My Lady Ludlow (19 page)

When Miss Galindo went, she left so favourable an impression of her visit
on my lady, that she said to me with a pleased smile—

"I think I have provided Mr. Horner with a far better clerk than he would
have made of that lad Gregson in twenty years. And I will send the lad
to my lord's grieve, in Scotland, that he may be kept out of harm's way."

But something happened to the lad before this purpose could be
accomplished.

The next morning, Miss Galindo made her appearance, and, by some mistake,
unusual to my lady's well-trained servants, was shown into the room where
I was trying to walk; for a certain amount of exercise was prescribed for
me, painful although the exertion had become.

She brought a little basket along with her and while the footman was gone
to inquire my lady's wishes (for I don't think that Lady Ludlow expected
Miss Galindo so soon to assume her clerkship; nor, indeed, had Mr. Horner
any work of any kind ready for his new assistant to do), she launched out
into conversation with me.

"It was a sudden summons, my dear! However, as I have often said to
myself, ever since an occasion long ago, if Lady Ludlow ever honours me
by asking for my right hand, I'll cut it off, and wrap the stump up so
tidily she shall never find out it bleeds. But, if I had had a little
more time, I could have mended my pens better. You see, I have had to
sit up pretty late to get these sleeves made"—and she took out of her
basket a pail of brown-holland over-sleeves, very much such as a grocer's
apprentice wears—"and I had only time to make seven or eight pens, out
of some quills Farmer Thomson gave me last autumn. As for ink, I'm
thankful to say, that's always ready; an ounce of steel filings, an ounce
of nut-gall, and a pint of water (tea, if you're extravagant, which,
thank Heaven! I'm not), put all in a bottle, and hang it up behind the
house door, so that the whole gets a good shaking every time you slam it
to—and even if you are in a passion and bang it, as Sally and I often
do, it is all the better for it—and there's my ink ready for use; ready
to write my lady's will with, if need be."

"O, Miss Galindo!" said I, "don't talk so my lady's will! and she not
dead yet."

"And if she were, what would be the use of talking of making her will?
Now, if you were Sally, I should say, 'Answer me that, you goose!' But,
as you're a relation of my lady's, I must be civil, and only say, 'I
can't think how you can talk so like a fool!' To be sure, poor thing,
you're lame!"

I do not know how long she would have gone on; but my lady came in, and
I, released from my duty of entertaining Miss Galindo, made my limping
way into the next room. To tell the truth, I was rather afraid of Miss
Galindo's tongue, for I never knew what she would say next.

After a while my lady came, and began to look in the bureau for
something: and as she looked she said—"I think Mr. Horner must have made
some mistake, when he said he had so much work that he almost required a
clerk, for this morning he cannot find anything for Miss Galindo to do;
and there she is, sitting with her pen behind her ear, waiting for
something to write. I am come to find her my mother's letters, for I
should like to have a fair copy made of them. O, here they are: don't
trouble yourself, my dear child."

When my lady returned again, she sat down and began to talk of Mr. Gray.

"Miss Galindo says she saw him going to hold a prayer-meeting in a
cottage. Now that really makes me unhappy, it is so like what Mr. Wesley
used to do in my younger days; and since then we have had rebellion in
the American colonies and the French Revolution. You may depend upon it,
my dear, making religion and education common—vulgarising them, as it
were—is a bad thing for a nation. A man who hears prayers read in the
cottage where he has just supped on bread and bacon, forgets the respect
due to a church: he begins to think that one place is as good as another,
and, by-and-by, that one person is as good as another; and after that, I
always find that people begin to talk of their rights, instead of
thinking of their duties. I wish Mr. Gray had been more tractable, and
had left well alone. What do you think I heard this morning? Why that
the Home Hill estate, which niches into the Hanbury property, was bought
by a Baptist baker from Birmingham!"

"A Baptist baker!" I exclaimed. I had never seen a Dissenter, to my
knowledge; but, having always heard them spoken of with horror, I looked
upon them almost as if they were rhinoceroses. I wanted to see a live
Dissenter, I believe, and yet I wished it were over. I was almost
surprised when I heard that any of them were engaged in such peaceful
occupations as baking.

"Yes! so Mr. Horner tells me. A Mr. Lambe, I believe. But, at any rate,
he is a Baptist, and has been in trade. What with his schismatism and
Mr. Gray's methodism, I am afraid all the primitive character of this
place will vanish."

From what I could hear, Mr. Gray seemed to be taking his own way; at any
rate, more than he had done when he first came to the village, when his
natural timidity had made him defer to my lady, and seek her consent and
sanction before embarking in any new plan. But newness was a quality
Lady Ludlow especially disliked. Even in the fashions of dress and
furniture, she clung to the old, to the modes which had prevailed when
she was young; and though she had a deep personal regard for Queen
Charlotte (to whom, as I have already said, she had been maid-of-honour),
yet there was a tinge of Jacobitism about her, such as made her extremely
dislike to hear Prince Charles Edward called the young Pretender, as many
loyal people did in those days, and made her fond of telling of the thorn-
tree in my lord's park in Scotland, which had been planted by bonny Queen
Mary herself, and before which every guest in the Castle of Monkshaven
was expected to stand bare-headed, out of respect to the memory and
misfortunes of the royal planter.

We might play at cards, if we so chose, on a Sunday; at least, I suppose
we might, for my lady and Mr. Mountford used to do so often when I first
went. But we must neither play cards, nor read, nor sew on the fifth of
November and on the thirtieth of January, but must go to church, and
meditate all the rest of the day—and very hard work meditating was. I
would far rather have scoured a room. That was the reason, I suppose,
why a passive life was seen to be better discipline for me than an active
one.

But I am wandering away from my lady, and her dislike to all innovation.
Now, it seemed to me, as far as I heard, that Mr. Gray was full of
nothing but new things, and that what he first did was to attack all our
established institutions, both in the village and the parish, and also in
the nation. To be sure, I heard of his ways of going on principally from
Miss Galindo, who was apt to speak more strongly than accurately.

"There he goes," she said, "clucking up the children just like an old
hen, and trying to teach them about their salvation and their souls, and
I don't know what—things that it is just blasphemy to speak about out of
church. And he potters old people about reading their Bibles. I am sure
I don't want to speak disrespectfully about the Holy Scriptures, but I
found old Job Horton busy reading his Bible yesterday. Says I, 'What are
you reading, and where did you get it, and who gave it you?' So he made
answer, 'That he was reading Susannah and the Elders, for that he had
read Bel and the Dragon till he could pretty near say it off by heart,
and they were two as pretty stories as ever he had read, and that it was
a caution to him what bad old chaps there were in the world.' Now, as
Job is bed-ridden, I don't think he is likely to meet with the Elders,
and I say that I think repeating his Creed, the Commandments, and the
Lord's Prayer, and, maybe, throwing in a verse of the Psalms, if he
wanted a bit of a change, would have done him far more good than his
pretty stories, as he called them. And what's the next thing our young
parson does? Why he tries to make us all feel pitiful for the black
slaves, and leaves little pictures of negroes about, with the question
printed below, 'Am I not a man and a brother?' just as if I was to be
hail-fellow-well-met with every negro footman. They do say he takes no
sugar in his tea, because he thinks he sees spots of blood in it. Now I
call that superstition."

The next day it was a still worse story.

"Well, my dear! and how are you? My lady sent me in to sit a bit with
you, while Mr. Horner looks out some papers for me to copy. Between
ourselves, Mr. Steward Horner does not like having me for a clerk. It is
all very well he does not; for, if he were decently civil to me, I might
want a chaperone, you know, now poor Mrs. Horner is dead." This was one
of Miss Galindo's grim jokes. "As it is, I try to make him forget I'm a
woman, I do everything as ship-shape as a masculine man-clerk. I see he
can't find a fault—writing good, spelling correct, sums all right. And
then he squints up at me with the tail of his eye, and looks glummer than
ever, just because I'm a woman—as if I could help that. I have gone
good lengths to set his mind at ease. I have stuck my pen behind my ear,
I have made him a bow instead of a curtsey, I have whistled—not a tune I
can't pipe up that—nay, if you won't tell my lady, I don't mind telling
you that I have said 'Confound it!' and 'Zounds!' I can't get any
farther. For all that, Mr. Horner won't forget I am a lady, and so I am
not half the use I might be, and if it were not to please my Lady Ludlow,
Mr. Horner and his books might go hang (see how natural that came out!).
And there is an order for a dozen nightcaps for a bride, and I am so
afraid I shan't have time to do them. Worst of all, there's Mr. Gray
taking advantage of my absence to seduce Sally!"

"To seduce Sally! Mr. Gray!"

"Pooh, pooh, child! There's many a kind of seduction. Mr. Gray is
seducing Sally to want to go to church. There has he been twice at my
house, while I have been away in the mornings, talking to Sally about the
state of her soul and that sort of thing. But when I found the meat all
roasted to a cinder, I said, 'Come, Sally, let's have no more praying
when beef is down at the fire. Pray at six o'clock in the morning and
nine at night, and I won't hinder you.' So she sauced me, and said
something about Martha and Mary, implying that, because she had let the
beef get so overdone that I declare I could hardly find a bit for Nancy
Pole's sick grandchild, she had chosen the better part. I was very much
put about, I own, and perhaps you'll be shocked at what I said—indeed, I
don't know if it was right myself—but I told her I had a soul as well as
she, and if it was to be saved by my sitting still and thinking about
salvation and never doing my duty, I thought I had as good a right as she
had to be Mary, and save my soul. So, that afternoon I sat quite still,
and it was really a comfort, for I am often too busy, I know, to pray as
I ought. There is first one person wanting me, and then another, and the
house and the food and the neighbours to see after. So, when tea-time
comes, there enters my maid with her hump on her back, and her soul to be
saved. 'Please, ma'am, did you order the pound of butter?'—'No, Sally,'
I said, shaking my head, 'this morning I did not go round by Hale's farm,
and this afternoon I have been employed in spiritual things.'

"Now, our Sally likes tea and bread-and-butter above everything, and dry
bread was not to her taste.

"'I'm thankful,' said the impudent hussy, 'that you have taken a turn
towards godliness. It will be my prayers, I trust, that's given it you.'

"I was determined not to give her an opening towards the carnal subject
of butter, so she lingered still, longing to ask leave to run for it. But
I gave her none, and munched my dry bread myself, thinking what a famous
cake I could make for little Ben Pole with the bit of butter we were
saving; and when Sally had had her butterless tea, and was in none of the
best of tempers because Martha had not bethought herself of the butter, I
just quietly said—

"'Now, Sally, to-morrow we'll try to hash that beef well, and to remember
the butter, and to work out our salvation all at the same time, for I
don't see why it can't all be done, as God has set us to do it all.' But
I heard her at it again about Mary and Martha, and I have no doubt that
Mr. Gray will teach her to consider me a lost sheep."

I had heard so many little speeches about Mr. Gray from one person or
another, all speaking against him, as a mischief-maker, a setter-up of
new doctrines, and of a fanciful standard of life (and you may be sure
that, where Lady Ludlow led, Mrs. Medlicott and Adams were certain to
follow, each in their different ways showing the influence my lady had
over them), that I believe I had grown to consider him as a very
instrument of evil, and to expect to perceive in his face marks of his
presumption, and arrogance, and impertinent interference. It was now
many weeks since I had seen him, and when he was one morning shown into
the blue drawing-room (into which I had been removed for a change), I was
quite surprised to see how innocent and awkward a young man he appeared,
confused even more than I was at our unexpected tete-a-tete. He looked
thinner, his eyes more eager, his expression more anxious, and his colour
came and went more than it had done when I had seen him last. I tried to
make a little conversation, as I was, to my own surprise, more at my ease
than he was; but his thoughts were evidently too much preoccupied for him
to do more than answer me with monosyllables.

Presently my lady came in. Mr. Gray twitched and coloured more than
ever; but plunged into the middle of his subject at once.

"My lady, I cannot answer it to my conscience, if I allow the children of
this village to go on any longer the little heathens that they are. I
must do something to alter their condition. I am quite aware that your
ladyship disapproves of many of the plans which have suggested themselves
to me; but nevertheless I must do something, and I am come now to your
ladyship to ask respectfully, but firmly, what you would advise me to
do."