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 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 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.