North and South - Elizabeth Gaskell (popular books to read .TXT) 📗

the same quiet obstinacy as on the previous day; and he was obliged to console himself for her rejection, by eating them all himself But Margaret was the first to hear the stopping of the cab that brought her aunt from the railway station. Her eyelids quivered, her lips coloured and trembled. Mr. Bell went down to meet Mrs. Shaw; and when they came up, Margaret was standing, trying to steady her dizzy self; and when she saw her aunt, she went forward to the arms open to receive her, and first found the passionate relief of tears on her aunt’s shoulder. All thoughts of quiet habitual love, of tenderness for years, of relationship to the dead,—all that inexplicable likeness in look, tone, and gesture, that seem to belong to one family, and which reminded Margaret so forcibly at this moment of her mother,—came in to melt and soften her numbed heart into the overflow of warm tears.

Mr. Bell stole out of the room, and went down into the study, where he ordered a fire, and tried to divert his thoughts by taking down and examining the different books. Each volume brought a remembrance or a suggestion of his dead friend. It might be a change of employment from his two days’ work of watching Margaret, but it was no change of thought. He was glad to catch the sound of Mr. Thornton’s voice, making enquiry at the door. Dixon was rather cavalierly dismissing him; for with the appearance of Mrs. Shaw’s maid, came visions of former grandeur, of the Beresford blood, of the ‘station’ (so she was pleased to term it) from which her young lady had been ousted, and to which she was now, please God, to be restored. These visions, which she had been dwelling on with complacency in her conversation with Mrs. Shaw’s maid (skilfully eliciting meanwhile all the circumstances of state and consequence connected with the Harley Street establishment, for the edification of the listening Martha), made Dixon rather inclined to be supercilious in her treatment of any inhabitant of Milton; so, though she always stood rather in awe of Mr. Thornton, she was as curt as she durst be in telling him that he could see none of the inmates of the house that night. It was rather uncomfortable to be contradicted in her statement by Mr. Bell’s opening the study-door, and calling out:

‘Thornton! is that you? Come in for a minute or two; I want to speak to you.’ So Mr. Thornton went into the study, and Dixon had to retreat into the kitchen, and reinstate herself in her own esteem by a prodigious story of Sir John Beresford’s coach and six, when he was high sheriff.

‘I don’t know what I wanted to say to you after all. Only it’s dull enough to sit in a room where everything speaks to you of a dead friend. Yet Margaret and her aunt must have the drawing-room to themselves!’

‘Is Mrs.—is her aunt come?’ asked Mr. Thornton.

‘Come? Yes! maid and all. One would have thought she might have come by herself at such a time! And now I shall have to turn out and find my way to the Clarendon.’

‘You must not go to the Clarendon. We have five or six empty bedrooms at home.’

‘Well aired?’

‘I think you may trust my mother for that.’

‘Then I’ll only run upstairs and wish that wan girl goodnight, and make my bow to her aunt, and go off with you straight.’

Mr. Bell was some time upstairs. Mr. Thornton began to think it long, for he was full of business, and had hardly been able to spare the time for running up to Crampton, and enquiring how Miss Hale was.

When they had set out upon their walk, Mr. Bell said:

‘I was kept by those women in the drawing-room. Mrs. Shaw is anxious to get home—on account of her daughter, she says—and wants Margaret to go off with her at once. Now she is no more fit for travelling than I am for flying. Besides, she says, and very justly, that she has friends she must see—that she must wish goodbye to several people; and then her aunt worried her about old claims, and was she forgetful of old friends? And she said, with a great burst of crying, she should be glad enough to go from a place where she had suffered so much. Now I must return to Oxford to-morrow, and I don’t know on which side of the scale to throw in my voice.’

He paused, as if asking a question; but he received no answer from his companion, the echo of whose thoughts kept repeating—

‘Where she had suffered so much.’ Alas! and that was the way in which this eighteen months in Milton—to him so unspeakably precious, down to its very bitterness, which was worth all the rest of life’s sweetness—would be remembered. Neither loss of father, nor loss of mother, dear as she was to Mr. Thornton, could have poisoned the remembrance of the weeks, the days, the hours, when a walk of two miles, every step of which was pleasant, as it brought him nearer and nearer to her, took him to her sweet presence—every step of which was rich, as each recurring moment that bore him away from her made him recall some fresh grace in her demeanour, or pleasant pungency in her character. Yes! whatever had happened to him, external to his relation to her, he could never have spoken of that time, when he could have seen her every day—when he had her within his grasp, as it were—as a time of suffering. It had been a royal time of luxury to him, with all its stings and contumelies, compared to the poverty that crept round and clipped the anticipation of the future down to sordid fact, and life without an atmosphere of either hope or fear.

Mrs. Thornton and Fanny were in the dining-room; the latter in a flutter of small exultation, as the maid held up one glossy material after another, to try the effect of the wedding-dresses by candlelight. Her mother really tried to sympathise with her, but could not. Neither taste nor dress were in her line of subjects, and she heartily wished that Fanny had accepted her brother’s offer of having the wedding clothes provided by some first-rate London dressmaker, without the endless troublesome discussions, and unsettled wavering, that arose out of Fanny’s desire to choose and superintend everything herself. Mr. Thornton was only too glad to mark his grateful approbation of any sensible man, who could be captivated by Fanny’s second-rate airs and graces, by giving her ample means for providing herself with the finery, which certainly rivalled, if it did not exceed, the lover in her estimation. When her brother and Mr. Bell came in, Fanny blushed and simpered, and fluttered over the signs of her employment, in a way which could not have failed to draw attention from any one else but Mr. Bell. If he thought about her and her silks and satins at all, it was to compare her and them with the pale sorrow he had left behind him, sitting motionless, with bent head and folded hands, in a room where the stillness was so great that you might almost fancy the rush in your straining ears was occasioned by the spirits of the dead, yet hovering round their beloved. For, when Mr. Bell had first gone upstairs, Mrs. Shaw lay asleep on the sofa; and no sound broke the silence.

Mrs. Thornton gave Mr. Bell her formal, hospitable welcome. She was never so gracious as when receiving her Son’s friends in her son’s house; and the more unexpected they were, the more honour to her admirable housekeeping preparations for comfort.

‘How is Miss Hale?’ she asked.

‘About as broken down by this last stroke as she can be.’

‘I am sure it is very well for her that she has such a friend as you.’

‘I wish I were her only friend, madam. I daresay it sounds very brutal; but here have I been displaced, and turned out of my post of comforter and adviser by a fine lady aunt; and there are cousins and what not claiming her in London, as if she were a lap-dog belonging to them. And she is too weak and miserable to have a will of her own.’

‘She must indeed be weak,’ said Mrs. Thornton, with an implied meaning which her son understood well. ‘But where,’ continued Mrs. Thornton, ‘have these relations been all this time that Miss Hale has appeared almost friendless, and has certainly had a good deal of anxiety to bear?’ But she did not feel interest enough in the answer to her question to wait for it. She left the room to make her household arrangements.

‘They have been living abroad. They have some kind of claim upon her. I will do them that justice. The aunt brought her up, and she and the cousin have been like sisters. The thing vexing me, you see, is that I wanted to take her for a child of my own; and I am jealous of these people, who don’t seem to value the privilege of their right. Now it would be different if Frederick claimed her.’

‘Frederick!’ exclaimed Mr. Thornton. ‘Who is he? What right—?’ Me stopped short in his vehement question.

‘Frederick,’ said Mr. Bell in surprise. ‘Why don’t you know? He’s her brother. Have you not heard—’

‘I never heard his name before. Where is he? Who is he?’

‘Surely I told you about him, when the family first came to Milton—the son who was concerned in that mutiny.’

‘I never heard of him till this moment. Where does he live?’

‘In Spain. He’s liable to be arrested the moment he sets foot on English ground. Poor fellow! he will grieve at not being able to attend his father’s funeral. We must be content with Captain Lennox; for I don’t know of any other relation to summon.’

‘I hope I may be allowed to go?’

‘Certainly; thankfully. You’re a good fellow, after all, Thornton. Hale liked you. He spoke to me, only the other day, about you at Oxford. He regretted he had seen so little of you lately. I am obliged to you for wishing to show him respect.’

‘But about Frederick. Does he never come to England?’

‘Never.’

‘He was not over here about the time of Mrs. Hale’s death?’

‘No. Why, I was here then. I hadn’t seen Hale for years and years and, if you remember, I came—No, it was some time after that that I came. But poor Frederick Hale was not here then. What made you think he was?’

‘I saw a young man walking with Miss Hale one day,’ replied Mr. Thornton, ‘and I think it was about that time.’

‘Oh, that would be this young Lennox, the Captain’s brother. He’s a lawyer, and they were in pretty constant correspondence with him; and I remember Mr. Hale told me he thought he would come down. Do you know,’ said Mr. Bell, wheeling round, and shutting one eye, the better to bring the forces of the other to bear with keen scrutiny on Mr. Thornton’s face, ‘that I once fancied you had a little tenderness for Margaret?’

No answer. No change of countenance.

‘And so did poor Hale. Not at first, and not till I had put it into his head.’

‘I admired Miss Hale. Every one must do so. She is a beautiful creature,’ said Mr. Thornton, driven to bay by Mr. Bell’s pertinacious questioning.

‘Is that all! You can speak of her in that measured way, as simply a “beautiful creature”—only something to catch the eye. I did hope you had had nobleness enough in you to make you pay her the homage of the heart. Though I believe—in