She could enjoy but little of what had been her favourite solace at that time. She had but few opportunities now for long solitary walks. She saw the autumn fading away, melting in rain and cold fog, without its having been made use of. It had been as unfavourable a season as the summer,—dreary, unproductive, disappointing in every way; but there had been days in the latter autumn when the sun had shown his dim face, when the dank hedges had looked fresh, and the fallen leaves in the wood-paths had rustled under the tread of the squirrel; and Margaret would on such days have liked to spend the whole morning in rambles by herself. But there were reasons why she should not. Almost before the chilliness of the coming season began to be felt, hardship was complained of throughout the country. The prices of provisions were inordinately high; and the evil consequences which, in the rural districts, follow upon a scarcity, began to make themselves felt. The poachers were daring beyond belief; and deep was the enmity between the large proprietors and the labourers around them. The oldest men and women, and children scarcely able to walk, were found trespassing day by day in all plantations, with bags, aprons, or pinafores, full of fir-cones, and wood snapped off from the trees, or plucked out of the hedges. There was no end to repairing the fences. There were unpleasant rumours, too, of its being no longer safe to walk singly in the more retired places. No such thing as highway robbery had ever before been heard of at Deerbrook, within the memory of the oldest inhabitant; the oldest of the inhabitants being Jim Bird, the man of a hundred years. But there was reason now for the caution. Mr Jones’s meat-cart had been stopped on the high-road, by two men who came out of the hedge, and helped themselves to what the cart contained. An ill-looking fellow had crossed the path of Mrs James and her young sister in the Verdon woods, evidently with the intention of stopping the ladies; but luckily the jingling of a timber-wain was heard below, and the man had retreated. Mr Grey had desired that the ladies of his family would not go further without his escort than a mile out and back again on the high-road. They were not to attempt the lanes. The Miss Andersons no longer came into Deerbrook in their pony-chaise; and Mrs Howell reported to all her customers that Lady Hunter never walked in her own grounds without a footman behind her, two dogs before her, and the game-keeper within hearing of a scream. Mr Walcot was advised to leave his watch and purse at home when he set forth to visit his country patients; and it did not comfort him much to perceive that his neighbours were always vigilant to note the hour and minute of his setting forth, and to learn the precise time when he might be looked for at home again. It was observed, that he was generally back half-an-hour sooner than he was expected, with a very red face, and his horse all in a foam.
In addition to these grounds of objection to solitary walks, Margaret had strong domestic reasons for denying herself the rambles she delighted in. As the months rolled on, poverty pressed closer and closer. When the rent was secured, and some of the comforts provided which Hester must have in her confinement, so little was left that it became necessary to limit the weekly expenses of the family to a sum small enough to require the nicest management, and the most strenuous domestic industry, to make it suffice. Hope would not pledge his credit while he saw so little prospect of redeeming it. His family were of one mind as to purchasing nothing which they were not certainly able to pay for. This being his principle, he made every effort to increase his funds. A guinea or two dropped in now and then, in return for contributions to medical periodicals. Money was due to him from some of his patients. To these he sent in his bills again, and even made personal application. From several he obtained promises; from two or three the amount of whose debt was very small, he got his money, disgraced by smiles of wonder and contempt. From the greater number he received nothing but excuses on account of the pressure of the times. The small sums he did recover were of a value which none of the three had ever imagined that money could be to them. Every little extra comfort thus obtained,—the dinner of meat once oftener in the week, the fire in the evening, the new gloves for Hope, when the old ones could no longer, by any mending, be made to look fit for him,—what a luxury it was! And all the more for being secretly enjoyed. No one out of the house had a suspicion how far their poverty had gone. Mr Grey had really been vexed at them for withdrawing from the book club; had attributed this instance of economy to the “enthusiasm” which was, in his eyes, the fault of the family; and never dreamed of their not dining on meat, vegetables, and pudding, with their glass of wine, every day. The Greys little knew what a blessing they were conferring on their cousins, when they insisted on having them for a long day once more before Hester’s confinement, and set them down to steaming soup, and a plentiful joint, and accompaniments without stint. The guests laughed, when they were at home again, over the new sort of pleasure they had felt, the delight at the sight of a good dinner, to which nothing was wanting but that Morris should have had her share. Morris, for her part, had been very happy at home. She had put aside for her mistress’s luncheon next day, the broth which she had been told was for her, and had feasted on potatoes and water, and the idea of the good dinner her young ladies were to enjoy. While their affairs were in this state, it was a great luxury in the family to have any unusual comfort which betokened that Hope had been successful in some of his errands,—had received a fee, or recovered the amount of a bill. One day, Morris brought in a goose and giblets, which had been bought and paid for by Mr Hope, the messenger said. Another morning, came a sack of apples, from the orchard of a country patient who was willing to pay in kind. At another time Edward emptied his pockets of knitted worsted stockings and mittens, the handiwork of a farmer’s dame, who was flattered by his taking the produce of her evening industry instead of money, which she could not well spare at the present season. There was more mirth, more real gladness in the house, on the arrival of windfalls like these, than if Hope had daily exhibited a purse full of gold. There was no sting in their poverty; no adventitious misery belonging to it. They suffered its genuine force, and that was all.
What is Poverty? Not destitution, but poverty? It has many shapes,—aspects almost as various as the minds and circumstances of those whom it visits. It is famine to the savage in the wilds; it is hardship to the labourer in the cottage; it is disgrace to the proud; and to the miser despair. It is a spectre which “with dread of change perplexes” him who lives at ease. Such are its aspects: but what is it? It is a deficiency of the comforts of life,—a deficiency present and to come. It involves many other things; but this is what it is. Is it then worth all the apprehension and grief it occasions? Is it an adequate cause for the gloom of the merchant, the discontent of the artisan, the foreboding sighs of the mother, the ghastly dreams which haunt the avaricious, the conscious debasement of the subservient, the humiliation of the proud? These are severe sufferings; are they authorised by the nature of poverty? Certainly not, if poverty induced no adventitious evils, involved nothing but a deficiency of the comforts of life, leaving life itself unimpaired. “The life is more than food, and the body than raiment;” and the untimely extinction of the life itself would not be worth the pangs which apprehended poverty excites. But poverty involves woes which, in their sum, are far greater than itself. To a multitude it is the loss of a pursuit which they have yet to learn will be certainly supplied. For such, alleviation or compensation is in store, in the rising up of objects new, and the creation of fresh hopes. The impoverished merchant, who may no longer look out for his argosies, may yet be in glee when he finds it “a rare dropping morning for the early colewort.” To another multitude, poverty involves loss of rank,—a letting down among strangers whose manners are ungenial, and their thoughts unfamiliar. For these there may be solace in retirement, or the evil may fall short of its threats. The reduced gentlewoman may live in patient solitude, or may grow into sympathy with her neighbours, by raising some of them up to herself, and by warming her heart at the great central fire of Humanity, which burns on under the crust of manners as rough as the storms of the tropics, or as frigid as polar snows. The avaricious are out of the pale of peace already, and at all events. Poverty is most seriously an evil to sons and daughters, who see their parents stripped of comfort, at an age when comfort is almost one with life itself: and to parents who watch the narrowing of the capacities of their children by the pressure of poverty,—the impairing of their promise, the blotting out of their prospects. To such mourning children there is little comfort, but in contemplating the easier life which lies behind, and (it may be hoped) the happier one which stretches before their parents, on the other side the postern of life. If there is sunshine on the two grand reaches of their path, the shadow which lies in the midst is necessarily but a temporary gloom. To grieving parents it should be a consoling truth, that as the life is more than food, so is the soul more than instruction and opportunity, and such accomplishments as man can administer: that as the fowls are fed and the lilies clothed by Him whose hand made the air musical with the one, and dressed the fields with the other, so is the human spirit nourished and adorned by airs from heaven, which blow over the whole earth, and light from the skies, which no hand is permitted to intercept. Parents know not but that Providence may be substituting the noblest education for the misteaching of intermediate guardians. It may possibly be so; but if not, still there is appointed to every human being much training, many privileges, which capricious fortune can neither give nor take away. The father may sigh to see his boy condemned to the toil of the loom, or the gossip and drudgery of the shop, when he would fain have beheld him the ornament of a university; but he knows not whether a more simple integrity, a loftier disinterestedness, may not come out of the humbler discipline than the higher privilege. The mother’s eyes may swim as she hears her little daughter sing her baby brother to sleep on the cottage threshold,—her eyes may swim at the thought how those wild and moving tones might have been exalted by art. Such art would have been in itself a good; but would this child then have been, as now, about her Father’s business, which, in ministering to one of his little ones, she is as surely as the archangel who suspends new systems of worlds in the furthest void? Her occupation is now earnest and holy; and what need the true mother wish for more?
What is poverty to those who are not thus set in families? What is it to the solitary, or to the husband and wife who have faith in each other’s strength? If they have the higher faith which usually originates mutual trust, mere poverty is scarcely worth a passing fear. If they have plucked out the stings of pride and selfishness, and purified their vision by faith, what is there to dread? What is their case? They have life, without certainty how it is to be nourished. They do without certainty, like “the young ravens which cry,” and work for and enjoy the subsistence of the day, leaving the morrow to take care of what concerns it. If living in the dreariest abodes of a town, the light from within shines in the dark place, and, dispelling the mists of worldly care, guides to the blessing of tending the sick, and sharing the food of to-day with the orphan, and him who has no help but in them. If the philosopher goes into such retreats with his lantern, there may he best find the generous and the brave. If, instead of the alleys of a city, they live under the open sky, they are yet lighter under their poverty. There, however blank the future may lie before them, they have to-day the living reality of lawns and woods, and flocks in “the green pasture and beside the still waters,” which silently remind them of the Shepherd, under whom they shall not want any real good thing. The quiet of the shady lane is theirs, and the beauty of the blossoming thorn above the pool. Delight steals through them with the scent of the violet, or the new mown hay. If they have hushed the voices of complaint and fear within them, there is the music of the merry lark for them, or of the leaping waterfall, or of a whole orchestra of harps, when the breeze sweeps through a grove of pines. While it is not for fortune to “rob them of free nature’s grace,” and while she leaves them life and strength of limb and soul, the certainty of a future, though they cannot see what, and the assurance of progression, though they cannot see how,—is poverty worth, for themselves, more than a passing doubt? Can it ever be worth the torment of fear, the bondage of subservience?—the compromise of free thought,—the sacrifice of free speech,—the bending of the erect head, the veiling of the open brow, the repression of the salient soul? If; instead of this, poverty should act as the liberator of the spirit, awakening it to trust in God and sympathy for man, and placing it aloft, fresh and free, like morning on the hill-top, to survey the expanse of life, and recognise its realities from beneath its mists, it should be greeted with that holy joy before which all sorrow and sighing flee away.
Their poverty, which had never afflicted them very grievously, was almost lost sight of by the corner-house family, when Hester’s infant was born. They were all happy and satisfied then, though there were people in Deerbrook who found fault with their arrangements, and were extremely scandalised when it was found that no nurse had arrived from Blickley, and that Morris took the charge of her mistress upon herself. The Greys pronounced by their own fireside that it was a strange fancy—carrying an affection for an old servant to a rather romantic extreme—that it was a fresh instance of the “enthusiasm” which adversity had not yet moderated in their cousins, as might have been wished. Out-of-doors, however, Sophia vaunted the attachment of Morris to her young mistress—an attachment so strong, as that she would have been really hurt if any one else had been allowed to sit up with Hester; and indeed no one could have filled her place half so much to the satisfaction of the family—Morris had had so much experience, and was as fond of her charge as a mother could be. No one knew what a treasure her cousins had in Morris. All of which was true in its separate particulars, though altogether it did not constitute the reason why Hester had no nurse from Buckley.
They were happy and satisfied. Yes, even Margaret. This infant opened up a spring of consolation in her heart, which she could not have believed existed there. On this child she could pour out some of her repressed affections, and on him did she rest her baffled hopes. He beguiled her into the future, from which she had hitherto recoiled. That helpless, unconscious little creature, cradled on her arm, and knowing nothing of its resting-place, was more powerful than sister, brother, or friend—than self-interest, philosophy, or religion, in luring her imagination onward into future years of honour and peace. Holy and sweet was the calm of her mind, as, forgetting herself and her griefs, she watched the first efforts of this infant to acquaint himself with his own powers, and with the world about him; when she smiled at the ungainly stretching of the little limbs, and the unpractised movement of his eyes seeking the light. Holy and sweet were the tears which swelled into her eyes when she saw him at his mother’s breast, and could not but gaze at the fresh and divine beauty now mantling on that mother’s face, amidst the joy of this new relation. It was a delicious moment when Hope came in, the first day that Hester sat by the fireside, when he stopped short for a brief instant, as if arrested by the beauty of what he saw; and then glanced towards Margaret for sympathy. It was a delicious moment to her—the moment of that full, free, unembarrassed glance, which she had scarcely met since the first days of their acquaintance.
It was a pleasure to them all to see Hester well provided with luxuries. Maria, knowing that her surgeon would not accept money from her, took this opportunity of sending in wine. Oh, the pleasure of finding the neglected corkscrew, and making Morris take a glass with them! The Greys brought game, and Hester’s little table was well served every day. With what zeal did Margaret apply herself, under Morris’s teaching, to cook Hester’s choice little dinners! Yes, to cook them. Margaret was learning all Morris’s arts from her; for, of two troubles which somewhat disturbed this season of comfort, one was that it appeared too certain that Morris must go, as Susan and Charles had gone before her. No one had expressly declared this: it was left undiscussed, apparently by common consent, till it should be ascertained that baby was healthy and Hester getting strong; but the thought was in the minds of them all, and their plans involved preparation for this.
The other trouble was, that with peace and comfort, some slight, very slight symptoms recurred of Hester’s propensity to self-torment. It could not be otherwise. The wonder was, that for weeks and months she had been relieved from her old enemy to the extent she had been. The reverence with which her husband and sister regarded the temper in which she had borne unbounded provocation and most unmerited adversity, sometimes beguiled them into a hope that her troubles from within were over for ever; but a little reflection, and some slight experience, taught them that this was unreasonable. They remembered that the infirmity of a lifetime was not to be wholly cured in half-a-year; and that they must expect some recurrence of her old malady at times when there was no immediate appeal to her magnanimity, and no present cause for anxiety for those in whom she forgot herself.
The first time that Hester was in the drawing-room for the whole day, Morris was laying the cloth for dinner, and Margaret was walking up and down the room with the baby on her arm, when Hope came in. Hester forgot everybody and everything else when her husband appeared—a fact which Morris’s benevolence was never weary of noting and commenting upon to herself. She often wondered if ever lady loved her husband as her young mistress did; and she smiled to herself to see the welcome that beamed upon Hester’s whole face when Hope came to take his seat beside her on the sofa. This was in her mind to-day, when her master presently said:
“Where is my boy? I have not seen him for hours. Why do you put him out of his father’s way? Oh, Margaret has him! Come, Margaret, yield him up. You can have him all the hours that I am away. You do not grudge him to me, do you?”