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.