In spite of Peggy’s prophecy that Susan’s life should not seem long, it
did seem wearisome and endless, as the years slowly uncoiled their
monotonous circles. To be sure, she might have made change for herself,
but she did not care to do it. It was, indeed, more than “not caring,”
which merely implies a certain degree of _vis inertiæ_ to be subdued
before an object can be attained, and that the object itself does not
seem to be of sufficient importance to call out the requisite energy.
On the contrary, Susan exerted herself to avoid change and variety. She
had a morbid dread of new faces, which originated in her desire to keep
poor dead Willie’s state a profound secret. She had a contempt for new
customs; and, indeed, her old ways prospered so well under her active
hand and vigilant eye, that it was difficult to know how they could be
improved upon. She was regularly present in Coniston market with the
best butter and the earliest chickens of the season. Those were the
common farm produce that every farmer’s wife about had to sell; but
Susan, after she had disposed of the more feminine articles, turned to
on the man’s side. A better judge of a horse or cow there was not in
all the country round. Yorkshire itself might have attempted to jockey
her, and would have failed. Her corn was sound and clean; her potatoes
well preserved to the latest spring. People began to talk of the hoards
of money Susan Dixon must have laid up somewhere; and one young
ne’er-do-weel of a farmer’s son undertook to make love to the woman of
forty, who looked fifty-five, if a day. He made up to her by opening a
gate on the road-path home, as she was riding on a bare-backed horse,
her purchase not an hour ago. She was off before him, refusing his
civility; but the remounting was not so easy, and rather than fail she
did not choose to attempt it. She walked, and he walked alongside,
improving his opportunity, which, as he vainly thought, had been
consciously granted to him. As they drew near Yew Nook, he ventured on
some expression of a wish to keep company with her. His words were
vague and clumsily arranged. Susan turned round and coolly asked him to
explain himself, he took courage, as he thought of her reputed wealth,
and expressed his wishes this second time pretty plainly. To his
surprise, the reply she made was in a series of smart strokes across
his shoulders, administered through the medium of a supple
hazel-switch.
“Take that!” said she, almost breathless, “to teach thee how thou
darest make a fool of an honest woman old enough to be thy mother. If
thou com’st a step nearer the house, there’s a good horse-pool, and
there’s two stout fellows who’ll like no better fun than ducking thee.
Be off wi’ thee!”
And she strode into her own premises, never looking round to see
whether he obeyed her injunction or not.
Sometimes three or four years would pass over without her hearing
Michael Hurst’s name mentioned. She used to wonder at such times
whether he were dead or alive. She would sit for hours by the dying
embers of her fire on a winter’s evening, trying to recall the scenes
of her youth; trying to bring up living pictures of the faces she had
then known—Michael’s most especially. She thought it was possible, so
long had been the lapse of years, that she might now pass by him in the
street unknowing and unknown. His outward form she might not recognize,
but himself she should feel in the thrill of her whole being. He could
not pass her unawares.
What little she did hear about him, all testified a downward tendency.
He drank—not at stated times when there was no other work to be done,
but continually, whether it was seed-time or harvest. His children were
all ill at the same time; then one died, while the others recovered,
but were poor sickly things. No one dared to give Susan any direct
intelligence of her former lover; many avoided all mention of his name
in her presence; but a few spoke out either in indifference to, or
ignorance of, those bygone days. Susan heard every word, every whisper,
every sound that related to him. But her eye never changed, nor did a
muscle of her face move.
Late one November night she sat over her fire; not a human being
besides herself in the house; none but she had ever slept there since
Willie’s death. The farm-labourers had foddered the cattle and gone
home hours before. There were crickets chirping all round the warm
hearth-stones; there was the clock ticking with the peculiar beat Susan
had known from her childhood, and which then and ever since she had
oddly associated within the idea of a mother and child talking
together, one loud tick, and quick—a feeble, sharp one following.
The day had been keen, and piercingly cold. The whole lift of heaven
seemed a dome of iron. Black and frost-bound was the earth under the
cruel east wind. Now the wind had dropped, and as the darkness had
gathered in, the weather-wise old labourers prophesied snow. The sounds
in the air arose again, as Susan sat still and silent. They were of a
different character to what they had been during the prevalence of the
east wind. Then they had been shrill and piping; now they were like low
distant growling; not unmusical, but strangely threatening. Susan went
to the window, and drew aside the little curtain. The whole world was
white—the air was blinded with the swift and heavy fall of snow. At
present it came down straight, but Susan knew those distant sounds in
the hollows and gulleys of the hills portended a driving wind and a
more cruel storm. She thought of her sheep; were they all folded? the
new-born calf, was it bedded well? Before the drifts were formed too
deep for her to pass in and out—and by the morning she judged that they
would be six or seven feet deep—she would go out and see after the
comfort of her beasts. She took a lantern, and tied a shawl over her
head, and went out into the open air. She had tenderly provided for all
her animals, and was returning, when, borne on the blast as if some
spirit-cry—for it seemed to come rather down from the skies than from
any creature standing on earth’s level—she heard a voice of agony; she
could not distinguish words; it seemed rather as if some bird of prey
was being caught in the whirl of the icy wind, and torn and tortured by
its violence. Again up high above! Susan put down her lantern, and
shouted loud in return; it was an instinct, for if the creature were
not human, which she had doubted but a moment before, what good could
her responding cry do? And her cry was seized on by the tyrannous wind,
and borne farther away in the opposite direction to that from which the
call of agony had proceeded. Again she listened; no sound: then again
it rang through space; and this time she was sure it was human. She
turned into the house, and heaped turf and wood on the fire, which,
careless of her own sensations, she had allowed to fade and almost die
out. She put a new candle in her lantern; she changed her shawl for a
maud, and leaving the door on latch, she sallied out. Just at the
moment when her ear first encountered the weird noises of the storm, on
issuing forth into the open air, she thought she heard the words, “O
God! O help!” They were a guide to her, if words they were, for they
came straight from a rock not a quarter of a mile from Yew Nook, but
only to be reached, on account of its precipitous character, by a
round-about path. Thither she steered, defying wind and snow; guided by
here a thorn-tree, there an old, doddered oak, which had not quite lest
their identity under the whelming mask of snow. Now and then she
stopped to listen; but never a word or sound heard she, till right from
where the copse-wood grew thick and tangled at the base of the rock,
round which she was winding, she heard a moan. Into the brake—all snow
in appearance—almost a plain of snow looked on from the little eminence
where she stood—she plunged, breaking down the bush, stumbling,
bruising herself, fighting her way; her lantern held between her teeth,
and she herself using head as well as hands to butt away a passage, at
whatever cost of bodily injury. As she climbed or staggered, owing to
the unevenness of the snow-covered ground, where the briars and weeds
of years were tangled and matted together, her foot felt something
strangely soft and yielding. She lowered her lantern; there lay a man,
prone on his face, nearly covered by the fast-falling flakes; he must
have fallen from the rock above, as, not knowing of the circuitous
path, he had tried to descend its steep, slippery face. Who could tell?
it was no time for thinking. Susan lifted him up with her wiry
strength; he gave no help—no sign of life; but for all that he might be
alive: he was still warm; she tied her maud round him; she fastened the
lantern to her apron-string; she held him tight: half-carrying,
half-dragging—what did a few bruises signify to him, compared to dear
life, to precious life! She got him through the brake, and down the
path. There, for an instant, she stopped to take breath; but, as if
stung by the Furies, she pushed on again with almost superhuman
strength. Clasping him round the waist, and leaning his dead weight
against the lintel of the door, she tried to undo the latch; but now,
just at this moment, a trembling faintness came over her, and a fearful
dread took possession of her—that here, on the very threshold of her
home, she might be found dead, and buried under the snow, when the
farm-servants came in the morning. This terror stirred her up to one
more effort. Then she and her companion were in the warmth of the quiet
haven of that kitchen; she laid him on the settle, and sank on the
floor by his side. How long she remained in this swoon she could not
tell; not very long she judged by the fire, which was still red and
sullenly glowing when she came to herself. She lighted the candle, and
bent over her late burden to ascertain if indeed he were dead. She
stood long gazing. The man lay dead. There could be no doubt about it.
His filmy eyes glared at her, unshut. But Susan was not one to be
affrighted by the stony aspect of death. It was not that; it was the
bitter, woeful recognition of Michael Hurst!
She was convinced he was dead; but after a while she refused to believe
in her conviction. She stripped off his wet outer-garments with
trembling, hurried hands. She brought a blanket down from her own bed;
she made up the fire. She swathed him in fresh, warm wrappings, and
laid him on the flags before the fire, sitting herself at his head, and
holding it in her lap, while she tenderly wiped his loose, wet hair,
curly still, although its colour had changed from nut-brown to
iron-gray since she had seen it last. From time to time she bent over
the face afresh, sick, and fain to believe that the flicker of the
fire-light was some slight convulsive motion. But the dim, staring eyes
struck chill to her heart. At last she ceased her delicate, busy cares:
but she still held the head softly, as if caressing it. She thought
over all the possibilities and chances in the mingled yarn of their
lives that might, by so slight a turn, have ended far otherwise. If her
mother’s cold had been early tended, so that the responsibility as to
her brother’s weal or woe had not fallen upon her; if the fever had not
taken such rough, cruel hold on Will; nay, if Mrs. Gale, that hard,
worldly sister, had not accompanied him on his last visit to Yew
Nook—his very last before this fatal, stormy might; if she had heard
his cry,—cry uttered by these pale, dead lips with such wild,
despairing agony, not yet three hours ago!—O! if she had but heard it
sooner, he might have been saved before that blind, false step had
precipitated him down the rock! In going over this weary chain of
unrealized possibilities, Susan learnt the force of Peggy’s words. Life
was short, looking back upon it. It seemed but yesterday since all the
love of her being had been poured out, and run to waste. The
intervening years—the long monotonous years that had turned her into an
old woman before her time—were but a dream.
The labourers coming in the dawn of the winter’s day were surprised to
see the fire-light through the low kitchen-window. They knocked, and
hearing a moaning answer, they entered, fearing that something had
befallen their mistress. For all explanation they got these words
“It is Michael Hurst. He was belated, and fell down the Raven’s Crag.
Where does Eleanor, his wife, live?”
How Michael Hurst got to Yew Nook no one but Susan ever knew. They
thought he had dragged himself there, with some sore internal bruise
sapping away his minuted life. They could not have believed the
superhuman exertion which had first sought him out, and then dragged
him hither. Only Susan knew of that.
She gave him into the charge of her servants, and went out and saddled
her horse. Where the wind had drifted the snow on one side, and the
road was clear and bare, she rode, and rode fast; where the soft,
deceitful heaps were massed up, she dismounted and led her steed,
plunging in deep, with fierce energy, the pain at her heart urging her
onwards with a sharp, digging spur.
The gray, solemn, winter’s noon was more night-like than the depth of
summer’s night; dim-purple brooded the low skies over the white earth,
as Susan rode up to what had been Michael Hurst’s abode while living.
It was a small farm-house carelessly kept outside, slatternly tended
within. The pretty Nelly Hebthwaite was pretty still; her delicate face
had never suffered from any long-enduring feeling. If anything, its
expression was that of plaintive sorrow; but the soft, light hair had
scarcely a tinge of gray; the wood-rose tint of complexion yet
remained, if not so brilliant as in youth; the straight nose, the small
mouth were untouched by time. Susan felt the contrast even at that
moment. She knew that her own skin was weather-beaten, furrowed,
brown,—that her teeth were gone, and her hair gray and ragged. And yet
she was not two years older than Nelly,—she had not been, in youth,
when she took account of these things. Nelly stood wondering at the
strange-enough horse-woman, who stopped and panted at the door, holding
her horse’s bridle, and refusing to enter.
“Where is Michael Hurst?” asked Susan, at last.
“Well, I can’t rightly say. He should have been at home last night, but
he was off, seeing after a public-house to be let at Ulverstone, for
our farm does not answer, and we were thinking—”
“He did not come home last night?” said Susan, cutting short the story,
and half-affirming, half-questioning, by way of letting in a ray of the
awful light before she let it full in, in its consuming wrath.
“No! he’ll be stopping somewhere out Ulverstone ways. I’m sure we’ve
need of him at home, for I’ve no one but lile Tommy to help me tend the
beasts. Things have not gone well with us, and we don’t keep a servant
now. But you’re trembling all over, ma’am. You’d better come in, and
take something warm, while your horse rests. That’s the stable-door, to
your left.”
Susan took her horse there; loosened his girths, and rubbed him down
with a wisp of straw. Then she hooked about her for hay; but the place
was bare of feed, and smelt damp and unused. She went to the house,
thankful for the respite, and got some clap-bread, which she mashed up
in a pailful of lukewarm water. Every moment was a respite, and yet
every moment made her dread the more the task that lay before her. It
would be longer than she thought at first. She took the saddle off, and
hung about her horse, which seemed, somehow, more like a friend than
anything else in the world. She laid her cheek against its neck, and
rested there, before returning to the house for the last time.
Eleanor had brought down one of her own gowns, which hung on a chair
against the fire, and had made her unknown visitor a cup of hot tea.
Susan could hardly bear all these little attentions: they choked her,
and yet she was so wet, so weak with fatigue and excitement, that she
could neither resist by voice or by action. Two children stood
awkwardly about, puzzled at the scene, and even Eleanor began to wish
for some explanation of who her strange visitor was.
“You’ve, maybe, heard him speaking of me? I’m called Susan Dixon.”
Nelly coloured, and avoided meeting Susan’s eye.
“I’ve heard other folk speak of you. He never named your name.”
This respect of silence came like balm to Susan: balm not felt or
heeded at the time it was applied, but very grateful in its effects for
all that.
“He is at my house,” continued Susan, determined not to stop or quaver
in the operation—the pain which must be inflicted.
“At your house? Yew Nook?” questioned Eleanor, surprised. “How came he
there?”—half jealously. “Did he take shelter from the coming storm?
Tell me,—there is something—tell me, woman!”
“He took no shelter. Would to God he had!”
“O! would to God! would to God!” shrieked out Eleanor, learning all
from the woful import of those dreary eyes. Her cries thrilled through
the house; the children’s piping wailings and passionate cries on
“Daddy! Daddy!” pierced into Susan’s very marrow. But she remained as
still and tearless as the great round face upon the clock.
At last, in a lull of crying, she said,—not exactly questioning, but as
if partly to herself—
“You loved him, then?”
“Loved him! he was my husband! He was the father of three bonny bairns
that lie dead in Grasmere churchyard. I wish you’d go, Susan Dixon, and
let me weep without your watching me! I wish you’d never come near the
place.”
“Alas! alas! it would not have brought him to life. I would have laid
down my own to save his. My life has been so very sad! No one would
have cared if I had died. Alas! alas!”
The tone in which she said this was so utterly mournful and despairing
that it awed Nelly into quiet for a time. But by-and-by she said, “I
would not turn a dog out to do it harm; but the night is clear, and
Tommy shall guide you to the Red Cow. But, oh, I want to be alone! If
you’ll come back to-morrow, I’ll be better, and I’ll hear all, and
thank you for every kindness you have shown him,—and I do believe
you’ve showed him kindness,—though I don’t know why.”
Susan moved heavily and strangely.
She said something—her words came thick and unintelligible. She had had
a paralytic stroke since she had last spoken. She could not go, even if
she would. Nor did Eleanor, when she became aware of the state of the
case, wish her to leave. She had her laid on her own bed, and weeping
silently all the while for her last husband, she nursed Susan like a
sister. She did not know what her guest’s worldly position might be;
and she might never be repaid. But she sold many a little trifle to
purchase such small comforts as Susan needed. Susan, lying still and
motionless, learnt much. It was not a severe stroke; it might be the
forerunner of others yet to come, but at some distance of time. But for
the present she recovered, and regained much of her former health. On
her sick-bed she matured her plans. When she returned to Yew Nook, she
took Michael Hurst’s widow and children with her to live there, and
fill up the haunted hearth with living forms that should banish the
ghosts.
And so it fell out that the latter days of Susan Dixon’s life were
better than the former.