She paused.
‘Well?’ said Jeremiah, with interest; although his attention appeared to be divided between the mother’s story and the eager playfulness of the baby on his knee.
‘Philip knew he were alive; he’d seen him taken by t’ press-gang, and Charley had sent a message to me by Philip.’
Her white face was reddening, her eyes flashing at this point of her story.
‘And he niver told me a word on it, not when he saw me like to break my heart in thinking as Kinraid were dead; he kept it a’ to hissel’; and watched me cry, and niver said a word to comfort me wi’ t’ truth. It would ha’ been a great comfort, sir, only t’ have had his message if I’d niver ha’ been to see him again. But Philip niver let on to any one, as I iver heared on, that he’d seen Charley that morning as t’ press-gang took him. Yo’ know about feyther’s death, and how friendless mother and me was left? and so I married him; for he were a good friend to us then, and I were dazed like wi’ sorrow, and could see naught else to do for mother. He were allays very tender and good to her, for sure.’
Again a long pause of silent recollection, broken by one or two deep sighs.
‘If I go on, sir, now, I mun ask yo’ to promise as yo’ll niver tell. I do so need some one to tell me what I ought to do, and I were led here, like, else I would ha’ died wi’ it all within my teeth. Yo’ll promise, sir?’
Jeremiah Foster looked in her face, and seeing the wistful, eager look, he was touched almost against his judgment into giving the promise required; she went on.
‘Upon a Tuesday morning, three weeks ago, I think, tho’ for t’ matter o’ time it might ha’ been three years, Kinraid come home; come back for t’ claim me as his wife, and I were wed to Philip! I met him i’ t’ road at first; and I couldn’t tell him theere. He followed me into t’ house — Philip’s house, sir, behind t’ shop — and somehow I told him all, how I were a wedded wife to another. Then he up and said I’d a false heart — me false, sir, as had eaten my daily bread in bitterness, and had wept t’ nights through, all for sorrow and mourning for his death! Then he said as Philip knowed all t’ time he were alive and coming back for me; and I couldn’t believe it, and I called Philip, and he come, and a’ that Charley had said were true; and yet I were Philip’s wife! So I took a mighty oath, and I said as I’d niver hold Philip to be my lawful husband again, nor iver forgive him for t’ evil he’d wrought us, but hold him as a stranger and one as had done me a heavy wrong.’
She stopped speaking; her story seemed to her to end there. But her listener said, after a pause,
‘It were a cruel wrong, I grant thee that; but thy oath were a sin, and thy words were evil, my poor lass. What happened next?’
‘I don’t justly remember,’ she said, wearily. ‘Kinraid went away, and mother cried out; and I went to her. She were asleep, I thought, so I lay down by her, to wish I were dead, and to think on what would come on my child if I died; and Philip came in softly, and I made as if I were asleep; and that’s t’ very last as I’ve iver seen or heared of him.’
Jeremiah Foster groaned as she ended her story. Then he pulled himself up, and said, in a cheerful tone of voice,
‘He’ll come back, Sylvia Hepburn. He’ll think better of it: never fear!’
‘I fear his coming back!’ said she. ‘That’s what I’m feared on; I would wish as I knew on his well-doing i’ some other place; but him and me can niver live together again.’
‘Nay,’ pleaded Jeremiah. ‘Thee art sorry what thee said; thee were sore put about, or thee wouldn’t have said it.’
He was trying to be a peace-maker, and to heal over conjugal differences; but he did not go deep enough.
‘I’m not sorry,’ said she, slowly. ‘I were too deeply wronged to be “put about”; that would go off wi’ a night’s sleep. It’s only the thought of mother (she’s dead and happy, and knows nought of all this, I trust) that comes between me and hating Philip. I’m not sorry for what I said.’
Jeremiah had never met with any one so frank and undisguised in expressions of wrong feeling, and he scarcely knew what to say.
He looked extremely grieved, and not a little shocked. So pretty and delicate a young creature to use such strong relentless language!
She seemed to read his thoughts, for she made answer to them.
‘I dare say you think I’m very wicked, sir, not to be sorry. Perhaps I am. I can’t think o’ that for remembering how I’ve suffered; and he knew how miserable I was, and might ha’ cleared my misery away wi’ a word; and he held his peace, and now it’s too late! I’m sick o’ men and their cruel, deceitful ways. I wish I were dead.’
She was crying before she had ended this speech, and seeing her tears, the child began to cry too, stretching out its little arms to go back to its mother. The hard stony look on her face melted away into the softest, tenderest love as she clasped the little one to her, and tried to soothe its frightened sobs.
A bright thought came into the old man’s mind.
He had been taking a complete dislike to her till her pretty way with her baby showed him that she had a heart of flesh within her.
‘Poor little one!’ said he, ‘thy mother had need love thee, for she’s deprived thee of thy father’s love. Thou’rt half-way to being an orphan; yet I cannot call thee one of the fatherless to whom God will be a father. Thou’rt a desolate babe, thou may’st well cry; thine earthly parents have forsaken thee, and I know not if the Lord will take thee up.’
Sylvia looked up at him affrighted; holding her baby tighter to her, she exclaimed.
‘Don’t speak so, sir! it’s cursing, sir! I haven’t forsaken her! Oh, sir! those are awful sayings.’
‘Thee hast sworn never to forgive thy husband, nor to live with him again. Dost thee know that by the law of the land, he may claim his child; and then thou wilt have to forsake it, or to be forsworn? Poor little maiden!’ continued he, once more luring the baby to him with the temptation of the watch and chain.
Sylvia thought for a while before speaking. Then she said,
‘I cannot tell what ways to take. Whiles I think my head is crazed. It were a cruel turn he did me!’
‘It was. I couldn’t have thought him guilty of such baseness.’
This acquiescence, which was perfectly honest on Jeremiah’s part, almost took Sylvia by surprise. Why might she not hate one who had been both cruel and base in his treatment of her? And yet she recoiled from the application of such hard terms by another to Philip, by a cool-judging and indifferent person, as she esteemed Jeremiah to be. From some inscrutable turn in her thoughts, she began to defend him, or at least to palliate the harsh judgment which she herself had been the first to pronounce.
‘He were so tender to mother; she were dearly fond on him; he niver spared aught he could do for her, else I would niver ha’ married him.’
‘He was a good and kind-hearted lad from the time he was fifteen. And I never found him out in any falsehood, no more did my brother.’
‘But it were all the same as a lie,’ said Sylvia, swiftly changing her ground, ‘to leave me to think as Charley were dead, when he knowed all t’ time he were alive.’
‘It was. It was a self-seeking lie; putting thee to pain to get his own ends. And the end of it has been that he is driven forth like Cain.’
‘I niver told him to go, sir.’
‘But thy words sent him forth, Sylvia.’
‘I cannot unsay them, sir; and I believe as I should say them again.’
But she said this as one who rather hopes for a contradiction.
All Jeremiah replied, however, was, ‘Poor wee child!’ in a pitiful tone, addressed to the baby.
Sylvia’s eyes filled with tears.
‘Oh, sir, I’ll do anything as iver yo’ can tell me for her. That’s what I came for t’ ask yo’. I know I mun not stay theere, and Philip gone away; and I dunnot know what to do: and I’ll do aught, only I must keep her wi’ me. Whativer can I do, sir?’
Jeremiah
thought it over for a minute or two. Then he replied,
‘I must have time to think. I must talk it over with brother John.’
‘But you’ve given me yo’r word, sir!’ exclaimed she.
‘I have given thee my word never to tell any one of what has passed between thee and thy husband, but I must take counsel with my brother as to what is to be done with thee and thy child, now that thy husband has left the shop.’
This was said so gravely as almost to be a reproach, and he got up, as a sign that the interview was ended.
He gave the baby back to its mother; but not without a solemn blessing, so solemn that, to Sylvia’s superstitious and excited mind, it undid the terrors of what she had esteemed to be a curse.
‘The Lord bless thee and keep thee! The Lord make His face to shine upon thee!’
All the way down the hill-side, Sylvia kept kissing the child, and whispering to its unconscious ears, —
‘I’ll love thee for both, my treasure, I will. I’ll hap thee round wi’ my love, so as thou shall niver need a feyther’s.’
CHAPTER XXXVII
BEREAVEMENT
Hester had been prevented by her mother’s indisposition from taking Philip’s letter to the Fosters, to hold a consultation with them over its contents.
Alice Rose was slowly failing, and the long days which she had to spend alone told much upon her spirits, and consequently upon her health.
All this came out in the conversation which ensued after reading Hepburn’s letter in the little parlour at the bank on the day after Sylvia had had her confidential interview with Jeremiah Foster.
He was a true man of honour, and never so much as alluded to her visit to him; but what she had then told him influenced him very much in the formation of the project which he proposed to his brother and Hester.
He recommended her remaining where she was, living still in the house behind the shop; for he thought within himself that she might have exaggerated the effect of her words upon Philip; that, after all, it might have been some cause totally disconnected with them, which had blotted out her husband’s place among the men of Monkshaven; and that it would be so much easier for both to resume their natural relations, both towards each other and towards the world, if Sylvia remained where her husband had left her — in an expectant attitude, so to speak.
Jeremiah Foster questioned Hester straitly about her letter: whether she had made known its contents to any one. No, not to any one. Neither to her mother nor to William Coulson? No, to neither.
She looked at him as she replied to his inquiries, and he looked at her, each wondering if the other could be in the least aware that a conjugal quarrel might be at the root of the dilemma in which they were placed by Hepburn’s disappearance.
But neither Hester, who had witnessed the misunderstanding between the husband and wife on the evening, before the morning on which Philip went away, nor Jeremiah Foster, who had learnt from Sylvia the true reason of her husband’s disappearance, gave the slightest reason to the other to think that they each supposed they had a clue to the reason of Hepburn’s sudden departure.
What Jeremiah Foster, after a night’s consideration, had to propose was this; that Hester and her mother should come and occupy the house in the market-place, conjointly with Sylvia and her child. Hester’s interest in the shop was by this time acknowledged. Jeremiah had made over to her so much of his share in the business, that she had a right to be considered as a kind of partner; and she had long been the superintendent of that department of goods which were exclusively devoted to women. So her daily presence was requisite for more reasons than one.
Yet her mother’s health and spirits were such as to render it unadvisable that the old woman should be too much left alone; and Sylvia’s devotion to her own mother seemed to point her out as the very person who could be a gentle and tender companion to Alice Rose during those hours when her own daughter would necessarily be engaged in the shop.
Many desirable objects seemed to be gained by this removal of Alice: an occupation was provided for Sylvia, which would detain her in the place where her husband had left her, and where (Jeremiah Foster fairly expected in spite of his letter) he was likely to come back to find her; and Alice Rose, the early love of one of the brothers, the old friend of the other, would be well cared for, and under her daughter’s immediate supervision during the whole of the time that she was occupied in the shop.
Philip’s share of the business, augmented by the money which he had put in from the legacy of his old Cumberland uncle, would bring in profits enough to support Sylvia and her child in ease and comfort until that time, which they all anticipated, when he should return from his mysterious wandering — mysterious, whether his going forth had been voluntary or involuntary.
Thus far was settled; and Jeremiah Foster went to tell Sylvia of the plan.
She was too much a child, too entirely unaccustomed to any independence of action, to do anything but leave herself in his hands. Her very confession, made to him the day before, when she sought his counsel, seemed to place her at his disposal. Otherwise, she had had notions of the possibility of a free country life once more — how provided for and arranged she hardly knew; but Haytersbank was to let, and Kester disengaged, and it had just seemed possible that she might have to return to her early home, and to her old life. She knew that it would take much money to stock the farm again, and that her hands were tied from much useful activity by the love and care she owed to her baby. But still, somehow, she hoped and she fancied, till Jeremiah Foster’s measured words and carefully-arranged plan made her silently relinquish her green, breezy vision.
Hester, too, had her own private rebellion — hushed into submission by her gentle piety. If Sylvia had been able to make Philip happy, Hester could have felt lovingly and almost gratefully towards her; but Sylvia had failed in this.
Philip had been made unhappy, and was driven forth a wanderer into the wide world — never to come back! And his last words to Hester, the postscript of his letter, containing the very pith of it, was to ask her to take charge and care of the wife whose want of love towards him had uprooted him from the place where he was valued and honoured.
It cost Hester many a struggle and many a self-reproach before she could make herself feel what she saw all along — that in everything Philip treated her like a sister. But even a sister might well be indignant if she saw her brother’s love disregarded and slighted, and his life embittered by the thoughtless conduct of a wife! Still Hester fought against herself, and for Philip’s sake she sought to see the good in Sylvia, and she strove to love her as well as to take care of her.
With the baby, of course, the case was different. Without thought or struggle, or reason, every one loved the little girl. Coulson and his buxom wife, who were childless, were never weary of making much of her. Hester’s happiest hours were spent with that little child. Jeremiah Foster almost looked upon her as his own from the day when she honoured him by yielding to the temptation of the chain and seal, and coming to his knee; not a customer to the shop but knew the smiling child’s sad history, and many a country-woman would save a rosy-cheeked apple from out her store that autumn to bring it on next market-day for ‘Philip Hepburn’s baby, as had lost its father, bless it.’
Even stern Alice Rose was graciously inclined towards the little Bella; and though her idea of the number of the elect was growing narrower and narrower every day, she would have been loth to exclude the innocent little child, that stroked her wrinkled cheeks so softly every night in return for her blessing, from the few that should be saved. Nay, for the child’s sake, she relented towards the mother; and strove to have Sylvia rescued from the many castaways with fervent prayer, or, as she phrased it, ‘wrestling with the Lord’.
Alice had a sort of instinct that the little child, so tenderly loved by, so fondly loving, the mother whose ewe-lamb she was, could not be even in heaven without yearning for the creature she had loved best on earth; and the ol
d woman believed that this was the principal reason for her prayers for Sylvia; but unconsciously to herself, Alice Rose was touched by the filial attentions she constantly received from the young mother, whom she believed to be foredoomed to condemnation.
Sylvia rarely went to church or chapel, nor did she read her Bible; for though she spoke little of her ignorance, and would fain, for her child’s sake, have remedied it now it was too late, she had lost what little fluency of reading she had ever had, and could only make out her words with much spelling and difficulty. So the taking her Bible in hand would have been a mere form; though of this Alice Rose knew nothing.
No one knew much of what was passing in Sylvia; she did not know herself. Sometimes in the nights she would waken, crying, with a terrible sense of desolation; every one who loved her, or whom she had loved, had vanished out of her life; every one but her child, who lay in her arms, warm and soft.
But then Jeremiah Foster’s words came upon her; words that she had taken for cursing at the time; and she would so gladly have had some clue by which to penetrate the darkness of the unknown region from whence both blessing and cursing came, and to know if she had indeed done something which should cause her sin to be visited on that soft, sweet, innocent darling.
If any one would teach her to read! If any one would explain to her the hard words she heard in church or chapel, so that she might find out the meaning of sin and godliness! — words that had only passed over the surface of her mind till now! For her child’s sake she should like to do the will of God, if she only knew what that was, and how to be worked out in her daily life.
But there was no one she dared confess her ignorance to and ask information from. Jeremiah Foster had spoken as if her child, sweet little merry Bella, with a loving word and a kiss for every one, was to suffer heavily for the just and true words her wronged and indignant mother had spoken. Alice always spoke as if there were no hope for her; and blamed her, nevertheless, for not using the means of grace that it was not in her power to avail herself of.
Delphi Complete Works of Elizabeth Gaskell Page 215
