Cranford
letting you sacrifice yourself for me as you did! I have so loved
you—and yet I have thought only of myself. God forgive me!”
“Hush, love! hush!” said Miss Jessie, sobbing.
“And my father, my dear, dear father! I will not complain now, if God
will give me strength to be patient. But, oh, Jessie! tell my father
how I longed and yearned to see him at last, and to ask his forgiveness.
He can never know now how I loved him—oh! if I might but tell him,
before I die! What a life of sorrow his has been, and I have done so
little to cheer him!”
A light came into Miss Jessie’s face. “Would it comfort you, dearest,
to think that he does know?—would it comfort you, love, to know that his
cares, his sorrows”—Her voice quivered, but she steadied it into
calmness—“Mary! he has gone before you to the place where the weary are
at rest. He knows now how you loved him.”
A strange look, which was not distress, came over Miss Brown’s face.
She did not speak for some time, but then we saw her lips form the
words, rather than heard the sound—“Father, mother, Harry, Archy;”—then,
as if it were a new idea throwing a filmy shadow over her darkened
mind—“But you will be alone, Jessie!”
Miss Jessie had been feeling this all during the silence, I think; for
the tears rolled down her cheeks like rain, at these words, and she
could not answer at first. Then she put her hands together tight, and
lifted them up, and said—but not to us—“Though He slay me, yet will I
trust in Him.”
In a few moments more Miss Brown lay calm and still—never to sorrow or
murmur more.
After this second funeral, Miss Jenkyns insisted that Miss Jessie should
come to stay with her rather than go back to the desolate house, which,
in fact, we learned from Miss Jessie, must now be given up, as she had
not wherewithal to maintain it. She had something above twenty pounds a
year, besides the interest of the money for which the furniture would
sell; but she could not live upon that: and so we talked over her
qualifications for earning money.
“I can sew neatly,” said she, “and I like nursing. I think, too, I
could manage a house, if any one would try me as housekeeper; or I would
go into a shop as saleswoman, if they would have patience with me at
first.”
Miss Jenkyns declared, in an angry voice, that she should do no such
thing; and talked to herself about “some people having no idea of their
rank as a captain’s daughter,” nearly an hour afterwards, when she
brought Miss Jessie up a basin of delicately-made arrowroot, and stood
over her like a dragoon until the last spoonful was finished: then she
disappeared. Miss Jessie began to tell me some more of the plans which
had suggested themselves to her, and insensibly fell into talking of the
days that were past and gone, and interested me so much I neither knew
nor heeded how time passed. We were both startled when Miss Jenkyns
reappeared, and caught us crying. I was afraid lest she would be
displeased, as she often said that crying hindered digestion, and I knew
she wanted Miss Jessie to get strong; but, instead, she looked queer and
excited, and fidgeted round us without saying anything. At last she
spoke.
“I have been so much startled—no, I’ve not been at all startled—don’t
mind me, my dear Miss Jessie—I’ve been very much surprised—in fact, I’ve
had a caller, whom you knew once, my dear Miss Jessie”—
Miss Jessie went very white, then flushed scarlet, and looked eagerly at
Miss Jenkyns.
“A gentleman, my dear, who wants to know if you would see him.”
“Is it?—it is not”—stammered out Miss Jessie—and got no farther.
“This is his card,” said Miss Jenkyns, giving it to Miss Jessie; and
while her head was bent over it, Miss Jenkyns went through a series of
winks and odd faces to me, and formed her lips into a long sentence, of
which, of course, I could not understand a word.
“May he come up?” asked Miss Jenkyns at last.
“Oh, yes! certainly!” said Miss Jessie, as much as to say, this is your
house, you may show any visitor where you like. She took up some
knitting of Miss Matty’s and began to be very busy, though I could see
how she trembled all over.
Miss Jenkyns rang the bell, and told the servant who answered it to show
Major Gordon upstairs; and, presently, in walked a tall, fine,
frank-looking man of forty or upwards. He shook hands with Miss Jessie;
but he could not see her eyes, she kept them so fixed on the ground.
Miss Jenkyns asked me if I would come and help her to tie up the
preserves in the store-room; and though Miss Jessie plucked at my gown,
and even looked up at me with begging eye, I durst not refuse to go
where Miss Jenkyns asked. Instead of tying up preserves in the
store-room, however, we went to talk in the dining-room; and there Miss
Jenkyns told me what Major Gordon had told her; how he had served in the
same regiment with Captain Brown, and had become acquainted with Miss
Jessie, then a sweet-looking, blooming girl of eighteen; how the
acquaintance had grown into love on his part, though it had been some
years before he had spoken; how, on becoming possessed, through the will
of an uncle, of a good estate in Scotland, he had offered and been
refused, though with so much agitation and evident distress that he was
sure she was not indifferent to him; and how he had discovered that the
obstacle was the fell disease which was, even then, too surely
threatening her sister. She had mentioned that the surgeons foretold
intense suffering; and there was no one but herself to nurse her poor
Mary, or cheer and comfort her father during the time of illness. They
had had long discussions; and on her refusal to pledge herself to him as
his wife when all should be over, he had grown angry, and broken off
entirely, and gone abroad, believing that she was a cold-hearted person
whom he would do well to forget. He had been travelling in the East,
and was on his return home when, at Rome, he saw the account of Captain
Brown’s death in _Galignani_.
Just then Miss Matty, who had been out all the morning, and had only
lately returned to the house, burst in with a face of dismay and
outraged propriety.
“Oh, goodness me!” she said. “Deborah, there’s a gentleman sitting in
the drawing-room with his arm round Miss Jessie’s waist!” Miss Matty’s
eyes looked large with terror.
[Picture: “With his arm around Miss Jessie’s waist!”]
Miss Jenkyns snubbed her down in an instant.
“The most proper place in the world for his arm to be in. Go away,
Matilda, and mind your own business.” This from her sister, who had
hitherto been a model of feminine decorum, was a blow for poor Miss
Matty, and with a double shock she left the room.
The last time I ever saw poor Miss Jenkyns was many years after this.
Mrs Gordon had kept up a warm and affectionate intercourse with all at
Cranford. Miss Jenkyns, Miss Matty, and Miss Pole had all been to visit
her, and returned with wonderful accounts of her house, her husband, her
dress, and her looks. For, with happiness, something of her early bloom
returned; she had been a year or two younger than we had taken her for.
Her eyes were always lovely, and, as Mrs Gordon, her dimples were not
out of place. At the time to which I have referred, when I last saw
Miss Jenkyns, that lady was old and feeble, and had lost something of
her strong mind. Little Flora Gordon was staying with the Misses
Jenkyns, and when I came in she was reading aloud to Miss Jenkyns, who
lay feeble and changed on the sofa. Flora put down the _Rambler_ when I
came in.
“Ah!” said Miss Jenkyns, “you find me changed, my dear. I can’t see as
I used to do. If Flora were not here to read to me, I hardly know how I
should get through the day. Did you ever read the _Rambler_? It’s a
wonderful book—wonderful! and the most improving reading for Flora”
(which I daresay it would have been, if she could have read half the
words without spelling, and could have understood the meaning of a
third), “better than that strange old book, with the queer name, poor
Captain Brown was killed for reading—that book by Mr Boz, you know—‘Old
Poz’; when I was a girl—but that’s a long time ago—I acted Lucy in ‘Old
Poz.’” She babbled on long enough for Flora to get a good long spell at
the “Christmas Carol,” which Miss Matty had left on the table.
CHAPTER III.
A LOVE AFFAIR OF LONG AGO
I THOUGHT that probably my connection with Cranford would cease after
Miss Jenkyns’s death; at least, that it would have to be kept up by
correspondence, which bears much the same relation to personal
intercourse that the books of dried plants I sometimes see (“Hortus
Siccus,” I think they call the thing) do to the living and fresh flowers
in the lanes and meadows. I was pleasantly surprised, therefore, by
receiving a letter from Miss Pole (who had always come in for a
supplementary week after my annual visit to Miss Jenkyns) proposing that
I should go and stay with her; and then, in a couple of days after my
acceptance, came a note from Miss Matty, in which, in a rather
circuitous and very humble manner, she told me how much pleasure I
should confer if I could spend a week or two with her, either before or
after I had been at Miss Pole’s; “for,” she said, “since my dear
sister’s death I am well aware I have no attractions to offer; it is
only to the kindness of my friends that I can owe their company.”
Of course I promised to come to dear Miss Matty as soon as I had ended
my visit to Miss Pole; and the day after my arrival at Cranford I went
to see her, much wondering what the house would be like without Miss
Jenkyns, and rather dreading the changed aspect of things. Miss Matty
began to cry as soon as she saw me. She was evidently nervous from
having anticipated my call. I comforted her as well as I could; and I
found the best consolation I could give was the honest praise that came
from my heart as I spoke of the deceased. Miss Matty slowly shook her
head over each virtue as it was named and attributed to her sister; and
at last she could not restrain the tears which had long been silently
flowing, but hid her face behind her handkerchief and sobbed aloud.
“Dear Miss Matty,” said I, taking her hand—for indeed I did not know in
what way to tell her how sorry I was for her, left deserted in the
world. She put down her handkerchief and said—
“My dear, I’d rather you did not call me Matty. She did not like it;
but I did many a thing she did not like, I’m afraid—and now she’s gone!
If you please, my love, will you call me Matilda?”
I promised faithfully, and began to practise the new name with Miss Pole
that very day; and, by degrees, Miss Matilda’s feeling on the subject
was known through Cranford, and we all tried to drop the more familiar
name, but with so little success that by-and-by we gave up the attempt.
My visit to Miss Pole was very quiet. Miss Jenkyns had so long taken
the lead in Cranford that now she was gone, they hardly knew how to give
a party. The Honourable Mrs Jamieson, to whom Miss Jenkyns herself had
always yielded the post of honour, was fat and inert, and very much at
the mercy of her old servants. If they chose that she should give a
party, they reminded her of the necessity for so doing: if not, she let
it alone. There was all the more time for me to hear old-world stories
from Miss Pole, while she sat knitting, and I making my father’s shirts.
I always took a quantity of plain sewing to Cranford; for, as we did not
read much, or walk much, I found it a capital time to get through my
work. One of Miss Pole’s stories related to a shadow of a love affair
that was dimly perceived or suspected long years before.
Presently, the time arrived when I was to remove to Miss Matilda’s