Chapter L
In the Cottage
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.
"It's wonderful she doesn't love th' lad," Adam had said sometimes
to himself, "for anybody 'ud think he was just cut out for her.
But her heart's so taken up with other things. She's one o' those
women that feel no drawing towards having a husband and children
o' their own. She thinks she should be filled up with her own
life then, and she's been used so to living in other folks's
cares, she can't bear the thought of her heart being shut up from
'em. I see how it is, well enough. She's cut out o' different
stuff from most women: I saw that long ago. She's never easy but
when she's helping somebody, and marriage 'ud interfere with her
ways--that's true. I've no right to be contriving and thinking it
'ud be better if she'd have Seth, as if I was wiser than she is--
or than God either, for He made her what she is, and that's one o'
the greatest blessings I've ever had from His hands, and others
besides me."
This self-reproof had recurred strongly to Adam's mind when he
gathered from Dinah's face that he had wounded her by referring to
his wish that she had accepted Seth, and so he had endeavoured to
put into the strongest words his confidence in her decision as
right--his resignation even to her going away from them and
ceasing to make part of their life otherwise than by living in
their thoughts, if that separation were chosen by herself. He
felt sure she knew quite well enough how much he cared to see her
continually--to talk to her with the silent consciousness of a
mutual great remembrance. It was not possible she should hear
anything but self-renouncing affection and respect in his
assurance that he was contented for her to go away; and yet there
remained an uneasy feeling in his mind that he had not said quite
the right thing--that, somehow, Dinah had not understood him.
Dinah must have risen a little before the sun the next morning,
for she was downstairs about five o'clock. So was Seth, for,
through Lisbeth's obstinate refusal to have any woman-helper in
the house, he had learned to make himself, as Adam said, "very
handy in the housework," that he might save his mother from too
great weariness; on which ground I hope you will not think him
unmanly, any more than you can have thought the gallant Colonel
Bath unmanly when he made the gruel for his invalid sister. Adam,
who had sat up late at his writing, was still asleep, and was not
likely, Seth said, to be down till breakfast-time. Often as Dinah
had visited Lisbeth during the last eighteen months, she had never
slept in the cottage since that night after Thias's death, when,
you remember, Lisbeth praised her deft movements and even gave a
modified approval to her porridge. But in that long interval
Dinah had made great advances in household cleverness, and this
morning, since Seth was there to help, she was bent on bringing
everything to a pitch of cleanliness and order that would have
satisfied her Aunt Poyser. The cottage was far from that standard
at present, for Lisbeth's rheumatism had forced her to give up her
old habits of dilettante scouring and polishing. When the kitchen
was to her mind, Dinah went into the new room, where Adam had been
writing the night before, to see what sweeping and dusting were
needed there. She opened the window and let in the fresh morning
air, and the smell of the sweet-brier, and the bright low-slanting
rays of the early sun, which made a glory about her pale face and
pale auburn hair as she held the long brush, and swept, singing to
herself in a very low tone--like a sweet summer murmur that you
have to listen for very closely--one of Charles Wesley's hymns:
Eternal Beam of Light Divine,
Fountain of unexhausted love,
In whom the Father's glories shine,
Through earth beneath and heaven above;
Jesus! the weary wanderer's rest,
Give me thy easy yoke to bear;
With steadfast patience arm my breast,
With spotless love and holy fear.
Speak to my warring passions, "Peace!"
Say to my trembling heart, "Be still!"
Thy power my strength and fortress is,
For all things serve thy sovereign will.
She laid by the brush and took up the duster; and if you had ever
lived in Mrs. Poyser's household, you would know how the duster
behaved in Dinah's hand--how it went into every small corner, and
on every ledge in and out of sight--how it went again and again
round every bar of the chairs, and every leg, and under and over
everything that lay on the table, till it came to Adam's papers
and rulers and the open desk near them. Dinah dusted up to the
very edge of these and then hesitated, looking at them with a
longing but timid eye. It was painful to see how much dust there
was among them. As she was looking in this way, she heard Seth's
step just outside the open door, towards which her back was
turned, and said, raising her clear treble, "Seth, is your brother
wrathful when his papers are stirred?"
"Yes, very, when they are not put back in the right places," said
a deep strong voice, not Seth's.
It was as if Dinah had put her hands unawares on a vibrating
chord. She was shaken with an intense thrill, and for the instant
felt nothing else; then she knew her cheeks were glowing, and
dared not look round, but stood still, distressed because she
could not say good-morning in a friendly way. Adam, finding that
she did not look round so as to see the smile on his face, was
afraid she had thought him serious about his wrathfulness, and
went up to her, so that she was obliged to look at him.
"What! You think I'm a cross fellow at home, Dinah?" he said,
smilingly.
"Nay," said Dinah, looking up with timid eyes, "not so. But you
might be put about by finding things meddled with; and even the
man Moses, the meekest of men, was wrathful sometimes."
"Come, then," said Adam, looking at her affectionately, "I'll help
you move the things, and put 'em back again, and then they can't
get wrong. You're getting to be your aunt's own niece, I see, for
particularness."
They began their little task together, but Dinah had not recovered
herself sufficiently to think of any remark, and Adam looked at
her uneasily. Dinah, he thought, had seemed to disapprove him
somehow lately; she had not been so kind and open to him as she
used to be. He wanted her to look at him, and be as pleased as he
was himself with doing this bit of playful work. But Dinah did
not look at him--it was easy for her to avoid looking at the tall
man--and when at last there was no more dusting to be done and no
further excuse for him to linger near her, he could bear it no
longer, and said, in rather a pleading tone, "Dinah, you're not
displeased with me for anything, are you? I've not said or done
anything to make you think ill of me?"
The question surprised her, and relieved her by giving a new
course to her feeling. She looked up at him now, quite earnestly,
almost with the tears coming, and said, "Oh, no, Adam! how could
you think so?"
"I couldn't bear you not to feel as much a friend to me as I do to
you," said Adam. "And you don't know the value I set on the very
thought of you, Dinah. That was what I meant yesterday, when I
said I'd be content for you to go, if you thought right. I meant,
the thought of you was worth so much to me, I should feel I ought
to be thankful, and not grumble, if you see right to go away. You
know I do mind parting with you, Dinah?"
"Yes, dear friend," said Dinah, trembling, but trying to speak
calmly, "I know you have a brother's heart towards me, and we
shall often be with one another in spirit; but at this season I am
in heaviness through manifold temptations. You must not mark me.
I feel called to leave my kindred for a while; but it is a trial--
the flesh is weak."
Adam saw that it pained her to be obliged to answer.
"I hurt you by talking about it, Dinah," he said. "I'll say no
more. Let's see if Seth's ready with breakfast now."
That is a simple scene, reader. But it is almost certain that
you, too, have been in love--perhaps, even, more than once, though
you may not choose to say so to all your feminine friends. If so,
you will no more think the slight words, the timid looks, the
tremulous touches, by which two human souls approach each other
gradually, like two little quivering rain-streams, before they
mingle into one--you will no more think these things trivial than
you will think the first-detected signs of coming spring trivial,
though they be but a faint indescribable something in the air and
in the song of the birds, and the tiniest perceptible budding on
the hedge-row branches. Those slight words and looks and touches
are part of the soul's language; and the finest language, I
believe, is chiefly made up of unimposing words, such as "light,"
"sound," "stars," "music"--words really not worth looking at, or
hearing, in themselves, any more than "chips" or "sawdust." It is
only that they happen to be the signs of something unspeakably
great and beautiful. I am of opinion that love is a great and
beautiful thing too, and if you agree with me, the smallest signs
of it will not be chips and sawdust to you: they will rather be
like those little words,"light" and "music," stirring the long-
winding fibres of your memory and enriching your present with your
most precious past.
