Dickens' Women (2 page)

Alice got up, took off her wet cloak, and laid it aside. That done, she sat down as before, and with her arms folded, and her eyes gazing at the fire, remained silently listening with a contemptuous face to her old mother's inarticulate complainings.

‘Did you expect to see me return as youthful as I went away, mother?' she said at length, turning her eyes upon the old woman. ‘Did you think a foreign life, like mine, was good for good looks? One would believe so, to hear you!'

‘It an't that!' cried the mother. ‘She knows it!'

‘What is it then?' returned the daughter. ‘It had best be something that don't last, mother, or my way out is easier than my way in.'

‘Hear that!' exclaimed the mother. ‘After all these years she threatens to desert me in the moment of her coming back again!'

‘I tell you, mother, for the second time, there have been years for me as well as you,' said Alice. ‘Come back harder? Of course I have come back harder. What else did you expect?'

‘Harder to me! To her own dear mother!' cried the old woman.

‘I don't know who began to harden me, if my own dear mother didn't,' she returned, sitting with her folded arms, and knitted brows, and compressed lips as if she were bent on excluding, by force, every softer feeling from her breast. ‘Listen, mother, to a word or two. If we understand each other now, we shall not fall out any more, perhaps. I went away a girl, and have come back a woman. I went away undutiful enough, and have come back not better, you may swear. But have you been very dutiful to me?'

‘I!' cried the old woman. ‘To my gal! A mother dutiful to her own child!'

‘It sounds unnatural, don't it?' returned the daughter, looking coldly on her with her stern, regardless, hardy, beautiful face; ‘but I have thought of it sometimes, in the course of my lone years, till I have got used to it. I have heard some talk about duty first and last; but it has always been of my duty to other people. I have wondered now and then – to pass away the time – whether no one ever owed any duty to me.'

At night, she should have been a skeleton, with dart and hour-glass, rather than a woman, this attendant; for her touch was as the touch of Death. The painted object
shrivelled
underneath her hand; the form collapsed, the hair dropped off, the arched dark eyebrows changed to scanty tufts of grey; the pale lips shrunk, the skin became
cadaverous
and loose; an old, worn, yellow, nodding woman, with red eyes, alone remained in Cleopatra's place, huddled up, like a slovenly bundle, in a greasy flannel gown.

‘Why don't you tell me,' it said sharply, ‘that he is coming here to-morrow by appointment?'

‘Because you know it,' returned Edith, ‘Mother.'

The mocking emphasis she laid on that one word!

‘You know he has bought me,' she resumed. ‘Or that he will, to-morrow. He has considered of his bargain; he has shown it to his friend; he is even rather proud of it; he thinks that it will suit him, and may be had sufficiently cheap; and he will buy to-morrow. God, that I have lived for this, and that I feel it!'

Compress into one handsome face the conscious
self-abasement
, and the burning indignation of a hundred women, strong in passion and in pride; and there it hid itself with two white shuddering arms.

‘What do you mean?' returned the angry mother. ‘Haven't you from a child –'

‘A child!' said Edith, looking at her, ‘when was I a child? What childhood did you ever leave to me? I was a woman – artful, designing, mercenary, laying snares for men – before I knew myself, or you, or even understood the base and wretched aim of every new display I learnt. You gave birth to a woman. Look upon her. She is in her pride to-night.'

And as she spoke, she struck her hand upon her
beautiful
bosom, as though she would have beaten down herself.

‘Look at me,' she said, ‘who have never known what it is to have an honest heart, and love. Look at me, taught to scheme and plot when children play; and married in my youth – an old age of design – to one for whom I had no feeling but indifference. Look at me, whom he left a widow, dying before his inheritance descended to him – a
judgment on you! well deserved! – and tell me what has been my life for ten years since.'

‘We have been making every effort to endeavour to secure to you a good establishment,' rejoined her mother. ‘That has been your life. And now you have got it.'

‘There is no slave in a market; there is no horse in a fair: so shown and offered and examined and paraded, mother, as I have been, for ten shameful years,' cried Edith, with a burning brow, and the same bitter emphasis on the one word. ‘Is it not so? Have I been made the bye-word of all kinds of men? Have fools, have profligates, have boys, have dotards, dangled after me, and one by one rejected me, and fallen off, because you were too plain with all your cunning: yes, and too true, with all those false pretences: until we have almost come to be notorious? The licence of look and touch,' she said, with flashing eyes, ‘have I submitted to it, in half the places of resort upon the map of England. Have I been hawked and vended here and there until the last grain of self-respect is dead within me, and I loathe myself? Has this been my late childhood? I had none before. Do not tell me that I had, to-night, of all nights in my life!'

‘You might have been well married,' said her mother, ‘twenty times at least, Edith, if you had given
encouragement
enough.'

‘No! Who takes me, refuse that I am, and as I well deserve to be,' she answered, raising her head, and
trembling
in her energy of shame and stormy pride, ‘shall take me, as this man does, with no art of mine put forth to lure him. He sees me at the auction, and he thinks it well to buy me. Let him! When he came to view me – perhaps to bid – he required to see the roll of my accomplishments. I gave it to him. When he would have me show one of them, to justify his purchase to his men, I require of him to say which he demands, and I exhibit it. I will do no more. He makes
the purchase of his own will, and with his own sense of its worth, and the power of his money; and I hope it may never disappoint him. I have not vaunted and pressed the bargain; neither have you, so far as I have been able to prevent you.'

‘You talk strangely to-night, Edith, to your own mother.'

‘It seems so to me; stranger to me than you,' said Edith. ‘But my education was completed long ago. I am too old now, and have fallen too low, by degrees, to take a new course, and to stop yours, and to help myself. The germ of all that purifies a woman's breast, and makes it true and good, has never stirred in mine, and I have nothing else to sustain me when I despise myself.' There had been a touching sadness in her voice, but it was gone, when she went on to say, with a curled lip, ‘So, as we are genteel and poor, I am content that we should be made rich by these means; all I say is, I have kept the only purpose I have had the strength to form – I had almost said the power, with you at my side, mother – and have not tempted this man on.'

‘This man! You speak,' said her mother, ‘as if you hated him.'

‘And you thought I loved him, did you not?' she answered, stopping on her way across the room, and looking round. ‘Shall I tell you,' she continued, with her eyes fixed on her mother, ‘who already knows us
thoroughly
, and reads us right, and before whom I have even less of self-respect or confidence than before my own inward self; being so much degraded by his knowledge of me?'

… Edith suddenly let fall her face, as if it had been stung, and while she pressed her hands upon it, a terrible tremble crept over her whole frame. It was quickly gone; and with her usual step, she passed out of the room.

The maid who should have been a skeleton, then
reappeared
, and giving one arm to her mistress, who appeared to have taken off her manner with her charms, and to have put on paralysis with her flannel gown, collected the ashes of Cleopatra, and carried them away in the other, ready for tomorrow's revivification.

She gave me a triumphant glance in passing me, as if she rejoiced that my hands were so coarse and my boots were so thick, and she opened the gate, and stood holding it. I was passing out without looking at her, when she touched me with a taunting hand. ‘Why don't you cry?' ‘Because I don't want to.' ‘You do,' said she. ‘You have been crying till you are half blind, and you are near crying again now.' She laughed contemptuously, pushed me out, and locked the gate upon me.

John Forster, 3rd Sept 1857

Poor Catherine and I are not made for each other, and there is no help for it. It is not only that she makes me uneasy and unhappy, but that I make her so too – and much more so. She is exactly what you know, in the way of being amiable and complying; but we are strangely ill-assorted for the bond there is between us. God knows she would have been a thousand times happier if she had married another kind of man, and that her avoidance of this destiny would have been at least equally good for us both. I am often cut to the heart by thinking what a pity it is, for her own sake, that I ever fell in her way; and if I were sick or disabled to-morrow, I know how sorry she would be, and how deeply grieved myself, to think how we had lost each other. But exactly the same incompatibility would arise, the moment I was well again; and nothing on earth could make her understand me, or suit us to each other. Her temperament will not go with mine
.

It mattered not so much when we had only ourselves to consider, but reasons have been growing since which make it all but hopeless that we should even try to struggle on. What is now befalling me I have seen steadily coming, ever since the days you remember when Mary was born; and I know too well that you cannot, and no one can, help me. Why I have even written I
hardly know; but it is a miserable sort of comfort that you should be clearly aware how matters stand. The mere mention of the fact, without any complaint or blame of any sort, is a relief to my present state of spirits – and I can get this only from you, because I can speak of it to no one else
.

Baroness Burdett-Coutts, 9th May 1858

… if the children loved her, or had ever loved her, this
severance
would have been a far easier thing than it is. But she has never attached one of them to herself, never played with them in their infancy, never attracted their confidence as they have grown older, never presented herself before them in the aspect of a mother
.