Margret Howth: A Story of To-Day | Page 8

the
same. He gave her scanty praise. Two years ago (he had keen, watchful
eyes, this man) he had fancied that the homely girl had a dream, as
most women have, of love and marriage: she had put it aside, he
thought, forever; it was too expensive a luxury; she had to begin the
life-long battle for bread and butter. Her dream had been real and pure,
perhaps; for she accepted no sham love in its place: if it had left an
empty hunger in her heart, she had not tried to fill it. Well, well, it was
the old story. Yet he looked after her kindly as he thought of it; as some
people look sorrowfully at children, going back to their own childhood.
For a moment he half relented in his purpose, thinking, perhaps, her
work for life was hard enough. But no: this woman had been planned
and kept by God for higher uses than daughter or wife or mother. It was
his part to put her work into her hands.
The road was creeping drowsily now between high grass-banks, out
through the hills. A sleepy, quiet road. The restless dust of the town
never had been heard of out there. It went wandering lazily through the
corn-fields, down by the river, into the very depths of the woods,--the
low October sunshine slanting warmly down it all the way, touching
the grass-banks and the corn-fields with patches of russet gold. Nobody
in such a road could be in a hurry. The quiet was so deep, the free air,
the heavy trees, the sunshine, all so full and certain and fixed, one
could be sure of finding them the same a hundred years from now.
Nobody ever was in a hurry. The brown bees came along there, when

their work was over, and hummed into the great purple thistles on the
road-side in a voluptuous stupor of delight. The cows sauntered
through the clover by the fences, until they wound up by lying down in
it and sleeping outright. The country-people, jogging along to the mill,
walked their fat old nags through the stillness and warmth so slowly
that even Margret left them far behind. As the road went deeper into the
hills, the quiet grew even more penetrating and certain,--so certain in
these grand old mountains that one called it eternal, and, looking up to
the peaks fixed in the clear blue, grew surer of a world beyond this
where there is neither change nor death.
It was growing late; the evening air more motionless and cool; the
russet gold of the sunshine mottled only the hill-tops now; in the
valleys there was a duskier brown, deepening every moment. Margret
turned from the road, and went down the fields. One did not wonder,
feeling the silence of these hills and broad sweeps of meadow, that this
woman, coming down from among them, should be strangely still, with
dark questioning eyes dumb to their own secrets.
Looking into her face now, you could be sure of one thing: that she had
left the town, the factory, the dust far away, shaken the thought of them
off her brain. No miles could measure the distance between her home
and them. At a stile across the field an old man sat waiting. She hurried
now, her cheek colouring. Dr. Knowles could see them going to the
house beyond, talking earnestly. He sat down in the darkening twilight
on the stile, and waited half an hour. He did not care to hear the story of
Margret's first day at the mill, knowing how her father and mother
would writhe under it, soften it as she would. It was nothing to her, he
knew. So he waited. After a while he heard the old man's laugh, like
that of a pleased child, and then went in and took her place beside him.
She went out, but came back presently, every grain of dust gone, in her
clear dress of pearl gray. The neutral tint suited her well. As she stood
by the window, listening gravely to them, the homely face and waiting
figure came into full relief. Nature had made the woman in a freak of
rare sincerity. There were no reflected lights about her; no gloss on her
skin, no glitter in her eyes, no varnish on her soul. Simple and dark and
pure, there she was, for God and her master to conquer and understand.

Her flesh was cold and colourless,--there were no surface tints on it,--it
warmed sometimes slowly from far within; her voice, quiet,--out of her
heart; her hair, the only beauty of the woman, was lustreless brown, lay
in unpolished folds of dark shadow. I saw such hair once, only once. It
had been cut from the head of