ST. BEVIS’S AND SQUIRE GODWIN.
Within three months from the date of the drawing-room, Lady Lucie
Penruddock was dead and buried. Her dowager’s allowance had lapsed to
the Squire Penruddock of the day. The sale of the furniture in her
lodging had done little more than pay the expenses of its late owner’s
funeral. Lady Bell Etheredge, the one orphan child of an earl who had so
squandered his estate in his lifetime, that it seemed rather proper and
convenient that his title had died with him, was left destitute. Her
sole inheritance consisted of her suit of mourning, with her other
suits, and a little sum of pocket-money, sufficient to carry her down to
Warwickshire to the keeping of her mother’s unmarried brother and
sister, Squire Godwin and Mrs. Die Godwin, of St. Bevis’s.
The journey was made by posting under the escort of a maid and a man,
appointed to see Lady Bell safe, by some friend of Lady Lucie’s, who
took so much interest in the girl, for her grand-aunt’s sake. It was
travelling away from the civilised world to Lady Bell, and it was
travelling which lasted for several days, and was half-killing in the
mingled grief and fatigue that attended on it.
Lady Bell reached St. Bevis’s early on a dark, wet October evening. For
so young a girl, she was sunk in depression and desolation; since she
had bidden farewell to all she had known and loved. She had never seen
her mother’s kindred, for there had been a quarrel between them and her
father soon after his marriage, while the particulars which Lady Lucie
had let fall from time to time, that seemed to make little impression
then, but were painfully present to Lady Bell’s mind now, were not
reassuring.
Lady Bell had tried for the last half-hour to catch a glimpse of the
country round St. Bevis’s through the steaming chaise windows. The fact
was, that all the country was new to her, except what, in her ignorance,
she had called country when she had gone out of town for a day’s
pleasure to Chelsea, or Richmond, or Greenwich. But the most ardent
admirer of the country, pure and simple, will admit that the close of a
dismal day in the fall of the year, when the fields are bare, and the
woods half stripped, is hardly a propitious season for a novice making
her first acquaintance with the country, even though she be not turning
her back on the delights of youth, though the country inns at which she
has lain have not been comfortless, though the roads are not quagmires,
and though her nerves are not shaken with fears of highwaymen.
“Lud, how horrid lonesome it do be here,” exclaimed the maid who sat
inside with Lady Bell, while the man sat outside with the driver. “We
shall see a man hanging in chains at the next cross roads, I come bound.
It would give me the dumps in no time to be kept down here. However do
country bumpkins and their sweethearts make shift to exist in such a
hole? In course, it is quite different with the gentlefolks, who can
have their country houses full of company.” The woman corrected herself,
remembering, in time, Lady Bell’s circumstances.
Lady Bell could not find fault, for she caught herself echoing the
reflection in her own style as she pressed her white face against the
glass, “What can life be like here without a court, or assemblies, or
drums, or even shops—and we have not passed a waggon or pack-horses
since we left the great road.”
At last the driver proceeded to draw up his horses, mud and mire to the
fetlocks. There before Lady Bell rose a portion of a pillared façade,
belonging to a great house that had never been completely built, and of
which the fragments were only dimly illuminated by the light from
within, confined to a few windows, and by a lamp swinging over the
entrance-door. The whole building had a cheerless and spectral air to
Lady Bell. There was no want of life in it, however, such as it was. A
troop of men, most of them in stable-boy’s jackets or country frocks,
one or two in tarnished livery, rushed out at the sound of wheels to
hail the chaise, and shout for news before the travellers had time to
alight. “Any word of the Foxlow races, driver, before you started?”
“Were Nimble Dick’s dying speech and confession come out?”
“Shut your pipes, you rude rascals; it is the young lady, the squire’s
niece,” protested a more civilised voice than those of the others; while
a bloated, pursy man in slovenly black, who might be either butler or
chaplain to Squire Godwin, stepped forward, opened the door, and helped
the cramped, shivering girl out, amidst a slight cessation of the rough
clamour. “Your servant, Lady Bell Etheredge; follow me.”
He conducted her into a dreary unfurnished hall on a vast scale, paused
a moment, laid a flabby finger on his forehead, scratched his head under
his wig, spoke to himself, but yet as it sounded in confidence to Lady
Bell. “Curse me if I know where I had better take her first. Mrs. Die is
not to be seen at this hour, or it will be the worse for the person who
sees her. Mrs. Kitty won’t leave Mrs. Die’s room to do the honours; I
think I had better take his niece to the squire himself, though we do
interrupt his game.”
They proceeded up a spacious staircase with the walls in a grimy edition
of the original whitewash,—oak balustrades, but the space between filled
with hempen rope, and the wide steps as innocent of the application of
water as ever were the steps of stairs in any Hotel de Polignac of
Paris, or Strozzi House of Florence. They traversed gusty unmatted
corridors until they reached a room which bore some traces of
habitableness and use.
It was a moderately sized room, panelled and hung with portraits, as
Lady Bell saw when her usher threw open the door after he had knocked.
It was supplied with a carpet, table, and chairs, and had a fire blazing
behind the dogs. Two gentlemen were in the room, sitting at the table
engaged at cards, with wax candles, bottles and glasses at their elbows.
The one who faced Lady Bell as she entered was a facsimile of her
conductor, except that the last was shaggier and dirtier, but not so
bloated and pursy as his fellow. He looked up on the interruption, and,
turning his head a little, so that his side-face could not be seen by
his companion at table, winked warningly to the new-comers. The other
man, whose back was to Lady Bell, wore a velvet coat and had his hair in
powder. He grumbled resentfully before he looked round. “What the plague
do you mean by bringing any one here at this hour, Sneyd?”
“It is your niece, Lady Bell Etheredge, squire. I thought you would like
to see her at once, as Mrs. Die is not to be disturbed after supper,”
answered the squire’s butler, as if he were delivering a carefully
considered speech.
The squire with a little “humph!” possibly meant to be inaudible, got up
and turned round. “My dear niece, I beg to welcome you to St. Bevis’s,”
he said, in a voice cultivated and agreeable in spite of its slight
hoarseness. He took Lady Bell by the hand, saluted her, sat down
opposite to her and looked at her, giving her the opportunity of
glancing with a gleam of hopefulness at him. He was a handsome, nay, an
elegant man in middle life, though his face was haggard with hard living
and devouring anxiety. Notwithstanding the evident dilapidation of his
house and the disorder of his household, his dress was costly and
fashionable,—in every particular that of a well-endowed gentleman
somewhat foppish for his years. His spotless ruffles were of Mechlin,
the ring on his finger was worth many diamonds, and as it was a
delicately cut antique, it required the taste of a scholarly fine
gentleman to appreciate it.
Lady Bell experienced a feeling of relief. In Mr. Godwin’s presence she
was restored to the element in which she had been reared. From her first
dismal glimpse of her future home she did not know what churlish boor
she had expected her uncle to be.
Unfortunately, that feeling of relief came too late to be of service to
Lady Bell. If she had known it, her first interview with her uncle had
been critical, and one moment had rendered it a failure. He was a man
liable to excessive partialities or aversions where women were
concerned. Had Lady Bell caught his fancy at first, and struck him as
having the making of a charming young woman, though he might have borne
a grudge at her father’s memory and been annoyed at her becoming
dependent on him, he might also have felt pride in her, and been as kind
an uncle as circumstances and character would have permitted. He might
have gone so far as to make a pet of her, and thus have had a strange
thread of gentleness introduced into the web of his life. How far the
result would have been to Lady Bell’s advantage is a different matter.
As it was, Squire Godwin saw Lady Bell first in her tumbled habit and
bent hat, her face blue with cold, her eyes red with crying, her mouth
relaxed with fasting, Lady Lucie’s excellent lessons as to holding
herself up, walking and sitting, for the moment forgotten. Mr. Godwin
set down Lady Bell, without hesitation, as a plain, unformed,
weak-minded girl, of whose breeding Lady Lucie had made a mess, whose
title sounded still more incongruously than poverty alone could have
made it sound, who would be nothing save “an infernal plague” to him who
had plagues enough without her. And Squire Godwin was a man who rarely
departed from a conclusion.
The next words which her uncle addressed to Lady Bell were spoken with
courtesy in their reserve, but they fell on her spirits, now beginning
to rise, like so many bolts of ice.
“Sneyd will see that you get some refreshment before you retire for the
night. You will meet Mrs. Die, and be put under her charge in the
morning. Let me wish you a very good night, Lady Bell.”
Down, fathoms down, went the dismayed girlish heart; but, for as lightly
as her uncle esteemed her breeding, then and thenceforth, Lady Bell
walked out of the room, marshalled by Sneyd, with a more erect head and
firmer step than those with which she had entered it. She did not salt
the spiced beef, home-made bread, and mulled white wine with which Sneyd
sought to regale her, with the tears which were ready to choke her. She
responded loftily to his good-humoured attempts at entertaining her, so
that he pronounced her in his mind “a chip of the old block,” as proud
and passionate as fire, like Mrs. Die herself—but trust her to be broken
in by Mrs. Die and Mrs. Kitty together, the poor young mylady!
Even after Lady Bell had been conducted to the dark, chill closet—all
that there was for her room—which looked out on an unfinished wing of
the house, where owls roosted and cats scrambled and miauled, she would
not have given way before herself, so great was the mistake of Mr.
Godwin that Lady Lucie’s instructions had not sunk into her
grand-niece’s heart, had it not been for a physical, certainly not in
itself heroic, shrinking from darkness, and apprehension at the idea of
ghosts—like that of Cock Lane, which caused Lady Bell at last to lay
aside her youthful dignity, as Louis le Grand laid aside his wig, from
between closed curtains, and to break down and sob herself to sleep,
with the bed-clothes drawn tightly over her head.