Delphi Complete Works of George Eliot (Illustrated) (60 page)

“Nay, Uncle,” said Dinah, trying to be quite calm. “When I first came, I said it was only for a time, as long as I could be of any comfort to my aunt.”

“Well, an’ who said you’d ever left off being a comfort to me?” said Mrs. Poyser. “If you didna mean to stay wi’ me, you’d better never ha’ come. Them as ha’ never had a cushion don’t miss it.”

“Nay, nay,” said Mr. Poyser, who objected to exaggerated views. “Thee mustna say so; we should ha’ been ill off wi’out her, Lady day was a twelvemont’. We mun be thankful for that, whether she stays or no. But I canna think what she mun leave a good home for, to go back int’ a country where the land, most on’t, isna worth ten shillings an acre, rent and profits.”

“Why, that’s just the reason she wants to go, as fur as she can give a reason,” said Mrs. Poyser. “She says this country’s too comfortable, an’ there’s too much t’ eat, an’ folks arena miserable enough. And she’s going next week. I canna turn her, say what I will. It’s allays the way wi’ them meek-faced people; you may’s well pelt a bag o’ feathers as talk to ‘em. But I say it isna religion, to be so obstinate — is it now, Adam?”

Adam saw that Dinah was more disturbed than he had ever seen her by any matter relating to herself, and, anxious to relieve her, if possible, he said, looking at her affectionately, “Nay, I can’t find fault with anything Dinah does. I believe her thoughts are better than our guesses, let ‘em be what they may. I should ha’ been thankful for her to stay among us, but if she thinks well to go, I wouldn’t cross her, or make it hard to her by objecting. We owe her something different to that.”

As it often happens, the words intended to relieve her were just too much for Dinah’s susceptible feelings at this moment. The tears came into the grey eyes too fast to be hidden and she got up hurriedly, meaning it to be understood that she was going to put on her bonnet.

“Mother, what’s Dinah crying for?” said Totty. “She isn’t a naughty dell.”

“Thee’st gone a bit too fur,” said Mr. Poyser. “We’ve no right t’ interfere with her doing as she likes. An’ thee’dst be as angry as could be wi’ me, if I said a word against anything she did.”

“Because you’d very like be finding fault wi’out reason,” said Mrs. Poyser. “But there’s reason i’ what I say, else I shouldna say it. It’s easy talking for them as can’t love her so well as her own aunt does. An’ me got so used to her! I shall feel as uneasy as a new sheared sheep when she’s gone from me. An’ to think of her leaving a parish where she’s so looked on. There’s Mr. Irwine makes as much of her as if she was a lady, for all her being a Methodist, an’ wi’ that maggot o’ preaching in her head — God forgi’e me if I’m i’ the wrong to call it so.”

“Aye,” said Mr. Poyser, looking jocose; “but thee dostna tell Adam what he said to thee about it one day. The missis was saying, Adam, as the preaching was the only fault to be found wi’ Dinah, and Mr. Irwine says, ‘But you mustn’t find fault with her for that, Mrs. Poyser; you forget she’s got no husband to preach to. I’ll answer for it, you give Poyser many a good sermon.’ The parson had thee there,” Mr. Poyser added, laughing unctuously. “I told Bartle Massey on it, an’ he laughed too.”

“Yes, it’s a small joke sets men laughing when they sit a-staring at one another with a pipe i’ their mouths,” said Mrs. Poyser. “Give Bartle Massey his way and he’d have all the sharpness to himself. If the chaff-cutter had the making of us, we should all be straw, I reckon. Totty, my chicken, go upstairs to cousin Dinah, and see what she’s doing, and give her a pretty kiss.”

This errand was devised for Totty as a means of checking certain threatening symptoms about the corners of the mouth; for Tommy, no longer expectant of cake, was lifting up his eyelids with his forefingers and turning his eyeballs towards Totty in a way that she felt to be disagreeably personal.

“You’re rare and busy now — eh, Adam?” said Mr. Poyser. “Burge’s getting so bad wi’ his asthmy, it’s well if he’ll ever do much riding about again.”

“Yes, we’ve got a pretty bit o’ building on hand now,” said Adam, “what with the repairs on th’ estate, and the new houses at Treddles’on.”

“I’ll bet a penny that new house Burge is building on his own bit o’ land is for him and Mary to go to,” said Mr. Poyser. “He’ll be for laying by business soon, I’ll warrant, and be wanting you to take to it all and pay him so much by th’ ‘ear. We shall see you living on th’ hill before another twelvemont’s over.”

“Well,” said Adam, “I should like t’ have the business in my own hands. It isn’t as I mind much about getting any more money. We’ve enough and to spare now, with only our two selves and mother; but I should like t’ have my own way about things — I could try plans then, as I can’t do now.”

“You get on pretty well wi’ the new steward, I reckon?” said Mr. Poyser.

“Yes, yes; he’s a sensible man enough; understands farming — he’s carrying on the draining, and all that, capital. You must go some day towards the Stonyshire side and see what alterations they’re making. But he’s got no notion about buildings. You can so seldom get hold of a man as can turn his brains to more nor one thing; it’s just as if they wore blinkers like th’ horses and could see nothing o’ one side of ‘em. Now, there’s Mr. Irwine has got notions o’ building more nor most architects; for as for th’ architects, they set up to be fine fellows, but the most of ‘em don’t know where to set a chimney so as it shan’t be quarrelling with a door. My notion is, a practical builder that’s got a bit o’ taste makes the best architect for common things; and I’ve ten times the pleasure i’ seeing after the work when I’ve made the plan myself.”

Mr. Poyser listened with an admiring interest to Adam’s discourse on building, but perhaps it suggested to him that the building of his corn-rick had been proceeding a little too long without the control of the master’s eye, for when Adam had done speaking, he got up and said, “Well, lad, I’ll bid you good-bye now, for I’m off to the rick-yard again.”

Adam rose too, for he saw Dinah entering, with her bonnet on and a little basket in her hand, preceded by Totty.

“You’re ready, I see, Dinah,” Adam said; “so we’ll set off, for the sooner I’m at home the better.”

“Mother,” said Totty, with her treble pipe, “Dinah was saying her prayers and crying ever so.”

“Hush, hush,” said the mother, “little gells mustn’t chatter.”

Whereupon the father, shaking with silent laughter, set Totty on the white deal table and desired her to kiss him. Mr. and Mrs. Poyser, you perceive, had no correct principles of education.

“Come back to-morrow if Mrs. Bede doesn’t want you, Dinah,” said Mrs. Poyser: “but you can stay, you know, if she’s ill.”

So, when the good-byes had been said, Dinah and Adam left the Hall Farm together.

Chapter
L

In the Cottag
e

ADAM did not ask Dinah to take his arm when they got out into the lane. He had never yet done so, often as they had walked together, for he had observed that she never walked arm-in-arm with Seth, and he thought, perhaps, that kind of support was not agreeable to her. So they walked apart, though side by side, and the close poke of her little black bonnet hid her face from him.

“You can’t be happy, then, to make the Hall Farm your home, Dinah?” Adam said, with the quiet interest of a brother, who has no anxiety for himself in the matter. “It’s a pity, seeing they’re so fond of you.”

“You know, Adam, my heart is as their heart, so far as love for them and care for their welfare goes, but they are in no present need. Their sorrows are healed, and I feel that I am called back to my old work, in which I found a blessing that I have missed of late in the midst of too abundant worldly good. I know it is a vain thought to flee from the work that God appoints us, for the sake of finding a greater blessing to our own souls, as if we could choose for ourselves where we shall find the fulness of the Divine Presence, instead of seeking it where alone it is to be found, in loving obedience. But now, I believe, I have a clear showing that my work lies elsewhere — at least for a time. In the years to come, if my aunt’s health should fail, or she should otherwise need me, I shall return.”

“You know best, Dinah,” said Adam. “I don’t believe you’d go against the wishes of them that love you, and are akin to you, without a good and sufficient reason in your own conscience. I’ve no right to say anything about my being sorry: you know well enough what cause I have to put you above every other friend I’ve got; and if it had been ordered so that you could ha’ been my sister, and lived with us all our lives, I should ha’ counted it the greatest blessing as could happen to us now. But Seth tells me there’s no hope o’ that: your feelings are different, and perhaps I’m taking too much upon me to speak about it.”

Dinah made no answer, and they walked on in silence for some yards, till they came to the stone stile, where, as Adam had passed through first and turned round to give her his hand while she mounted the unusually high step, she could not prevent him from seeing her face. It struck him with surprise, for the grey eyes, usually so mild and grave, had the bright uneasy glance which accompanies suppressed agitation, and the slight flush in her cheeks, with which she had come downstairs, was heightened to a deep rose-colour. She looked as if she were only sister to Dinah. Adam was silent with surprise and conjecture for some moments, and then he said, “I hope I’ve not hurt or displeased you by what I’ve said, Dinah. Perhaps I was making too free. I’ve no wish different from what you see to be best, and I’m satisfied for you to live thirty mile off, if you think it right. I shall think of you just as much as I do now, for you’re bound up with what I can no more help remembering than I can help my heart beating.”

Poor Adam! Thus do men blunder. Dinah made no answer, but she presently said, “Have you heard any news from that poor young man, since we last spoke of him?”

Dinah always called Arthur so; she had never lost the image of him as she had seen him in the prison.

“Yes,” said Adam. “Mr. Irwine read me part of a letter from him yesterday. It’s pretty certain, they say, that there’ll be a peace soon, though nobody believes it’ll last long; but he says he doesn’t mean to come home. He’s no heart for it yet, and it’s better for others that he should keep away. Mr. Irwine thinks he’s in the right not to come. It’s a sorrowful letter. He asks about you and the Poysers, as he always does. There’s one thing in the letter cut me a good deal: ‘You can’t think what an old fellow I feel,’ he says; ‘I make no schemes now. I’m the best when I’ve a good day’s march or fighting before me.’“

“He’s of a rash, warm-hearted nature, like Esau, for whom I have always felt great pity,” said Dinah. “That meeting between the brothers, where Esau is so loving and generous, and Jacob so timid and distrustful, notwithstanding his sense of the Divine favour, has always touched me greatly. Truly, I have been tempted sometimes to say that Jacob was of a mean spirit. But that is our trial: we must learn to see the good in the midst of much that is unlovely.”

“Ah,” said Adam, “I like to read about Moses best, in th’ Old Testament. He carried a hard business well through, and died when other folks were going to reap the fruits. A man must have courage to look at his life so, and think what’ll come of it after he’s dead and gone. A good solid bit o’ work lasts: if it’s only laying a floor down, somebody’s the better for it being done well, besides the man as does it.”

They were both glad to talk of subjects that were not personal, and in this way they went on till they passed the bridge across the Willow Brook, when Adam turned round and said, “Ah, here’s Seth. I thought he’d be home soon. Does he know of you’re going, Dinah?”

“Yes, I told him last Sabbath.”

Adam remembered now that Seth had come home much depressed on Sunday evening, a circumstance which had been very unusual with him of late, for the happiness he had in seeing Dinah every week seemed long to have outweighed the pain of knowing she would never marry him. This evening he had his habitual air of dreamy benignant contentment, until he came quite close to Dinah and saw the traces of tears on her delicate eyelids and eyelashes. He gave one rapid glance at his brother, but Adam was evidently quite outside the current of emotion that had shaken Dinah: he wore his everyday look of unexpectant calm. Seth tried not to let Dinah see that he had noticed her face, and only said, “I’m thankful you’re come, Dinah, for Mother’s been hungering after the sight of you all day. She began to talk of you the first thing in the morning.”

When they entered the cottage, Lisbeth was seated in her arm-chair, too tired with setting out the evening meal, a task she always performed a long time beforehand, to go and meet them at the door as usual, when she heard the approaching footsteps.

“Coom, child, thee’t coom at last,” she said, when Dinah went towards her. “What dost mane by lavin’ me a week an’ ne’er coomin’ a-nigh me?”

“Dear friend,” said Dinah, taking her hand, “you’re not well. If I’d known it sooner, I’d have come.”

“An’ how’s thee t’ know if thee dostna coom? Th’ lads on’y know what I tell ‘em. As long as ye can stir hand and foot the men think ye’re hearty. But I’m none so bad, on’y a bit of a cold sets me achin’. An’ th’ lads tease me so t’ ha’ somebody wi’ me t’ do the work — they make me ache worse wi’ talkin’. If thee’dst come and stay wi’ me, they’d let me alone. The Poysers canna want thee so bad as I do. But take thy bonnet off, an’ let me look at thee.”

Dinah was moving away, but Lisbeth held her fast, while she was taking off her bonnet, and looked at her face as one looks into a newly gathered snowdrop, to renew the old impressions of purity and gentleness.

“What’s the matter wi’ thee?” said Lisbeth, in astonishment; “thee’st been a-cryin’.”

“It’s only a grief that’ll pass away,” said Dinah, who did not wish just now to call forth Lisbeth’s remonstrances by disclosing her intention to leave Hayslope. “You shall know about it shortly — we’ll talk of it to-night. I shall stay with you to-night.”

Lisbeth was pacified by this prospect. And she had the whole evening to talk with Dinah alone; for there was a new room in the cottage, you remember, built nearly two years ago, in the expectation of a new inmate; and here Adam always sat when he had writing to do or plans to make. Seth sat there too this evening, for he knew his mother would like to have Dinah all to herself.

There were two pretty pictures on the two sides of the wall in the cottage. On one side there was the broad-shouldered, large-featured, hardy old woman, in her blue jacket and buff kerchief, with her dim-eyed anxious looks turned continually on the lily face and the slight form in the black dress that were either moving lightly about in helpful activity, or seated close by the old woman’s arm-chair, holding her withered hand, with eyes lifted up towards her to speak a language which Lisbeth understood far better than the Bible or the hymn-book. She would scarcely listen to reading at all to-night. “Nay, nay, shut the book,” she said. “We mun talk. I want t’ know what thee was cryin’ about. Hast got troubles o’ thy own, like other folks?”

On the other side of the wall there were the two brothers so like each other in the midst of their unlikeness: Adam with knit brows, shaggy hair, and dark vigorous colour, absorbed in his “figuring”; Seth, with large rugged features, the close copy of his brother’s, but with thin, wavy, brown hair and blue dreamy eyes, as often as not looking vaguely out of the window instead of at his book, although it was a newly bought book — Wesley’s abridgment of Madame Guyon’s life, which was full of wonder and interest for him. Seth had said to Adam, “Can I help thee with anything in here to-night? I don’t want to make a noise in the shop.”

“No, lad,” Adam answered, “there’s nothing but what I must do myself. Thee’st got thy new book to read.”

And often, when Seth was quite unconscious, Adam, as he paused after drawing a line with his ruler, looked at his brother with a kind smile dawning in his eyes. He knew “th’ lad liked to sit full o’ thoughts he could give no account of; they’d never come t’ anything, but they made him happy,” and in the last year or so, Adam had been getting more and more indulgent to Seth. It was part of that growing tenderness which came from the sorrow at work within him.

For Adam, though you see him quite master of himself, working hard and delighting in his work after his inborn inalienable nature, had not outlived his sorrow — had not felt it slip from him as a temporary burden, and leave him the same man again. Do any of us? God forbid. It would be a poor result of all our anguish and our wrestling if we won nothing but our old selves at the end of it — if we could return to the same blind loves, the same self-confident blame, the same light thoughts of human suffering, the same frivolous gossip over blighted human lives, the same feeble sense of that Unknown towards which we have sent forth irrepressible cries in our loneliness. Let us rather be thankful that our sorrow lives in us as an indestructible force, only changing its form, as forces do, and passing from pain into sympathy — the one poor word which includes all our best insight and our best love. Not that this transformation of pain into sympathy had completely taken place in Adam yet. There was still a great remnant of pain, and this he felt would subsist as long as her pain was not a memory, but an existing thing, which he must think of as renewed with the light of every new morning. But we get accustomed to mental as well as bodily pain, without, for all that, losing our sensibility to it. It becomes a habit of our lives, and we cease to imagine a condition of perfect ease as possible for us. Desire is chastened into submission, and we are contented with our day when we have been able to bear our grief in silence and act as if we were not suffering. For it is at such periods that the sense of our lives having visible and invisible relations, beyond any of which either our present or prospective self is the centre, grows like a muscle that we are obliged to lean on and exert.

That was Adam’s state of mind in this second autumn of his sorrow. His work, as you know, had always been part of his religion, and from very early days he saw clearly that good carpentry was God’s will — was that form of God’s will that most immediately concerned him. But now there was no margin of dreams for him beyond this daylight reality, no holiday-time in the working-day world, no moment in the distance when duty would take off her iron glove and breast-plate and clasp him gently into rest. He conceived no picture of the future but one made up of hard-working days such as he lived through, with growing contentment and intensity of interest, every fresh week. Love, he thought, could never be anything to him but a living memory — a limb lopped off, but not gone from consciousness. He did not know that the power of loving was all the while gaining new force within him; that the new sensibilities bought by a deep experience were so many new fibres by which it was possible, nay, necessary to him, that his nature should intertwine with another. Yet he was aware that common affection and friendship were more precious to him than they used to be — that he clung more to his mother and Seth, and had an unspeakable satisfaction in the sight or imagination of any small addition to their happiness. The Poysers, too — hardly three or four days passed but he felt the need of seeing them and interchanging words and looks of friendliness with them. He would have felt this, probably, even if Dinah had not been with them, but he had only said the simplest truth in telling Dinah that he put her above all other friends in the world. Could anything be more natural? For in the darkest moments of memory the thought of her always came as the first ray of returning comfort. The early days of gloom at the Hall Farm had been gradually turned into soft moonlight by her presence; and in the cottage, too, for she had come at every spare moment to soothe and cheer poor Lisbeth, who had been stricken with a fear that subdued even her querulousness at the sight of her darling Adam’s grief-worn face. He had become used to watching her light quiet movements, her pretty loving ways to the children, when he went to the Hall Farm; to listen for her voice as for a recurrent music; to think everything she said and did was just right, and could not have been better. In spite of his wisdom, he could not find fault with her for her overindulgence of the children, who had managed to convert Dinah the preacher, before whom a circle of rough men had often trembled a little, into a convenient household slave — though Dinah herself was rather ashamed of this weakness, and had some inward conflict as to her departure from the precepts of Solomon. Yes, there was one thing that might have been better; she might have loved Seth and consented to marry him. He felt a little vexed, for his brother’s sake, and he could not help thinking regretfully how Dinah, as Seth’s wife, would have made their home as happy as it could be for them all — how she was the one being that would have soothed their mother’s last days into peacefulness and rest.