A formal but friendly letter came to Mistress Betty, when her life was
one of long dusty exertion, and her heart was very thirsty and parched.
The shabby-genteel world and the tradesman's life, unless in exceptional
cases of great wealth, were different things a hundred and fifty years
ago from what they are now. The villas at Twickenham, the rural
retreats, the gardens, the grottos, the books, the harpsichords, the
water-colour drawings, belonged to the quality, or to the literary
lions: to Lady Mary or Pope, Horace Walpole or his young friends the
Berrys. The half-pay officer's widow, the orphan of the bankrupt in the
South Sea business, the wife and family of the moderately flourishing
haberdasher, or coach-builder, or upholsterer--the tobacconist rose far
above the general level--were cooped up in the City dwellings, and
confined to gossip, fine clothes, and good eating if they could afford
them. A walk in the City gardens, a trip to Richmond Hill, and the
shows, were their pastimes, and Mr. Steele's 'Christian Hero,' 'An
Advice to a Daughter,' and De Foe's 'History of the Plague,' were their
mental delectation.
But Mistress Betty had the soul of a martyr; she had resigned herself to
sinking down into the star of cousin Ward's set, who went on holidays to
the play--mostly honest, fat and fatuous, or jaunty and egotistical
folk, who admired the scenery and the dresses, but could no more have
made a play to themselves than they could have drawn the cartoons. She
helped cousin Ward, not only with her purse, but with a kinswoman's
concern in her and hers: she assisted to wash and dress the children of
a morning; she took a turn at cooking in the middle of the day; she
helped to detain Master Ward at the tea-table, and to keep his wig and
knee-buckles from too early an appearance and too thorough a soaking of
his self-conceit and wilfulness at his tavern; and she heard the lads
their lessons, while she darned their frills before supper.
Then arrived the summons, over which Mistress Betty, a little worn by
voluntary adversity, shed "a power" of joyful tears. To travel down into
Somersetshire, and stroll among the grass in the meadows, and the gorse
on the commons, which she had not seen for twelve months; to feed the
calves, and milk the cows, and gather the eggs, and ride Dapple, and tie
up the woodbine, and eat syllabub in a bower; to present "great frieze
coats" and "riding-hoods" to a dozen of the poorest old men and women in
the parish; to hear prayers in a little grey church, through whose open
windows ivy nodded, and before whose doors trees arched in vistas; to
see her sweet little Prissy and Fiddy, who had taken such a fancy to
her, and the vicar, and madam, and granny, and find them all perfectly
agreeable, and not slighting her or doubting her because she had been a
woman of fashion and an actress; and Master Rowland well disposed of
elsewhere; Larks' Hall deserted by its master--the brave, generous,
enamoured squire--heigho! Mistress Betty, for all her candour, good
humour, and cordiality, had her decent pride, and would not have thrown
herself at any man's head.
Somersetshire, in spite of Bath, was as antediluvian a hundred and fifty
years ago as the lanes and coombes of Devonshire. Larks' Hall, Foxholes,
Bearwood, the Vicarage of Mosely, and their outlying acquaintances,
their yeomen and their labourers, lived as old-fashioned and hearty a
life as if the battle of Sedgemoor had never been fought.
Down in Somersetshire, among its orchards, nutteries, and blackberry
thickets, poor little Mistress Fiddy was drooping, as girls would pine
sometimes, even in the days of Will Shakspeare, ere cloth-yard shafts
were abolished from merry England, when there were still mayings among
the hyacinths, and milkmaids' dances under the thorns, and mummings when
the snow fell. And Dick Ashbridge shot and fished in the most
disconsolate abandonment, though the girl yet ran past him "like a
ghost" when the beetle and bat were abroad, and he was still mooning
about the vicarage meadows.
Neither of them knew for certain, and nobody could predict exactly, that
she would live to wed Dick, bear him children, and leave him a sorrowful
widower, whose heart was chastened--not torn. No; nor could the good
folk in Somersetshire understand how closely Lady Betty and little Fiddy
were bound up together, and how little Fiddy was to return Lady Betty's
kindness, in the days when the little girl should be the teacher, and
the fine woman the scholar, and the lesson to be learnt came from
regions beyond the stars.
In the meantime, Fiddy was a sick, capricious, caressed darling in a
cambric cap and silk shawl, on whom fond friends were waiting lovingly:
whom nobody in the world, not even the doctor, the parish clerk, or the
housekeeper at Larks' Hall, dreamt of subjecting to the wholesome
medicine of contradiction--unless it might be Granny, when she came in
with her staff in her hand. She would laugh at their excess of care, and
order them to leave off spoiling that child; but even Granny herself
would let fall a tear from her dim eyes when she read the register of
the child's age in the family Bible.
"Ah!" sighs whimsical little Mistress Fiddy, "if only Lady Betty were
here--great, good, kind, clever, funny, beautiful Lady Betty--who cured
me that night at Bath, papa and mamma, I would be well again. She knows
the complaint; she has had it herself; and her face is so cheering, her
wit so enlivening, and she reads the lessons so solemnly and sweetly. O
mamma! send for Mistress Betty; she will come at once; she does not play
now; the prints say so. She will be the better of the country air too.
Send for Mistress Betty to Mosely."
Madam was in a difficulty. An actress at the vicarage! And Master
Rowland had been so rash. He had dropped hints, which, along with his
hurried visit to London, had instilled dim, dark suspicions into the
minds of his appalled relations of the whirlpool he had just coasted,
they knew not how: they could not believe the only plain palpable
solution of the fact. And Granny had inveighed against women of fashion
and all public characters, ever since Uncle Rowland took that jaunt to
town, whence he returned so glum and dogged. But then, again, how could
the mother deny her ailing Fiddy? And this brilliant Mistress Betty
from the gay world might possess some talisman unguessed by the quiet
folks at home. Little Fiddy had no real disease, no settled pain: she
only wanted change, pleasant company, and diversion, and would be plump
and strong again in no time. And Mistress Betty had retired from the
stage now; she was no longer a marked person: she might pass anywhere as
Mistress Lumley, who had acted with success and celebrity, and withdrawn
at the proper moment, with the greatest dignity and discretion. And
Master Rowland was arranging his affairs to make the grand tour in the
prime of life: his absence would clear away a monstrous objection. What
would the Vicar say? What would Granny say?
The Vicar ruled his parish, and lectured in the church; but in the
parsonage he thought very much as madam did, and was only posed when old
madam and young madam pulled him different ways.
And Granny! Why, to madam's wonder, Granny required no wheedling,
but--apprised of the deliberation, by the little minx Prissy, who in
Fiddy's illness attended on Granny--she sent for madam before madam even
knew that the proposal had been so much as mooted to her, and struck her
stick on the ground in her determined way, and insisted that Mistress
Betty should be writ for forthwith and placed at the head of the child's
society. Granny, who had soundly rated fine ladies and literary women
not two days before! It was very extraordinary; but Granny must have her
way. The children paid her affectionate duty, young madam did her
half-grateful, half-vexed homage, the Vicar and Master Rowland deferred
to her in her widowhood and dependence, and with little less grace and
reverence than what she had taught them to practise when they were lads
under tutelage. She was, in fact, the fully accredited mistress of
Larks' Hall.
And Granny, in reality, presided at the vicarage; not oppressively, for
she was one of those sagacious magnates who are satisfied with the
substance of power without loving its show. Notwithstanding, she
prevented the publication of more than two calf-skin volumes at a time
of the Vicar's sermons; she turned madam aside when she would have hung
the parlour with gilt leather, in imitation of Foxholes; and she
restricted the little girls to fresh ribbons once a month, and
stomachers of their own working. And so, when Granny decreed that
Mistress Betty was to be invited down to Mosely, there was no more
question of the propriety of the measure that there would have been of
an Act of Council given under the Tudors; the only things left to order
were the airing of the best bedroom, the dusting of the ebony furniture,
and the bleaching on the daisies of old madam's diamond quilt.
Down to Somersetshire went Mistress Betty, consoling cousin Ward with
the gift of a bran-new mantua and a promise of a speedy return, and
braving those highwaymen who were for ever robbing King George's mail;
but the long, light midsummer nights were in their favour, and their
mounted escort had to encounter no paladins of the road in scarlet coats
and feathered hats.
Mistress Betty's buoyant spirit rose with the fresh air, the green
fields, and the sunshine. She was so obliging and entertaining to an
invalid couple among her fellow-travellers, an orange nabob from
India and his splendid wife, that they declared she had done them more
good than they would derive from the Pump-room, the music, and the
cards, to which they were bound. They asked her address, and pressed
her to pay them a visit; when they would have certainly adopted her,
and bequeathed to her their plum. As it was, half-a-dozen years later,
when, to her remorse, she had clean forgotten their existence, they
astounded her by leaving her a handsome legacy; which, with the
consent of another party concerned--one who greatly relished the mere
name of the bequest, as a proof that nobody could ever resist Lady
Betty--she shared with a cross-grained grand-nephew whom the
autocratic pair had cut off with a shilling.