Delphi Complete Works of Elizabeth Gaskell

by Elizabeth Gaskell

  ‘I will breakfast with you tomorrow,’ said Uncle Peter, ‘if you will permit me, taking you on my way back from my spring; but I need not an introduction to Helena - we are already friends;’ and he explained their previous meeting, and Lady Helena was surprised of course that she had not at once detected who the child’s companion had been.

  He came the next morning to breakfast, and afterwards proposed a walk to his nephew, in the course of which, by a series of blunt questions, he ascertained the whole history of his affairs.

  ‘And why did you not let me know all this before?’ said Uncle Peter, when he had learned everything.

  ‘I wrote to you before we left England, and told you much of what you have asked me about now; when I received no answer to my letter, it can scarcely surprise you, I think, from your knowledge of my character, that I did not write again.’

  ‘Wrote to me before you left England? I never got your letter. I have never heard from you since your marriage.’

  ‘It is surprising that you did not receive my letter; I carried it to the post myself, too anxious at the time about its result not to take every pains that it should reach its destination. I did not tell my wife then that I had written it; she knew all, end was reconciled to the worst. I longed indeed that that worst might not come, but I would not destroy her heroic fortitude by suggesting a hope of assistance in our difficulties, which might be, as indeed it proved, delusion. And yet,’ he said, thoughtfully, ‘I am glad, dear uncle, you never got my letter. Had I got easily out of my troubles, I should never perhaps have learned, as now I have, to overcome so completely the habits which had led to them. I should never have known my wife, too; never seen such strength and gentleness of character in her as I did not believe existed upon earth. And more, I should never have known myself, my selfishness and sin. I have learned much intellectually in these last few years, for I have studied hard with a hope to turn my labours to account in some way so as to improve our position. But I am chiefly of all thankful to the moral lessons which I have received from her, and which I feel to be the most valuable and the most indelible of all.’

  Uncle Peter was as sadly perplexed about the missing letter; too long an interval hall elapsed since it had been written for him to entertain any chance of discovering what had become of it; it was therefore with very little hope of obtaining any information on the subject that he said to his servant, when he came into his room that evening -

  ‘Thompson, I have learned this morning that a letter sent to me by my nephew four years ago, ono of great importance, miscarried, and never reached me. ‘

  ‘I always said, sir, you never got it,’ exclaimed the old servant, quickly and indignantly.

  Uncle Peter prosecuted his inquiries, and learned that the letter had in due course arrived at Hursleigh, that it had made a considerable sensation in the servants’ hall, where Charles Merton had ever been held ‘in high consideration,’ and where his estrangement from his uncle and Hursleigh had been unceasingly deplored. Thompson remembered the letter coming; he remembered the expectations which had been formed about it among the old servants; he remembered its being taken into the saloon by a new footman recently engaged, who had not been present at the discussion among them about the letter, and who knew nothing of the Captain. He remembered himself asking Thomas how his master looked when he received the letter, and Thomas saying that he did not know there was a letter for Mr. Merton; that he had given all three to Mrs. Howard. He always had his suspicions that his master never got that letter; and he was plunging into a history of the very unfavourable prepossessions entertained from various little circumstances against Mrs. Howard in the servants’ hall, but was checked decisively by his master, who did not suffer the familiarity of an old servant to go so far as to listen to reflections from him upon a relation and a guest of his own.

  But the case certainly did look awkward against Mrs. Howard; he thought long how it would be right to act concerning it; the footman, Thomas, had long since left his service, having been discovered to be too impracticably stupid to remain. He felt that to charge Mrs. Howard with the suspected act would be only to meet with the most calm denial of all knowledge of it; nor did he see any means of bringing it home to her, even if he did not shrink, as he did, from the publicity which must attend any attempt to do so.

  Hursleigh is now a happier mansion than it has been for many years; it has been just refurnished, and music, and flowers, and the merry voice of childhood, adorn its once deserted apartments. It is not a place, even now, where much entertainment of the neighbourhood goes on; but Lord Elsmore and his family are ever welcome guests, and sometimes some of the neighbouring families are invited to meet them. Mrs. Howard is never seen there, nor her daughters; it is said that she received one day a letter in the cramped hand of Uncle Peter, which arrived when she was in the midst of a select circle of morning callers; that she read tho early part of it aloud, which described the entire restoration of the health of her ‘dear relative,’ and of his purpose of speedily returning to Hursleigh; but suddenly it was noticed that she stopped short, started, read on rapidly to herself, turned pale, rose from her chair, and with a hurried apology left the room and her visitors. A bell was speedily rung, and it is said that the small jug of very hot water which Hannah then carried upstairs in answer to it, was really used for the purpose for which it was demanded - to dilute a very considerable dose of salvolatile.

  (Fraser’s Magazine, 1853)

  THE WELL OF PEN-MORFA

  CHAPTER I

  Of a hundred travellers who spend a night at Tre-Madoc, in North Wales, there is not one, perhaps, who goes to the neighbouring village of Pen-Morfa. The new town, built by Mr Maddocks, Shelley’s friend, has taken away all the importance of the ancient village--formerly, as its name imports, ‘the head of the marsh;’ that marsh which Mr Maddocks drained and dyked, and reclaimed from the Traeth Mawr, till Pen-Morfa, against the walls of whose cottages the winter tides lashed in former days, has come to stand, high and dry, three miles from the sea, on a disused road to Caernarvon. I do not think there has been a new cottage built in Pen-Morfa this hundred years, and many an old one has dates in some obscure corner which tell of the fifteenth century. The joists of timber, where they meet overhead, are blackened with the smoke of centuries. There is one large room, round which the beds are built like cupboards, with wooden doors to open and shut, somewhat in the old Scotch fashion, I imagine; and below the bed (at least in one instance I can testify that this was the case, and I was told it was not uncommon) is a great wide wooden drawer, which contained the oat-cake, baked for some months’ consumption by the family. They call the promontory of Llyn (the point at the end of Caernarvonshire), Welsh Wales. I think they might call Pen-Morfa a Welsh Welsh village; it is so national in its ways, and buildings, and inhabitants, and so different from the towns and hamlets into which the English throng in summer. How these said inhabitants of Pen-Morfa ever are distinguished by their names, I, uninitiated, cannot tell. I only know for a fact, that in a family there with which I am acquainted, the eldest son’s name is John Jones, because his father’s was John Thomas; that the second son is called David Williams, because his grandfather was William Wynn; and that the girls are called indiscriminately by the names of Thomas and Jones. I have heard some of the Welsh chuckle over the way in which they have baffled the barristers at Caernarvon assizes, denying the name under which they had been subpoenaed to give evidence, if they were unwilling witnesses. I could tell you of a great deal which is peculiar and wild in these true Welsh people, who are what I suppose we English were a century ago; but I must hasten on to my tale.

  I have received great, true, beautiful kindness from one of the members of the family of whom I just now spoke as living at Pen-Morfa; and when I found that they wished me to drink tea with them, I gladly did so, though my friend was the only one in the house who could speak English at all fluently. After tea, I went with them to see some of their friends; and it was then I
saw the interiors of the houses of which I have spoken. It was an autumn evening: we left mellow sunset-light in the open air when we entered the houses, in which all seemed dark, save in the ruddy sphere of the firelight, for the windows were very’ small, and deep-set in the thick walls. Here were an old couple, who welcomed me in Welsh; and brought forth milk and oat-cake with patriarchal hospitality. Sons and daughters had married away from them; they lived alone; he was blind, or nearly so; and they sat one on each side of the fire, so old and so still (till we went in and broke the silence) that they seemed to be listening for death. At another house lived a woman stern and severe-looking. She was busy hiving a swarm of bees, alone and unassisted. I do not think my companion would have chosen to speak to her; but seeing her out in her hill-side garden, she made some inquiry in Welsh, which was answered in the most mournful tone I ever heard in my life; a voice of which the freshness and ‘timbre’ had been choked up by tears long years ago. I asked who she was. I dare say the story is common enough; but the sight of the woman and her few words had impressed me. She had been the beauty of Pen-Morfa; had been in service; had been taken to London by the family whom she served; had come down, in a year or so, back to Pen-Morfa, her beauty gone into that sad, wild, despairing look which I saw; and she about to become a mother. Her father had died during her absence, and left her a very little money; and after her child was born, she took the little cottages where I saw her, and made a scanty living by the produce of her bees. She associated with no one. One event had made her savage and distrustful to her kind. She kept so much aloof that it was some time before it became known that her child was deformed, and had lost the use of its lower limbs. Poor thing! When I saw the mother, it had been for fifteen years bedridden. But go past when you would, in the night, you saw a light burning; it was often that of the watching mother, solitary and friendless, soothing the moaning child; or you might hear her crooning some old Welsh air, in hopes to still the pain with the loud monotonous music. Her sorrow was so dignified, and her mute endurance and her patient love won her such respect, that the neighbours would fain have been friends; but she kept alone and solitary. This a most true story. I hope that woman and her child are dead now, and their souls above.

  Another story which I heard of these old primitive dwellings I mean to tell at somewhat greater length:--

  There are rocks high above Pen-Morfa; they are the same that hang over Tre-Madoc, but near Pen-Morfa they sweep away, and are lost in the plain. Everywhere they are beautiful. The great, sharp ledges, which would otherwise look hard and cold, are adorned with the brightest-coloured moss, and the golden lichen. Close to, you see the scarlet leaves of the crane’s-bill, and the tufts of purple heather, which fill up every cleft and cranny; but, in the distance, you see only the general effect of infinite richness of colour, broken, here and there, by great masses of ivy. At the foot of these rocks come a rich, verdant meadow or two; and then you are at Pen-Morfa. The village well is sharp down under the rocks. There are one or two large sloping pieces of stone in that last field, on the road leading to the well, which are always slippery; slippery in the summer’s heat, almost as much as in the frost of winter, when some little glassy stream that runs over them is turned into a thin sheet of ice. Many, many years back--a lifetime ago--there lived in Pen-Morfa a widow and her daughter. Very little is required in those out-of-the-way Welsh villages. The wants of the people are very simple. Shelter, fire, a little oat-cake and buttermilk, and garden produce; perhaps some pork and bacon from the pig in winter; clothing, which is principally of home manufacture, and of the most enduring kind: these take very little money to purchase, especially in a district into which the large capitalists have not yet come, to buy up two or three acres of the peasants; and nearly every man about Pen-Morfa owned, at the time of which I speak, his dwelling and some land beside.

  Eleanor Gwynn inherited the cottage (by the roadside, on the left hand as you go from Tre-Madoc to Pen-Morfa) in which she and her husband had lived all their married life, and a small garden sloping southwards, in which her bees lingered before winging their way to the more distant heather. She took rank among her neighbours as the possessor of a moderate independence--not rich, and not poor. But the young men of Pen-Morfa thought her very rich in the possession of a most lovely daughter. Most of us know how very pretty Welsh women are; but, from all accounts Nest Gwynn (Nest, or Nesta, is the Welsh for Agnes) was more regularly beautiful than any one for miles round. The Welsh are still fond of triads, and ‘as beautiful as a summer’s morning at sunrise, as a white seagull on the green sea wave, and as Nest Gwynn,’ is yet a saying in that district. Nest knew she was beautiful, and delighted in it. Her mother sometimes checked her in her happy pride, and sometimes reminded her that beauty was a great gift of God (for the Welsh are a very pious people); but when she began her little homily, Nest came dancing to her, and knelt down before her, and put her face up to be kissed, and so, with a sweet interruption, she stopped her mother’s lips. Her high spirits made some few shake their heads, and some called her a flirt and a coquette; for she could not help trying to please all, both old and young, both men and women. A very little from Nest sufficed for this; a sweet, glittering smile, a word of kindness, a merry glance, or a little sympathy; all these pleased and attracted: she was like the fairy-gifted child, and dropped inestimable gifts. But some, who had interpreted her smiles and kind words rather as their wishes led them, than as they were really warranted, found that the beautiful, beaming Nest could be decided and saucy enough; and so they revenged themselves by calling her a flirt. Her mother heard it, and sighed; but Nest only laughed.

  It was her work to fetch water for the day’s use from the well I told you about. Old people say it was the prettiest sight in the world to see her come stepping lightly and gingerly over the stones with the pail of water balanced on her head; she was too adroit to need to steady it with her hand. They say, now that they can afford to be charitable and speak the truth, that in all her changes to other people, there never was a better daughter to a widowed mother than Nest. There is a picturesque old farmhouse under Moel Gwynn, on the road from Tre-Madoc to Criccaeth, called by some Welsh name which I now forget; but its meaning in English is ‘The End of Time;’ a strange, boding, ominous name. Perhaps, the builder meant his work to endure till the end of time. I do not know; but there the old house stands, and will stand for many a year. When Nest was young, it belonged to one Edward Williams; his mother was dead, and people said he was on the look-out for a wife. They told Nest so, but she tossed her head and reddened, and said she thought he might look long before he got one; so it was not strange that one morning when she went to the well, one autumn morning when the dew lay heavy on the grass, and the thrushes were busy among the mountain-ash berries, Edward Williams happened to be there, on his way to the coursing match near, and somehow his greyhounds threw her pail of water over in their romping play, and she was very long in filling it again; and when she came home she threw her arms round her mother’s neck, and, in a passion of joyous tears, told her that Edward Williams, of ‘The End of Time,’ had asked her to marry him, and that she had said ‘Yes.’

  Eleanor Gwynn shed her tears too; but they fell quietly when she was alone. She was thankful Nest had found a protector--one suitable in age and apparent character, and above her in fortune; but she knew she should miss her sweet daughter in a thousand household ways; miss her in the evenings by the fireside; miss her when at night she wakened up with a start from a dream of her youth, and saw her fair face lying calm in the moonlight, pillowed by her side. Then she forgot her dream, and blessed her child, and slept again. But who could be so selfish as to be sad when Nest was so supremely happy; she danced and sang more than ever; and then sat silent, and smiled to herself: if spoken to, she started and came back to the present with a scarlet blush, which told what she had been thinking of.

  That was a sunny, happy, enchanted autumn. But the winter was nigh at hand; and with it came sorrow.
One fine frosty morning, Nest went out with her lover--she to the well, he to some farming business, which was to be transacted at the little inn of Pen-Morfa. He was late for his appointment; so he left her at the entrance of the village, and hastened to the inn; and she, in her best cloak and new hat (put on against her mother’s advice; but they were a recent purchase, and very becoming), went through the Dol Mawr, radiant with love and happiness. One who lived until lately, met her going down towards the well that morning, and said ‘he turned round to look’ after her--she seemed unusually lovely. He wondered at the time at her wearing her Sunday clothes; for the pretty, hooded blue-cloth cloak is kept among the Welsh women as a church and market garment, and not commonly used, even on the coldest days of winter, for such household errands as fetching water from the well. However, as he said, ‘It was not possible to look in her face, and “fault” anything she wore.’ Down the sloping stones the girl went blithely with her pail. She filled it at the well; and then she took off her hat, tied the strings together, and slung it over her arm. She lifted the heavy pail and balanced it on her head. But, alas! in going up the smooth, slippery, treacherous rock, the encumbrance of her cloak--it might be such a trifle as her slung hat--something, at any rate, took away her evenness of poise; the freshet had frozen on the slanting stone, and was one coat of ice; poor Nest fell, and put out her hip. No more flushing rosy colour on that sweet face; no more look of beaming innocent happiness; instead, there was deadly pallor, and filmy eyes, over which dark shades seemed to chase each other as the shoots of agony grew more and more intense. She screamed once or twice; but the exertion (involuntary, and forced out of her by excessive pain) overcame her, and she fainted. A child, coming an hour or two afterwards, on the same errand, saw her lying there, ice-glued to the stone, and thought she was dead. It flew crying back.