The Beth Book
in Uncle James's household.
Harriet was the daughter of a labourer. Her people lived at a village
some miles away, and every Saturday morning a carrier with a covered
cart brought her a letter from home, and a little parcel containing a
cheesecake or some other dainty. Beth took a lively interest both in
the cheesecake and the letter. "What's the news from home to-day?" she
would ask. "How's Annie, and what has mother sent?" Whereupon Harriet
would share the cheesecake with her, and read the letter aloud, work
being suspended as long as possible for the purpose.
Harriet was about twenty-five at this time. She had very black silky
hair, straight and heavy, parted in the middle, drawn down over her
ears, and gathered up in a knot behind. Her face was oval, forehead
high, eyebrows arched and delicate, nose straight, and she had large
expressive dark grey eyes, rather deeply set, with long black lashes,
and a mouth that would have been handsome of the sensual full-lipped
kind, had it not been distorted by a burn, which had disfigured her
throat and chin as well. She had set her pinafore on fire when she was
a child, and it had blazed up under her chin, causing irreparable
injury before the flames could be extinguished. But for that accident
she would have been a singularly good-looking woman of a type which
was common in books of beauty at the beginning of this reign.
She could read and write after a fashion, and was intelligent, but
ignorant, deceitful, superstitious, and hysterical. Mrs. Caldwell
continually lectured Beth about going into the kitchen so much; but
she only lectured on principle really. Young ladies could not be
allowed to associate with servants as a rule, but an exception might
be made in the case of a good, steady, sober sort of person, such as
Mrs. Caldwell believed Harriet to be, who would keep the troublesome
child out of mischief, and do her no harm. Harriet, as it happened,
delighted in mischief, and was often the instigator; but Mrs. Caldwell
might be excused for not suspecting this, as she only saw her on her
best behaviour. When the children were safe in bed, and Miss Victoria
Bench, who was an early person, had also retired, Harriet would put on
a clean apron, and appear before Mrs. Caldwell in the character of a
respectable, vigilant domestic, more anxious about her mistress's
interests than her own; and she would then make a report in which Beth
figured as a fiend of a child who could not be trusted alone for a
moment, and Harriet herself as a conscientious custodian, but for whom
nobody knows what might have happened.
When Harriet had no particular incident to report at these secret
conferences, she would tell Mrs. Caldwell her dreams, and describe
signs and portents of coming events which she had observed during the
day; and Mrs. Caldwell would listen with interest. Superstition is a
subject on which the most class-proud will consult with the lowest and
the wickedest; it is a mighty leveller downwards. But the poor lady
had a lonely life. It was not Mrs. Caldwell's fault, but the fault of
her day, that she was not a noble woman. She belonged to early
Victorian times, when every effort was made to mould the characters of
women as the homes of the period were built, on lines of ghastly
uniformity. The education of a girl in those days was eminently
calculated to cloud her intelligence and strengthen every failing
developed in her sex by ages of suppression. Mrs. Caldwell was a
plastic person, and her mind had been successfully compressed into the
accustomed groove until her husband came and helped it to escape a
little in one or two directions--with the effect, however, of spoiling
its conventional symmetry without restoring its natural beauty. If the
mind be tight-laced long enough, it is ruined as a model, just as the
body is; and throwing off the stays which restrained it, merely
exposes its deformities without remedying them; so that there is
nothing for the old generation but to remain in stays. Mrs. Caldwell,
with all her deformities, was just as heroic as she knew how to be.
She lived for her children to the extent of denying herself the bare
necessaries of life for them; and bore poverty and obscurity of a
galling kind without a murmur. She scarcely ever saw a soul to speak
to. Uncle James Patten and the Benyon family did not associate much
with the townspeople, and were not popular in the county; so that Mrs.
Caldwell had very few visitors. Of course it was an advantage to be
known as a relation of the great people of the place, although the
great people had a bad name; but then she was evidently a poor
relation, which made it almost a virtue to neglect her in a community
of Christians who only professed to love the Lord Himself for what
they could get. "You must worship God because He can give you
everything," was what they taught their children. Even the vicar of
the parish would not call on anybody with less than five hundred a
year. He kept a school for boys, which paid him more than cent. per
cent., but did nothing for his parishioners except preach sermons an
hour long on Sundays. Self-denial and morality were his favourite
subjects. He had had three wives himself, and was getting through a
fourth as fast as one baby a year would do it.
Mrs. Caldwell, left to herself, found her evenings especially long and
dreary. It was her habit to write her letters then, and read,
particularly in French and Italian, which, she had some vague notion,
helped to improve her mind. But she often wearied for a word, and
began to hear voices herself in the howling winter winds, and to brood
upon the possible meaning of her own dreams, and to wonder why a
solitary rook flew over her house in particular, and cawed twice as it
passed. Little things naturally become of great importance in such a
life, and Harriet kept up the supply; she being the connecting link
between Mrs. Caldwell and the outer world. She knew all that was
happening in the place, and she claimed to know all that was going to
happen; and by degrees the mistress as well as the maid fell into the
way of comparing events with the forebodings which had preceded them,
and often established a satisfactory connection between the two.
Mrs. Caldwell always made coffee in the kitchen for breakfast in the
morning, and while she was so engaged, Harriet, busy making toast,
would begin--"Did you 'ear a noise last night, m'em?"
"No, Harriet--at least--was it about ten o'clock?"
"Yes, m'em, just about--a sort of scraping rattling noise, like a lot
of people walking over gravel."
"I did hear something of the kind. I wonder what it was," Mrs.
Caldwell would rejoin.
"Well, m'em, I think it means there are people coming to the 'ouse,
for I remember it 'appened the night before your brother come, m'em,
unexpected, and the lawyer."
If nobody came during the day, the token would be supposed to refer to
some future period; and so, by degrees, signs and portents took the
place of more substantial interests in Mrs. Caldwell's dreary life.
Such things were in the air, for the little seaside place was quite
out of the world at the time, and the people still had more faith in
an incantation than a doctor's dose. If an accident happened, or a
storm decimated the fishing-fleet, signs innumerable were always
remembered which had preceded the event. If you asked why nobody had
profited by the warning, people would shake their heads and tell you
it was to be; and if you asked what was the use of the warning then,
they would say to break the blow--in which idea there seemed to be
some sense.
"When they told Tom's wife 'e was drownded, she'd 'a' dropped down
dead 'erself and left the children, if she 'adn't 'a' knowed it all
along," Harriet explained to Beth. "Eh! lass, you mark my words,
warnin's comes for one thing, and warnin's comes for another, but they
always comes for good, an' you're forced to take notice an' act on 'em
or you're forced to leave 'em alone, just as is right, an' ye can't
'elp it yerself, choose 'ow. There's Mrs. Pettinger, she dreamed one
night 'er husband's boat was lost, an' next mornin' 'e was to go out
fishin', but she wouldn't let 'im. 'No, 'Enery John,' she ses, 'you'll
not go, not if ah 'as to 'old you,' ses she, an' 'e was that mad 'e
struck 'er an' knocked 'er down an' broke 'er arm, an' then, needs
must, 'e 'ad to fetch the doctor to set it, an' by the time that was
done, the boat 'ad gone wi'out 'im. The other men thought 'e was
drunk--'e often was--an' they wouldn't wait. Well, that boat never
came back."
"And did he beat his wife again?" Beth asked.
"Oh, as to that, 'ow could it make any difference?" Harriet answered.
Beth was fascinated by the folk-lore of the place, and soon surpassed
Harriet herself in the interpretation of dreams and the reading of
signs and tokens. She began to invent methods of divination for
herself too, such as, "If the boards don't creak when I walk across
the room I shall get through my lessons without trouble this morning,"
a trick which soon became a confirmed habit into which she was apt to
lapse at any time; and so persistent are these early impressions that
to the end of her days she would always rather have seen two rooks
together than one alone, rooks being the birds of omen in a land where
magpies were scarce. Mrs. Caldwell knew nothing of Beth's proficiency
in the black arts. She would never have discussed such a subject
before the children, and took it for granted that Harriet was equally
discreet; while Beth on her part, with her curious quick sense of what
was right and proper, believed her mother to be above such things.
Harriet was a person of varied interests, all of which she discussed
with Beth impartially. She had many lovers, according to her own
account, and was stern and unyielding with them all, and so particular
that she would dismiss them at any moment for nothing almost. If she
went out at night she had always much to tell the next morning, and
Beth would hurry over her lessons, watch her mother out of the way,
and slip into the kitchen or upstairs after Harriet, and question her
about what she had said, and he had said, and if she had let him kiss
her even once.
"Well, last night," Harriet said on one occasion, in a tone of apology
for her own weakness and good-nature. "Last night I couldn't 'elp it.
'E just put 'is arm round me, and, well, there! I was sorry for 'im."
"Why don't you say _he_ and _him_ and _his_, Harriet?"
"I do."
"No, you don't. You say 'e and 'im and 'is."
"Well, that's what you say."
Beth shouted the aspirates at her for answer, but in vain; with all
the will in the world to "talk fine," as she called it, Harriet could
never acquire the art, for want of an ear to hear. She could not
perceive the slightest difference between him and 'im.
Even at this age Beth had her own point of view in social matters, and
frequently disconcerted Harriet by a word or look or inflection of the
voice which expressed disapproval of her conduct. Harriet had been at
home on one occasion for a week's holiday, a charwoman having done her
work in her absence, and on her return she had much to relate of
Charles Russell, the groom at Fairholm, who continued to be an ardent
admirer of hers, but not an honourable one, because he did not realise
what a very superior person Harriet was. He thought she was no better
than other girls, and when they were sitting up one night together in
her mother's cottage, the rest of the family having gone to bed, he
made her a proposal which Harriet indignantly rejected.
"And ah _ses_ to 'im, 'Charles _Russell_,' ah ses to 'im, 'not was it
ever so,' ah ses to 'im"--she was proceeding emphatically when Beth
interrupted her.