Books: The Poor Clare
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Elizabeth Gaskell >> The Poor Clare
She threw up her right hand, filled with poor Mignon's life-drops;
they spirted, one or two of them, on his shooting-dress,--an ominous
sight to the follower. But the master only laughed a little, forced,
scornful laugh, and went on to the Hall. Before he got there,
however, he took out a gold piece, and bade the boy carry it to the
old woman on his return to the village. The lad was "afeared," as he
told me in after years; he came to the cottage, and hovered about,
not daring to enter. He peeped through the window at last; and by
the flickering wood-flame, he saw Bridget kneeling before the picture
of Our Lady of the Holy Heart, with dead Mignon lying between her and
the Madonna. She was praying wildly, as her outstretched arms
betokened. The lad shrunk away in redoubled terror; and contented
himself with slipping the gold piece under the ill-fitting door. The
next day it was thrown out upon the midden; and there it lay, no one
daring to touch it.
Meanwhile Mr. Gisborne, half curious, half uneasy, thought to lessen
his uncomfortable feelings by asking Sir Philip who Bridget was? He
could only describe her--he did not know her name. Sir Philip was
equally at a loss. But an old servant of the Starkeys, who had
resumed his livery at the Hall on this occasion--a scoundrel whom
Bridget had saved from dismissal more than once during her palmy
days--said:-
"It will be the old witch, that his worship means. She needs a
ducking, if ever a woman did, does that Bridget Fitzgerald."
"Fitzgerald!" said both the gentlemen at once. But Sir Philip was
the first to continue:-
"I must have no talk of ducking her, Dickon. Why, she must be the
very woman poor Starkey bade me have a care of; but when I came here
last she was gone, no one knew where. I'll go and see her to-morrow.
But mind you, sirrah, if any harm comes to her, or any more talk of
her being a witch--I've a pack of hounds at home, who can follow the
scent of a lying knave as well as ever they followed a dog-fox; so
take care how you talk about ducking a faithful old servant of your
dead master's."
"Had she ever a daughter?" asked Mr. Gisborne, after a while.
"I don't know--yes! I've a notion she had; a kind of waiting woman
to Madam Starkey."
"Please your worship," said humbled Dickon, "Mistress Bridget had a
daughter--one Mistress Mary--who went abroad, and has never been
heard on since; and folk do say that has crazed her mother."
Mr. Gisborne shaded his eyes with his hand.
"I could wish she had not cursed me," he muttered. "She may have
power--no one else could." After a while, he said aloud, no one
understanding rightly what he meant, "Tush! it is impossible!"--and
called for claret; and he and the other gentlemen set-to to a
drinking-bout.
CHAPTER II.
I now come to the time in which I myself was mixed up with the people
that I have been writing about. And to make you understand how I
became connected with them, I must give you some little account of
myself. My father was the younger son of a Devonshire gentleman of
moderate property; my eldest uncle succeeded to the estate of his
forefathers, my second became an eminent attorney in London, and my
father took orders. Like most poor clergymen, he had a large family;
and I have no doubt was glad enough when my London uncle, who was a
bachelor, offered to take charge of me, and bring me up to be his
successor in business.
In this way I came to live in London, in my uncle's house, not far
from Gray's Inn, and to be treated and esteemed as his son, and to
labour with him in his office. I was very fond of the old gentleman.
He was the confidential agent of many country squires, and had
attained to his present position as much by knowledge of human nature
as by knowledge of law; though he was learned enough in the latter.
He used to say his business was law, his pleasure heraldry. From his
intimate acquaintance with family history, and all the tragic courses
of life therein involved, to hear him talk, at leisure times, about
any coat of arms that came across his path was as good as a play or a
romance. Many cases of disputed property, dependent on a love of
genealogy, were brought to him, as to a great authority on such
points. If the lawyer who came to consult him was young, he would
take no fee, only give him a long lecture on the importance of
attending to heraldry; if the lawyer was of mature age and good
standing, he would mulct him pretty well, and abuse him to me
afterwards as negligent of one great branch of the profession. His
house was in a stately new street called Ormond Street, and in it he
had a handsome library; but all the books treated of things that were
past; none of them planned or looked forward into the future. I
worked away--partly for the sake of my family at home, partly because
my uncle had really taught me to enjoy the kind of practice in which
he himself took such delight. I suspect I worked too hard; at any
rate, in seventeen hundred and eighteen I was far from well, and my
good uncle was disturbed by my ill looks.
One day, he rang the bell twice into the clerk's room at the dingy
office in Grey's Inn Lane. It was the summons for me, and I went
into his private room just as a gentleman--whom I knew well enough by
sight as an Irish lawyer of more reputation than he deserved--was
leaving.
My uncle was slowly rubbing his hands together and considering. I
was there two or three minutes before he spoke. Then he told me that
I must pack up my portmanteau that very afternoon, and start that
night by post-horse for West Chester. I should get there, if all
went well, at the end of five days' time, and must then wait for a
packet to cross over to Dublin; from thence I must proceed to a
certain town named Kildoon, and in that neighbourhood I was to
remain, making certain inquiries as to the existence of any
descendants of the younger branch of a family to whom some valuable
estates had descended in the female line. The Irish lawyer whom I
had seen was weary of the case, and would willingly have given up the
property, without further ado, to a man who appeared to claim them;
but on laying his tables and trees before my uncle, the latter had
foreseen so many possible prior claimants, that the lawyer had begged
him to undertake the management of the whole business. In his youth,
my uncle would have liked nothing better than going over to Ireland
himself, and ferreting out every scrap of paper or parchment, and
every word of tradition respecting the family. As it was, old and
gouty, he deputed me.
Accordingly, I went to Kildoon. I suspect I had something of my
uncle's delight in following up a genealogical scent, for I very soon
found out, when on the spot, that Mr. Rooney, the Irish lawyer, would
have got both himself and the first claimant into a terrible scrape,
if he had pronounced his opinion that the estates ought to be given
up to him. There were three poor Irish fellows, each nearer of kin
to the last possessor; but, a generation before, there was a still
nearer relation, who had never been accounted for, nor his existence
ever discovered by the lawyers, I venture to think, till I routed him
out from the memory of some of the old dependants of the family.
What had become of him? I travelled backwards and forwards; I
crossed over to France, and came back again with a slight clue, which
ended in my discovering that, wild and dissipated himself, he had
left one child, a son, of yet worse character than his father; that
this same Hugh Fitzgerald had married a very beautiful serving-woman
of the Byrnes--a person below him in hereditary rank, but above him
in character; that he had died soon after his marriage, leaving one
child, whether a boy or a girl I could not learn, and that the mother
had returned to live in the family of the Byrnes. Now, the chief of
this latter family was serving in the Duke of Berwick's regiment, and
it was long before I could hear from him; it was more than a year
before I got a short, haughty letter--I fancy he had a soldier's
contempt for a civilian, an Irishman's hatred for an Englishman, an
exiled Jacobite's jealousy of one who prospered and lived tranquilly
under the government he looked upon as an usurpation. "Bridget
Fitzgerald," he said, "had been faithful to the fortunes of his
sister--had followed her abroad, and to England when Mrs. Starkey had
thought fit to return. Both his sister and her husband were dead, he
knew nothing of Bridget Fitzgerald at the present time: probably Sir
Philip Tempest, his nephew's guardian, might be able to give me some
information." I have not given the little contemptuous terms; the
way in which faithful service was meant to imply more than it said--
all that has nothing to do with my story. Sir Philip, when applied
to, told me that he paid an annuity regularly to an old woman named
Fitzgerald, living at Coldholme (the village near Starkey Manor-
house). Whether she had any descendants he could not say.
One bleak March evening, I came in sight of the places described at
the beginning of my story. I could hardly understand the rude
dialect in which the direction to old Bridget's house was given.
"Yo' see yon furleets," all run together, gave me no idea that I was
to guide myself by the distant lights that shone in the windows of
the Hall, occupied for the time by a farmer who held the post of
steward, while the Squire, now four or five and twenty, was making
the grand tour. However, at last, I reached Bridget's cottage--a
low, moss-grown place: the palings that had once surrounded it were
broken and gone; and the underwood of the forest came up to the
walls, and must have darkened the windows. It was about seven
o'clock--not late to my London notions--but, after knocking for some
time at the door and receiving no reply, I was driven to conjecture
that the occupant of the house was gone to bed. So I betook myself
to the nearest church I had seen, three miles back on the road I had
come, sure that close to that I should find an inn of some kind; and
early the next morning I set off back to Coldholme, by a field-path
which my host assured me I should find a shorter cut than the road I
had taken the night before. It was a cold, sharp morning; my feet
left prints in the sprinkling of hoar-frost that covered the ground;
nevertheless, I saw an old woman, whom I instinctively suspected to
be the object of my search, in a sheltered covert on one side of my
path. I lingered and watched her. She must have been considerably
above the middle size in her prime, for when she raised herself from
the stooping position in which I first saw her, there was something
fine and commanding in the erectness of her figure. She drooped
again in a minute or two, and seemed looking for something on the
ground, as, with bent head, she turned off from the spot where I
gazed upon her, and was lost to my sight. I fancy I missed my way,
and made a round in spite of the landlord's directions; for by the
time I had reached Bridget's cottage she was there, with no semblance
of hurried walk or discomposure of any kind. The door was slightly
ajar. I knocked, and the majestic figure stood before me, silently
awaiting the explanation of my errand. Her teeth were all gone, so
the nose and chin were brought near together; the gray eyebrows were
straight, and almost hung over her deep, cavernous eyes, and the
thick white hair lay in silvery masses over the low, wide, wrinkled
forehead. For a moment, I stood uncertain how to shape my answer to
the solemn questioning of her silence.
"Your name is Bridget Fitzgerald, I believe?"
She bowed her head in assent.
"I have something to say to you. May I come in? I am unwilling to
keep you standing."
"You cannot tire me," she said, and at first she seemed inclined to
deny me the shelter of her roof. But the next moment--she had
searched the very soul in me with her eyes during that instant--she
led me in, and dropped the shadowing hood of her gray, draping cloak,
which had previously hid part of the character of her countenance.
The cottage was rude and bare enough. But before the picture of the
Virgin, of which I have made mention, there stood a little cup filled
with fresh primroses. While she paid her reverence to the Madonna, I
understood why she had been out seeking through the clumps of green
in the sheltered copse. Then she turned round, and bade me be
seated. The expression of her face, which all this time I was
studying, was not bad, as the stories of my last night's landlord had
led me to expect; it was a wild, stern, fierce, indomitable
countenance, seamed and scarred by agonies of solitary weeping; but
it was neither cunning nor malignant.
"My name is Bridget Fitzgerald," said she, by way of opening our
conversation.
"And your husband was Hugh Fitzgerald, of Knock Mahon, near Kildoon,
in Ireland?"
A faint light came into the dark gloom of her eyes.
"He was."
"May I ask if you had any children by him?"
The light in her eyes grew quick and red. She tried to speak, I
could see; but something rose in her throat, and choked her, and
until she could speak calmly, she would fain not speak at all before
a stranger. In a minute or so she said--"I had a daughter--one Mary
Fitzgerald,"--then her strong nature mastered her strong will, and
she cried out, with a trembling wailing cry: "Oh, man! what of her?-
-what of her?"
She rose from her seat, and came and clutched at my arm, and looked
in my eyes. There she read, as I suppose, my utter ignorance of what
had become of her child; for she went blindly back to her chair, and
sat rocking herself and softly moaning, as if I were not there; I not
daring to speak to the lone and awful woman. After a little pause,
she knelt down before the picture of Our Lady of the Holy Heart, and
spoke to her by all the fanciful and poetic names of the Litany.
"O Rose of Sharon! O Tower of David! O Star of the Sea! have ye no
comfort for my sore heart? Am I for ever to hope? Grant me at least
despair!"--and so on she went, heedless of my presence. Her prayers
grew wilder and wilder, till they seemed to me to touch on the
borders of madness and blasphemy. Almost involuntarily, I spoke as
if to stop her.
"Have you any reason to think that your daughter is dead?
She rose from her knees, and came and stood before me.
"Mary Fitzgerald is dead," said she. "I shall never see her again in
the flesh. No tongue ever told me; but I know she is dead. I have
yearned so to see her, and my heart's will is fearful and strong: it
would have drawn her to me before now, if she had been a wanderer on
the other side of the world. I wonder often it has not drawn her out
of the grave to come and stand before me, and hear me tell her how I
loved her. For, sir, we parted unfriends."
I knew nothing but the dry particulars needed for my lawyer's quest,
but I could not help feeling for the desolate woman; and she must
have read the unusual sympathy with her wistful eyes.
"Yes, sir, we did. She never knew how I loved her; and we parted
unfriends; and I fear me that I wished her voyage might not turn out
well, only meaning,--O, blessed Virgin! you know I only meant that
she should come home to her mother's arms as to the happiest place on
earth; but my wishes are terrible--their power goes beyond my
thought--and there is no hope for me, if my words brought Mary harm."
"But," I said, "you do not know that she is dead. Even now, you
hoped she might be alive. Listen to me," and I told her the tale I
have already told you, giving it all in the driest manner, for I
wanted to recall the clear sense that I felt almost sure she had
possessed in her younger days, and by keeping up her attention to
details, restrain the vague wildness of her grief.
She listened with deep attention, putting from time to time such
questions as convinced me I had to do with no common intelligence,
however dimmed and shorn by solitude and mysterious sorrow. Then she
took up her tale; and in few brief words, told me of her wanderings
abroad in vain search after her daughter; sometimes in the wake of
armies, sometimes in camp, sometimes in city. The lady, whose
waiting-woman Mary had gone to be, had died soon after the date of
her last letter home; her husband, the foreign officer, had been
serving in Hungary, whither Bridget had followed him, but too late to
find him. Vague rumours reached her that Mary had made a great
marriage: and this sting of doubt was added,--whether the mother
might not be close to her child under her new name, and even hearing
of her every day; and yet never recognizing the lost one under the
appellation she then bore. At length the thought took possession of
her, that it was possible that all this time Mary might be at home at
Coldholme, in the Trough of Bolland, in Lancashire, in England; and
home came Bridget, in that vain hope, to her desolate hearth, and
empty cottage. Here she had thought it safest to remain; if Mary was
in life, it was here she would seek for her mother.
I noted down one or two particulars out of Bridget's narrative that I
thought might be of use to me: for I was stimulated to further
search in a strange and extraordinary manner. It seemed as if it
were impressed upon me, that I must take up the quest where Bridget
had laid it down; and this for no reason that had previously
influenced me (such as my uncle's anxiety on the subject, my own
reputation as a lawyer, and so on), but from some strange power which
had taken possession of my will only that very morning, and which
forced it in the direction it chose.
"I will go," said I. "I will spare nothing in the search. Trust to
me. I will learn all that can be learnt. You shall know all that
money, or pains, or wit can discover. It is true she may be long
dead: but she may have left a child."
"A child!" she cried, as if for the first time this idea had struck
her mind. "Hear him, Blessed Virgin! he says she may have left a
child. And you have never told me, though I have prayed so for a
sign, waking or sleeping!"
"Nay," said I, "I know nothing but what you tell me. You say you
heard of her marriage."
But she caught nothing of what I said. She was praying to the Virgin
in a kind of ecstasy, which seemed to render her unconscious of my
very presence.
From Coldholme I went to Sir Philip Tempest's. The wife of the
foreign officer had been a cousin of his father's, and from him I
thought I might gain some particulars as to the existence of the
Count de la Tour d'Auvergne, and where I could find him; for I knew
questions de vive voix aid the flagging recollection, and I was
determined to lose no chance for want of trouble. But Sir Philip had
gone abroad, and it would be some time before I could receive an
answer. So I followed my uncle's advice, to whom I had mentioned how
wearied I felt, both in body and mind, by my will-o'-the-wisp search.
He immediately told me to go to Harrogate, there to await Sir
Philip's reply. I should be near to one of the places connected with
my search, Coldholme; not far from Sir Philip Tempest, in case he
returned, and I wished to ask him any further questions; and, in
conclusion, my uncle bade me try to forget all about my business for
a time.
This was far easier said than done. I have seen a child on a common
blown along by a high wind, without power of standing still and
resisting the tempestuous force. I was somewhat in the same
predicament as regarded my mental state. Something resistless seemed
to urge my thoughts on, through every possible course by which there
was a chance of attaining to my object. I did not see the sweeping
moors when I walked out: when I held a book in my hand, and read the
words, their sense did not penetrate to my brain. If I slept, I went
on with the same ideas, always flowing in the same direction. This
could not last long without having a bad effect on the body. I had
an illness, which, although I was racked with pain, was a positive
relief to me, as it compelled me to live in the present suffering,
and not in the visionary researches I had been continually making
before. My kind uncle came to nurse me; and after the immediate
danger was over, my life seemed to slip away in delicious languor for
two or three months. I did not ask--so much did I dread falling into
the old channel of thought--whether any reply had been received to my
letter to Sir Philip. I turned my whole imagination right away from
all that subject. My uncle remained with me until nigh midsummer,
and then returned to his business in London; leaving me perfectly
well, although not completely strong. I was to follow him in a
fortnight; when, as he said, "we would look over letters, and talk
about several things." I knew what this little speech alluded to,
and shrank from the train of thought it suggested, which was so
intimately connected with my first feelings of illness. However, I
had a fortnight more to roam on those invigorating Yorkshire moors.
In those days, there was one large, rambling inn, at Harrogate, close
to the Medicinal Spring; but it was already becoming too small for
the accommodation of the influx of visitors, and many lodged round
about, in the farm-houses of the district. It was so early in the
season, that I had the inn pretty much to myself; and, indeed, felt
rather like a visitor in a private house, so intimate had the
landlord and landlady become with me during my long illness. She
would chide me for being out so late on the moors, or for having been
too long without food, quite in a motherly way; while he consulted me
about vintages and wines, and taught me many a Yorkshire wrinkle
about horses. In my walks I met other strangers from time to time.
Even before my uncle had left me, I had noticed, with half-torpid
curiosity, a young lady of very striking appearance, who went about
always accompanied by an elderly companion,--hardly a gentlewoman,
but with something in her look that prepossessed me in her favour.
The younger lady always put her veil down when any one approached; so
it had been only once or twice, when I had come upon her at a sudden
turn in the path, that I had even had a glimpse at her face. I am
not sure if it was beautiful, though in after-life I grew to think it
so. But it was at this time overshadowed by a sadness that never
varied: a pale, quiet, resigned look of intense suffering, that
irresistibly attracted me,--not with love, but with a sense of
infinite compassion for one so young yet so hopelessly unhappy. The
companion wore something of the same look: quiet melancholy,
hopeless, yet resigned. I asked my landlord who they were. He said
they were called Clarke, and wished to be considered as mother and
daughter; but that, for his part, he did not believe that to be their
right name, or that there was any such relationship between them.
They had been in the neighbourhood of Harrogate for some time,
lodging in a remote farm-house. The people there would tell nothing
about them; saying that they paid handsomely, and never did any harm;
so why should they be speaking of any strange things that might
happen? That, as the landlord shrewdly observed, showed there was
something out of the common way he had heard that the elderly woman
was a cousin of the farmer's where they lodged, and so the regard
existing between relations might help to keep them quiet.
"What did he think, then, was the reason for their extreme
seclusion?" asked I.
"Nay, he could not tell,--not he. He had heard that the young lady,
for all as quiet as she seemed, played strange pranks at times." He
shook his head when I asked him for more particulars, and refused to
give them, which made me doubt if he knew any, for he was in general
a talkative and communicative man. In default of other interests,
after my uncle left, I set myself to watch these two people. I
hovered about their walks drawn towards them with a strange
fascination, which was not diminished by their evident annoyance at
so frequently meeting me. One day, I had the sudden good fortune to
be at hand when they were alarmed by the attack of a bull, which, in
those unenclosed grazing districts, was a particularly dangerous
occurrence. I have other and more important things to relate, than
to tell of the accident which gave me an opportunity of rescuing
them, it is enough to say, that this event was the beginning of an
acquaintance, reluctantly acquiesced in by them, but eagerly
prosecuted by me. I can hardly tell when intense curiosity became
merged in love, but in less than ten days after my uncle's departure
I was passionately enamoured of Mistress Lucy, as her attendant
called her; carefully--for this I noted well--avoiding any address
which appeared as if there was an equality of station between them.
I noticed also that Mrs. Clarke, the elderly woman, after her first
reluctance to allow me to pay them any attentions had been overcome,
was cheered by my evident attachment to the young girl; it seemed to
lighten her heavy burden of care, and she evidently favoured my
visits to the farmhouse where they lodged. It was not so with Lucy.
A more attractive person I never saw, in spite of her depression of
manner, and shrinking avoidance of me. I felt sure at once, that
whatever was the source of her grief, it rose from no fault of her
own. It was difficult to draw her into conversation; but when at
times, for a moment or two, I beguiled her into talk, I could see a
rare intelligence in her face, and a grave, trusting look in the
soft, gray eyes that were raised for a minute to mine. I made every
excuse I possibly could for going there. I sought wild flowers for
Lucy's sake; I planned walks for Lucy's sake; I watched the heavens
by night, in hopes that some unusual beauty of sky would justify me
in tempting Mrs. Clarke and Lucy forth upon the moors, to gaze at the
great purple dome above.