"ElizabethGaskell-TheHalfBrothers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gaskell Elizabeth C)

THE HALF-BROTHERS.




My mother was twice married. She never spoke of her first husband,
and it is only from other people that I have learnt what little I
know about him. I believe she was scarcely seventeen when she was
married to him: and he was barely one-and-twenty. He rented a small
farm up in Cumberland, somewhere towards the sea-coast; but he was
perhaps too young and inexperienced to have the charge of land and
cattle: anyhow, his affairs did not prosper, and he fell into ill
health, and died of consumption before they had been three years man
and wife, leaving my mother a young widow of twenty, with a little
child only just able to walk, and the farm on her hands for four
years more by the lease, with half the stock on it dead, or sold off
one by one to pay the more pressing debts, and with no money to
purchase more, or even to buy the provisions needed for the small
consumption of every day. There was another child coming, too; and
sad and sorry, I believe, she was to think of it. A dreary winter
she must have had in her lonesome dwelling, with never another near
it for miles around; her sister came to bear her company, and they
two planned and plotted how to make every penny they could raise go
as far as possible. I can't tell you how it happened that my little
sister, whom I never saw, came to sicken and die; but, as if my poor
mother's cup was not full enough, only a fortnight before Gregory was
born the little girl took ill of scarlet fever, and in a week she lay
dead. My mother was, I believe, just stunned with this last blow.
My aunt has told me that she did not cry; aunt Fanny would have been
thankful if she had; but she sat holding the poor wee lassie's hand
and looking in her pretty, pale, dead face, without so much as
shedding a tear. And it was all the same, when they had to take her
away to be buried. She just kissed the child, and sat her down in
the window-seat to watch the little black train of people
(neighbours--my aunt, and one far-off cousin, who were all the
friends they could muster) go winding away amongst the snow, which
had fallen thinly over the country the night before. When my aunt
came back from the funeral, she found my mother in the same place,
and as dry-eyed as ever. So she continued until after Gregory was
born; and, somehow, his coming seemed to loosen the tears, and she
cried day and night, till my aunt and the other watcher looked at
each other in dismay, and would fain have stopped her if they had but
known how. But she bade them let her alone, and not be over-anxious,
for every drop she shed eased her brain, which had been in a terrible
state before for want of the power to cry. She seemed after that to
think of nothing but her new little baby; she had hardly appeared to
remember either her husband or her little daughter that lay dead in
Brigham churchyard--at least so aunt Fanny said, but she was a great
talker, and my mother was very silent by nature, and I think aunt
Fanny may have been mistaken in believing that my mother never