Margaret of the North (43 page)

Margaret never asked John how the
trip to London was with his mother.  Not that night nor the subsequent ones. 
She thought he would tell her when he was ready.  The night following his
return, he came home with flowers and was particularly solicitous and charming
to her.  She naturally attributed all this to their first brief time of being
away from each other.  She had missed him, as well, the night he was gone. 
Several times that night, she had reached out in the dark for his reassuring
presence next to her and the first time she did so, his absence jolted her into
full awakening.

At dinner in their sitting room,
John gave her an account of his stay at Harley Street, describing in detail his
evening with Edith and Captain Lennox.  Margaret listened without a word until
he finished his stories and, then, remarked, greatly amused.  "You
surprise me.  I would never have guessed that vases of flowers, table settings,
and roast trimmings would interest you enough to notice, much less describe
them.  And, in such detail, too!"

He laughed.  "Normally, they
are a haze to me but how else could I convince you where I was the night I was
away?  Besides, I am sure that Edith would have wanted me to let you know she
went out of her way to please me."

"Yes, my dear cousin likes
you very much.  Frankly, I had been uncertain how she would regard you because
she was as snobbish as they come in London about people in the trades but she
does have an affectionate heart that serves her well."

Dinner came to an end a couple of
hours later but John hardly said anything about his mother or Fanny except to
say that Fanny was, as usual, getting everyone to fuss over her and his mother
fell into her indulgent maternal role almost as soon as they arrived.

**************

John did not tell Margaret that
he missed his train because an emotional parting with his mother had detained
him longer than he had intended.  He was, in fact, getting ready to leave on an
earlier train and had gone in to bid his mother farewell in her bedroom.  She
was almost like her old self with him, touching his face affectionately and
rearranging his cravat.  But she seemed to be avoiding his eyes and John could
not help saying, "I hope you have forgiven me for deciding in favor of the
workers."

She glanced at him and turned
around to sit on the only armchair in the room.  "You decided what you
thought was best for the mill."

"But you are still unhappy. 
Is there anything else I can do to make it up you."

She clenched her teeth and
answered, her eyes somewhat defiant.  "I want you to tell me that you can
see why I said all those hurtful things to Margaret."

"What hurtful things?" 
He was perplexed and his voice could not hide the reflexive anger her answer
elicited.  "What do you mean, mother?"

Mrs. Thornton realized then that
Margaret never said anything to John about their encounters but it was too late
for her to take back what she said.  He stared at her demanding an
explanation.  "Mother, what did you say to my wife?"

"I did talk to her the day
before we left and told her I did not mean those hurtful words."

"Mother, what hurtful
words?"

"I forget exactly.  I was
frustrated and angry.  I told her that she did not understand us and did not
belong in Milton.  I am sorry but I believe those to be true.  For me, she will
always be from the south.  But I said something I should not have.  I told her
to get out of our lives.  That was wrong.  She is your wife after all." 
She replied, avoiding his eyes.

John glared at his mother with
narrowed eyes as she explained.  He did not, could not, speak for a moment or
two.  Then, in a voice he struggled to keep under control, he snarled at her
under his breath.  "Mother, you had no right."

He rushed out of the room.  Just outside
the door, he spun around to face her and, in a low voice still quivering from
suppressed anger, he said, "You must see that I love Margaret with all my
heart.  I do not care what she knows or not about Milton and cotton.  What I
care about and find amazing is that she loves me for who I am and what I am. 
So, you see, she belongs nowhere else but with me, in Milton.  I can no longer
be happy without Margaret, mother."  He turned around and left, ignoring
her pleas and her obvious distress at what she had wrought in him.

"John!"  Mrs. Thornton
cried, "Please do not leave like this.  John!"  She started to get up
from her chair to stop him but he had moved too fast and was running down the
stairs in what seemed like a flash.  She sat down again and compressed her
quivering lips to steady them.  Her hands clutched tightly at the handkerchief
in her hand.  She had not anticipated the violence of his anger.  The few times
in the past that she had witnessed it, it was directed at someone else and
never at her.  She sat very still but her body was aching with tension.  What
was she to do?  Her despair did not last long, however.  Fanny came in to ask
what had happened and as she reassured her daughter that it was but a
misunderstanding that should sort itself out in time, she also convinced
herself that her son would come back.  He had to.  She knew in her heart that
her son would and could never disregard what was due to her as his mother.

John hurried past the drawing
room, ignoring Watson and Fanny who gawked at him, startled.  He bolted out the
door and, in hasty angry strides, headed for the train station, unconcerned
that it was rather too far to walk.  After some distance, he slowed down but he
kept walking until he came upon a park.  He stopped under a shady tree and
leaned against it.  Trying to calm himself further, he stood there for a long
time  But his anger began to swell up once more as he recalled Margaret, sad
and even despondent, clinging to him.  Once she even talked about leaving for
London and staying there for a little while.  Was that, perhaps, after his
mother's harsh, unfair tirade? 

He clenched his jaw and
compressed his mouth to suppress an urge to shout, hit something, or run away. 
But he knew only too well that he could not run away.  He had never been this
angry with his mother, never ever parted with her in acrimony.  His rage tore
him up.  He felt guilty—and angry at himself—for being angry.  What right had
he to be angry at his mother—he who had hurt her deeply when he decided against
her in favor of workers?  As Margaret had told him once, his mother had already
been through frustration and despair over changes she had to endure after he
married.

Mrs. Thornton hated disruptions
in her life and John suspected that it would have suited her if he never
married.  She had taken pride in the fact that women thought him a good catch
but because he never showed any serious interest in any of these women, it had
not bothered her.  But Margaret changed all that.  From the time he apprised her
of his regard for Margaret, Mrs. Thornton had been anxious, and probably
resented losing her son to someone from a world quite different from that they
inhabited, a world that—because it was foreign—intimidated her and elicited her
contempt.

John knew Mrs. Thornton was
unhappy that he married Margaret.  Still, she might have learned to live with
his marriage were it not that Margaret's influence extended to the way he saw
important matters related to running the mill.  Although John had held many of
the same opinions and beliefs as his mother, he proved to be not only curious
and interested in other viewpoints but also susceptible to the merits in them. 
Consistent with Margaret's views and perceptions, he had made changes at the
mill which his mother considered wasteful, at the least.  Worse, she probably
thought these changes—concessions to workers, in her opinion—emboldened them to
ask him to tell her to stop coming to the mill.  In his mother's reckoning,
Margaret was to blame for the workers' request.  After taking her son away,
Margaret then deprived her of the mill, everything she lived for.  John thought
he finally saw what Margaret already knew.

Margaret had seen into his
mother's heart before he did, had been alive to the desperation Mrs. Thornton
felt over all the changes resulting from his marriage.  John took in a long
deep breath, his eyes sad and thoughtful.  Understanding his mother's despair
and her animosity towards Margaret did not easily come with acceptance, did not
mollify his anger at his mother or at himself for not having seen right away. 
If Margaret had loved him less or had not been strong, she might have escaped
to London by now, away from his mother, away from him.  That possibility
perturbed him deeply and he wished with all his heart that he was home with
her, prostrate at her feet, telling her how sorry he was for what she had to
endure.

And yet, distressed as John was
at what Margaret had been through, he could not reproach his mother for too
long.  He and she were alike in many ways: Easily provoked to anger when
threatened, they jealously guarded what they thought they could rightly lay
claim to.  That was precisely what she had done, ill-advised though it was. 

His mother's incontrovertible
beliefs, sometimes inappropriate and even destructive, also led to much good,
of which he was the principal beneficiary.  John could not but be grateful for
all that.  What he was, he owed to his mother.  In return, he owed her not only
the comfort he could now give her but also the generosity and respect that
allowed her to make mistakes and to expect her children to understand and
forgive.  As hurt as Margaret must have been, she understood what his mother
was going through.  Mollified, John knew he should do no less and as a son, he
needed to do more: He must forgive.

John felt his chaotic emotions
gradually getting spent and he walked to a bench nearby where he sat for a long
time.  It was growing dark by the time he got up and retraced his steps slowly
back to the Watson apartment where he knew his mother waited.  He was certain
he had missed his train and would have to take the last one to go back home to
Margaret.

In early December, Margaret began
to plan for the holidays that were coming.  She was going to have her hands
full with preparations this year.  They would be celebrating their first
Christmas in the new house and Elise's very first one but her efforts were
going to be directed at the mill.  It was doing much better than had been expected
the past year and she thought it appropriate, as a gesture of gratitude and
goodwill, to have a bigger celebration at Marlborough Mills. 

Her intent was to put together
gift baskets for the workers and their families and celebrate Christmas Eve
with a dinner at the Dining Hall for everyone involved in the mill including
masters, overseers, workers, and their families.  When she was pregnant the
year before, she had not been able to do more than supervise the purchase and
wrapping of gifts for the children.  She realized her current plans were rather
ambitious, probably unheard of in the other mills but were in keeping with
John's desire to encourage communication between masters and hands.  She hoped
John would go along with them.

On a pleasant weekend afternoon,
John and Margaret sat reading in the conservatory, trying to concentrate on
their respective books with relative success.  They were often interrupted by
the continuous babble and occasional screams from Elise who was playing with
Mary on a thick rug on the floor.  Accustomed to her daughter's utterings,
Margaret sometimes glanced curiously at the two figures on the floor but
generally she ignored them and went on reading.  John was not quite as
successful and found his daughter's utterances inevitably more distracting.  He
looked up so frequently to see what was going on that, eventually, he decided
to put his book down and watch his daughter play.

"Is she saying something you
can understand?" He asked Margaret after a few minutes had passed.

"She is saying
something."  She barely looked up from her book.  "I am not sure
exactly what it is, though."

"But how do you know?" 
He persisted.

Margaret turned her head towards
him.  "Well, if you listen to her for a while, you'll notice there are
sounds she would utter repeatedly and they have a rhythm unique to those
sounds.  So, I think they must mean something, to her at least."

"Fascinating!  Like
what?"

"I don't know, really.  They
bear no resemblance to real words."  Margaret put the book, open face
down, on the table next to her and asked jauntily, "Does all this really
interest you or do you just want my attention?"

"It does interest me more
than you might think although, right now, I would not object to taking a turn
in the garden."  He grinned, got up, grasped her hands and pulled her up
from her chair.  Margaret grabbed a shawl she had flung on the back of her
chair, draped it around her shoulders and strolled into the garden with him.

"It is cooler than I
thought.  Are you warm enough in that shawl?"

"Not really.  But if we walk
briskly, we should warm up.

After several energetic turns
around the garden, John slowed down a little.  "You are in good shape. 
You had no trouble keeping up with me."

She smiled broadly at him. 
"I take care of a frisky little girl who weighs more than 15 pounds and I
carry her up and down the stairs several times a day.  I have to be in good
shape."

He smiled, placed his arm around
her waist, and drew her close.  "Yes, of course.  She is growing fast and
more active every day."  Invigorated by their brisk pace and the fresh
cool air, they took a few more turns, slowing gradually to an easy pace. 
Halfway around the garden, John paused.  "I wanted to talk to you about
something I have been thinking about since I came back from London."

"I had something to tell you
as well but it probably is not as weighty a matter as yours."  She
replied, curious about the gravity his voice had just taken on and the scowl
that had crept back on his brow.