Books: Half a Life Time Ago
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Elizabeth Gaskell >> Half a Life Time Ago
Once this fit of violence lasted longer than usual. Susan's strength
both of mind and body was nearly worn out; she wrestled in prayer
that somehow it might end before she, too, was driven mad; or, worse,
might be obliged to give up life's aim, and consign Willie to a
madhouse. From that moment of prayer (as she afterwards
superstitiously thought) Willie calmed--and then he drooped--and then
he sank--and, last of all, he died in reality from physical
exhaustion.
But he was so gentle and tender as he lay on his dying bed; such
strange, child-like gleams of returning intelligence came over his
face, long after the power to make his dull, inarticulate sounds had
departed, that Susan was attracted to him by a stronger tie than she
had ever felt before. It was something to have even an idiot loving
her with dumb, wistful, animal affection; something to have any
creature looking at her with such beseeching eyes, imploring
protection from the insidious enemy stealing on. And yet she knew
that to him death was no enemy, but a true friend, restoring light
and health to his poor clouded mind. It was to her that death was an
enemy; to her, the survivor, when Willie died; there was no one to
love her.
Worse doom still, there was no one left on earth for her to love.
You now know why no wandering tourist could persuade her to receive
him as a lodger; why no tired traveller could melt her heart to
afford him rest and refreshment; why long habits of seclusion had
given her a moroseness of manner, and how care for the interests of
another had rendered her keen and miserly.
But there was a third act in the drama of her life.
CHAPTER V.
In spite of Peggy's prophecy that Susan's life should not seem long,
it did seem wearisome and endless, as the years slowly uncoiled their
monotonous circles. To be sure, she might have made change for
herself, but she did not care to do it. It was, indeed, more than
"not caring," which merely implies a certain degree of vis inertiae
to be subdued before an object can be attained, and that the object
itself does not seem to be of sufficient importance to call out the
requisite energy. On the contrary, Susan exerted herself to avoid
change and variety. She had a morbid dread of new faces, which
originated in her desire to keep poor dead Willie's state a profound
secret. She had a contempt for new customs; and, indeed, her old
ways prospered so well under her active hand and vigilant eye, that
it was difficult to know how they could be improved upon. She was
regularly present in Coniston market with the best butter and the
earliest chickens of the season. Those were the common farm produce
that every farmer's wife about had to sell; but Susan, after she had
disposed of the more feminine articles, turned to on the man's side.
A better judge of a horse or cow there was not in all the country
round. Yorkshire itself might have attempted to jockey her, and
would have failed. Her corn was sound and clean; her potatoes well
preserved to the latest spring. People began to talk of the hoards
of money Susan Dixon must have laid up somewhere; and one young
ne'er-do-weel of a farmer's son undertook to make love to the woman
of forty, who looked fifty-five, if a day. He made up to her by
opening a gate on the road-path home, as she was riding on a bare-
backed horse, her purchase not an hour ago. She was off before him,
refusing his civility; but the remounting was not so easy, and rather
than fail she did not choose to attempt it. She walked, and he
walked alongside, improving his opportunity, which, as he vainly
thought, had been consciously granted to him. As they drew near Yew
Nook, he ventured on some expression of a wish to keep company with
her. His words were vague and clumsily arranged. Susan turned round
and coolly asked him to explain himself, he took courage, as he
thought of her reputed wealth, and expressed his wishes this second
time pretty plainly. To his surprise, the reply she made was in a
series of smart strokes across his shoulders, administered through
the medium of a supple hazel-switch.
"Take that!" said she, almost breathless, "to teach thee how thou
darest make a fool of an honest woman old enough to be thy mother.
If thou com'st a step nearer the house, there's a good horse-pool,
and there's two stout fellows who'll like no better fun than ducking
thee. Be off wi' thee!"
And she strode into her own premises, never looking round to see
whether he obeyed her injunction or not.
Sometimes three or four years would pass over without her hearing
Michael Hurst's name mentioned. She used to wonder at such times
whether he were dead or alive. She would sit for hours by the dying
embers of her fire on a winter's evening, trying to recall the scenes
of her youth; trying to bring up living pictures of the faces she had
then known--Michael's most especially. She thought it was possible,
so long had been the lapse of years, that she might now pass by him
in the street unknowing and unknown. His outward form she might not
recognize, but himself she should feel in the thrill of her whole
being. He could not pass her unawares.
What little she did hear about him, all testified a downward
tendency. He drank--not at stated times when there was no other work
to be done, but continually, whether it was seed-time or harvest.
His children were all ill at the same time; then one died, while the
others recovered, but were poor sickly things. No one dared to give
Susan any direct intelligence of her former lover; many avoided all
mention of his name in her presence; but a few spoke out either in
indifference to, or ignorance of, those bygone days. Susan heard
every word, every whisper, every sound that related to him. But her
eye never changed, nor did a muscle of her face move.
Late one November night she sat over her fire; not a human being
besides herself in the house; none but she had ever slept there since
Willie's death. The farm-labourers had foddered the cattle and gone
home hours before. There were crickets chirping all round the warm
hearth-stones; there was the clock ticking with the peculiar beat
Susan had known from her childhood, and which then and ever since she
had oddly associated within the idea of a mother and child talking
together, one loud tick, and quick--a feeble, sharp one following.
The day had been keen, and piercingly cold. The whole lift of heaven
seemed a dome of iron. Black and frost-bound was the earth under the
cruel east wind. Now the wind had dropped, and as the darkness had
gathered in, the weather-wise old labourers prophesied snow. The
sounds in the air arose again, as Susan sat still and silent. They
were of a different character to what they had been during the
prevalence of the east wind. Then they had been shrill and piping;
now they were like low distant growling; not unmusical, but strangely
threatening. Susan went to the window, and drew aside the little
curtain. The whole world was white--the air was blinded with the
swift and heavy fall of snow. At present it came down straight, but
Susan knew those distant sounds in the hollows and gulleys of the
hills portended a driving wind and a more cruel storm. She thought
of her sheep; were they all folded? the new-born calf, was it bedded
well? Before the drifts were formed too deep for her to pass in and
out--and by the morning she judged that they would be six or seven
feet deep--she would go out and see after the comfort of her beasts.
She took a lantern, and tied a shawl over her head, and went out into
the open air. She had tenderly provided for all her animals, and was
returning, when, borne on the blast as if some spirit-cry--for it
seemed to come rather down from the skies than from any creature
standing on earth's level--she heard a voice of agony; she could not
distinguish words; it seemed rather as if some bird of prey was being
caught in the whirl of the icy wind, and torn and tortured by its
violence. Again up high above! Susan put down her lantern, and
shouted loud in return; it was an instinct, for if the creature were
not human, which she had doubted but a moment before, what good could
her responding cry do? And her cry was seized on by the tyrannous
wind, and borne farther away in the opposite direction to that from
which the call of agony had proceeded. Again she listened; no sound:
then again it rang through space; and this time she was sure it was
human. She turned into the house, and heaped turf and wood on the
fire, which, careless of her own sensations, she had allowed to fade
and almost die out. She put a new candle in her lantern; she changed
her shawl for a maud, and leaving the door on latch, she sallied out.
Just at the moment when her ear first encountered the weird noises of
the storm, on issuing forth into the open air, she thought she heard
the words, "O God! O help!" They were a guide to her, if words they
were, for they came straight from a rock not a quarter of a mile from
Yew Nook, but only to be reached, on account of its precipitous
character, by a round-about path. Thither she steered, defying wind
and snow; guided by here a thorn-tree, there an old, doddered oak,
which had not quite lest their identity under the whelming mask of
snow. Now and then she stopped to listen; but never a word or sound
heard she, till right from where the copse-wood grew thick and
tangled at the base of the rock, round which she was winding, she
heard a moan. Into the brake--all snow in appearance--almost a plain
of snow looked on from the little eminence where she stood--she
plunged, breaking down the bush, stumbling, bruising herself,
fighting her way; her lantern held between her teeth, and she herself
using head as well as hands to butt away a passage, at whatever cost
of bodily injury. As she climbed or staggered, owing to the
unevenness of the snow-covered ground, where the briars and weeds of
years were tangled and matted together, her foot felt something
strangely soft and yielding. She lowered her lantern; there lay a
man, prone on his face, nearly covered by the fast-falling flakes; he
must have fallen from the rock above, as, not knowing of the
circuitous path, he had tried to descend its steep, slippery face.
Who could tell? it was no time for thinking. Susan lifted him up
with her wiry strength; he gave no help--no sign of life; but for all
that he might be alive: he was still warm; she tied her maud round
him; she fastened the lantern to her apron-string; she held him
tight: half-carrying, half-dragging--what did a few bruises signify
to him, compared to dear life, to precious life! She got him through
the brake, and down the path. There, for an instant, she stopped to
take breath; but, as if stung by the Furies, she pushed on again with
almost superhuman strength. Clasping him round the waist, and
leaning his dead weight against the lintel of the door, she tried to
undo the latch; but now, just at this moment, a trembling faintness
came over her, and a fearful dread took possession of her--that here,
on the very threshold of her home, she might be found dead, and
buried under the snow, when the farm-servants came in the morning.
This terror stirred her up to one more effort. Then she and her
companion were in the warmth of the quiet haven of that kitchen; she
laid him on the settle, and sank on the floor by his side. How long
she remained in this swoon she could not tell; not very long she
judged by the fire, which was still red and sullenly glowing when she
came to herself. She lighted the candle, and bent over her late
burden to ascertain if indeed he were dead. She stood long gazing.
The man lay dead. There could be no doubt about it. His filmy eyes
glared at her, unshut. But Susan was not one to be affrighted by the
stony aspect of death. It was not that; it was the bitter, woeful
recognition of Michael Hurst!
She was convinced he was dead; but after a while she refused to
believe in her conviction. She stripped off his wet outer-garments
with trembling, hurried hands. She brought a blanket down from her
own bed; she made up the fire. She swathed him in fresh, warm
wrappings, and laid him on the flags before the fire, sitting herself
at his head, and holding it in her lap, while she tenderly wiped his
loose, wet hair, curly still, although its colour had changed from
nut-brown to iron-gray since she had seen it last. From time to time
she bent over the face afresh, sick, and fain to believe that the
flicker of the fire-light was some slight convulsive motion. But the
dim, staring eyes struck chill to her heart. At last she ceased her
delicate, busy cares: but she still held the head softly, as if
caressing it. She thought over all the possibilities and chances in
the mingled yarn of their lives that might, by so slight a turn, have
ended far otherwise. If her mother's cold had been early tended, so
that the responsibility as to her brother's weal or woe had not
fallen upon her; if the fever had not taken such rough, cruel hold on
Will; nay, if Mrs. Gale, that hard, worldly sister, had not
accompanied him on his last visit to Yew Nook--his very last before
this fatal, stormy might; if she had heard his cry,--cry uttered by
these pale, dead lips with such wild, despairing agony, not yet three
hours ago!--O! if she had but heard it sooner, he might have been
saved before that blind, false step had precipitated him down the
rock! In going over this weary chain of unrealized possibilities,
Susan learnt the force of Peggy's words. Life was short, looking
back upon it. It seemed but yesterday since all the love of her
being had been poured out, and run to waste. The intervening years--
the long monotonous years that had turned her into an old woman
before her time--were but a dream.
The labourers coming in the dawn of the winter's day were surprised
to see the fire-light through the low kitchen-window. They knocked,
and hearing a moaning answer, they entered, fearing that something
had befallen their mistress. For all explanation they got these
words
"It is Michael Hurst. He was belated, and fell down the Raven's
Crag. Where does Eleanor, his wife, live?"
How Michael Hurst got to Yew Nook no one but Susan ever knew. They
thought he had dragged himself there, with some sore internal bruise
sapping away his minuted life. They could not have believed the
superhuman exertion which had first sought him out, and then dragged
him hither. Only Susan knew of that.
She gave him into the charge of her servants, and went out and
saddled her horse. Where the wind had drifted the snow on one side,
and the road was clear and bare, she rode, and rode fast; where the
soft, deceitful heaps were massed up, she dismounted and led her
steed, plunging in deep, with fierce energy, the pain at her heart
urging her onwards with a sharp, digging spur.
The gray, solemn, winter's noon was more night-like than the depth of
summer's night; dim-purple brooded the low skies over the white
earth, as Susan rode up to what had been Michael Hurst's abode while
living. It was a small farm-house carelessly kept outside,
slatternly tended within. The pretty Nelly Hebthwaite was pretty
still; her delicate face had never suffered from any long-enduring
feeling. If anything, its expression was that of plaintive sorrow;
but the soft, light hair had scarcely a tinge of gray; the wood-rose
tint of complexion yet remained, if not so brilliant as in youth; the
straight nose, the small mouth were untouched by time. Susan felt
the contrast even at that moment. She knew that her own skin was
weather-beaten, furrowed, brown,--that her teeth were gone, and her
hair gray and ragged. And yet she was not two years older than
Nelly,--she had not been, in youth, when she took account of these
things. Nelly stood wondering at the strange-enough horse-woman, who
stopped and panted at the door, holding her horse's bridle, and
refusing to enter.
"Where is Michael Hurst?" asked Susan, at last.
"Well, I can't rightly say. He should have been at home last night,
but he was off, seeing after a public-house to be let at Ulverstone,
for our farm does not answer, and we were thinking--"
"He did not come home last night?" said Susan, cutting short the
story, and half-affirming, half-questioning, by way of letting in a
ray of the awful light before she let it full in, in its consuming
wrath.
"No! he'll be stopping somewhere out Ulverstone ways. I'm sure we've
need of him at home, for I've no one but lile Tommy to help me tend
the beasts. Things have not gone well with us, and we don't keep a
servant now. But you're trembling all over, ma'am. You'd better
come in, and take something warm, while your horse rests. That's the
stable-door, to your left."
Susan took her horse there; loosened his girths, and rubbed him down
with a wisp of straw. Then she hooked about her for hay; but the
place was bare of feed, and smelt damp and unused. She went to the
house, thankful for the respite, and got some clap-bread, which she
mashed up in a pailful of lukewarm water. Every moment was a
respite, and yet every moment made her dread the more the task that
lay before her. It would be longer than she thought at first. She
took the saddle off, and hung about her horse, which seemed, somehow,
more like a friend than anything else in the world. She laid her
cheek against its neck, and rested there, before returning to the
house for the last time.
Eleanor had brought down one of her own gowns, which hung on a chair
against the fire, and had made her unknown visitor a cup of hot tea.
Susan could hardly bear all these little attentions: they choked
her, and yet she was so wet, so weak with fatigue and excitement,
that she could neither resist by voice or by action. Two children
stood awkwardly about, puzzled at the scene, and even Eleanor began
to wish for some explanation of who her strange visitor was.
"You've, maybe, heard him speaking of me? I'm called Susan Dixon."
Nelly coloured, and avoided meeting Susan's eye.
"I've heard other folk speak of you. He never named your name."
This respect of silence came like balm to Susan: balm not felt or
heeded at the time it was applied, but very grateful in its effects
for all that.
"He is at my house," continued Susan, determined not to stop or
quaver in the operation--the pain which must be inflicted.
"At your house? Yew Nook?" questioned Eleanor, surprised. "How came
he there?"--half jealously. "Did he take shelter from the coming
storm? Tell me,--there is something--tell me, woman!"
"He took no shelter. Would to God he had!"
"O! would to God! would to God!" shrieked out Eleanor, learning all
from the woful import of those dreary eyes. Her cries thrilled
through the house; the children's piping wailings and passionate
cries on "Daddy! Daddy!" pierced into Susan's very marrow. But she
remained as still and tearless as the great round face upon the
clock.
At last, in a lull of crying, she said,--not exactly questioning, but
as if partly to herself -
"You loved him, then?"
"Loved him! he was my husband! He was the father of three bonny
bairns that lie dead in Grasmere churchyard. I wish you'd go, Susan
Dixon, and let me weep without your watching me! I wish you'd never
come near the place."
"Alas! alas! it would not have brought him to life. I would have
laid down my own to save his. My life has been so very sad! No one
would have cared if I had died. Alas! alas!"
The tone in which she said this was so utterly mournful and
despairing that it awed Nelly into quiet for a time. But by-and-by
she said, "I would not turn a dog out to do it harm; but the night is
clear, and Tommy shall guide you to the Red Cow. But, oh, I want to
be alone! If you'll come back to-morrow, I'll be better, and I'll
hear all, and thank you for every kindness you have shown him,--and I
do believe you've showed him kindness,--though I don't know why."
Susan moved heavily and strangely.
She said something--her words came thick and unintelligible. She had
had a paralytic stroke since she had last spoken. She could not go,
even if she would. Nor did Eleanor, when she became aware of the
state of the case, wish her to leave. She had her laid on her own
bed, and weeping silently all the while for her lest husband, she
nursed Susan like a sister. She did not know what her guest's
worldly position might be; and she might never be repaid. But she
sold many a little trifle to purchase such small comforts as Susan
needed. Susan, lying still and motionless, learnt much. It was not
a severe stroke; it might be the forerunner of others yet to come,
but at some distance of time. But for the present she recovered, and
regained much of her former health. On her sick-bed she matured her
plans. When she returned to Yew Nook, she took Michael Hurst's widow
and children with her to live there, and fill up the haunted hearth
with living forms that should banish the ghosts.
And so it fell out that the latter days of Susan Dixon's life were
better than the former.