The Weight of Proposals and Family Duty — North and South

Margaret spends the morning after Thornton's rejected proposal comparing it privately with Henry Lennox's earlier proposal in Helstone. The comparison is supposed to confirm her distance from Thornton but the analysis is more complicated than she expects: with Lennox she had felt chiefly sorry; with Thornton, the feelings are harder to categorise. She puts the question aside and goes to visit Bessy Higgins, who is visibly worse. Bessy asks Margaret to read aloud from Scripture, not for the sense of it but for the comfort of familiar words against her ear as she slides toward unconsciousness. Margaret reads, and Bessy drifts into an uneasy sleep. Margaret leaves and returns home to find her mother in a state of urgent longing: she wants to see Frederick, the son exiled after a naval mutiny, before she dies. She cannot make peace with the thought of dying without him. Margaret, watching her mother's fragile hope, promises to write to Frederick that night and to tell him to come. She is as sure he will come as she is sure of her own life. Walking home with her father afterward, she holds the weight of what she has just committed to. She knows Frederick is a naval mutineer who cannot safely return to England. She has helped her mother want the thing that might destroy him. Her father speaks cheerfully of how right it was to write, how Frederick would want to come; Margaret walks quietly beside him, carrying a terror she cannot name to him, wondering whether she has decoyed her brother home to his death.