'Yo'd better be off,' said Sylvia, in a minute or two. 'Yo' and me
has got wrong, and it'll take a night's sleep to set us right. Yo've
said all yo' can for him; and perhaps it's not yo' as is to blame,
but yo'r nature. But I'm put out wi' thee, and want thee out o' my
sight for awhile.' One or two more speeches of this kind convinced him that it would be
wise in him to take her at her word. He went back to Simpson, and
found him, though still alive, past the understanding of any words
of human forgiveness. Philip had almost wished he had not troubled
or irritated Sylvia by urging the dying man's request: the
performance of this duty seemed now to have been such a useless
office.
After all, the performance of a duty is never a useless office,
though we may not see the consequences, or they may be quite
different to what we expected or calculated on. In the pause of
active work, when daylight was done, and the evening shades came on,
Sylvia had time to think; and her heart grew sad and soft, in
comparison to what it had been when Philip's urgency had called out
all her angry opposition. She thought of her father--his sharp
passions, his frequent forgiveness, or rather his forgetfulness that
he had even been injured. All Sylvia's persistent or enduring
qualities were derived from her mother, her impulses from her
father. It was her dead father whose example filled her mind this
evening in the soft and tender twilight. She did not say to herself
that she would go and tell Simpson that she forgave him; but she
thought that if Philip asked her again that she should do so.
But when she saw Philip again he told her that Simpson was dead; and
passed on from what he had reason to think would be an unpleasant
subject to her. Thus he never learnt how her conduct might have been
more gentle and relenting than her words--words which came up into
his memory at a future time, with full measure of miserable
significance.
In general, Sylvia was gentle and good enough; but Philip wanted her
to be shy and tender with him, and this she was not. She spoke to
him, her pretty eyes looking straight and composedly at him. She
consulted him like the family friend that he was: she met him
quietly in all the arrangements for the time of their marriage,
which she looked upon more as a change of home, as the leaving of
Haytersbank, as it would affect her mother, than in any more
directly personal way. Philip was beginning to feel, though not as
yet to acknowledge, that the fruit he had so inordinately longed for
was but of the nature of an apple of Sodom.