CRANFORD
PART 5
V—OLD LETTERS
I have often noticed that almost every one has his own
individual small economies—careful habits of saving fractions of pennies in
some one peculiar direction—any disturbance of which annoys him more than
spending shillings or pounds on some real extravagance. An old gentleman
of my acquaintance, who took the intelligence of the failure of a Joint-Stock
Bank, in which some of his money was invested, with stoical mildness, worried
his family all through a long summer’s day because one of them had torn
(instead of cutting) out the written leaves of his now useless bank-book; of
course, the corresponding pages at the other end came out as well, and this
little unnecessary waste of paper (his private economy) chafed him more than
all the loss of his money. Envelopes fretted his soul terribly when they
first came in; the only way in which he could reconcile himself to such waste
of his cherished article was by patiently turning inside out all that were sent
to him, and so making them serve again. Even now, though tamed by age, I
see him casting wistful glances at his daughters when they send a inside of a half-sheet of note paper, with the three lines of
acceptance to an invitation, written on only one of the sides. I am not
above owning that I have this human weakness myself. String is my foible.
My pockets get full of little hanks of it, picked up and twisted together,
ready for uses that never come. I am seriously annoyed if any one cuts
the string of a parcel instead of patiently and faithfully undoing it fold by
fold. How people can bring themselves to use india-rubber rings, which
are a sort of deification of string, as lightly as they do, I cannot
imagine. To me an india-rubber ring is a precious treasure. I have
one which is not new—one that I picked up off the floor nearly six years
ago. I have really tried to use it, but my heart failed me, and I could
not commit the extravagance.
Small
pieces of butter grieve others. They cannot attend to conversation
because of the annoyance occasioned by the habit which some people have of invariably
taking more butter than they want. Have you not seen the anxious look
(almost mesmeric) which such persons fix on the article? They would feel
it a relief if they might bury it out of their sight by popping it into their
own mouths and swallowing it down; and they are really made happy if the person
on whose plate it lies unused suddenly breaks off a piece of toast (which he
does not want at all) and eats up his butter. They think that this is not
waste.
Now Miss
Matty Jenkyns was chary of candles. We had many devices to use as few as
possible. In the winter afternoons she would sit knitting for two or
three hours—she could do this in the dark, or by firelight—and
when I asked if I might not ring for candles to finish stitching my wristbands,
she told me to “keep blind man’s holiday.” They were usually brought in
with tea; but we only burnt one at a time. As we lived in constant
preparation for a friend who might come in any evening (but who never did), it
required some contrivance to keep our two candles of the same length, ready to
be lighted, and to look as if we burnt two always. The candles took it in
turns; and, whatever we might be talking about or doing, Miss Matty’s eyes were
habitually fixed upon the candle, ready to jump up and extinguish it and to
light the other before they had become too uneven in length to be restored to
equality in the course of the evening.
One night,
I remember this candle economy particularly annoyed me. I had been very
much tired of my compulsory “blind man’s holiday,” especially as Miss Matty had
fallen asleep, and I did not like to stir the fire and run the risk of
awakening her; so I could not even sit on the rug, and scorch myself with
sewing by firelight, according to my usual custom. I fancied Miss Matty
must be dreaming of her early life; for she spoke one or two words in her
uneasy sleep bearing reference to persons who were dead long before. When
Martha brought in the lighted candle and tea, Miss Matty started into
wakefulness, with a strange, bewildered look around, as if we were not the
people she expected to see about her. There was a little sad expression
that shadowed her face as she recognised me; but immediately afterwards she
tried to give me her usual smile. All through tea-time her talk ran upon the days of her childhood and youth. Perhaps this
reminded her of the desirableness of looking over all the old family letters,
and destroying such as ought not to be allowed to fall into the hands of
strangers; for she had often spoken of the necessity of this task, but had
always shrunk from it, with a timid dread of something painful. To-night,
however, she rose up after tea and went for them—in the dark; for she piqued
herself on the precise neatness of all her chamber arrangements, and used to
look uneasily at me when I lighted a bed-candle to go to another room for
anything. When she returned there was a faint, pleasant smell of Tonquin
beans in the room. I had always noticed this scent about any of the
things which had belonged to her mother; and many of the letters were addressed
to her—yellow bundles of love-letters, sixty or seventy years old.
Miss Matty
undid the packet with a sigh; but she stifled it directly, as if it were hardly
right to regret the flight of time, or of life either. We agreed to look
them over separately, each taking a different letter out of the same bundle and
describing its contents to the other before destroying it. I never knew
what sad work the reading of old-letters was before that evening, though I
could hardly tell why. The letters were as happy as letters could be—at
least those early letters were. There was in them a vivid and intense
sense of the present time, which seemed so strong and full, as if it could
never pass away, and as if the warm, living hearts that so expressed themselves
could never die, and be as nothing to the sunny earth. I should have felt
less melancholy, I believe, if the letters had been more so. I saw the tears stealing down the well-worn furrows of Miss
Matty’s cheeks, and her spectacles often wanted wiping. I trusted at last
that she would light the other candle, for my own eyes were rather dim, and I
wanted more light to see the pale, faded ink; but no, even through her tears,
she saw and remembered her little economical ways.
The
earliest set of letters were two bundles tied together, and ticketed (in Miss
Jenkyns’s handwriting) “Letters interchanged between my ever-honoured father
and my dearly-beloved mother, prior to their marriage, in July 1774.” I
should guess that the rector of Cranford was about twenty-seven years of age
when he wrote those letters; and Miss Matty told me that her mother was just
eighteen at the time of her wedding. With my idea of the rector derived
from a picture in the dining-parlour, stiff and stately, in a huge
full-bottomed wig, with gown, cassock, and bands, and his hand upon a copy of
the only sermon he ever published—it was strange to read these letters.
They were full of eager, passionate ardour; short homely sentences, right fresh
from the heart (very different from the grand Latinised, Johnsonian style of
the printed sermon preached before some judge at assize time). His
letters were a curious contrast to those of his girl-bride. She was
evidently rather annoyed at his demands upon her for expressions of love, and
could not quite understand what he meant by repeating the same thing over in so
many different ways; but what she was quite clear about was a longing for a
white “Paduasoy”—whatever that might be; and six or seven letters were
principally occupied in asking her lover to use his
influence with her parents (who evidently kept her in good order) to obtain
this or that article of dress, more especially the white “Paduasoy.” He
cared nothing how she was dressed; she was always lovely enough for him, as he
took pains to assure her, when she begged him to express in his answers a
predilection for particular pieces of finery, in order that she might show what
he said to her parents. But at length he seemed to find out that she
would not be married till she had a “trousseau” to her mind; and then he sent
her a letter, which had evidently accompanied a whole box full of finery, and
in which he requested that she might be dressed in everything her heart
desired. This was the first letter, ticketed in a frail, delicate hand,
“From my dearest John.” Shortly afterwards they were married, I suppose,
from the intermission in their correspondence.
“We must
burn them, I think,” said Miss Matty, looking doubtfully at me. “No one
will care for them when I am gone.” And one by one she dropped them into
the middle of the fire, watching each blaze up, die out, and rise away, in
faint, white, ghostly semblance, up the chimney, before she gave another to the
same fate. The room was light enough now; but I, like her, was fascinated
into watching the destruction of those letters, into which the honest warmth of
a manly heart had been poured forth.
The next
letter, likewise docketed by Miss Jenkyns, was endorsed, “Letter of pious congratulation
and exhortation from my venerable grandfather to my beloved mother, on occasion
of my own birth. Also some practical remarks on the
desirability of keeping warm the extremities of infants, from my excellent
grandmother.”
The first
part was, indeed, a severe and forcible picture of the responsibilities of
mothers, and a warning against the evils that were in the world, and lying in
ghastly wait for the little baby of two days old. His wife did not write,
said the old gentleman, because he had forbidden it, she being indisposed with
a sprained ankle, which (he said) quite incapacitated her from holding a
pen. However, at the foot of the page was a small “T.O.,” and on turning
it over, sure enough, there was a letter to “my dear, dearest Molly,” begging
her, when she left her room, whatever she did, to go up stairs before
going down: and telling her to wrap her baby’s feet up in flannel, and
keep it warm by the fire, although it was summer, for babies were so tender.
It was
pretty to see from the letters, which were evidently exchanged with some
frequency between the young mother and the grandmother, how the girlish vanity
was being weeded out of her heart by love for her baby. The white
“Paduasoy” figured again in the letters, with almost as much vigour as
before. In one, it was being made into a christening cloak for the
baby. It decked it when it went with its parents to spend a day or two at
Arley Hall. It added to its charms, when it was “the prettiest little
baby that ever was seen. Dear mother, I wish you could see her!
Without any pershality, I do think she will grow up a regular bewty!” I
thought of Miss Jenkyns, grey, withered, and wrinkled, and I wondered if her
mother had known her in the courts of heaven: and then I
knew that she had, and that they stood there in angelic guise.
There was
a great gap before any of the rector’s letters appeared. And then his
wife had changed her mode of her endorsement. It was no longer from, “My
dearest John;” it was from “My Honoured Husband.” The letters were
written on occasion of the publication of the same sermon which was represented
in the picture. The preaching before “My Lord Judge,” and the “publishing
by request,” was evidently the culminating point—the event of his life.
It had been necessary for him to go up to London to superintend it through the
press. Many friends had to be called upon and consulted before he could
decide on any printer fit for so onerous a task; and at length it was arranged
that J. and J. Rivingtons were to have the honourable responsibility. The
worthy rector seemed to be strung up by the occasion to a high literary pitch,
for he could hardly write a letter to his wife without cropping out into
Latin. I remember the end of one of his letters ran thus: “I shall ever
hold the virtuous qualities of my Molly in remembrance, dum memor ipse mei,
dum spiritus regit artus,” which, considering that the English of his
correspondent was sometimes at fault in grammar, and often in spelling, might
be taken as a proof of how much he “idealised his Molly;” and, as Miss Jenkyns
used to say, “People talk a great deal about idealising now-a-days, whatever
that may mean.” But this was nothing to a fit of writing classical poetry
which soon seized him, in which his Molly figured away as “Maria.” The
letter containing the carmen was endorsed by her, “Hebrew verses sent me
by my honoured husband. I thowt to have had a letter
about killing the pig, but must wait. Mem., to send the poetry to Sir
Peter Arley, as my husband desires.” And in a post-scriptum note in his
handwriting it was stated that the Ode had appeared in the Gentleman’s
Magazine, December 1782.
Her
letters back to her husband (treasured as fondly by him as if they had been M.
T. Ciceronis Epistolæ) were more satisfactory to an absent husband and
father than his could ever have been to her. She told him how Deborah
sewed her seam very neatly every day, and read to her in the books he had set
her; how she was a very “forrard,” good child, but would ask questions her
mother could not answer, but how she did not let herself down by saying she did
not know, but took to stirring the fire, or sending the “forrard” child on an
errand. Matty was now the mother’s darling, and promised (like her sister
at her age), to be a great beauty. I was reading this aloud to Miss
Matty, who smiled and sighed a little at the hope, so fondly expressed, that
“little Matty might not be vain, even if she were a bewty.”
“I had
very pretty hair, my dear,” said Miss Matilda; “and not a bad mouth.” And
I saw her soon afterwards adjust her cap and draw herself up.
But to
return to Mrs Jenkyns’s letters. She told her husband about the poor in
the parish; what homely domestic medicines she had administered; what kitchen
physic she had sent. She had evidently held his displeasure as a rod in
pickle over the heads of all the ne’er-do-wells. She asked for his
directions about the cows and pigs; and did not always
obtain them, as I have shown before.
The kind
old grandmother was dead when a little boy was born, soon after the publication
of the sermon; but there was another letter of exhortation from the
grandfather, more stringent and admonitory than ever, now that there was a boy
to be guarded from the snares of the world. He described all the various
sins into which men might fall, until I wondered how any man ever came to a
natural death. The gallows seemed as if it must have been the termination
of the lives of most of the grandfather’s friends and acquaintance; and I was
not surprised at the way in which he spoke of this life being “a vale of
tears.”
It seemed
curious that I should never have heard of this brother before; but I concluded
that he had died young, or else surely his name would have been alluded to by
his sisters.
By-and-by
we came to packets of Miss Jenkyns’s letters. These Miss Matty did regret
to burn. She said all the others had been only interesting to those who
loved the writers, and that it seemed as if it would have hurt her to allow
them to fall into the hands of strangers, who had not known her dear mother,
and how good she was, although she did not always spell, quite in the modern
fashion; but Deborah’s letters were so very superior! Any one might
profit by reading them. It was a long time since she had read Mrs
Chapone, but she knew she used to think that Deborah could have said the same
things quite as well; and as for Mrs Carter! people thought a deal of her
letters, just because she had written “Epictetus,” but she
was quite sure Deborah would never have made use of such a common expression as
“I canna be fashed!”
Miss Matty
did grudge burning these letters, it was evident. She would not let them
be carelessly passed over with any quiet reading, and skipping, to
myself. She took them from me, and even lighted the second candle in
order to read them aloud with a proper emphasis, and without stumbling over the
big words. Oh dear! how I wanted facts instead of reflections, before
those letters were concluded! They lasted us two nights; and I won’t deny
that I made use of the time to think of many other things, and yet I was always
at my post at the end of each sentence.
The
rector’s letters, and those of his wife and mother-in-law, had all been
tolerably short and pithy, written in a straight hand, with the lines very
close together. Sometimes the whole letter was contained on a mere scrap
of paper. The paper was very yellow, and the ink very brown; some of the
sheets were (as Miss Matty made me observe) the old original post, with the
stamp in the corner representing a post-boy riding for life and twanging his
horn. The letters of Mrs Jenkyns and her mother were fastened with a
great round red wafer; for it was before Miss Edgeworth’s “patronage” had
banished wafers from polite society. It was evident, from the tenor of
what was said, that franks were in great request, and were even used as a means
of paying debts by needy members of Parliament. The rector sealed his
epistles with an immense coat of arms, and showed by the care with which he had
performed this ceremony that he expected they should be cut
open, not broken by any thoughtless or impatient hand. Now, Miss
Jenkyns’s letters were of a later date in form and writing. She wrote on
the square sheet which we have learned to call old-fashioned. Her hand
was admirably calculated, together with her use of many-syllabled words, to
fill up a sheet, and then came the pride and delight of crossing. Poor
Miss Matty got sadly puzzled with this, for the words gathered size like
snowballs, and towards the end of her letter Miss Jenkyns used to become quite
sesquipedalian. In one to her father, slightly theological and
controversial in its tone, she had spoken of Herod, Tetrarch of Idumea.
Miss Matty read it “Herod Petrarch of Etruria,” and was just as well pleased as
if she had been right.
I can’t
quite remember the date, but I think it was in 1805 that Miss Jenkyns wrote the
longest series of letters—on occasion of her absence on a visit to some friends
near Newcastle-upon-Tyne. These friends were intimate with the commandant
of the garrison there, and heard from him of all the preparations that were
being made to repel the invasion of Buonaparte, which some people imagined
might take place at the mouth of the Tyne. Miss Jenkyns was evidently
very much alarmed; and the first part of her letters was often written in
pretty intelligible English, conveying particulars of the preparations which
were made in the family with whom she was residing against the dreaded event;
the bundles of clothes that were packed up ready for a flight to Alston Moor (a
wild hilly piece of ground between Northumberland and Cumberland); the signal
that was to be given for this flight, and for the
simultaneous turning out of the volunteers under arms—which said signal was to
consist (if I remember rightly) in ringing the church bells in a particular and
ominous manner. One day, when Miss Jenkyns and her hosts were at a
dinner-party in Newcastle, this warning summons was actually given (not a very
wise proceeding, if there be any truth in the moral attached to the fable of
the Boy and the Wolf; but so it was), and Miss Jenkyns, hardly recovered from
her fright, wrote the next day to describe the sound, the breathless shock, the
hurry and alarm; and then, taking breath, she added, “How trivial, my dear
father, do all our apprehensions of the last evening appear, at the present
moment, to calm and enquiring minds!” And here Miss Matty broke in with—
“But,
indeed, my dear, they were not at all trivial or trifling at the time. I
know I used to wake up in the night many a time and think I heard the tramp of
the French entering Cranford. Many people talked of hiding themselves in
the salt mines—and meat would have kept capitally down there, only perhaps we
should have been thirsty. And my father preached a whole set of sermons
on the occasion; one set in the mornings, all about David and Goliath, to
spirit up the people to fighting with spades or bricks, if need were; and the
other set in the afternoons, proving that Napoleon (that was another name for
Bony, as we used to call him) was all the same as an Apollyon and
Abaddon. I remember my father rather thought he should be asked to print
this last set; but the parish had, perhaps, had enough of them with hearing.”
Peter Marmaduke Arley Jenkyns (“poor Peter!” as Miss
Matty began to call him) was at school at Shrewsbury by this time. The
rector took up his pen, and rubbed up his Latin once more, to correspond with
his boy. It was very clear that the lad’s were what are called show
letters. They were of a highly mental description, giving an account of
his studies, and his intellectual hopes of various kinds, with an occasional
quotation from the classics; but, now and then, the animal nature broke out in
such a little sentence as this, evidently written in a trembling hurry, after
the letter had been inspected: “Mother dear, do send me a cake, and put plenty
of citron in.” The “mother dear” probably answered her boy in the form of
cakes and “goody,” for there were none of her letters among this set; but a
whole collection of the rector’s, to whom the Latin in his boy’s letters was
like a trumpet to the old war-horse. I do not know much about Latin,
certainly, and it is, perhaps, an ornamental language, but not very useful, I
think—at least to judge from the bits I remember out of the rector’s
letters. One was, “You have not got that town in your map of Ireland; but
Bonus Bernardus non videt omnia, as the Proverbia say.” Presently
it became very evident that “poor Peter” got himself into many scrapes.
There were letters of stilted penitence to his father, for some wrong-doing;
and among them all was a badly-written, badly-sealed, badly-directed, blotted
note:—“My dear, dear, dear, dearest mother, I will be a better boy; I will,
indeed; but don’t, please, be ill for me; I am not worth it; but I will be
good, darling mother.”
Miss Matty could not speak for crying, after she had
read this note. She gave it to me in silence, and then got up and took it
to her sacred recesses in her own room, for fear, by any chance, it might get
burnt. “Poor Peter!” she said; “he was always in scrapes; he was too
easy. They led him wrong, and then left him in the lurch. But he
was too fond of mischief. He could never resist a joke. Poor
Peter!”
To be continued
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