Cranford Page #15

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

								

doing, Miss Matty’s eyes were habitually fixed upon the candle, ready to
jump up and extinguish it and to light the other before they had become
too uneven in length to be restored to equality in the course of the
evening.

One night, I remember this candle economy particularly annoyed me.  I had
been very much tired of my compulsory “blind man’s holiday,” especially
as Miss Matty had fallen asleep, and I did not like to stir the fire and
run the risk of awakening her; so I could not even sit on the rug, and
scorch myself with sewing by firelight, according to my usual custom.  I
fancied Miss Matty must be dreaming of her early life; for she spoke one
or two words in her uneasy sleep bearing reference to persons who were
dead long before.  When Martha brought in the lighted candle and tea,
Miss Matty started into wakefulness, with a strange, bewildered look
around, as if we were not the people she expected to see about her.
There was a little sad expression that shadowed her face as she
recognised me; but immediately afterwards she tried to give me her usual
smile.  All through tea-time her talk ran upon the days of her childhood
and youth.  Perhaps this reminded her of the desirableness of looking
over all the old family letters, and destroying such as ought not to be
allowed to fall into the hands of strangers; for she had often spoken of
the necessity of this task, but had always shrunk from it, with a timid
dread of something painful.  To-night, however, she rose up after tea and
went for them—in the dark; for she piqued herself on the precise neatness
of all her chamber arrangements, and used to look uneasily at me when I
lighted a bed-candle to go to another room for anything.  When she
returned there was a faint, pleasant smell of Tonquin beans in the room.
I had always noticed this scent about any of the things which had
belonged to her mother; and many of the letters were addressed to
her—yellow bundles of love-letters, sixty or seventy years old.

Miss Matty undid the packet with a sigh; but she stifled it directly, as
if it were hardly right to regret the flight of time, or of life either.
We agreed to look them over separately, each taking a different letter
out of the same bundle and describing its contents to the other before
destroying it.  I never knew what sad work the reading of old letters was
before that evening, though I could hardly tell why.  The letters were as
happy as letters could be—at least those early letters were.  There was
in them a vivid and intense sense of the present time, which seemed so
strong and full, as if it could never pass away, and as if the warm,
living hearts that so expressed themselves could never die, and be as
nothing to the sunny earth.  I should have felt less melancholy, I
believe, if the letters had been more so.  I saw the tears stealing down
the well-worn furrows of Miss Matty’s cheeks, and her spectacles often
wanted wiping.  I trusted at last that she would light the other candle,
for my own eyes were rather dim, and I wanted more light to see the pale,
faded ink; but no, even through her tears, she saw and remembered her
little economical ways.

The earliest set of letters were two bundles tied together, and ticketed
(in Miss Jenkyns’s handwriting) “Letters interchanged between my
ever-honoured father and my dearly-beloved mother, prior to their
marriage, in July 1774.”  I should guess that the rector of Cranford was
about twenty-seven years of age when he wrote those letters; and Miss
Matty told me that her mother was just eighteen at the time of her
wedding.  With my idea of the rector derived from a picture in the
dining-parlour, stiff and stately, in a huge full-bottomed wig, with
gown, cassock, and bands, and his hand upon a copy of the only sermon he
ever published—it was strange to read these letters.  They were full of
eager, passionate ardour; short homely sentences, right fresh from the
heart (very different from the grand Latinised, Johnsonian style of the
printed sermon preached before some judge at assize time).  His letters
were a curious contrast to those of his girl-bride.  She was evidently
rather annoyed at his demands upon her for expressions of love, and could
not quite understand what he meant by repeating the same thing over in so
many different ways; but what she was quite clear about was a longing for
a white “Paduasoy”—whatever that might be; and six or seven letters were
principally occupied in asking her lover to use his influence with her
parents (who evidently kept her in good order) to obtain this or that
article of dress, more especially the white “Paduasoy.”  He cared nothing
how she was dressed; she was always lovely enough for him, as he took
pains to assure her, when she begged him to express in his answers a
predilection for particular pieces of finery, in order that she might
show what he said to her parents.  But at length he seemed to find out
that she would not be married till she had a “trousseau” to her mind; and
then he sent her a letter, which had evidently accompanied a whole box
full of finery, and in which he requested that she might be dressed in
everything her heart desired.  This was the first letter, ticketed in a
frail, delicate hand, “From my dearest John.”  Shortly afterwards they
were married, I suppose, from the intermission in their correspondence.

“We must burn them, I think,” said Miss Matty, looking doubtfully at me.
“No one will care for them when I am gone.”  And one by one she dropped
them into the middle of the fire, watching each blaze up, die out, and
rise away, in faint, white, ghostly semblance, up the chimney, before she
gave another to the same fate.  The room was light enough now; but I,
like her, was fascinated into watching the destruction of those letters,
into which the honest warmth of a manly heart had been poured forth.

The next letter, likewise docketed by Miss Jenkyns, was endorsed, “Letter
of pious congratulation and exhortation from my venerable grandfather to
my beloved mother, on occasion of my own birth.  Also some practical
remarks on the desirability of keeping warm the extremities of infants,
from my excellent grandmother.”

The first part was, indeed, a severe and forcible picture of the
responsibilities of mothers, and a warning against the evils that were in
the world, and lying in ghastly wait for the little baby of two days old.
His wife did not write, said the old gentleman, because he had forbidden
it, she being indisposed with a sprained ankle, which (he said) quite
incapacitated her from holding a pen.  However, at the foot of the page
was a small “T.O.,” and on turning it over, sure enough, there was a
letter to “my dear, dearest Molly,” begging her, when she left her room,
whatever she did, to go up stairs before going down: and telling her
to wrap her baby’s feet up in flannel, and keep it warm by the fire,
although it was summer, for babies were so tender.
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