THE HALF-BROTHERS
by Elizabeth Gaskell


My mother was twice married. She never spoke of her first husband, and
it is only from other people that I have learnt what little I know about
him. I believe she was scarcely seventeen when she was married to him:
and he was barely one-and-twenty. He rented a small farm up in
Cumberland, somewhere towards the sea-coast; but he was perhaps too young
and inexperienced to have the charge of land and cattle: anyhow, his
affairs did not prosper, and he fell into ill health, and died of
consumption before they had been three years man and wife, leaving my
mother a young widow of twenty, with a little child only just able to
walk, and the farm on her hands for four years more by the lease, with
half the stock on it dead, or sold off one by one to pay the more
pressing debts, and with no money to purchase more, or even to buy the
provisions needed for the small consumption of every day. There was
another child coming, too; and sad and sorry, I believe, she was to think
of it. A dreary winter she must have had in her lonesome dwelling, with
never another near it for miles around; her sister came to bear her
company, and they two planned and plotted how to make every penny they
could raise go as far as possible. I can't tell you how it happened that
my little sister, whom I never saw, came to sicken and die; but, as if my
poor mother's cup was not full enough, only a fortnight before Gregory
was born the little girl took ill of scarlet fever, and in a week she lay
dead. My mother was, I believe, just stunned with this last blow. My
aunt has told me that she did not cry; aunt Fanny would have been
thankful if she had; but she sat holding the poor wee lassie's hand and
looking in her pretty, pale, dead face, without so much as shedding a
tear. And it was all the same, when they had to take her away to be