Once she tried to bring about a complete revolution in all their lives; only once. She was really half-crazy with despair when she made the attempt; nothing else could have given her the courage. As it was, she was intimidated by her own audacity, for by nature she accepted circumstances without questioning. Inaugurations terrified her; yet here was she, Nan, inaugurating.
She sat at the table, under the lamp, Silas and Gregory on either side of her, the remains of supper before them. She sat twisting her hands; swallowing hard.
She began, “Shall we be here always?” then stopped, then plunged on again, “living always here, with the floods every winter, all the winter through? Why shouldn’t we go away, somewhere else, if we choose? Why shouldn’t we?” she cried suddenly, in a frightened voice, as nobody answered.
She looked at Silas and Gregory; Silas was smiling, and Gregory was smiling too, in a twisty, derisive way, as though he knew what she had been talking about. Yet he couldn’t know. Silas had a look of surprise and amusement; grateful surprise, as though she had provided him with an unexpected amusement in an hour of boredom.
“Go on!” he said to her.
At that she felt all her source of boldness, of inventiveness, dried up within her. What was the good of this struggle for escape when she was hemmed in, not only by the floods and the dykes, but by those two immovable men who owned her? But her terror urged against her hopelessness; and was the stronger.
“Can youlikeliving here?” she appealed to Silas, trying to touch him upon his own inclinations.
“As well here as anywhere else,” he answered. “I work here.”
She knew the bitterness that edged his voice whenever he mentioned his work.
“You tie up parcels in a packing-shed,” she said, “always the same,—work that a half-wit could do. Yes, a poor wanting creature could do your work. Why don’t you bestir yourself? Why don’t you come away?” She talked so, knowing that she strained to pull a weight that lay solid against her small strength.
If only Silas or Gregory would get up, she thought that with that insignificant display of mobility her hope would revive; but they sat on either side of her, cast in bronze. If they were doomed men, then they made no effort to escape their doom. Too proud, perhaps. They sat and waited. They seemed too indifferent to care.
“Nobody’s put you in prison into Abbot’s Etchery,” she murmured.
Yet they were so like prisoners, Silas in his darkness, Gregory in his silence, that she almost looked for gyves about their wrists and ankles. When they stirred, it should have been to the accompaniment of a heavy clank. When Silas fought, when he cried aloud, it was the struggle of a chained man. But his struggles were so ineffective; Nan, who wasnot oppressed from within, but only from without, thought that he could help himself if he would. She had all the impatience of the naturally buoyant with the dogged tragedy of the fatalistic.
“Come away,” she urged. “What is it that keeps you here? There are warm, pretty places. Let’s make the best of things.”
“I might get away from Abbot’s Etchery, I shouldn’t be getting away from myself,” said Silas.
Nan cried out, “Can’tone get away? Who says so? Isn’t it in our own hands?”
“Is it?” replied Silas, letting drop the sorrowful query as though it were rather the echo of a perpetual self-communion revolving in his soul, than an idle response.
The old mournfulness, the old anguish, closed down upon them again. They were like haunted people, who would not help themselves. They seemed haunted by the past,—which contained indeed the death of Hannah, a death so rough and dingy,—by the present, and by the overcharged future. But their dread was not to be defined; it was of the nature of a mystic sentence, presaged from a long way off. Sometimes she thought that they wereafraid of themselves; sometimes that they were too apathetic to be afraid. Only Silas made his dungeon clamorous sometimes with his wild revolt, that led to nothing, to no change, to no illumination.