North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell (classic literature books .txt) 📖

But ever when true friendship binds, Spirit it is that spirit finds; In spirit then our bliss we found, In spirit yet to them I’m bound.’ UHLAND.

Margaret was ready long before the appointed time, and had leisure enough to cry a little, quietly, when unobserved, and to smile brightly when any one looked at her. Her last alarm was lest they should be too late and miss the train; but no! they were all in time; and she breathed freely and happily at length, seated in the carriage opposite to Mr. Bell, and whirling away past the well-known stations; seeing the old south country-towns and hamlets sleeping in the warm light of the pure sun, which gave a yet ruddier colour to their tiled roofs, so different to the cold slates of the north. Broods of pigeons hovered around these peaked quaint gables, slowly settling here and there, and ruffling their soft, shiny feathers, as if exposing every fibre to the delicious warmth. There were few people about at the stations, it almost seemed as if they were too lazily content to wish to travel; none of the bustle and stir that Margaret had noticed in her two journeys on the London and North-Western line. Later on in the year, this line of railway should be stirring and alive with rich pleasure-seekers; but as to the constant going to and fro of busy trades-people it would always be widely different from the northern lines. Here a spectator or two stood lounging at nearly every station, with his hands in his pockets, so absorbed in the simple act of watching, that it made the travellers wonder what he could find to do when the train whirled away, and only the blank of a railway, some sheds, and a distant field or two were left for him to gaze upon. The hot air danced over the golden stillness of the land, farm after farm was left behind, each reminding Margaret of German Idyls—of Herman and Dorothea—of Evangeline. From this waking dream she was roused. It was the place to leave the train and take the fly to Helstone. And now sharper feelings came shooting through her heart, whether pain or pleasure she could hardly tell. Every mile was redolent of associations, which she would not have missed for the world, but each of which made her cry upon ‘the days that are no more,’ with ineffable longing. The last time she had passed along this road was when she had left it with her father and mother—the day, the season, had been gloomy, and she herself hopeless, but they were there with her. Now she was alone, an orphan, and they, strangely, had gone away from her, and vanished from the face of the earth. It hurt her to see the Helstone road so flooded in the sunlight, and every turn and every familiar tree so precisely the same in its summer glory as it had been in former years. Nature felt no change, and was ever young.

Mr. Bell knew something of what would be passing through her mind, and wisely and kindly held his tongue. They drove up to the Lennard Arms; half farm-house, half-inn, standing a little apart from the road, as much as to say, that the host did not so depend on the custom of travellers, as to have to court it by any obtrusiveness; they, rather, must seek him out. The house fronted the village green; and right before it stood an immemorial lime-tree benched all round, in some hidden recesses of whose leafy wealth hung the grim escutcheon of the Lennards. The door of the inn stood wide open, but there was no hospitable hurry to receive the travellers. When the landlady did appear—and they might have abstracted many an article first—she gave them a kind welcome, almost as if they had been invited guests, and apologised for her coming having been so delayed, by saying, that it was hay-time, and the provisions for the men had to be sent a-field, and she had been too busy packing up the baskets to hear the noise of wheels over the road, which, since they had left the highway, ran over soft short turf.

‘Why, bless me!’ exclaimed she, as at the end of her apology, a glint of sunlight showed her Margaret’s face, hitherto unobserved in that shady parlour. ‘It’s Miss Hale, Jenny,’ said she, running to the door, and calling to her daughter. ‘Come here, come directly, it’s Miss Hale!’ And then she went up to Margaret, and shook her hands with motherly fondness.

‘And how are you all? How’s the Vicar and Miss Dixon? The Vicar above all! God bless him! We’ve never ceased to be sorry that he left.’

Margaret tried to speak and tell her of her father’s death; of her mother’s it was evident that Mrs. Purkis was aware, from her omission of her name. But she choked in the effort, and could only touch her deep mourning, and say the one word, ‘Papa.’

‘Surely, sir, it’s never so!’ said Mrs. Purkis, turning to Mr. Bell for confirmation of the sad suspicion that now entered her mind. ‘There was a gentleman here in the spring—it might have been as long ago as last winter—who told us a deal of Mr. Hale and Miss Margaret; and he said Mrs. Hale was gone, poor lady. But never a word of the Vicar’s being ailing!’

‘It is so, however,’ said Mr. Bell. ‘He died quite suddenly, when on a visit to me at Oxford. He was a good man, Mrs. Purkis, and there’s many of us that might be thankful to have as calm an end as his. Come Margaret, my dear! Her father was my oldest friend, and she’s my god-daughter, so I thought we would just come down together and see the old place; and I know of old you can give us comfortable rooms and a capital dinner. You don’t remember me I see, but my name is Bell, and once or twice when the parsonage has been full, I’ve slept here, and tasted your good ale.’

‘To be sure; I ask your pardon; but you see I was taken up with Miss Hale. Let me show you to a room, Miss Margaret, where you can take off your bonnet, and wash your face. It’s only this very morning I plunged some fresh-gathered roses head downward in the water-jug, for, thought I, perhaps some one will be coming, and there’s nothing so sweet as spring-water scented by a musk rose or two. To think of the Vicar being dead! Well, to be sure, we must all die; only that gentleman said, he was quite picking up after his trouble about Mrs. Hale’s death.’

‘Come down to me, Mrs. Purkis, after you have attended to Miss Hale. I want to have a consultation with you about dinner.’

The little casement window in Margaret’s bed-chamber was almost filled up with rose and vine branches; but pushing them aside, and stretching a little out, she could see the tops of the parsonage chimneys above the trees; and distinguish many a well-known line through the leaves.

‘Aye!’ said Mrs. Purkis, smoothing down the bed, and despatching Jenny for an armful of lavender-scented towels, ‘times is changed, miss; our new Vicar has seven children, and is building a nursery ready for more, just out where the arbour and tool-house used to be in old times. And he has had new grates put in, and a plate-glass window in the drawing-room. He and his wife are stirring people, and have done a deal of good; at least they say it’s doing good; if it were not, I should call it turning things upside down for very little purpose. The new Vicar is a teetotaller, miss, and a magistrate, and his wife has a deal of receipts for economical cooking, and is for making bread without yeast; and they both talk so much, and both at a time, that they knock one down as it were, and it’s not till they’re gone, and one’s a little at peace, that one can think that there were things one might have said on one’s own side of the question. He’ll be after the men’s cans in the hayfield, and peeping in; and then there’ll be an ado because it’s not ginger beer, but I can’t help it. My mother and my grandmother before me sent good malt liquor to haymakers; and took salts and senna when anything ailed them; and I must e’en go on in their ways, though Mrs. Hepworth does want to give me comfits instead of medicine, which, as she says, is a deal pleasanter, only I’ve no faith in it. But I must go, miss, though I’m wanting to hear many a thing; I’ll come back to you before long.

Mr. Bell had strawberries and cream, a loaf of brown bread, and a jug of milk, (together with a Stilton cheese and a bottle of port for his own private refreshment,) ready for Margaret on her coming down stairs; and after this rustic luncheon they set out to walk, hardly knowing in what direction to turn, so many old familiar inducements were there in each.

‘Shall we go past the vicarage?’ asked Mr. Bell.

‘No, not yet. We will go this way, and make a round so as to come back by it,’ replied Margaret.

Here and there old trees had been felled the autumn before; or a squatter’s roughly-built and decaying cottage had disappeared. Margaret missed them each and all, and grieved over them like old friends. They came past the spot where she and Mr. Lennox had sketched. The white, lightning-scarred trunk of the venerable beech, among whose roots they had sate down was there no more; the old man, the inhabitant of the ruinous cottage, was dead; the cottage had been pulled down, and a new one, tidy and respectable, had been built in its stead. There was a small garden on the place where the beech-tree had been.

‘I did not think I had been so old,’ said Margaret after a pause of silence; and she turned away sighing.

‘Yes!’ said Mr. Bell. ‘It is the first changes among familiar things that make such a mystery of time to the young, afterwards we lose the sense of the mysterious. I take changes in all I see as a matter of course. The instability of all human things is familiar to me, to you it is new and oppressive.’

‘Let us go on to see little Susan,’ said Margaret, drawing her companion up a grassy roadway, leading under the shadow of a forest glade.

‘With all my heart, though I have not an idea who little Susan may be. But I have a kindness for all Susans, for simple Susan’s sake.’

‘My little Susan was disappointed when I left without wishing her goodbye; and it has been on my conscience ever since, that I gave her pain which a little more exertion on my part might have prevented. But it is a long way. Are you sure you will not be tired?’

‘Quite sure. That is, if you don’t walk so fast. You see, here there are no views that can give one an excuse for stopping to take breath. You would think it romantic to be walking with a person “fat and scant o’ breath” if I were Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Have compassion on my infirmities for his sake.’

‘I will walk slower for your own sake. I like you twenty times better than Hamlet.’

‘On the principle that a living ass is better than a dead lion?’

‘Perhaps so. I don’t analyse my feelings.’

‘I am content to take your liking me, without examining too curiously into the materials it is made of. Only we need not walk at a