Delphi Complete Works of Elizabeth Gaskell

by Elizabeth Gaskell

  The sounds came nearer and neater. I got up and saw to the fastenings of the door, for though I cared not for mortal man, I did care for what I believed was surrounding the house, in evil might and power. But the door shook as though it, too, were in deadly terror, and I thought the fastenings would give way. I stood facing the entrance, lashing my heart up to defy the spiritual enemy that I looked to see, every instant, in bodily presence; and the door did burst open; and before me stood--what was it? man or demon? a grey-haired man, with poor, worn clothes all wringing wet, and he himself battered and piteous to look upon, from the storm he had passed through.

  ‘Let me in!’ he said. ‘Give me shelter. I am poor, or I would reward you. And I am friendless, too,’ he said, looking up in my face, like one seeking what he cannot find. In that look, strangely changed, I knew that God had heard me; for it was the old cowardly look of my life’s enemy. Had he been a stranger, I might not have welcomed him; but as he was mine enemy, I gave him welcome in a lordly dish. I sat opposite to him. ‘Whence do you come?’ said I. ‘It is a strange night to be out on the fells.’

  He looked up at me sharp; but in general he held his head down like a beast or hound.

  You won’t betray me. I’ll not trouble you long. As soon as the storm abates, I’ll go.’

  ‘Friend!’ said I, ‘what have I to betray?’ and I trembled lest he should keep himself out of my power and not tell me. ‘You come for shelter, and I give you of my best. Why do you suspect me?’

  ‘Because,’ said he, in his abject bitterness, all the world is against me. I never met with goodness or kindness; and now I am hunted like a wild beast. I’ll tell you--I’m a convict returned before my time. I was a Sway man’ (as if I, of all men, did nor know it!), ‘and I went back, like a fool, to the old place. They’ve hunted me out where I would fain have lived rightly and quietly, and they’ll send me back to that hell upon earth, if they catch me. I did nor know it would be such a night. Only let me rest and get warm once more, and I’ll go away. Good, kind man, have pity upon me!’ I smiled all his doubts away; I promised him a bed on the floor, and I thought of Jael and Sisera. My heart leaped up like a war-horse at the sound of the trumpet, and said, ‘Ha, ha, the Lord hath heard my prayer and supplication; I shall have vengeance at last!’

  He did not dream who I was. He was changed; so that I, who had learned his features with all the diligence of hatred, did not, at first, recognize him; and he thought not of me, only of his own woe and affright. He looked into the fire with the dreamy gaze of one whose strength of character, if he had any, is beaten out of him, and cannot return at any emergency whatsoever. He sighed and pitied himself, yet could not decide on what to do. I went softly about my business, which was to make him up a bed on the floor, and, when he was lulled to sleep and security, to make the best of my way to Padiham, and summon the constable, into whose hands I would give him up, to be taken back to his ‘hell upon earth.’ I went into Nelly’s room. She was awake and anxious. I saw she had been listening to the voices.

  ‘Who is there?’ said she. ‘John, tell me; it sounded like a voice I knew. For God’s sake, speak!’

  I smiled a quiet smile. It is a poor man, who has lost his way. Go to sleep, my dear--I shall make him up on the floor. I may not come for some time. Go to sleep;’ and I kissed her. I thought she was soothed, but nor fully satisfied. However, I hastened away before there was any further time for questioning. I made up the bed, and Richard Jackson, tired out, lay down and fell asleep. My contempt for him almost equalled my hate. If I were avoiding return to a place which I thought to be a hell upon earth, think you I would have taken a quiet sleep under any man’s roof till, somehow or another, I was secure. Now comes this man, and, with incontinence of tongue, blabs out the very thing he most should conceal, and then lies down to a good, quiet, snoring sleep. I looked again. His face was old, and worn, and miserable. So should mine enemy look. And yet it was sad to gaze upon him, poor, hunted creature!

  I would gaze no more, lest I grew weak and pitiful. Thus I took my hat, and softly opened the door. The wind blew in, but did not disturb him, he was so utterly weary. I was our in the open air of night. The storm was ceasing, and, instead of the black sky of doom that I had seen when I last looked forth, the moon was come out, wan and pale, as if wearied with the fight in the heavens, and her white light fell ghostly and calm on many a well-known object. Now and then, a dark, torn cloud was blown across her home in the sky; but they grew fewer and fewer, and at last she shone out steady and clear. I could see Padiham down before me. I heard the noise of the watercourses down the hill-side. My mind was hill of one thought, and strained upon that one thought, and yet my senses were most acute and observant. When I came to the brook, it was swollen to a rapid, tossing river; and the little bridge, with its hand-rail, was utterly swept away. It was like the bridge at Sway, where I had first seen Newly; and I remembered that day even then in the midst of my vexation at having to go round. I turned away from the brook, and there stood a little figure facing me. No spirit from the dead could have affrighted me as it did; for I saw it was Grace, whom I had left in bed by her mother’s side.

  She came to me, and took my hand. Her bare feet glittered white in the moonshine, and sprinkled the light upwards, as they plashed through the pool.

  ‘Father,’ said she, ‘mother bade me say this.’ Then pausing to gather breath and memory, she repeated these words, like a lesson of which she feared to forget a syllable:--

  ‘Mother says, “There is a God in heaven; and in His house are many mansions. If you hope to meet her there, you will come back and speak to her; if you are to be separate for ever and ever, you will go on, and may God have mercy on her and on you!” Father, I have said it right--every word.’ I was silent. At last, I said,--

  ‘What made mother say this? How came she to send you out?’

  ‘I was asleep, father, and I heard her cry. I wakened up, and I think you had but just left the house, and that she was calling for you. Then she prayed, with the tears rolling down her cheeks, and kept saying--”Oh, that I could walk!--oh, that for one hour I could run and walk!” So I said, “Mother, I can run and walk. Where must I go?” And she clutched at my arm, and bade God bless me, and told me not to fear, for that He would compass me about, and taught me my message: and now, father, dear father, you will meet mother in heaven, won’t you, and not be separate for ever and ever?’ She clung to my knees, and pleaded once more in her mother’s words. I took her up in my arms, and turned homewards.

  ‘Is yon man there, on the kitchen floor?’ asked I.

  ‘Yes!’ she answered. At any rate, my vengeance was not out of my power yet.

  When we got home I passed him, dead asleep.

  In our room, to which my child guided me, was Nelly. She sat up in bed, a most unusual attitude for her, and one of which I thought she had been incapable of attaining to without help. She had her hands clasped, and her face rapt, as if in prayer; and when she saw me, she lay back with a sweet ineffable smile. She could not speak at first; but when I came near, she took my hand and kissed it, and then she called Grace to her, and made her take off her cloak and her wet things, and dressed in her short scanty nightgown, she slipped in to her mother’s warm side; and all this time my Nelly never told me why she summoned me: it seemed enough that she should hold my hand, and feel that I was there. I believed she had read my heart; and yet I durst not speak to ask her. At last, she looked up. ‘My husband,’ said she, ‘God has saved you and me from a great sorrow this night.’ I would not understand, and I felt her look die away into disappointment.

  ‘That poor wanderer in the house-place is Richard Jackson, is it not?’

  I made no answer. Her face grew white and wan. ‘Oh,’ said she, ‘this is hard to bear. Speak what is in your mind, I beg of you. I will not thwart you harshly; dearest John, only speak to me.’

  ‘Why need I speak? You seem to know all.’

  ‘I do know that his is a voice I ca
n never forget; and I do know the awful prayers you have prayed; and I know how I have lain awake, to pray that your words might never be heard; and I am a powerless cripple. I put my cause in God’s hands. You shall not do the man any harm. What you have it in your thoughts to do, I cannot tell. But I know that you cannot do it. My eyes are dim with a strange mist; but some voice tells me that you will forgive even Richard Jackson. Dear husband--dearest John, it is so dark, I cannot see you: but speak once to me.

  I moved the candle; but when I saw her face, I saw what was drawing the mist over those loving eyes--how strange and woeful that she could die! Her little girl lying by her side looked in my face, and then at her; and the wild knowledge of death shot through her young heart, and she screamed aloud.

  Nelly opened her eyes once more. They fell upon the gaunt, sorrow-worn man who was the cause of all. He roused him from his sleep, at that child’s piercing cry, and stood at the doorway, looking in. He knew Nelly, and understood where the storm had driven him to shelter. He came towards her--

  ‘Oh, woman--dying woman--you have haunted me in the loneliness of the Bush far away--you have been in my dreams for ever--the hunting of men has not been so terrible as the hunting of your spirit,--that stone--that stone!’ He fell down by her bedside in an agony; above which her saint-like face looked on us all, for the last time, glorious with the coming light of heaven. She spoke once again:--

  ‘It was a moment of passion; I never bore you malice for it. I forgive you; and so does John, I trust.’

  Could I keep my purpose there? It faded into nothing. But, above my choking tears, I strove to speak clear and distinct, for her dying ear to hear, and her sinking heart to be gladdened.

  ‘I forgive you, Richard; I will befriend you in your trouble.’

  She could not see; but, instead of the dim shadow of death stealing over her face, a quiet light came over it, which we knew was the look of a soul at rest.

  That night I listened to his tale for her sake; and I learned that it is better to be sinned against than to sin. In the storm of the night mine enemy came to me; in the calm of the grey morning I led him forth, and bade him ‘God speed.’ And a woe had come upon me, but the burning burden of a sinful, angry heart was taken off. I am old now, and my daughter is married. I try to go about preaching and teaching in my rough, rude way; and what I teach is, how Christ lived and died, and what was Nelly’s faith of love.

  THE LAST GENERATION IN ENGLAND

  I have just taken up by chance an old number of the Edinburgh Review (April 1848), in which it is said that Southey had proposed to himself to write a ‘history of English domestic life.’ I will not enlarge upon the infinite loss we have had in the nonfulfilment of this plan; every one must in some degree feel its extent who has read those charming glimpses of home scenes contained in the early volumes of the ‘Doctor, &c.’ This quarter of an hour’s chance reading has created a wish in me to put upon record some of the details of country town life, either observed by myself, or handed down to me by older relations; for even in small towns, scarcely removed from villages, the phases of society are rapidly changing; and much will appear strange, which yet occurred only in the generation immediately preceding ours. I must however say before going on, that although I choose to disguise my own identity, and to conceal the name of the town to which I refer, every circumstance and occurrence which I shall relate is strictly and truthfully told without exaggeration. As for classing the details with which I am acquainted under any heads, that will be impossible from their heterogeneous nature; I must write them down as they arise in my memory.

  The town in which I once resided is situated in a district inhabited by large landed proprietors of very old family. The daughters of these families, if unmarried, retired to live in - on their annuities, and gave the tone to the society there, stately ladies they were, remembering etiquette and precedence in every occurrence of life, and having their genealogy at their tongue’s end. Then there were the widows of the cadets of these same families; also poor, and also proud, but I think more genial and less given to recounting their pedigrees than the former. Then came the professional men and their wives; who were more wealthy than the ladies I have named, but who always treated them with deference and respect, sometimes even amounting to obsequiousness; for was there not ‘my brother, Sir John --,’ and ‘my uncle, Mr --, of --,’ to give employment and patronage to the doctor or the attorney? A grade lower came a class of single or widow ladies; and again it was possible, not to say probable, that their pecuniary circumstances were in better condition than those of the aristocratic dames, who nevertheless refused to meet in general society the ci-devant housekeepers, or widows of stewards, who had been employed by their fathers and brothers, they would occasionally condescend to ask ‘Mason,’ or ‘that good Bentley,’ to a private tea-drinking, at which I doubt not much gossip relating to former days at the hall would pass; but that was patronage; to associate with them at another person’s house, would have been an acknowledgment of equality.

  Below again came the shopkeepers, who dared to be original; who gave comfortable suppers after the very early dinners of that day, not checked by the honourable Mr D--’s precedent of a seven o’clock tea on the most elegant and economical principles, and a supperless turn-out at nine. There were the usual respectable and disrespectable poor; and hanging on the outskirts of society were a set of young men, ready for mischief and brutality, and every now and then dropping off the pit’s brink into crime. The habits of this class (about forty years ago) were much such as those of the Mohawks a century before. They would stop ladies returning from the card-parties, which were the staple gaiety of the place, and who were only attended by a maidservant bearing a lantern, and whip them; literally whip them as you whip a little child; until administering such chastisement to a good, precise old lady of high family, ‘my brother, the magistrate,’ came forward and put down such proceedings with a high hand.

  Certainly there was more individuality of character in those days than now; no one even in a little town of two thousand inhabitants would now be found to drive out with a carriage full of dogs; each dressed in the male or female fashion of the day, as the case might be; each dog provided with a pair of house-shoes, for which his carriage boots were changed on his return. No old lady would be so oblivious of ‘Mrs Grundy’s’ existence now as to dare to invest her favourite cow, after its unlucky fall into a lime-pit, in flannel waistcoat and drawers, in which the said cow paraded the streets of - to the day of its death.

  There were many regulations which were strictly attended to in the society of -, and which probably checked more manifestations of eccentricity. Before a certain hour in the morning calls were never paid, nor yet after a certain hour in the afternoon; the consequence was that everybody was out, calling on everybody at the same time, for it was de rigueur that morning calls should be returned within three days; and accordingly, making due allowance for our proportion of rain in England, every fine morning was given up to this employment. A quarter of an hour was the limit of a morning call.

  Before the appointed hour of reception, I fancy the employment of many of the ladies was fitting up their laces and muslins (which, for the information of all those whom it may concern, were never ironed, but carefully stretched, and pinned, thread by thread, with most Lilliputian pieces, on a board covered with flannel). Most of these scions of quality had many pounds’ worth of valuable laces descended to them from mothers and grandmothers, which must be ‘got up’ by no hands, as you may guess, but those of Fairly Fair. Indeed when muslin and net were a guinea a yard, this was not to be wondered at. The lace was washed in buttermilk, which gave rise to an odd little circumstance. One lady left her lace, basted up, in some not very sour buttermilk; and unluckily the cat lapped it up, lace and all (one would have thought the lace would have choked her, but so it was); the lace was too valuable to be lost, so a small dose of tartar emetic was administered to the poor cat; the lace returned to view was car
efully darned, and decked the good lady’s best cap for many a year after; and many a time did she tell the story, gracefully bridling up in a prim sort of way, and giving a little cough, as if preliminary to a rather improper story. The first sentence of it was always, I remember, ‘I do not think you can guess where the lace on my cap has been;’ dropping her voice, ‘in pussy’s inside, my dear!’

  The dinner hour was three o’clock in all houses of any pretensions to gentility; and a very late hour it was considered to be. Soon after four one or two inveterate card-players might he seen in calash and pattens, picking their way along the streets to the house where the party of the evening was to be held. As soon as they arrived and had unpacked themselves, an operation of a good half-hour’s duration in the dining-parlour, they were ushered into the drawing-room, where, unless in the very height of summer, it was considered a delicate attention to have the shutters closed, the curtains drawn, and the candles lighted. The card-tables were set out, each with two new packs of cards, for which it was customary to pay, each person placing a shilling under one of the candlesticks.

  The ladies settled down to Preference, and allowed of no interruption; even the tea-trays were placed on the middle of the card-tables, and tea hastily gulped down with a few remarks on the good or ill fortune of the evening. New arrivals were greeted with nods in the intervals of the game; and as people entered the room, they were pounced upon by the lady of the house to form another table. Cards were a business in those days, not a recreation. Their very names were to be treated with reverence. Some one came to - from a place where flippancy was in fashion; he called the knave ‘Jack,’ and everybody looked grave, and voted him vulgar; but when he was overheard calling Preference - the decorous, highly-respectable game of Preference, - Pref., why, what course remained for us but to cut him, and cut him we did.