WINDY BROW.
While North Aston was employing its time in wondering, and Alick
Corfield was breaking his heart in sorrowing, Leam was doing battle with
her despair and distress at Windy Brow--doing the best she could to keep
her senses clear and to live through the penance which she had inflicted
on herself.
So far, Mrs. Pepper's conclusions, based on a badly-gummed envelope,
were right: Miss Gryce of Windy Brow was the sister of Mr. Gryce of
Lionnet, though even Mrs. Pepper did not know that Leam Dundas, under
the name of Leonora Darley, was living with her.
It is not the most obvious agents that are the most influential. The
greatest things in Nature are the work of the smallest creatures, and
our lives are manipulated far more by unseen influences, known only to
ourselves, than by those patent to the world. In all North Aston, Mr.
Gryce was the man who had apparently the least hold on the place and the
slightest connection with the people. He had come there by accident and
by choice lived in retirement, though also by choice he had not been
there a month before he knew all there was to be known of every
individual for miles round. The merest chances had made him personally
acquainted with Sebastian Dundas--those chances his tenancy of Lionnet
and the slight attack of fever which called forth his landlord's
sentiment and pity. Through the father he came to know the daughter,
when the prying curiosity of his nature, his liking for secret influence
and concealed action, together with the kind heart at bottom, and his
real affection for the girl whose confidence he had partly forced and
partly won, threw the whole secret into his hands and made him master of
the situation--the keeper of the seal set against the writings whom no
one suspected of complicity. This was exactly the kind of thing he
liked, and the kind of thing that suited him, human mole, born detective
and conspirator as he was.
When Leam met him in the wood on the evening of her confession to Edgar,
she met him with the deliberate intention of confessing her fearful
secret to him too, and of asking him to help her to escape, like the
friend which he had promised he would be. She knew that it was
impossible for her now to live at North Aston, and the sole desire she
had was to be blotted out, as she had been.
There was no excitement about her, no feverish exaltation that would
burn itself cold before twenty-four hours were over--only the dead
dreariness of heartbreak, the tenacious resolution of despair. She
neither wept nor wrung her hands, but quiet, pale, rigid, she told her
terrible story in the low and level tones in which a Greek Fate might
have spoken, as sad and as immutable. She had sinned, and now had made
such atonement as she could by confession--to her lover to save him from
pollution, to her father to cancel his obligations to her, to her friend
to be helped in her lifelong penance. This done, she had strengthened
herself to bear all that might come to her with that resignation of
remorse which demands no rights and inherits no joys. She was not one of
those emotional half-hearted creatures who resolve one day, break down
the next, and drift always. For good and evil alike she had the power to
hold where she had gripped and to maintain what she had undertaken; and
even her life at Windy Brow did not shake her.
And that life might well have shaken both a stronger mind and even a
more resolute will than hers.
A square stone house of eight rooms, set on a bleak fell-side where the
sun never shone, where no fruits ripened, no flowers bloomed and no
trees grew, save here and there a dwarfed and twisted thorn covered with
pale gray lichen and bent by the wind into painful deformity of
growth--a house which had no garden, only a strip of rank, coarse grass
before the windows, with a potato-patch and kail-yard to the side; where
was no adornment within or without, no beauty of color, no softness of
line, merely a rugged, lonesome, square stone tent set up on a
mountain-spur, as it would seem for the express reception of tortured
penitents not seeking to soften sorrow,--this was Windy Brow, the
patrimony of the Gryces, where Keziah, Emmanuel's eldest sister, lived
and had lived these sixty years and more.
The house stood alone. Monk Grange, the hamlet to which it
geographically belonged--a place as bleak and bare as itself, and which
seemed to have been flung against the fell-foot as if a brick-layer's
hodman had pitched the hovels at haphazard anyhow--was two good miles
away, and the market-town, to be got at only by crossing a dangerous
moor, was nine miles off--as far as Sherrington from North Aston.
The few poor dwellers in Monk Grange had little to do with the
market-town. They lived mostly on what they managed to raise and rear
among themselves--holding braxy mutton good enough for feast-days, and
oatmeal porridge all the year round the finest food for men and bairns
alike. As for the gudewives' household necessaries, they were got by the
carrier who passed once a fortnight on their road; and for the rest, if
aught was wanting more than that which they had, they did without, and,
according to the local saying, "want was t' master."
Society of a cultured kind there was none. The clergyman was an old man
little if it all superior to the flock to which he ministered. He was a
St. Bees man, the son of a handloom weaver, speaking broad Cumberland
and hopelessly "dished" by a hard word in the Bible. He was fond of his
glass, and was to be found every day of his life from three to nine at
the Blucher, smoking a clay pipe and drinking rum and milk. He had never
married, but he was by no means an ascetic in his morals, as more than
one buxom wench in his parish had proved; and in all respects he was an
anachronism, the like of which is rare now among the fells and dales,
though at one time it was the normal type for the clergy of the remoter
North Country districts.
This old sinner--Priest Wilson as he was called--and Miss Gryce of Windy
Brow represented the wealth and intellect of a place which was at the
back of everything, out of the highway of life and untouched by the
progress of history or science. And the one was not very much superior
to the other save in moral cleanliness; which, however, counts for
something.
If North Aston had said with a sniff that Mr. Gryce was not
thoroughbred, what would have been its verdict on Sister Keziah? He at
least had rubbed off some of the native fell-side mould by rolling about
foreign parts, gathering experience if not moss, and becoming rich in
knowledge if not in guineas; but Keziah, who had spent the last twenty
years of her life in close attendance on a paralytic old mother, had
stiffened as she stood, and the local mould encrusting her was very
thick. Nevertheless, she too had a good heart if a rough hand, and,
though eccentric almost to insanity, as one so often finds with people
living out of the line and influence of public opinion, yet was as sound
at the core as she was rude and odd in the husk.
She was a small woman, lean, wrinkled, and with a curious mixture of
primness and slovenliness in her dress. She wore a false front, which
she called a topknot, the small, crimped, deep-brown mohair curls of
which were bound about her forehead with a bit of black velvet ribbon,
while gray hairs straggled from underneath to make the patent sham more
transparent still; and over her topknot she wore a rusty black cap that
enclosed the keen monkeyish face like a ruff. Her every-day gown was one
of coarse brown camlet, any number of years old, darned and patched till
it was like a Joseph's coat; and the Rob Roy tartan shawl which she
pinned across her bosom hid a state of dilapidation which even she did
not care should be seen. She wore a black stuff apron full of fine tones
from fruit-stains and fire-scorchings; and she took snuff.
She was reputed to be worth a mort of money, and she had saved a goodly
sum. It would have been more had she had the courage to invest it; but
she had a profound distrust of all financial speculations--had not
Emmanuel lost his share by playing at knucklebones with it in the
City?--and she was not the fool to follow my leader into the mire. For
her part, she put her trust in teapots and stockings, with richer hoards
wrapped in rags and sewn up in the mattress, and here a few odd pounds
under the rice and there a few hidden in the coffee. That was her idea
of a banking account, and she held it to be the best there was.
"Don't lend your hat," she used to say, "and then you'll not have to go
bareheaded." And sometimes, talking of loans on securities, she would
take a pinch of snuff and say she "reckoned nowt of that man who locked
his own granary door and gave another man the key."
To all appearance, she lived only to scrape and hoard, moidering away
her loveless life on the futile energies and sordid aims of a miser's
wretched pleasures. But every now and then she had risen up out of the
slough into which she had gradually sunk, and had done some grand things
that marked her name with so many white stones. While she gloried in her
skill in filching from the pig what would serve the chickens, in making
Jenny go short to save to-day's baking of havre-bread, in skimping Tim's
bowl of porridge--his appetite being a burden on her estate which she
often declared would break her--she had more than once given a hundred
pounds at a blow to build a raft for a poor drowning wretch who must
otherwise have sunk. In fact, she was one of those people who are small
with the small things of life and great with the great--who will grudge
a daily dole of a few threshed-out stalks of straw, but who sometimes,
when rightly touched, will shower down with both hands full sheaves of
golden grain. That is, she had mean aims, a bad temper, no imagination,
but the capacity for pity and generosity on occasions.
Above all things, she hated to be put out of the way or intruded on.
When her brother Emmanuel came down on her without a word of warning,
bringing a girl with eyes that, as she said, made her feel foolish to
look at, and a manner part scared, part stony, and wholly unconformable,
telling her to keep this precious-bit madam like a bale of goods till
called for, and to do the best with it she could, she was justified, she
said, in splurging against his thoughtlessness and want of
consideration, taking a body like that all of a heap, without With your
leave or By your leave, or giving one a chance of saying Yes I will, or
No I won't.
But though she splurged she gave way; and after she had fumed and
fussed, heckled the maid and harried the man, said she didn't see as how
she could, and she didn't think as how she would, sworn there was no
bedding fit to use, and that she had no place for the things--apples and
onions chiefly--that were in the spare room if she gave it up for the
young lass's use, she seemed to quiet down, and going over to Leam,
standing mutely by the black-boarded fireplace, put on her spectacles,
peered up into her face, and said in shrill tones, rasping as a saw,
though she meant to be kind, "Ah, well! I suppose it must be; so go your
ways up stairs with Jenny, bairn, and make yourself at home. It's little
I have for a fine young miss like you to play with, but what I have
you're welcome to; so make no bones about it: d'ye hear?"
"But I am in your way," said Leam, not moving. "You do not want me?"
Miss Gryce laughed. "Want ye?" she shouted. "Want ye, do you say? Nay,
nay, honey, it was no wanting of you or your marras that would ever have
given me a headache, I'll ensure ye. But now that you are here you can
bide as long as you've a mind; and you're welcome kindly. And Emmanuel
there knows that my word is as good as my bond, and what I say I mean."
"Am I to stay?" asked Leam, turning to Mr. Gryce with a certain forced
humility which showed how much it cost her to submit.
"Yes," he answered, less cheerfully and more authoritatively than was
his manner at North Aston, speaking without a lisp and with a full
Cumberland accent. "It is the best thing I can do for you--all I have to
offer."
To which Leam bent her sad head with pathetic patience--pathetic indeed
to those who knew the proud spirit that it reported broken and humbled
for ever. Following the red-armed, touzled, ragged maid to the dingy
cabin that was to be her room, she left her friend to explain to his
sister, so far as he chose and could, the necessity under which he found
himself of leaving his adopted daughter, Leonora Darley, in her care for
a week or two, until such time as he should return and claim her.
"Your adopted daughter? God bless my soul, man! but you are the daftest
donnet I ever saw on two legs!" cried Keziah, snatching up the coarse
gray knitting which was the sole unanchored circumstance in the room and
casting off her heel viciously. "What call had you to adopt a
daughter--you with never a wife to mother her nor a house of your own to
take her to? For I reckon nowt of your furnished houses here and your
beggarly apartments there, as you know. And now you can do nothing
better than bring her here to fash the life out of me before the week's
over! But that's always the way with you men. You talk precious big, but
it's mighty little you put your hands to; and when you hack out yokes
for which you get a deal of praise, you take care not to bear them on
your own backs. It's us women who have to do that."
"One would have supposed you would have liked a pretty young thing like
that in the house. You are lonesome enough here, and it makes a little
life," said Emmanuel quietly.
He knew his sister Keziah, and that she must have her head when the
talking fit was on her.
"'A pretty young thing like that!'" she repeated scornfully. "Lord love
you, born cuddy as you are! What's her good looks to me, I wonder, but a
pound spent on a looking-glass, and Jenny taken off her work to make
cakes and butter-sops for her dainty teeth? We'll have all the men-folk
too havering round to see which of 'em may have the honor of ruining
himself for my fine lady. And I'll not have it, I tell ye. I'll not have
my house turned into a fair, with madam there as the show. Life! what do
I want with 'life' about me, or you either, Emmanuel? I've got my right
foot in the grave, and I reckon yours is not far off; and what we've
both got to do now is to see that we make a good ending for our souls."
"At all events, you don't refuse to take her for a week or two?" asked
Emmanuel innocently.
"Did I say I refused? Did I send her up stairs as the nighest road to
the street-door?" retorted his sister with disdain. "Did I not tell you,
as plain as tongue could speak, that she is welcome to her bit and sup,
and I'll pass the time away for her in the best way I can, though bad is
the best, I reckon?"
"Well, well, you are a good body," said her brother.
"Ay," she answered, "I am good enough when I jump your way. But tell me,
Emmanuel," changing from the disdain of the superior creature holding
forth on high matters to the inferior to the familiar gossip of the
natural woman, "what's to do with her? It's as plain as a pike-staff
that something is troubling her, and maybe it will be some of your love
nonsense? for it's mainly that as fashes the lasses. Good Lord! I'm
thankful I was never hindered that way."
"Yes," said Mr. Gryce, "she has had what you women call a
disappointment; and," speaking with unusual energy, "the man was a fool
and a coward, and she has had a lucky escape."
"Say ye? If so, then there is no call for her to carry on," said Keziah
philosophically. "But the poor bairn's looking wantle enough now, though
I warrant me the fell-side air will brisk her up in no time."
"I hope it will," said her brother.
"What does she eat, now? You see, now I've got the lass on my hands, I
cannot hunger her," said Keziah. "Not that I can give her dainties and
messes," she added hastily, the miser's cloak suddenly covering the
woman's heart. "She'll have to take what we get, and be thankful for her
meat. Still, it's as well to know what a body's been accustomed to when
they come like this, all of a heap."
"Don't fash yourself about her," answered Emmanuel. "Do what you
can--that you will, I know--but leave her to herself: that's the way for
her. She's an odd little body, and the least said the soonest mended
with Leam."
"With who, d'ye say?" asked Keziah sharply.
"Lean--Leonora," said Emmanuel cherubically.
"Well, I wouldn't call a daughter of mine after old Pharaoh's kine,"
snapped Keziah with supreme scorn; and at that moment Leam came into the
room, and Keziah bustled out of it to tig after Jenny and ding at Tim,
as these two faithful servitors were wont to express the way of their
mistress toward them.
"My dear, I did not know that things were so miserable here for you, but
you must just bide here till the scent grows cold, and then I'll come
for you and put you where you'll be better off," said Mr. Gryce kindly
when he was alone with Leam.
"This will do," said Leam, suppressing a shudder as she looked round
the little room, where what had originally been a rhubarb-colored
paper--chosen because it was a good wearing color--was patched here and
there with scraps of newspapers or bits of other patterned papers; where
the huge family Bible and a few musty and torn odd volumes of the
_Spectator_ and the _Tatler_ comprised the sole library; and where the
only ornaments on the chimneypiece were three or four bits of lead ore
from the Roughton Gill mines, above Caldbeck.
"You have been used to something far different," said Emmanuel,
compassionately.
"My past is over," she answered in a low voice.
"But you'll come to a better future," he cried, his mild blue eyes
watery and red.
"Shall I? When I die?" was her reply as she passed her hand wearily over
her forehead, and wished--ah, how ardently!--that the question might
answer itself now at once.
But the young live against their will, and Leam, though bruised and
broken, had still the grand vitality of youth to support her. Of the
stuff of which in a good cause martyrs, in a bad criminals, are made,
she accepted her position at Windy Brow with the very heroism of
resignation. She never complained, though every circumstance, every
condition, was simply torture; and so soon as she saw what she was
expected to do, she did it without remonstrance or reluctance. Her life
there was like a lesson in a foreign language which she had undertaken
to learn by heart, and she gave herself to her task loyally. But it was
suffering beyond even what Emmanuel Gryce supposed or Keziah ever
dreamed of. She, with the sun of the South in her veins, her dreams of
pomegranates and orange-groves, of music and color and bright blue
skies, of women as beautiful as mamma, of that one man--not of the
South, but fit to have been the godlike son of Spain--suddenly
translated from soft and leafy North Aston to a bleak fell-side in the
most desolate corner of Cumberland--where for lush hedges were cold,
grim gray stone walls, and the sole flowers to be seen gorse which she
could not gather, and heather which had no perfume--to a house set so
far under the shadow that it saw the sun only for three months in the
year, and where her sole companion was old Keziah Gryce, ill-favored in
person, rough of mood if true of soul, or creatures even worse than
herself;--she, with that tenacious loyalty, that pride and concentrated
passion, that dry reserve and want of general benevolence characteristic
of her, to be suddenly cast among uncouth strangers whose ways she must
adopt, and who were physically loathsome to her; dead to the only man
she loved, his love for her killed by her own hand, herself by her own
confession accursed; and to bear it all in silent patience,--was it not
heroic? Had she been more plastic than she was, the effort would not
have been so great. Being what she was, it was grand; and made as it was
for penitence, it had in it the essential spirit of saintliness. For
saintliness comes in small things as well as great, and George Herbert's
swept room is a true image. There was saintliness in the docility with
which she rose at six and went to bed at nine; saintliness in the quiet
asceticism with which she ate porridge for breakfast and porridge for
supper--at the first honestly believing it either a joke or an insult,
and that they had given her pigs' food to try her temper; saintliness in
the silence with which she accepted her dinners, maybe a piece of fried
bacon and potatoes, or a huge mess of apple-pudding on washing-days, or
a plate of poached eggs cooked in a pan not over clean; saintliness in
the enforced attention which she gave to Keziah's rambling stories of
her pigs and her chickens, her mother's ailments, Jenny's shortcomings
in the matter of sweepings and savings, Tim's wastefulness in the garden
over the kailrunts, and the hardships of life on a lone woman left with
only a huzzy to look after her; saintliness in the repression of that
proud, fastidious self to which Keziah's familiarity and snuff, Jenny's
familiarity and disorder, the smell of the peat--which was the only fuel
they burnt--reeking through the house, and the utter ugliness and
barren discomfort of everything about, were hourly miseries which she
would once have repudiated with her most cutting scorn; saintliness in
the repression of that self indeed at all four corners, and the resolute
submission to her burden because it was her fitting punishment.
So the sad days wore on, and the fell-side air had not yet brisked up
Emmanuel's adopted daughter as his sister prophesied. Indeed, she seemed
slighter and paler than ever, and if possible more submissive to her lot
and more taciturn. And as her intense quietude of bearing suited Miss
Gryce, who could not bear to be fussed, and time proved her douce and
not fashious, she became quite a favorite with her rough-grained
hostess, who wondered more and more where Emmanuel had picked her up,
and whose bairn she really was.
Her only pleasure was in wandering over the fells, whence she could see
the tops of the Derwentwater mountains, and from some points a glimpse
of blue Bassanthwaite flowing out into the open; where mountain-tarns,
lying like silver plates in the purple distance, were her magic shows,
seen only in certain lights, and more often lost than found; whence she
could look over the broad Carlisle plain and dream of that day on the
North Aston moor when she first met Edgar Harrowby; and whence the
glittering strip of the Solway against the horizon made her yearn to be
in one of the ships which she could dimly discern passing up and down,
so that she might leave England for ever and lay down the burden of her
life and her sorrow in mamma's dear land.
So the hours passed, dreary as Mariana's, and hopeless as those wherein
we stand round the grave and know that the end of all things has come.
And while North Aston wondered, and Alick mourned, and Edgar repented of
his past folly with his handsome head in Adelaide's lap, Leam Dundas
moved slowly through the shadow to the light, and from her chastisement
gathered that sweet grace of patience which redeemed her soul and raised
her from sin to sanctity.