Susan and Michael were to be married in April. He had already gone to
take possession of his new farm, three or four miles away from Yew
Nook—but that is neighbouring, according to the acceptation of the word
in that thinly-populated district,—when William Dixon fell ill. He came
home one evening, complaining of head-ache and pains in his limbs, but
seemed to loathe the posset which Susan prepared for him; the
treacle-posset which was the homely country remedy against an incipient
cold. He took to his bed with a sensation of exceeding weariness, and
an odd, unusual looking-back to the days of his youth, when he was a
lad living with his parents, in this very house.
The next morning he had forgotten all his life since then, and did not
know his own children; crying, like a newly-weaned baby, for his mother
to come and soothe away his terrible pain. The doctor from Coniston
said it was the typhus-fever, and warned Susan of its infectious
character, and shook his head over his patient. There were no near
friends to come and share her anxiety; only good, kind old Peggy, who
was faithfulness itself, and one or two labourers’ wives, who would
fain have helped her, had not their hands been tied by their
responsibility to their own families. But, somehow, Susan neither
feared nor flagged. As for fear, indeed, she had no time to give way to
it, for every energy of both body and mind was required. Besides, the
young have had too little experience of the danger of infection to
dread it much. She did indeed wish, from time to time, that Michael had
been at home to have taken Willie over to his father’s at High Beck;
but then, again, the lad was docile and useful to her, and his
fecklessness in many things might make him harshly treated by
strangers; so, perhaps, it was as well that Michael was away at Appleby
fair, or even beyond that—gone into Yorkshire after horses.
Her father grew worse; and the doctor insisted on sending over a nurse
from Coniston. Not a professed nurse—Coniston could not have supported
such a one; but a widow who was ready to go where the doctor sent her
for the sake of the payment. When she came, Susan suddenly gave way;
she was felled by the fever herself, and lay unconscious for long
weeks. Her consciousness returned to her one spring afternoon; early
spring: April,—her wedding-month. There was a little fire burning in
the small corner-grate, and the flickering of the blaze was enough for
her to notice in her weak state. She felt that there was some one
sitting on the window-side of her bed, behind the curtain, but she did
not care to know who it was; it was even too great a trouble for her
languid mind to consider who it was likely to be. She would rather shut
her eyes, and melt off again into the gentle luxury of sleep. The next
time she wakened, the Coniston nurse perceived her movement, and made
her a cup of tea, which she drank with eager relish; but still they did
not speak, and once more Susan lay motionless—not asleep, but
strangely, pleasantly conscious of all the small chamber and household
sounds; the fall of a cinder on the hearth, the fitful singing of the
half-empty kettle, the cattle tramping out to field again after they
had been milked, the aged step on the creaking stair—old Peggy’s, as
she knew. It came to her door; it stopped; the person outside listened
for a moment, and then lifted the wooden latch, and looked in. The
watcher by the bedside arose, and went to her. Susan would have been
glad to see Peggy’s face once more, but was far too weak to turn, so
she lay and listened.
“How is she?” whispered one trembling, aged voice.
“Better,” replied the other. “She’s been awake, and had a cup of tea.
She’ll do now.”
“Has she asked after him?”
“Hush! No; she has not spoken a word.”
“Poor lass! poor lass!”
The door was shut. A weak feeling of sorrow and self-pity came over
Susan. What was wrong? Whom had she loved? And dawning, dawning, slowly
rose the sun of her former life, and all particulars were made distinct
to her. She felt that some sorrow was coming to her, and cried over it
before she knew what it was, or had strength enough to ask. In the dead
of night,—and she had never slept again,—she softly called to the
watcher, and asked—
“Who?”
“Who what?” replied the woman, with a conscious affright, ill-veiled by
a poor assumption of ease. “Lie still, there’s a darling, and go to
sleep. Sleep’s better for you than all the doctor’s stuff.”
“Who?” repeated Susan. “Something is wrong. Who?”
“Oh, dear!” said the woman. “There’s nothing wrong. Willie has taken
the turn, and is doing nicely.”
“Father?”
“Well! he’s all right now,” she answered, looking another way, as if
seeking for something.
“Then it’s Michael! Oh, me! oh, me!” She set up a succession of weak,
plaintive, hysterical cries before the nurse could pacify her, by
declaring that Michael had been at the house not three hours before to
ask after her, and looked as well and as hearty as ever man did.
“And you heard of no harm to him since?” inquired Susan.
“Bless the lass, no, for sure! I’ve ne’er heard his name named since I
saw him go out of the yard as stout a man as ever trod shoe-leather.”
It was well, as the nurse said afterwards to Peggy, that Susan had been
so easily pacified by the equivocating answer in respect to her father.
If she had pressed the questions home in his case as she did in
Michael’s, she would have learnt that he was dead and buried more than
a month before. It was well, too, that in her weak state of
convalescence (which lasted long after this first day of consciousness)
her perceptions were not sharp enough to observe the sad change that
had taken place in Willie. His bodily strength returned, his appetite
was something enormous, but his eyes wandered continually; his regard
could not be arrested; his speech became slow, impeded, and incoherent.
People began to say that the fever had taken away the little wit Willie
Dixon had ever possessed and that they feared that he would end in
being a “natural,” as they call an idiot in the Dales.
The habitual affection and obedience to Susan lasted longer than any
other feeling that the boy had had previous to his illness; and,
perhaps, this made her be the last to perceive what every one else had
long anticipated. She felt the awakening rude when it did come. It was
in this wise:—
One June evening, she sat out of doors under the yew-tree, knitting.
She was pale still from her recent illness; and her languor, joined to
the fact of her black dress, made her look more than usually
interesting. She was no longer the buoyant self-sufficient Susan, equal
to every occasion. The men were bringing in the cows to be milked, and
Michael was about in the yard giving orders and directions with
somewhat the air of a master, for the farm belonged of right to Willie,
and Susan had succeeded to the guardianship of her brother. Michael and
she were to be married as soon as she was strong enough—so, perhaps,
his authoritative manner was justified; but the labourers did not like
it, although they said little. They remembered a stripling on the farm,
knowing far less than they did, and often glad to shelter his ignorance
of all agricultural matters behind their superior knowledge. They would
have taken orders from Susan with far more willingness; nay, Willie
himself might have commanded them; and from the old hereditary feeling
toward the owners of land, they would have obeyed him with far greater
cordiality than they now showed to Michael. But Susan was tired with
even three rounds of knitting, and seemed not to notice, or to care,
how things went on around her; and Willie—poor Willie!—there he stood
lounging against the door-sill, enormously grown and developed, to be
sure, but with restless eyes and ever-open mouth, and every now and
then setting up a strange kind of howling cry, and then smiling
vacantly to himself at the sound he had made. As the two old labourers
passed him, they looked at each other ominously, and shook their heads.
“Willie, darling,” said Susan, “don’t make that noise—it makes my head
ache.”
She spoke feebly, and Willie did not seem to hear; at any rate, he
continued his howl from time to time.
“Hold thy noise, wilt’a?” said Michael, roughly, as he passed near him,
and threatening him with his fist. Susan’s back was turned to the pair.
The expression of Willie’s face changed from vacancy to fear, and he
came shambling up to Susan, who put her arm round him, and, as if
protected by that shelter, he began making faces at Michael. Susan saw
what was going on, and, as if now first struck by the strangeness of
her brother’s manner, she looked anxiously at Michael for an
explanation. Michael was irritated at Willie’s defiance of him, and did
not mince the matter.
“It’s just that the fever has left him silly—he never was as wise as
other folk, and now I doubt if he will ever get right.”
Susan did not speak, but she went very pale, and her lip quivered. She
looked long and wistfully at Willie’s face, as he watched the motion of
the ducks in the great stable-pool. He laughed softly to himself every
now and then.
“Willie likes to see the ducks go overhead,” said Susan, instinctively
adopting the form of speech she would have used to a young child.
“Willie, boo! Willie, boo!” he replied, clapping his hands, and
avoiding her eye.
“Speak properly, Willie,” said Susan, making a strong effort at
self-control, and trying to arrest his attention.
“You know who I am—tell me my name!” She grasped his arm almost
painfully tight to make him attend. Now he looked at her, and, for an
instant, a gleam of recognition quivered over his face; but the
exertion was evidently painful, and he began to cry at the vainness of
the effort to recall her name. He hid his face upon her shoulder with
the old affectionate trick of manner. She put him gently away, and went
into the house into her own little bedroom. She locked the door, and
did not reply at all to Michael’s calls for her, hardly spoke to old
Peggy, who tried to tempt her out to receive some homely sympathy, and
through the open easement there still came the idiotic sound of
“Willie, boo! Willie, boo!”