There was no excitement about her, no feverish exaltation that would burn itself cold before twenty-four hours were over—only the dead dreariness of heartbreak, the tenacious resolution of despair. She neither wept nor wrung her hands, but quiet, pale, rigid, she told her terrible story in the low and level tones in which a Greek Fate might have spoken, as sad and as immutable. She had sinned, and now had made such atonement as she could by confession—to her lover to save him from pollution, to her father to cancel his obligations to her, to her friend to be helped in her lifelong penance. This done, she had strengthened herself to bear all that might come to her with that resignation of remorse which demands no rights and inherits no joys. She was not one of those emotional half-hearted creatures who resolve one day, break down the next, and drift always. For good and evil alike she had the power to hold where she had gripped and to maintain what she had undertaken; and even her life at Windy Brow did not shake her.
And that life might well have shaken both a stronger mind and even a more resolute will than hers.
A square stone house of eight rooms, set on a bleak fell-side where the sun never shone, where no fruits ripened, no flowers bloomed and no trees grew, save here and there a dwarfed and twisted thorn covered with pale gray lichen and bent by the wind into painful deformity of growth—a house which had no garden, only a strip of rank, coarse grass before the windows, with a potato-patch and kail-yard to the side; where was no adornment within or without, no beauty of color, no softness of line, merely a rugged, lonesome, square stone tent set up on a mountain-spur, as it would seem for the express reception of tortured penitents not seeking to soften sorrow,—this was Windy Brow, the patrimony of the Gryces, where Keziah, Emmanuel's eldest sister, lived and had lived these sixty years and more.
The house stood alone. Monk Grange, the hamlet to which it geographically belonged—a place as bleak and bare as itself, and which seemed to have been flung against the fell-foot as if a brick-layer's hodman had pitched the hovels at haphazard anyhow—was two good miles away, and the market-town, to be got at only by crossing a dangerous moor, was nine miles off—as far as Sherrington from North Aston.
The few poor dwellers in Monk Grange had little to do with the market-town. They lived mostly on what they managed to raise and rear among themselves—holding braxy mutton good enough for feast-days, and oatmeal porridge all the year round the finest food for men and bairns alike. As for the gudewives' household necessaries, they were got by the carrier who passed once a fortnight on their road; and for the rest, if aught was wanting more than that which they had, they did without, and, according to the local saying, "want was t' master."
Society of a cultured kind there was none. The clergyman was an old man little if it all superior to the flock to which he ministered. He was a St. Bees man, the son of a handloom weaver, speaking broad Cumberland and hopelessly "dished" by a hard word in the Bible. He was fond of his glass, and was to be found every day of his life from three to nine at the Blucher, smoking a clay pipe and drinking rum and milk. He had never married, but he was by no means an ascetic in his morals, as more than one buxom wench in his parish had proved; and in all respects he was an anachronism, the like of which is rare now among the fells and dales, though at one time it was the normal type for the clergy of the remoter North Country districts.
This old sinner—Priest Wilson as he was called—and Miss Gryce of Windy Brow represented the wealth and intellect of a place which was at the back of everything, out of the highway of life and untouched by the progress of history or science. And the one was not very much superior to the other save in moral cleanliness; which, however, counts for something.
If North Aston had said with a sniff that Mr. Gryce was not thoroughbred, what would have been its verdict on Sister Keziah? He at least had rubbed off some of the native fell-side mould by rolling about foreign parts, gathering experience if not moss, and becoming rich in knowledge if not in guineas; but Keziah, who had spent the last twenty years of her life in close attendance on a paralytic old mother, had stiffened as she stood, and the local mould encrusting her was very thick. Nevertheless, she too had a good heart if a rough hand, and, though eccentric almost to insanity, as one so often finds with people living out of the line and influence of public opinion, yet was as sound at the core as she was rude and odd in the husk.
She was a small woman, lean, wrinkled, and with a curious mixture of primness and slovenliness in her dress. She wore a false front, which she called a topknot, the small, crimped, deep-brown mohair curls of which were bound about her forehead with a bit of black velvet ribbon, while gray hairs straggled from underneath to make the patent sham more transparent still; and over her topknot she wore a rusty black cap that enclosed the keen monkeyish face like a ruff. Her every-day gown was one of coarse brown camlet, any number of years old, darned and patched till it was like a Joseph's coat; and the Rob Roy tartan shawl which she pinned across her bosom hid a state of dilapidation which even she did not care should be seen. She wore a black stuff apron full of fine tones from fruit-stains and fire-scorchings; and she took snuff.
She was reputed to be worth a mort of money, and she had saved a goodly sum. It would have been more had she had the courage to invest it; but she had a profound distrust of all financial speculations—had not Emmanuel lost his share by playing at knucklebones with it in the City?—and she was not the fool to follow my leader into the mire. For her part, she put her trust in teapots and stockings, with richer hoards wrapped in rags and sewn up in the mattress, and here a few odd pounds under the rice and there a few hidden in the coffee. That was her idea of a banking account, and she held it to be the best there was.