the task that lay before her. It
would be longer than she thought at first. She took the saddle off, and
hung about her horse, which seemed, somehow, more like a friend than
anything else in the world. She laid her cheek against its neck, and
rested there, before returning to the house for the last time.
Eleanor had brought down one of her own gowns, which hung on a chair
against the fire, and had made her unknown visitor a cup of hot tea.
Susan could hardly bear all these little attentions: they choked her,
and yet she was so wet, so weak with fatigue and excitement, that she
could neither resist by voice or by action. Two children stood
awkwardly about, puzzled at the scene, and even Eleanor began to wish
for some explanation of who her strange visitor was.
“You’ve, maybe, heard him speaking of me? I’m called Susan Dixon.”
Nelly coloured, and avoided meeting Susan’s eye.
“I’ve heard other folk speak of you. He never named your name.”
This respect of silence came like balm to Susan: balm not felt or
heeded at the time it was applied, but very grateful in its effects for
all that.
“He is at my house,” continued Susan, determined not to stop or quaver
in the operation—the pain which must be inflicted.
“At your house? Yew Nook?” questioned Eleanor, surprised. “How came he
there?”—half jealously. “Did he take shelter from the coming storm?
Tell me,—there is something—tell me, woman!”
“He took no shelter. Would to God he had!”
“O! would to God! would to God!” shrieked out Eleanor, learning all
from the woful import of those dreary eyes. Her cries thrilled through
the house; the children’s piping wailings and passionate cries on
“Daddy! Daddy!” pierced into Susan’s very marrow. But she remained as
still and tearless as the great round face upon the clock.
At last, in a lull of crying, she said,—not exactly questioning, but as
if partly to herself—
“You loved him, then?”
“Loved him! he was my husband! He was the father of three bonny bairns
that lie dead in Grasmere churchyard. I wish you’d go, Susan Dixon, and
let me weep without your watching me! I wish you’d never come near the
place.”
“Alas! alas! it would not have brought him to life. I would have laid
down my own to save his. My life has been so very sad! No one would
have cared if I had died. Alas! alas!”
The tone in which she said this was so utterly mournful and despairing
that it awed Nelly into quiet for a time. But by-and-by she said, “I
would not turn a dog out to do it harm; but the night is clear, and
Tommy shall guide you to the Red Cow. But, oh, I want to be alone! If
you’ll come back to-morrow, I’ll be better, and I’ll hear all, and
thank you for every kindness you have shown him,—and I do believe
you’ve showed him kindness,—though I don’t know why.”
Susan moved heavily and strangely.
She said something—her words came thick and unintelligible. She had had
a paralytic stroke since she had last spoken. She could not go, even if
she would. Nor did Eleanor, when she became aware of the state of the
case, wish her to leave. She had her laid on her own bed, and weeping
silently all the while for her last husband, she nursed Susan like a
sister. She did not know what her guest’s worldly position might be;
and she might never be repaid. But she sold many a little trifle to
purchase such small comforts as Susan needed. Susan, lying still and
motionless, learnt much. It was not a severe stroke; it might be the
forerunner of others yet to come, but at some distance of time. But for
the present she recovered, and regained much of her former health. On
her sick-bed she matured her plans. When she returned to Yew Nook, she
took Michael Hurst’s widow and children with her to live there, and
fill up the haunted hearth with living forms that should banish the
ghosts.
And so it fell out that the latter days of Susan Dixon’s life were
better than the former.
When this narrative was finished, Mrs. Dawson called on our two
gentlemen, Signor Sperano and Mr. Preston, and told them that they had
hitherto been amused or interested, but that it was now their turn to
amuse or interest. They looked at each other as if this application of
hers took them by surprise, and seemed altogether as much abashed as
well-grown men can ever be. Signor Sperano was the first to recover
himself: after thinking a little, he said—
“Your will, dear lady, is law. Next Monday evening, I will bring you an
old, old story, which I found among the papers of the good old priest
who first welcomed me to England. It was but a poor return for his
generous kindness; but I had the opportunity of nursing him through the
cholera, of which he died. He left me all that he had—no money—but his
scanty furniture, his book of prayers, his crucifix and rosary, and his
papers. How some of those papers came into his hands I know not. They
had evidently been written many years before the venerable man was
born; and I doubt whether he had ever examined the bundles, which had
come down to him from some old ancestor, or in some strange bequest.
His life was too busy to leave any time for the gratification of mere
curiosity; I, alas! have only had too much leisure.”
Next Monday, Signor Sperano read to us the story which I will call
“THE POOR CLARE.”
THE POOR CLARE
CHAPTER I.
December 12th, 1747.—My life has been strangely bound up with
extraordinary incidents, some of which occurred before I had any
connection with the principal actors in them, or indeed, before I even
knew of their existence. I suppose, most old men are, like me, more
given to looking back upon their own career with a kind of fond interest
and affectionate remembrance, than to watching the events—though these
may have far more interest for the multitude—immediately passing before
their eyes. If this should be the case with the generality of old
people, how much more so with me! . . . If I am to enter upon that
strange story connected with poor Lucy, I must begin a long way back. I
myself only came to the knowledge of her family history after I knew her;
but, to make the tale clear to any one else, I must arrange events in the
order in which they occurred—not that in which I became acquainted with
them.
There is a great old hall in the north-east of Lancashire, in a part they
called the Trough of Bolland, adjoining that other district named Craven.
Starkey Manor-house is rather like a number of rooms clustered round a
gray, massive, old keep than a regularly-built hall. Indeed, I suppose
that the house only consisted of a great tower in the centre, in the days
when the Scots made their raids terrible as far south as this; and that
after the Stuarts came in, and there was a little more security of
property in those parts, the Starkeys of that time added the lower
building, which runs, two stories high, all round the base of the keep.
There has been a grand garden laid out in my days, on the southern slope
near the house; but when I first knew the place, the kitchen-garden at
the farm was the only piece of cultivated ground belonging to it. The
deer used to come within sight of the drawing-room windows, and might
have browsed quite close up to the house if they had not been too wild
and shy. Starkey Manor-house itself stood on a projection or peninsula
of high land, jutting out from the abrupt hills that form the sides of
the Trough of Bolland. These hills were rocky and bleak enough towards
their summit; lower down they were clothed with tangled copsewood and
green depths of fern, out of which a gray giant of an ancient forest-tree
would tower here and there, throwing up its ghastly white branches, as if
in imprecation, to the sky. These trees, they told me, were the remnants
of that forest which existed in the days of the Heptarchy, and were even
then noted as landmarks. No wonder that their upper and more exposed
branches were leafless, and that the dead bark had peeled away, from
sapless old age.
Not far from the house there were a few cottages, apparently, of the same
date as the keep; probably built for some retainers of the family, who
sought shelter—they and their families and their small flocks and
herds—at the hands of their feudal lord. Some of them had pretty much
fallen to decay. They were built in a strange fashion. Strong beams had
been sunk firm in the ground at the requisite distance, and their other
ends had been fastened together, two and two, so as to form the shape of
one of those rounded waggon-headed gipsy-tents, only very much larger.
The spaces between were filled with mud, stones, osiers, rubbish,
mortar—anything to keep out the weather. The fires were made in the
centre of these rude dwellings, a hole in the roof forming the only
chimney. No Highland hut or Irish cabin could be of rougher
construction.
The owner of this property, at the beginning of the present century, was
a Mr. Patrick Byrne Starkey. His family had kept to the old faith, and
were stanch Roman Catholics, esteeming it even a sin to marry any one of
Protestant descent, however willing he or she might have been to embrace
the Romish religion. Mr. Patrick Starkey’s father had been a follower of
James the Second; and, during the disastrous Irish campaign of that
monarch he had fallen in love with an Irish beauty, a Miss Byrne, as
zealous for her religion and for the Stuarts as himself. He had returned
to Ireland after his escape to France, and married her, bearing her back
to the court at St. Germains. But some licence on the part of the
disorderly gentlemen who surrounded King James in his exile, had insulted
his beautiful wife, and disgusted him; so he removed from St. Germains to
Antwerp, whence, in a few years’ time, he quietly returned to Starkey
Manor-house—some of his Lancashire neighbours having lent their good
offices to reconcile him to the powers that were. He was as firm a
Catholic as ever, and as stanch an advocate for the Stuarts and the
divine rights of kings; but his religion almost amounted to asceticism,
and the conduct of these with whom he had been brought in such close
contact at St. Germains would little bear the inspection of a stern
moralist. So he gave his allegiance where he could not give his esteem,
and learned to respect sincerely the upright and moral character of one
whom he yet regarded as an usurper. King William’s government had little
need to fear such a one. So he returned, as I have said, with a sobered
heart and impoverished fortunes, to his ancestral house, which had fallen
sadly to ruin while the owner had been a courtier, a soldier, and an
exile. The roads into the Trough of Bolland were little more than
cart-ruts; indeed, the way up to the house lay along a ploughed field
before you came to the deer-park. Madam, as the country-folk used to
call Mrs. Starkey, rode on a pillion behind her husband, holding on to
him with a light hand by his leather riding-belt. Little master (he that
was afterwards Squire Patrick Byrne Starkey) was held on to his pony by a
serving-man. A woman past middle age walked, with a firm and strong
step, by the cart that held much of the baggage; and high up on the mails
and boxes, sat a girl of dazzling beauty, perched lightly on the topmost
trunk, and swaying herself fearlessly to and fro, as the cart rocked and
shook in the heavy roads of late autumn. The girl wore the Antwerp
faille, or black Spanish mantle over her head, and altogether her
appearance was such that the old cottager, who described the possession
to me many years after, said that all the country-folk took her for a
foreigner. Some dogs, and the boy who held them in charge, made up the
company. They rode silently along, looking with grave, serious eyes at
the people, who came out of the scattered cottages to bow or curtsy to
the real Squire, “come back at last,” and gazed after the little
procession with gaping wonder, not deadened by the sound of the foreign
language in which the few necessary words that passed among them were
spoken. One lad, called from his staring by the Squire to come and help
about the cart, accompanied them to the Manor-house. He said that when
the lady had descended from her pillion, the middle-aged woman whom I
have described as walking while the others rode, stepped quickly forward,
and taking Madam Starkey (who was of a slight and delicate figure) in her
arms, she lifted her over the threshold, and set her down in her
husband’s house, at the same time uttering a passionate and outlandish
blessing. The Squire stood by, smiling gravely at first; but when the
words of blessing were pronounced, he took off his fine feathered hat,
and bent his head. The girl with the black mantle stepped onward into
the shadow of the dark hall, and kissed the lady’s hand; and that was all
the lad could tell to the group that gathered round him on his return,
eager to hear everything, and to know how much the Squire had given him
for his services.
From all I could gather, the Manor-house, at the time of the Squire’s
return, was in the most dilapidated state. The stout gray walls remained
firm and entire; but the inner chambers had been used for all kinds of
purposes. The great withdrawing-room had been a barn; the state
tapestry-chamber had held wool, and so on. But, by-and-by, they were
cleared out; and if the Squire had no money to spend on new furniture, he
and his wife had the knack of making the best of the old. He was no
despicable joiner; she had a kind of grace in whatever she did, and
imparted an air of elegant picturesqueness to whatever she touched.
Besides, they had brought many rare things from the Continent; perhaps I
should rather say, things that were rare in that part of
England—carvings, and crosses, and beautiful pictures. And then, again,
wood was plentiful in the Trough of Bolland, and great log-fires danced
and glittered in all the dark, old rooms, and gave a look of home and
comfort to everything.
Why do I tell you all this? I have little to do with the Squire and
Madame Starkey; and yet I dwell upon them, as if I were unwilling to come
to the real people with whom my life was so strangely mixed up. Madam
had been nursed in Ireland by the very woman who lifted her in her arms,
and welcomed her to her husband’s home in Lancashire. Excepting for the
short period of her own married life, Bridget Fitzgerald had never left
her nursling. Her marriage—to one above her in rank—had been unhappy.
Her husband had died, and left her in even greater poverty than that in
which she was when he had first met with her. She had one child, the
beautiful daughter who came riding on the waggon-load of furniture that
was brought to the Manor-house. Madame Starkey had taken her again into
her service when she became a widow. She and her daughter had followed
“the mistress” in all her fortunes; they had lived at St. Germains and at
Antwerp, and were now come to her home in Lancashire. As soon as Bridget
had arrived there, the Squire gave her a cottage of her own, and took
more pains in furnishing it for her than he did in anything else out of
his own house. It was only nominally her residence. She was constantly
up at the great house; indeed, it was but a short cut across the woods
from her own home to the home of her nursling. Her daughter Mary, in
like manner, moved from one house to the other at her own will. Madam
loved both mother and child dearly. They had great influence over her,
and, through her, over her husband. Whatever Bridget or Mary willed was
sure to come to pass. They were not disliked; for, though wild and
passionate, they were also generous by nature. But the other servants
were afraid of them, as being in secret the ruling spirits of the
household. The Squire had lost his interest in all secular things; Madam
was gentle, affectionate, and yielding. Both husband and wife were
tenderly attached to each other and to their boy; but they grew more and
more to shun the trouble of decision on any point; and hence it was that
Bridget could exert such despotic power. But if everyone else yielded to
her “magic of a superior mind,” her daughter not unfrequently rebelled.
She and her mother were too much alike to agree. There were wild
quarrels between them, and wilder reconciliations. There were times
when, in the heat of passion, they could have stabbed each other. At all
other times they both—Bridget especially—would have willingly laid down
their lives for one another. Bridget’s love for her child lay very
deep—deeper than that daughter ever knew; or I should think she would
never have wearied of home as she did, and prayed her mistress to obtain
for her some situation—as waiting maid—beyond the seas, in that more
cheerful continental life, among the scenes of which so many of her
happiest years had been spent. She thought, as youth thinks, that life
would last for ever, and that two or three years were but a small portion
of it to pass away from her mother, whose only child she was. Bridget
thought differently, but was too proud ever to show what she felt. If
her child wished to leave her, why—she should go. But people said
Bridget became ten years older in the course of two months at this time.
She took it that Mary wanted to leave her. The truth was, that Mary
wanted for a time to leave the place, and to seek some change, and would
thankfully have taken her mother with her. Indeed when Madam Starkey had
gotten her a situation with some grand lady abroad, and the time drew
near for her to go, it was Mary who clung to her mother with passionate
embrace, and, with floods of tears, declared that she would never leave
her; and it was Bridget, who at last loosened her arms, and, grave and
tearless herself, bade her keep her word, and go forth into the wide
world. Sobbing aloud, and looking back continually, Mary went away.
Bridget was still as death, scarcely drawing her breath, or closing her
stony eyes; till at last she turned back into her cottage, and heaved a
ponderous old settle against the door. There she sat, motionless, over
the gray ashes of her extinguished fire, deaf to Madam’s sweet voice, as
she begged leave to enter and comfort her nurse. Deaf, stony, and
motionless, she sat for more than twenty hours; till, for the third time,
Madam came across the snowy path from the great house, carrying with her
a young spaniel, which had been Mary’s pet up at the hall; and which had
not ceased all night long to seek for its absent mistress, and to whine
and moan after her. With tears Madam told this story, through the closed
door—tears excited by the terrible look of anguish, so steady, so
immovable—so the same to-day as it was yesterday—on her nurse’s face.
The little creature in her arms began to utter its piteous cry, as it
shivered with the cold. Bridget stirred; she moved—she listened. Again
that long whine; she thought it was for her daughter; and what she had
denied to her nursling and mistress she granted to the dumb creature that
Mary had cherished. She opened the door, and took the dog from Madam’s
arms. Then Madam came in, and kissed and comforted the old woman, who
took but little notice of her or anything. And sending up Master Patrick
to the hall for fire and food, the sweet young lady never left her nurse
all that night. Next day, the Squire himself came down, carrying a
beautiful foreign picture—Our Lady of the Holy Heart, the Papists call
it. It is a picture of the Virgin, her heart pierced with arrows, each
arrow representing one of her great woes. That picture hung in Bridget’s
cottage when I first saw her; I have that picture now.
Years went on. Mary was still abroad. Bridget was still and stern,
instead of active and passionate. The little dog, Mignon, was indeed her
darling. I have heard that she talked to it continually; although, to
most people, she was so silent. The Squire and Madam treated her with
the greatest consideration, and well they might; for to them she was as
devoted and faithful as ever. Mary wrote pretty often, and seemed
satisfied with her life. But at length the letters ceased—I hardly know
whether before or after a great and terrible sorrow came upon the house
of the Starkeys. The Squire sickened of a putrid fever; and Madam caught
it in nursing him, and died. You may be sure, Bridget let no other woman
tend her but herself; and in the very arms that had received her at her
birth, that sweet young woman laid her head down, and gave up her breath.
The Squire recovered, in a fashion. He was never strong—he had never the
heart to smile again. He fasted and prayed more than ever; and people
did say that he tried to cut off the entail, and leave all the property
away to found a monastery abroad, of which he prayed that some day little
Squire Patrick might be the reverend father. But he could not do this,
for the strictness of the entail and the laws against the Papists. So he
could only appoint gentlemen of his own faith as guardians to his son,
with many charges about the lad’s soul, and a few about the land, and the
way it was to be held while he was a minor. Of course, Bridget was not
forgotten. He sent for her as he lay on his death-bed, and asked her if
she would rather have a sum down, or have a small annuity settled upon
her. She said at once she would have a sum down; for she thought of her
daughter, and how she could bequeath the money to her, whereas an annuity
would have died with her. So the Squire left her her cottage for life,
and a fair sum of money. And then he died, with as ready and willing a
heart as, I suppose, ever any gentleman took out of this world with him.
The young Squire was carried off by his guardians, and Bridget was left
alone.
I have said that she had not heard from Mary for some time. In her last
letter, she had told of travelling about with her mistress, who was the
English wife of some great foreign officer, and had spoken of her chances
of making a good marriage, without naming the gentleman’s name, keeping
it rather back as a pleasant surprise to her mother; his station and
fortune being, as I had afterwards reason to know, far superior to
anything she had a right to expect. Then came a long silence; and Madam
was dead, and the Squire was dead; and Bridget’s heart was gnawed by
anxiety, and she knew not whom to ask for news of her child. She could
not write, and the Squire had managed her communication with her
daughter. She walked off to Hurst; and got a good priest there—one whom
she had known at Antwerp—to write for her. But no answer came. It was
like crying into the’ awful stillness of night.
One day, Bridget was missed by those neighbours who had been accustomed
to mark her goings-out and comings-in. She had never been sociable with
any of them; but the sight of her had become a part of their daily lives,
and slow wonder arose in their minds, as morning after morning came, and
her house-door remained closed, her window dead from any glitter, or
light of fire within. At length, some one tried the door; it was locked.
Two or three laid their heads together, before daring to look in through
the blank unshuttered window. But, at last, they summoned up courage;
and then saw that Bridget’s absence from their little world was not the
result of accident or death, but of premeditation. Such small articles
of furniture as could be secured from the effects of time and damp by
being packed up, were stowed away in boxes. The picture of the Madonna
was taken down, and gone. In a word, Bridget had stolen away from her
home, and left no trace whither she was departed. I knew afterwards,
that she and her little dog had wandered off on the long search for her
lost daughter. She was too illiterate to have faith in letters, even had
she had the means of writing and sending many. But she had faith in her
own strong love, and believed that her passionate instinct would guide
her to her child. Besides, foreign travel was no new thing to her, and
she could speak enough of French to explain the object of her journey,
and had, moreover, the advantage of being, from her faith, a welcome
object of charitable hospitality at many a distant convent. But the
country people round Starkey Manor-house knew nothing of all this. They
wondered what had become of her, in a torpid, lazy fashion, and then left
off thinking of her altogether. Several years passed. Both Manor-house
and cottage were deserted. The young Squire lived far away under the
direction of his guardians. There were inroads of wool and corn into the
sitting-rooms of the Hall; and there was some low talk, from time to
time, among the hinds and country people whether it would not be as well
to break into old Bridget’s cottage, and save such of her goods as were
left from the moth and rust which must be making sad havoc. But this
idea was always quenched by the recollection of her strong character and
passionate anger; and tales of her masterful spirit, and vehement force
of will, were whispered about, till the very thought of offending her, by
touching any article of hers, became invested with a kind of horror: it
was believed that, dead or alive, she would not fail to avenge it.
Suddenly she came home; with as little noise or note of preparation as
she had departed. One day some one noticed a thin, blue curl of smoke
ascending from her chimney. Her door stood open to the noonday sun; and,
ere many hours had elapsed, some one had seen an old
travel-and-sorrow-stained woman dipping her pitcher in the well; and
said, that the dark, solemn eyes that looked up at him were more like
Bridget Fitzgerald’s than any one else’s in this world; and yet, if it
were she, she looked as if she had been scorched in the flames of hell,
so brown, and scared, and fierce a creature did she seem. By-and-by many
saw her; and those who met her eye once cared not to be caught looking at
her again. She had got into the habit of perpetually talking to herself;
nay, more, answering herself, and varying her tones according to the side
she took at the moment. It was no wonder that those who dared to listen
outside her door at night believed that she held converse with some
spirit; in short, she was unconsciously earning for herself the dreadful
reputation of a witch.
Her little dog, which had wandered half over the Continent with her, was
her only companion; a dumb remembrancer of happier days. Once he was
ill; and she carried him more than three miles, to ask about his
management from one who had been groom to the last Squire, and had then
been noted for his skill in all diseases of animals. Whatever this man
did, the dog recovered; and they who heard her thanks, intermingled with
blessings (that were rather promises of good fortune than prayers),
looked grave at his good luck when, next year, his ewes twinned, and his
meadow-grass was heavy and thick.
Now it so happened that, about the year seventeen hundred and eleven, one
of the guardians of the young squire, a certain Sir Philip Tempest,
bethought him of the good shooting there must be on his ward’s property;
and in consequence he brought down four or five gentlemen, of his
friends, to stay for a week or two at the Hall. From all accounts, they
roystered and spent pretty freely. I never heard any of their names but
one, and that was Squire Gisborne’s. He was hardly a middle-aged man
then; he had been much abroad, and there, I believe, he had known Sir
Philip Tempest, and done him some service. He was a daring and dissolute
fellow in those days: careless and fearless, and one who would rather be
in a quarrel than out of it. He had his fits of ill-temper besides, when
he would spare neither man nor beast. Otherwise, those who knew him
well, used to say he had a good heart, when he was neither drunk, nor
angry, nor in any way vexed. He had altered much when I came to know
him.
One day, the gentlemen had all been out shooting, and with but little
success, I believe; anyhow, Mr. Gisborne had none, and was in a black
humour accordingly. He was coming home, having his gun loaded,
sportsman-like, when little Mignon crossed his path, just as he turned
out of the wood by Bridget’s cottage. Partly for wantonness, partly to
vent his spleen upon some living creature. Mr. Gisborne took his gun,
and fired—he had better have never fired gun again, than aimed that
unlucky shot, he hit Mignon, and at the creature’s sudden cry, Bridget
came out, and saw at a glance what had been done. She took Mignon up in
her arms, and looked hard at the wound; the poor dog looked at her with
his glazing eyes, and tried to wag his tail and lick her hand, all
covered with blood. Mr. Gisborne spoke in a kind of sullen penitence:
“You should have kept the dog out of my way—a little poaching varmint.”
At this very moment, Mignon stretched out his legs, and stiffened in her
arms—her lost Mary’s dog, who had wandered and sorrowed with her for
years. She walked right into Mr. Gisborne’s path, and fixed his
unwilling, sullen look, with her dark and terrible eye.
“Those never throve that did me harm,” said she. “I’m alone in the
world, and helpless; the more do the saints in heaven hear my prayers.
Hear me, ye blessed ones! hear me while I ask for sorrow on this bad,
cruel man. He has killed the only creature that loved me—the dumb beast
that I loved. Bring down heavy sorrow on his head for it, O ye saints!
He thought that I was helpless, because he saw me lonely and poor; but
are not the armies of heaven for the like of me?”
“Come, come,” said he, half remorseful, but not one whit afraid. “Here’s
a crown to buy thee another dog. Take it, and leave off cursing! I care
none for thy threats.”
“Don’t you?” said she, coming a step closer, and changing her imprecatory
cry for a whisper which made the gamekeeper’s lad, following Mr.
Gisborne, creep all over. “You shall live to see the creature you love
best, and who alone loves you—ay, a human creature, but as innocent and
fond as my poor, dead darling—you shall see this creature, for whom death
would be too happy, become a terror and a loathing to all, for this
blood’s sake. Hear me, O holy saints, who never fail them that have no
other help!”
She threw up her right hand, filled with poor Mignon’s life-drops; they
spirted, one or two of them, on his shooting-dress,—an ominous sight to
the follower. But the master only laughed a little, forced, scornful
laugh, and went on to the Hall. Before he got there, however, he took
out a gold piece, and bade the boy carry it to the old woman on his
return to the village. The lad was “afeared,” as he told me in after
years; he came to the cottage, and hovered about, not daring to enter.
He peeped through the window at last; and by the flickering wood-flame,
he saw Bridget kneeling before the picture of Our Lady of the Holy Heart,
with dead Mignon lying between her and the Madonna. She was praying
wildly, as her outstretched arms betokened. The lad shrunk away in
redoubled terror; and contented himself with slipping the gold piece
under the ill-fitting door. The next day it was thrown out upon the
midden; and there it lay, no one daring to touch it.
Meanwhile Mr. Gisborne, half curious, half uneasy, thought to lessen his
uncomfortable feelings by asking Sir Philip who Bridget was? He could
only describe her—he did not know her name. Sir Philip was equally at a
loss. But an old servant of the Starkeys, who had resumed his livery at
the Hall on this occasion—a scoundrel whom Bridget had saved from
dismissal more than once during her palmy days—said:—
“It will be the old witch, that his worship means. She needs a ducking,
if ever a woman did, does that Bridget Fitzgerald.”
“Fitzgerald!” said both the gentlemen at once. But Sir Philip was the
first to continue:—
“I must have no talk of ducking her, Dickon. Why, she must be the very
woman poor Starkey bade me have a care of; but when I came here last she
was gone, no one knew where. I’ll go and see her to-morrow. But mind
you, sirrah, if any harm comes to her, or any more talk of her being a
witch—I’ve a pack of hounds at home, who can follow the scent of a lying
knave as well as ever they followed a dog-fox; so take care how you talk
about ducking a faithful old servant of your dead master’s.”
“Had she ever a daughter?” asked Mr. Gisborne, after a while.
“I don’t know—yes! I’ve a notion she had; a kind of waiting woman to
Madam Starkey.”
“Please your worship,” said humbled Dickon, “Mistress Bridget had a
daughter—one Mistress Mary—who went abroad, and has never been heard on
since; and folk do say that has crazed her mother.”
Mr. Gisborne shaded his eyes with his hand.
“I could wish she had not cursed me,” he muttered. “She may have
power—no one else could.” After a while, he said aloud, no one
understanding rightly what he meant, “Tush! it is impossible!”—and called
for claret; and he and the other gentlemen set-to to a drinking-bout.
CHAPTER II.
I now come to the time in which I myself was mixed up with the people
that I have been writing about. And to make you understand how I became
connected with them, I must give you some little account of myself. My
father was the younger son of a Devonshire gentleman of moderate
property; my eldest uncle succeeded to the estate of his forefathers, my
second became an eminent attorney in London, and my father took orders.
Like most poor clergymen, he had a large family; and I have no doubt was
glad enough when my London uncle, who was a bachelor, offered to take
charge of me, and bring me up to be his successor in business.
In this way I came to live in London, in my uncle’s house, not far from
Gray’s Inn, and to be treated and esteemed as his son, and to labour with
him in his office. I was very fond of the old gentleman. He was the
confidential agent of many country squires, and had attained to his
present position as much by knowledge of human nature as by knowledge of
law; though he was learned enough in the latter. He used to say his
business was law, his pleasure heraldry. From his intimate acquaintance
with family history, and all the tragic courses of life therein involved,
to hear him talk, at leisure times, about any coat of arms that came
across his path was as good as a play or a romance. Many cases of
disputed property, dependent on a love of genealogy, were brought to him,
as to a great authority on such points. If the lawyer who came to
consult him was young, he would take no fee, only give him a long lecture
on the importance of attending to heraldry; if the lawyer was of mature
age and good standing, he would mulct him pretty well, and abuse him to
me afterwards as negligent of one great branch of the profession. His
house was in a stately new street called Ormond Street, and in it he had
a handsome library; but all the books treated of things that were past;
none of them planned or looked forward into the future. I worked
away—partly for the sake of my family at home, partly because my uncle
had really taught me to enjoy the kind of practice in which he himself
took such delight. I suspect I worked too hard; at any rate, in
seventeen hundred and eighteen I was far from well, and my good uncle was
disturbed by my ill looks.
One day, he rang the bell twice into the clerk’s room at the dingy office
in Grey’s Inn Lane. It was the summons for me, and I went into his
private room just as a gentleman—whom I knew well enough by sight as an
Irish lawyer of more reputation than he deserved—was leaving.
My uncle was slowly rubbing his hands together and considering. I was
there two or three minutes before he spoke. Then he told me that I must
pack up my portmanteau that very afternoon, and start that night by
post-horse for West Chester. I should get there, if all went well, at
the end of five days’ time, and must then wait for a packet to cross over
to Dublin; from thence I must proceed to a certain town named Kildoon,
and in that neighbourhood I was to remain, making certain inquiries as to
the existence of any descendants of the younger branch of a family to
whom some valuable estates had descended in the female line. The Irish
lawyer whom I had seen was weary of the case, and would willingly have
given up the property, without further ado, to a man who appeared to
claim them; but on laying his tables and trees before my uncle, the
latter had foreseen so many possible prior claimants, that the lawyer had
begged him to undertake the management of the whole business. In his
youth, my uncle would have liked nothing better than going over to
Ireland himself, and ferreting out every scrap of paper or parchment, and
every word of tradition respecting the family. As it was, old and gouty,
he deputed me.
Accordingly, I went to Kildoon. I suspect I had something of my uncle’s
delight in following up a genealogical scent, for I very soon found out,
when on the spot, that Mr. Rooney, the Irish lawyer, would have got both
himself and the first claimant into a terrible scrape, if he had
pronounced his opinion that the estates ought to be given up to him.
There were three poor Irish fellows, each nearer of kin to the last
possessor; but, a generation before, there was a still nearer relation,
who had never been accounted for, nor his existence ever discovered by
the lawyers, I venture to think, till I routed him out from the memory of
some of the old dependants of the family. What had become of him? I
travelled backwards and forwards; I crossed over to France, and came back
again with a slight clue, which ended in my discovering that, wild and
dissipated himself, he had left one child, a son, of yet worse character
than his father; that this same Hugh Fitzgerald had married a very
beautiful serving-woman of the Byrnes—a person below him in hereditary
rank, but above him in character; that he had died soon after his
marriage, leaving one child, whether a boy or a girl I could not learn,
and that the mother had returned to live in the family of the Byrnes.
Now, the chief of this latter family was serving in the Duke of Berwick’s
regiment, and it was long before I could hear from him; it was more than
a year before I got a short, haughty letter—I fancy he had a soldier’s
contempt for a civilian, an Irishman’s hatred for an Englishman, an
exiled Jacobite’s jealousy of one who prospered and lived tranquilly
under the government he looked upon as an usurpation. “Bridget
Fitzgerald,” he said, “had been faithful to the fortunes of his
sister—had followed her abroad, and to England when Mrs. Starkey had
thought fit to return. Both his sister and her husband were dead, he
knew nothing of Bridget Fitzgerald at the present time: probably Sir
Philip Tempest, his nephew’s guardian, might be able to give me some
information.” I have not given the little contemptuous terms; the way in
which faithful service was meant to imply more than it said—all that has
nothing to do with my story. Sir Philip, when applied to, told me that
he paid an annuity regularly to an old woman named Fitzgerald, living at
Coldholme (the village near Starkey Manor-house). Whether she had any
descendants he could not say.
One bleak March evening, I came in sight of the places described at the
beginning of my story. I could hardly understand the rude dialect in
which the direction to old Bridget’s house was given.
“Yo’ see yon furleets,” all run together, gave me no idea that I was to
guide myself by the distant lights that shone in the windows of the Hall,
occupied for the time by a farmer who held the post of steward, while the
Squire, now four or five and twenty, was making the grand tour. However,
at last, I reached Bridget’s cottage—a low, moss-grown place: the palings
that had once surrounded it were broken and gone; and the underwood of
the forest came up to the walls, and must have darkened the windows. It
was about seven o’clock—not late to my London notions—but, after knocking
for some time at the door and receiving no reply, I was driven to
conjecture that the occupant of the house was gone to bed. So I betook
myself to the nearest church I had seen, three miles back on the road I
had come, sure that close to that I should find an inn of some kind; and
early the next morning I set off back to Coldholme, by a field-path which
my host assured me I should find a shorter cut than the road I had taken
the night before. It was a cold, sharp morning; my feet left prints in
the sprinkling of hoar-frost that covered the ground; nevertheless, I saw
an old woman, whom I instinctively suspected to be the object of my
search, in a sheltered covert on one side of my path. I lingered and
watched her. She must have been considerably above the middle size in
her prime, for when she raised herself from the stooping position in
which I first saw her, there was something fine and commanding in the
erectness of her figure. She drooped again in a minute or two, and
seemed looking for something on the ground, as, with bent head, she
turned off from the spot where I gazed upon her, and was lost to my
sight. I fancy I missed my way, and made a round in spite of the
landlord’s directions; for by the time I had reached Bridget’s cottage
she was there, with no semblance of hurried walk or discomposure of any
kind. The door was slightly ajar. I knocked, and the majestic figure
stood before me, silently awaiting the explanation of my errand. Her
teeth were all gone, so the nose and chin were brought near together; the
gray eyebrows were straight, and almost hung over her deep, cavernous
eyes, and the thick white hair lay in silvery masses over the low, wide,
wrinkled forehead. For a moment, I stood uncertain how to shape my
answer to the solemn questioning of her silence.
“Your name is Bridget Fitzgerald, I believe?”
She bowed her head in assent.
“I have something to say to you. May I come in? I am unwilling to keep
you standing.”
“You cannot tire me,” she said, and at first she seemed inclined to deny
me the shelter of her roof. But the next moment—she had searched the
very soul in me with her eyes during that instant—she led me in, and
dropped the shadowing hood of her gray, draping cloak, which had
previously hid part of the character of her countenance. The cottage was
rude and bare enough. But before the picture of the Virgin, of which I
have made mention, there stood a little cup filled with fresh primroses.
While she paid her reverence to the Madonna, I understood why she had
been out seeking through the clumps of green in the sheltered copse.
Then she turned round, and bade me be seated. The expression of her
face, which all this time I was studying, was not bad, as the stories of
my last night’s landlord had led me to expect; it was a wild, stern,
fierce, indomitable countenance, seamed and scarred by agonies of
solitary weeping; but it was neither cunning nor malignant.
“My name is Bridget Fitzgerald,” said she, by way of opening our
conversation.
“And your husband was Hugh Fitzgerald, of Knock Mahon, near Kildoon, in
Ireland?”
A faint light came into the dark gloom of her eyes.
“He was.”
“May I ask if you had any children by him?”
The light in her eyes grew quick and red. She tried to speak, I could
see; but something rose in her throat, and choked her, and until she
could speak calmly, she would fain not speak at all before a stranger.
In a minute or so she said—“I had a daughter—one Mary Fitzgerald,”—then
her strong nature mastered her strong will, and she cried out, with a
trembling wailing cry: “Oh, man! what of her?—what of her?”
She rose from her seat, and came and clutched at my arm, and looked in my
eyes. There she read, as I suppose, my utter ignorance of what had
become of her child; for she went blindly back to her chair, and sat
rocking herself and softly moaning, as if I were not there; I not daring
to speak to the lone and awful woman. After a little pause, she knelt
down before the picture of Our Lady of the Holy Heart, and spoke to her
by all the fanciful and poetic names of the Litany.
“O Rose of Sharon! O Tower of David! O Star of the Sea! have ye no
comfort for my sore heart? Am I for ever to hope? Grant me at least
despair!”—and so on she went, heedless of my presence. Her prayers grew
wilder and wilder, till they seemed to me to touch on the borders of
madness and blasphemy. Almost involuntarily, I spoke as if to stop her.
“Have you any reason to think that your daughter is dead?”
She rose from her knees, and came and stood before me.
“Mary Fitzgerald is dead,” said she. “I shall never see her again in the
flesh. No tongue ever told me; but I know she is dead. I have yearned
so to see her, and my heart’s will is fearful and strong: it would have
drawn her to me before now, if she had been a wanderer on the other side
of the world. I wonder often it has not drawn her out of the grave to
come and stand before me, and hear me tell her how I loved her. For,
sir, we parted unfriends.”
I knew nothing but the dry particulars needed for my lawyer’s quest, but
I could not help feeling for the desolate woman; and she must have read
the unusual sympathy with her wistful eyes.
“Yes, sir, we did. She never knew how I loved her; and we parted
unfriends; and I fear me that I wished her voyage might not turn out
well, only meaning,—O, blessed Virgin! you know I only meant that she
should come home to her mother’s arms as to the happiest place on earth;
but my wishes are terrible—their power goes beyond my thought—and there
is no hope for me, if my words brought Mary harm.”
“But,” I said, “you do not know that she is dead. Even now, you hoped
she might be alive. Listen to me,” and I told her the tale I have
already told you, giving it all in the driest manner, for I wanted to
recall the clear sense that I felt almost sure she had possessed in her
younger days, and by keeping up her attention to details, restrain the
vague wildness of her grief.
She listened with deep attention, putting from time to time such
questions as convinced me I had to do with no common intelligence,
however dimmed and shorn by solitude and mysterious sorrow. Then she
took up her tale; and in few brief words, told me of her wanderings
abroad in vain search after her daughter; sometimes in the wake of
armies, sometimes in camp, sometimes in city. The lady, whose
waiting-woman Mary had gone to be, had died soon after the date of her
last letter home; her husband, the foreign officer, had been serving in
Hungary, whither Bridget had followed him, but too late to find him.
Vague rumours reached her that Mary had made a great marriage: and this
sting of doubt was added,—whether the mother might not be close to her
child under her new name, and even hearing of her every day; and yet
never recognizing the lost one under the appellation she then bore. At
length the thought took possession of her, that it was possible that all
this time Mary might be at home at Coldholme, in the Trough of Bolland,
in Lancashire, in England; and home came Bridget, in that vain hope, to
her desolate hearth, and empty cottage. Here she had thought it safest
to remain; if Mary was in life, it was here she would seek for her
mother.
I noted down one or two particulars out of Bridget’s narrative that I
thought might be of use to me: for I was stimulated to further search in
a strange and extraordinary manner. It seemed as if it were impressed
upon me, that I must take up the quest where Bridget had laid it down;
and this for no reason that had previously influenced me (such as my
uncle’s anxiety on the subject, my own reputation as a lawyer, and so
on), but from some strange power which had taken possession of my will
only that very morning, and which forced it in the direction it chose.
“I will go,” said I. “I will spare nothing in the search. Trust to me.
I will learn all that can be learnt. You shall know all that money, or
pains, or wit can discover. It is true she may be long dead: but she may
have left a child.”
“A child!” she cried, as if for the first time this idea had struck her
mind. “Hear him, Blessed Virgin! he says she may have left a child. And
you have never told me, though I have prayed so for a sign, waking or
sleeping!”
“Nay,” said I, “I know nothing but what you tell me. You say you heard
of her marriage.”
But she caught nothing of what I said. She was praying to the Virgin in
a kind of ecstasy, which seemed to render her unconscious of my very
presence.
From Coldholme I went to Sir Philip Tempest’s. The wife of the foreign
officer had been a cousin of his father’s, and from him I thought I might
gain some particulars as to the existence of the Count de la Tour
d’Auvergne, and where I could find him; for I knew questions _de vive
voix_ aid the flagging recollection, and I was determined to lose no
chance for want of trouble. But Sir Philip had gone abroad, and it would
be some time before I could receive an answer. So I followed my uncle’s
advice, to whom I had mentioned how wearied I felt, both in body and
mind, by my will-o’-the-wisp search. He immediately told me to go to
Harrogate, there to await Sir Philip’s reply. I should be near to one of
the places connected with my search, Coldholme; not far from Sir Philip
Tempest, in case he returned, and I wished to ask him any further
questions; and, in conclusion, my uncle bade me try to forget all about
my business for a time.
This was far easier said than done. I have seen a child on a common
blown along by a high wind, without power of standing still and resisting
the tempestuous force. I was somewhat in the same predicament as
regarded my mental state. Something resistless seemed to urge my
thoughts on, through every possible course by which there was a chance of
attaining to my object. I did not see the sweeping moors when I walked
out: when I held a book in my hand, and read the words, their sense did
not penetrate to my brain. If I slept, I went on with the same ideas,
always flowing in the same direction. This could not last long without
having a bad effect on the body. I had an illness, which, although I was
racked with pain, was a positive relief to me, as it compelled me to live
in the present suffering, and not in the visionary researches I had been
continually making before. My kind uncle came to nurse me; and after the
immediate danger was over, my life seemed to slip away in delicious
languor for two or three months. I did not ask—so much did I dread
falling into the old channel of thought—whether any reply had been
received to my letter to Sir Philip. I turned my whole imagination right
away from all that subject. My uncle remained with me until nigh
midsummer, and then returned to his business in London; leaving me
perfectly well, although not completely strong. I was to follow him in a
fortnight; when, as he said, “we would look over letters, and talk about
several things.” I knew what this little speech alluded to, and shrank
from the train of thought it suggested, which was so intimately connected
with my first feelings of illness. However, I had a fortnight more to
roam on those invigorating Yorkshire moors.
In those days, there was one large, rambling inn, at Harrogate, close to
the Medicinal Spring; but it was already becoming too small for the
accommodation of the influx of visitors, and many lodged round about, in
the farm-houses of the district. It was so early in the season, that I
had the inn pretty much to myself; and, indeed, felt rather like a
visitor in a private house, so intimate had the landlord and landlady
become with me during my long illness. She would chide me for being out
so late on the moors, or for having been too long without food, quite in
a motherly way; while he consulted me about vintages and wines, and
taught me many a Yorkshire wrinkle about horses. In my walks I met other
strangers from time to time. Even before my uncle had left me, I had
noticed, with half-torpid curiosity, a young lady of very striking
appearance, who went about always accompanied by an elderly
companion,—hardly a gentlewoman, but with something in her look that
prepossessed me in her favour. The younger lady always put her veil down
when any one approached; so it had been only once or twice, when I had
come upon her at a sudden turn in the path, that I had even had a glimpse
at her face. I am not sure if it was beautiful, though in after-life I
grew to think it so. But it was at this time overshadowed by a sadness
that never varied: a pale, quiet, resigned look of intense suffering,
that irresistibly attracted me,—not with love, but with a sense of
infinite compassion for one so young yet so hopelessly unhappy. The
companion wore something of the same look: quiet melancholy, hopeless,
yet resigned. I asked my landlord who they were. He said they were
called Clarke, and wished to be considered as mother and daughter; but
that, for his part, he did not believe that to be their right name, or
that there was any such relationship between them. They had been in the
neighbourhood of Harrogate for some time, lodging in a remote farm-house.
The people there would tell nothing about them; saying that they paid
handsomely, and never did any harm; so why should they be speaking of any
strange things that might happen? That, as the landlord shrewdly
observed, showed there was something out of the common way he had heard
that the elderly woman was a cousin of the farmer’s where they lodged,
and so the regard existing between relations might help to keep them
quiet.
“What did he think, then, was the reason for their extreme seclusion?”
asked I.