Margaret of the North (48 page)

Snow fell profusely for weeks
after Christmas and the Thorntons spent much of January indoors.  Margaret had
anticipated the need for something green and vibrant in the bleakness of a
northern winter and, in late October, ordered a few pots of plants and flowers
brought in from the garden.  She had them placed all around the edge of the
vast space of the conservatory.  Dixon, taking her cue from Margaret, began
cultivating new pots with herbs and salad greens.  Soon after, Margaret planted
more pots with colorful pansies, poppies and tulips and scattered them among
the greenery.  By December, the conservatory was a lush indoor garden that
became—with the addition of a couple of stoves at each end—the coziest and most
inviting common space in the house where the family preferred to spend an
afternoon.  To accommodate preoccupations other than reading and conversations,
Margaret replaced two large armchairs and a settee from the old house, with two
new sets of four ample wicker chairs and a table.  A large trunk at one corner
was filled with woolen blankets and shawls that could be brought out when extra
warmth was needed.

On weekends, John sometimes took
home business correspondence and accounting books from the mill and worked on
them at one table while Margaret wrote letters or planned and reviewed
household expenses at the other.  On sunny Sundays, they had long, leisurely
breakfasts there while Elise played.  Except on particularly cold winter days
when doors to it had to be closed, the conservatory substituted for the
garden.  A small space between the groupings of chairs was laid with thick rugs
and secured with a small fence so that Elise would have a place in which to
play.  There, her tearful and happy struggles and her little antics frequently
provided distraction to her parents while they rested, had breakfast or tea, or
went about their work.

Elise was learning new skills and
had attempted to walk by pulling herself up to a standing position and taking
steps.  On her first attempt, she fell on her behind and cried.  Mary ran to
help her but Margaret, watching from her seat by the table where she worked,
told Mary to leave her alone unless she fell on any other part of her body but
her buttocks.  After she fell down several times, Elise stopped trying.  A week
or so later, Elise tried walking again, fell, and waited for someone to pick
her up.  When no one did, she crawled towards Mary, pulled herself up and tried
again. 

Now that her daughter was on the
brink of growing into a more independent toddler, impatient to do things on her
own, Margaret was thankful that she could summon up her experience helping
Edith take care of her son, Sholto.  It had taught Margaret enough about young
children that she could take Elise's failed attempts in stride.  She watched
Elise closely but left her alone, allowing her to fail without much of a fuss,
confident that Elise would try again once she was ready.

Margaret, who had been listless
at the frequent dinner parties and other indulgences of social life with her
cousin and aunt in London, settled into a full busy life in Milton.  She
devoted her day to taking care of Elise, managing the household, and painting
in her studio.  Elise was, now, more active by the day and, although Mary's
main task was to take care of her, Margaret spent some play time with Elise
everyday and attended to her needs in the morning and at bedtime.

While Margaret lavished time on
her daughter, she discharged her household duties with dispatch, discussing
meals, purchases, and other household matters with Dixon who thrived in her
role as trusted head housekeeper to a wealthy family.  She also reduced to two
or three mornings a week the practice Mrs. Thornton passed on to her of meeting
daily with all the servants.  Usually, it was her only time with many of them
and she spent it listening to individual problems and occasional complaints
they had about their work.

By the time Elise was at her
early afternoon nap, Margaret was eager for solitude in her studio, painting or
sketching or, every once in a while, just thumbing through some books she
brought back from Paris.  She continued to work on the portrait of John and
Elise, still unfinished since Christmas, when the frenzied pace leading to it
claimed her attention for many weeks.  The portrait was her first work on a
relatively large mounted canvas.  Although she had made countless sketches,
including some in oils, it was taking her longer than she had thought.  She had
erased sections of it and corrected others a few times.

One day, in frustration, she
decided to put the unfinished picture aside and start all over again.  With a
fresh canvas on her easel, she laid a wash of pthalo blue but she could not
begin to make any mark on it.  She regarded the canvas a long time, her arms
leaden, unable to make the first stroke with the charcoal in her hand.  In
exasperation at herself, she put the charcoal back in its box, wiped her hands
of stains, and walked out of her studio.

Momentarily aimless from
frustration, she went into the drawing room.  She walked around the room,
opened a couple of books that had been left on a table, and  closed them
without reading either.  She walked around again, occasionally glancing at the
gleaming mahogany expanse of the piano.  Although pushed to a relatively dark
corner of the room, it could not escape her attention and after passing near it
a few times, she stopped and stared at it for some minutes.  She had neither
touched it nor even come close to it since Christmas day and she approached it
slowly, hesitantly.  She sat down on the bench, lifted the cover carefully, ran
her fingers slowly over all the keys twice and hit a few at random.

Margaret started playing the
rondo she had performed with Edith the night before her wedding.  Her fingers
felt stiff and she made many mistakes so she repeated the first bars several
times until, frustrated again, she stopped—this time because she could not
remember the rest of the piece.  But she was surprised to discover that, alone,
with no one around to judge her, she found pleasure playing.  The silky
smoothness of the keys appealed to her and she derived some gratification from
the sounds they produced despite her certainty that, because she was playing
from memory, her notes were frequently off.  So, she blundered through a few
more pieces she could recollect.  By the time she exhausted her very limited
repertoire, she resolved to devote at least an hour practicing at around the
same time on days when John was at work.  That evening, she wrote to Edith to
select and send her some music sheets.  Perhaps, she might surprise John one leisurely
afternoon with an air or two.

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

In February, the incessant snow
that came with January began to ease up but still occasionally descended upon
the city.  It did so, one day, in the middle of the month—agitated into renewed
fury by bitterly cold wind—forcing the closing of the doors to the conservatory
and the shuttering of windows all over the house.  The storm also forced the
mill to close.  In the afternoon, John and Margaret retired to read by gas
lamps in their sitting room where the fire crackled—radiating heat, casting a
golden glow, and suffusing the whole room in comforting warmth.  It might have
been a cozy calm evening but for the wind that howled, the snow that pounded on
the roof, and the dense grayness of the light that peeked through gaps in the
curtains.

It was that part of the day—when
the bustle of the house was at its ebb and she was alone—that Margaret regarded
as her quiet hours, to spend on herself and as she pleased.  Often, she painted
in her studio after practicing on the piano.  Sometimes, she read or even did
some needlework.  Since the end of the holidays, she had not devoted much time
to those pursuits.  Instead, she had been preoccupied with ideas that brewed in
her head, some of which she had already begun to work on.  But she was at an
impasse and, on this stormy afternoon, she paced the room restlessly, unread
book in hand, keeping company with her thoughts.  John sat nearby, pleasantly
absorbed in his journal.

At the Christmas festivities at
the mill, Margaret realized, as she talked and read to the children, that if
she were to do something for mill workers, she could start with the children. 
At home, while watching her daughter play, she thought about how differently
her child would be brought up.  Elise would have all the privileges that came
with money and informed solicitous parents, particularly a mother determined to
give her daughter the best education available to girls.  She knew of at least
one new school for women that had been recently established to give them an
education nearly comparable to that of men.  She knew as well that, while still
rare, a few women had become doctors, scientists, painters, and writers.  If
her daughter desired a profession, Margaret would make sure that Elise got the
education she needed.

Opportunities Elise would have
were sadly unimaginable to the children at the mill.  While Margaret knew she
could not offer these children the same, she could find some means of helping
improve their chances at a better life.  But she was unsure of how much she was
capable of committing herself to, with responsibilities to her husband and her
daughter.  She thought of young Thomas.  Perhaps, she could start there.  The
expense of sending Thomas to a boarding school for boys would hardly put a dent
on their investment earnings but would be one of its most worthwhile uses. 
Nicholas could be convinced to spare Thomas from having to work at the mill if
a much brighter future awaited him.  It was a small step and would not require
much to do.

Margaret was not satisfied; what
she could do for little Thomas was still not enough.  She had to do more for
the children who worked at the mill.  In the jumble of ideas in her mind, she
remembered Bessy Higgins who had suffered from a malady she had contracted as a
child while working at a mill.  She died from it probably from want of care. 
In lamenting Bessy's plight, Margaret began to believe it to be the master's
moral obligation to make care available for free to workers ill with maladies
stemming from mill work.  The more she thought about it, the more convinced she
was that the greatest need children at the mill had was for some type of
medical care.

She asked Dr. Donaldson to tea
one afternoon to consult with him.  The doctor, who was always happy to fit the
young Mrs. Thornton's invitations into his busy schedule, freely shared his
opinions and endorsed her enthusiasm.  He gave her useful information about
doctor's fees, medicines, equipment and other supplies that she needed to
calculate the costs of holding a clinic within mill premises.

Margaret had what she needed to
lay some plans on paper.  She wanted them ready before she talked to John about
a clinic and other tasks that remained to be done—where and how to set up a
clinic, what hours it should open, and how to find a doctor willing to provide
care at the mill.  Considering the scarcity of doctors, Margaret thought the
last task the most daunting.

The medical clinic became
Margaret's priority but she could not give up her earlier ideas that children
should be taught to read and write.  Teaching was more along the lines of what
she knew she could directly provide but she suspected that, if she offered free
lessons to younger children forbidden by law to work, very few parents would
bother to take their children to those.  Free medical care, she knew, was going
to be welcomed by workers.  But illiterate parents, confronted with more
immediate needs that compelled children to work, would be hard to convince that
reading and writing were essential.  After all, work in mills or other
factories did not require such skills.

That stormy afternoon, Margaret
decided to talk to John only about her plans for the medical clinic.  Before
she could say anything, John looked up from his journal and asked, "Is this
dreary day making you restless?"

He had never seen her this way
and it distracted him from his reading.  When he was home, she was often
content to read, write letters, or plan and review household expenses while he
read his journals or did some mill-related work.

"Yes, this weather is
getting to me I have been unable to go beyond the walls of this house for more
than a month now."

"We are having a spell of
bad weather and if this keeps up, I may have to close the mill again
tomorrow."

"Are you behind in
completing orders?"  She asked as she walked by him.

"A little but we can handle
it.  I am probably now seeing some results from all the changes we have made. 
More and more workers have been willing to stay and catch up."

She stopped pacing and sat down on
the sofa.  "Wonderful!"  Her tone was lively but distracted.

"Yes.  I told the workers
that we might need to open on two or three Sundays to fully catch up and
Higgins canvassed how many would come, with pay, of course.  Practically
everyone said they would.  That says a lot because Sundays are sacred, the one
day they have for rest and recreation.  Most would not give those up, even with
pay."  His voice was animated, his eyes glowed from within.

Margaret caught her breath, swept
into the wave of pride and gratification that seized him as he talked.  He
paused and she waited but he merely stared thoughtfully at her for a few
minutes.

He still appeared deep in thought
when he spoke again.  "I realized when Higgins told me the results of his
canvassing that the mill is not just a factory that produces cotton.  The mill
is really more the people who work there and that without them, we could not
make cotton.  The mill would just be a lot of machines sitting idle."

"That was what I saw on the
day I came back to Milton, a sad, desolate place with big silent
machines."  She smiled, pleased at his insight.