Authors: Elizabeth Gaskell
But when Mr. Gray got an inkling of her meaning in talking about a
Sabbath-day's journey, he only took notice of a part of it: he smiled and
bowed, and said no one knew better than her ladyship what were the duties
that abrogated all inferior laws regarding the Sabbath; and that he must
go in and read to old Betty Brown, so that he would not detain her
ladyship.
"But I shall wait for you, Mr. Gray," said she. "Or I will take a drive
round by Oakfield, and be back in an hour's time." For, you see, she
would not have him feel hurried or troubled with a thought that he was
keeping her waiting, while he ought to be comforting and praying with old
Betty.
"A very pretty young man, my dears," said she, as we drove away. "But I
shall have my pew glazed all the same."
We did not know what she meant at the time; but the next Sunday but one
we did. She had the curtains all round the grand old Hanbury family seat
taken down, and, instead of them, there was glass up to the height of six
or seven feet. We entered by a door, with a window in it that drew up or
down just like what you see in carriages. This window was generally
down, and then we could hear perfectly; but if Mr. Gray used the word
"Sabbath," or spoke in favour of schooling and education, my lady stepped
out of her corner, and drew up the window with a decided clang and clash.
I must tell you something more about Mr. Gray. The presentation to the
living of Hanbury was vested in two trustees, of whom Lady Ludlow was
one: Lord Ludlow had exercised this right in the appointment of Mr.
Mountford, who had won his lordship's favour by his excellent
horsemanship. Nor was Mr. Mountford a bad clergyman, as clergymen went
in those days. He did not drink, though he liked good eating as much as
any one. And if any poor person was ill, and he heard of it, he would
send them plates from his own dinner of what he himself liked best;
sometimes of dishes which were almost as bad as poison to sick people. He
meant kindly to everybody except dissenters, whom Lady Ludlow and he
united in trying to drive out of the parish; and among dissenters he
particularly abhorred Methodists—some one said, because John Wesley had
objected to his hunting. But that must have been long ago for when I
knew him he was far too stout and too heavy to hunt; besides, the bishop
of the diocese disapproved of hunting, and had intimated his
disapprobation to the clergy. For my own part, I think a good run would
not have come amiss, even in a moral point of view, to Mr. Mountford. He
ate so much, and took so little exercise, that we young women often heard
of his being in terrible passions with his servants, and the sexton and
clerk. But they none of them minded him much, for he soon came to
himself, and was sure to make them some present or other—some said in
proportion to his anger; so that the sexton, who was a bit of a wag (as
all sextons are, I think), said that the vicar's saying, "The Devil take
you," was worth a shilling any day, whereas "The Deuce" was a shabby
sixpenny speech, only fit for a curate.
There was a great deal of good in Mr. Mountford, too. He could not bear
to see pain, or sorrow, or misery of any kind; and, if it came under his
notice, he was never easy till he had relieved it, for the time, at any
rate. But he was afraid of being made uncomfortable; so, if he possibly
could, he would avoid seeing any one who was ill or unhappy; and he did
not thank any one for telling him about them.
"What would your ladyship have me to do?" he once said to my Lady Ludlow,
when she wished him to go and see a poor man who had broken his leg. "I
cannot piece the leg as the doctor can; I cannot nurse him as well as his
wife does; I may talk to him, but he no more understands me than I do the
language of the alchemists. My coming puts him out; he stiffens himself
into an uncomfortable posture, out of respect to the cloth, and dare not
take the comfort of kicking, and swearing, and scolding his wife, while I
am there. I hear him, with my figurative ears, my lady, heave a sigh of
relief when my back is turned, and the sermon that he thinks I ought to
have kept for the pulpit, and have delivered to his neighbours (whose
case, as he fancies, it would just have fitted, as it seemed to him to be
addressed to the sinful), is all ended, and done, for the day. I judge
others as myself; I do to them as I would be done to. That's
Christianity, at any rate. I should hate—saving your ladyship's
presence—to have my Lord Ludlow coming and seeing me, if I were ill.
'Twould be a great honour, no doubt; but I should have to put on a clean
nightcap for the occasion; and sham patience, in order to be polite, and
not weary his lordship with my complaints. I should be twice as thankful
to him if he would send me game, or a good fat haunch, to bring me up to
that pitch of health and strength one ought to be in, to appreciate the
honour of a visit from a nobleman. So I shall send Jerry Butler a good
dinner every day till he is strong again; and spare the poor old fellow
my presence and advice."
My lady would be puzzled by this, and by many other of Mr. Mountford's
speeches. But he had been appointed by my lord, and she could not
question her dead husband's wisdom; and she knew that the dinners were
always sent, and often a guinea or two to help to pay the doctor's bills;
and Mr. Mountford was true blue, as we call it, to the back-bone; hated
the dissenters and the French; and could hardly drink a dish of tea
without giving out the toast of "Church and King, and down with the
Rump." Moreover, he had once had the honour of preaching before the King
and Queen, and two of the Princesses, at Weymouth; and the King had
applauded his sermon audibly with,—"Very good; very good;" and that was
a seal put upon his merit in my lady's eyes.
Besides, in the long winter Sunday evenings, he would come up to the
Court, and read a sermon to us girls, and play a game of picquet with my
lady afterwards; which served to shorten the tedium of the time. My lady
would, on those occasions, invite him to sup with her on the dais; but as
her meal was invariably bread and milk only, Mr. Mountford preferred
sitting down amongst us, and made a joke about its being wicked and
heterodox to eat meagre on Sunday, a festival of the Church. We smiled
at this joke just as much the twentieth time we heard it as we did at the
first; for we knew it was coming, because he always coughed a little
nervously before he made a joke, for fear my lady should not approve: and
neither she nor he seemed to remember that he had ever hit upon the idea
before.
Mr. Mountford died quite suddenly at last. We were all very sorry to
lose him. He left some of his property (for he had a private estate) to
the poor of the parish, to furnish them with an annual Christmas dinner
of roast beef and plum pudding, for which he wrote out a very good
receipt in the codicil to his will.
Moreover, he desired his executors to see that the vault, in which the
vicars of Hanbury were interred, was well aired, before his coffin was
taken in; for, all his life long, he had had a dread of damp, and
latterly he kept his rooms to such a pitch of warmth that some thought it
hastened his end.
Then the other trustee, as I have said, presented the living to Mr. Gray,
Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford. It was quite natural for us all, as
belonging in some sort to the Hanbury family, to disapprove of the other
trustee's choice. But when some ill-natured person circulated the report
that Mr. Gray was a Moravian Methodist, I remember my lady said, "She
could not believe anything so bad, without a great deal of evidence."
Before I tell you about Mr. Gray, I think I ought to make you understand
something more of what we did all day long at Hanbury Court. There were
five of us at the time of which I am speaking, all young women of good
descent, and allied (however distantly) to people of rank. When we were
not with my lady, Mrs. Medlicott looked after us; a gentle little woman,
who had been companion to my lady for many years, and was indeed, I have
been told, some kind of relation to her. Mrs. Medlicott's parents had
lived in Germany, and the consequence was, she spoke English with a very
foreign accent. Another consequence was, that she excelled in all manner
of needlework, such as is not known even by name in these days. She
could darn either lace, table-linen, India muslin, or stockings, so that
no one could tell where the hole or rent had been. Though a good
Protestant, and never missing Guy Faux day at church, she was as skilful
at fine work as any nun in a Papist convent. She would take a piece of
French cambric, and by drawing out some threads, and working in others,
it became delicate lace in a very few hours. She did the same by
Hollands cloth, and made coarse strong lace, with which all my lady's
napkins and table-linen were trimmed. We worked under her during a great
part of the day, either in the still-room, or at our sewing in a chamber
that opened out of the great hall. My lady despised every kind of work
that would now be called Fancy-work. She considered that the use of
coloured threads or worsted was only fit to amuse children; but that
grown women ought not to be taken with mere blues and reds, but to
restrict their pleasure in sewing to making small and delicate stitches.
She would speak of the old tapestry in the hall as the work of her
ancestresses, who lived before the Reformation, and were consequently
unacquainted with pure and simple tastes in work, as well as in religion.
Nor would my lady sanction the fashion of the day, which, at the
beginning of this century, made all the fine ladies take to making shoes.
She said that such work was a consequence of the French Revolution, which
had done much to annihilate all distinctions of rank and class, and hence
it was, that she saw young ladies of birth and breeding handling lasts,
and awls, and dirty cobblers'-wax, like shoe'-makers' daughters.
Very frequently one of us would be summoned to my lady to read aloud to
her, as she sat in her small withdrawing-room, some improving book. It
was generally Mr. Addison's "Spectator;" but one year, I remember, we had
to read "Sturm's Reflections" translated from a German book Mrs.
Medlicott recommended. Mr. Sturm told us what to think about for every
day in the year; and very dull it was; but I believe Queen Charlotte had
liked the book very much, and the thought of her royal approbation kept
my lady awake during the reading. "Mrs. Chapone's Letters" and "Dr.
Gregory's Advice to Young Ladies" composed the rest of our library for
week-day reading. I, for one, was glad to leave my fine sewing, and even
my reading aloud (though this last did keep me with my dear lady) to go
to the still-room and potter about among the preserves and the medicated
waters. There was no doctor for many miles round, and with Mrs.
Medlicott to direct us, and Dr. Buchan to go by for recipes, we sent out
many a bottle of physic, which, I dare say, was as good as what comes out
of the druggist's shop. At any rate, I do not think we did much harm;
for if any of our physics tasted stronger than usual, Mrs. Medlicott
would bid us let it down with cochineal and water, to make all safe, as
she said. So our bottles of medicine had very little real physic in them
at last; but we were careful in putting labels on them, which looked very
mysterious to those who could not read, and helped the medicine to do its
work. I have sent off many a bottle of salt and water coloured red; and
whenever we had nothing else to do in the still-room, Mrs. Medlicott
would set us to making bread-pills, by way of practice; and, as far as I
can say, they were very efficacious, as before we gave out a box Mrs.
Medlicott always told the patient what symptoms to expect; and I hardly
ever inquired without hearing that they had produced their effect. There
was one old man, who took six pills a-night, of any kind we liked to give
him, to make him sleep; and if, by any chance, his daughter had forgotten
to let us know that he was out of his medicine, he was so restless and
miserable that, as he said, he thought he was like to die. I think ours
was what would be called homoeopathic practice now-a-days. Then we
learnt to make all the cakes and dishes of the season in the still-room.
We had plum-porridge and mince-pies at Christmas, fritters and pancakes
on Shrove Tuesday, furmenty on Mothering Sunday, violet-cakes in Passion
Week, tansy-pudding on Easter Sunday, three-cornered cakes on Trinity
Sunday, and so on through the year: all made from good old Church
receipts, handed down from one of my lady's earliest Protestant
ancestresses. Every one of us passed a portion of the day with Lady
Ludlow; and now and then we rode out with her in her coach and four. She
did not like to go out with a pair of horses, considering this rather
beneath her rank; and, indeed, four horses were very often needed to pull
her heavy coach through the stiff mud. But it was rather a cumbersome
equipage through the narrow Warwickshire lanes; and I used often to think
it was well that countesses were not plentiful, or else we might have met
another lady of quality in another coach and four, where there would have
been no possibility of turning, or passing each other, and very little
chance of backing. Once when the idea of this danger of meeting another
countess in a narrow, deep-rutted lane was very prominent in my mind I
ventured to ask Mrs. Medlicott what would have to be done on such an
occasion; and she told me that "de latest creation must back, for sure,"
which puzzled me a good deal at the time, although I understand it now. I
began to find out the use of the "Peerage," a book which had seemed to me
rather dull before; but, as I was always a coward in a coach, I made
myself well acquainted with the dates of creation of our three
Warwickshire earls, and was happy to find that Earl Ludlow ranked second,
the oldest earl being a hunting widower, and not likely to drive out in a
carriage.