More Pages from a Journal

by William Hale White

I shall come back this week; your aunt wants you here, and a change will do you good.

Blackdeep, 10th April 1839.

I am glad you went to Ely, for yesterday the parson called to see you. He had received a letter from Mr. Craggs, and considered it his duty as a Christian minister to endeavour to bring about a reconciliation. I told him at once he might spare himself the pains, for they would be useless. He replied that I ought to think of the example. Well, at that I broke out. I asked him whether that slut of a Quimby girl wasn’t a worse example, who at five-and-twenty had married Horrocks, the hoary old wretch, for his money, and leads him a dog’s life? Had he ever warned either of them? They go to church regular. I was very free, and I said I thought it was a bright example that a woman should have given up a fine house and money in London because there was no love with them, and should have come back to her mother at Blackdeep. Besides, I added, why should my Esther suffer a living death for years for the sake of the folk hereabouts? They weren’t worth it. She was too precious for that. ‘Oh!’ but he went on again, ‘they have souls to be saved. Husbands and wives may be led to imagine there is no harm in separating, and may yield to the temptations of unlawful love.’ This made me very hot, and I gave it him back sharp that a sinner could find in the Bible itself an excuse for his sin.

He said no more except that it would be a nice scandal for the Dissenters, and that he trusted God would bring me into a better frame of mind. He then went away. His reasoning went in at one ear and out at the other. Parsons are bound to preach by rule. It is all general: it doesn’t fit the ins and outs.

Blackdeep, 1st May 1839.

You had better stop at Ely as long as you can. Everybody is gossiping, for parson has told the story as he heard it from your husband. It is worse for Jim than for me, as he goes about among people here, and although they daren’t say anything to him about you, there is no mistake as to what they think. Mrs. Horrocks inquired after me, and said she was sorry to hear of my trouble. Jim told her I was quite well, and that the two cows were now all right. He wouldn’t let her see he knew what she meant.

Last night, Jim, who has been talking for a twelvemonth past about going to his cousin in America, asked me whether I would not be willing to leave. I have always set my face against it. To turn my back on the old house and the Fen, to begin again at my time of life in a new strange world would be the death of me. More than ever now am I determined to end my days here. They’d say at once we had fled. No, here we’ll bide and face it out.

They did not fly. Years went on, and to the astonishment of their neighbours—perhaps they were a little sorry—there was no sign that Esther had a lover. Mrs. Horrocks’s eyes were feline, but she was obliged to admit she was at fault. Jim married, and an agreeable opportunity was presented for the expression of amazement that his wife’s father and mother felt safe in allowing their child to enter such a family—but then she came from Norwich. The majority of the poor in Blackdeep Fen sided with the Suttons, and here and there a pagan farmer boldly declared that old Mrs. Sutton and her daughter were of a right good sort, and that there was not a straightforrarder man than Jim in Ely market. But to respectable Blackdeep society the Suttons remained a vexatious knot which it could not unpick and lay straight. Nobody, as Mrs. Horrocks observed, knew how to take them. Mrs. Craggs wore her wedding-ring, and when she was in Mrs. Jarvis’s shop looked her straight in the face and asked for what she wanted as if she were the parson’s wife. But that, according to Mrs. Horrocks, just showed her impudence. ‘What a time that poor Craggs in London must have had of it:’ (Mr. Horrocks was not present). ‘Lord! how I do pity the man.’ ‘And yet,’ added Mrs. Jarvis, ‘and yet, you might eat your dinner off Mrs. Craggs’s floor. I call it hers, for she cleans it.’ Clearly the living-room ought to have been a pigsty. It was particularly annoying that, although Mrs. Sutton and her family by absence from church had become infidels, they did not go to the devil openly as they ought to do, and thereby relieve Blackdeep of that pain and even hatred which are begotten by an obstinate exception to what would otherwise be a general law. Parson often preached that everybody was either a sheep or a goat. The Suttons were not sheep—that was certain; and yet it was difficult to classify them as ordinary Blackdeep goats, creatures with horns. Mrs. Jarvis had heard that there was a peculiar breed of goats with sheep’s wool and without horns. ‘Esther Craggs,’ she maintained, ‘will one day show us what she’s after; mark my word, you’ll see. If that brazen face means nothing, then I’m stone-blind.’

After Jim’s marriage Esther continued to manage the house and the dairy, leaving the cooking to her sister-in-law and the needlework to her mother. Soon after five o’clock on a bright summer morning the labourer going to his work heard the unbarring of Mrs. Sutton’s shutters and the withdrawal of bolts. The casement windows and the door were then flung open, and Esther generally came into the doorway and for a few minutes faced the sun. She did not shut herself up. She walked the village like a queen, and no Fen farmer or squireling ventured to jest with her. Mrs. Jarvis could not be brought to admit her stone-blindness and clung to the theory of somebody in London; but as Esther never went to London, and nobody from London came to her, and the postmistress swore no letters passed between London and the Sutton family, Mrs. Jarvis became a little distrusted, although some of her acquaintances believed her predictions with greater firmness as they remained unfulfilled. ‘I don’t care what you may say; don’t tell me,’ was her reply to sceptical objections, and it carried great weight.

Esther died of the Blackdeep fever in the fifth year after she came home. As soon as he received the news of her death Mr. Craggs married Mrs. Perkins, who had been twelve months a widow, was admitted into partnership, and is now one of the most respected men in the City.