SEA-SIDE LODGINGS
To set a dog barking is easier than to stop him by the soundest
reasoning. Even if the roof above his honest head, growing loose on its
nails, is being mended, he comes out to ask about the matter, and in
strong terms proclaims his opinion to the distance.
After this kind behaved the people about to be protected by this
battery. They had dreamed of no danger till they saw their houses
beginning to be protected, and for this--though it added to their
importance--they were not truly thankful. They took it in various ways,
according to their rich variety of reflection; but the way in which
nobody took it was that of gratitude and humility.
“Everything upside down,” they said, “everything gone clean topsy-turvy!
And the deep meaning of it is to rob our fishing, under pretence of the
Nationals. It may bring a good bit of money to the place, for the lining
of one or two pockets, such as John Prater's and Cheeseman's; but I
never did hold so much with money, when shattery ways comes along of it.
No daughter of mine stirs out-of-doors after sundown, I can tell them.”
Thus were the minds of the men disturbed, or at any rate those of the
elder ones; while the women, on the whole, were pleased, although they
pretended to be contemptuous. “I'll tell you what I think, ma'am,” Mrs.
Cheeseman said to Widow Shanks quite early, “if you take a farthing less
than half a guinea a week for your dimity-parlour, with the window up
the hill, and the little door under the big sweet-briar, I shall think
that you are not as you used to be.”
“And right you would be, ma'am, and too right there;” Mrs. Shanks sighed
deeply as she thought of it. “There is nobody but you can understand
it, and I don't mind saying it on that account to you. Whenever I have
wanted for a little bit of money, as the nature of lone widows generally
does, it has always been out of your power, Mrs. Cheeseman, to oblige
me, and quite right of you. But I have a good son, thank the Lord,
by the name of Harry, to provide for me; and a guinea a week is the
agreement now for the dimity-parlour, and the three leg'd bed, and cold
dinner to be paid for extra, such as I might send for to your good shop,
with the money ready in the hand of my little girl, and jug below her
apron for refreshment from the Darling.”
“Well, I never! My dear soul, you have taken all my breath away. Why,
it must be the captain of all the gunners. How gunpowder do pay, to be
sure!”
“Lor, ma'am, why, don't you know,” replied Mrs. Shanks, with some
contempt, “that the man with three ribs is the captain of the
gunners--the man in my back sitting-room? No dimity-parlour for him with
his family, not for a guinea and a half a week. But if I was to tell
you who the gentleman is, and one of the highest all round these parts,
truthful as you know me, Mrs. Cheeseman, you would say to yourself, what
a liar she is!”
“Mrs. Shanks, I never use coarse expressions, even to myself in private.
And perhaps I could tell you a thing or two would astonish you more than
me, ma'am. Suppose I should tell you, to begin with, who your guinea
lodger is?”
“That you could never do, Mrs. Cheeseman, with all your time a-counting
changes. He is not of the rank for a twopenny rasher, or a wedge of
cheese packed in old petticoat.”
These two ladies now looked at one another. They had not had a quarrel
for almost three months, and a large arrear of little pricks on either
side was pending. Sooner or later it would have to be fought out (like
a feud between two nations), with a houseful of loss and woe to either
side, but a thimbleful of pride and glory. Yet so much wiser were these
women than the most sagacious nations that they put off to a cheaper
time their grudge against each other.
“His rank may be royal,” said the wife of Mr. Cheeseman, “though a
going-downhill kind of royalty, perhaps, and yet he might be glad, Mrs.
Shanks, to come where the butter has the milk spots, and none is in the
cheese, ma'am.”
“If such should be his wish, ma'am, for supper or for breakfast, or even
for dinner on a Sunday when the rain comes through the Castle, you may
trust me to know where to send him, but not to guarantee him at all of
his money.”
“They high ones is very apt to slip in that,” Mrs. Cheeseman answered,
thoughtfully; “they seem to be less particular in paying for a thing
than they was to have it good. But a burnt child dreads the fire, as
they say; and a young man with a castleful of owls and rats, by reason
of going for these hundred years on credit, will have it brought home
to him to pay ready money. But the Lord be over us! if I don't see him
a-going your way already! Good-by, my dear soul--good-by, and preserve
you; and if at any time short of table or bed linen, a loan from an old
friend, and coming back well washed, and it sha'n't be, as the children
sing, 'A friend with a loan has the pick of your bone, and he won't let
you very long alone.'”
“Many thanks to you for friendly meaning, ma'am,” said the widow, as she
took up her basket to go home, “and glad I may be to profit by it, with
the time commanding. But as yet I have had neither sleepers or feeders
in my little house, but the children. Though both of them reserves
the right to do it, if nature should so compel them--the three-ribbed
gentleman with one ear, at five shillings a week, in the sitting-room,
and the young man up over him. Their meaning is for business, and
studying, and keeping of accounts, and having of a quiet place in bad
weather, though feed they must, sooner or later, I depend; and then who
is there but Mr. Cheeseman?”
“How grand he do look upon that black horse, quite as solid as if he was
glued to it!” the lady of the shop replied, as she put away the money;
“and to do that without victuals is beyond a young man's power. He
looks like what they used to call a knight upon an errand, in the
picture-books, when I was romantic, only for the hair that comes under
his nose. Ah! his errand will be to break the hearts of the young ladies
that goes down upon the sands in their blue gowns, I'm afraid, if they
can only manage with the hair below his nose.”
“And do them good, some of them, and be a judgment from the Lord, for
the French style in their skirts is a shocking thing to see. What should
we have said when you and I were young, my dear? But quick step is the
word for me, for I expect my Jenny home on her day out from the Admiral,
and no Harry in the house to look after her. Ah! dimity-parlours is a
thing as may happen to cut both ways, Mrs. Cheeseman.”
Widow Shanks had good cause to be proud of her cottage, which was the
prettiest in Springhaven, and one of the most commodious. She had fought
a hard fight, when her widowhood began, and the children were too young
to help her, rather than give up the home of her love-time, and the
cradle of her little ones. Some of her neighbours (who wanted the house)
were sadly pained at her stubbornness, and even dishonesty, as they put
it, when she knew that she never could pay her rent. But “never is a
long time,” according to the proverb; and with the forbearance of
the Admiral, the kindness of his daughters, and the growth of her own
children, she stood clear of all debt now, except the sweet one of
gratitude.
And now she could listen to the moaning of the sea (which used to make
her weep all night) with a milder sense of the cruel woe that it had
drowned her husband, and a lull of sorrow that was almost hope; until
the dark visions of wrecks and corpses melted into sweet dreams of her
son upon the waters, finishing his supper, and getting ready for his
pipe. For Harry was making his own track well in the wake of his dear
father.
Now if she had gone inland to dwell, from the stroke of her great
calamity--as most people told her to make haste and do--not only the
sympathy of the sea, but many of the little cares, which are the ants
that bury heavy grief, would have been wholly lost to her. And amongst
these cares the foremost always, and the most distracting, was that
of keeping her husband's cottage--as she still would call it--tidy,
comfortable, bright, and snug, as if he were coming on Saturday.
Where the brook runs into the first hearing of the sea, to defer its own
extinction it takes a lively turn inland, leaving a pleasant breadth of
green between itself and its destiny. At the breath of salt the larger
trees hang back, and turn their boughs up; but plenty of pretty shrubs
come forth, and shade the cottage garden. Neither have the cottage walls
any lack of leafy mantle, where the summer sun works his own defeat by
fostering cool obstruction. For here are the tamarisk, and jasmin, and
the old-fashioned corchorus flowering all the summer through, as well
as the myrtle that loves the shore, with a thicket of stiff young sprigs
arising, slow of growth, but hiding yearly the havoc made in its head
and body by the frost of 1795, when the mark of every wave upon the
sands was ice. And a vine, that seems to have been evolved from a
miller, or to have prejected him, clambers with grey silver pointrels
through the more glossy and darker green. And over these you behold the
thatch, thick and long and parti-coloured, eaved with little windows,
where a bird may nest for ever.
But it was not for this outward beauty that Widow Shanks, stuck to her
house, and paid the rent at intervals. To her steadfast and well-managed
mind, the number of rooms, and the separate staircase which a solvent
lodger might enjoy, were the choicest grant of the household gods. The
times were bad--as they always are when conscientious people think
of them--and poor Mrs. Shanks was desirous of paying her rent, by the
payment of somebody. Every now and then some well-fed family, hungering
(after long carnage) for fish, would come from village pastures or town
shambles, to gaze at the sea, and to taste its contents. For in those
days fish were still in their duty, to fry well, to boil well, and to
go into the mouth well, instead of being dissolute--as nowadays the
best is--with dirty ice, and flabby with arrested fermentation. In the
pleasant dimity-parlour then, commanding a fair view of the lively sea
and the stream that sparkled into it, were noble dinners of sole, and
mackerel, and smelt that smelled of cucumber, and dainty dory, and
pearl-buttoned turbot, and sometimes even the crisp sand-lance, happily
for himself, unhappily for whitebait, still unknown in London. Then,
after long rovings ashore or afloat, these diners came back with a new
light shed upon them--that of the moon outside the house, of the supper
candles inside. There was sure to be a crab or lobster ready, and a dish
of prawns sprigged with parsley; if the sea were beginning to get cool
again, a keg of philanthropic oysters; or if these were not hospitably
on their hinges yet, certainly there would be choice-bodied creatures,
dried with a dash of salt upon the sunny shingle, and lacking of
perfection nothing more than to be warmed through upon a toasting-fork.
By none, however, of these delights was the newly won lodger tempted.
All that he wanted was peace and quiet, time to go through a great trunk
full of papers and parchments, which he brought with him, and a breath
of fresh air from the downs on the north, and the sea to the south,
to enliven him. And in good truth he wanted to be enlivened, as Widow
Shanks said to her daughter Jenny; for his eyes were gloomy, and his
face was stern, and he seldom said anything good-natured. He seemed to
avoid all company, and to be wrapped up wholly in his own concerns, and
to take little pleasure in anything. As yet he had not used the bed at
his lodgings, nor broken his fast there to her knowledge, though he rode
down early every morning and put up his horse at Cheeseman's, and never
rode away again until the dark had fallen. Neither had he cared to make
the acquaintance of Captain Stubbarb, who occupied the room beneath
his for a Royal Office--as the landlady proudly entitled it; nor had
he received, to the best of her knowledge, so much as a single visitor,
though such might come by his private entrance among the shrubs
unnoticed. All these things stirred with deep interest and wonder the
enquiring mind of the widow.
“And what do they say of him up at the Hall?” she asked her daughter
Jenny, who was come to spend holiday at home. “What do they say of my
new gentleman, young Squire Carne from the Castle? The Carnes and the
Darlings was never great friends, as every one knows in Springhaven.
Still, it do seem hard and unchristianlike to keep up them old enmities;
most of all, when the one side is down in the world, with the owls and
the bats and the coneys.”
“No, mother, no. They are not a bit like that,” replied Jenny--a maid
of good loyalty; “it is only that he has not called upon them. All
gentlefolks have their proper rules of behaviour. You can't be expected
to understand them, mother.”
“But why should he go to them more than they should come to him,
particular with young ladies there? And him with only one horse to
their seven or eight. I am right, you may depend upon it, Jenny; and
my mother, your grandmother, was a lady's-maid in a higher family than
Darling--it depends upon them to come and look him up first, and he have
no call to knock at their door without it. Why, it stands to reason,
poor young man! And not a bit hath he eaten from Monday.”
“Well, I believe I am right, but I'll ask Miss Dolly. She is that sharp,
she knows everything, and I don't mind what I say to her, when she
thinks that she looks handsome. And it takes a very bad dress, I can
tell you, to put her out of that opinion.”
“She is right enough there:” Mrs. Shanks shook her head at her daughter
for speaking in this way. “The ugliest frock as ever came from France
couldn't make her any but a booty. And the Lord knows the quality have
come to queer shapes now. Undecent would be the name for it in our ranks
of women. Why, the last of her frocks she gave you, Jenny, how much did
I put on, at top and bottom, and you three inches shorter than she is!
And the slips they ties round them--oh dear! oh dear! as if that was to
hold them up and buckle them together! Won't they have the groanings by
the time they come to my age?”