Part 34 (1/2)
Sister Emme is gone to Lincoln again, of which I'm very glad for her own sake; for she is weak and our misfortunes daily impair her health. Sister Kezzy, too, will have a fair chance of going. I believe if sister Molly stays long at home it will be because she can't get away. It is likely in a few years' time our family may be lessened--perhaps none left but your poor sister Martha, for whose welfare few are concerned.
My father has been at Louth to see sister Wright, who by good providence was brought to bed two days before he got thither; which perhaps might prevent his saying what he otherwise might have said to her; for none that deserves the name of man would say anything to grieve a woman in a condition where grief is often present death to them. I fancy you have heard before now that her child is dead.
Of these letters but a faint echo reached Hetty as she lay in her bed at Louth--a few words transcribed by Charles from the one (No. 2) received by him, and sent with his affectionate inquiries. He added that Molly had also written to Jack, but to what effect he knew not; only that Jack, after reading it in his presence, had 'pish'd' and pocketed it in a huff.
She lay in a darkened room, with her own hopes at their darkest--or rather, their blankest. She had journeyed to Wroote, and from her humble lodging there had written an honest letter to her father, begging only to see her mother or Molly, promising to hold no communication with them if he refused. He had refused, in a curt note of three lines. From Wroote she returned to Louth, to face her trouble alone; for the preliminaries of selling the Lincoln business had brought old Wright's creditors about her husband's ears like a swarm of wasps. Until then they had waited with fair patience: but no sooner did he make a perfectly honest move towards paying them off in a lump than the whole swarm took panic and he was forced to decamp to London to escape the sponging-house. There Uncle Matthew came to the rescue, satisfied immediate claims, and guaranteed the rest.
But meanwhile Hetty's child--a boy, as she had prayed--was born, and died on the third day after birth.
She hardly dared to think of it--of the poor mite and the hopes she had built on him. As she had told Charles, she was sorry, but not penitent--at least not wholly penitent. Once she had been wholly penitent: but the tyrannous compulsion of her marriage had eased or deadened her sense of responsibility. Henceforth she had no duty but to make the best of it. So she told herself, and had conscientiously striven to make the best of it. She had even succeeded, up to a point; by shutting herself within doors and busily, incessantly, spinning a life of illusion. She was a penitent--a woman in a book-- redeeming her past by good conduct. The worst of it was that her husband declined to help the cheat. He was proud of her, honest man!
and had no fancy at all for the _role_ a.s.signed to him, of ”all for love, and the world well lost.” That she refused to be shown off he set down to sulkiness; and went off of an evening to taverns and returned fuddled. She studied, above all things, to make home bright for him, and ever met him with a smile: and this was good enough, yet not (as it slowly grew clear to her) precisely what he wanted.
So she had been driven to build fresh hopes on the unborn babe.
_He_ would make all the difference: would win his father back, or at worst give her own life a new foundation for hope. Her son should be a gentleman: she would deny herself and toil and live for him.
And now G.o.d had resumed His gift, and her life was blank indeed.
She might have another--and another might die. She had never supposed that this one could die, and its death gave her a dreadful feeling of insecurity--as if no child of hers could ever be reared.
What then? The prospect of pardon by continued good conduct seemed to her shadowy indeed. Something more was needed. Yes, penitence was needed; _real_ penitence: urgently, she felt the need of it and yet for the life of her could not desire it as she knew it ought to be desired.
She turned from the thought and let her mind dwell on the sentence or two quoted by Charles from Molly's letter. They were peevish sentences, and she did not doubt that the letter to John had been yet more peevish. Life had taught her what some never learn, that folks are not to be divided summarily into good and bad, right and wrong, pleasant and unpleasant. Men and women are not always refined or enn.o.bled by unmerited suffering. They are soured often, sometimes coa.r.s.ened. Hetty loved Molly far better than she loved John: but in a flash she saw that, not Molly only, but all her sisters who had suffered for John's advancement, would exact the price of their sacrifices in a consuming jealousy to be first in his favour.
She saw it so clearly that she pitied him for what would worry him incessantly and be met by him with a patient conscientiousness.
He would never understand--could never understand--on what these jealous sisters of his based their claims.
She saw it the more closely because she had no care of her own to stand first with him. She smiled and stretched out an arm along the pillow where the babe was not. Then suddenly she buried her face in it and wept, and being weak, pa.s.sed from tears into sleep.
CHAPTER III.
Molly's protest against the tyranny of home had long since pa.s.sed into a mere withholding of a.s.sent. She went about her daily task more dutifully than ever. She had always been the household drudge: but now she not only took over all the clerical work upon the _Dissertationes in Librum Jobi_ (for the Rector's right hand was shaken by palsy and the drawings occupied more and more of Johnny Whitelamb's time); she devised new schemes for eking out the family income. She bred poultry. With Johnny's help--he was famous with the spade--she added half an acre to the kitchen garden and planted it. The summer of 1727 proved one of the rainiest within men's memory, and floods covered the face of the country almost to the Parsonage door. ”I hope,” wrote the Rector to John on June 6th, ”I may be able to serve both my cures this summer, or if not, die pleasantly in my last dike.” On June 21st he could ”make s.h.i.+ft to get from Wroote to Epworth by boat.” Five days later he was twisted with rheumatism as a result of his Sunday journey to Epworth and back, ”being lamed with having my breeches too full of water, partly with a downpour from a thunder-shower, and partly from the wash over the boat. Yet I thank G.o.d I was able to preach here in the afternoon. I wish the rain had not reached us on this side Lincoln, but we have it so continual that we have scarce one bank left, and I can't possibly have one quarter of oats in all the levels; but thanks be to G.o.d the field-barley and rye are good. We can neither go afoot nor horseback to Epworth, but only by boat as far as Scawsit Bridge and then walk over the common, though I hope it will soon be better.”
That week the floods subsided, and on July 4th he wrote again: ”My hide is tough, and I think no carrion can kill me. I walked sixteen miles yesterday; and this morning, I thank G.o.d, I was not a penny worse. The occasion of this booted walk was to hire a room for myself at Epworth, which I think I have done. You will find your mother much altered. I believe what would kill a cat has almost killed her. I have observed of late little convulsions in her very frequently, which I don't like.”
This report frightened John, who wrote back urgently for further particulars. Mrs. Wesley had indeed fallen into a low state of health, occasioned partly (as Kezzy declared in a letter) by ”want of clothes or convenient meat,” partly by the miasma from the floods.
Ague was the commonest of maladies in the Isle of Axholme, and even the labourers fortified themselves against it with opium.
”Dear son John,” replied the Rector sardonically, ”we received last post your compliments of condolence and congratulation to your mother on the supposition of her near approaching demise, to which your sister Patty will by no means subscribe; for she says she is not so good a philosopher as you are, and that she can't spare her mother yet, if it please G.o.d, without great inconveniency. And indeed, though she has now and then some very sick fits, yet I hope the sight of you would revive her. However, when you come you will see a new face of things, my family being now pretty well colonised, and all perfect harmony--much happier, in no small straits, than perhaps we ever were in our greatest affluence.”
Molly, while she helped to cook the miserable meals which could not tempt her mother's appet.i.te, or looked abroad upon the desolate floods, saw with absolute clearness that this apparent peace was but the peace of exhaustion. Yet it was true that--thanks to her--the pinch of poverty had relaxed. The larger debts were paid: for some months she had not opened the door to a dunning tradesman.
The floods, as by a miracle, had spared her crops and she had a scheme for getting her surplus vegetables conveyed to Epworth market.
Already she had opened up a trade in fowls with a travelling dealer.
”Molly,” wrote her father, ”miraculously gets money even in Wroote, and has given the first fruit of her earning to her mother, lending her money, and presenting her with a new cloak of her own buying and making, for which G.o.d will bless her.”
Her secret dissent did not escape the Rector's eye, so alert for every sign of defiance: but in his expanding sense of success he let it pa.s.s. There was another, however, who divined it and watched it anxiously day after dreary day, for it answered a trouble in his own breast.
Johnny Whitelamb was now almost a man grown: but what really separated him from the Johnny Whitelamb of two years ago was no increase in stature or in knowledge. That which grew within him, and still grew, defying all efforts to kill it, was--a doubt. It had been born in him--no bigger then than a grain of mustard-seed--on the day when he sought Hetty to send her to the house where William Wright waited for her answer. Until then the Rector had been to him a divine man, in wisdom and goodness very little lower than the angels. And now--
He fought it hard, at first in terror, at length in cold desperation.
But still the doubt grew. And the worst was that Molly guessed his secret. He feared to meet her eye. It seemed to him that he and she were bound in some monstrous conspiracy. He spent hours in wrestling with it. At times he would rise from table on some stammered excuse, rush off to the fields and there, in a hidden corner, fall on his knees and pray, or even lie at full length, his face hidden in the gra.s.ses, his body writhing, his ungainly legs twisting and untwisting. And still the doubt grew.
Everything confirmed it. He saw the suffering by which mother and daughters were yoked. He noted the insufficient food, the thin clothing, the wan cheeks, the languid tread. He no longer took these for granted, but looked into their causes. And the Rector's blindness to them, or indifference, became a terror to him--a thing inhuman.