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 the 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 herself with that stern resolution, of which the scar 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 plashing 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.