Cranford
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.
It was pretty to see from the letters, which were evidently exchanged
with some frequency between the young mother and the grandmother, how
the girlish vanity was being weeded out of her heart by love for her
baby. The white “Paduasoy” figured again in the letters, with almost as
much vigour as before. In one, it was being made into a christening
cloak for the baby. It decked it when it went with its parents to
spend a day or two at Arley Hall. It added to its charms, when it was
“the prettiest little baby that ever was seen. Dear mother, I wish you
could see her! Without any pershality, I do think she will grow up a
regular bewty!” I thought of Miss Jenkyns, grey, withered, and
wrinkled, and I wondered if her mother had known her in the courts of
heaven: and then I knew that she had, and that they stood there in
angelic guise.
There was a great gap before any of the rector’s letters appeared. And
then his wife had changed her mode of her endorsement. It was no longer
from, “My dearest John;” it was from “My Honoured Husband.” The letters
were written on occasion of the publication of the same sermon which was
represented in the picture. The preaching before “My Lord Judge,” and
the “publishing by request,” was evidently the culminating point—the
event of his life. It had been necessary for him to go up to London to
superintend it through the press. Many friends had to be called upon
and consulted before he could decide on any printer fit for so onerous a
task; and at length it was arranged that J. and J. Rivingtons were to
have the honourable responsibility. The worthy rector seemed to be
strung up by the occasion to a high literary pitch, for he could hardly
write a letter to his wife without cropping out into Latin. I remember
the end of one of his letters ran thus: “I shall ever hold the virtuous
qualities of my Molly in remembrance, _dum memor ipse mei_, _dum
spiritus regit artus_,” which, considering that the English of his
correspondent was sometimes at fault in grammar, and often in spelling,
might be taken as a proof of how much he “idealised his Molly;” and, as
Miss Jenkyns used to say, “People talk a great deal about idealising
now-a-days, whatever that may mean.” But this was nothing to a fit of
writing classical poetry which soon seized him, in which his Molly
figured away as “Maria.” The letter containing the _carmen_ was
endorsed by her, “Hebrew verses sent me by my honoured husband. I thowt
to have had a letter about killing the pig, but must wait. Mem., to
send the poetry to Sir Peter Arley, as my husband desires.” And in a
post-scriptum note in his handwriting it was stated that the Ode had
appeared in the _Gentleman’s Magazine_, December 1782.
Her letters back to her husband (treasured as fondly by him as if they
had been _M. T. Ciceronis Epistolæ_) were more satisfactory to an absent
husband and father than his could ever have been to her. She told him
how Deborah sewed her seam very neatly every day, and read to her in the
books he had set her; how she was a very “forrard,” good child, but
would ask questions her mother could not answer, but how she did not let
herself down by saying she did not know, but took to stirring the fire,
or sending the “forrard” child on an errand. Matty was now the mother’s
darling, and promised (like her sister at her age), to be a great
beauty. I was reading this aloud to Miss Matty, who smiled and sighed a
little at the hope, so fondly expressed, that “little Matty might not be
vain, even if she were a bewty.”
“I had very pretty hair, my dear,” said Miss Matilda; “and not a bad
mouth.” And I saw her soon afterwards adjust her cap and draw herself
up.
But to return to Mrs Jenkyns’s letters. She told her husband about the
poor in the parish; what homely domestic medicines she had administered;
what kitchen physic she had sent. She had evidently held his
displeasure as a rod in pickle over the heads of all the ne’er-do-wells.
She asked for his directions about the cows and pigs; and did not
always obtain them, as I have shown before.
The kind old grandmother was dead when a little boy was born, soon after
the publication of the sermon; but there was another letter of
exhortation from the grandfather, more stringent and admonitory than
ever, now that there was a boy to be guarded from the snares of the
world. He described all the various sins into which men might fall,
until I wondered how any man ever came to a natural death. The gallows
seemed as if it must have been the termination of the lives of most of
the grandfather’s friends and acquaintance; and I was not surprised at
the way in which he spoke of this life being “a vale of tears.”
It seemed curious that I should never have heard of this brother before;
but I concluded that he had died young, or else surely his name would
have been alluded to by his sisters.
By-and-by we came to packets of Miss Jenkyns’s letters. These Miss
Matty did regret to burn. She said all the others had been only
interesting to those who loved the writers, and that it seemed as if it
would have hurt her to allow them to fall into the hands of strangers,
who had not known her dear mother, and how good she was, although she
did not always spell quite in the modern fashion; but Deborah’s letters
were so very superior! Any one might profit by reading them. It was a
long time since she had read Mrs Chapone, but she knew she used to think
that Deborah could have said the same things quite as well; and as for
Mrs Carter! people thought a deal of her letters, just because she had
written “Epictetus,” but she was quite sure Deborah would never have
made use of such a common expression as “I canna be fashed!”
[Picture: I made use of the time to think of many other things]
Miss Matty did grudge burning these letters, it was evident. She would
not let them be carelessly passed over with any quiet reading, and
skipping, to myself. She took them from me, and even lighted the second
candle in order to read them aloud with a proper emphasis, and without
stumbling over the big words. Oh dear! how I wanted facts instead of
reflections, before those letters were concluded! They lasted us two
nights; and I won’t deny that I made use of the time to think of many
other things, and yet I was always at my post at the end of each
sentence.
The rector’s letters, and those of his wife and mother-in-law, had all
been tolerably short and pithy, written in a straight hand, with the
lines very close together. Sometimes the whole letter was contained on
a mere scrap of paper. The paper was very yellow, and the ink very
brown; some of the sheets were (as Miss Matty made me observe) the old
original post, with the stamp in the corner representing a post-boy
riding for life and twanging his horn. The letters of Mrs Jenkyns and
her mother were fastened with a great round red wafer; for it was before
Miss Edgeworth’s “patronage” had banished wafers from polite society.
It was evident, from the tenor of what was said, that franks were in
great request, and were even used as a means of paying debts by needy
members of Parliament. The rector sealed his epistles with an immense
coat of arms, and showed by the care with which he had performed this
ceremony that he expected they should be cut open, not broken by any
thoughtless or impatient hand. Now, Miss Jenkyns’s letters were of a
later date in form and writing. She wrote on the square sheet which we
have learned to call old-fashioned. Her hand was admirably calculated,
together with her use of many-syllabled words, to fill up a sheet, and
then came the pride and delight of crossing. Poor Miss Matty got sadly
puzzled with this, for the words gathered size like snowballs, and
towards the end of her letter Miss Jenkyns used to become quite
sesquipedalian. In one to her father, slightly theological and
controversial in its tone, she had spoken of Herod, Tetrarch of Idumea.
Miss Matty read it “Herod Petrarch of Etruria,” and was just as well
pleased as if she had been right.
I can’t quite remember the date, but I think it was in 1805 that Miss
Jenkyns wrote the longest series of letters—on occasion of her absence
on a visit to some friends near Newcastle-upon-Tyne. These friends were
intimate with the commandant of the garrison there, and heard from him
of all the preparations that were being made to repel the invasion of
Buonaparte, which some people imagined might take place at the mouth of
the Tyne. Miss Jenkyns was evidently very much alarmed; and the first
part of her letters was often written in pretty intelligible English,
conveying particulars of the preparations which were made in the family
with whom she was residing against the dreaded event; the bundles of
clothes that were packed up ready for a flight to Alston Moor (a wild
hilly piece of ground between Northumberland and Cumberland); the signal
that was to be given for this flight, and for the simultaneous turning
out of the volunteers under arms—which said signal was to consist (if I
remember rightly) in ringing the church bells in a particular and
ominous manner. One day, when Miss Jenkyns and her hosts were at a
dinner-party in Newcastle, this warning summons was actually given (not
a very wise proceeding, if there be any truth in the moral attached to
the fable of the Boy and the Wolf; but so it was), and Miss Jenkyns,
hardly recovered from her fright, wrote the next day to describe the
sound, the breathless shock, the hurry and alarm; and then, taking
breath, she added, “How trivial, my dear father, do all our
apprehensions of the last evening appear, at the present moment, to calm
and enquiring minds!” And here Miss Matty broke in with—
“But, indeed, my dear, they were not at all trivial or trifling at the
time. I know I used to wake up in the night many a time and think I
heard the tramp of the French entering Cranford. Many people talked of
hiding themselves in the salt mines—and meat would have kept capitally
down there, only perhaps we should have been thirsty. And my father
preached a whole set of sermons on the occasion; one set in the
mornings, all about David and Goliath, to spirit up the people to
fighting with spades or bricks, if need were; and the other set in the
afternoons, proving that Napoleon (that was another name for Bony, as we