In the Cottage
Adam did not ask Dinah to take his arm when they got out into the lane.
He had never yet done so, often as they had walked together, for he had
observed that she never walked arm-in-arm with Seth, and he thought,
perhaps, that kind of support was not agreeable to her. So they walked
apart, though side by side, and the close poke of her little black
bonnet hid her face from him.
“You can’t be happy, then, to make the Hall Farm your home, Dinah?”
Adam said, with the quiet interest of a brother, who has no anxiety for
himself in the matter. “It’s a pity, seeing they’re so fond of you.”
“You know, Adam, my heart is as their heart, so far as love for them
and care for their welfare goes, but they are in no present need. Their
sorrows are healed, and I feel that I am called back to my old work, in
which I found a blessing that I have missed of late in the midst of too
abundant worldly good. I know it is a vain thought to flee from the
work that God appoints us, for the sake of finding a greater blessing
to our own souls, as if we could choose for ourselves where we shall
find the fulness of the Divine Presence, instead of seeking it where
alone it is to be found, in loving obedience. But now, I believe, I
have a clear showing that my work lies elsewhere—at least for a time.
In the years to come, if my aunt’s health should fail, or she should
otherwise need me, I shall return.”
“You know best, Dinah,” said Adam. “I don’t believe you’d go against
the wishes of them that love you, and are akin to you, without a good
and sufficient reason in your own conscience. I’ve no right to say
anything about my being sorry: you know well enough what cause I have
to put you above every other friend I’ve got; and if it had been
ordered so that you could ha’ been my sister, and lived with us all our
lives, I should ha’ counted it the greatest blessing as could happen to
us now. But Seth tells me there’s no hope o’ that: your feelings are
different, and perhaps I’m taking too much upon me to speak about it.”
Dinah made no answer, and they walked on in silence for some yards,
till they came to the stone stile, where, as Adam had passed through
first and turned round to give her his hand while she mounted the
unusually high step, she could not prevent him from seeing her face. It
struck him with surprise, for the grey eyes, usually so mild and grave,
had the bright uneasy glance which accompanies suppressed agitation,
and the slight flush in her cheeks, with which she had come downstairs,
was heightened to a deep rose-colour. She looked as if she were only
sister to Dinah. Adam was silent with surprise and conjecture for some
moments, and then he said, “I hope I’ve not hurt or displeased you by
what I’ve said, Dinah. Perhaps I was making too free. I’ve no wish
different from what you see to be best, and I’m satisfied for you to
live thirty mile off, if you think it right. I shall think of you just
as much as I do now, for you’re bound up with what I can no more help
remembering than I can help my heart beating.”
Poor Adam! Thus do men blunder. Dinah made no answer, but she presently
said, “Have you heard any news from that poor young man, since we last
spoke of him?”
Dinah always called Arthur so; she had never lost the image of him as
she had seen him in the prison.
“Yes,” said Adam. “Mr. Irwine read me part of a letter from him
yesterday. It’s pretty certain, they say, that there’ll be a peace
soon, though nobody believes it’ll last long; but he says he doesn’t
mean to come home. He’s no heart for it yet, and it’s better for others
that he should keep away. Mr. Irwine thinks he’s in the right not to
come. It’s a sorrowful letter. He asks about you and the Poysers, as he
always does. There’s one thing in the letter cut me a good deal: ‘You
can’t think what an old fellow I feel,’ he says; ‘I make no schemes
now. I’m the best when I’ve a good day’s march or fighting before me.’”
“He’s of a rash, warm-hearted nature, like Esau, for whom I have always
felt great pity,” said Dinah. “That meeting between the brothers, where
Esau is so loving and generous, and Jacob so timid and distrustful,
notwithstanding his sense of the Divine favour, has always touched me
greatly. Truly, I have been tempted sometimes to say that Jacob was of
a mean spirit. But that is our trial: we must learn to see the good in
the midst of much that is unlovely.”
“Ah,” said Adam, “I like to read about Moses best, in th’ Old
Testament. He carried a hard business well through, and died when other
folks were going to reap the fruits. A man must have courage to look at
his life so, and think what’ll come of it after he’s dead and gone. A
good solid bit o’ work lasts: if it’s only laying a floor down,
somebody’s the better for it being done well, besides the man as does
it.”
They were both glad to talk of subjects that were not personal, and in
this way they went on till they passed the bridge across the Willow
Brook, when Adam turned round and said, “Ah, here’s Seth. I thought
he’d be home soon. Does he know of you’re going, Dinah?”
“Yes, I told him last Sabbath.”
Adam remembered now that Seth had come home much depressed on Sunday
evening, a circumstance which had been very unusual with him of late,
for the happiness he had in seeing Dinah every week seemed long to have
outweighed the pain of knowing she would never marry him. This evening
he had his habitual air of dreamy benignant contentment, until he came
quite close to Dinah and saw the traces of tears on her delicate
eyelids and eyelashes. He gave one rapid glance at his brother, but
Adam was evidently quite outside the current of emotion that had shaken
Dinah: he wore his everyday look of unexpectant calm. Seth tried not to
let Dinah see that he had noticed her face, and only said, “I’m
thankful you’re come, Dinah, for Mother’s been hungering after the
sight of you all day. She began to talk of you the first thing in the
morning.”
When they entered the cottage, Lisbeth was seated in her arm-chair, too
tired with setting out the evening meal, a task she always performed a
long time beforehand, to go and meet them at the door as usual, when
she heard the approaching footsteps.
“Coom, child, thee’t coom at last,” she said, when Dinah went towards
her. “What dost mane by lavin’ me a week an’ ne’er coomin’ a-nigh me?”
“Dear friend,” said Dinah, taking her hand, “you’re not well. If I’d
known it sooner, I’d have come.”
“An’ how’s thee t’ know if thee dostna coom? Th’ lads on’y know what I
tell ’em. As long as ye can stir hand and foot the men think ye’re
hearty. But I’m none so bad, on’y a bit of a cold sets me achin’. An’
th’ lads tease me so t’ ha’ somebody wi’ me t’ do the work—they make me
ache worse wi’ talkin’. If thee’dst come and stay wi’ me, they’d let me
alone. The Poysers canna want thee so bad as I do. But take thy bonnet
off, an’ let me look at thee.”
Dinah was moving away, but Lisbeth held her fast, while she was taking
off her bonnet, and looked at her face as one looks into a newly
gathered snowdrop, to renew the old impressions of purity and
gentleness.
“What’s the matter wi’ thee?” said Lisbeth, in astonishment; “thee’st
been a-cryin’.”
“It’s only a grief that’ll pass away,” said Dinah, who did not wish
just now to call forth Lisbeth’s remonstrances by disclosing her
intention to leave Hayslope. “You shall know about it shortly—we’ll
talk of it to-night. I shall stay with you to-night.”
Lisbeth was pacified by this prospect. And she had the whole evening to
talk with Dinah alone; for there was a new room in the cottage, you
remember, built nearly two years ago, in the expectation of a new
inmate; and here Adam always sat when he had writing to do or plans to
make. Seth sat there too this evening, for he knew his mother would
like to have Dinah all to herself.
There were two pretty pictures on the two sides of the wall in the
cottage. On one side there was the broad-shouldered, large-featured,
hardy old woman, in her blue jacket and buff kerchief, with her
dim-eyed anxious looks turned continually on the lily face and the
slight form in the black dress that were either moving lightly about in
helpful activity, or seated close by the old woman’s arm-chair, holding
her withered hand, with eyes lifted up towards her to speak a language
which Lisbeth understood far better than the Bible or the hymn-book.
She would scarcely listen to reading at all to-night. “Nay, nay, shut
the book,” she said. “We mun talk. I want t’ know what thee was cryin’
about. Hast got troubles o’ thy own, like other folks?”
On the other side of the wall there were the two brothers so like each
other in the midst of their unlikeness: Adam with knit brows, shaggy
hair, and dark vigorous colour, absorbed in his “figuring”; Seth, with
large rugged features, the close copy of his brother’s, but with thin,
wavy, brown hair and blue dreamy eyes, as often as not looking vaguely
out of the window instead of at his book, although it was a newly
bought book—Wesley’s abridgment of Madame Guyon’s life, which was full
of wonder and interest for him. Seth had said to Adam, “Can I help thee
with anything in here to-night? I don’t want to make a noise in the
shop.”
“No, lad,” Adam answered, “there’s nothing but what I must do myself.
Thee’st got thy new book to read.”
And often, when Seth was quite unconscious, Adam, as he paused after
drawing a line with his ruler, looked at his brother with a kind smile
dawning in his eyes. He knew “th’ lad liked to sit full o’ thoughts he
could give no account of; they’d never come t’ anything, but they made
him happy,” and in the last year or so, Adam had been getting more and
more indulgent to Seth. It was part of that growing tenderness which
came from the sorrow at work within him.
For Adam, though you see him quite master of himself, working hard and
delighting in his work after his inborn inalienable nature, had not
outlived his sorrow—had not felt it slip from him as a temporary
burden, and leave him the same man again. Do any of us? God forbid. It
would be a poor result of all our anguish and our wrestling if we won
nothing but our old selves at the end of it—if we could return to the
same blind loves, the same self-confident blame, the same light
thoughts of human suffering, the same frivolous gossip over blighted
human lives, the same feeble sense of that Unknown towards which we
have sent forth irrepressible cries in our loneliness. Let us rather be
thankful that our sorrow lives in us as an indestructible force, only
changing its form, as forces do, and passing from pain into
sympathy—the one poor word which includes all our best insight and our
best love. Not that this transformation of pain into sympathy had
completely taken place in Adam yet. There was still a great remnant of
pain, and this he felt would subsist as long as _her_ pain was not a
memory, but an existing thing, which he must think of as renewed with
the light of every new morning. But we get accustomed to mental as well
as bodily pain, without, for all that, losing our sensibility to it. It
becomes a habit of our lives, and we cease to imagine a condition of
perfect ease as possible for us. Desire is chastened into submission,
and we are contented with our day when we have been able to bear our
grief in silence and act as if we were not suffering. For it is at such
periods that the sense of our lives having visible and invisible
relations, beyond any of which either our present or prospective self
is the centre, grows like a muscle that we are obliged to lean on and
exert.
That was Adam’s state of mind in this second autumn of his sorrow. His
work, as you know, had always been part of his religion, and from very
early days he saw clearly that good carpentry was God’s will—was that
form of God’s will that most immediately concerned him. But now there
was no margin of dreams for him beyond this daylight reality, no
holiday-time in the working-day world, no moment in the distance when
duty would take off her iron glove and breast-plate and clasp him
gently into rest. He conceived no picture of the future but one made up
of hard-working days such as he lived through, with growing contentment
and intensity of interest, every fresh week. Love, he thought, could
never be anything to him but a living memory—a limb lopped off, but not
gone from consciousness. He did not know that the power of loving was
all the while gaining new force within him; that the new sensibilities
bought by a deep experience were so many new fibres by which it was
possible, nay, necessary to him, that his nature should intertwine with
another. Yet he was aware that common affection and friendship were
more precious to him than they used to be—that he clung more to his
mother and Seth, and had an unspeakable satisfaction in the sight or
imagination of any small addition to their happiness. The Poysers,
too—hardly three or four days passed but he felt the need of seeing
them and interchanging words and looks of friendliness with them. He
would have felt this, probably, even if Dinah had not been with them,
but he had only said the simplest truth in telling Dinah that he put
her above all other friends in the world. Could anything be more
natural? For in the darkest moments of memory the thought of her always
came as the first ray of returning comfort. The early days of gloom at
the Hall Farm had been gradually turned into soft moonlight by her
presence; and in the cottage, too, for she had come at every spare
moment to soothe and cheer poor Lisbeth, who had been stricken with a
fear that subdued even her querulousness at the sight of her darling
Adam’s grief-worn face. He had become used to watching her light quiet
movements, her pretty loving ways to the children, when he went to the
Hall Farm; to listen for her voice as for a recurrent music; to think
everything she said and did was just right, and could not have been
better. In spite of his wisdom, he could not find fault with her for
her overindulgence of the children, who had managed to convert Dinah
the preacher, before whom a circle of rough men had often trembled a
little, into a convenient household slave—though Dinah herself was
rather ashamed of this weakness, and had some inward conflict as to her
departure from the precepts of Solomon. Yes, there was one thing that
might have been better; she might have loved Seth and consented to
marry him. He felt a little vexed, for his brother’s sake, and he could
not help thinking regretfully how Dinah, as Seth’s wife, would have
made their home as happy as it could be for them all—how she was the
one being that would have soothed their mother’s last days into
peacefulness and rest.
“It’s wonderful she doesn’t love th’ lad,” Adam had said sometimes to
himself, “for anybody ’ud think he was just cut out for her. But her
heart’s so taken up with other things. She’s one o’ those women that
feel no drawing towards having a husband and children o’ their own. She
thinks she should be filled up with her own life then, and she’s been
used so to living in other folks’s cares, she can’t bear the thought of
her heart being shut up from ’em. I see how it is, well enough. She’s
cut out o’ different stuff from most women: I saw that long ago. She’s
never easy but when she’s helping somebody, and marriage ’ud interfere
with her ways—that’s true. I’ve no right to be contriving and thinking
it ’ud be better if she’d have Seth, as if I was wiser than she is—or
than God either, for He made her what she is, and that’s one o’ the
greatest blessings I’ve ever had from His hands, and others besides
me.”
This self-reproof had recurred strongly to Adam’s mind when he gathered
from Dinah’s face that he had wounded her by referring to his wish that
she had accepted Seth, and so he had endeavoured to put into the
strongest words his confidence in her decision as right—his resignation
even to her going away from them and ceasing to make part of their life
otherwise than by living in their thoughts, if that separation were
chosen by herself. He felt sure she knew quite well enough how much he
cared to see her continually—to talk to her with the silent
consciousness of a mutual great remembrance. It was not possible she
should hear anything but self-renouncing affection and respect in his
assurance that he was contented for her to go away; and yet there
remained an uneasy feeling in his mind that he had not said quite the
right thing—that, somehow, Dinah had not understood him.
Dinah must have risen a little before the sun the next morning, for she
was downstairs about five o’clock. So was Seth, for, through Lisbeth’s
obstinate refusal to have any woman-helper in the house, he had learned
to make himself, as Adam said, “very handy in the housework,” that he
might save his mother from too great weariness; on which ground I hope
you will not think him unmanly, any more than you can have thought the
gallant Colonel Bath unmanly when he made the gruel for his invalid
sister. Adam, who had sat up late at his writing, was still asleep, and
was not likely, Seth said, to be down till breakfast-time. Often as
Dinah had visited Lisbeth during the last eighteen months, she had
never slept in the cottage since that night after Thias’s death, when,
you remember, Lisbeth praised her deft movements and even gave a
modified approval to her porridge. But in that long interval Dinah had
made great advances in household cleverness, and this morning, since
Seth was there to help, she was bent on bringing everything to a pitch
of cleanliness and order that would have satisfied her Aunt Poyser. The
cottage was far from that standard at present, for Lisbeth’s rheumatism
had forced her to give up her old habits of dilettante scouring and
polishing. When the kitchen was to her mind, Dinah went into the new
room, where Adam had been writing the night before, to see what
sweeping and dusting were needed there. She opened the window and let
in the fresh morning air, and the smell of the sweet-brier, and the
bright low-slanting rays of the early sun, which made a glory about her
pale face and pale auburn hair as she held the long brush, and swept,
singing to herself in a very low tone—like a sweet summer murmur that
you have to listen for very closely—one of Charles Wesley’s hymns:
Eternal Beam of Light Divine,
Fountain of unexhausted love,
In whom the Father’s glories shine,
Through earth beneath and heaven above;
Jesus! the weary wanderer’s rest,
Give me thy easy yoke to bear;
With steadfast patience arm my breast,
With spotless love and holy fear.
Speak to my warring passions, “Peace!”
Say to my trembling heart, “Be still!”
Thy power my strength and fortress is,
For all things serve thy sovereign will.
She laid by the brush and took up the duster; and if you had ever lived
in Mrs. Poyser’s household, you would know how the duster behaved in
Dinah’s hand—how it went into every small corner, and on every ledge in
and out of sight—how it went again and again round every bar of the
chairs, and every leg, and under and over everything that lay on the
table, till it came to Adam’s papers and rulers and the open desk near
them. Dinah dusted up to the very edge of these and then hesitated,
looking at them with a longing but timid eye. It was painful to see how
much dust there was among them. As she was looking in this way, she
heard Seth’s step just outside the open door, towards which her back
was turned, and said, raising her clear treble, “Seth, is your brother
wrathful when his papers are stirred?”
“Yes, very, when they are not put back in the right places,” said a
deep strong voice, not Seth’s.
It was as if Dinah had put her hands unawares on a vibrating chord. She
was shaken with an intense thrill, and for the instant felt nothing
else; then she knew her cheeks were glowing, and dared not look round,
but stood still, distressed because she could not say good-morning in a
friendly way. Adam, finding that she did not look round so as to see
the smile on his face, was afraid she had thought him serious about his
wrathfulness, and went up to her, so that she was obliged to look at
him.
“What! You think I’m a cross fellow at home, Dinah?” he said,
smilingly.
“Nay,” said Dinah, looking up with timid eyes, “not so. But you might
be put about by finding things meddled with; and even the man Moses,
the meekest of men, was wrathful sometimes.”
“Come, then,” said Adam, looking at her affectionately, “I’ll help you
move the things, and put ’em back again, and then they can’t get wrong.
You’re getting to be your aunt’s own niece, I see, for particularness.”
They began their little task together, but Dinah had not recovered
herself sufficiently to think of any remark, and Adam looked at her
uneasily. Dinah, he thought, had seemed to disapprove him somehow
lately; she had not been so kind and open to him as she used to be. He
wanted her to look at him, and be as pleased as he was himself with
doing this bit of playful work. But Dinah did not look at him—it was
easy for her to avoid looking at the tall man—and when at last there
was no more dusting to be done and no further excuse for him to linger
near her, he could bear it no longer, and said, in rather a pleading
tone, “Dinah, you’re not displeased with me for anything, are you? I’ve
not said or done anything to make you think ill of me?”
The question surprised her, and relieved her by giving a new course to
her feeling. She looked up at him now, quite earnestly, almost with the
tears coming, and said, “Oh, no, Adam! how could you think so?”
“I couldn’t bear you not to feel as much a friend to me as I do to
you,” said Adam. “And you don’t know the value I set on the very
thought of you, Dinah. That was what I meant yesterday, when I said I’d
be content for you to go, if you thought right. I meant, the thought of
you was worth so much to me, I should feel I ought to be thankful, and
not grumble, if you see right to go away. You know I do mind parting
with you, Dinah?”
“Yes, dear friend,” said Dinah, trembling, but trying to speak calmly,
“I know you have a brother’s heart towards me, and we shall often be
with one another in spirit; but at this season I am in heaviness
through manifold temptations. You must not mark me. I feel called to
leave my kindred for a while; but it is a trial—the flesh is weak.”
Adam saw that it pained her to be obliged to answer.
“I hurt you by talking about it, Dinah,” he said. “I’ll say no more.
Let’s see if Seth’s ready with breakfast now.”
That is a simple scene, reader. But it is almost certain that you, too,
have been in love—perhaps, even, more than once, though you may not
choose to say so to all your feminine friends. If so, you will no more
think the slight words, the timid looks, the tremulous touches, by
which two human souls approach each other gradually, like two little
quivering rain-streams, before they mingle into one—you will no more
think these things trivial than you will think the first-detected signs
of coming spring trivial, though they be but a faint indescribable
something in the air and in the song of the birds, and the tiniest
perceptible budding on the hedge-row branches. Those slight words and
looks and touches are part of the soul’s language; and the finest
language, I believe, is chiefly made up of unimposing words, such as
“light,” “sound,” “stars,” “music”—words really not worth looking at,
or hearing, in themselves, any more than “chips” or “sawdust.” It is
only that they happen to be the signs of something unspeakably great
and beautiful. I am of opinion that love is a great and beautiful thing
too, and if you agree with me, the smallest signs of it will not be
chips and sawdust to you: they will rather be like those little words,
“light” and “music,” stirring the long-winding fibres of your memory
and enriching your present with your most precious past.