Take Courage (52 page)

“You do not know me, Mistress,” said he in a somewhat mournful tone: “I am become a stranger to my brethren.”

“Ah, heavens! Can it be Joseph Lister?” I cried.

Lister smiled. “The very same, Mrs. Thorpe,” said he.

“Why—Lister,” I stammered, for in truth I did not know
how to greet him: “It is long since we saw you. You have done well for yourself, it seems.”

“Aye, the Lord hath prospered my way,” said Lister. “I have been much about the country since I departed from The Breck.”

“He has been in London, and seen our Sam,” put in John.

“Oh, I have spent several years in London,” said Lister condescendingly. “And after, I was steward for a gentleman in Durham. But the preaching there has of late become so clouded and confused, I am come home again to Yorkshire to hear sermons with some meat in them.”

“Well, Lister,” said I in an easy gracious tone, for I was vexed a little by his smug carriage: “For the sake of old times I forgive you for deserting us in a time of trouble, and make you heartily welcome to The Breck.”

“Deserting you in a time of trouble!” exclaimed Lister, taken aback. “Did I not get the hay in for you?”

“Why,” I began, but broke off, for I saw Lister's eyes fix suddenly in a wide stare at something beyond my head. I turned, and there was Chris, leaning against the angle of the stairs, dangling the scissors in his hand. I had never seen him look so tall, so handsome, or so like his father.

“I brought your scissors,” he murmured, disconcerted a little by Lister's silent stare.

Lister's face was as white as tallow. I saw what a strange conjunction it was of the four of us: Lister, and John, and Francis's son, and me. And the boy there was so ignorant of it all, and thought our lives at The Breck so tedious and dull! My heart melted.

“This is my third son, Christopher,” said I. “Chris, this is Joseph Lister.”

Chris came forward with his frank smile and his easy manner, and gave Lister his hand—he had been trained, I take some pride to say it, after a better prescription than his father, and was always courteous, especially to those who were older or poorer or some way weaker than he.

“I have heard much of you from my brother Sam,” he said.

Lister dropped his hand as if it were fire, but could not take his eyes from the lad.

“He hath your voice of velvet, Mistress,” said he.

“Well—you will stay and dine with us, will you not, Lister?” I went on hurriedly. “And what trade do you intend to drive in Bradford? Shall you be a steward again, or return to cloth?”

“I thought to be a merchant,” muttered Lister, in a voice so changed from his former complacency that I felt bound to try to cheer him.

“I am sure far-seeing merchants are much needed in these hard times,” I said.

John was relieved that this awkward meeting had passed off without open flame, and as we all sat down together he became more at ease with Lister, and they fell to talking of old times. I could see Chris's look of tedium at all this, courteously veiled, and Abraham listening with a puzzled air, as children do to talk of times long past, and I had a strange sense of how life rolled on, how a moment ago I was a child listening to my elders at The Breck, and now I was an elder with children listening to me, and all my life had gone like a flash between.

“I believe Joseph here will need your good offices towards his settlement in Bradford, wife,” John was saying with a smile. “He thinks to wed your Sarah's eldest daughter.”

“She is very young,” I said, startled, and I remembered a picture I had not called to mind for many a year—little Sarah leaning against her Uncle Lister's knee, as she called him, while the Royalists attacked Bradford Church. That was a couple of moments only before Francis's death. “I hope you will prosper in your wooing,” I said, in politeness bound, but my voice was so cold that the children looked at me curiously.

“The God of Heaven alone shall prosper us,” said Lister, offended.

His utterance was smoother than of old, his manner less
uncouth, and his hair less ugly now that it was greying; moreover there was something in his keeping a fondness for young Sarah through all these years and returning rich to a poor girl, which was taking to a woman's heart; but for all that I could not imagine any woman fancying him. However, it was none of my business, as I told Sarah and her daughter when they came up to The Breck a few days later to ask my advice. They sat on the edge of our chairs, clad in their poor best, and wished to know what Mr. Thorpe and I thought of Mr. Lister's proposal. I thought John would not wish to be consulted in the matter, for he had turned against Denton since he became so fanatical and mutinous, and when I was obliged to aid Sarah after Denton's death, though he did not actually forbid me he folded his mouth rather sourly when he caught me at it. So I said merely:

“Joseph Lister is forty and your daughter is just turned twenty—but yet if they like each other that is not against the match.”

I had never taken much notice of young Sarah before, regarding her only as one of our Sarah's children, but now I looked at her more closely. She was a round yellow-haired solid girl, squat and sturdy like her father and no beauty, quiet and bashful, yet with a certain sly look in her eyes—I thought perhaps she would hold her own with Lister as well as any woman. I would have naught to do with the match, either for or against; but knowing how hard put to it the Dentons were, poor things, since Denton was shot, I was not surprised when Lister had his way, and married the girl within a month or two of his return to Bradford. It was a sign of the times that he was, in a sense, married twice. Under the rule of those hateful Major-Generals it was a law that marriages had to be performed by magistrates only. Lister complied with this, and was married by a justice, but the civil ceremony did not satisfy him, and a fortnight later he had his uncle, an ordained minister, to marry them again. It seemed to me that when such heathenish goings-on were countenanced by any nation, a sad judgment
was in store for it, and to do Lister justice, he thought so too. On the occasion of the second marriage, we had a sermon and a wedding breakfast, and John and I perforce were present.

Lister took a house in Bradford, at the near end of Kirk-gate, and set up as a merchant, and John and he did business together. I was sorry for his return and uneasy at his presence, which reminded us of things best forgotten, and at first John seemed the same. But presently Lister's wife conceived and bore him a son, and Lister was so much excited about his fatherhood that he thought of little else. I went to see Sarah Lister while she was in bed, taking some jellies and broths and the like, and to make pleasant talk between us asked what she meant to call her child.

“David,” said she.

I was startled and not very well pleased.

“After your brother,” added Sarah.

Something in her voice made me believe she was not best pleased either, and I asked her whether the name were her own choice.

“Nay, it is my husband's,” said Sarah.

“A woman should name her own children,” said I.

“Did you name yours, Mrs. Thorpe?” said Sarah slyly.

I was startled; and looking back, I remembered how I had always wished to name a child Robert, for my father, and yet had never done so; and I laughed, and Sarah Lister laughed too, and after that I always found her very tolerable. For all she was so stolid and lacking words, I thought she derived some quiet amusement from her husband's pomposity. Their child, David, was dedicated from birth to the Lord's work and service in the Lord's ministry. I own I disliked him; he had a flat face like Lister, and towy hair like Sarah, and a very high colour in his cheeks, and to me seemed a rude ungracious child, very homely in speech and always picking his nose. That such a child should bear my David's name was disagreeable to me, and yet I could not but acknowledge that Lister's love for my brother had something good and pleasant in it.

It was the sight of Lister, I am sure, which caused poor old Giles Ferrand to fall ill in the autumn of Lister's return. As it chanced, Chris was the one who brought them face to face. It was Market Day and he was standing by the broken Market Cross, supposed to be assisting John but in truth only looking about and enjoying the bustling scene, and old Giles came up and stood by him. Giles was babbling on about something and nothing, running his fingers through his beard and twirling up his drooping moustache, when Lister passed by, very complacent and smug in a thick new cloak. Chris saw him and greeted him politely, and Lister replied in his harsh grating voice:

“Good morning, Master Christopher.”

Old Giles spun round at the voice, and stared at him, and Lister stared back brazenly. At least, that is how Giles told me the story, but in truth I think Lister's look was not brazen at all, but simply unrecognising. Poor Mr. Ferrand was a very odd figure at that time; with his shabby old-fashioned clothes and his long beard, and his head bald on top and long hair straggling into his neck, he looked so different from the rich fashionable Cavalier whom Lister would remember as Mr. Ferrand of Holroyd Hall, that I do not believe he recognised him. However that may be—for I never heard Lister allude to the matter—old Giles clutching at the air with one cramped old hand, and uttering a strangled sound in his throat, gazed so wildly at Lister that Chris said anyone who knew him not would think him crazy; and Lister drew himself up with an offended air, muttering something (a text, I expect), and moved on with as stately a step as his awkward gait could compass.

The result of this meeting was that a few days later old Ralph, who was now grown very tottering and mottled, came to our back door to beg me to visit Mr. Ferrand, who had taken to his bed.

It was sad indeed to me to see the change in Holroyd Hall, for though old Giles had come to The Breck often enough, and we had been in his laithe, I had not entered his dwelling-house for nigh on fifteen years. It was cold and damp and
dark within, the windows being smeared with dust; all the downstairs rooms save the kitchen were empty of furniture, the corners thick in white cobweb, and long threads of dirt hanging from the ceilings. The coat of arms over the parlour mantel was so dark with dirt it could hardly be discerned. Upstairs, Mr. Ferrand's room was almost as bare as The Breck after the Royalist sack; the bed was the same fine old carved piece as before, but the chair and table were of some common wood, new and roughly shaped. I was amazed at all this, and at Mr. Ferrand's scant and dirty bedclothes; and as I bent over him to ask how he did, I remembered Holroyd Hall as it looked in my youth, and the tears stood in my eyes. This vexed Mr. Ferrand.

“None of that, Penninah!” said he testily. “No tears, if you please. Suppose I must die, well, 'tis the common lot; there is no need to be lugubrious about it.”

He was very determined in this sense all through the winter, and I humoured him as well as I could, though my heart ached to see him. Our maids and I between us kept him clean and tidy and well fed, and we combed his fair silky beard, of which he was very proud, and his thin locks, and told him the news of Bradford; and almost every day he would urge us not to be lugubrious, and explain how if he had not got that bang on the head at Marston Moor, he would have lived to a good old age, he would have outlived Oliver Cromwell. (Since he was well past seventy we hardly knew what to say in reply.) There seemed nothing much the matter with him, but the physician we sent said he was just fading away, he would last only a few months longer. He would not talk of his own affairs, or matters of public interest; I tried him once with Moll Fairfax's marriage to the Duke of Buckingham, thinking he might be interested in this joining of erstwhile enemies, but his old face so winced and shrank at the name of Fairfax that I never spoke again to him of anything which might recall the Civil War. He liked to talk of foolish unimportant things, the new fashion for periwigs, for instance; and he liked to see the children, Chris and Abraham, though whether he made a
distinction between them or not, I could not tell. He lay with his hands folded, gazing at them and smiling, if they chanced to come to the Hall to fetch me; he could not always catch what they said, and made odd comments, misapprehending them; when they set him right politely, in a louder tone, he smiled again and seemed well content. I reproached myself then for not having confessed Chris's parentage to him, but he was too far gone now for such weighty matters; he was just a poor silly old man, dying not without gallantry, as he had lived.

And so, that summer, I went from the childbed of Lister's wife to the deathbed of old Giles Ferrand. Such contrasts are familiar in every woman's life, it being the especial business of women to cherish their kinsfolk through the dark hours of birth and death; and while these contrasts are full of sadness, they are also full of hope. Life renews itself; the old die, but the children are born, and with them the hope of a better world; and while for my part I thought a child of Lister's a poor substitute for old Uncle Giles, who was I to question the workings of Providence? I passed, then, from the birth of David Lister to the death of Giles Ferrand, both taking place in early summer.

John was vexed to hear that he was appointed his uncle's executor by his will, poor Giles having no other near kin left to him. (This explained old Giles's saying when John offered to sell his fleeces, we agreed.) He returned from a consultation with Giles's lawyer with a very dark hot angry look on his face; he took me by the arm and hurried me upstairs, and shut our doors and turned to me and said, speaking very rapidly:

“Uncle Giles has left all his estate to Chris—I am to stand possessed of it now for his use and behoof—in the end it comes all to Chris.”

“What!” I cried. “Why”

“You know very well why, Penninah,” said John in a deep angry tone.