Читать книгу Margret Howth: A Story of To-day - Rebecca Harding Davis - Страница 4

The morning, when it came long after, came quiet and cool,—the warm red dawn helplessly smothered under great waves of gray cloud. Margret, looking out into the thick fog, lay down wearily again, closing her eyes. What was the day to her?

Very slowly the night was driven back. An hour after, when she lifted her head again, the stars were still glittering through the foggy arch, like sparks of brassy blue, and hills and valleys were one drifting, slow-heaving mass of ashy damp. Off in the east a stifled red film groped through. It was another day coming; she might as well get up, and live the rest of her life out;—what else had she to do?

Whatever this night had been to the girl, it left one thought sharp, alive, in the exhausted quiet of her brain: a cowardly dread of the trial of the day, when she would see him again. Was the old struggle of years before coming back? Was it all to go over again? She was worn out. She had been quiet in these two years: what had gone before she never looked back upon; but it made her thankful for even this stupid quiet. And now, when she had planned her life, busy, useful, contented, why need God have sent the old thought to taunt her? A wild, sickening sense of what might have been struggled up: she thrust it down,—she had kept it down all night; the old pain should not come back,—it should not. She did not think of the love she had given up as a dream, as verse-makers or sham people do; she knew it to be the quick seed of her soul. She cried for it even now, with all the fierce strength of her nature; it was the best she knew; through it she came nearest to God. Thinking of the day when she had given it up, she remembered it with a vague consciousness of having fought a deadly struggle with her fate, and that she had been conquered,—never had lived again. Let it be; she could not bear the struggle again.

She went on dressing herself in a dreary, mechanical way. Once, a bitter laugh came on her face, as she looked into the glass, and saw the dead, dull eyes, and the wrinkle on her forehead. Was that the face to be crowned with delicate caresses and love? She scorned herself for the moment, grew sick of herself, balked, thwarted in her true life as she was. Other women whom God has loved enough to probe to the depths of their nature have done the same,—saw themselves as others saw them: their strength drying up within them, jeered at, utterly alone. It is a trial we laugh at. I think the quick fagots at the stake were fitter subjects for laughter than the slow gnawing hunger in the heart of many a slighted woman or a selfish man. They come out of the trial as out of martyrdom, according to their faith: you see its marks sometimes in a frivolous old age going down with tawdry hopes and starved eyes to the grave; you see its victory in the freshest, fullest lives in the earth. This woman had accepted her trial, but she took it up as an inflexible fate which she did not understand; it was new to her; its solitude, its hopeless thirst were freshly bitter. She loathed herself as one whom God had thought unworthy of every woman's right,—to love and be loved.

She went to the window, looking blankly out into the gray cold. Any one with keen analytic eye, noting the thin muscles of this woman, the protruding brain, the eyes deep, concealing, would have foretold that she would conquer in the fight; force her soul down,—but that the forcing down would leave the weak, flaccid body spent and dead. One thing was certain: no curious eyes would see the struggle; the body might be nerveless or sickly, but it had the great power of reticence; the calm with which she faced the closest gaze was natural to her,—no mask. When she left her room and went down, the same unaltered quiet that had baffled Knowles steadied her step and cooled her eyes.

After you have made a sacrifice of yourself for others, did you ever notice how apt you were to doubt, as soon as the deed was irrevocable, whether, after all, it were worth while to have done it? How mean seems the good gained! How new and unimagined the agony of empty hands and stifled wish! Very slow the angels are, sometimes, that are sent to minister!

Margret, going down the stairs that morning, found none of the chivalric unselfish glow of the night before in her home. It was an old, bare house in the midst of dreary stubble fields, in which her life was slowly to be worn out: working for those who did not comprehend her; thanked her little,—that was all. It did not matter; life was short: she could thank God for that at least.

She opened the house-door. A draught of cold morning air struck her face, sweeping from the west; it had driven the fog in great gray banks upon the hills, or in shimmering swamps into the cleft hollows: a vague twilight filled the space left bare. Tiger, asleep in the hall, rushed out into the meadow, barking, wild with the freshness and cold, then back again to tear round her for a noisy good-morning. The touch of the dog seemed to bring her closer to his master; she put him away; she dared not suffer even that treachery to her purpose: the very circumstances that had forced her to give him up made it weak cowardice to turn again. It was a simple story, yet one which she dared not tell to herself; for it was not altogether for her father's sake she had made the sacrifice. She knew, that, though she might be near to this man Holmes as his own soul, she was a clog on him,—stood in his way,—kept him back. So she had quietly stood aside, taken up her own solitary burden, and left him with his clear self-reliant life,—with his Self, dearer to him than she had ever been. Why should it not be dearer? She thought,—remembering the man as he was, a master among men: fit to be a master. She,—what was she compared to him? He was back again; she must see him. So she stood there with this persistent dread running through her brain.

Suddenly, in the lane by the house, she heard a voice talking to Joel,—the huckster-girl. What a weak, cheery sound it was in the cold and fog! It touched her curiously: broke through her morbid thought as anything true and healthy should have done. "Poor Lois!" she thought, with an eager pity, forgetting her own intolerable future for the moment, as she gathered up some breakfast and went with it down the lane. Morning had come; great heavy bars of light fell from behind the hills athwart the banks of gray and black fog; there was shifting, uneasy, obstinate tumult among the shadows; they did not mean to yield to the coming dawn. The hills, the massed woods, the mist opposed their immovable front, scornfully. Margret did not notice the silent contest until she reached the lane. The girl Lois, sitting in her cart, was looking, attentive, at the slow surge of the shadows, and the slower lifting of the slanted rays.

"T' mornin' comes grand here, Miss Marg'et!" she said, lowering her voice.

Margret said nothing in reply; the morning, she thought, was gray and cold, like her own life. She stood leaning on the low cart; some strange sympathy drew her to this poor wretch, dwarfed, alone in the world,—some tie of equality, which the odd childish face, nor the quaint air of content about the creature, did not lessen. Even when Lois shook down the patched skirt of her flannel frock straight, and settled the heaps of corn and tomatoes about her, preparatory for a start, Margret kept her hand on the side of the cart, and walked slowly by it down the road. Once, looking at the girl, she thought with a half smile how oddly clean she was. The flannel skirt she arranged so complacently had been washed until the colours had run madly into each other in sheer desperation; her hair was knotted with relentless tightness into a comb such as old women wear. The very cart, patched as it was, had a snug, cosy look; the masses of vegetables, green and crimson and scarlet, were heaped with a certain reference to the glow of colour, Margret noticed, wondering if it were accidental. Looking up, she saw the girl's brown eyes fixed on her face. They were singularly soft, brooding brown.

"Ye 'r' goin' to th' mill, Miss Marg'et?" she asked, in a half whisper.

"Yes. You never go there now, Lois?"

"No, 'm."

The girl shuddered, and then tried to hide it in a laugh. Margret walked on beside her, her hand on the cart's edge. Somehow this creature, that Nature had thrown impatiently aside as a failure, so marred, imperfect, that even the dogs were kind to her, came strangely near to her, claimed recognition by some subtile instinct.