Once she tried to bring about a complete revolution in all their lives;
only once. She was really half-crazy with despair when she made the
attempt; nothing else could have given her the courage. As it was, she
was intimidated by her own audacity, for by nature she accepted
circumstances without questioning. Inaugurations terrified her; yet here
was she, Nan, inaugurating.
She sat at the table, under the lamp, Silas and Gregory on either side
of her, the remains of supper before them. She sat twisting her hands;
swallowing hard.
She began, “Shall we be here always?” then stopped, then plunged on
again, “living always here, with the floods every winter, all the winter
through? Why shouldn’t we go away, somewhere else, if we choose? Why
shouldn’t we?” she cried suddenly, in a frightened voice, as nobody
answered.
She looked at Silas and Gregory; Silas was smiling, and Gregory was
smiling too, in a twisty, derisive way, as though he knew what she had
been talking about. Yet he couldn’t know. Silas had a look of surprise
and amusement; grateful surprise, as though she had provided him with an
unexpected amusement in an hour of boredom.
“Go on!” he said to her.
At that she felt all her source of boldness, of inventiveness, dried up
within her. What was the good of this struggle for escape when she was
hemmed in, not only by the floods and the dykes, but by those two
immovable men who owned her? But her terror urged against her
hopelessness; and was the stronger.
“Can you _like_ living here?” she appealed to Silas, trying to touch him
upon his own inclinations.
“As well here as anywhere else,” he answered. “I work here.”
She knew the bitterness that edged his voice whenever he mentioned his
work.
“You tie up parcels in a packing-shed,” she said, “always the same,—work
that a half-wit could do. Yes, a poor wanting creature could do your
work. Why don’t you bestir yourself? Why don’t you come away?” She
talked so, knowing that she strained to pull a weight that lay solid
against her small strength.
If only Silas or Gregory would get up, she thought that with that
insignificant display of mobility her hope would revive; but they sat on
either side of her, cast in bronze. If they were doomed men, then they
made no effort to escape their doom. Too proud, perhaps. They sat and
waited. They seemed too indifferent to care.
“Nobody’s put you in prison into Abbot’s Etchery,” she murmured.
Yet they were so like prisoners, Silas in his darkness, Gregory in his
silence, that she almost looked for gyves about their wrists and ankles.
When they stirred, it should have been to the accompaniment of a heavy
clank. When Silas fought, when he cried aloud, it was the struggle of a
chained man. But his struggles were so ineffective; Nan, who was not
oppressed from within, but only from without, thought that he could help
himself if he would. She had all the impatience of the naturally buoyant
with the dogged tragedy of the fatalistic.
“Come away,” she urged. “What is it that keeps you here? There are warm,
pretty places. Let’s make the best of things.”
“I might get away from Abbot’s Etchery, I shouldn’t be getting away from
myself,” said Silas.
Nan cried out, “_Can’t_ one get away? Who says so? Isn’t it in our own
hands?”
“Is it?” replied Silas, letting drop the sorrowful query as though it
were rather the echo of a perpetual self-communion revolving in his
soul, than an idle response.
The old mournfulness, the old anguish, closed down upon them again. They
were like haunted people, who would not help themselves. They seemed
haunted by the past,—which contained indeed the death of Hannah, a death
so rough and dingy,—by the present, and by the overcharged future. But
their dread was not to be defined; it was of the nature of a mystic
sentence, presaged from a long way off. Sometimes she thought that they
were afraid of themselves; sometimes that they were too apathetic to be
afraid. Only Silas made his dungeon clamorous sometimes with his wild
revolt, that led to nothing, to no change, to no illumination.