Ruth, Elizabeth Gaskell [read this if TXT] 📗

woman of five or six and thirty. She had all the variety of small-talk at her finger-ends, that was formerly needed by barbers to amuse the people who came to be shaved. She had admired the town till Jemima was weary of its praises, sick and oppressed by its sameness, as she had been these many weeks.

“Here are some bonnets, ma’am, that will be just the thing for you—elegant and tasty, yet quite of the simple style, suitable to young ladies. Oblige me by trying on this white silk!”

Jemima looked at herself in the glass; she was obliged to own it was very becoming, and perhaps not the less so for the flush of modest shame which came into her cheeks, as she heard Mrs. Pearson’s open praises of the “rich, beautiful hair,” and the “Oriental eyes” of the wearer.

“I induced the young lady who accompanied your sisters the other day—the governess, is she, ma’am?”

“Yes—Mrs. Denbigh is her name,” said Jemima, clouding over.

“Thank you, ma’am. Well, I persuaded Mrs. Denbigh to try on that bonnet, and you can’t think how charming she looked in it; and yet I don’t think it became her as much as it does you.”

“Mrs. Denbigh is very beautiful,” said Jemima, taking off the bonnet, and not much inclined to try on any other.

“Very, ma’am. Quite a peculiar style of beauty. If I might be allowed, I should say that hers was a Grecian style of loveliness, while yours was Oriental. She reminded me of a young person I once knew in Fordham.” Mrs. Pearson sighed an audible sigh.

“In Fordham!” said Jemima, remembering that Ruth had once spoken of the place as one in which she had spent some time, while the county in which it was situated was the same in which Ruth was born. “In Fordham! Why, I think Mrs. Denbigh comes from that neighbourhood.”

“Oh, ma’am! she cannot be the young person I mean—I am sure, ma’am—holding the position she does in your establishment. I should hardly say I knew her myself; for I only saw her two or three times at my sister’s house; but she was so remarked for her beauty, that I remember her face quite well—the more so, on account of her vicious conduct afterwards.”

“Her vicious conduct!” repeated Jemima, convinced by these words that there could be no identity between Ruth and “young person” alluded to. “Then it could not have been our Mrs. Denbigh.”

“Oh no, ma’am! I am sure I should be sorry to be understood to have suggested anything of the kind. I beg your pardon if I did so. All I meant to say—and perhaps that was a liberty I ought not to have taken, considering what Ruth Hilton was–-”

“Ruth Hilton!” said Jemima, turning suddenly round, and facing Mrs. Pearson.

“Yes, ma’am, that was the name of the young person I allude to.”

“Tell me about her—what did she do?” asked Jemima, subduing her eagerness of tone and look as best she might, but trembling as on the verge of some strange discovery.

“I don’t know whether I ought to tell you, ma’am—it is hardly a fit story for a young lady; but this Ruth Hilton was an apprentice to my sister-in-law, who had a first-rate business in Fordham, which brought her a good deal of patronage from the county families; and this young creature was very artful and bold, and thought sadly too much of her beauty; and, somehow, she beguiled a young gentleman, who took her into keeping (I am sure, ma’am, I ought to apologise for polluting your ears)–-”

“Go on,” said Jemima breathlessly.

“I don’t know much more. His mother followed him into Wales. She was a lady of a great deal of religion, and a very old family, and was much shocked at her son’s misfortune in being captivated by such a person; but she led him to repentance, and took him to Paris, where, I think, she died; but I am not sure, for, owing to family differences, I have not been on terms for some years with my sister-in-law, who was my informant.”

“Who died?” interrupted Jemima—“the young man’s mother, or—or Ruth Hilton?”

“Oh dear, ma’am! pray don’t confuse the two. It was the mother, Mrs. –- I forget the name—something like Billington. It was the lady who died.”

“And what became of the other?” asked Jemima, unable, as her dark suspicion seemed thickening, to speak the name.

“The girl? Why, ma’am, what could become of her? Not that I know exactly—only one knows they can but go from bad to worse, poor creatures! God forgive me, if I am speaking too transiently of such degraded women, who, after all, are a disgrace to our sex.”

“Then you know nothing more about her?” asked Jemima.

“I did hear that she had gone off with another gentleman that she met with in Wales, but I’m sure I can’t tell who told me.”

There was a little pause. Jemima was pondering on all she had heard. Suddenly she felt that Mrs. Pearson’s eyes were upon her, watching her; not with curiosity, but with a newly-awakened intelligence;—and yet she must ask one more question; but she tried to ask it in an indifferent, careless tone, handling the bonnet while she spoke.

“How long is it since all this—all you have been telling me about—happened!” (Leonard was eight years old.)

“Why—let me see. It was before I was married, and I was married three years, and poor dear Pearson has been deceased five—I should say going on for nine years this summer. Blush roses would become your complexion, perhaps, better than these lilacs,” said she, as with superficial observation she watched Jemima turning the bonnet round and round on her hand—the bonnet that her dizzy eyes did not see.

“Thank you. It is very pretty. But I don’t want a bonnet. I beg your pardon for taking up your time.” And with an abrupt bow to the discomfited Mrs. Pearson, she was out and away in the open air, threading her way with instinctive energy along the crowded street. Suddenly she turned round, and went back to Mrs. Pearson’s with even more rapidity than she had been walking away from the house.

“I have changed my mind,” said she, as she came, breathless, up into the show-room. “I will take the bonnet. How much is it?”

“Allow me to change the flowers; it can be done in an instant, and then you can see if you would not prefer the roses; but with either foliage it is a lovely little bonnet,” said Mrs. Pearson, holding it up admiringly on her hand.

“Oh! never mind the flowers—yes! change them to the roses.” And she stood by, agitated (Mrs. Pearson thought with impatience), all the time the milliner was making the alteration with skilful, busy haste.

“By the way,” said Jemima, when she saw the last touches were being given, and that she must not delay executing the purpose which was the real cause of her return—“Papa, I am sure, would not like your connecting Mrs. Denbigh’s name with such a—story as you have been telling me.”

“Oh dear! ma’am, I have too much respect for you all to think of doing such a thing! Of course I know, ma’am, that it is not to be cast up to any lady that she is like anybody disreputable.”

“But I would rather you did not name the likeness to any one,” said Jemima; “not to any one. Don’t tell any one the story you have told me this morning.”

“Indeed, ma’am, I should never think of such a thing! My poor husband could have borne witness that I am as close as the grave where there is anything to conceal.”

“Oh dear!” said Jemima, “Mrs. Pearson, there is nothing to conceal; only you must not speak about it.”

“I certainly shall not do it, ma’am; you may rest assured of me.”

This time Jemima did not go towards home, but in the direction of the outskirts of the town, on the hilly side. She had some dim recollection of hearing her sisters ask if they might not go and invite Leonard and his mother to tea; and how could she face Ruth, after the conviction had taken possession of her heart that she, and the sinful creature she bad just heard of, were one and the same? It was yet only the middle of the afternoon; the hours were early in the old-fashioned town of Eccleston. Soft white clouds had come slowly sailing up out of the west; the plain was flecked with thin floating shadows, gently borne along by the westerly wind that was waving the long grass in the hay-fields into alternate light and shade. Jemima went into one of these fields, lying by the side of the upland road. She was stunned by the shock she had received. The diver leaving the green sward, smooth and known, where his friends stand with their familiar smiling faces, admiring his glad bravery—the diver, down in an instant in the horrid depths of the sea, close to some strange, ghastly, lidless-eyed monster, can hardly more feel his blood curdle at the near terror than did Jemima now. Two hours ago—but a point of time on her mind’s dial—she had never Imagined that she should ever come in contact with any one who had committed open sin; she had never shaped her conviction into words and sentences, but still it was there, that all the respectable, all the family and religious circumstances of her life, would hedge her in, and guard her from ever encountering the great shock of coming face to face with Vice. Without being pharisaical in her estimation of herself, she had all a Pharisee’s dread of publicans and sinners, and all a child’s cowardliness—that cowardliness which prompts it to shut its eyes against the object of terror, rather than acknowledge its existence with brave faith. Her father’s often reiterated speeches had not been without their effect. He drew a clear line of partition, which separated mankind into two great groups, to one of which, by the grace of God, he and his belonged; while the other was composed of those whom it was his duty to try and reform, and bring the whole force of his morality to bear upon, with lectures, admonitions, and exhortations—a duty to be performed, because it was a duty—but with very little of that Hope and Faith which is the Spirit that maketh alive. Jemima had rebelled against these hard doctrines of her father’s, but their frequent repetition had had its effect, and led her to look upon those who had gone astray with shrinking, shuddering recoil, instead of with a pity so Christ-like as to have both wisdom and tenderness in it.

And now she saw among her own familiar associates one, almost her house-fellow, who had been stained with that evil most repugnant to her womanly modesty, that would fain have ignored its existence altogether. She loathed the thought of meeting Ruth again. She wished that she could take her up, and put her down at a distance somewhere—anywhere—where she might never see or hear of her more; never be reminded, as she must be whenever she saw her, that such things were in this sunny, bright, lark-singing earth, over which the blue dome of heaven bent softly down as Jemima sat in the hay-field that June afternoon; her cheeks flushed and red, but her lips pale and compressed, and her eyes full of a heavy, angry sorrow. It was Saturday, and the people in that part of the country left their work an hour earlier on that day. By this, Jemima knew it must be growing time for her to be at home. She had had so much of conflict in her own mind of late, that she had grown to dislike struggle, or