North and South: Chapter 5 Summary & Analysis

That night, Margaret sits in her bedroom, reflecting on the day and filled with sorrow that “seemed to have pressed the youth and buoyancy out of her heart, never to return.” Henry’s marriage proposal seems like a mere dream, next to the painful reality of Mr. Hale’s leaving the Church. She stares out at the outline of the church in the darkness, feeling that God seems unreachable.

Just then, Mr. Hale steps into Margaret’s room and asks her to pray with him, so they kneel by the window-seat and recite the Lord’s Prayer. Margaret feels the closeness of God once again and decides she will have to trust God to reveal the path one step at a time. She passes a fretful night dreaming unpleasantly of Henry Lennox, then wakes up unrefreshed, with Mr. Hale’s doubts pressing on her once again.

While Margaret knows that her father would have delayed telling Mrs. Hale the news until the last possible moment, she is “of different stuff” and breaks it to her mother as they walk around the garden that morning, blurting the whole of it in a few blunt sentences. Mrs. Hale begins to cry, sure that there must be some mistake. Margaret gives what details she can, conscious that “it was an error in her father to have left [Mrs. Hale] to learn his change of opinion…from her better-informed child.”

Mrs. Hale is impatient and dismissive of Mr. Hale’s religious doubts and hurt by his failure to consult her. However, Margaret manages to distract her with talk of Milton, and they discuss the “factory-people” among whom they will be living. Mrs. Hale wonders, “Who on earth wears cotton that can afford linen?” Margaret replies that she isn’t standing up for cotton-spinners “any more than for any other trades-people,” but consoles her mother that they will have little to do with such people.

That evening Mr. Hale returns home with a timid look “almost pitiful to see in a man’s face,” and Margaret leaves Mrs. Hale weeping on his chest. She retreats to her room and finally lets go of her own self-control, crying until Dixon comes into the room some time later. Dixon is indignant about Mr. Hale’s “turning Dissenter at his time of life” and wonders what Mrs. Hale’s father would have said. Margaret, offended at having these words spoken to her face, sends Dixon from the room. Dixon heeds Margaret and respects  her from that time forward.

Mrs. Hale becomes too ill from stress to be of use, and Mr. Hale is too depressed to deal with the practical questions of moving. Margaret finds that the weight of decision-making has been thrown onto her. She reflects on the contrast between the relative superficiality of her life in London and her present burdens; now, “every day brought some question, momentous to her, and to those whom she loved, to be settled.” She brightens, however, when she comes up with the plan to settle Mrs. Hale and Dixon at Heston, a seaside town, while she and Mr. Hale search for a house in Milton.