My Lady Ludlow (23 page)

And when we went to church,—my father's own church,—though the pulpit
cushions were black, and many of the congregation had put on some humble
sign of mourning, yet it did not alter the whole material aspect of the
place. And yet what was Lord Ludlow's relation to Hanbury, compared to
my father's work and place in—?

O! it was very wicked in me! I think if I had seen my lady,—if I had
dared to ask to go to her, I should not have felt so miserable, so
discontented. But she sat in her own room, hung with black, all, even
over the shutters. She saw no light but that which was
artificial—candles, lamps, and the like—for more than a month. Only
Adams went near her. Mr. Gray was not admitted, though he called daily.
Even Mrs. Medlicott did not see her for near a fortnight. The sight of
my lady's griefs, or rather the recollection of it, made Mrs. Medlicott
talk far more than was her wont. She told us, with many tears, and much
gesticulation, even speaking German at times, when her English would not
flow, that my lady sat there, a white figure in the middle of the
darkened room; a shaded lamp near her, the light of which fell on an open
Bible,—the great family Bible. It was not open at any chapter or
consoling verse; but at the page whereon were registered the births of
her nine children. Five had died in infancy,—sacrificed to the cruel
system which forbade the mother to suckle her babies. Four had lived
longer; Urian had been the first to die, Ughtred-Mortimar, Earl Ludlow,
the last.

My lady did not cry, Mrs. Medlicott said. She was quite composed; very
still, very silent. She put aside everything that savoured of mere
business: sent people to Mr. Horner for that. But she was proudly alive
to every possible form which might do honour to the last of her race.

In those days, expresses were slow things, and forms still slower. Before
my lady's directions could reach Vienna, my lord was buried. There was
some talk (so Mrs. Medlicott said) about taking the body up, and bringing
him to Hanbury. But his executors,—connections on the Ludlow
side,—demurred to this. If he were removed to England, he must be
carried on to Scotland, and interred with his Monkshaven forefathers. My
lady, deeply hurt, withdrew from the discussion, before it degenerated to
an unseemly contest. But all the more, for this understood mortification
of my lady's, did the whole village and estate of Hanbury assume every
outward sign of mourning. The church bells tolled morning and evening.
The church itself was draped in black inside. Hatchments were placed
everywhere, where hatchments could be put. All the tenantry spoke in
hushed voices for more than a week, scarcely daring to observe that all
flesh, even that of an Earl Ludlow, and the last of the Hanburys, was but
grass after all. The very Fighting Lion closed its front door, front
shutters it had none, and those who needed drink stole in at the back,
and were silent and maudlin over their cups, instead of riotous and
noisy. Miss Galindo's eyes were swollen up with crying, and she told me,
with a fresh burst of tears, that even hump-backed Sally had been found
sobbing over her Bible, and using a pocket-handkerchief for the first
time in her life; her aprons having hitherto stood her in the necessary
stead, but not being sufficiently in accordance with etiquette to be used
when mourning over an earl's premature decease.

If it was this way out of the Hall, "you might work it by the rule of
three," as Miss Galindo used to say, and judge what it was in the Hall.
We none of us spoke but in a whisper: we tried not to eat; and indeed the
shock had been so really great, and we did really care so much for my
lady, that for some days we had but little appetite. But after that, I
fear our sympathy grew weaker, while our flesh grew stronger. But we
still spoke low, and our hearts ached whenever we thought of my lady
sitting there alone in the darkened room, with the light ever falling on
that one solemn page.

We wished, O how I wished that she would see Mr. Gray! But Adams said,
she thought my lady ought to have a bishop come to see her. Still no one
had authority enough to send for one.

Mr. Horner all this time was suffering as much as any one. He was too
faithful a servant of the great Hanbury family, though now the family had
dwindled down to a fragile old lady, not to mourn acutely over its
probable extinction. He had, besides, a deeper sympathy and reverence
with, and for, my lady, in all things, than probably he ever cared to
show, for his manners were always measured and cold. He suffered from
sorrow. He also suffered from wrong. My lord's executors kept writing
to him continually. My lady refused to listen to mere business, saying
she intrusted all to him. But the "all" was more complicated than I ever
thoroughly understood. As far as I comprehended the case, it was
something of this kind:—There had been a mortgage raised on my lady's
property of Hanbury, to enable my lord, her husband, to spend money in
cultivating his Scotch estates, after some new fashion that required
capital. As long as my lord, her son, lived, who was to succeed to both
the estates after her death, this did not signify; so she had said and
felt; and she had refused to take any steps to secure the repayment of
capital, or even the payment of the interest of the mortgage from the
possible representatives and possessors of the Scotch estates, to the
possible owner of the Hanbury property; saying it ill became her to
calculate on the contingency of her son's death.

But he had died childless, unmarried. The heir of the Monkshaven
property was an Edinburgh advocate, a far-away kinsman of my lord's: the
Hanbury property, at my lady's death, would go to the descendants of a
third son of the Squire Hanbury in the days of Queen Anne.

This complication of affairs was most grievous to Mr. Horner. He had
always been opposed to the mortgage; had hated the payment of the
interest, as obliging my lady to practise certain economies which, though
she took care to make them as personal as possible, he disliked as
derogatory to the family. Poor Mr. Horner! He was so cold and hard in
his manner, so curt and decisive in his speech, that I don't think we any
of us did him justice. Miss Galindo was almost the first, at this time,
to speak a kind word of him, or to take thought of him at all, any
farther than to get out of his way when we saw him approaching.

"I don't think Mr. Horner is well," she said one day; about three weeks
after we had heard of my lord's death. "He sits resting his head on his
hand, and hardly hears me when I speak to him."

But I thought no more of it, as Miss Galindo did not name it again. My
lady came amongst us once more. From elderly she had become old; a
little, frail, old lady, in heavy black drapery, never speaking about nor
alluding to her great sorrow; quieter, gentler, paler than ever before;
and her eyes dim with much weeping, never witnessed by mortal.

She had seen Mr. Gray at the expiration of the month of deep retirement.
But I do not think that even to him she had said one word of her own
particular individual sorrow. All mention of it seemed buried deep for
evermore. One day, Mr. Horner sent word that he was too much indisposed
to attend to his usual business at the Hall; but he wrote down some
directions and requests to Miss Galindo, saying that he would be at his
office early the next morning. The next morning he was dead.

Miss Galindo told my lady. Miss Galindo herself cried plentifully, but
my lady, although very much distressed, could not cry. It seemed a
physical impossibility, as if she had shed all the tears in her power.
Moreover, I almost think her wonder was far greater that she herself
lived than that Mr. Horner died. It was almost natural that so faithful
a servant should break his heart, when the family he belonged to lost
their stay, their heir, and their last hope.

Yes! Mr. Horner was a faithful servant. I do not think there are many
so faithful now; but perhaps that is an old woman's fancy of mine. When
his will came to be examined, it was discovered that, soon after Harry
Gregson's accident, Mr. Horner had left the few thousands (three, I
think,) of which he was possessed, in trust for Harry's benefit, desiring
his executors to see that the lad was well educated in certain things,
for which Mr. Horner had thought that he had shown especial aptitude; and
there was a kind of implied apology to my lady in one sentence where he
stated that Harry's lameness would prevent his being ever able to gain
his living by the exercise of any mere bodily faculties, "as had been
wished by a lady whose wishes" he, the testator, "was bound to regard."

But there was a codicil in the will, dated since Lord Ludlow's
death—feebly written by Mr. Horner himself, as if in preparation only
for some more formal manner of bequest: or, perhaps, only as a mere
temporary arrangement till he could see a lawyer, and have a fresh will
made. In this he revoked his previous bequest to Harry Gregson. He only
left two hundred pounds to Mr Gray to be used, as that gentleman thought
best, for Henry Gregson's benefit. With this one exception, he
bequeathed all the rest of his savings to my lady, with a hope that they
might form a nest-egg, as it were, towards the paying off of the mortgage
which had been such a grief to him during his life. I may not repeat all
this in lawyer's phrase; I heard it through Miss Galindo, and she might
make mistakes. Though, indeed, she was very clear-headed, and soon
earned the respect of Mr. Smithson, my lady's lawyer from Warwick. Mr.
Smithson knew Miss Galindo a little before, both personally and by
reputation; but I don't think he was prepared to find her installed as
steward's clerk, and, at first, he was inclined to treat her, in this
capacity, with polite contempt. But Miss Galindo was both a lady and a
spirited, sensible woman, and she could put aside her self-indulgence in
eccentricity of speech and manner whenever she chose. Nay more; she was
usually so talkative, that if she had not been amusing and warm-hearted,
one might have thought her wearisome occasionally. But to meet Mr.
Smithson she came out daily in her Sunday gown; she said no more than was
required in answer to his questions; her books and papers were in
thorough order, and methodically kept; her statements of matters-of-fact
accurate, and to be relied on. She was amusingly conscious of her
victory over his contempt of a woman-clerk and his preconceived opinion
of her unpractical eccentricity.

"Let me alone," said she, one day when she came in to sit awhile with me.
"That man is a good man—a sensible man—and I have no doubt he is a good
lawyer; but he can't fathom women yet. I make no doubt he'll go back to
Warwick, and never give credit again to those people who made him think
me half-cracked to begin with. O, my dear, he did! He showed it twenty
times worse than my poor dear master ever did. It was a form to be gone
through to please my lady, and, for her sake, he would hear my statements
and see my books. It was keeping a woman out of harm's way, at any rate,
to let her fancy herself useful. I read the man. And, I am thankful to
say, he cannot read me. At least, only one side of me. When I see an
end to be gained, I can behave myself accordingly. Here was a man who
thought that a woman in a black silk gown was a respectable, orderly kind
of person; and I was a woman in a black silk gown. He believed that a
woman could not write straight lines, and required a man to tell her that
two and two made four. I was not above ruling my books, and had Cocker a
little more at my fingers' ends than he had. But my greatest triumph has
been holding my tongue. He would have thought nothing of my books, or my
sums, or my black silk gown, if I had spoken unasked. So I have buried
more sense in my bosom these ten days than ever I have uttered in the
whole course of my life before. I have been so curt, so abrupt, so
abominably dull, that I'll answer for it he thinks me worthy to be a man.
But I must go back to him, my dear, so good-bye to conversation and you."

But though Mr. Smithson might be satisfied with Miss Galindo, I am afraid
she was the only part of the affair with which he was content. Everything
else went wrong. I could not say who told me so—but the conviction of
this seemed to pervade the house. I never knew how much we had all
looked up to the silent, gruff Mr. Horner for decisions, until he was
gone. My lady herself was a pretty good woman of business, as women of
business go. Her father, seeing that she would be the heiress of the
Hanbury property, had given her a training which was thought unusual in
those days, and she liked to feel herself queen regnant, and to have to
decide in all cases between herself and her tenantry. But, perhaps, Mr.
Horner would have done it more wisely; not but what she always attended
to him at last. She would begin by saying, pretty clearly and promptly,
what she would have done, and what she would not have done. If Mr.
Horner approved of it, he bowed, and set about obeying her directly; if
he disapproved of it, he bowed, and lingered so long before he obeyed
her, that she forced his opinion out of him with her "Well, Mr. Horner!
and what have you to say against it?" For she always understood his
silence as well as if he had spoken. But the estate was pressed for
ready money, and Mr. Horner had grown gloomy and languid since the death
of his wife, and even his own personal affairs were not in the order in
which they had been a year or two before, for his old clerk had gradually
become superannuated, or, at any rate, unable by the superfluity of his
own energy and wit to supply the spirit that was wanting in Mr. Horner.

Day after day Mr. Smithson seemed to grow more fidgety, more annoyed at
the state of affairs. Like every one else employed by Lady Ludlow, as
far as I could learn, he had an hereditary tie to the Hanbury family. As
long as the Smithsons had been lawyers, they had been lawyers to the
Hanburys; always coming in on all great family occasions, and better able
to understand the characters, and connect the links of what had once been
a large and scattered family, than any individual thereof had ever been.