‘Yes,’ said Margaret, ‘more than once. But I don’t believe it would do any good. And, you know, we have not the money to bring any great London surgeon down, and I am sure Dr. Donaldson is only second in skill to the very best, — if, indeed, he is to them.’
Frederick began to walk up and down the room impatiently.
‘I have credit in Cadiz,’ said he, ‘but none here, owing to this wretched change of name. Why did my father leave Helstone? That was the blunder.’
‘It was no blunder,’ said Margaret gloomily. ‘And above all possible chances, avoid letting papa hear anything like what you have just been saying. I can see that he is tormenting himself already with the idea that mamma would never have been ill if we had stayed at Helstone, and you don’t know papa’s agonising power of self-reproach!’
Frederick walked away as if he were on the quarter-deck. At last he stopped right opposite to Margaret, and looked at her drooping and desponding attitude for an instant.
‘My little Margaret!’ said he, caressing her. ‘Let us hope as long as we can. Poor little woman! what! is this face all wet with tears? I will hope. I will, in spite of a thousand doctors. Bear up, Margaret, and be brave enough to hope!’
Margaret choked in trying to speak, and when she did it was very low.
‘I must try to be meek enough to trust. Oh, Frederick! mamma was getting to love me so! And I was getting to understand her. And now comes death to snap us asunder!’
‘Come, come, come! Let us go up-stairs, and do something, rather than waste time that may be so precious. Thinking has, many a time, made me sad, darling; but doing never did in all my life. My theory is a sort of parody on the maxim of “Get money, my son, honestly if you can; but get money.” My precept is, “Do something, my sister, do good if you can; but, at any rate, do something.”‘
‘Not excluding mischief,’ said Margaret, smiling faintly through her tears.
‘By no means. What I do exclude is the remorse afterwards. Blot your misdeeds out (if you are particularly conscientious), by a good deed, as soon as you can; just as we did a correct sum at school on the slate, where an incorrect one was only half rubbed out. It was better than wetting our sponge with our tears; both less loss of time where tears had to be waited for, and a better effect at last.’
If Margaret thought Frederick’s theory rather a rough one at first, she saw how he worked it out into continual production of kindness in fact. After a bad night with his mother (for he insisted on taking his turn as a sitter-up) he was busy next morning before breakfast, contriving a leg-rest for Dixon, who was beginning to feel the fatigues of watching. At breakfast-time, he interested Mr. Hale with vivid, graphic, rattling accounts of the wild life he had led in Mexico, South America, and elsewhere. Margaret would have given up the effort in despair to rouse Mr. Hale out of his dejection; it would even have affected herself and rendered her incapable of talking at all. But Fred, true to his theory, did something perpetually; and talking was the only thing to be done, besides eating, at breakfast.
Before the night of that day, Dr. Donaldson’s opinion was proved to be too well founded. Convulsions came on; and when they ceased, Mrs. Hale was unconscious. Her husband might lie by her shaking the bed with his sobs; her son’s strong arms might lift her tenderly up into a comfortable position; her daughter’s hands might bathe her face; but she knew them not. She would never recognise them again, till they met in Heaven.
Before the morning came all was over.
Then Margaret rose from her trembling and despondency, and became as a strong angel of comfort to her father and brother. For Frederick had broken down now, and all his theories were of no use to him. He cried so violently when shut up alone in his little room at night, that Margaret and Dixon came down in affright to warn him to be quiet: for the house partitions were but thin, and the next-door neighbours might easily hear his youthful passionate sobs, so different from the slower trembling agony of after-life, when we become inured to grief, and dare not be rebellious against the inexorable doom, knowing who it is that decrees.
Margaret sate with her father in the room with the dead. If he had cried, she would have been thankful. But he sate by the bed quite quietly; only, from time to time, he uncovered the face, and stroked it gently, making a kind of soft inarticulate noise, like that of some mother-animal caressing her young. He took no notice of Margaret’s presence. Once or twice she came up to kiss him; and he submitted to it, giving her a little push away when she had done, as if her affection disturbed him from his absorption in the dead. He started when he heard Frederick’s cries, and shook his head: — ’Poor boy! poor boy!’ he said, and took no more notice. Margaret’s heart ached within her. She could not think of her own loss in thinking of her father’s case. The night was wearing away, and the day was at hand, when, without a word of preparation, Margaret’s voice broke upon the stillness of the room, with a clearness of sound that startled even herself: ‘Let not your heart be troubled,’ it said; and she went steadily on through all that chapter of unspeakable consolation.
CHAPTER XXXI
‘SHOULD AULD ACQUAINTANCE BE FORGOT?’
‘Show not that manner, and these features all,
The serpent’s cunning, and the sinner’s fall?’
CRABBE.
The chill, shivery October morning came; not the October morning of the country, with soft, silvery mists, clearing off before the sunbeams that bring out all the gorgeous beauty of colouring, but the October morning of Milton, whose silver mists were heavy fogs, and where the sun could only show long dusky streets when he did break through and shine. Margaret went languidly about, assisting Dixon in her task of arranging the house. Her eyes were continually blinded by tears, but she had no time to give way to regular crying. The father and brother depended upon her; while they were giving way to grief, she must be working, planning, considering. Even the necessary arrangements for the funeral seemed to devolve upon her.
When the fire was bright and crackling — when everything was ready for breakfast, and the tea-kettle was singing away, Margaret gave a last look round the room before going to summon Mr. Hale and Frederick. She wanted everything to look as cheerful as possible; and yet, when it did so, the contrast between it and her own thoughts forced her into sudden weeping. She was kneeling by the sofa, hiding her face in the cushions that no one might hear her cry, when she was touched on the shoulder by Dixon.
‘Come, Miss Hale — come, my dear! You must not give way, or where shall we all be? There is not another person in the house fit to give a direction of any kind, and there is so much to be done. There’s who’s to manage the funeral; and who’s to come to it; and where it’s to be; and all to be settled: and Master Frederick’s like one crazed with crying, and master never was a good one for settling; and, poor gentleman, he goes about now as if he was lost. It’s bad enough, my dear, I know; but death comes to us all; and you’re well off never to have lost any friend till now. ‘Perhaps so. But this seemed a loss by itself; not to bear comparison with any other event in the world. Margaret did not take any comfort from what Dixon said, but the unusual tenderness of the prim old servant’s manner touched her to the heart; and, more from a desire to show her gratitude for this than for any other reason, she roused herself up, and smiled in answer to Dixon’s anxious look at her; and went to tell her father and brother that breakfast was ready.
Mr. Hale came — as if in a dream, or rather with the unconscious motion of a sleep-walker, whose eyes and mind perceive other things than what are present. Frederick came briskly in, with a forced cheerfulness, grasped her hand, looked into her eyes, and burst into tears. She had to try and think of little nothings to say all breakfast-time, in order to prevent the recurrence of her companions’ thoughts too strongly to the last meal they had taken together, when there had been a continual strained listening for some sound or signal from the sick-room.
After breakfast, she resolved to speak to her father, about the funeral.
He shook his head, and assented to all she proposed, though many of her propositions absolutely contradicted one another. Margaret gained no real decision from him; and was leaving the room languidly, to have a consultation with Dixon, when Mr. Hale motioned her back to his side.
‘Ask Mr. Bell,’ said he in a hollow voice.
‘Mr. Bell!’ said she, a little surprised. ‘Mr. Bell of Oxford?’
‘Mr. Bell,’ he repeated. ‘Yes. He was my groom’s-man.’
Margaret understood the association.
‘I will write to-day,’ said she. He sank again into listlessness. All morning she toiled on, longing for rest, but in a continual whirl of melancholy business.
Towards evening, Dixon said to her:
‘I’ve done it, miss. I was really afraid for master, that he’d have a stroke with grief. He’s been all this day with poor missus; and when I’ve listened at the door, I’ve heard him talking to her, and talking to her, as if she was alive. When I went in he would be quite quiet, but all in a maze like. So I thought to myself, he ought to be roused; and if it gives him a shock at first, it will, maybe, be the better afterwards. So I’ve been and told him, that I don’t think it’s safe for Master Frederick to be here. And I don’t. It was only on Tuesday, when I was out, that I met-a Southampton man — the first I’ve seen since I came to Milton; they don’t make their way much up here, I think. Well, it was young Leonards, old Leonards the draper’s son, as great a scamp as ever lived — who plagued his father almost to death, and then ran off to sea. I never could abide him. He was in the Orion at the same time as Master Frederick, I know; though I don’t recollect if he was there at the mutiny.’
‘Did he know you?’ said Margaret, eagerly.
‘Why, that’s the worst of it. I don’t believe he would have known me but for my being such a fool as to call out his name. He were a Southampton man, in a strange place, or else I should never have been so ready to call cousins with him, a nasty, good-for-nothing fellow. Says he, “Miss Dixon! who would ha’ thought of seeing you here? But perhaps I mistake, and you’re Miss Dixon no longer?” So I told him he might still address me as an unmarried lady, though if I hadn’t been so particular, I’d had good chances of matrimony. He was polite enough: “He couldn’t look at me and doubt me.” But I were not to be caught with such chaff from such a fellow as him, and so I told him; and, by way of being even, I asked him after his father (who I knew had turned him out of doors), as if they was the best friends as ever was. So then, to spite me — for you see we were getting savage, for all we were so civil to each other — he began to inquire after Master Frederick, and said, what a scrape he’d got into (as if Master Frederick’s scrapes would ever wash George Leonards’ white, or make ‘em look otherwise than nasty, dirty black), and how he’d be hung for mutiny if ever he were caught, and how a hundred pound reward had been offered for catching him, and what a disgrace he had been to his family — all to spite me, you see, my dear, because before now I’ve helped old Mr. Leonards to give George a good rating, down in Southampton. So I said, there were other families be thankful if they could think they were earning an honest living as I knew, who had far more cause to blush for their sons, and to far away from home. To which he made answer, like the impudent chap he is, that he were in a confidential situation, and if I knew of any young man who had been so unfortunate as to lead vicious courses, and wanted to turn steady, he’d have no objection to lend him his patronage. He, indeed! Why, he’d corrupt a saint. I’ve not felt so bad myself for years as when I were standing talking to him the other day. I could have cried to think I couldn’t spite him better, for he kept smiling in my face, as if he took all my compliments for earnest; and I couldn’t see that he minded what I said in the least, while I was mad with all his speeches.’
‘But you did not tell him anything about us — about Frederick?’
‘Not I,’ said Dixon. ‘He had never the grace to ask where I was staying; and I shouldn’t have told him if he had asked. Nor did I ask him what his precious situation was. He was waiting for a bus, and just then it drove up, and he hailed it. But, to plague me to the last, he turned back before he got in, and said, “If you can help me to trap Lieutenant Hale, Miss Dixon, we’ll go partners in the reward. I know you’d like to be my partner, now wouldn’t you? Don’t be shy, but say yes.” And he jumped on the bus, and I saw his ugly face leering at me with a wicked smile to think how he’d had the last word of plaguing.’
Margaret was made very uncomfortable by this account of Dixon’s.
‘Have you told Frederick?’ asked she.
‘No,’ said Dixon. ‘I were uneasy in my mind at knowing that bad Leonards was in town; but there was so much else to think about that I did not dwell on it at all. But when I saw master sitting so stiff, and with his eyes so glazed and sad, I thought it might rouse him to have to think of Master Frederick’s safety a bit. So I told him all, though I blushed to say how a young man had been speaking to me. And it has done master good. And if we’re to keep Master Frederick in hiding, he would have to go, poor fellow, before Mr. Bell came.’
‘Oh, I’m not afraid of Mr. Bell; but I am afraid of this
Leonards. I must tell Frederick. What did Leonards look like?’
‘A bad-looking fellow, I can assure you, miss. Whiskers such as I should be ashamed to wear — they are so red. And for all he said he’d got a confidential situation, he was dressed in fustian just like a working-man.’
It was evident that Frederick must go. Go, too, when he had so completely vaulted into his place in the family, and promised to be such a stay and staff to his father and sister. Go, when his cares for the living mother, and sorrow for the dead, seemed to make him one of those peculiar people who are bound to us by a fellow-love for them that are taken away. Just as Margaret was thinking all this, sitting over the drawing-room fire — her father restless and uneasy under the pressure of this newly-aroused fear, of which he had not as yet spoken — Frederick came in, his brightness dimmed, but the extreme violence of his grief passed away. He came up to Margaret, and kissed her forehead.
‘How wan you look, Margaret!’ said he in a low voice. ‘You have been thinking of everybody, and no one has thought of you. Lie on this sofa — there is nothing for you to do.’
‘That is the worst,’ said Margaret, in a sad whisper. But she went and lay down, and her brother covered her feet with a shawl, and then sate on the ground by her side; and the two began to talk in a subdued tone.
Margaret told him all that Dixon had related of her interview with young Leonards. Frederick’s lips closed with a long whew of dismay.
‘I should just like to have it out with that young fellow. A worse sailor was never on board ship — nor a much worse man either. I declare, Margaret — you know the circumstances of the whole affair?’
‘Yes, mamma told me.’
‘Well, when all the sailors who were good for anything were indignant with our captain, this fellow, to curry favour — pah! And to think of his being here! Oh, if he’d a notion I was within twenty miles of him, he’d ferret me out to pay off old grudges. I’d rather anybody had the hundred pounds they think I am worth than that rascal. What a pity poor old Dixon could not be persuaded to give me up, and make a provision for her old age!’
‘Oh, Frederick, hush! Don’t talk so.’
Mr. Hale came towards them, eager and trembling. He had overheard what they were saying. He took Frederick’s hand in both of his:
‘My boy, you must go. It is very bad — but I see you must. You have done all you could — you have been a comfort to her.’
‘Oh, papa, must he go?’ said Margaret, pleading against her own conviction of necessity.
‘I declare, I’ve a good mind to face it out, and stand my trial. If I could only pick up my evidence! I cannot endure the thought of being in the power of such a blackguard as Leonards. I could almost have enjoyed — in other circumstances — this stolen visit: it has had all the charm which the F
rench-woman attributed to forbidden pleasures.’
‘One of the earliest things I can remember,’ said Margaret, ‘was your being in some great disgrace, Fred, for stealing apples. We had plenty of our own — trees loaded with them; but some one had told you that stolen fruit tasted sweetest, which you took au pied de la lettre, and off you went a-robbing. You have not changed your feelings much since then.’
‘Yes — you must go,’ repeated Mr. Hale, answering Margaret’s question, which she had asked some time ago. His thoughts were fixed on one subject, and it was an effort to him to follow the zig-zag remarks of his children — an effort which ho did not make.
Margaret and Frederick looked at each other. That quick momentary sympathy would be theirs no longer if he went away. So much was understood through eyes that could not be put into words. Both coursed the same thought till it was lost in sadness. Frederick shook it off first:
‘Do you know, Margaret, I was very nearly giving both Dixon and myself a good fright this afternoon. I was in my bedroom; I had heard a ring at the front door, but I thought the ringer must have done his business and gone away long ago; so I was on the point of making my appearance in the passage, when, as I opened my room door, I saw Dixon coming downstairs; and she frowned and kicked me into hiding again. I kept the door open, and heard a message given to some man that was in my father’s study, and that then went away. Who could it have been? Some of the shopmen?’
‘Very likely,’ said Margaret, indifferently. ‘There was a little quiet man who came up for orders about two o’clock.’
‘But this was not a little man — a great powerful fellow; and it was past four when he was here.’
Delphi Complete Works of Elizabeth Gaskell Page 146
