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 may-be, 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 call 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 my 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 mignonette,
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 these 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 other
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 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 leases 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, &c., 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
levées (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, may-be, 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 outlying 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 recognised 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.