My Lady Ludlow (6 page)

I was not at my ease that first day, nor indeed for many days afterwards,
notwithstanding my chair was so comfortable. Yet I forgot my sad pain in
silently wondering over the meaning of many of the things we turned out
of those curious old drawers. I was puzzled to know why some were kept
at all; a scrap of writing maybe, with only half a dozen common-place
words written on it, or a bit of broken riding-whip, and here and there a
stone, of which I thought I could have picked up twenty just as good in
the first walk I took. But it seems that was just my ignorance; for my
lady told me they were pieces of valuable marble, used to make the floors
of the great Roman emperors palaces long ago; and that when she had been
a girl, and made the grand tour long ago, her cousin Sir Horace Mann, the
Ambassador or Envoy at Florence, had told her to be sure to go into the
fields inside the walls of ancient Rome, when the farmers were preparing
the ground for the onion-sowing, and had to make the soil fine, and pick
up what bits of marble she could find. She had done so, and meant to
have had them made into a table; but somehow that plan fell through, and
there they were with all the dirt out of the onion-field upon them; but
once when I thought of cleaning them with soap and water, at any rate,
she bade me not to do so, for it was Roman dirt—earth, I think, she
called it—but it was dirt all the same.

Then, in this bureau, were many other things, the value of which I could
understand—locks of hair carefully ticketed, which my lady looked at
very sadly; and lockets and bracelets with miniatures in them,—very
small pictures to what they make now-a-days, and called miniatures: some
of them had even to be looked at through a microscope before you could
see the individual expression of the faces, or how beautifully they were
painted. I don't think that looking at these made may lady seem so
melancholy, as the seeing and touching of the hair did. But, to be sure,
the hair was, as it were, a part of some beloved body which she might
never touch and caress again, but which lay beneath the turf, all faded
and disfigured, except perhaps the very hair, from which the lock she
held had been dissevered; whereas the pictures were but pictures after
all—likenesses, but not the very things themselves. This is only my own
conjecture, mind. My lady rarely spoke out her feelings. For, to begin
with, she was of rank: and I have heard her say that people of rank do
not talk about their feelings except to their equals, and even to them
they conceal them, except upon rare occasions. Secondly,—and this is my
own reflection,—she was an only child and an heiress; and as such was
more apt to think than to talk, as all well-brought-up heiresses must be.
I think. Thirdly, she had long been a widow, without any companion of
her own age with whom it would have been natural for her to refer to old
associations, past pleasures, or mutual sorrows. Mrs. Medlicott came
nearest to her as a companion of this sort; and her ladyship talked more
to Mrs. Medlicott, in a kind of familiar way, than she did to all the
rest of the household put together. But Mrs. Medlicott was silent by
nature, and did not reply at any great length. Adams, indeed, was the
only one who spoke much to Lady Ludlow.

After we had worked away about an hour at the bureau, her ladyship said
we had done enough for one day; and as the time was come for her
afternoon ride, she left me, with a volume of engravings from Mr.
Hogarth's pictures on one side of me (I don't like to write down the
names of them, though my lady thought nothing of it, I am sure), and upon
a stand her great prayer-book open at the evening psalms for the day, on
the other. But as soon as she was gone, I troubled myself little with
either, but amused myself with looking round the room at my leisure. The
side on which the fire-place stood was all panelled,—part of the old
ornaments of the house, for there was an Indian paper with birds and
beasts and insects on it, on all the other sides. There were coats of
arms, of the various families with whom the Hanburys had intermarried,
all over these panels, and up and down the ceiling as well. There was
very little looking-glass in the room, though one of the great drawing-
rooms was called the "Mirror Room," because it was lined with glass,
which my lady's great-grandfather had brought from Venice when he was
ambassador there. There were china jars of all shapes and sizes round
and about the room, and some china monsters, or idols, of which I could
never bear the sight, they were so ugly, though I think my lady valued
them more than all. There was a thick carpet on the middle of the floor,
which was made of small pieces of rare wood fitted into a pattern; the
doors were opposite to each other, and were composed of two heavy tall
wings, and opened in the middle, moving on brass grooves inserted into
the floor—they would not have opened over a carpet. There were two
windows reaching up nearly to the ceiling, but very narrow and with deep
window-seats in the thickness of the wall. The room was full of scent,
partly from the flowers outside, and partly from the great jars of pot-
pourri inside. The choice of odours was what my lady piqued herself
upon, saying nothing showed birth like a keen susceptibility of smell. We
never named musk in her presence, her antipathy to it was so well
understood through the household: her opinion on the subject was believed
to be, that no scent derived from an animal could ever be of a
sufficiently pure nature to give pleasure to any person of good family,
where, of course, the delicate perception of the senses had been
cultivated for generations. She would instance the way in which
sportsmen preserve the breed of dogs who have shown keen scent; and how
such gifts descend for generations amongst animals, who cannot be
supposed to have anything of ancestral pride, or hereditary fancies about
them. Musk, then, was never mentioned at Hanbury Court. No more were
bergamot or southern-wood, although vegetable in their nature. She
considered these two latter as betraying a vulgar taste in the person who
chose to gather or wear them. She was sorry to notice sprigs of them in
the button-hole of any young man in whom she took an interest, either
because he was engaged to a servant of hers or otherwise, as he came out
of church on a Sunday afternoon. She was afraid that he liked coarse
pleasures; and I am not sure if she did not think that his preference for
these coarse sweetnesses did not imply a probability that he would take
to drinking. But she distinguished between vulgar and common. Violets,
pinks, and sweetbriar were common enough; roses and mignionette, for
those who had gardens, honeysuckle for those who walked along the bowery
lanes; but wearing them betrayed no vulgarity of taste: the queen upon
her throne might be glad to smell at a nosegay of the flowers. A beau-
pot (as we called it) of pinks and roses freshly gathered was placed
every morning that they were in bloom on my lady's own particular table.
For lasting vegetable odours she preferred lavender and sweet-woodroof to
any extract whatever. Lavender reminded her of old customs, she said,
and of homely cottage-gardens, and many a cottager made his offering to
her of a bundle of lavender. Sweet woodroof, again, grew in wild,
woodland places where the soil was fine and the air delicate: the poor
children used to go and gather it for her up in the woods on the higher
lands; and for this service she always rewarded them with bright new
pennies, of which my lord, her son, used to send her down a bagful fresh
from the Mint in London every February.

Attar of roses, again, she disliked. She said it reminded her of the
city and of merchants' wives, over-rich, over-heavy in its perfume. And
lilies-of-the-valley somehow fell under the same condemnation. They were
most graceful and elegant to look at (my lady was quite candid about
this), flower, leaf, colour—everything was refined about them but the
smell. That was too strong. But the great hereditary faculty on which
my lady piqued herself, and with reason, for I never met with any person
who possessed it, was the power she had of perceiving the delicious odour
arising from a bed of strawberries in the late autumn, when the leaves
were all fading and dying. "Bacon's Essays" was one of the few books
that lay about in my lady's room; and if you took it up and opened it
carelessly, it was sure to fall apart at his "Essay on Gardens."
"Listen," her ladyship would say, "to what that great philosopher and
statesman says. 'Next to that,'—he is speaking of violets, my dear,—'is
the musk-rose,'—of which you remember the great bush, at the corner of
the south wall just by the Blue Drawing-room windows; that is the old
musk-rose, Shakespeare's musk-rose, which is dying out through the
kingdom now. But to return to my Lord Bacon: 'Then the strawberry
leaves, dying with a most excellent cordial smell.' Now the Hanburys can
always smell this excellent cordial odour, and very delicious and
refreshing it is. You see, in Lord Bacon's time, there had not been so
many intermarriages between the court and the city as there have been
since the needy days of his Majesty Charles the Second; and altogether in
the time of Queen Elizabeth, the great, old families of England were a
distinct race, just as a cart-horse is one creature, and very useful in
its place, and Childers or Eclipse is another creature, though both are
of the same species. So the old families have gifts and powers of a
different and higher class to what the other orders have. My dear,
remember that you try if you can smell the scent of dying
strawberry-leaves in this next autumn. You have some of Ursula Hanbury's
blood in you, and that gives you a chance."

But when October came, I sniffed and sniffed, and all to no purpose; and
my lady—who had watched the little experiment rather anxiously—had to
give me up as a hybrid. I was mortified, I confess, and thought that it
was in some ostentation of her own powers that she ordered the gardener
to plant a border of strawberries on that side of the terrace that lay
under her windows.

I have wandered away from time and place. I tell you all the
remembrances I have of those years just as they come up, and I hope that,
in my old age, I am not getting too like a certain Mrs. Nickleby, whose
speeches were once read out aloud to me.

I came by degrees to be all day long in this room which I have been
describing; sometimes sitting in the easy-chair, doing some little piece
of dainty work for my lady, or sometimes arranging flowers, or sorting
letters according to their handwriting, so that she could arrange them
afterwards, and destroy or keep, as she planned, looking ever onward to
her death. Then, after the sofa was brought in, she would watch my face,
and if she saw my colour change, she would bid me lie down and rest. And
I used to try to walk upon the terrace every day for a short time: it
hurt me very much, it is true, but the doctor had ordered it, and I knew
her ladyship wished me to obey.

Before I had seen the background of a great lady's life, I had thought it
all play and fine doings. But whatever other grand people are, my lady
was never idle. For one thing, she had to superintend the agent for the
large Hanbury estate. I believe it was mortgaged for a sum of money
which had gone to improve the late lord's Scotch lands; but she was
anxious to pay off this before her death, and so to leave her own
inheritance free of incumbrance to her son, the present Earl; whom, I
secretly think, she considered a greater person, as being the heir of the
Hanburys (though through a female line), than as being my Lord Ludlow
with half a dozen other minor titles.

With this wish of releasing her property from the mortgage, skilful care
was much needed in the management of it; and as far as my lady could go,
she took every pains. She had a great book, in which every page was
ruled into three divisions; on the first column was written the date and
the name of the tenant who addressed any letter on business to her; on
the second was briefly stated the subject of the letter, which generally
contained a request of some kind. This request would be surrounded and
enveloped in so many words, and often inserted amidst so many odd reasons
and excuses, that Mr. Horner (the steward) would sometimes say it was
like hunting through a bushel of chaff to find a grain of wheat. Now, in
the second column of this book, the grain of meaning was placed, clean
and dry, before her ladyship every morning. She sometimes would ask to
see the original letter; sometimes she simply answered the request by a
"Yes," or a "No;" and often she would send for lenses and papers, and
examine them well, with Mr. Horner at her elbow, to see if such
petitions, as to be allowed to plough up pasture fields, were provided
for in the terms of the original agreement. On every Thursday she made
herself at liberty to see her tenants, from four to six in the afternoon.
Mornings would have suited my lady better, as far as convenience went,
and I believe the old custom had been to have these levees (as her
ladyship used to call them) held before twelve. But, as she said to Mr.
Horner, when he urged returning to the former hours, it spoilt a whole
day for a farmer, if he had to dress himself in his best and leave his
work in the forenoon (and my lady liked to see her tenants come in their
Sunday clothes; she would not say a word, maybe, but she would take her
spectacles slowly out, and put them on with silent gravity, and look at a
dirty or raggedly-dressed man so solemnly and earnestly, that his nerves
must have been pretty strong if he did not wince, and resolve that,
however poor he might be, soap and water, and needle and thread, should
be used before he again appeared in her ladyship's anteroom). The out-
lying tenants had always a supper provided for them in the servants'-hall
on Thursdays, to which, indeed all comers were welcome to sit down. For
my lady said, though there were not many hours left of a working man's
day when their business with her was ended, yet that they needed food and
rest, and that she should be ashamed if they sought either at the
Fighting Lion (called at this day the Hanbury Arms). They had as much
beer as they could drink while they were eating; and when the food was
cleared away, they had a cup a-piece of good ale, in which the oldest
tenant present, standing up, gave Madam's health; and after that was
drunk, they were expected to set off homewards; at any rate, no more
liquor was given them. The tenants one and all called her "Madam;" for
they recognized in her the married heiress of the Hanburys, not the widow
of a Lord Ludlow, of whom they and their forefathers knew nothing; and
against whose memory, indeed, there rankled a dim unspoken grudge, the
cause of which was accurately known to the very few who understood the
nature of a mortgage, and were therefore aware that Madam's money had
been taken to enrich my lord's poor land in Scotland. I am sure—for you
can understand I was behind the scenes, as it were, and had many an
opportunity of seeing and hearing, as I lay or sat motionless in my
lady's room with the double doors open between it and the anteroom
beyond, where Lady Ludlow saw her steward, and gave audience to her
tenants,—I am certain, I say, that Mr. Horner was silently as much
annoyed at the money that was swallowed up by this mortgage as any one;
and, some time or other, he had probably spoken his mind out to my lady;
for there was a sort of offended reference on her part, and respectful
submission to blame on his, while every now and then there was an implied
protest—whenever the payments of the interest became due, or whenever my
lady stinted herself of any personal expense, such as Mr. Horner thought
was only decorous and becoming in the heiress of the Hanburys. Her
carriages were old and cumbrous, wanting all the improvements which had
been adopted by those of her rank throughout the county. Mr. Horner
would fain have had the ordering of a new coach. The carriage-horses,
too, were getting past their work; yet all the promising colts bred on
the estate were sold for ready money; and so on. My lord, her son, was
ambassador at some foreign place; and very proud we all were of his glory
and dignity; but I fancy it cost money, and my lady would have lived on
bread and water sooner than have called upon him to help her in paying
off the mortgage, although he was the one who was to benefit by it in the
end.