BLACKDEEP, 26th March 1839.
Dearest Mother,--This letter came this morning, and I send it at once to you at Ely. Am I to answer it? When I read some parts I wished he had been near me that I might have caught him by the throat. I should have exulted that for once I could move him, although it should be by terror. It is strange that not until now did I know he was so brutal. Notice that, according to him, if a wife leaves her husband it must be for a rival. He does not understand how much she can hate him, body and soul, and with no thought of a lover; that her loathing needs no other pa.s.sion to inflame it, and that the touch of his clean finger may be worse to her than a leper"s embrace.
When I had written so far I was afraid. I knelt down and cried to our Father who is in Heaven.--Your loving daughter,
ESTHER.
ELY, 28th March 1839.
You must not reply. I have always tried not to answer back if it will do no good. In a way, I am not sorry he has written in this style to you. It proves that the leading I had was true. I feared cruel claws ever since I first set eyes on him notwithstanding he was so even-tempered, and I am glad he has not shown them till you are safe in Blackdeep. I know what you will have to go through in time to come, but for all that I am sure I am right and that you are right. I am more sure than ever. I am sorry for him, but he will soon settle down and rejoice that you have gone. That spiteful word about my religion does not disturb me. I have my own religion. I have brought up my children in it. I have taught them to fear G.o.d and to love the Lord Jesus Christ, who has stood by me in all my troubles and guided me in all my straits whenever I have been willing to wait His time. I bless G.o.d, my dear child, that you have not gone away from your mother"s faith--ay, and your father"s too-- and that you can still pray to your Heavenly Father in your distress. Be thankful you have been spared the worst, that you have not grown hard.
I shall come back this week; your aunt wants you here, and a change will do you good.
BLACKDEEP, 10th April 1839.
I am glad you went to Ely, for yesterday the parson called to see you. He had received a letter from Mr. Craggs, and considered it his duty as a Christian minister to endeavour to bring about a reconciliation. I told him at once he might spare himself the pains, for they would be useless. He replied that I ought to think of the example. Well, at that I broke out. I asked him whether that s.l.u.t of a Quimby girl wasn"t a worse example, who at five-and- twenty had married Horrocks, the h.o.a.ry old wretch, for his money, and leads him a dog"s life? Had he ever warned either of them?
They go to church regular. I was very free, and I said I thought it was a bright example that a woman should have given up a fine house and money in London because there was no love with them, and should have come back to her mother at Blackdeep. Besides, I added, why should my Esther suffer a living death for years for the sake of the folk hereabouts? They weren"t worth it. She was too precious for that. "Oh!" but he went on again, "they have souls to be saved.
Husbands and wives may be led to imagine there is no harm in separating, and may yield to the temptations of unlawful love."
This made me very hot, and I gave it him back sharp that a sinner could find in the Bible itself an excuse for his sin.
He said no more except that it would be a nice scandal for the Dissenters, and that he trusted G.o.d would bring me into a better frame of mind. He then went away. His reasoning went in at one ear and out at the other. Parsons are bound to preach by rule. It is all general: it doesn"t fit the ins and outs.
BLACKDEEP, 1st May 1839.
You had better stop at Ely as long as you can. Everybody is gossiping, for parson has told the story as he heard it from your husband. It is worse for Jim than for me, as he goes about among people here, and although they daren"t say anything to him about you, there is no mistake as to what they think. Mrs. Horrocks inquired after me, and said she was sorry to hear of my trouble.
Jim told her I was quite well, and that the two cows were now all right. He wouldn"t let her see he knew what she meant.
Last night, Jim, who has been talking for a twelvemonth past about going to his cousin in America, asked me whether I would not be willing to leave. I have always set my face against it. To turn my back on the old house and the Fen, to begin again at my time of life in a new strange world would be the death of me. More than ever now am I determined to end my days here. They"d say at once we had fled. No, here we"ll bide and face it out.
They did not fly. Years went on, and to the astonishment of their neighbours--perhaps they were a little sorry--there was no sign that Esther had a lover. Mrs. Horrocks"s eyes were feline, but she was obliged to admit she was at fault. Jim married, and an agreeable opportunity was presented for the expression of amazement that his wife"s father and mother felt safe in allowing their child to enter such a family--but then she came from Norwich. The majority of the poor in Blackdeep Fen sided with the Suttons, and here and there a pagan farmer boldly declared that old Mrs. Sutton and her daughter were of a right good sort, and that there was not a straightforrarder man than Jim in Ely market. But to respectable Blackdeep society the Suttons remained a vexatious knot which it could not unpick and lay straight. n.o.body, as Mrs. Horrocks observed, knew how to take them. Mrs. Craggs wore her wedding-ring, and when she was in Mrs. Jarvis"s shop looked her straight in the face and asked for what she wanted as if she were the parson"s wife.
But that, according to Mrs. Horrocks, just showed her impudence.
"What a time that poor Craggs in London must have had of it:" (Mr.
Horrocks was not present). "Lord! how I do pity the man." "And yet," added Mrs. Jarvis, "and YET, you might eat your dinner off Mrs. Craggs"s floor. I call it hers, for she cleans it." Clearly the living-room ought to have been a pigsty. It was particularly annoying that, although Mrs. Sutton and her family by absence from church had become infidels, they did not go to the devil openly as they ought to do, and thereby relieve Blackdeep of that pain and even hatred which are begotten by an obstinate exception to what would otherwise be a general law. Parson often preached that everybody was either a sheep or a goat. The Suttons were not sheep- -that was certain; and yet it was difficult to cla.s.sify them as ordinary Blackdeep goats, creatures with horns. Mrs. Jarvis had heard that there was a peculiar breed of goats with sheep"s wool and without horns. "Esther Craggs," she maintained, "will one day show us what she"s after; mark my word, you"ll see. If that brazen face means nothing, then I"m stone-blind."
After Jim"s marriage Esther continued to manage the house and the dairy, leaving the cooking to her sister-in-law and the needlework to her mother. Soon after five o"clock on a bright summer morning the labourer going to his work heard the unbarring of Mrs. Sutton"s shutters and the withdrawal of bolts. The cas.e.m.e.nt windows and the door were then flung open, and Esther generally came into the doorway and for a few minutes faced the sun. She did not shut herself up. She walked the village like a queen, and no Fen farmer or squireling ventured to jest with her. Mrs. Jarvis could not be brought to admit her stone-blindness and clung to the theory of somebody in London; but as Esther never went to London, and n.o.body from London came to her, and the postmistress swore no letters pa.s.sed between London and the Sutton family, Mrs. Jarvis became a little distrusted, although some of her acquaintances believed her predictions with greater firmness as they remained unfulfilled. "I don"t care what you may say; don"t tell me," was her reply to sceptical objections, and it carried great weight.
Esther died of the Blackdeep fever in the fifth year after she came home. As soon as he received the news of her death Mr. Craggs married Mrs. Perkins, who had been twelve months a widow, was admitted into partnership, and is now one of the most respected men in the City.
KATE RADCLIFFE
In 1844 there were living between Carlisle and Keswick, Robert Radcliffe and his only child Kate. They belonged to an ancient Roman Catholic family, remotely connected with the Earl of Derwent.w.a.ter who was executed in 1716; but Robert Radcliffe"s father had departed from the faith of his ancestors, and his descendants, excepting one, had remained Protestant. Robert had inherited a small estate and had not been brought up to any profession. He had been at Cambridge, and at one time it was thought he might become a clergyman, but he had no call that way, and returned to c.u.mberland after his father"s death to occupy himself with his garden and books. He was a good scholar and had a library of some three thousand volumes. He married when he was about eight-and-twenty, but his wife died two years after Kate was born, and he did not marry again. He took no particular pleasure in field sports except angling, nor in the gaieties of county society, although he was not a recluse and was on friendly terms with most of his neighbours. He was fond of wandering in his own country, and knew every mountain and every pa.s.s for twenty miles round him. His daughter was generally his companion, sometimes on her pony and sometimes on foot. Neither of them had been abroad, save once to France when she was about sixteen. They cared little for travelling in foreign parts, and he always said he got nothing out of a place in which he was a lodger. He went once a Sunday to the village church: he was patron of the living. The sermons were short and simple.
Theological questions did not much concern him, and he found in Horace, Montaigne, Swift, and the County History whatever mental exercise he needed. So far he was the son of his father, but his mother had her share in him. She was a strange creature, often shaken by presentiments. Years after she was married her husband had to go to Penrith on some business which she knew would keep him there for a night. She got it into her head when she was alone in the evening that something had happened to him. She could not go to bed nor sit still, and at three o"clock in the morning she called up her servant and bade him saddle his horse and hers. Off they started for Penrith, and she appeared before her astonished husband just as he was leaving his room at the inn for an early breakfast.
She rushed speechless into his arms and sobbed.
"What is the matter?" he cried.
"Nothing."
"Nothing wrong at home?"
"Nothing."
She pa.s.sed her hands slowly over his face as if to rea.s.sure herself, pushed back his hair, looked in his eyes, took both his hands and said softly, "Not another word, please."
He understood her, at least in part. She remained quietly at the inn till the afternoon and then went home with him. She was also peculiar in her continual reference to first principles. The meaningless traditions, which we mistake for things, to her were nothing. She constantly asked, "why not?" and was therefore dangerous. "If you go on asking "why not?"" said her aunt to her once, "mark me you"ll come to some harm." She saw realities, and yet--it was singular--she saw ghosts. Mr. Radcliffe did not obviously resemble his mother, nor did Kate, and yet across both of them there often shot clear, and at times even flashing gleams, indisputable evidence that in son and granddaughter she still lived.
It was in his relationship to his daughter that Mr. Radcliffe betrayed his mother"s blood. His reading, as we have said, was in Horace, Montaigne, and Swift, but if Kate went away for no longer than a couple of days to her cousins at Penrith, he used to watch her departure till she was hidden at the first bend of the road about half a mile distant, and then when he went back to his room and looked at her empty chair, a half-mad, unconquerable melancholy overcame him. It was not to be explained by anxiety. It was inexplicable, a revelation of something in him dark and terrible.
In 1844 Kate Radcliffe was twenty-four years old. She had never been handsome, and when she was sixteen her pony had missed its footing on a treacherous mountain track and she narrowly escaped with her life. She was thrown on a rock, and her forehead was crossed henceforth beyond remedy with a long broad mark. She had never cared much for company, and her disfigurement made her care for it less. She could not help feeling that everybody noticed it, and most people in truth noticed nothing else. She was "the girl with a scar." As time went on, this self-consciousness, or rather consciousness of herself as the scar, diminished, but her indifference remained, other reasons for it being added. She never had a lover; and, indeed, what man could be expected to take to himself as wife even the wisest and most affectionate of women whose brow was indented? She was advised to wear some kind of head-gear which would hide her misfortune, but she refused. "Everybody," she said, "would know what was behind, and I will not be hara.s.sed by concealment." To her father her accident did but the more endear her. There is no love so wild, no, not even the love of a mistress, as that which is sometimes found in a father or mother for a child, and often for one who is physically or even mentally defective. It is not subject to satiety and la.s.situde, and grows with age. To Kate also her father was more than the whole world of men and women.
The best of friends weary of one another and large s.p.a.ces of separation are necessary, but these two were always happy together.
Theirs was the blessed intimacy which is never unmeaning and yet can endure silence. They never felt that unpleasant stricture of the chest caused by a search for entertainment or for some subject of conversation.
Nevertheless, although Mr. Radcliffe was so much to Kate, she was herself, and consequently had wants which were not his. There had been born in her before 1844 a pa.s.sion which could not be satisfied by any human being, a leaning forward and outward to something she knew not what. The sun rose over the fells; they were purple in sunset; the constellations slowly climbed the eastern sky on a clear night, and her heart lay bare: she wondered, she was bowed down with awe, and she also longed unspeakably. When she was about twenty-five years old she accepted an invitation to spend a few weeks with a friend in London. She was fond of music, and on her first Sunday she could not resist the temptation to hear a ma.s.s by Mozart in Saint Mary"s, Moorfields. She was overpowered, and something moved in her soul which she had never felt in the church at home. She worshipped at Saint Mary"s several times afterwards, and her friend rallied her on conversion to Roman Catholicism.
"It is the music, Kate."
"Well, then, why not?"
"The music is so tender, so overwhelming, that thinking is impossible."
"Is thinking the only way to the truth--putting two and two together? The n.o.blest truth comes with music. More solid truth has been demonstrated by a song, a march, or a hymn, than by famous political and theological treatises. But I am not a Roman Catholic."
"Oh yes! I know what you mean: it is a poetical way of saying that music stimulates aspiration."
"No, that is not what I mean. If there be such a mental operation as pa.s.sionless thinking it does not lead to much. Emotion makes intellectual discoveries."
"I do not understand you. Revealed religion rests on intelligent conviction. It is the doctrine of a Creator, of law, of sin, of redemption, of future happiness and misery."
"That is to say, your religion stands on authority or logic. But I cannot dispute with you. The beliefs by which some of us live-- "belief" is not the right word--are not begotten or strengthened and cannot be overthrown by argument. We dare not expose them, but if they were to fail, we should welcome death and annihilation. I repeat, I am not a Roman Catholic."
Kate went back to her father and her native hills. The drama of Saint Mary Moorfields was continually before her eyes, and Mozart"s music was continually in her ears. An ideal human being had been revealed to her who understood her, pitied her, and loved her. She was no longer a mere atom of dust, unnoticed amongst millions of millions. But the intensity of her faith gave birth to fear and doubt. Her own words recurred to her, but she was forced to admit that she must depend upon evidence. If Christ were nothing but a legend, she might as well kneel to a mist.
In those days, within five miles of her father"s house was a small Roman Catholic chapel. The priest had been well educated, but he had never questioned any of the dogmas imposed on him as a child.
One Sunday morning, when her father did not go to church, Kate walked over to the chapel and heard ma.s.s. The contrast with Saint Mary Moorfields was great. The sermon disappointed her. It was little more than simple insistence on ritual duty. She reflected, however, that it was not addressed to her, but to those who had been brought up to believe. As she walked home a strange conflict arose in her. On the one hand were her imperious needs, which almost compelled a.s.sumption of fact; but the wind blew, and when she looked up the clouds sailed over the mountains. She sat on a grey rock to rest. It had lain there for thousands of years, and she was reminded of the Druid circle above the Greta. She could get no further with her thinking, and knelt down and prayed for light. It is of all prayers the most sincere, but she was not answered--at least not then. The next Sunday she went again to ma.s.s, and she had half a mind to signify her wish to confess, but what could she confess? She was burdened with no sins, and in confession she could not fully explain her case. She determined she would write to the priest and ask him to grant her an interview.
Her desertion of the parish church was observed, and of course n.o.body was surprised that Miss Radcliffe had turned Papist. The old Radcliffes were all Papists; there was Popery in the blood, and it came out like the gout, missing a couple of generations. Then again there was the scar, and Miss Radcliffe would never be married. One of the neighbours who suggested the scar and maidenhood as a sufficient reason for apostasy was a retired mill-owner, who was a Wesleyan Methodist when he was in business in Manchester, but had become ostentatiously Anglican when he retired into the country.
The village blacksmith, whose ancestors had worked at the same forge since the days of Queen Elizabeth, was a fearless gentleman, and hated the mill-owner as an upstart. He therefore made reply that "other people changed their religion because they wanted to be respectable and get folk like the Radcliffes to visit them--which they won"t," the last words being spoken with emphasis and scorn.
Mr. Radcliffe was much disturbed. To him Roman Catholicism was superst.i.tion, and he wondered how any rational person could submit to it. To be sure he a.s.sented every week to supernatural history and doctrines presented to him in his own parish church, but to these he was accustomed, and his reason, acute as it was, made no objection. There was another cause for his distress. His only sister, whom he tenderly loved, had become a foreign nun and was lost to him for ever. His life was bound up with his child, and he dreaded intervention. It is all very well to say that religious differences need not be a bar to friendship. This is one of the commonplaces of people who understand neither friendship nor religion. When Kate and he went for their long walks together, they would no longer see the same hills; and there would always be something behind her affection for him and above it. He was moodily jealous, and it was unendurable that he should be supplanted by an intruder who would hear secrets which were not entrusted to a parent. There was still some hope. He did not know how far she had gone; and he resolved to speak to her. One morning, as soon as breakfast was over, he proposed an excursion; he could talk more freely in the open air. After a few minutes" indifferent conversation he asked her abruptly if she was a Roman Catholic.
"I cannot say."