________________________________________________
_ As far as I can remember, it was very soon after this that I first
began to have the pain in my hip, which has ended in making me a
cripple for life. I hardly recollect more than one walk after our
return under Mr. Gray's escort from Mr. Lathom's. Indeed, at the
time, I was not without suspicions (which I never named) that the
beginning of all the mischief was a great jump I had taken from the
top of one of the stiles on that very occasion.
Well, it is a long while ago, and God disposes of us all, and I am
not going to tire you out with telling you how I thought and felt,
and how, when I saw what my life was to be, I could hardly bring
myself to be patient, but rather wished to die at once. You can
every one of you think for yourselves what becoming all at once
useless and unable to move, and by-and-by growing hopeless of cure,
and feeling that one must be a burden to some one all one's life
long, would be to an active, wilful, strong girl of seventeen,
anxious to get on in the world, so as, if possible, to help her
brothers and sisters. So I shall only say, that one among the
blessings which arose out of what seemed at the time a great, black
sorrow was, that Lady Ludlow for many years took me, as it were, into
her own especial charge; and now, as I lie still and alone in my old
age, it is such a pleasure to think of her!
Mrs. Medlicott was great as a nurse, and I am sure I can never be
grateful enough to her memory for all her kindness. But she was
puzzled to know how to manage me in other ways. I used to have long,
hard fits of crying; and, thinking that I ought to go home--and yet
what could they do with me there?--and a hundred and fifty other
anxious thoughts, some of which I could tell to Mrs. Medlicott, and
others I could not. Her way of comforting me was hurrying away for
some kind of tempting or strengthening food--a basin of melted
calves-foot jelly was, I am sure she thought, a cure for every woe.
"There take it, dear, take it!" she would say; "and don't go on
fretting for what can't be helped."
But, I think, she got puzzled at length at the non-efficacy of good
things to eat; and one day, after I had limped down to see the
doctor, in Mrs. Medlicott's sitting-room--a room lined with
cupboards, containing preserves and dainties of all kinds, which she
perpetually made, and never touched herself--when I was returning to
my bed-room to cry away the afternoon, under pretence of arranging my
clothes, John Footman brought me a message from my lady (with whom
the doctor had been having a conversation) to bid me go to her in
that private sitting-room at the end of the suite of apartments,
about which I spoke in describing the day of my first arrival at
Hanbury. I had hardly been in it since; as, when we read to my lady,
she generally sat in the small withdrawing-room out of which this
private room of hers opened. I suppose great people do not require
what we smaller people value so much,--I mean privacy. I do not
think that there was a room which my lady occupied that had not two
doors, and some of them had three or four. Then my lady had always
Adams waiting upon her in her bed-chamber; and it was Mrs.
Medlicott's duty to sit within call, as it were, in a sort of
anteroom that led out of my lady's own sitting-room, on the opposite
side to the drawing-room door. To fancy the house, you must take a
great square and halve it by a line: at one end of this line was the
hall-door, or public entrance; at the opposite the private entrance
from a terrace, which was terminated at one end by a sort of postern
door in an old gray stone wall, beyond which lay the farm buildings
and offices; so that people could come in this way to my lady on
business, while, if she were going into the garden from her own room,
she had nothing to do but to pass through Mrs. Medlicott's apartment,
out into the lesser hall, and then turning to the right as she passed
on to the terrace, she could go down the flight of broad, shallow
steps at the corner of the house into the lovely garden, with
stretching, sweeping lawns, and gay flower-beds, and beautiful, bossy
laurels, and other blooming or massy shrubs, with full-grown beeches,
or larches feathering down to the ground a little farther off. The
whole was set in a frame, as it were, by the more distant woodlands.
The house had been modernized in the days of Queen Anne, I think; but
the money had fallen short that was requisite to carry out all the
improvements, so it was only the suite of withdrawing-rooms and the
terrace-rooms, as far as the private entrance, that had the new,
long, high windows put in, and these were old enough by this time to
be draped with roses, and honeysuckles, and pyracanthus, winter and
summer long.
Well, to go back to that day when I limped into my lady's sitting-
room, trying hard to look as if I had not been crying, and not to
walk as if I was in much pain. I do not know whether my lady saw how
near my tears were to my eyes, but she told me she had sent for me,
because she wanted some help in arranging the drawers of her bureau,
and asked me--just as if it was a favour I was to do her--if I could
sit down in the easy-chair near the window--(all quietly arranged
before I came in, with a footstool, and a table quite near)--and
assist her. You will wonder, perhaps, why I was not bidden to sit or
lie on the sofa; but (although I found one there a morning or two
afterwards, when I came down) the fact was, that there was none in
the room at this time. I have even fancied that the easy-chair was
brought in on purpose for me; for it was not the chair in which I
remembered my lady sitting the first time I saw her. That chair was
very much carved and gilded, with a countess' coronet at the top. I
tried it one day, some time afterwards, when my lady was out of the
room, and I had a fancy for seeing how I could move about, and very
uncomfortable it was. Now my chair (as I learnt to call it, and to
think it) was soft and luxurious, and seemed somehow to give one's
body rest just in that part where one most needed it.
I was not at my ease that first day, nor indeed for many days
afterwards, notwithstanding my chair was so comfortable. Yet I
forgot my sad pain in silently wondering over the meaning of many of
the things we turned out of those curious old drawers. I was puzzled
to know why some were kept at all; a scrap of writing maybe, with
only half a dozen common-place words written on it, or a bit of
broken riding-whip, and here and there a stone, of which I thought I
could have picked up twenty just as good in the first walk I took.
But it seems that was just my ignorance; for my lady told me they
were pieces of valuable marble, used to make the floors of the great
Roman emperors palaces long ago; and that when she had been a girl,
and made the grand tour long ago, her cousin Sir Horace Mann, the
Ambassador or Envoy at Florence, had told her to be sure to go into
the fields inside the walls of ancient Rome, when the farmers were
preparing the ground for the onion-sowing, and had to make the soil
fine, and pick up what bits of marble she could find. She had done
so, and meant to have had them made into a table; but somehow that
plan fell through, and there they were with all the dirt out of the
onion-field upon them; but once when I thought of cleaning them with
soap and water, at any rate, she bade me not to do so, for it was
Roman dirt--earth, I think, she called it--but it was dirt all the
same.
Then, in this bureau, were many other things, the value of which I
could understand--locks of hair carefully ticketed, which my lady
looked at very sadly; and lockets and bracelets with miniatures in
them,--very small pictures to what they make now-a-days, and called
miniatures: some of them had even to be looked at through a
microscope before you could see the individual expression of the
faces, or how beautifully they were painted. I don't think that
looking at these made may lady seem so melancholy, as the seeing and
touching of the hair did. But, to be sure, the hair was, as it were,
a part of some beloved body which she might never touch and caress
again, but which lay beneath the turf, all faded and disfigured,
except perhaps the very hair, from which the lock she held had been
dissevered; whereas the pictures were but pictures after all--
likenesses, but not the very things themselves. This is only my own
conjecture, mind. My lady rarely spoke out her feelings. For, to
begin with, she was of rank: and I have heard her say that people of
rank do not talk about their feelings except to their equals, and
even to them they conceal them, except upon rare occasions.
Secondly,--and this is my own reflection,--she was an only child and
an heiress; and as such was more apt to think than to talk, as all
well-brought-up heiresses must be. I think. Thirdly, she had long
been a widow, without any companion of her own age with whom it would
have been natural for her to refer to old associations, past
pleasures, or mutual sorrows. Mrs. Medlicott came nearest to her as
a companion of this sort; and her ladyship talked more to Mrs.
Medlicott, in a kind of familiar way, than she did to all the rest of
the household put together. But Mrs. Medlicott was silent by nature,
and did not reply at any great length. Adams, indeed, was the only
one who spoke much to Lady Ludlow.
After we had worked away about an hour at the bureau, her ladyship
said we had done enough for one day; and as the time was come for her
afternoon ride, she left me, with a volume of engravings from Mr.
Hogarth's pictures on one side of me (I don't like to write down the
names of them, though my lady thought nothing of it, I am sure), and
upon a stand her great prayer-book open at the evening psalms for the
day, on the other. But as soon as she was gone, I troubled myself
little with either, but amused myself with looking round the room at
my leisure. The side on which the fire-place stood was all
panelled,--part of the old ornaments of the house, for there was an
Indian paper with birds and beasts and insects on it, on all the
other sides. There were coats of arms, of the various families with
whom the Hanburys had intermarried, all over these panels, and up and
down the ceiling as well. There was very little looking-glass in the
room, though one of the great drawing-rooms was called the "Mirror
Room," because it was lined with glass, which my lady's great-
grandfather had brought from Venice when he was ambassador there.
There were china jars of all shapes and sizes round and about the
room, and some china monsters, or idols, of which I could never bear
the sight, they were so ugly, though I think my lady valued them more
than all. There was a thick carpet on the middle of the floor, which
was made of small pieces of rare wood fitted into a pattern; the
doors were opposite to each other, and were composed of two heavy
tall wings, and opened in the middle, moving on brass grooves
inserted into the floor--they would not have opened over a carpet.
There were two windows reaching up nearly to the ceiling, but very
narrow and with deep window-seats in the thickness of the wall. The
room was full of scent, partly from the flowers outside, and partly
from the great jars of pot-pourri inside. The choice of odours was
what my lady piqued herself upon, saying nothing showed birth like a
keen susceptibility of smell. We never named musk in her presence,
her antipathy to it was so well understood through the household:
her opinion on the subject was believed to be, that no scent derived
from an animal could ever be of a sufficiently pure nature to give
pleasure to any person of good family, where, of course, the delicate
perception of the senses had been cultivated for generations. She
would instance the way in which sportsmen preserve the breed of dogs
who have shown keen scent; and how such gifts descend for generations
amongst animals, who cannot be supposed to have anything of ancestral
pride, or hereditary fancies about them. Musk, then, was never
mentioned at Hanbury Court. No more were bergamot or southern-wood,
although vegetable in their nature. She considered these two latter
as betraying a vulgar taste in the person who chose to gather or wear
them. She was sorry to notice sprigs of them in the button-hole of
any young man in whom she took an interest, either because he was
engaged to a servant of hers or otherwise, as he came out of church
on a Sunday afternoon. She was afraid that he liked coarse
pleasures; and I am not sure if she did not think that his preference
for these coarse sweetnesses did not imply a probability that he
would take to drinking. But she distinguished between vulgar and
common. Violets, pinks, and sweetbriar were common enough; roses and
mignionette, for those who had gardens, honeysuckle for those who
walked along the bowery lanes; but wearing them betrayed no vulgarity
of taste: the queen upon her throne might be glad to smell at a
nosegay of the flowers. A beau-pot (as we called it) of pinks and
roses freshly gathered was placed every morning that they were in
bloom on my lady's own particular table. For lasting vegetable
odours she preferred lavender and sweet-woodroof to any extract
whatever. Lavender reminded her of old customs, she said, and of
homely cottage-gardens, and many a cottager made his offering to her
of a bundle of lavender. Sweet woodroof, again, grew in wild,
woodland places where the soil was fine and the air delicate: the
poor children used to go and gather it for her up in the woods on the
higher lands; and for this service she always rewarded them with
bright new pennies, of which my lord, her son, used to send her down
a bagful fresh from the Mint in London every February.
Attar of roses, again, she disliked. She said it reminded her of the
city and of merchants' wives, over-rich, over-heavy in its perfume.
And lilies-of-the-valley somehow fell under the same condemnation.
They were most graceful and elegant to look at (my lady was quite
candid about this), flower, leaf, colour--everything was refined
about them but the smell. That was too strong. But the great
hereditary faculty on which my lady piqued herself, and with reason,
for I never met with any person who possessed it, was the power she
had of perceiving the delicious odour arising from a bed of
strawberries in the late autumn, when the leaves were all fading and
dying. "Bacon's Essays" was one of the few books that lay about in
my lady's room; and if you took it up and opened it carelessly, it
was sure to fall apart at his "Essay on Gardens." "Listen," her
ladyship would say, "to what that great philosopher and statesman
says. 'Next to that,'--he is speaking of violets, my dear,--'is the
musk-rose,'--of which you remember the great bush, at the corner of
the south wall just by the Blue Drawing-room windows; that is the old
musk-rose, Shakespeare's musk-rose, which is dying out through the
kingdom now. But to return to my Lord Bacon: 'Then the strawberry
leaves, dying with a most excellent cordial smell.' Now the Hanburys
can always smell this excellent cordial odour, and very delicious and
refreshing it is. You see, in Lord Bacon's time, there had not been
so many intermarriages between the court and the city as there have
been since the needy days of his Majesty Charles the Second; and
altogether in the time of Queen Elizabeth, the great, old families of
England were a distinct race, just as a cart-horse is one creature,
and very useful in its place, and Childers or Eclipse is another
creature, though both are of the same species. So the old families
have gifts and powers of a different and higher class to what the
other orders have. My dear, remember that you try if you can smell
the scent of dying strawberry-leaves in this next autumn. You have
some of Ursula Hanbury's blood in you, and that gives you a chance."
But when October came, I sniffed and sniffed, and all to no purpose;
and my lady--who had watched the little experiment rather anxiously--
had to give me up as a hybrid. I was mortified, I confess, and
thought that it was in some ostentation of her own powers that she
ordered the gardener to plant a border of strawberries on that side
of the terrace that lay under her windows.
I have wandered away from time and place. I tell you all the
remembrances I have of those years just as they come up, and I hope
that, in my old age, I am not getting too like a certain Mrs.
Nickleby, whose speeches were once read out aloud to me.
I came by degrees to be all day long in this room which I have been
describing; sometimes sitting in the easy-chair, doing some little
piece of dainty work for my lady, or sometimes arranging flowers, or
sorting letters according to their handwriting, so that she could
arrange them afterwards, and destroy or keep, as she planned, looking
ever onward to her death. Then, after the sofa was brought in, she
would watch my face, and if she saw my colour change, she would bid
me lie down and rest. And I used to try to walk upon the terrace
every day for a short time: it hurt me very much, it is true, but
the doctor had ordered it, and I knew her ladyship wished me to obey.
Before I had seen the background of a great lady's life, I had
thought it all play and fine doings. But whatever other grand people
are, my lady was never idle. For one thing, she had to superintend
the agent for the large Hanbury estate. I believe it was mortgaged
for a sum of money which had gone to improve the late lord's Scotch
lands; but she was anxious to pay off this before her death, and so
to leave her own inheritance free of incumbrance to her son, the
present Earl; whom, I secretly think, she considered a greater
person, as being the heir of the Hanburys (though through a female
line), than as being my Lord Ludlow with half a dozen other minor
titles.
With this wish of releasing her property from the mortgage, skilful
care was much needed in the management of it; and as far as my lady
could go, she took every pains. She had a great book, in which every
page was ruled into three divisions; on the first column was written
the date and the name of the tenant who addressed any letter on
business to her; on the second was briefly stated the subject of the
letter, which generally contained a request of some kind. This
request would be surrounded and enveloped in so many words, and often
inserted amidst so many odd reasons and excuses, that Mr. Horner (the
steward) would sometimes say it was like hunting through a bushel of
chaff to find a grain of wheat. Now, in the second column of this
book, the grain of meaning was placed, clean and dry, before her
ladyship every morning. She sometimes would ask to see the original
letter; sometimes she simply answered the request by a "Yes," or a
"No;" and often she would send for lenses and papers, and examine
them well, with Mr. Horner at her elbow, to see if such petitions, as
to be allowed to plough up pasture fields, were provided for in the
terms of the original agreement. On every Thursday she made herself
at liberty to see her tenants, from four to six in the afternoon.
Mornings would have suited my lady better, as far as convenience
went, and I believe the old custom had been to have these levees (as
her ladyship used to call them) held before twelve. But, as she said
to Mr. Horner, when he urged returning to the former hours, it spoilt
a whole day for a farmer, if he had to dress himself in his best and
leave his work in the forenoon (and my lady liked to see her tenants
come in their Sunday clothes; she would not say a word, maybe, but
she would take her spectacles slowly out, and put them on with silent
gravity, and look at a dirty or raggedly-dressed man so solemnly and
earnestly, that his nerves must have been pretty strong if he did not
wince, and resolve that, however poor he might be, soap and water,
and needle and thread, should be used before he again appeared in her
ladyship's anteroom). The out-lying tenants had always a supper
provided for them in the servants'-hall on Thursdays, to which,
indeed all comers were welcome to sit down. For my lady said, though
there were not many hours left of a working man's day when their
business with her was ended, yet that they needed food and rest, and
that she should be ashamed if they sought either at the Fighting Lion
(called at this day the Hanbury Arms). They had as much beer as they
could drink while they were eating; and when the food was cleared
away, they had a cup a-piece of good ale, in which the oldest tenant
present, standing up, gave Madam's health; and after that was drunk,
they were expected to set off homewards; at any rate, no more liquor
was given them. The tenants one and all called her "Madam;" for they
recognized in her the married heiress of the Hanburys, not the widow
of a Lord Ludlow, of whom they and their forefathers knew nothing;
and against whose memory, indeed, there rankled a dim unspoken
grudge, the cause of which was accurately known to the very few who
understood the nature of a mortgage, and were therefore aware that
Madam's money had been taken to enrich my lord's poor land in
Scotland. I am sure--for you can understand I was behind the scenes,
as it were, and had many an opportunity of seeing and hearing, as I
lay or sat motionless in my lady's room with the double doors open
between it and the anteroom beyond, where Lady Ludlow saw her
steward, and gave audience to her tenants,--I am certain, I say, that
Mr. Horner was silently as much annoyed at the money that was
swallowed up by this mortgage as any one; and, some time or other, he
had probably spoken his mind out to my lady; for there was a sort of
offended reference on her part, and respectful submission to blame on
his, while every now and then there was an implied protest--whenever
the payments of the interest became due, or whenever my lady stinted
herself of any personal expense, such as Mr. Horner thought was only
decorous and becoming in the heiress of the Hanburys. Her carriages
were old and cumbrous, wanting all the improvements which had been
adopted by those of her rank throughout the county. Mr. Horner would
fain have had the ordering of a new coach. The carriage-horses, too,
were getting past their work; yet all the promising colts bred on the
estate were sold for ready money; and so on. My lord, her son, was
ambassador at some foreign place; and very proud we all were of his
glory and dignity; but I fancy it cost money, and my lady would have
lived on bread and water sooner than have called upon him to help her
in paying off the mortgage, although he was the one who was to
benefit by it in the end.
Mr. Horner was a very faithful steward, and very respectful to my
lady; although sometimes, I thought she was sharper to him than to
any one else; perhaps because she knew that, although he never said
anything, he disapproved of the Hanburys being made to pay for the
Earl Ludlow's estates and state.
The late lord had been a sailor, and had been as extravagant in his
habits as most sailors are, I am told,--for I never saw the sea; and
yet he had a long sight to his own interests; but whatever he was, my
lady loved him and his memory, with about as fond and proud a love as
ever wife gave husband, I should think.
For a part of his life Mr. Horner, who was born on the Hanbury
property, had been a clerk to an attorney in Birmingham; and these
few years had given him a kind of worldly wisdom, which, though
always exerted for her benefit, was antipathetic to her ladyship, who
thought that some of her steward's maxims savoured of trade and
commerce. I fancy that if it had been possible, she would have
preferred a return to the primitive system, of living on the produce
of the land, and exchanging the surplus for such articles as were
needed, without the intervention of money.
But Mr. Horner was bitten with new-fangled notions, as she would say,
though his new-fangled notions were what folk at the present day
would think sadly behindhand; and some of Mr. Gray's ideas fell on
Mr. Horner's mind like sparks on tow, though they started from two
different points. Mr. Horner wanted to make every man useful and
active in this world, and to direct as much activity and usefulness
as possible to the improvement of the Hanbury estates, and the
aggrandisement of the Hanbury family, and therefore he fell into the
new cry for education.
Mr. Gray did not care much,--Mr. Horner thought not enough,--for this
world, and where any man or family stood in their earthly position;
but he would have every one prepared for the world to come, and
capable of understanding and receiving certain doctrines, for which
latter purpose, it stands to reason, he must have heard of these
doctrines; and therefore Mr. Gray wanted education. The answer in
the Catechism that Mr. Horner was most fond of calling upon a child
to repeat, was that to, "What is thy duty towards thy neighbour?"
The answer Mr. Gray liked best to hear repeated with unction, was
that to the question, "What is the inward and spiritual grace?" The
reply to which Lady Ludlow bent her head the lowest, as we said our
Catechism to her on Sundays, was to, "What is thy duty towards God?"
But neither Mr. Horner nor Mr. Gray had heard many answers to the
Catechism as yet.
Up to this time there was no Sunday-school in Hanbury. Mr. Gray's
desires were bounded by that object. Mr. Horner looked farther on:
he hoped for a day-school at some future time, to train up
intelligent labourers for working on the estate. My lady would hear
of neither one nor the other: indeed, not the boldest man whom she
ever saw would have dared to name the project of a day-school within
her hearing.
So Mr. Horner contented himself with quietly teaching a sharp, clever
lad to read and write, with a view to making use of him as a kind of
foreman in process of time. He had his pick of the farm-lads for
this purpose; and, as the brightest and sharpest, although by far the
raggedest and dirtiest, singled out Job Gregson's son. But all this-
-as my lady never listened to gossip, or indeed, was spoken to unless
she spoke first--was quite unknown to her, until the unlucky incident
took place which I am going to relate. _
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