Chapter Forty Three.
Working Round.
Several days passed, and there was no direct news of Enderby. Maria never spoke of him, though many little intervals in Margaret’s busy life occurred when the friends were together, and Maria ought have taken occasion to say anything she wished. It was clear that she chose to avoid the subject. Her talk was almost entirely about the sick, for whom she laboured as strenuously as her strength would permit. She could not go about among them, nor sit up with the sufferers: but she cooked good things over her fire for them, all day long; and she took to her home many children who were too young to be useful, and old enough to be troublesome in a sick house. Between her cooking, teaching, and playing with the children, she was as fully occupied as her friends in the corner-house, and perhaps might not really know anything about Mr Enderby.
Each one of the family had caught glimpses of him at one time or another. There was reason to think that he was active among Mr Walcot’s poor patients; and Hope had encountered him more than once in the course of his rounds, when a few words on the business of the moment were exchanged, and nothing more happened. Margaret saw him twice: once on horseback, when he turned suddenly down a lane to avoid her; and at the Rowlands’ dining-room window, with Ned in his arms. She never now passed that house when she could help it: but this once it was necessary; and she was glad that Philip had certainly not seen her. His back was half-turned to the window at the moment, as if some one within was speaking to him. Each time, his image was so stamped in upon her mind, that, amidst all the trials of such near neighbourhood without intercourse, his presence in Deerbrook was, on the whole, certainly a luxury. She had gained something to compensate for all her restlessness, in the three glimpses of him with which she had now been favoured. A thought sometimes occurred to her, of which she was so ashamed that she made every endeavour to banish it. She asked herself now and then, whether, if she had been able to sit at home, or take her accustomed walks, she should not have beheld Philip oftener:—whether she was not sadly out of the way of seeing him at the cottage in the lane, and the other sordid places where her presence was necessary. Not for this occasional question did she stay away one moment longer than she would otherwise have done from the cottage in the lane; but while she was there, it was apt to recur.
There she sat one afternoon, somewhat weary, but not dreaming of going home. There lay the three sick creatures still. The woman was likely to recover; the boy lingered, and seemed waiting for his father to go with him. Platt had sunk very rapidly, and this day had made a great change. Margaret had taken the moaning and restless child on her lap, for the ease of change of posture: and she was now shading from his eyes with her shawl, the last level rays of the sun which shone in upon her from the window. She was unwilling to change her seat, for it seemed as if the slightest movement would quench the lingering life of the child: and there was no one to draw the window-curtain, the old woman having gone to buy food in the village. Mrs Platt slept almost all the day and night through, and she was asleep now: so Margaret sat quite still, holding up her shawl before the pallid face which looked already dead. Nothing broke the silence but the twitter of the young birds in the thatch, and the mutterings of the sick man, whom Margaret imagined to be somewhat disturbed by the unusual light that was in the room. It had not been the custom of the sun to shine into any houses of late; and the place full of yellow light, did not look like itself. She knew that in a few minutes the sun would have set; and she hoped that then poor Platt would be still. Meantime she appeared to take no notice, but sat with her eyes fixed on the boy’s face, marking that each sigh was fainter than the last. At length a louder sound than she had yet heard from the sick man, made her look towards him; and the instant throb of her heart seemed to be felt by the child, for he moved his head slightly. Platt was trying to support himself upon his elbow, while in the other shaking hand, he held towards her her turquoise ring. She remembered her charge, and did not spring to seize it; but there was something in her countenance that strongly excited the sick man. He struggled to rise from his bed, and his face was fierce. Margaret spoke gently—as calmly as she could—told him she would come presently—that there was no hurry, and urged him to lie down till she could put the child off her lap; but her voice failed her, in spite of herself; for now, at last, she recognised in Platt the tall woman. This was the look which had perplexed her more than once.
“Patience! a little further patience!” she said to herself, as she saw the ring still trembling in the sick man’s hand, and felt one more sigh from the little fellow on her lap. No more patience was needed. This was the boy’s last breath. His head fell back, and the sunlight, which streamed in upon his half-closed eyes, could now disturb them no more. Margaret gently closed them and laid the body on its little bed in the corner, straightening and covering the limbs before she turned away.
She then gently approached the bed, and took her ring into a hand which trembled little less than the sick man’s own. She spoke calmly, however. She strove earnestly to learn something of the facts: she tried to understand the mutterings amidst which only a word here and there sounded like speech. She thought, from the earnestness with which Platt seized and pressed her hand, that he was seeking pardon from her; and she spoke as if it were so. It grew very distressing—the earnestness of the man, and the uncertainty whether his mind was wandering or not. She wished the old woman would come back. She went to the door to look for her. The old woman was coming down the lane. Margaret put on her ring, and drew on her gloves, and determined to say nothing about it at present.
“Mr Platt has been talking almost ever since you went,” said Margaret; “and I can make out nothing that he says. Do try if you can understand him. I am sure there is something he wishes me to hear. There is no time to lose, I am afraid. Do try.”
The woman coaxed him to lie down, and then turning round, said she thought he wanted to know what o’clock it was.
“Is that all? Tell him that the sun is now setting. But if you have a watch, that will show more exactly. Are you sure you have no watch in the house?”
The old woman looked suspiciously at her, and asked her what made her suppose that poor folks had watches, when some gentlefolks had none? Margaret inquired whether a watch was not a possession handed down from father to son, and sometimes found in the poorest cottages. She believed she had seen such at Deerbrook. The old woman replied by saying, she believed Margaret might have understood some few things among the many the poor sick creature had been saying. Not one, Margaret declared; but it was so plain that she was not believed, that she had little doubt of Hester’s watch having been harboured in this very house, if it was not there still.
The poor boy, who had had little care from his natural guardians while alive from the hour of his being doomed by the fortune-teller, was now loudly mourned as dead. Yet the mourning was strangely mixed with exultation at the fortune-teller having been right in the end. The mother, suddenly awakened, groaned and screamed, so that it was fearful to hear her. All efforts to restore quiet were in vain. Margaret was moved, shocked, terrified. She could not keep her own calmness in such a scene of confusion: but, while her cheeks were covered with tears, while her voice trembled as she implored silence, she never took off her glove. In the midst of the tumult, Platt sank back and died. The renewed cries had the effect of bringing some neighbours from the end of the lane. While they were there, Margaret could be of no further use. She promised to send coffins immediately—that stage of pestilence being now reached when coffins were the first consideration—and then slipped out from the door into the darkness, and ran till she had turned the corner of the long lane. She usually considered herself safe abroad, even in times like these, as she carried no property of value about with her: but now that she was wearing her precious ring again, she felt too rich to be walking alone in the dark.
She did not slacken her pace till she approached lights and people; and then she was glad to stop for breath. She could not resist going first to Maria, to show her the recovered treasure; and this caused her to direct her steps through the churchyard. It was there that she came in view of lights and people; and under the limes it was that she stopped for breath. The churchyard was now the most frequented spot in the village. The path by the turnstile was indeed grown over with grass: but the great gate was almost always open, and the ground near it was trodden bare by the feet of many mourners. Funeral trains—trains which daily grew shorter, till each coffin was now followed only by two or by three—were passing in from early morning, at intervals, till sunset, and now might be often seen by torchlight far into the night. The villager passing the churchyard wall might hear, in the night air, the deep voice of the clergyman announcing the farewell to some brother or sister, committing “ashes to ashes, and dust to dust.” There was no disturbance now from boys leaping over the graves, or from little children, eager to renew their noisy play. Such of the young villagers as remained above ground appeared to be silenced and subdued by the privation, the dreariness, the neglect, of these awful days: they looked on from afar, or avoided the spot. Instead of such, the observer of the two funerals which were now in the churchyard, was a person quite at the other extremity of life. Margaret saw the man of a hundred years, Jem Bird, the pride of the village in his way, seated on the bench under the spreading tree, which was youthful in comparison with himself. He was listlessly watching the black figures which moved about in the light of a solitary torch, by an open grave, while waiting for the clergyman who was engaged with the group beyond.
“You are late abroad, Mr Bird,” said Margaret. “I should not have looked for you here so far on in the evening.”
“What’s your will?” said the old man.
“Grandfather won’t go home ever, till they have done here,” said a great-grandchild of the old man, running up from his amusement of hooting to the owls in the church tower. “They’ll soon have done with these two, and then grandfather and I shall go home. Won’t we, granny?”
“Does it not make you sad to see so many funerals?” said Margaret, sitting down on the bench beside him.
“Ay.”
“Had you not better stay at home than see so many that you knew laid in the ground?”
“Does he understand?” she asked aside of the boy. “Does he never answer but in this way?”
“Oh! he talks fast enough sometimes. It is just as you happen to take him.”
Margaret was curious to know what were the meditations among the tombs of one so aged as this man: so she spoke again.
“I have heard that you knew this place before anybody lived in it: and now you seem likely to see it empty again.”
“It was a wild place enough in my young time,” said Jem, speaking now very fluently. “There was nothing of it but the church; and that was never used, because it had had its roof pulled off in the wars. There was only a footpath to it through the fields then, and few people went nigh it—except a few gentry that came a-pleasuring here, into the woods. The owls and I knew it as well then as we do to-day, and nobody else that is now living. The owls and I.”
And the old man laughed the chuckling laugh which was all he had strength for.
“The woods!” said Margaret. “Did the Verdon woods spread as far as this church in those days? And were they not private property then?”
“It was all forest hereabouts, except a clear space round the church tower. It might be thin sprinkled, but it was called forest. The place where I was born had thorns all about it; and when I could scarce walk alone, I used to scramble among the blossoms that made the ground white all under those thorns. The birds that lived by the haws in winter were prodigious. That cottage stood, as near as I can tell, where Grey and Rowland’s great granary is now. There used to be much swine in the woods then; and many’s the time they have thrown me down when I was a young thing getting acorns. That was about the time of my hearing the first music I ever heard—unless you call the singing of the birds music (we had plenty of that), and the bells on the breeze from a distance, when the wind was south. The first music (so to call it) that I heard was from a blind fiddler that came to us. What brought him, I don’t know—whether he lost his way, or what; but he lost his way after he left us. His dog seems to have been in fault: but he got into a pool in the middle of the wood, and there he lay drowned, with one foot up on the bank, when I went to see what the harking of the dog could be about. He clutched his fiddle in drowning; and I remember I tried to get the music out of it as it lay wet and broken on the bank, while father was saying the poor soul must have been under the water now two days. So I have reason to remember the first music I heard.”
“You have got him talking now,” said the grandchild, running off; and presently the owls were heard hooting again.
“Whereabouts was this pool?” asked Margaret.
“It is a deep part of the brook, that in hot summers is left a pond. It is there that the chief of the sliding goes on in winter now, in the meadow. It is meadow now; but then the deer used to come down through the wood to drink at the brook there. That is how the village got its name.”
“So you remember the time when the deer came down to drink at the brook! How many things have happened since then! You have heard a great deal of music since those days.”
“Ay, there has been a good deal of fiddling at our weddings since that. And we have had recruiting parties through in war times.”
“And many a mother singing to her baby; and the psalm in the church for so many years! Yes, the place has been full of music for long; but it seems likely to be silent enough now.”
“I began to think I should be left the last, as I was the first,” said the old man: “but they say the sickness is abating now, and that several are beginning to recover. Pray God it may be so! First, after the wood was somewhat cleared, there was a labourer’s cottage or two—now standing empty, and the folk that lived in them lying yonder. Then there was the farmhouse; and then a carpenter came, and a wheeler. Then there was a shop wanted; and the church was roofed in and used: and some gentry came and sat down by the river side; and the place grew to what it is. They say now, it is not near its end yet: but it is strange to me to see the churchyard the fullest place near, so that I have to come here for company.”
And the old man chuckled again. As she rose to go, Margaret asked whether he knew the Platts, who lived in the cottage in the lane.
“I know him to see to. Is he down?”
“He is dead and his child: but his wife is recovering.”
“Ay, there’s many recovering now, they say.”
“Indeed! who?”
“Why, a many. But the fever has got into Rowland’s house, they say.” Margaret’s heart turned sick at hearing these words, and she hastily pursued her way. It was not Philip, however, who was seized. He was in the churchyard at this moment. She saw him walking quickly along the turnstile path, slackening his pace only for a moment, as he passed the funeral group. The light from the torch shone full upon his face—the face settled and composed, as she knew it would not be if he were aware who was within a few paces of him. She felt the strongest impulse to show him her ring—the strongest desire for his sympathy in its recovery: but an instant showed her the absurdity of the thought, and she hung down her blushing head in the darkness.
From Maria she had sympathy, such as it was—sympathy without any faith in Philip. She had from her also good news of the state of the village. There were recoveries talked of; and there would be more, now that those who were seized would no longer consider death inevitable. Mrs Howell was ill; and poor Miss Nares was down with the fever, which no one could wonder at: but Mr Jones and his son John were both out of danger, and the little Tuckers were likely to do well. Mr James was already talking of sending for his wife and sister-in-law home again, as the worst days of the disease seemed to be past, and so many families had not been attacked at all. It was too true that Matilda Rowland was unwell to-day; but Mr Walcot hoped it was only a slight feverish attack, which would be thought nothing of under any other circumstances.—On the whole, Maria thought the neighbours she had seen to-day in better spirits than at any time since the fever made its appearance.
Margaret found more good news at home. In the first place, the door was opened to her by Morris. Hester stood behind to witness the meeting. She had her bonnet on: she was going with her husband to see Mrs Howell, and make some provision for her comfort: but she had waited a little while, in hopes that Margaret would return, and be duly astonished to see Morris.
“You must make tea for each other, and be comfortable while we are away,” said Hester. “We will go now directly, that we may be back as early as we can.”
“I have several things to tell you,” said Margaret, “when you return: and one now, brother, which must not be delayed. Platt and his child are dead, and coffins must be sent. The sooner the better, or we shall lose the poor woman too.”
Hope promised to speak to the undertaker as he went by.
“We have become very familiar with death, Morris, since you went away,” said Margaret, as she obliged her old friend to sit down by the fire, and prepared to make tea for both.
“That is why you see me here, Miss Margaret. Every piece of news I could get of this place was worse than the last; and I could perceive from your last letter, that you had sickness all about you; and I could not persuade myself but that it was my duty to come and be useful, and to take care of you, my dear, if I may say so.”
“And now you are here, I trust you may stay—I trust we may be justified in keeping you. We have meat every day now, Morris,—at least when we have time to cook it. Since my brother has been attending so many of Mr Jones’s family, we have had meat almost every day.”
“Indeed, my dear, I don’t know how you could keep up without it, so busy as I find you are among the sick;—busy night and day, my mistress tells me, till the people have got to call you ‘the good lady.’ You do not look as if you had lost much of your natural rest: but I know how the mind keeps the body up. Yours is an earnest mind, Margaret, that will always keep you up: but, my dear, I do hope it has been an easy mind too. You will excuse my saying so.”
Margaret more than excused it, but she could not immediately answer. The tears trembled in her eyes, and her lip quivered when she would have spoken. Morris stroked her hair, and kissed her forehead, as if she had been still a child, and whispered that all things ended well in God’s own time.
“Oh, yes! I know,” said Margaret. “Has Hester told you how prosperous we are growing? I do not mean only about money. We are likely to have enough of that too, for my brother’s old patients have almost all sent for him again: but we care the less about that from having discovered that we were as happy with little money as with much. But it is a satisfaction and pleasure to find my brother regarded more and more as he ought to be: and yet greater to see how nobly he deserves the best that can be thought of him.”
“He forgives his enemies, no doubt, heaping coals of fire on their heads.”
“You will witness it Morris. You will see him among them, and it will make your heart glow. Poor creatures! I have heard some of them own to him, from their sick beds, with dread and tears, that they broke his windows, and slandered his name. Then you should see him smile when he tells them that is all over now, and that they will not mistake him so much again.”
“No, never. He has shown himself now what he is.”
“He sat up two nights with one poor boy who is now likely to get through; and in the middle of the second night, the boy’s father got up from his sick bed in the next room, and came to my brother, to say that he felt that ill luck would be upon them all, if he did not confess that he put that very boy behind the hedge, with stones in his hand, to throw at Edward, the day he was mobbed at the almshouses. He was deluded by the neighbours, he said, into thinking that my brother meant ill by the poor.”
“They have learned to the contrary now, my dear. And what does Sir William Hunter say of my master, now-a-days? Do you know?”
“There is very little heard of Sir William and Lady Hunter at present—shut up at home as they are. But Dr Levitt, who loves to make peace, you know, and tell what is pleasant, declares that Sir William Hunter has certainly said that, after all, it does not so much signify which way a man votes at an election, if he shows a kind heart to his neighbours in troublesome times.”
“Sir William Hunter has learned his lesson then, it seems, from this affliction. I suppose he sees that one who does his duty as my master does at a season like this, is just the one to vote according to his conscience at an election. But, my dear, what sort of a heart have these Hunters got, that they shut themselves up as you say?”
“They give their money freely: and that is all that we can expect from them. If they have always been brought up and accustomed to fear sickness, and danger, and death, we cannot expect that they should lose their fear at a time like this. We must be thankful for what they give; and their money has been of great service, though there is no doubt that their example would have been of more.”
“One would like to look into their minds, and see how they regard my master there.”
“They regard him, no doubt, so far rightly as to consider him quite a different sort of person from themselves, and no rule for them. So far they are right. They do not comprehend his satisfactions and ease of mind; and it is very likely that they have pleasures of their own which we do not understand.”
“And they are quite welcome, I am sure, my dear, as long as they do not meddle with my master’s name. That is, as he says, all over now. After this, however, the people in Deerbrook will be more ready to trust in my master’s skill and kindness than in Sir William Hunter’s grandeur and money, which can do little to save them in time of need.”
Margaret explained how ignorantly the poor in the neighbourhood had relied on the fortune-tellers, who had only duped them; how that which would have been religion in them if they had been early taught, and which would have enabled them to rely on the only power which really can save, had been degraded by ignorance into a foolish and pernicious superstition. Morris hoped that this also was over now. She had met some of these conjurors on the Blickley road; and seen others breaking up their establishment in the lanes, and turning their backs upon Deerbrook. Whether they were scared away by the mortality of the place, or had found the tide of fortune-telling beginning to turn, mattered nothing as long as they were gone.
The tea-table was cleared, and Morris and Margaret were admiring the baby as he slept, when Hester and her husband returned. Mrs Howell was very unwell, and likely to be worse. All attempts to bring Miss Miskin to reason, and induce her to enter her friend’s room, were in vain. She bestowed abundance of tears, tremors, and foreboding on Mrs Howell’s state and prospects, but shut herself up in a fumigated apartment, where she promised to pray for a good result, and to await it. The maid was a hearty lass, who would sit up willingly, under Hester’s promise that she should be relieved in the morning. The girl’s fear was of not being able to satisfy her mistress, whom it was not so easy to nurse as it might have been, from her insisting on having everything arranged precisely as it was in her poor dear Howell’s last illness. As Miss Miskin had refused to enter the chamber, Hester had been obliged to search a chest of drawers for Mr Howell’s last dressing-gown, which Miss Miskin had promised should be mended and aired, and ready for wear by the morning.
“Margaret!” cried Hester, as her sister was lighting her candle. The exclamation made Edward turn round, and brought back Morris into the parlour after saying ‘Good-night.’ “Margaret! your ring?”
There was as much joy as shame in Margaret’s crimson blush. She let her sister examine the turquoise, and said:
“Yes, this is the boon of to-day.”
“Edward’s hundred pounds has come,” said Hester: “but that is nothing to this.”
Margaret’s eyes thanked her. She just explained that poor Platt had been the thief, and had restored it to her before he died, and that she could get no explanation, no tidings of Hester’s watch; and she was gone.
“Dr Levitt’s early stir about this ring prevented its being disposed of, I have no doubt,” said Edward. “If so, it is yet possible that we may recover your watch. I will speak to Dr Levitt in the morning.”
“Dear Margaret!” said Hester. “She is now drinking in the hue of that turquoise, and blessing it for being unchanged. She regards this recovery of it as a good omen, I see; and far be it from us to mock at such a superstition!”
As usual, when she was upon this subject, Hester looked up into her husband’s face: and as usual, when she spoke on this subject, he made no reply.