Cranford
it was quite right to have come to see such things? She could not help
fearing they were lending encouragement to something that was not
quite”— A little shake of the head filled up the blank. Mrs Forrester
replied, that the same thought had crossed her mind; she too was feeling
very uncomfortable, it was so very strange. She was quite certain that
it was her pocket-handkerchief which was in that loaf just now; and it
had been in her own hand not five minutes before. She wondered who had
furnished the bread? She was sure it could not be Dakin, because he was
the churchwarden. Suddenly Miss Matty half-turned towards me—
“Will you look, my dear—you are a stranger in the town, and it won’t
give rise to unpleasant reports—will you just look round and see if the
rector is here? If he is, I think we may conclude that this wonderful
man is sanctioned by the Church, and that will be a great relief to my
mind.”
I looked, and I saw the tall, thin, dry, dusty rector, sitting
surrounded by National School boys, guarded by troops of his own sex
from any approach of the many Cranford spinsters. His kind face was all
agape with broad smiles, and the boys around him were in chinks of
laughing. I told Miss Matty that the Church was smiling approval, which
set her mind at ease.
[Picture: Afraid of matrimonial reports]
I have never named Mr Hayter, the rector, because I, as a well-to-do and
happy young woman, never came in contact with him. He was an old
bachelor, but as afraid of matrimonial reports getting abroad about him
as any girl of eighteen: and he would rush into a shop or dive down an
entry, sooner than encounter any of the Cranford ladies in the street;
and, as for the Preference parties, I did not wonder at his not
accepting invitations to them. To tell the truth, I always suspected
Miss Pole of having given very vigorous chase to Mr Hayter when he first
came to Cranford; and not the less, because now she appeared to share so
vividly in his dread lest her name should ever be coupled with his. He
found all his interests among the poor and helpless; he had treated the
National School boys this very night to the performance; and virtue was
for once its own reward, for they guarded him right and left, and clung
round him as if he had been the queen-bee and they the swarm. He felt
so safe in their environment that he could even afford to give our party
a bow as we filed out. Miss Pole ignored his presence, and pretended to
be absorbed in convincing us that we had been cheated, and had not seen
Signor Brunoni after all.
CHAPTER X.
THE PANIC
I THINK a series of circumstances dated from Signor Brunoni’s visit to
Cranford, which seemed at the time connected in our minds with him,
though I don’t know that he had anything really to do with them. All at
once all sorts of uncomfortable rumours got afloat in the town. There
were one or two robberies—real _bonâ fide_ robberies; men had up before
the magistrates and committed for trial—and that seemed to make us all
afraid of being robbed; and for a long time, at Miss Matty’s, I know, we
used to make a regular expedition all round the kitchens and cellars
every night, Miss Matty leading the way, armed with the poker, I
following with the hearth-brush, and Martha carrying the shovel and
fire-irons with which to sound the alarm; and by the accidental hitting
together of them she often frightened us so much that we bolted
ourselves up, all three together, in the back-kitchen, or store-room, or
wherever we happened to be, till, when our affright was over, we
recollected ourselves and set out afresh with double valiance. By day
we heard strange stories from the shopkeepers and cottagers, of carts
that went about in the dead of night, drawn by horses shod with felt,
and guarded by men in dark clothes, going round the town, no doubt in
search of some unwatched house or some unfastened door.
Miss Pole, who affected great bravery herself, was the principal person
to collect and arrange these reports so as to make them assume their
most fearful aspect. But we discovered that she had begged one of Mr
Hoggins’s worn-out hats to hang up in her lobby, and we (at least I) had
doubts as to whether she really would enjoy the little adventure of
having her house broken into, as she protested she should. Miss Matty
made no secret of being an arrant coward, but she went regularly through
her housekeeper’s duty of inspection—only the hour for this became
earlier and earlier, till at last we went the rounds at half-past six,
and Miss Matty adjourned to bed soon after seven, “in order to get the
night over the sooner.”
Cranford had so long piqued itself on being an honest and moral town
that it had grown to fancy itself too genteel and well-bred to be
otherwise, and felt the stain upon its character at this time doubly.
But we comforted ourselves with the assurance which we gave to each
other that the robberies could never have been committed by any Cranford
person; it must have been a stranger or strangers who brought this
disgrace upon the town, and occasioned as many precautions as if we were
living among the Red Indians or the French.
This last comparison of our nightly state of defence and fortification
was made by Mrs Forrester, whose father had served under General
Burgoyne in the American war, and whose husband had fought the French in
Spain. She indeed inclined to the idea that, in some way, the French
were connected with the small thefts, which were ascertained facts, and
the burglaries and highway robberies, which were rumours. She had been
deeply impressed with the idea of French spies at some time in her life;
and the notion could never be fairly eradicated, but sprang up again
from time to time. And now her theory was this:—The Cranford people
respected themselves too much, and were too grateful to the aristocracy
who were so kind as to live near the town, ever to disgrace their
bringing up by being dishonest or immoral; therefore, we must believe
that the robbers were strangers—if strangers, why not foreigners?—if
foreigners, who so likely as the French? Signor Brunoni spoke broken
English like a Frenchman; and, though he wore a turban like a Turk, Mrs
Forrester had seen a print of Madame de Staël with a turban on, and
another of Mr Denon in just such a dress as that in which the conjuror
had made his appearance, showing clearly that the French, as well as the
Turks, wore turbans. There could be no doubt Signor Brunoni was a
Frenchman—a French spy come to discover the weak and undefended places
of England, and doubtless he had his accomplices. For her part, she,
Mrs Forrester, had always had her own opinion of Miss Pole’s adventure
at the “George Inn”—seeing two men where only one was believed to be.
French people had ways and means which, she was thankful to say, the
English knew nothing about; and she had never felt quite easy in her
mind about going to see that conjuror—it was rather too much like a
forbidden thing, though the rector was there. In short, Mrs Forrester
grew more excited than we had ever known her before, and, being an
officer’s daughter and widow, we looked up to her opinion, of course.
Really I do not know how much was true or false in the reports which
flew about like wildfire just at this time; but it seemed to me then
that there was every reason to believe that at Mardon (a small town
about eight miles from Cranford) houses and shops were entered by holes
made in the walls, the bricks being silently carried away in the dead of
the night, and all done so quietly that no sound was heard either in or
out of the house. Miss Matty gave it up in despair when she heard of
this. “What was the use,” said she, “of locks and bolts, and bells to
the windows, and going round the house every night? That last trick was
fit for a conjuror. Now she did believe that Signor Brunoni was at the
bottom of it.”
One afternoon, about five o’clock, we were startled by a hasty knock at
the door. Miss Matty bade me run and tell Martha on no account to open
the door till she (Miss Matty) had reconnoitred through the window; and
she armed herself with a footstool to drop down on the head of the
visitor, in case he should show a face covered with black crape, as he
looked up in answer to her inquiry of who was there. But it was nobody
but Miss Pole and Betty. The former came upstairs, carrying a little
hand-basket, and she was evidently in a state of great agitation.
“Take care of that!” said she to me, as I offered to relieve her of her
basket. “It’s my plate. I am sure there is a plan to rob my house
to-night. I am come to throw myself on your hospitality, Miss Matty.
Betty is going to sleep with her cousin at the ‘George.’ I can sit up
here all night if you will allow me; but my house is so far from any
neighbours, and I don’t believe we could be heard if we screamed ever
so!”
“But,” said Miss Matty, “what has alarmed you so much? Have you seen
any men lurking about the house?”
“Oh, yes!” answered Miss Pole. “Two very bad-looking men have gone
three times past the house, very slowly; and an Irish beggar-woman came
not half-an-hour ago, and all but forced herself in past Betty, saying
her children were starving, and she must speak to the mistress. You
see, she said ‘mistress,’ though there was a hat hanging up in the hall,
and it would have been more natural to have said ‘master.’ But Betty
shut the door in her face, and came up to me, and we got the spoons
together, and sat in the parlour-window watching till we saw Thomas
Jones going from his work, when we called to him and asked him to take
care of us into the town.”
We might have triumphed over Miss Pole, who had professed such bravery
until she was frightened; but we were too glad to perceive that she
shared in the weaknesses of humanity to exult over her; and I gave up my
room to her very willingly, and shared Miss Matty’s bed for the night.
But before we retired, the two ladies rummaged up, out of the recesses
of their memory, such horrid stories of robbery and murder that I quite
quaked in my shoes. Miss Pole was evidently anxious to prove that such
terrible events had occurred within her experience that she was
justified in her sudden panic; and Miss Matty did not like to be
outdone, and capped every story with one yet more horrible, till it
reminded me oddly enough, of an old story I had read somewhere, of a
nightingale and a musician, who strove one against the other which could
produce the most admirable music, till poor Philomel dropped down dead.
One of the stories that haunted me for a long time afterwards was of a
girl who was left in charge of a great house in Cumberland on some
particular fair-day, when the other servants all went off to the
gaieties. The family were away in London, and a pedlar came by, and
asked to leave his large and heavy pack in the kitchen, saying he would
call for it again at night; and the girl (a gamekeeper’s daughter),
roaming about in search of amusement, chanced to hit upon a gun hanging
up in the hall, and took it down to look at the chasing; and it went off
through the open kitchen door, hit the pack, and a slow dark thread of
blood came oozing out. (How Miss Pole enjoyed this part of the story,
dwelling on each word as if she loved it!) She rather hurried over the
further account of the girl’s bravery, and I have but a confused idea
that, somehow, she baffled the robbers with Italian irons, heated
red-hot, and then restored to blackness by being dipped in grease.
We parted for the night with an awe-stricken wonder as to what we should
hear of in the morning—and, on my part, with a vehement desire for the
night to be over and gone: I was so afraid lest the robbers should have