The Complete Novels of Elizabeth Gaskell. Elizabeth Gaskell
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live to have such a fine strapping son as I am, did you now?"
She smiled a little, and looked up at him, which was just what he wanted.
"Thou'rt not so fine a man as thy father was, by a deal!" said she, looking at him with much fondness, notwithstanding her depreciatory words.
He took another turn or two up and down the room. He wanted to bend the subject round to his own case.
"Those were happy days when father was alive!"
"You may say so, lad! Such days as will never come again to me, at any rate." She sighed sorrowfully.
"Mother!" said he at last, stopping short, and taking her hand in his with tender affection, "you'd like me to be as happy a man as my father was before me, would not you? You'd like me to have some one to make me as happy as you made father? Now, would you not, dear mother?"
"I did not make him as happy as I might ha' done," murmured she, in a low, sad voice of self-reproach. "Th' accident gave a jar to my temper it's never got the better of; and now he's gone where he can never know how I grieve for having frabbed him as I did."
"Nay, mother, we don't know that!" said Jem, with gentle soothing. "Any how, you and father got along with as few rubs as most people. But for his sake, dear mother, don't say me nay, now that I come to you to ask your blessing before setting out to see her, who is to be my wife, if ever woman is; for his sake, if not for mine, love her who I shall bring home to be to me all you were to him: and mother! I do not ask for a truer or a tenderer heart than yours is, in the long run."
The hard look left her face; though her eyes were still averted from Jem's gaze, it was more because they were brimming over with tears, called forth by his words, than because any angry feeling yet remained. And when his manly voice died away in low pleadings, she lifted up her hands, and bent down her son's head below the level of her own; and then she solemnly uttered a blessing.
"God bless thee, Jem, my own dear lad. And may He bless Mary Barton for thy sake."
Jem's heart leaped up, and from this time hope took the place of fear in his anticipations with regard to Mary.
"Mother! you show your own true self to Mary, and she'll love you as dearly as I do."
So with some few smiles, and some few tears, and much earnest talking, the evening wore away.
"I must be off to see Margaret. Why, it's near ten o'clock! Could you have thought it? Now don't you stop up for me, mother. You and Will go to bed, for you've both need of it. I shall be home in an hour."
Margaret had felt the evening long and lonely; and was all but giving up the thoughts of Jem's coming that night, when she heard his step at the door.
He told her of his progress with his mother; he told her his hopes, and was silent on the subject of his fears.
"To think how sorrow and joy are mixed up together. You'll date your start in life as Mary's acknowledged lover from poor Alice Wilson's burial day. Well! the dead are soon forgotten!"
"Dear Margaret!—But you're worn out with your long evening waiting for me. I don't wonder. But never you, nor any one else, think because God sees fit to call up new interests, perhaps right out of the grave, that therefore the dead are forgotten. Margaret, you yourself can remember our looks, and fancy what we're like."
"Yes! but what has that to do with remembering Alice?"
"Why, just this. You're not always trying to think on our faces, and making a labour of remembering; but often, I'll be bound, when you're sinking off to sleep, or when you're very quiet and still, the faces you knew so well when you could see, come smiling before you with loving looks. Or you remember them, without striving after it, and without thinking it's your duty to keep recalling them. And so it is with them that are hidden from our sight. If they've been worthy to be heartily loved while alive, they'll not be forgotten when dead; it's against nature. And we need no more be upbraiding ourselves for letting in God's rays of light upon our sorrow, and no more be fearful of forgetting them, because their memory is not always haunting and taking up our minds, than you need to trouble yourself about remembering your grandfather's face, or what the stars were like,—you can't forget if you would, what it's such a pleasure to think about. Don't fear my forgetting Aunt Alice."
"I'm not, Jem; not now, at least; only you seemed so full about Mary."
"I've kept it down so long, remember. How glad Aunt Alice would have been to know that I might hope to have her for my wife! that's to say, if God spares her!"
"She would not have known it, even if you could have told her this last fortnight,—ever since you went away she's been thinking always that she was a little child at her mother's apron-string. She must have been a happy little thing; it was such a pleasure to her to think about those early days, when she lay old and gray on her death-bed."
"I never knew any one seem more happy all her life long."
"Ay! and how gentle and easy her death was! She thought her mother was near her."
They fell into calm thought about those last peaceful happy hours.
It struck eleven. Jem started up.
"I should have been gone long ago. Give me the bundle. You'll not forget my mother. Good night, Margaret."
She let him out and bolted the door behind him. He stood on the steps to adjust some fastening about the bundle. The court, the street, was deeply still. Long ago had all retired to rest on that quiet Sabbath evening. The stars shone down on the silent deserted streets, and the soft clear moonlight fell in bright masses, leaving the steps on which Jem stood in shadow.
A foot-fall was heard along the pavement; slow and heavy was the sound. Before Jem had ended his little piece of business, a form had glided into sight; a wan, feeble figure, bearing, with evident and painful labour, a jug of water from the neighbouring pump. It went before Jem, turned up the court at the corner of which he was standing, passed into the broad, calm light; and there, with bowed head, sinking and shrunk body, Jem recognised John Barton.
No haunting ghost could have had less of the energy of life in its involuntary motions than he, who, nevertheless, went on with the same measured clock-work tread until the door of his own house was reached. And then he disappeared, and the latch fell feebly to, and made a faint and wavering sound, breaking the solemn silence of the night. Then all again was still.
For a minute or two Jem stood motionless, stunned by the thoughts which the sight of Mary's father had called up.
Margaret did not know he was at home: had he stolen like a thief by dead of night into his own dwelling? Depressed as Jem had often and long seen him, this night there was something different about him still; beaten down by some inward storm, he seemed to grovel along, all self-respect lost and gone.
Must he be told of Mary's state? Jem felt he must not; and this for many reasons. He could not be informed of her illness without many other particulars being communicated at the same time, of which it were better he should be kept in ignorance; indeed, of which Mary herself could alone give the full explanation. No suspicion that he was the criminal seemed hitherto to have been excited in the mind of any one. Added to these reasons was Jem's extreme unwillingness to face him, with the belief in his breast that he, and none other, had done the fearful deed.
It was true that he was Mary's father, and as such had every right to be told of all concerning her; but supposing he were, and that he followed the impulse so natural to a father, and wished to go to her, what might be the consequences? Among the mingled feelings she had revealed in her delirium, ay, mingled even with the most tender expressions of love for her father, was a sort of horror of him; a dread of him as a blood-shedder, which seemed to separate him into two persons,—one, the father who had dandled her on his knee, and loved her all her life long; the other, the assassin, the cause of all her trouble and woe.
If he presented himself before her while this idea of his character was uppermost, who might tell the consequence?
Jem could not, and would not, expose her to any