Part 24

I went along the lane, I recollect, switching at all the taller roadside weeds, till, after a turn or two, I found myself close in front of the Hope Farm. There was a garden between the house and the shady, grassy lane; I afterwards found that this garden was called the court; perhaps because there was a low wall round it, with an iron railing on the top of the wall, and two great gates between pillars crowned with stone balls for a state entrance to the flagged path leading up to the front door. It was not the habit of the place to go in either by these great gates or by the front door; the gates, indeed, were locked, as I found, though the door stood wide open. I had to go round by a side-path lightly worn on a broad grassy way, which led past the court-wall, past a horse-mount, half covered with stonecrop and a little wild yellow fumitory, to another door—“the curate,” as I found it was termed by the master of the house, while the front door, “handsome and all for show,” was termed the “rector.” I knocked with my hand upon the “curate” door; a tall girl, about my own age, as I thought, came and opened it, and stood there silent, waiting to know my errand. I see her now—Cousin Phillis. The westering sun shone full upon her, and made a slanting stream of light into the room within. She was dressed in dark blue cotton of some kind; up to her throat, down to her wrists, with a little frill of the same wherever it touched her white skin. And such a white skin as it was! I have never seen the like. She had light hair, nearer yellow than any other colour. She looked me steadily in the face with large, quiet eyes, wondering, but untroubled by the sight of a stranger. I thought it odd, that so old, so full-grown as she was, she should wear a pinafore over her gown.

Before I had quite made up my mind what to say in reply to her mute inquiry of what I wanted there, a woman’s voice called out, “Who is it, Phillis? If it is anyone for butter-milk send them round to the back door.”

I thought I could rather speak to the owner of that voice than to the girl before me; so I passed her, and stood at the entrance of a room, hat in hand, for this side-door opened straight into the hall or house-place where the family sate when work was done. There was a brisk little woman of forty or so ironing some huge muslin cravats under the light of a long vine-shaded casement window. She looked at me distrustfully till I began to speak. “My name is Paul Manning,” said I; but I saw she did not know the name. “My mother’s name was Moneypenny,” said I—“Margaret Moneypenny.”

“And she married one John Manning, of Birmingham,” said Mrs. Holman eagerly. “And you’ll be her son. Sit down! I am right glad to see you. To think of your being Margaret’s son! Why, she was almost a child not so long ago. Well, to be sure, it is five-and-twenty years ago. And what brings you into these parts?”

She sate herself down, as if oppressed by her curiosity as to all the five-and-twenty years that had passed since she had seen my mother. Her daughter Phillis took up her knitting—a man’s long grey worsted stocking, I remember—and knitted away without looking at her work. I felt that the steady gaze of those deep grey eyes was upon me, though once, when I stealthily raised mine to hers, she was examining something on the wall above my head.

When I had answered all my cousin Holman’s questions, she heaved a long breath, and said, “To think of Margaret Moneypenny’s boy being in our house! I wish the minister was here. Phillis, in what field is thy father to-day?”

“In the five-acre; they are beginning to cut the corn.”

“He’ll not like being sent for then, else I should have liked you to have seen the minister. But the five-acre is a good step off. You shall have a glass of wine and a bit of cake before you stir from this house, though. You’re bound to go, you say, or else the minister comes in mostly when the men have their four o’clock.”

“I must go—I ought to have been off before now.”

“Here, then, Phillis, take the keys.” She gave her daughter some whispered directions, and Phillis left the room.

“She is my cousin, is she not?” I asked. I knew she was, but somehow I wanted to talk of her, and did not know how to begin.

“Yes—Phillis Holman. She is our only child—now.”

Either from that “now,” or from a strange momentary wistfulness in her eyes, I knew that there had been more children, who were now dead.

“How old is Cousin Phillis?” said I, scarcely venturing on the new name, it seemed too prettily familiar for me to call her by it; but Cousin Holman took no notice of it, answering straight to the purpose.

“Seventeen last May-Day; but the minister does not like to hear me calling it May-Day,” said she, checking herself with a little awe. “Phillis was seventeen on the first day of May last,” she repeated in an emended edition.

“And I am nineteen in another month,” thought I to myself; I don’t know why.

Then Phillis came in, carrying a tray with wine and cake upon it.

“We keep a house-servant,” said Cousin Holman, “but it is churning day, and she is busy.” It was meant as a little proud apology for her daughter’s being the handmaiden.

“I like doing it, mother,” said Phillis, in her grave, full voice.

I felt as if I were somebody in the Old Testament—who, I could not recollect—being served and waited upon by the daughter of the host. Was I like Abraham’s steward, when Rebekah gave him to drink at the well? I thought Isaac had not gone the pleasantest way to work in winning him a wife. But Phillis never thought about such things. She was a stately, gracious young woman, in the dress and with the simplicity of a child.

As I had been taught, I drank to the health of my new-found cousin and her husband; and then I ventured to name my Cousin Phillis with a little bow of my head towards her; but I was too awkward to look and see how she took my compliment. “I must go now,” said I, rising.

The Dawn of Love

From _Cousin Phillis_, 1865

“He had never spoken much about you before, but the sudden going away unlocked his heart, and he told me how he loved you, and how he hoped on his return that you might be his wife.”

“Don’t,” said she, almost gasping out the word, which she had tried once or twice before to speak; but her voice had been choked. Now she put her hand backwards; she had quite turned away from me, and felt for mine. She gave it a soft lingering pressure; and then she put her arms down on the wooden division, and laid her head on it, and cried quiet tears. I did not understand her at once, and feared lest I had mistaken the whole case, and only annoyed her. I went up to her. “Oh, Phillis, I am so sorry—I thought you would, perhaps, have cared to hear it; he did talk so feelingly, as if he did love you so much, and somehow I thought it would give you pleasure.”

She lifted up her head and looked at me. Such a look! Her eyes, glittering with tears as they were, expressed an almost heavenly happiness; her tender mouth was curved with rapture—her colour vivid and blushing; but as if she was afraid her face expressed too much, more than the thankfulness to me she was essaying to speak, she hid it again almost immediately. So it was all right then, and my conjecture was well-founded. I tried to remember something more to tell her of what he had said, but again she stopped me.

“Don’t,” she said. She still kept her face covered and hidden. In half a minute she added, in a very low voice, “Please, Paul, I think I would rather not hear any more—I don’t mean but what I have—but what I am very much obliged—only—only, I think I would rather hear the rest from himself when he comes back.”

And then she cried a little more, in quite a different way. I did not say any more, I waited for her. By-and-by she turned towards me—not meeting my eyes, however; and putting her hand in mine just as if we were two children, she said, “We had best go back now—I don’t look as if I had been crying, do I?”

“You look as if you had a bad cold,” was all the answer I made.

“Oh! but I am—I am quite well, only cold; and a good run will warm me. Come along, Paul.”

So we ran, hand in hand, till, just as we were on the threshold of the house, she stopped:

“Paul, please, we won’t speak about _that_ again.”

* * * * *

I never saw her so lovely, or so happy. I think she hardly knew why she was so happy all the time. I can see her now, standing under the budding branches of the grey trees, over which a tinge of green seemed to be deepening day after day, her sunbonnet fallen back on her neck, her hands full of delicate wood-flowers, quite unconscious of my gaze, but intent on sweet mockery of some bird in neighbouring bush or tree. She had the art of warbling, and replying to the notes of different birds, and knew their song, their habits and ways, more accurately than anyone else I ever knew. She had often done it at my request the spring before; but this year she really gurgled, and whistled, and warbled just as they did, out of the very fulness and joy of her heart. She was more than ever the very apple of her father’s eye; her mother gave her both her own share of love and that of the dead child, who had died in infancy. I have heard Cousin Holman murmur, after a long dreamy look at Phillis, and tell herself how like she was growing to Johnnie, and soothe herself with plaintive, inarticulate sounds, and many gentle shakes of the head, for the aching sense of loss she would never get over in this world. The old servants about the place had the dumb loyal attachment to the child of the land common to most agricultural labourers; not often stirred into activity or expression. My Cousin Phillis was like a rose that had come to full bloom on the sunny side of a lonely house, sheltered from storms. I have read in some book of poetry:

“A maid whom there were none to praise, And very few to love.”

And somehow those lines always remind me of Phillis; yet they were not true of her either. I never heard her praised; and out of her own household there were very few to love her; but though no one spoke out their appreciation, she always did right in her parents’ eyes, out of her natural simple goodness and wisdom.

III

Stories

I. AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL

II. BIOGRAPHICAL

III. SHORTER EXTRACTS

The only biography which Mrs. Gaskell wrote was _The Life of Charlotte Brontë_, which is one of the best biographies ever written. It has now become a classic. At the time of her death, in 1865, Mrs. Gaskell was collecting material for a Life of Madame Sévigné.

Mrs. Gaskell has written very little that is autobiographical. She always studied to keep herself in the background, though her stories contain much that is based on her own life.

Autobiographical

Mary Barton

Preface to the Original Edition of 1848

Three years ago I became anxious (from circumstances that need not be more fully alluded to) to employ myself in writing a work of fiction. Living in Manchester, but with a deep relish and fond admiration for the country, my first thought was to find a framework for my story in some rural scene; and I had already made a little progress in a tale, the period of which was more than a century ago, and the place on the borders of Yorkshire, when I bethought me how deep might be the romance in the lives of some of those who elbowed me daily in the busy streets of the town in which I resided. I had always felt a deep sympathy with the care-worn men, who looked as if doomed to struggle through their lives in strange alternations between work and want; tossed to and fro by circumstances, apparently in even a greater degree than other men. A little manifestation of this sympathy, and a little attention to the expression of feelings on the part of some of the workpeople with whom I was acquainted had laid open to me the hearts of one or two of the more thoughtful among them; I saw that they were sore and irritable against the rich, the even tenor of whose seemingly happy lives appeared to increase the anguish caused by the lottery-like nature of their own. Whether the bitter complaints made by them of the neglect which they experienced from the prosperous—especially from the masters, whose fortunes they had helped to build up—were well-founded or no, it is not for me to judge. It is enough to say, that this belief of the injustice and unkindness which they endure from their fellow-creatures taints what might be resignation to God’s will, and turns it to revenge in many of the poor uneducated factory-workers of Manchester.

The more I reflected on this unhappy state of things between those so bound to each other by common interests, as the employers and employed must ever be, the more anxious I became to give some utterance to the agony which, from time to time, convulses this dumb people; the agony of suffering without the sympathy of the happy, or of erroneously believing that such is the case. If it be an error that the woes, which come with ever-returning tide-like flood to overwhelm the workmen in our manufacturing towns, pass unregarded by all but the sufferers, it is at any rate an error so bitter in its consequences to all parties, that whatever public effort can do in the way of merciful deeds, or helpless love in the way of “widow’s mites” could do, should be done, and that speedily, to disabuse the work-people of so miserable a misapprehension. At present they seem to me to be left in a state, wherein lamentations and tears are thrown aside as useless, but in which the lips are compressed for curses, and the hands clenched and ready to smite.

I know nothing of Political Economy, or the theories of trade. I have tried to write truthfully; and if my accounts agree or clash with any system, the agreement or disagreement is unintentional.

To myself the idea which I have formed of the state of feeling among too many of the factory-people in Manchester, and which I endeavoured to represent in this tale (completed above a year ago), has received some confirmation from the events which have so recently occurred among a similar class on the Continent.

_October, 1848._

Edinburgh Society in 1830

From _Round the Sofa_, 1859

Mrs. Gaskell spent a winter in Edinburgh in 1830-31, and she has woven some of her recollections in _Round the Sofa_. The Mr. Sperano mentioned was probably Agostino Ruffini, a friend of Mazzini’s, though he went as an exile to Edinburgh at a later period.

After we had been about a fortnight in Edinburgh Mr. Dawson said, in a sort of half-doubtful manner to Miss Duncan:

“My sister bids me say, that every Monday evening a few friends come in to sit round her sofa for an hour or so—some before going to gayer parties—and that if you and Miss Greatorex would like a little change, she would only be too glad to see you. Any time from seven to eight to-night; and I must add my injunctions, both for her sake and for that of my little patient’s, here, that you leave at nine o’clock. After all, I do not know if you will care to come; but Margaret bade me ask you,” and he glanced up suspiciously and sharply at us. If either of us had felt the slightest reluctance, however well disguised by manner, to accept this invitation, I am sure he would have at once detected our feelings, and withdrawn it, so jealous and chary was he of anything pertaining to the appreciation of this beloved sister.

But, if it had been to spend an evening at the dentist’s, I believe I should have welcomed the invitation, so weary was I of the monotony of the nights in our lodgings; and as for Miss Duncan, an invitation to tea was of itself a pure and unmixed honour, and one to be accepted with all becoming form and gratitude; so Mr. Dawson’s sharp glances over his spectacles failed to detect anything but the truest pleasure, and he went on:

“You’ll find it very dull, I dare say. Only a few old fogies like myself, and one or two good, sweet young women; I never know who’ll come. Margaret is obliged to lie in a darkened room—only half lighted, I mean—because her eyes are weak—oh, it will be very stupid, I dare say; don’t thank me till you’ve been once and tried it, and then if you like it, your best thanks will be, to come again every Monday, from half-past seven to nine, you know. Good-bye, good-bye.”

Hitherto I had never been out to a party of grown-up people; and no court-ball to a London young lady could seem more redolent of honour and pleasure than this Monday evening to me.

Dressed out in new stiff book-muslin, made up to my throat—a frock which had seemed to me and my sisters the height of earthly grandeur and finery—Alice, our old nurse, had been making it at home, in contemplation of the possibility of such an event during my stay in Edinburgh, but which had then appeared to me a robe too lovely and angelic to be ever worn short of heaven—I went with Miss Duncan to Mr. Dawson’s at the appointed time. We entered through one small lofty room—perhaps I ought to call it an ante-chamber, for the house was old-fashioned, and stately and grand—the large square drawing-room, into the centre of which Mrs. Dawson’s sofa was drawn. Behind her a little was placed a table with a great cluster candlestick upon it, bearing seven or eight wax-lights; and that was all the light in the room, which looked to me very vast and indistinct after our pinched-up apartment at the Mackenzies’. Mrs. Dawson must have been sixty; and yet her face looked very soft and smooth and childlike. Her hair was quite grey; it would have looked white but for the snowiness of her cap, and satin ribbon. She was wrapped in a kind of dressing-gown of French grey merino. The furniture of the room was deep rose-colour, and white and gold; the paper which covered the walls was Indian, beginning low down with a profusion of tropical leaves and birds and insects, and gradually diminishing in richness of detail, till at the top it ended in the most delicate tendrils and most filmy insects.

Mr. Dawson had acquired much riches in his profession, and his house gave one this impression. In the corners of the rooms were great jars of Eastern china, filled with flower leaves and spices; and in the middle of all this was placed the sofa, on which poor Margaret Dawson passed whole days, and months, and years, without the power of moving by herself. By-and-by Mrs. Dawson’s maid brought in tea and macaroons for us, and a little cup of milk and water and a biscuit for her. Then the door opened. We had come very early, and in came Edinburgh professors, Edinburgh beauties, and celebrities, all on their way to some other gayer and later party, but coming first to see Mrs. Dawson, and tell her their _bons-mots_, or their interests, or their plans. By each learned man, by each lovely girl, she was treated as a dear friend, who knew something more about their own individual selves, independent of their reputation and general society-character, than anyone else.

It was very brilliant and very dazzling, and gave enough to think about and wonder about for many days.

Monday after Monday we went, stationary, silent; what could we find to say to anyone but Mrs. Margaret herself? Winter passed, summer was coming.

* * * * *

People began to drop off from Edinburgh, only a few were left, and I am not sure if our Monday evenings were not all the pleasanter.

There was Mr. Sperano, the Italian exile, banished even from France, where he had long resided, and now teaching Italian with meek diligence in the northern city; there was Mr. Preston, the Westmorland squire, or, as he preferred to be called, statesman, whose wife had come to Edinburgh for the education of their numerous family, and who, whenever her husband had come over on one of his occasional visits, was only too glad to accompany him to Mrs. Dawson’s Monday evenings, he and the invalid lady having been friends from long ago. These and ourselves kept steady visitors, and enjoyed ourselves all the more from having the more of Mrs. Dawson’s society.

Cumberland Sheep-shearers

From _Household Words_, 1853

A graphic account of a visit which Mr. and Mrs. Gaskell and their daughters made to the sheep-shearing at a Westmorland farm near Keswick. The article aroused much interest among the readers of _Household Words_. John Forster, writing to Dickens, asked “who the deuce had written the delightful article on sheep-shearing?”

Three or four years ago we spent part of a summer in one of the dales in the neighbourhood of Keswick. We lodged at the house of a small Statesman, who added to his occupation of a sheep-farmer that of a woollen manufacturer. His own flock was not large, but he bought up other people’s fleeces, either on commission, or for his own purposes; and his life seemed to unite many pleasant and various modes of employment, and the great jolly, burly man throve upon all, both in body and mind.

One day his handsome wife proposed to us that we should accompany her to a distant sheep-shearing, to be held at the house of one of her husband’s customers, where she was sure we should be heartily welcome, and where we should see an old-fashioned shearing, such as was not often met with now in the Dales. I don’t know why it was, but we were lazy, and declined her invitation. It might be that the day was a broiling one, even for July, or it might be a fit of shyness; but, whichever was the reason, it very unaccountably vanished soon after she was gone, and the opportunity seemed to have slipped through our fingers. The day was hotter than ever; and we should have twice as much reason to be shy and self-conscious, now that we should not have our hostess to introduce and chaperone us. However, so great was our wish to go that we blew these obstacles to the winds, if there were any that day; and, obtaining the requisite directions from the farm-servant, we set out on our five-mile walk, about one o’clock on a cloudless day in the first half of July.