To begin with the old rigmarole of childhood. In a country there was a
shire, and in that shire there was a town, and in that town there was a
house, and in that house there was a room, and in that room there was a
bed, and in that bed there lay a little girl; wide awake and longing to
get up, but not daring to do so for fear of the unseen power in the next
room—a certain Betty, whose slumbers must not be disturbed until six
o’clock struck, when she wakened of herself “as sure as clockwork,” and
left the household very little peace afterwards. It was a June morning,
and early as it was, the room was full of sunny warmth and light.
On the drawers opposite to the little white dimity bed in which Molly
Gibson lay, was a primitive kind of bonnet stand, on which was hung a
bonnet, carefully covered over from any chance of dust, with a large
cotton handkerchief; of so heavy and serviceable a texture that, if
the thing underneath it had been a flimsy fabric of gauze and lace and
flowers, it would have been altogether “scomfished” (again to quote from
Betty’s vocabulary). But the bonnet was made of solid straw, and its
only trimming was a plain white ribbon put over the crown, and forming
the strings. Still, there was a neat little quilling inside, every
plait of which Molly knew, for had she not made it herself the evening
before, with infinite pains? and was there not a little blue bow in
this quilling, the very first bit of such finery Molly had ever had the
prospect of wearing?
Six o’clock now! the pleasant, brisk ringing of the church bells told
that; calling everyone to their daily work, as they had done for hundreds
of years. Up jumped Molly, and ran with her bare little feet across the
room, and lifted off the handkerchief and saw once again the bonnet—the
pledge of the gay bright day to come. Then to the window, and after some
tugging she opened the casement, and let in the sweet morning air. The
dew was already off the flowers in the garden below, but still rising
from the long hay-grass in the meadows directly beyond. At one side lay
the little town of Hollingford, into a street of which Mr. Gibson’s front
door opened; and delicate columns and little puffs of smoke were already
beginning to rise from many a cottage chimney, where some housewife was
already up, and preparing breakfast for the bread-winner of the family.
Molly Gibson saw all this, but all she thought about it was, “Oh! it will
be a fine day! I was afraid it never, never would come; or that, if it
ever came, it would be a rainy day!” Five-and-forty years ago, children’s
pleasures in a country town were very simple, and Molly had lived for
twelve long years without the occurrence of any event so great as that
which was now impending. Poor child! it is true that she had lost her
mother, which was a jar to the whole tenour of her life; but that was
hardly an event in the sense referred to; and besides, she had been too
young to be conscious of it at the time. The pleasure she was looking
forward to to-day was her first share in a kind of annual festival in
Hollingford.
The little straggling town faded away into country on one side, close
to the entrance-lodge of a great park, where lived my Lord and Lady
Cumnor: “the earl” and “the countess,” as they were always called by the
inhabitants of the town, where a very pretty amount of feudal feeling
still lingered, and showed itself in a number of simple ways, droll
enough to look back upon, but serious matters of importance at the time.
It was before the passing of the Reform Bill, but a good deal of liberal
talk took place occasionally between two or three of the more enlightened
freeholders living in Hollingford; and there was a great Whig family
in the county who, from time to time, came forward and contested the
election with the rival Tory family of Cumnor. One would have thought
that the above-mentioned liberal-talking inhabitants of Hollingford
would have, at least, admitted the possibility of their voting for the
Hely-Harrison who represented their own opinions. But no such thing.
“The earl” was lord of the manor, and owner of much of the land on which
Hollingford was built; he and his household were fed, and doctored, and,
to a certain measure, clothed by the good people of the town; their
fathers’ grandfathers had always voted for the eldest son of Cumnor
Towers, and following in the ancestral track, every man-jack in the place
gave his vote to the liege lord, totally irrespective of such chimeras as
political opinion.
This was no unusual instance of the influence of the great landowners
over humbler neighbours in those days before railways, and it was well
for a place where the powerful family, who thus overshadowed it, were of
so respectable a character as the Cumnors. They expected to be submitted
to, and obeyed; the simple worship of the townspeople was accepted by
the earl and countess as a right; and they would have stood still in
amazement and with a horrid memory of the French sansculottes who were
the bugbears of their youth, had any inhabitant of Hollingford ventured
to set his will or opinions in opposition to those of the earl. But,
yielded all that obeisance, they did a good deal for the town, and
were generally condescending, and often thoughtful and kind, in their
treatment of their vassals. Lord Cumnor was a forbearing landlord,
putting his steward a little on one side sometimes, and taking the reins
into his own hands now and then, much to the annoyance of the agent, who
was, in fact, too rich and independent to care greatly for preserving
a post where his decisions might any day be overturned by my lord’s
taking a fancy to go “pottering” (as the agent irreverently expressed
it in the sanctuary of his own home), which, being interpreted, meant
that occasionally the earl asked his own questions of his own tenants,
and used his own eyes and ears in the management of the smaller details
of his property. But his tenants liked my lord all the better for this
habit of his. Lord Cumnor had certainly a little time for gossip, which
he contrived to combine with the failing of personal intervention between
the old land steward and the tenantry. But, then, the countess made up by
her unapproachable dignity for this weakness of the earl’s. Once a year
she was condescending. She and the ladies, her daughters, had set up a
school; not a school after the manner of schools nowadays, where far
better intellectual teaching is given to the boys and girls of labourers
and work-people than often falls to the lot of their betters in worldly
estate; but a school of the kind we should call “industrial,” where girls
are taught to sew beautifully, to be capital housemaids, and pretty fair
cooks, and, above all, to dress neatly in a kind of charity uniform
devised by the ladies of Cumnor Towers—white caps, white tippets, check
aprons, blue gowns, and ready curtsies, and “please ma’ams” being _de
rigueur_.
Now, as the countess was absent from the Towers for a considerable part
of the year, she was glad to enlist the sympathy of the Hollingford
ladies in this school, with a view to obtaining their aid as visitors
during the many months that she and her daughters were away. And the
various unoccupied gentlewomen of the town responded to the call of
their liege lady, and gave her their service as required; and along with
it, a great deal of whispered and fussy admiration. “How good of the
countess! So like the dear countess—always thinking of others!” and so
on; while it was always supposed that no strangers had seen Hollingford
properly, unless they had been taken to the countess’s school, and been
duly impressed by the neat little pupils, and the still neater needlework
there to be inspected. In return, there was a day of honour set apart
every summer, when, with much gracious and stately hospitality, Lady
Cumnor and her daughters received all the school visitors at the Towers,
the great family mansion standing in aristocratic seclusion in the centre
of the large park, of which one of the lodges was close to the little
town. The order of this annual festivity was this. About ten o’clock
one of the Towers’ carriages rolled through the lodge, and drove to
different houses, wherein dwelt a woman to be honoured; picking them up
by ones or twos, till the loaded carriage drove back again through the
ready portals, bowled along the smooth tree-shaded road, and deposited
its covey of smartly dressed ladies on the great flight of steps leading
to the ponderous doors of Cumnor Towers. Back again to the town; another
picking up of womankind in their best clothes, and another return, and
so on till the whole party were assembled either in the house or in
the really beautiful gardens. After the proper amount of exhibition on
the one part, and admiration on the other, had been done, there was a
collation for the visitors, and some more display and admiration of the
treasures inside the house. Towards four o’clock coffee was brought
round; and this was a signal of the approaching carriage that was to
take them back to their own homes; whither they returned with the
happy consciousness of a well-spent day, but with some fatigue at the
long-continued exertion of behaving their best, and talking on stilts for
so many hours. Nor were Lady Cumnor and her daughters free from something
of the same self-approbation, and something, too, of the same fatigue;
the fatigue that always follows on conscious efforts to behave as will
best please the society you are in.
For the first time in her life, Molly Gibson was to be included among the
guests at the Towers.