Girlhood and Womanhood Part 7

Master Rowland, without his coat (for though he had an orderly turn of his own, he was not a methodical enough man to travel with a gown and slippers in his valise), was labouring to recover his niece; Mistress Prissy, with her cloak huddled round her, was making magnanimous efforts to aid her uncle; while the poor little sufferer--guileless, affectionate Mistress Fiddy--lay pale, faint, and chill, with life flickering beneath her half-closed eyelids and in the gushes of her fitful breath. Master Rowland's trouble rendered him outwardly cold and hard, as it does some men; yet Mistress Fiddy's closing eyes turned trustfully to him, and her weak fingers clung tightly to his strong hand.

"No, no; the fewer onlookers the better. What would a stranger do here, Mrs. Price?" he inquired angrily, remembering, with a pang, that certain new, unaccountable, engrossing emotions had quite banished Fiddy from his thoughts and notice, when he might have detected the signs of approaching illness, met them and vanquished them before their climax.

"Bid him speak a word with me, Mrs. Price, a gentleman cannot refuse. I have reasons which will excuse my importunity," reiterated that sympathetic voice.

He walked out doggedly, and never once lifted his eyes. "Madam, I am your servant; but we do not need your help: my niece would be scared by the presence of a stranger. Reserve your charity----" "for the poor" he was about to add; but she put her frank hand upon his arm, and said, "Your worship, I believe I could nurse the young lady better than anybody: I have seen my dear sister afflicted, as I judge similarly. Do not stand on ceremony, sir, and deprive a poor girl of a benefit which Providence has sent her, if you would not regret it. I beg your pardon, but do let me succour her."

He looked up. There she stood in her white wrapping-gown and cap, ready prepared for her patient; so appropriate-looking in dress and face, with her broad forehead full of thought, and her cheek flushed with feeling; an able tender woman in her prime, endeavouring to do Christian offices, longing to pour balm into gaping, smarting wounds, imploring to be allowed to fulfil her mission. He bowed, and stood aside; she curtsied, and pa.s.sed in. He heard her voice the next moment, low, but perfectly audible, cheerful and pleasant, addressing Mistress Prissy. "My dear madam, your uncle has permitted me to count myself a mature friend, like madam your mother; and after this introduction you will excuse me for taking care of you. Doctor, what drops do you favour? You have them there; if you please, I'll offer them: I've administered them before."

She spoke to the doctor very courteously; perhaps remarking that he was young and somewhat agitated. "Mayn't I chafe Mistress Fiddy's hands, doctor? You're better, my dear?"

Mistress Fiddy's head was on her arm; her eyes were raised to her nurse's face wonderingly but complacently, and, though quite conscious, Mistress Fiddy involuntarily sighed out "mother." Very motherly was the elder woman's a.s.surance: "Yes, my dear, I'll serve as madam your mother in her absence, till madam herself comes; and she'll laugh at our confusion and clumsiness, I warrant."

Mistress Fiddy smiled a little smile herself. Nature was reacting in its own redemption; the necessary stimulus was obtained, and the little la.s.s was in a fair way of recovery.

But Mistress Betty did not leave off her cares; she elected herself mistress of the sick room--for she reigned there as everywhere else.

She dismissed shivering, tearful, grateful Prissy with a hug, and a whispered promise that her dear sister Fiddy would be as lively as a grig in the morning; got rid of the doctor and Mrs. Price, and all but routed Master Rowland, succeeding in driving him as far as the next room.

How light her foot was--light as her fingers were nimble; how cleverly she shaded the sick girl from the light, without depriving her of air!

How resigned Fiddy was to be consigned to her! how quickly and entirely the child had confided in her; she had hailed her as another mother!

Mistress Betty was putting the chamber to rights, in defiance of all the chamber-maids of the "Bear;" she was concocting some refreshing drink, for which Mrs. Price had supplied the materials, over the fire, which she had ordered in case of mould and damp, even in the well-seasoned "Bear." Once she began to sing softly what might have been a cradle-song, but stopped short, as if fearing to disturb Fiddy, and composed herself to perfect stillness. Then Master Rowland heard Mistress Fiddy question Mistress Betty in her weak, timid voice, on Fiddy's own concerns. "You said you had seen these fits before, madam?

May I be so bold as to ask, did the sufferer recover?"

There was a moment's silence. "It was my sister, Fiddy: she was much older than I. She had a complication of diseases, besides being liable to swoons all her life. My dear, she died, as we must all die when our time comes; and may we all be as well prepared as was Deb! In the meantime we are in G.o.d's hands. I have been taken with fainting fits myself, Fiddy, ere now. I think they are in my const.i.tution, but they are not called out yet, and I believe they will be kept under; as, I fully trust, country air, and exercise, and early hours, will conquer yours."

"And you will take great care of yourself, and go into the country sometimes, dear Mistress Betty," pleaded the girl fondly, forgetting herself.

Mistress Betty laughed, and turned the conversation, and finally read her patient to sleep with the Morning Lesson, given softly and reverently, as good Bishop Ken himself might have done it.

The poor squire was a discomfited, disordered Sir Roger. He could not cope with this fine woman; and then it came home to him imperatively that he was precisely in that haggard, unbecoming state of looks and costume significantly expressed in those days by the powder being out of a man's hair and his frills rumpled. So he absented himself for an hour, and returned freshened by a plunge in the river and a puff in his wig.

But, alas! he found that Mistress Betty, without quitting Mistress Fiddy's bedchamber, and by the mere sleight of hand of tying on a worked ap.r.o.n with vine cl.u.s.ters and leaves and tendrils all in purple and green floss silks, pinning a pink bow under her mob-cap, and sticking in her bosom a bunch of dewy ponceau polyanthuses, had beat him most completely.

Mistress Fiddy was, as Mistress Betty had predicted, so far re-established that she could breakfast with the party and talk of riding home later in the day; though wan yet, like one of those roses with a faint colour and a fleeting odour in their earliest bud. And Mistress Betty breakfasted with the Parnells, and was such company as the little girls had never encountered before; nor, for that matter, their uncle before them, though he kept his discovery a profound secret.

It was not so pleasant in one sense, and yet in another it made him feel like a king.

This was Mistress Betty's last day in Bath, and she was to travel up to Town in the train of my Lord and Lady Salop, by easy stages and long halts; otherwise she must have hired servants, or carried pistols, and been prepared to use them, in the mail. Fortunately the Salops' chariots and gigs did not start till the afternoon, so that Mistress Betty had the morning to spend with her new friends, and she was delighted to bestow it on them; though my Lord and Lady and their satellites were perpetually sending lacqueys with compliments, conveniences, and little offerings to court Mistress Betty,--the star in the plenitude of her l.u.s.tre, who might emulate Polly Peacham, and be led to the altar by another enslaved Duke of Bolton.

How pleasant Mistress Betty was with the girls! Upon the whole, she slighted "the Justice," as she had dubbed him. She saw with her quick eyes that he was something superior; but then she saw many men quite as well-looking, well-endowed, well-mannered, and with as fair intellects, and more highly cultivated than he.

But she did not often find a pair of unsophisticated little girls won to her by her frankness and kindness, and dazzled by her goodness and greatness. How she awoke Fiddy's laugh with the Chit-Chat Club and the Silence Stakes. What harmless, diverting stories she told them of high life--how she had danced at Ranelagh, sailed upon the Thames, eaten her bun at Chelsea, mounted one of the eight hundred favours which cost a guinea a piece when Lady Die became a countess, and called upon Lady Petersham, in her deepest mourning, when she sat in her state-bed enveloped in c.r.a.pe, with her children and grandchildren in a row at her feet! And then she told that she was born in a farmhouse like that on the hill, and would like to know if they roasted groats and played at shovelboard there still; and ended by showing them her little silver tankard, which her G.o.dfather the jolly miller had given her, and out of which her elder sister, who had never taken kindly to tea, had drunk her ale and her aniseed water. And Fiddy and Prissy had each a draught of milk out of it, to boast of for the rest of their lives, as if they had sipped caudle out of the caudle-cup at a royal heir's christening.

Mistress Betty made the girls talk, too,--of their garden, the old parish clerk, the housekeeper at Larks' Hall, granny, madam, the vicar, and, to his face, of Uncle Rowland, his horses and colts, his cows and calves, his pictures and cabinets. They spoke also of Foxholes, of Letty and Grizel, of Sedley and Bearwood, and d.i.c.k Ashbridge--at whose name Prissy laughed saucily, and Fiddy bit her lips and frowned as fiercely as she was able. With what penetration Mistress Betty read their connections, and how blithely and tenderly she commented upon them!

Mistress Betty promised to send her young friends sets of silk for their embroidery (and kept her word); she presented Prissy with her enamel snuff-box, bearing an exact representation of that ugly building of St.

James's; and Fiddy with her "equipage"--scissors, tablets, and all, chased and wreathed with tiny pastorals, shepherds reclining and piping on sylvan banks, and shepherds and shepherdesses dancing on velvet lawns.

Mistress Betty kissed the girls at parting, and wished them health, peace, and good husbands; she held out her hand to Master Rowland, who took it with a crimson cheek, and raised it to his lips: pshaw! she never once looked at him.

The poor bachelor squire drove off, but for his manhood, groaning inwardly. Lady Betty had acted, and caught not only her share of Master Rowland's ticket, to which she was fairly ent.i.tled, but the cream of his fancy and the core of his heart; with which she had no manner of business, any more than with the State Papers and the Coronation-jewels.

IV.--MASTER ROWLAND GOES UP TO LONDON.

In the green-room of one of the great London theatres--David Garrick's, perhaps--the stage company and their friends were waiting the call-boy and the rising of the curtain.

As strange boards as any--as broad contrasts. Here a king, with his crown cast down; there a beggar, with his wallet laid aside. But kings and beggars are not affording the glaring discrepancies of Hogarth's "Olympus in a Barn," but suggesting and preserving the distinctions far below the buskins, the breastplate, the sandals, the symars. Here are heroes, with the heroism only skin deep; and peers, like their Graces of Bolton and Wharton, with less of the lofty, self-denying graces and the ancient chivalry, than the most grovelling of ploughmen.

Among the crowd, Lady Betty is biding her time, very _nonchalant_, and a little solitary in her state. Ladies who are independent, exclusive, and inflexible, however admired and respected, are generally left to enjoy their own opinions unmolested and at their leisure, whether behind the stage curtain or elsewhere.

Just then a country gentleman, whose murrey coat has a certain country cut, while his complexion breathes of hay-fields and hedge sides, is introduced, gazes round, and steps up to her. Mistress Betty cries out, "La!"--an exclamation not a whit vulgar in her day--"the Justice!" And she holds forth both her hands. "How are dear Mistress Prissy and Mistress Fiddy? Have you come up to town for any time, sir? I wish prosperity to your business."

He has not held such kind, unaffected, friendly hands since they parted; he has only once before held a hand that could have led a Jaffier to confess his conspiracy--that could have clung to a crushed man, and striven to raise him when calamity, like a whirlwind, cast him down.

The squire is sensibly moved, and Mistress Betty vindicates her womanliness by jumping at a conclusion and settling in her own mind that his brain is addled with this great London--its politicians, its mohawks, its beggars in Axe Lane, its rich tradesmen in Cranbourne Alley, its people of quality, fashion, and taste in their villas at Twickenham.

He asks if she is on in Belvidera, and when he hears that it is another actress's benefit, and that she has only consented to appear in a secondary part in a comedy of Sir John's, who is now a great castle-builder, he does not trouble himself to enter a box; at which she is half flattered, half perplexed. He waits, hot and excited, until her short service is over. He will not call upon her at her lodgings, because, in his delicacy, he has so keen a remembrance of her exposed position.

In the corner behind the curtain, bounded by the refreshment table, and filled with the prompter's monotonous drawl,--far, far from his barley ripe for the mowing, his boxwood peac.o.c.ks, his greyhaired Hal and his buxom milkmaids; far from old madam, the pedantic, formal vicar, young madam, brisk, hot, and genial, and his old charmers Prissy and Fiddy,--the squire told his tale of true love. The man threw down the costs and besought Mistress Betty Lumley, Lady Betty, to renounce the stage, forsake fame, quit studies, rehearsals, opening-nights, and concluding curtsies amidst the cheers of thousands, to go down with him to rural Larks' Hall, to grow younger, happier, and better every day, and die like Lady Loudon in her hundredth year, universally regretted,--above all, to fill up the gulf which had yawned in the market-place of his existence since that night at Bath.

It was a primitive proceeding. Lady Betty was amazed at the man's a.s.surance, simplicity, and loyalty. He spoke plainly--almost bluntly--but very forcibly. It was no slight or pa.s.sing pa.s.sion which had brought the squire, a gentleman of a score and more of honourable descents, to seek such an audience-chamber to sue a pasteboard queen. It was no weak love which had dislodged him from his old resting-place, and pitched him to this dreary distance.

Mistress Betty was taken "all in a heap;" she had heard many a love-tale, but never one with so manly a note. Shrewd, sensitive Mistress Betty was bewildered and confounded, and in her hurry she made a capital blunder. She dismissed him summarily, saw how white he grew, and heard how he stopped to ask if there were no possible alternative, no period of probation to endure, no achievement to be performed by him. She waved him off the faster because she became affrighted at his humility; and got away in her chair, and wrung her hands, and wept all night in the long summer twilight, and sat pensive and sick for many days.

In time, Mistress Betty resumed her profession; but she was unusually languid: she played to disappointed houses, and cherished always, with more romance, the shade of the brave, trustful, Somersetshire squire and antiquary. Suddenly she adopted the resolution of retiring from the stage in the summer of her popularity, and living on her savings and her poor young brother's bequest. Her tastes were simple; why should she toil to provide herself with luxuries? She had no one now for whose old age she could furnish ease, or for the aims and accidents of whose rising station she need lay by welcome stores; she had not even a nephew or niece to tease her. She would not wear out the talents a generous man had admired on a ma.s.s of knaves and villains, c.o.xcombs and b.u.t.terflies; she would not expose her poor mind and heart to further deterioration.

She would fly from the danger; she would retire, and board with her cousin Ward, and help her with a little addition to her limited income, and a spare hand in her small family; and she would jog-trot onwards for the rest of her life, so that when she came to die, Mistress Prissy and Mistress Fiddy would have no cause to be ashamed that so inoffensive, inconspicuous, respectable a person had once been asked to stand to them in the dignified relation of aunt. The public vehemently combated Mrs.

Betty's verdict, in vain; they were forced to lament during twice nine days their vanished favourite, who had levanted so unceremoniously beyond the reach of their good graces.

V.--MISTRESS BETTY TRAVELS DOWN INTO SOMERSETSHIRE.

A formal but friendly letter came to Mistress Betty, when her life was one of long dusty exertion, and her heart was very thirsty and parched.

The shabby-genteel world and the tradesman's life, unless in exceptional cases of great wealth, were different things a hundred and fifty years ago from what they are now. The villas at Twickenham, the rural retreats, the gardens, the grottos, the books, the harpsichords, the water-colour drawings, belonged to the quality, or to the literary lions: to Lady Mary or Pope, Horace Walpole or his young friends the Berrys. The half-pay officer's widow, the orphan of the bankrupt in the South Sea business, the wife and family of the moderately flourishing haberdasher, or coach-builder, or upholsterer--the tobacconist rose far above the general level--were cooped up in the City dwellings, and confined to gossip, fine clothes, and good eating if they could afford them. A walk in the City gardens, a trip to Richmond Hill, and the shows, were their pastimes, and Mr. Steele's 'Christian Hero,' 'An Advice to a Daughter,' and De Foe's 'History of the Plague,' were their mental delectation.

But Mistress Betty had the soul of a martyr; she had resigned herself to sinking down into the star of cousin Ward's set, who went on holidays to the play--mostly honest, fat and fatuous, or jaunty and egotistical folk, who admired the scenery and the dresses, but could no more have made a play to themselves than they could have drawn the cartoons. She helped cousin Ward, not only with her purse, but with a kinswoman's concern in her and hers: she a.s.sisted to wash and dress the children of a morning; she took a turn at cooking in the middle of the day; she helped to detain Master Ward at the tea-table, and to keep his wig and knee-buckles from too early an appearance and too thorough a soaking of his self-conceit and wilfulness at his tavern; and she heard the lads their lessons, while she darned their frills before supper.

Then arrived the summons, over which Mistress Betty, a little worn by voluntary adversity, shed "a power" of joyful tears. To travel down into Somersetshire, and stroll among the gra.s.s in the meadows, and the gorse on the commons, which she had not seen for twelve months; to feed the calves, and milk the cows, and gather the eggs, and ride Dapple, and tie up the woodbine, and eat syllabub in a bower; to present "great frieze coats" and "riding-hoods" to a dozen of the poorest old men and women in the parish; to hear prayers in a little grey church, through whose open windows ivy nodded, and before whose doors trees arched in vistas; to see her sweet little Prissy and Fiddy, who had taken such a fancy to her, and the vicar, and madam, and granny, and find them all perfectly agreeable, and not slighting her or doubting her because she had been a woman of fashion and an actress; and Master Rowland well disposed of elsewhere; Larks' Hall deserted by its master--the brave, generous, enamoured squire--heigho! Mistress Betty, for all her candour, good humour, and cordiality, had her decent pride, and would not have thrown herself at any man's head.

Somersetshire, in spite of Bath, was as antediluvian a hundred and fifty years ago as the lanes and coombes of Devonshire. Larks' Hall, Foxholes, Bearwood, the Vicarage of Mosely, and their outlying acquaintances, their yeomen and their labourers, lived as old-fashioned and hearty a life as if the battle of Sedgemoor had never been fought.

Down in Somersetshire, among its orchards, nutteries, and blackberry thickets, poor little Mistress Fiddy was drooping, as girls would pine sometimes, even in the days of Will Shakspeare, ere cloth-yard shafts were abolished from merry England, when there were still mayings among the hyacinths, and milkmaids' dances under the thorns, and mummings when the snow fell. And d.i.c.k Ashbridge shot and fished in the most disconsolate abandonment, though the girl yet ran past him "like a ghost" when the beetle and bat were abroad, and he was still mooning about the vicarage meadows.

Neither of them knew for certain, and n.o.body could predict exactly, that she would live to wed d.i.c.k, bear him children, and leave him a sorrowful widower, whose heart was chastened--not torn. No; nor could the good folk in Somersetshire understand how closely Lady Betty and little Fiddy were bound up together, and how little Fiddy was to return Lady Betty's kindness, in the days when the little girl should be the teacher, and the fine woman the scholar, and the lesson to be learnt came from regions beyond the stars.

In the meantime, Fiddy was a sick, capricious, caressed darling in a cambric cap and silk shawl, on whom fond friends were waiting lovingly: whom n.o.body in the world, not even the doctor, the parish clerk, or the housekeeper at Larks' Hall, dreamt of subjecting to the wholesome medicine of contradiction--unless it might be Granny, when she came in with her staff in her hand. She would laugh at their excess of care, and order them to leave off spoiling that child; but even Granny herself would let fall a tear from her dim eyes when she read the register of the child's age in the family Bible.

"Ah!" sighs whimsical little Mistress Fiddy, "if only Lady Betty were here--great, good, kind, clever, funny, beautiful Lady Betty--who cured me that night at Bath, papa and mamma, I would be well again. She knows the complaint; she has had it herself; and her face is so cheering, her wit so enlivening, and she reads the lessons so solemnly and sweetly. O mamma! send for Mistress Betty; she will come at once; she does not play now; the prints say so. She will be the better of the country air too.

Send for Mistress Betty to Mosely."

Madam was in a difficulty. An actress at the vicarage! And Master Rowland had been so rash. He had dropped hints, which, along with his hurried visit to London, had instilled dim, dark suspicions into the minds of his appalled relations of the whirlpool he had just coasted, they knew not how: they could not believe the only plain palpable solution of the fact. And Granny had inveighed against women of fashion and all public characters, ever since Uncle Rowland took that jaunt to town, whence he returned so glum and dogged. But then, again, how could the mother deny her ailing Fiddy? And this brilliant Mistress Betty from the gay world might possess some talisman unguessed by the quiet folks at home. Little Fiddy had no real disease, no settled pain: she only wanted change, pleasant company, and diversion, and would be plump and strong again in no time. And Mistress Betty had retired from the stage now; she was no longer a marked person: she might pa.s.s anywhere as Mistress Lumley, who had acted with success and celebrity, and withdrawn at the proper moment, with the greatest dignity and discretion. And Master Rowland was arranging his affairs to make the grand tour in the prime of life: his absence would clear away a monstrous objection. What would the Vicar say? What would Granny say?