She knit her restless forehead. ‘Then, despite, Aurora, that most radiant morning name, You’re dull as any London afternoon. I wanted time,—and gained it,—wanted you, And gain you! You will come and see the girl, In whose most prodigal eyes, the lineal pearl And pride of all your lofty race of Leighs Is destined to solution. Authorised By sight and knowledge, then, you’ll speak your mind, And prove to Romney, in your brilliant way, He’ll wrong the people and posterity (Say such a thing is bad for you and me, And you fail utterly,) by concluding thus An execrable marriage. Break it up, Disroot it—peradventure, presently, We’ll plant a better fortune in its place. Be good to me, Aurora, scorn me less For saying the thing I should not. Well I know I should not. I have kept, as others have, The iron rule of womanly reserve In lip and life, till now: I wept a week Before I came here.’—Ending, she was pale; The last words, haughtily said, were tremulous. This palfrey pranced in harness, arched her neck, And, only by the foam upon the bit, You saw she champed against it. Then I rose. ‘I love love! truth’s no cleaner thing than love. I comprehend a love so fiery hot It burns its natural veil of august shame, And stands sublimely in the nude, as chaste As Medicean Venus. But I know, A love that burns through veils, will burn through masks, And shrivel up treachery. What, love and lie! Nay—go to the opera! your love’s curable.’
‘I love and lie?’ she said—‘I lie, forsooth?’ And beat her taper foot upon the floor, And smiled against the shoe,—‘You’re hard, Miss Leigh, Unversed in current phrases.—Bowling-greens Of poets are fresher than the world’s highways; Forgive me that I rashly blew the dust Which dims our hedges even, in your eyes, And vexed you so much. You find, probably, No evil in this marriage,—rather good Of innocence, to pastoralise in song: You’ll give the bond your signature, perhaps, Beneath the lady’s mark,—indifferent That Romney chose a wife, could write her name, In witnessing he loved her.’ ‘Loved!’ I cried; ‘Who tells you that he wants a wife to love? He gets a horse to use, not love, I think: There’s work for wives as well,—and after, straw, When men are liberal. For myself, you err Supposing power in me to break this match. I could not do it, to save Romney’s life; And would not, to save mine.’ ‘You take it so,’ She said; ‘farewell then. Write your books in peace, As far as may be for some secret stir Now obvious to me,—for, most obviously, In coming hither I mistook the way.’ Whereat she touched my hand, and bent her head, And floated from me like a silent cloud That leaves the sense of thunder. I drew breath As hard as in a sick room. After all This woman breaks her social system up For love, so counted—the love possible To such,—and lilies are still lilies, pulled By smutty hands, though spotted from their white; And thus she is better, haply, of her kind, Than Romney Leigh, who lives by diagrams, And crosses out the spontaneities Of all his individual, personal life, With formal universals. As if man Were set upon a high stool at a desk, To keep God’s books for Him, in red and black, And feel by millions! What, if even God Were chiefly God by living out Himself To an individualism of the Infinite, Eterne, intense, profuse,—still throwing up The golden spray of multitudinous worlds In measure to the proclive weight and rush Of His inner nature,—the spontaneous love Still proof and outflow of spontaneous life? Then live, Aurora! Two hours afterward, Within St. Margaret’s Court I stood alone, Close-veiled. A sick child, from an ague-fit, Whose wasted right hand gambled ’gainst his left With an old brass button, in a blot of sun, Jeered weakly at me as I passed across The uneven pavement; while a woman, rouged Upon the angular cheek-bones, kerchief torn, Thin dangling locks, and flat lascivious mouth, Cursed at a window, both ways, in and out, By turns some bed-rid creature and myself,— ‘Lie still there, mother! liker the dead dog You’ll be to-morrow. What, we pick our way, Fine madam, with those damnable small feet! We cover up our face from doing good, As if it were our purse! What brings you here, My lady? is’t to find my gentleman Who visits his tame pigeon in the eaves? Our cholera catch you with its cramps and spasms, And tumble up your good clothes, veil and all, And turn your whiteness dead-blue.’ I looked up; I think I could have walked through hell that day, And never flinched. ‘The dear Christ comfort you,’ I said, ‘you must have been most miserable To be so cruel,’—and I emptied out My purse upon the stones: when, as I had cast The last charm in the cauldron, the whole court Went boiling, bubbling up, from all its doors And windows, with a hideous wail of laughs And roar of oaths, and blows perhaps ... I passed Too quickly for distinguishing ... and pushed A little side-door hanging on a hinge, And plunged into the dark, and groped and climbed The long, steep, narrow stair ’twixt broken rail And mildewed wall that let the plaster drop To startle me in the blackness. Still, up, up! So high lived Romney’s bride. I paused at last Before a low door in the roof, and knocked; There came an answer like a hurried dove— ‘So soon? can that be Mister Leigh? so soon?’ And as I entered, an ineffable face Met mine upon the threshold. ‘Oh, not you, Not you!’ ... the dropping of the voice implied, ‘Then, if not you, for me not any one.’ I looked her in the eyes, and held her hands, And said, ‘I am his cousin,—Romney Leigh’s; And here I’m come to see my cousin too.’ She touched me with her face and with her voice, This daughter of the people. Such soft flowers, From such rough roots? the people, under there, Can sin so, curse so, look so, smell so ... faugh! Yet have such daughters? No wise beautiful Was Marian Erle. She was not white nor brown, But could look either, like a mist that changed According to being shone on more or less. The hair, too, ran its opulence of curls In doubt ’twixt dark and bright, nor left you clear To name the colour. Too much hair perhaps (I’ll name a fault here) for so small a head, Which seemed to droop on that side and on this, As a full-blown rose uneasy with its weight, Though not a breath should trouble it. Again, The dimple in the cheek had better gone With redder, fuller rounds: and somewhat large The mouth was, though the milky little teeth Dissolved it to so infantine a smile! For soon it smiled at me; the eyes smiled too, But ’twas as if remembering they had wept, And knowing they should, some day, weep again.
We talked. She told me all her story out, Which I’ll re-tell with fuller utterance, As coloured and confirmed in aftertimes By others, and herself too. Marian Erle Was born upon the ledge of Malvern Hill To eastward, in a hut, built up at night To evade the landlord’s eye, of mud and turf, Still liable, if once he looked that way, To being straight levelled, scattered by his foot, Like any other anthill. Born, I say; God sent her to his world, commissioned right, Her human testimonials fully signed, Not scant in soul—complete in lineaments; But others had to swindle her a place To wail in when she had come. No place for her, By man’s law! born an outlaw, was this babe. Her first cry in our strange and strangling air, When cast in spasms out by the shuddering womb, Was wrong against the social code,—forced wrong. What business had the baby to cry there?
I tell her story and grow passionate. She, Marian, did not tell it so, but used Meek words that made no wonder of herself For being so sad a creature. ‘Mister Leigh Considered truly that such things should change. They will, in heaven—but meantime, on the earth, There’s none can like a nettle as a pink, Except himself. We’re nettles, some of us, And give offence by the act of springing up; And, if we leave the damp side of the wall, The hoes, of course, are on us.’ So she said. Her father earned his life by random jobs Despised by steadier workmen—keeping swine On commons, picking hops, or hurrying on The harvest at wet seasons,—or, at need, Assisting the Welsh drovers, when a drove Of startled horses plunged into the mist Below the mountain-road, and sowed the wind With wandering neighings. In between the gaps Of such irregular work, he drank and slept, And cursed his wife because, the pence being out, She could not buy more drink. At which she turned, (The worm) and beat her baby in revenge For her own broken heart. There’s not a crime But takes its proper change out still in crime, If once rung on the counter of this world; Let sinners look to it. Yet the outcast child, For whom the very mother’s face forewent The mother’s special patience, lived and grew; Learnt early to cry low, and walk alone, With that pathetic vacillating roll Of the infant body on the uncertain feet, (The earth being felt unstable ground so soon) At which most women’s arms unclose at once With irrepressive instinct. Thus, at three, This poor weaned kid would run off from the fold, This babe would steal off from the mother’s chair, And, creeping through the golden walls of gorse, Would find some keyhole toward the secresy Of Heaven’s high blue, and, nestling down, peer out— Oh, not to catch the angels at their games, She had never heard of angels,—but to gaze She knew not why, to see she knew not what, A-hungering outward from the barren earth For something like a joy. She liked, she said, To dazzle black her sight against the sky, For then, it seemed, some grand blind Love came down, And groped her out, and clasped her with a kiss; She learnt God that way, and was beat for it Whenever she went home,—yet came again, As surely as the trapped hare, getting free, Returns to his form. This grand blind Love, she said, This skyey father and mother both in one, Instructed her and civilised her more Than even the Sunday-school did afterward, To which a lady sent her to learn books And sit upon a long bench in a row With other children. Well, she laughed sometimes To see them laugh and laugh, and moil their texts; But ofter she was sorrowful with noise, And wondered if their mothers beat them hard, That ever they should laugh so. There was one She loved indeed,—Rose Bell, a seven years’ child, So pretty and clever, who read syllables When Marian was at letters; she would laugh At nothing—hold your finger up, she laughed, Then shook her curls down on her eyes and mouth To hide her make-mirth from the schoolmaster. And Rose’s pelting glee, as frank as rain On cherry-blossoms, brightened Marian too, To see another merry whom she loved. She whispered once (the children side by side, With mutual arms entwined about their necks) ‘Your mother lets you laugh so?’ ‘Ay,’ said Rose, ‘She lets me. She was dug into the ground Six years since, I being but a yearling wean. Such mothers let us play and lose our time, And never scold nor beat us! don’t you wish You had one like that?’ There, Marian breaking off Looked suddenly in my face. ‘Poor Rose,’ said she, ‘I heard her laugh last night in Oxford Street. I’d pour out half my blood to stop that laugh,— Poor Rose, poor Rose!’ said Marian. She resumed. It tried her, when she had learnt at Sunday-school What God was, what he wanted from us all, And how, in choosing sin, we vexed the Christ, To go straight home and hear her father pull The Name down on us from the thunder-shelf, Then drink away his soul into the dark From seeing judgment. Father, mother, home, Were God and heaven reversed to her: the more She knew of Right, the more she guessed their wrong; Her price paid down for knowledge, was to know The vileness of her kindred: through her heart, Her filial and tormented heart, henceforth, They struck their blows at virtue. Oh, ’tis hard To learn you have a father up in heaven By a gathering certain sense of being, on earth, Still worse than orphaned: ’tis too heavy a grief, The having to thank God for such a joy!
And so passed Marian’s life from year to year. Her parents took her with them when they tramped, Dodged lanes and heaths, frequented towns and fairs, And once went farther and saw Manchester, And once the sea, that blue end of the world, That fair scroll-finis of a wicked book,— And twice a prison,—back at intervals, Returning to the hills. Hills draw like heaven, And stronger sometimes, holding out their hands To pull you from the vile flats up to them; And though, perhaps, these strollers still strolled back, As sheep do, simply that they knew the way, They certainly felt bettered unawares Emerging from the social smut of towns To wipe their feet clean on the mountain-turf. In which long wanderings, Marian lived and learned, Endured and learned. The people on the roads Would stop and ask her how her eyes outgrew Her cheeks, and if she meant to lodge the birds In all that hair; and then they lifted her, The miller in his cart, a mile or twain, The butcher’s boy on horseback. Often, too, The pedlar stopped, and tapped her on the head With absolute forefinger, brown and ringed, And asked if peradventure she could read; And when she answered ‘ay,’ would toss her down Some stray odd volume from his heavy pack, A Thomson’s Seasons, mulcted of the Spring, Or half a play of Shakspeare’s, torn across: (She had to guess the bottom of a page By just the top sometimes,—as difficult, As, sitting on the moon, to guess the earth!) Or else a sheaf of leaves (for that small Ruth’s Small gleanings) torn out from the heart of books, From Churchyard Elegies and Edens Lost, From Burns, and Bunyan, Selkirk, and Tom Jones. ’Twas somewhat hard to keep the things distinct, And oft the jangling influence jarred the child Like looking at a sunset full of grace Through a pothouse window while the drunken oaths Went on behind her; but she weeded out Her book-leaves, threw away the leaves that hurt, (First tore them small, that none should find a word) And made a nosegay of the sweet and good To fold within her breast, and pore upon At broken moments of the noontide glare, When leave was given her to untie her cloak And rest upon the dusty roadside bank From the highway’s dust. Or oft, the journey done, Some city friend would lead her by the hand To hear a lecture at an institute: And thus she had grown, this Marian Erle of ours, To no book-learning,—she was ignorant Of authors,—not in earshot of the things Out-spoken o’er the heads of common men, By men who are uncommon,—but within The cadenced hum of such, and capable Of catching from the fringes of the wind Some fragmentary phrases, here and there, Of that fine music,—which, being carried in To her soul, had reproduced itself afresh In finer motions of the lips and lids.
She said, in speaking of it, ‘If a flower Were thrown you out of heaven at intervals, You’d soon attain to a trick of looking up,— And so with her.’ She counted me her years, Till I felt old; and then she counted me Her sorrowful pleasures, till I felt ashamed. She told me she was almost glad and calm On such and such a season; sate and sewed, With no one to break up her crystal thoughts; While rhymes from lovely poems span around Their ringing circles of ecstatic tune, Beneath the moistened finger of the Hour. Her parents called her a strange, sickly child, Not good for much, and given to sulk and stare, And smile into the hedges and the clouds, And tremble if one shook her from her fit By any blow, or word even. Out-door jobs Went ill with her; and household quiet work, She was not born to. Had they kept the north, They might have had their pennyworth out of her, Like other parents, in the factories; (Your children work for you, not you for them, Or else they better had been choked with air The first breath drawn;) but, in this tramping life, Was nothing to be done with such a child, But tramp and tramp. And yet she knitted hose Not ill, and was not dull at needlework; And all the country people gave her pence For darning stockings past their natural age, And patching petticoats from old to new, And other light work done for thrifty wives.
One day, said Marian,—the sun shone that day— Her mother had been badly beat, and felt The bruises sore about her wretched soul, (That must have been): she came in suddenly, And snatching, in a sort of breathless rage, Her daughter’s headgear comb, let down the hair Upon her, like a sudden waterfall, And drew her drenched and passive, by the arm, Outside the hut they lived in. When the child Could clear her blinded face from all that stream Of tresses ... there, a man stood, with beast’s eyes, That seemed as they would swallow her alive, Complete in body and spirit, hair and all,— With burning stertorous breath that hurt her cheek, He breathed so near. The mother held her tight, Saying hard between her teeth—‘Why wench, why wench, The squire speaks to you now—the squire’s too good; He means to set you up, and comfort us. Be mannerly at least.’ The child turned round, And looked up piteous in the mother’s face, (Be sure that mother’s death-bed will not want Another devil to damn, than such a look) ... ‘Oh, mother!’ then, with desperate glance to heaven, ‘God, free me from my mother,’ she shrieked out, ‘These mothers are too dreadful.’ And, with force As passionate as fear, she tore her hands Like lilies from the rocks, from hers and his, And sprang down, bounded headlong down the steep, Away from both—away, if possible, As far as God,—away! They yelled at her, As famished hounds at a hare. She heard them yell, She felt her name hiss after her from the hills, Like shot from guns. On, on. And now she had cast The voices off with the uplands. On. Mad fear Was running in her feet and killing the ground; The white roads curled as if she burnt them up, The green fields melted, wayside trees fell back To make room for her. Then, her head grew vexed, Trees, fields, turned on her, and ran after her; She heard the quick pants of the hills behind, Their keen air pricked her neck. She had lost her feet, Could run no more, yet, somehow, went as fast,— The horizon, red ’twixt steeples in the east, So sucked her forward, forward, while her heart Kept swelling, swelling, till it swelled so big It seemed to fill her body; then it burst, And overflowed the world and swamped the light, ‘And now I am dead and safe,’ thought Marian Erle— She had dropped, she had fainted. When the sense returned, The night had passed—not life’s night. She was ’ware Of heavy tumbling motions, creaking wheels, The driver shouting to the lazy team That swung their rankling bells against her brain; While, through the waggon’s coverture and chinks, The cruel yellow morning pecked at her Alive or dead, upon the straw inside,— At which her soul ached back into the dark And prayed, ‘no more of that.’ A waggoner Had found her in a ditch beneath the moon, As white as moonshine, save for the oozing blood. At first he thought her dead; but when he had wiped The mouth and heard it sigh, he raised her up, And laid her in his waggon in the straw, And so conveyed her to the distant town To which his business called himself, and left That heap of misery at the hospital.
She stirred;—the place seemed new and strange as death. The white strait bed, with others strait and white, Like graves dug side by side, at measured lengths, And quiet people walking in and out With wonderful low voices and soft steps, And apparitional equal care for each, Astonished her with order, silence, law: And when a gentle hand held out a cup, She took it, as you do at sacrament, Half awed, half melted,—not being used, indeed, To so much love as makes the form of love And courtesy of manners. Delicate drinks And rare white bread, to which some dying eyes Were turned in observation. O my God, How sick we must be, ere we make men just! I think it frets the saints in heaven to see How many desolate creatures on the earth Have learnt the simple dues of fellowship And social comfort, in a hospital, As Marian did. She lay there, stunned, half tranced, And wished, at intervals of growing sense, She might be sicker yet, if sickness made The world so marvellous kind, the air so hushed, And all her wake-time quiet as a sleep; For now she understood, (as such things were) How sickness ended very oft in heaven, Among the unspoken raptures. Yet more sick, And surelier happy. Then she dropped her lids, And, folding up her hands as flowers at night, Would lose no moment of the blessed time.
She lay and seethed in fever many weeks, But youth was strong and overcame the test; Revolted soul and flesh were reconciled And fetched back to the necessary day And daylight duties. She could creep about The long bare rooms, and stare out drearily From any narrow window on the street, Till some one, who had nursed her as a friend, Said coldly to her, as an enemy, ‘She had leave to go next week, being well enough,’ While only her heart ached. ‘Go next week,’ thought she, ‘Next week! how would it be with her next week, Let out into that terrible street alone Among the pushing people, ... to go ... where?’
One day, the last before the dreaded last, Among the convalescents, like herself Prepared to go next morning, she sate dumb, And heard half absently the women talk, How one was famished for her baby’s cheeks— ‘The little wretch would know her! a year old, And lively, like his father!’ one was keen To get to work, and fill some clamorous mouths; And one was tender for her dear goodman Who had missed her sorely,—and one, querulous ... ‘Would pay those scandalous neighbours who had dared To talk about her as already dead,’— And one was proud ... ‘and if her sweetheart Luke Had left her for a ruddier face than hers, (The gossip would be seen through at a glance) Sweet riddance of such sweethearts—let him hang! ’Twere good to have been as sick for such an end.’