CHAPTER XIII
GIVEN BACK
"The time draws near the birth of CHRIST:
The moon is hid; the night is still;
The Christmas bells from hill to hill
Answer each other in the mist."
—TENNYSON.
A hard winter followed that beautiful summer, and Christmas Eve, when it came, was one of the coldest days that Markwood could remember. This is saying a good deal, for the cold of those valleys can be something which higher and drier regions do not know. The frost-fog that lingers there on a level with the river has the power of piercing to the marrow of one's bones; it is colder than the bitterest wind that ever blew.
Mary Alfrick thought she had never been so cold in her life as on that Christmas Eve, when she came home for her first holiday after fifteen months of steady work at the Orphanage. She had had a long cross-country journey. Her father met her with his trap at the station; he seemed glad to see her in his rough way, and the welcome, careless as it was, made Mary feel that she had been right in coming. She had not been very willing to come; there was not much love at home for her; the associations of Markwood could only be painful; and yet sometimes she knew that her heart fairly ached with longing to see the place again from which she had banished herself so resolutely.
It was not so foggy on the high ground near the station, though the ground was as hard as iron, and the red sky foretold sharper frost still. Lower down, through Fiddler's Wood, they seemed truly to drive into the Arctic regions. A slight covering of snow lay on the road, enough to make driving bad and slippery; but the rime frost itself, the congealed white fog, which hung on everything, clothing every twig and bush in a thick coat of snowy crystals, had almost a more wintry effect than actual snow. Among the trees the mist hovered; it lay like a cold white sea in the valley, catching their breath as they descended into it and drove through the village, where in the advancing dusk nobody was to be seen, except a few boys sliding on the side of the road. Farmer Alfrick shouted at them angrily, and growled a good deal about broken legs.
They did not pass the blacksmith's shop, which was further on towards the church, and they could not see along the street through the fog. It was a little better when they turned into their own lane and climbed the short hill to the farm. Here Mary's welcome was cordial enough; her stepmother was pleased at her coming—"somebody to speak to at Christmas-time," as she said—and the children, especially Lizzie, were glad to see her. Mrs. Alfrick had honoured her guest by lighting a fire in the parlour, and here she and Mary sat in the evening after supper, when the children had been sent to bed and the father was smoking his pipe in the kitchen, which he found the warmest room of the two.
Before sitting down with her stepmother, Mary went to the house door and looked out. It was quite light, for a moon was shining above the fog. Invisible herself through white misty clouds, she yet filled them with her light, so that the mist itself seemed to shine. It was intensely cold, freezing hard. The church bells in the valley were ringing a Christmas peal—"Peace on earth, goodwill to men"—but their sweet and joyous voice only filled Mary with a deeper sadness. She almost wished now that she had not come. It was bad to be reminded of happy Christmas Days gone by. She closed the door and went quietly back into the parlour, where Mrs. Alfrick was poking the fire, and began unpacking some presents she had brought for the children.
"Well, Polly, I always did say you had a good heart," said Mrs. Alfrick. "My word, they will be pleased! There, sit down; you look perished. Your father said you were improved in looks, but for my part I don't see it. You're ever so thin, and to my mind you look years older than when you went away. I expect you've been harder worked than at home. I wish you could have settled your mind to have stayed—there was nothing to drive you away as I could ever see. You and John was a pair of idiots to make such a fuss about nothing, and now you see that child's gone, so you wouldn't have had much longer to wait."
Alfrick and his wife were both right about Mary. She looked thinner and older, though in fact her work had been easy. But in other ways she was improved; better dressed, gentler in manner and voice; an extremely nice, refined-looking girl, who did not now, with a wider knowledge of the world, think it necessary to hide her natural goodness under a rough, hard manner, or to "speak her mind," whether reasonable or not, on every occasion. Mary quite saw that she had herself, by her own obstinate temper, destroyed John's happiness and her own. Many a time she had said to herself, "I might have forgiven him when he asked me. I needn't have broke it all off like that." But regret seemed useless. John had his pride too, plenty of it; and even if they met again, a reconciliation hardly seemed possible; neither of them, now, could easily ask for it.
"Well—that's over, so don't let us talk about it," said Mary. "How's Mrs. Randal, though?"