Cranford
I thought he was meant for the Great Lama, though Peter was not so ugly,
indeed rather handsome, if he had not been freckled. I was thankful to
see her double upon Peter; but, in a moment, the delusive lady was off
upon Rowland’s Kalydor, and the merits of cosmetics and hair oils in
general, and holding forth so fluently that I turned to listen to Miss
Pole, who (through the llamas, the beasts of burden) had got to Peruvian
bonds, and the share market, and her poor opinion of joint-stock banks
in general, and of that one in particular in which Miss Matty’s money
was invested. In vain I put in “When was it—in what year was it that
you heard that Mr Peter was the Great Lama?” They only joined issue to
dispute whether llamas were carnivorous animals or not; in which dispute
they were not quite on fair grounds, as Mrs Forrester (after they had
grown warm and cool again) acknowledged that she always confused
carnivorous and graminivorous together, just as she did horizontal and
perpendicular; but then she apologised for it very prettily, by saying
that in her day the only use people made of four-syllabled words was to
teach how they should be spelt.
The only fact I gained from this conversation was that certainly Peter
had last been heard of in India, “or that neighbourhood”; and that this
scanty intelligence of his whereabouts had reached Cranford in the year
when Miss Pole had bought her Indian muslin gown, long since worn out
(we washed it and mended it, and traced its decline and fall into a
window-blind before we could go on); and in a year when Wombwell came to
Cranford, because Miss Matty had wanted to see an elephant in order that
she might the better imagine Peter riding on one; and had seen a
boa-constrictor too, which was more than she wished to imagine in her
fancy-pictures of Peter’s locality; and in a year when Miss Jenkyns had
learnt some piece of poetry off by heart, and used to say, at all the
Cranford parties, how Peter was “surveying mankind from China to Peru,”
which everybody had thought very grand, and rather appropriate, because
India was between China and Peru, if you took care to turn the globe to
the left instead of the right.
I suppose all these inquiries of mine, and the consequent curiosity
excited in the minds of my friends, made us blind and deaf to what was
going on around us. It seemed to me as if the sun rose and shone, and
as if the rain rained on Cranford, just as usual, and I did not notice
any sign of the times that could be considered as a prognostic of any
uncommon event; and, to the best of my belief, not only Miss Matty and
Mrs Forrester, but even Miss Pole herself, whom we looked upon as a kind
of prophetess, from the knack she had of foreseeing things before they
came to pass—although she did not like to disturb her friends by telling
them her foreknowledge—even Miss Pole herself was breathless with
astonishment when she came to tell us of the astounding piece of news.
But I must recover myself; the contemplation of it, even at this
distance of time, has taken away my breath and my grammar, and unless I
subdue my emotion, my spelling will go too.
We were sitting—Miss Matty and I—much as usual, she in the blue chintz
easy-chair, with her back to the light, and her knitting in her hand, I
reading aloud the _St James’s Chronicle_. A few minutes more, and we
should have gone to make the little alterations in dress usual before
calling-time (twelve o’clock) in Cranford. I remember the scene and the
date well. We had been talking of the signor’s rapid recovery since
the warmer weather had set in, and praising Mr Hoggins’s skill, and
lamenting his want of refinement and manner (it seems a curious
coincidence that this should have been our subject, but so it was), when
a knock was heard—a caller’s knock—three distinct taps—and we were
flying (that is to say, Miss Matty could not walk very fast, having had
a touch of rheumatism) to our rooms, to change cap and collars, when
Miss Pole arrested us by calling out, as she came up the stairs, “Don’t
go—I can’t wait—it is not twelve, I know—but never mind your dress—I
must speak to you.” We did our best to look as if it was not we who had
made the hurried movement, the sound of which she had heard; for, of
course, we did not like to have it supposed that we had any old clothes
that it was convenient to wear out in the “sanctuary of home,” as Miss
Jenkyns once prettily called the back parlour, where she was tying up
preserves. So we threw our gentility with double force into our
manners, and very genteel we were for two minutes while Miss Pole
recovered breath, and excited our curiosity strongly by lifting up her
hands in amazement, and bringing them down in silence, as if what she
had to say was too big for words, and could only be expressed by
pantomime.
“What do you think, Miss Matty? What _do_ you think? Lady Glenmire is
to marry—is to be married, I mean—Lady Glenmire—Mr Hoggins—Mr Hoggins is
going to marry Lady Glenmire!”
“Marry!” said we. “Marry! Madness!”
[Picture: What do you think, Miss Matty]
“Marry!” said Miss Pole, with the decision that belonged to her
character. “_I_ said marry! as you do; and I also said, ‘What a fool my
lady is going to make of herself!’ I could have said ‘Madness!’ but I
controlled myself, for it was in a public shop that I heard of it.
Where feminine delicacy is gone to, I don’t know! You and I, Miss
Matty, would have been ashamed to have known that our marriage was
spoken of in a grocer’s shop, in the hearing of shopmen!”
“But,” said Miss Matty, sighing as one recovering from a blow, “perhaps
it is not true. Perhaps we are doing her injustice.”
“No,” said Miss Pole. “I have taken care to ascertain that. I went
straight to Mrs Fitz-Adam, to borrow a cookery-book which I knew she
had; and I introduced my congratulations _à propos_ of the difficulty
gentlemen must have in house-keeping; and Mrs Fitz-Adam bridled up, and
said that she believed it was true, though how and where I could have
heard it she did not know. She said her brother and Lady Glenmire had
come to an understanding at last. ‘Understanding!’ such a coarse word!
But my lady will have to come down to many a want of refinement. I have
reason to believe Mr Hoggins sups on bread-and-cheese and beer every
night.
“Marry!” said Miss Matty once again. “Well! I never thought of it.
Two people that we know going to be married. It’s coming very near!”
“So near that my heart stopped beating when I heard of it, while you
might have counted twelve,” said Miss Pole.
“One does not know whose turn may come next. Here, in Cranford, poor
Lady Glenmire might have thought herself safe,” said Miss Matty, with a
gentle pity in her tones.
“Bah!” said Miss Pole, with a toss of her head. “Don’t you remember
poor dear Captain Brown’s song ‘Tibbie Fowler,’ and the line—
‘Set her on the Tintock tap,
The wind will blaw a man till her.’”
“That was because ‘Tibbie Fowler’ was rich, I think.”
“Well! there was a kind of attraction about Lady Glenmire that I, for
one, should be ashamed to have.”
I put in my wonder. “But how can she have fancied Mr Hoggins? I am not
surprised that Mr Hoggins has liked her.”
“Oh! I don’t know. Mr Hoggins is rich, and very pleasant-looking,”
said Miss Matty, “and very good-tempered and kind-hearted.”
“She has married for an establishment, that’s it. I suppose she takes
the surgery with it,” said Miss Pole, with a little dry laugh at her own
joke. But, like many people who think they have made a severe and
sarcastic speech, which yet is clever of its kind, she began to relax in
her grimness from the moment when she made this allusion to the surgery;
and we turned to speculate on the way in which Mrs Jamieson would
receive the news. The person whom she had left in charge of her house
to keep off followers from her maids to set up a follower of her own!
And that follower a man whom Mrs Jamieson had tabooed as vulgar, and
inadmissible to Cranford society, not merely on account of his name, but
because of his voice, his complexion, his boots, smelling of the stable,
and himself, smelling of drugs. Had he ever been to see Lady Glenmire
at Mrs Jamieson’s? Chloride of lime would not purify the house in its
owner’s estimation if he had. Or had their interviews been confined to
the occasional meetings in the chamber of the poor sick conjuror, to
whom, with all our sense of the _mésalliance_, we could not help
allowing that they had both been exceedingly kind? And now it turned
out that a servant of Mrs Jamieson’s had been ill, and Mr Hoggins had
been attending her for some weeks. So the wolf had got into the fold,
and now he was carrying off the shepherdess. What would Mrs Jamieson
say? We looked into the darkness of futurity as a child gazes after a
rocket up in the cloudy sky, full of wondering expectation of the
rattle, the discharge, and the brilliant shower of sparks and light.
Then we brought ourselves down to earth and the present time by
questioning each other (being all equally ignorant, and all equally
without the slightest data to build any conclusions upon) as to when IT
would take place? Where? How much a year Mr Hoggins had? Whether she
would drop her title? And how Martha and the other correct servants in
Cranford would ever be brought to announce a married couple as Lady
Glenmire and Mr Hoggins? But would they be visited? Would Mrs Jamieson
let us? Or must we choose between the Honourable Mrs Jamieson and the
degraded Lady Glenmire? We all liked Lady Glenmire the best. She was
bright, and kind, and sociable, and agreeable; and Mrs Jamieson was
dull, and inert, and pompous, and tiresome. But we had acknowledged the
sway of the latter so long, that it seemed like a kind of disloyalty now
even to meditate disobedience to the prohibition we anticipated.
Mrs Forrester surprised us in our darned caps and patched collars; and
we forgot all about them in our eagerness to see how she would bear the
information, which we honourably left to Miss Pole, to impart, although,
if we had been inclined to take unfair advantage, we might have rushed
in ourselves, for she had a most out-of-place fit of coughing for five
minutes after Mrs Forrester entered the room. I shall never forget the
imploring expression of her eyes, as she looked at us over her
pocket-handkerchief. They said, as plain as words could speak, “Don’t
let Nature deprive me of the treasure which is mine, although for a time
I can make no use of it.” And we did not.
Mrs Forrester’s surprise was equal to ours; and her sense of injury
rather greater, because she had to feel for her Order, and saw more
fully than we could do how such conduct brought stains on the
aristocracy.
When she and Miss Pole left us we endeavoured to subside into calmness;
but Miss Matty was really upset by the intelligence she had heard. She
reckoned it up, and it was more than fifteen years since she had heard
of any of her acquaintance going to be married, with the one exception
of Miss Jessie Brown; and, as she said, it gave her quite a shock, and
made her feel as if she could not think what would happen next.
I don’t know whether it is a fancy of mine, or a real fact, but I have
noticed that, just after the announcement of an engagement in any set,
the unmarried ladies in that set flutter out in an unusual gaiety and
newness of dress, as much as to say, in a tacit and unconscious manner,
“We also are spinsters.” Miss Matty and Miss Pole talked and thought
more about bonnets, gowns, caps, and shawls, during the fortnight that
succeeded this call, than I had known them do for years before. But it
might be the spring weather, for it was a warm and pleasant March; and