North and South Page #28

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

								

even considered a pretty fair classic in those days, though my Latin and
Greek have slipt away from me since. But I ask you, what preparation
were they for such a life as I had to lead? None at all. Utterly none at
all. On the point of education, any man who can read and write starts
fair with me in the amount of really useful knowledge that I had at that
time.”

“Well! I don’t agree with you. But there I am perhaps somewhat of a
pedant. Did not the recollection of the heroic simplicity of the Homeric
life nerve you up?”

“Not one bit!” exclaimed Mr. Thornton, laughing. “I was too busy to
think about any dead people, with the living pressing alongside of me,
neck to neck, in the struggle for bread. Now that I have my mother safe
in the quiet peace that becomes her age, and duly rewards her former
exertions, I can turn to all that old narration and thoroughly enjoy
it.”

“I dare say, my remark came from the professional feeling of there being
nothing like leather,” replied Mr. Hale.

When Mr. Thornton rose up to go away, after shaking hands with Mr. and
Mrs. Hale, he made an advance to Margaret to wish her good-bye in a
similar manner. It was the frank familiar custom of the place; but
Margaret was not prepared for it. She simply bowed her farewell;
although the instant she saw the hand, half put out, quickly drawn back,
she was sorry she had not been aware of the intention. Mr. Thornton,
however, knew nothing of her sorrow, and, drawing himself up to his full
height, walked off, muttering as he left the house--

“A more proud, disagreeable girl I never saw. Even her great beauty is
blotted out of one’s memory by her scornful ways.”




CHAPTER XI.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS.

    “There’s iron, they say, in all our blood,
    And a grain or two perhaps is good;
    But his, he makes me harshly feel,
    Has got a little too much of steel.”
              ANON.


“Margaret!” said Mr. Hale as he returned from showing his guest
downstairs; “I could not help watching your face with some anxiety, when
Mr. Thornton made his confession of having been a shop-boy. I knew it
all along from Mr. Bell; so I was aware of what was coming; but I half
expected to see you get up and leave the room.”

“Oh, papa! you don’t mean that you thought me so silly? I really liked
that account of himself better than anything else he said. Everything
else revolted me, from its hardness; but he spoke about himself so
simply--with so little of the pretence that makes the vulgarity of
shop-people, and with such tender respect for his mother, that I was
less likely to leave the room then than when he was boasting about
Milton, as if there was not such another place in the world; or quietly
professing to despise people for careless, wasteful improvidence,
without ever seeming to think it his duty to try to make them
different,--to give them anything of the training which his mother gave
him, and to which he evidently owes his position, whatever that may be.
No! his statement of having been a shop-boy was the thing I liked best
of all.”

“I am surprised at you, Margaret,” said her mother. “You who were always
accusing people of being shoppy at Helstone! I don’t think, Mr. Hale,
you have done quite right in introducing such a person to us without
telling us what he had been. I really was very much afraid of showing
him how much shocked I was at some parts of what he said. His father
‘dying in miserable circumstances.’ Why it might have been in the
workhouse.”

“I am not sure it was not worse than being in the workhouse,” replied
her husband. “I heard a good deal of his previous life from Mr. Bell
before we came here; and as he has told you a part, I will fill up what
he left out. His father speculated wildly, failed, and then killed
himself, because he could not bear the disgrace. All his former friends
shrunk from the disclosures that had to be made of his dishonest
gambling--wild, hopeless struggles, made with other people’s money, to
regain his own moderate portion of wealth. No one came forward to help
the mother and this boy. There was another child, I believe, a girl; too
young to earn money, but of course she had to be kept. At least, no
friend came forward immediately, and Mrs. Thornton is not one, I fancy,
to wait till tardy kindness comes to find her out. So they left Milton.
I knew he had gone into a shop, and that his earnings, with some
fragment of property secured to his mother, had been made to keep them
for a long time. Mr. Bell said they absolutely lived upon water-porridge
for years--how, he did not know; but long after the creditors had given
up hope of any payment of old Mr. Thornton’s debts (if, indeed, they
ever had hoped at all about it, after his suicide), this young man
returned to Milton, and went quietly round to each creditor, paying him
the first instalment of the money owing to him. No noise--no gathering
together of creditors--it was done very silently and quietly, but all
was paid at last; helped on materially by the circumstance of one of the
creditors, a crabbed old fellow (Mr. Bell says), taking in Mr. Thornton
as a kind of partner.”

“That really is fine,” said Margaret. “What a pity such a nature should
be tainted by his position as a Milton manufacturer.”

“How tainted?” asked her father.

“Oh, papa, by that testing everything by the standard of wealth. When he
spoke of the mechanical powers, he evidently looked upon them only as
new ways of extending trade and making money. And the poor men around
him--they were poor because they were vicious--out of the pale of his
sympathies because they had not his iron nature, and the capabilities
that it gives him for being rich.”

“Not vicious; he never said that. Improvident and self-indulgent were
his words.”

Margaret was collecting her mother’s working materials, and preparing to
go to bed. Just as she was leaving the room, she hesitated--she was
inclined to make an acknowledgment which she thought would please her
father, but which to be full and true must include a little annoyance.
However, out it came.

“Papa, I do think Mr. Thornton a very remarkable man; but personally I
don’t like him at all.”

“And I do!” said her father laughing. “Personally, as you call it, and
all. I don’t set him up for a hero, or anything of that kind. But
good-night, child. Your mother looks sadly tired to-night, Margaret.”

Margaret had noticed her mother’s jaded appearance with anxiety for some
time past, and this remark of her father’s sent her up to bed with a dim
fear lying like a weight on her heart. The life in Milton was so
different from what Mrs. Hale had been accustomed to live in Helstone,
in and out perpetually into the fresh and open air; the air itself was
so different, deprived of all revivifying principle as it seemed to be
here; the domestic worries pressed so very closely, and in so new and
sordid a form, upon all the women in the family, that there was good
reason to fear that her mother’s health might be becoming seriously
								Rate this book:0.0 / 0 votes