Cranford Page #14

Cranford is an episodic novel by the English writer Elizabeth Gaskell. It first appeared in instalments in the magazine Household Words, then was published with minor revisions as a book with the title Cranford in 1853.

• Novel

								

troubling her all the afternoon, and for which she now felt penitent, she
kept telling me how good and how clever Deborah was in her youth; how she
used to settle what gowns they were to wear at all the parties (faint,
ghostly ideas of grim parties, far away in the distance, when Miss Matty
and Miss Pole were young!); and how Deborah and her mother had started
the benefit society for the poor, and taught girls cooking and plain
sewing; and how Deborah had once danced with a lord; and how she used to
visit at Sir Peter Arley’s, and tried to remodel the quiet rectory
establishment on the plans of Arley Hall, where they kept thirty
servants; and how she had nursed Miss Matty through a long, long illness,
of which I had never heard before, but which I now dated in my own mind
as following the dismissal of the suit of Mr Holbrook.  So we talked
softly and quietly of old times through the long November evening.

The next day Miss Pole brought us word that Mr Holbrook was dead.  Miss
Matty heard the news in silence; in fact, from the account of the
previous day, it was only what we had to expect.  Miss Pole kept calling
upon us for some expression of regret, by asking if it was not sad that
he was gone, and saying—

“To think of that pleasant day last June, when he seemed so well!  And he
might have lived this dozen years if he had not gone to that wicked
Paris, where they are always having revolutions.”

She paused for some demonstration on our part.  I saw Miss Matty could
not speak, she was trembling so nervously; so I said what I really felt;
and after a call of some duration—all the time of which I have no doubt
Miss Pole thought Miss Matty received the news very calmly—our visitor
took her leave.

Miss Matty made a strong effort to conceal her feelings—a concealment she
practised even with me, for she has never alluded to Mr Holbrook again,
although the book he gave her lies with her Bible on the little table by
her bedside.  She did not think I heard her when she asked the little
milliner of Cranford to make her caps something like the Honourable Mrs
Jamieson’s, or that I noticed the reply—

“But she wears widows’ caps, ma’am?”

“Oh!  I only meant something in that style; not widows’, of course, but
rather like Mrs Jamieson’s.”

This effort at concealment was the beginning of the tremulous motion of
head and hands which I have seen ever since in Miss Matty.

The evening of the day on which we heard of Mr Holbrook’s death, Miss
Matilda was very silent and thoughtful; after prayers she called Martha
back and then she stood uncertain what to say.

“Martha!” she said, at last, “you are young”—and then she made so long a
pause that Martha, to remind her of her half-finished sentence, dropped a
curtsey, and said—

“Yes, please, ma’am; two-and-twenty last third of October, please,
ma’am.”

“And, perhaps, Martha, you may some time meet with a young man you like,
and who likes you.  I did say you were not to have followers; but if you
meet with such a young man, and tell me, and I find he is respectable, I
have no objection to his coming to see you once a week.  God forbid!”
said she in a low voice, “that I should grieve any young hearts.”  She
spoke as if she were providing for some distant contingency, and was
rather startled when Martha made her ready eager answer—

“Please, ma’am, there’s Jem Hearn, and he’s a joiner making
three-and-sixpence a-day, and six foot one in his stocking-feet, please,
ma’am; and if you’ll ask about him to-morrow morning, every one will give
him a character for steadiness; and he’ll be glad enough to come
to-morrow night, I’ll be bound.”

Though Miss Matty was startled, she submitted to Fate and Love.




CHAPTER V—OLD LETTERS


I HAVE often noticed that almost every one has his own individual small
economies—careful habits of saving fractions of pennies in some one
peculiar direction—any disturbance of which annoys him more than spending
shillings or pounds on some real extravagance.  An old gentleman of my
acquaintance, who took the intelligence of the failure of a Joint-Stock
Bank, in which some of his money was invested, with stoical mildness,
worried his family all through a long summer’s day because one of them
had torn (instead of cutting) out the written leaves of his now useless
bank-book; of course, the corresponding pages at the other end came out
as well, and this little unnecessary waste of paper (his private economy)
chafed him more than all the loss of his money.  Envelopes fretted his
soul terribly when they first came in; the only way in which he could
reconcile himself to such waste of his cherished article was by patiently
turning inside out all that were sent to him, and so making them serve
again.  Even now, though tamed by age, I see him casting wistful glances
at his daughters when they send a whole inside of a half-sheet of note
paper, with the three lines of acceptance to an invitation, written on
only one of the sides.  I am not above owning that I have this human
weakness myself.  String is my foible.  My pockets get full of little
hanks of it, picked up and twisted together, ready for uses that never
come.  I am seriously annoyed if any one cuts the string of a parcel
instead of patiently and faithfully undoing it fold by fold.  How people
can bring themselves to use india-rubber rings, which are a sort of
deification of string, as lightly as they do, I cannot imagine.  To me an
india-rubber ring is a precious treasure.  I have one which is not
new—one that I picked up off the floor nearly six years ago.  I have
really tried to use it, but my heart failed me, and I could not commit
the extravagance.

Small pieces of butter grieve others.  They cannot attend to conversation
because of the annoyance occasioned by the habit which some people have
of invariably taking more butter than they want.  Have you not seen the
anxious look (almost mesmeric) which such persons fix on the article?
They would feel it a relief if they might bury it out of their sight by
popping it into their own mouths and swallowing it down; and they are
really made happy if the person on whose plate it lies unused suddenly
breaks off a piece of toast (which he does not want at all) and eats up
his butter.  They think that this is not waste.

Now Miss Matty Jenkyns was chary of candles.  We had many devices to use
as few as possible.  In the winter afternoons she would sit knitting for
two or three hours—she could do this in the dark, or by firelight—and
when I asked if I might not ring for candles to finish stitching my
wristbands, she told me to “keep blind man’s holiday.”  They were usually
brought in with tea; but we only burnt one at a time.  As we lived in
constant preparation for a friend who might come in any evening (but who
never did), it required some contrivance to keep our two candles of the
same length, ready to be lighted, and to look as if we burnt two always.
The candles took it in turns; and, whatever we might be talking about or
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