One Day At Arle

One Day At Arle, by Frances
Hodgson Burnett

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Title: One Day At Arle
Author: Frances Hodgson Burnett
Release Date: November 4, 2007 [EBook #23330]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
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AT ARLE ***

Produced by David Widger

ONE DAY AT ARLE
By Frances Hodgson Burnett
Copyright, 1877

One day at Arle--a tiny scattered fishing hamlet on the northwestern
English coast--there stood at the door of one of the cottages near the
shore a woman leaning against the lintel-post and looking out: a
woman who would have been apt to attract a stranger's eye, too--a
woman young and handsome. This was what a first glance would have
taken in; a second would have been apt to teach more and leave a less
pleasant impression. She was young enough to have been girlish, but
she was not girlish in the least. Her tall, lithe, well-knit figure was
braced against the door-post with a tense sort of strength; her handsome
face was just at this time as dark and hard in expression as if she had
been a woman with years of bitter life behind her; her handsome brows
were knit, her lips were set; from head to foot she looked unyielding
and stern of purpose.
And neither form nor face belied her. The earliest remembrances of the
coast people concerning Meg Lonas had not been over-pleasant ones.
She had never been a favorite among them. The truth was they had half
feared her, even as the silent, dogged, neglected child who used to
wander up and down among the rocks and on the beach, working
harder for her scant living than the oldest of them. She had never a
word for them, and never satisfied their curiosity upon the subject of
the treatment she received from the ill-conditioned old grandfather who
was her only living relative, and this last peculiarity had rendered her
more unpopular than anything else would have done. If she had
answered their questions they might have pitied her; but as she chose to
meet them with stubborn silence, they managed to show their dislike in
many ways, until at last it became a settled point among them that the
girl was an outcast in their midst. But even in those days she gave them
back wrong for wrong and scorn for scorn; and as she grew older she
grew stronger of will, less prone to forgive her many injuries and
slights, and more prone to revenge them in an obstinate, bitter fashion.
But as she grew older she grew handsomer too, and the fisher boys who
had jeered at her in her childhood were anxious enough to gain her
good-will.
The women flouted her still, and she defied them openly; the men
found it wisest to be humble in their rough style, and her defiance of

them was more scornful than her defiance of their mothers and sisters.
She would revenge herself upon them, and did, until at last she met a
wooer who was tender enough, it seemed, to move her. At least so
people said at first; but suddenly the lover disappeared, and two or
three months later the whole community was electrified by her sudden
marriage with a suitor whom she had been wont to treat worse than all
the rest. How she treated him after the marriage nobody knew. She was
more defiant and silent than ever, and gossipers gained nothing by
asking questions. So at last she was left alone.
It was not the face of a tender wife waiting for a loving husband, the
face that was turned toward the sea. If she had hated the man for whom
she watched she could not have seemed more unbending. Ever since
her visitor had left her (she had had a visitor during the morning) she
had stood in the same place, even in the same position, without moving,
and when at last the figure of her husband came slouching across the
sands homeward she remained motionless still.
And surely his was not the face of a happy husband. Not a handsome
face at its dull best, it was doubly unprepossessing then, as, pale and
breathless, he passed the stern form in the doorway, his nervous,
reluctant eyes avoiding hers.
"Yo'll find yo're dinner aw ready on th' table," she said to him as he
passed in.
Everything was neat enough inside. The fireplace was clean and