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

"Tom, go to th' shippon, and supper the cows. I want to speak to
mother alone."

When he entered the house-place, she was sitting before the fire,
looking into its embers. She did not hear him come in: for some
time she had lost her quick perception of outward things.

"Mother! what's this about going to Manchester?" asked he.

"Oh, lad!" said she, turning round, and speaking in a beseeching
tone, "I must go and seek our Lizzie. I cannot rest here for
thinking on her. Many's the time I've left thy father sleeping in
bed, and stole to th' window, and looked and looked my heart out
towards Manchester, till I thought I must just set out and tramp over
moor and moss straight away till I got there, and then lift up every
downcast face till I came to our Lizzie. And often, when the south
wind was blowing soft among the hollows, I've fancied (it could but
be fancy, thou knowest) I heard her crying upon me; and I've thought
the voice came closer and closer, till at last it was sobbing out,
'Mother!' close to the door; and I've stolen down, and undone the
latch before now, and looked out into the still, black night,
thinking to see her--and turned sick and sorrowful when I heard no
living sound but the sough of the wind dying away. Oh, speak not to
me of stopping here, when she may be perishing for hunger, like the
poor lad in the parable." And now she lifted up her voice, and wept
aloud.

Will was deeply grieved. He had been old enough to be told the
family shame when, more than two years before, his father had had his
letter to his daughter returned by her mistress in Manchester,
telling him that Lizzie had left her service some time--and why. He
had sympathized with his father's stern anger; though he had thought
him something hard, it is true, when he had forbidden his weeping,
heart-broken wife to go and try to find her poor sinning child, and
declared that henceforth they would have no daughter; that she should
be as one dead, and her name never more be named at market or at meal
time, in blessing or in prayer. He had held his peace, with
compressed lips and contracted brow, when the neighbours had noticed
to him how poor Lizzie's death had aged both his father and his
mother; and how they thought the bereaved couple would never hold up
their heads again. He himself had felt as if that one event had made
him old before his time; and had envied Tom the tears he had shed
over poor, pretty, innocent, dead Lizzie. He thought about her
sometimes, till he ground his teeth together, and could have struck
her down in her shame. His mother had never named her to him until
now.

"Mother!" said he, at last. "She may be dead. Most likely she is"

"No, Will; she is not dead," said Mrs. Leigh. "God will not let her