CHAPTER XXII
IN THE HOME NEAR THE THACKBUSK
THE cottage near the Thackbusk was closed to visitors—Jenny said that her daughter was ill, and must be quiet. The statement was supposed to be intended as a protection against intruders, but at the same time there may have been truth in it. For, from the moment when Annie had been carried from the door-step, she had lain in her room upstairs, too weak to move. Jenny went about quietly, and was upstairs or below, and her light foot-fall was the only sound that could be heard.
Poor Jenny! If those who made free with her name could have kept their eyes on her through those silent hours they would not have seen her give way to lamentation, or leave off her employments to indulge herself in grief. Working people have little leisure for idleness—not even for the idleness that calls itself despair—and the habits of life are not easily discarded, even in the midst of overwhelming bitterness. Jenny went about quietly, and filled her pail with water, or prepared Nat’s breakfast, or cleared the meal away, her blue working-apron above her neat black dress, and a red handkerchief on her head to protect it from the dust. A stranger, setting eyes for the first time on Mrs Salter, would have been pleased with her quiet movements, her slim, girlish form; he would have had keen eyes to have been able to discover also the traces of a sorrow that was not a girlish grief. For that only showed itself in a little more pallor than usual, a little more compression of what was still a pretty mouth. Mrs Salter was not likely to have the sorrow that makes outcries; but the grief that is silent is the grief that kills.
Poor Jenny! If she was not quite forgiving she was yet very pitiful, and her pride was little more than the outcome of her reserve; she had shown no want of a mother’s tenderness, although she had scarcely spoken to her child. Annie lay in her room upstairs, and was gently watched and cared for; little dainties were set by the side of the bed for her to eat; the beautiful hair that had hung loose on the door-step was now plaited loosely, and gently brushed and smoothed. She lay on her pillows, her eyes bright with fever, and one hand hanging languidly on the counterpane; it was the left hand, on which shone the wedding-ring. Now and then, as she lay, there would pass across her features a convulsive spasm as of sudden pain or fear; but with the determination that still belonged to her she would make an attempt to check it, although such attempts almost always resulted in terrible shudderings that shook the bed-clothes under which she lay. These shudderings must have been evidence of some internal conflict; but, if it were so, she would not express it in words. The little circle of gold was her mother’s consolation; but it was a desperate consolation to which even the mother dared not cling.
Ah! do they know much of the feeling of a mother who imagine that at such a time it is composed of injured pride, of the dread of gossipping voices and a tarnished name? Is not its worst grief the knowledge, owned in silence, that the daughter, once close, is now distant, far away; that some unfathomable gulf has intervened between the souls of the mother and the child? Jenny had felt that gulf widening through the summer months, when she knew that her son and daughter had secrets of which they would not speak to her—and now, on one side at least, the ruin had come, and her daughter lay silent on her bed, whilst the village talked outside. Ah! what could she do, poor Jenny, the Jenny we have known, the gentle, upright, the timid, shrinking soul, but fulfil her house-duties with eyes too tired for tears, and surround her child with proofs of a mother’s tenderness? The authority that can rouse and awe the sinner is not for the affection that is strong in feebleness; the clarion voice that pierces and subdues finds no note in the accents of such a mother’s love. Yet Jenny had some strength in her calamity; her child was not left untended, or her house-work undone. It may be said that she should have trusted in religion, but then she had not been educated to understand such trust—to do her day’s duty well and carefully had, until now, made the chief part of the religion of her life.
Yet something stirred in her like religious bitterness, as she stood in the evening by the Thackbusk gate, with her eyes on the wide fields and the mellow light, and the sore pain pressing its heavy weight on her life. It is not always easy for those who have breadth of knowledge to escape from the point of vision of an individual pain; and the uneducated, with their narrower sympathies, see little clearly beyond the limits of their lives. To poor Jenny life seemed a hard thing at that moment, an irremediable, inexorable doom.
‘The Lord is hard on us working folk, He’s hard,’ a low voice was murmuring within her heart; ‘He knows as we’ve nothing but work an’ trouble left, when He lets there be no comfort in t’ husband or t’ child. T’ rich folk can buy themselves a heap o’ pleasures; I’ve nought but t’ lad an’ lass, an’ they bring grief to me.’
But the gentle nature had only risen for a moment; the echo of rebellion died away immediately into a murmur of the pitiful patience which from her childhood upwards had been the keynote of poor Jenny’s life.
‘I’m stupid—I’ve allays been so,’—she whispered to herself. ‘T’ lad an’ t’ girl would ha’ done well eno’ if they’d had another woman for a mother instead o’ me.’
The pathetic words were just audible in the evening stillness, but there was no one near enough to hear them. For one moment she stood leaning on the gate, looking with sore eyes at the wide fields, the evening light; and then, with a little sigh, she took up her burden of vegetables, and turned away from the gate towards her home. For her daughter might be wanting to have her evening meal; and oh! she must do her best to take care of Annie now. The time might come when she would resent the silence of her daughter, but as yet she could have no feeling towards her but that of a mother’s tenderness—the tenderness which still clings when all else has departed.