Author:  Elizabeth Gaskell

Release Date:  May 16, 2005 [eBook #2521]

Language:  English

Character set encoding:  ISO-646-us (us-ASCII)

***Start of the project gutenberg EBOOK Lizzie Leigh***

Transcribed from the 1896 Smith, Elder and Co. edition by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk.

LIZZIE LEIGH by Elizabeth Gaskell

CHAPTER I.

When Death is present in a household on a Christmas Day, the very contrast between the time as it now is, and the day as it has often been, gives a poignancy to sorrow—­a more utter blankness to the desolation.  James Leigh died just as the far-away bells of Rochdale Church were ringing for morning service on Christmas Day, 1836.  A few minutes before his death, he opened his already glazing eyes, and made a sign to his wife, by the faint motion of his lips, that he had yet something to say.  She stooped close down, and caught the broken whisper, “I forgive her, Annie!  May God forgive me!”

“Oh, my love, my dear! only get well, and I will never cease showing my thanks for those words.  May God in heaven bless thee for saying them.  Thou’rt not so restless, my lad! may be—­Oh, God!”

For even while she spoke he died.

They had been two-and-twenty years man and wife; for nineteen of those years their life had been as calm and happy as the most perfect uprightness on the one side, and the most complete confidence and loving submission on the other, could make it.  Milton’s famous line might have been framed and hung up as the rule of their married life, for he was truly the interpreter, who stood between God and her; she would have considered herself wicked if she had ever dared even to think him austere, though as certainly as he was an upright man, so surely was he hard, stern, and inflexible.  But for three years the moan and the murmur had never been out of her heart; she had rebelled against her husband as against a tyrant, with a hidden, sullen rebellion, which tore up the old landmarks of wifely duty and affection, and poisoned the fountains whence gentlest love and reverence had once been for ever springing.

But those last blessed words replaced him on his throne in her heart, and called out penitent anguish for all the bitter estrangement of later years.  It was this which made her refuse all the entreaties of her sons, that she would see the kind-hearted neighbours, who called on their way from church, to sympathize and condole.  No! she would stay with the dead husband that had spoken tenderly at last, if for three years he had kept silence; who knew but what, if she had only been more gentle and less angrily reserved he might have relented earlier—­and in time?