North and South Page #26

North and South is a social novel published in 1854 by English writer Elizabeth Gaskell. With Wives and Daughters and Cranford, it is one of her best-known novels and was adapted for television three times. The 2004 version renewed interest in the novel and attracted a wider readership.

• Novel

								

her compelled to do for her father, who took her little finger and thumb
in his masculine hand, and made them serve as sugar-tongues. Mr.
Thornton saw her beautiful eyes lifted to her father, full of light,
half-laughter, and half-love, as this bit of pantomime went on between
the two, unobserved as they fancied, by any. Margaret’s head still
ached, as the paleness of her complexion, and her silence might have
testified; but she was resolved to throw herself into the breach, if
there was any long untoward pause, rather than that her father’s friend,
pupil, and guest should have cause to think himself in any way
neglected. But the conversation went on; and Margaret drew into a
corner, near her mother, with her work, after the tea-things were taken
away; and felt that she might let her thoughts roam, without fear of
being suddenly wanted to fill up a gap.

Mr. Thornton and Mr. Hale were both absorbed in the continuation of some
object which had been started at their last meeting. Margaret was
recalled to a sense of the present by some trivial, low-spoken remark of
her mother’s; and on suddenly looking up from her work, her eye was
caught by the difference of outward appearance between her father and
Mr. Thornton, as betokening such distinctly opposite natures. Her father
was of slight figure, which made him appear taller than he really was,
when not contrasted, as at this time, with the tall, massive frame of
another. The lines in her father’s face were soft and waving, with a
frequent undulating kind of trembling movement passing over them,
showing every fluctuating emotion; the eyelids were large and arched,
giving to the eyes a peculiar languid beauty which was almost feminine.
The brows were finely arched, but were by the very size of the dreamy
lids, raised to a considerable distance from the eyes. Now, in Mr.
Thornton’s face the straight brows fell low over the clear, deep-set,
earnest eyes, which without being unpleasantly sharp, seemed intent
enough to penetrate into the very heart and core of what he was looking
at. The lines in the face were few but firm, as if they were carved in
marble, and lay principally about the lips, which were slightly
compressed, over a set of teeth so faultless and beautiful as to give
the effect of sudden sunlight when the rare bright smile, coming in an
instant and shining out of the eyes, changed the whole look from the
severe and resolved expression of a man ready to do and dare everything,
to the keen, honest, enjoyment of the moment, which is seldom shown so
fearlessly and instantaneously except by children. Margaret liked this
smile; it was the first thing she had admired in this new friend of her
father’s; and the opposition of character, shown in all these details
of appearance she had just been noticing, seemed to explain the
attraction they evidently felt towards each other.

She rearranged her mother’s worsted-work, and fell back into her own
thoughts--as completely forgotten by Mr. Thornton as if she had not been
in the room, so thoroughly was he occupied in explaining to Mr. Hale the
magnificent power, yet delicate adjustment of the might of the
steam-hammer, which was recalling to Mr. Hale some of the wonderful
stories of subservient genii in the Arabian Nights--one moment
stretching from earth to sky and filling all the width of the horizon,
at the next obediently compressed into a vase small enough to be borne
in the hand of a child.

“And this imagination of power, this practical realisation of a gigantic
thought, came out of one man’s brain in our good town. That very man has
it within him to mount, step by step, on each wonder he achieves to
higher marvels still. And I’ll be bound to say, we have many among us
who, if he were gone, could spring into the breach and carry on the war
which compels, and shall compel, all material power to yield to
science.”

“Your boast reminds me of the old lines--

    ‘I’ve a hundred captains in England,’ he said,
      ‘As good as ever was he.’”

At her father’s quotation Margaret looked suddenly up, with inquiring
wonder in her eyes. How in the world had they got from the cog-wheels to
Chevy Chace?

“It is no boast of mine,” replied Mr. Thornton; “it is plain
matter-of-fact. I won’t deny that I am proud of belonging to a town--or
perhaps I should rather say a district--the necessities of which give
birth to such grandeur of conception. I would rather be a man toiling,
suffering--nay, failing and successless--here, than lead a dull
prosperous life in the old worn grooves of what you call more
aristocratic society down in the South, with their slow days of careless
ease. One may be clogged with honey and unable to rise and fly.”

“You are mistaken,” said Margaret, roused by the aspersion on her
beloved South to a fond vehemence of defence, that brought the colour
into her cheeks and the angry tears into her eyes. “You do not know
anything about the South. If there is less adventure or less progress--I
suppose I must not say less excitement--from the gambling spirit of
trade, which seems requisite to force out these wonderful inventions,
there is less suffering also. I see men here going about in the streets
who look ground down by some pinching sorrow or care--who are not only
sufferers but haters. Now, in the South we have our poor, but there is
not that terrible expression in their countenances of a sullen sense of
injustice which I see here. You do not know the South, Mr. Thornton,”
she concluded, collapsing into a determined silence, and angry with
herself for having said so much.

“And may I say you do not know the North?” asked he, with an
inexpressible gentleness in his tone, as he saw that he had really hurt
her. She continued resolutely silent; yearning after the lovely haunts
she had left far away in Hampshire, with a passionate longing that made
her feel her voice would be unsteady and trembling if she spoke.

“At any rate, Mr. Thornton,” said Mrs. Hale, “you will allow that Milton
is a much more smoky, dirty town than you will ever meet with in the
South.”

“I’m afraid I must give up its cleanliness,” said Mr. Thornton, with the
quick gleaming smile. “But we are bidden by parliament to burn our own
smoke; so I suppose, like good little children, we shall do as we are
bid--some time.”

“But I think you told me you had altered your chimneys so as to consume
the smoke, did you not?” asked Mr. Hale.

“Mine were altered by my own will, before parliament meddled with the
affair. It was an immediate outlay, but it repays me in the saving of
coal. I’m not sure whether I should have done it, if I had waited until
the act was passed. At any rate, I should have waited to be informed
against and fined, and given all the trouble in yielding that I legally
could. But all laws which depend for their enforcement upon informers
and fines, become inert from the odiousness of the machinery. I doubt if
there has been a chimney in Milton informed against for five years past,
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