CRANFORD
PART 11
CHAPTER XI: SAMUEL BROWN
The next morning I met Lady Glenmire and Miss Pole
setting out on a long walk to find some old woman who was famous in the
neighbourhood for her skill in knitting woollen stockings. Miss Pole said
to me, with a smile half-kindly and half-contemptuous upon her countenance, “I
have been just telling Lady Glenmire of our poor friend Mrs Forrester, and her
terror of ghosts. It comes from living so much alone, and listening to
the bug-a-boo stories of that Jenny of hers.” She was so calm and so much
above superstitious fears herself that I was almost ashamed to say how glad I
had been of her Headingley Causeway proposition the night before, and turned
off the conversation to something else.
In the
afternoon Miss Pole called on Miss Matty to tell her of the adventure—the real
adventure they had met with on their morning’s walk. They had been
perplexed about the exact path which they were to take across the fields in
order to find the knitting old woman, and had stopped to inquire at a little
wayside public-house, standing on the high road to London, about three miles
from Cranford. The good woman had asked them to sit
down and rest themselves while she fetched her husband, who could direct them
better than she could; and, while they were sitting in the sanded parlour, a
little girl came in. They thought that she belonged to the landlady, and
began some trifling conversation with her; but, on Mrs Roberts’s return, she
told them that the little thing was the only child of a couple who were staying
in the house. And then she began a long story, out of which Lady Glenmire
and Miss Pole could only gather one or two decided facts, which were that,
about six weeks ago, a light spring-cart had broken down just before their
door, in which there were two men, one woman, and this child. One of the
men was seriously hurt—no bones broken, only “shaken,” the landlady called it;
but he had probably sustained some severe internal injury, for he had
languished in their house ever since, attended by his wife, the mother of this
little girl. Miss Pole had asked what he was, what he looked like.
And Mrs Roberts had made answer that he was not like a gentleman, nor yet like
a common person; if it had not been that he and his wife were such decent,
quiet people, she could almost have thought he was a mountebank, or something
of that kind, for they had a great box in the cart, full of she did not know
what. She had helped to unpack it, and take out their linen and clothes,
when the other man—his twin-brother, she believed he was—had gone off with the
horse and cart.
Miss Pole
had begun to have her suspicions at this point, and expressed her idea that it
was rather strange that the box and cart and horse and all should have disappeared; but good Mrs Roberts seemed to have become
quite indignant at Miss Pole’s implied suggestion; in fact, Miss Pole said she
was as angry as if Miss Pole had told her that she herself was a
swindler. As the best way of convincing the ladies, she bethought her of
begging them to see the wife; and, as Miss Pole said, there was no doubting the
honest, worn, bronzed face of the woman, who at the first tender word from Lady
Glenmire, burst into tears, which she was too weak to check until some word
from the landlady made her swallow down her sobs, in order that she might
testify to the Christian kindness shown by Mr and Mrs Roberts. Miss Pole
came round with a swing to as vehement a belief in the sorrowful tale as she
had been sceptical before; and, as a proof of this, her energy in the poor
sufferer’s behalf was nothing daunted when she found out that he, and no other,
was our Signor Brunoni, to whom all Cranford had been attributing all manner of
evil this six weeks past! Yes! his wife said his proper name was Samuel
Brown—“Sam,” she called him—but to the last we preferred calling him “the Signor”;
it sounded so much better.
The end of
their conversation with the Signora Brunoni was that it was agreed that he
should be placed under medical advice, and for any expense incurred in
procuring this Lady Glenmire promised to hold herself responsible, and had
accordingly gone to Mr Hoggins to beg him to ride over to the “Rising Sun” that
very afternoon, and examine into the signor’s real state; and, as Miss Pole
said, if it was desirable to remove him to Cranford to be more immediately
under Mr Hoggins’s eye, she would undertake to see for
lodgings and arrange about the rent. Mrs Roberts had been as kind as
could be all throughout, but it was evident that their long residence there had
been a slight inconvenience.
Before
Miss Pole left us, Miss Matty and I were as full of the morning’s adventure as
she was. We talked about it all the evening, turning it in every possible
light, and we went to bed anxious for the morning, when we should surely hear
from someone what Mr Hoggins thought and recommended; for, as Miss Matty
observed, though Mr Hoggins did say “Jack’s up,” “a fig for his heels,” and
called Preference “Pref.” she believed he was a very worthy man and a very
clever surgeon. Indeed, we were rather proud of our doctor at Cranford,
as a doctor. We often wished, when we heard of Queen Adelaide or the Duke
of Wellington being ill, that they would send for Mr Hoggins; but, on
consideration, we were rather glad they did not, for, if we were ailing, what
should we do if Mr Hoggins had been appointed physician-in-ordinary to the
Royal Family? As a surgeon we were proud of him; but as a man—or rather,
I should say, as a gentleman—we could only shake our heads over his name and
himself, and wished that he had read Lord Chesterfield’s Letters in the days when
his manners were susceptible of improvement. Nevertheless, we all
regarded his dictum in the signor’s case as infallible, and when he said that
with care and attention he might rally, we had no more fear for him.
But,
although we had no more fear, everybody did as much as if there was great cause
for anxiety—as indeed there was until Mr Hoggins took charge of
him. Miss Pole looked out clean and comfortable, if homely, lodgings;
Miss Matty sent the sedan-chair for him, and Martha and I aired it well before
it left Cranford by holding a warming-pan full of red-hot coals in it, and then
shutting it up close, smoke and all, until the time when he should get into it
at the “Rising Sun.” Lady Glenmire undertook the medical department under
Mr Hoggins’s directions, and rummaged up all Mrs Jamieson’s medicine glasses,
and spoons, and bed-tables, in a free-and-easy way, that made Miss Matty feel a
little anxious as to what that lady and Mr Mulliner might say, if they
knew. Mrs Forrester made some of the bread-jelly, for which she was so
famous, to have ready as a refreshment in the lodgings when he should
arrive. A present of this bread-jelly was the highest mark of favour dear
Mrs Forrester could confer. Miss Pole had once asked her for the receipt,
but she had met with a very decided rebuff; that lady told her that she could
not part with it to any one during her life, and that after her death it was
bequeathed, as her executors would find, to Miss Matty. What Miss Matty,
or, as Mrs Forrester called her (remembering the clause in her will and the
dignity of the occasion), Miss Matilda Jenkyns—might choose to do with the
receipt when it came into her possession—whether to make it public, or to hand
it down as an heirloom—she did not know, nor would she dictate. And a
mould of this admirable, digestible, unique bread-jelly was sent by Mrs
Forrester to our poor sick conjuror. Who says that the aristocracy are
proud? Here was a lady by birth a Tyrrell, and descended from the great
Sir Walter that shot King Rufus, and in whose veins ran the blood
of him who murdered the little princes in the Tower, going every day to see
what dainty dishes she could prepare for Samuel Brown, a mountebank! But,
indeed, it was wonderful to see what kind feelings were called out by this poor
man’s coming amongst us. And also wonderful to see how the great Cranford
panic, which had been occasioned by his first coming in his Turkish dress,
melted away into thin air on his second coming—pale and feeble, and with his
heavy, filmy eyes, that only brightened a very little when they fell upon the
countenance of his faithful wife, or their pale and sorrowful little girl.
Somehow we
all forgot to be afraid. I daresay it was that finding out that he, who
had first excited our love of the marvellous by his unprecedented arts, had not
sufficient every-day gifts to manage a shying horse, made us feel as if we were
ourselves again. Miss Pole came with her little basket at all hours of
the evening, as if her lonely house and the unfrequented road to it had never
been infested by that “murderous gang”; Mrs Forrester said she thought that
neither Jenny nor she need mind the headless lady who wept and wailed in
Darkness Lane, for surely the power was never given to such beings to harm
those who went about to try to do what little good was in their power, to which
Jenny tremblingly assented; but the mistress’s theory had little effect on the
maid’s practice until she had sewn two pieces of red flannel in the shape of a
cross on her inner garment.
I found
Miss Matty covering her penny ball—the ball that she used to roll under her
bed—with gay-coloured worsted in rainbow stripes.
“My dear,” said she, “my heart is sad for that little
careworn child. Although her father is a conjuror, she looks as if she had
never had a good game of play in her life. I used to make very pretty
balls in this way when I was a girl, and I thought I would try if I could not
make this one smart and take it to Phoebe this afternoon. I think ‘the
gang’ must have left the neighbourhood, for one does not hear any more of their
violence and robbery now.”
We were
all of us far too full of the signor’s precarious state to talk either about
robbers or ghosts. Indeed, Lady Glenmire said she never had heard of any
actual robberies, except that two little boys had stolen some apples from
Farmer Benson’s orchard, and that some eggs had been missed on a market-day off
Widow Hayward’s stall. But that was expecting too much of us; we could
not acknowledge that we had only had this small foundation for all our
panic. Miss Pole drew herself up at this remark of Lady Glenmire’s, and
said “that she wished she could agree with her as to the very small reason we
had had for alarm, but with the recollection of a man disguised as a woman who
had endeavoured to force himself into her house while his confederates waited
outside; with the knowledge gained from Lady Glenmire herself, of the
footprints seen on Mrs Jamieson’s flower borders; with the fact before her of
the audacious robbery committed on Mr Hoggins at his own door”—But here Lady
Glenmire broke in with a very strong expression of doubt as to whether this
last story was not an entire fabrication founded upon the theft of a cat; she
grew so red while she was saying all this that I was not
surprised at Miss Pole’s manner of bridling up, and I am certain, if Lady
Glenmire had not been “her ladyship,” we should have had a more emphatic
contradiction than the “Well, to be sure!” and similar fragmentary
ejaculations, which were all that she ventured upon in my lady’s
presence. But when she was gone Miss Pole began a long congratulation to
Miss Matty that so far they had escaped marriage, which she noticed always made
people credulous to the last degree; indeed, she thought it argued great natural
credulity in a woman if she could not keep herself from being married; and in
what Lady Glenmire had said about Mr Hoggins’s robbery we had a specimen of
what people came to if they gave way to such a weakness; evidently Lady
Glenmire would swallow anything if she could believe the poor vamped-up story
about a neck of mutton and a pussy with which he had tried to impose on Miss
Pole, only she had always been on her guard against believing too much of what
men said.
We were
thankful, as Miss Pole desired us to be, that we had never been married; but I
think, of the two, we were even more thankful that the robbers had left
Cranford; at least I judge so from a speech of Miss Matty’s that evening, as we
sat over the fire, in which she evidently looked upon a husband as a great
protector against thieves, burglars, and ghosts; and said that she did not
think that she should dare to be always warning young people against matrimony,
as Miss Pole did continually; to be sure, marriage was a risk, as she saw, now
she had had some experience; but she remembered the time
when she had looked forward to being married as much as any one.
“Not to
any particular person, my dear,” said she, hastily checking herself up, as if
she were afraid of having admitted too much; “only the old story, you know, of
ladies always saying, ‘When I marry,’ and gentlemen, ‘If I
marry.’” It was a joke spoken in rather a sad tone, and I doubt if either
of us smiled; but I could not see Miss Matty’s face by the flickering
fire-light. In a little while she continued—
“But,
after all, I have not told you the truth. It is so long ago, and no one
ever knew how much I thought of it at the time, unless, indeed, my dear mother
guessed; but I may say that there was a time when I did not think I should have
been only Miss Matty Jenkyns all my life; for even if I did meet with any one
who wished to marry me now (and, as Miss Pole says, one is never too safe), I
could not take him—I hope he would not take it too much to heart, but I could not
take him—or any one but the person I once thought I should be married to; and
he is dead and gone, and he never knew how it all came about that I said ‘No,’
when I had thought many and many a time—Well, it’s no matter what I
thought. God ordains it all, and I am very happy, my dear. No one
has such kind friends as I,” continued she, taking my hand and holding it in
hers.
If I had
never known of Mr Holbrook, I could have said something in this pause, but as I
had, I could not think of anything that would come in naturally, and so we both
kept silence for a little time.
“My father
once made us,” she began, “keep a diary, in two columns; on
one side we were to put down in the morning what we thought would be the course
and events of the coming day, and at night we were to put down on the other
side what really had happened. It would be to some people rather a sad
way of telling their lives,” (a tear dropped upon my hand at these words)—“I
don’t mean that mine has been sad, only so very different to what I
expected. I remember, one winter’s evening, sitting over our bedroom fire
with Deborah—I remember it as if it were yesterday—and we were planning our
future lives, both of us were planning, though only she talked about it.
She said she should like to marry an archdeacon, and write his charges; and you
know, my dear, she never was married, and, for aught I know, she never spoke to
an unmarried archdeacon in her life. I never was ambitious, nor could I
have written charges, but I thought I could manage a house (my mother used to
call me her right hand), and I was always so fond of little children—the shyest
babies would stretch out their little arms to come to me; when I was a girl, I
was half my leisure time nursing in the neighbouring cottages; but I don’t know
how it was, when I grew sad and grave—which I did a year or two after this
time—the little things drew back from me, and I am afraid I lost the knack,
though I am just as fond of children as ever, and have a strange yearning at my
heart whenever I see a mother with her baby in her arms. Nay, my dear”
(and by a sudden blaze which sprang up from a fall of the unstirred coals, I
saw that her eyes were full of tears—gazing intently on some vision of what
might have been), “do you know I dream sometimes that I
have a little child—always the same—a little girl of about two years old; she
never grows older, though I have dreamt about her for many years. I don’t
think I ever dream of any words or sound she makes; she is very noiseless and
still, but she comes to me when she is very sorry or very glad, and I have
wakened with the clasp of her dear little arms round my neck. Only last
night—perhaps because I had gone to sleep thinking of this ball for Phoebe—my
little darling came in my dream, and put up her mouth to be kissed, just as I
have seen real babies do to real mothers before going to bed. But all
this is nonsense, dear! only don’t be frightened by Miss Pole from being
married. I can fancy it may be a very happy state, and a little credulity
helps one on through life very smoothly—better than always doubting and
doubting and seeing difficulties and disagreeables in everything.”
If I had
been inclined to be daunted from matrimony, it would not have been Miss Pole to
do it; it would have been the lot of poor Signor Brunoni and his wife.
And yet again, it was an encouragement to see how, through all their cares and
sorrows, they thought of each other and not of themselves; and how keen were
their joys, if they only passed through each other, or through the little Phoebe.
The
signora told me, one day, a good deal about their lives up to this
period. It began by my asking her whether Miss Pole’s story of the
twin-brothers were true; it sounded so wonderful a likeness, that I should have
had my doubts, if Miss Pole had not been unmarried. But the signora, or
(as we found out she preferred to be called) Mrs Brown,
said it was quite true; that her brother-in-law was by many taken for her
husband, which was of great assistance to them in their profession; “though,”
she continued, “how people can mistake Thomas for the real Signor Brunoni, I
can’t conceive; but he says they do; so I suppose I must believe him. Not
but what he is a very good man; I am sure I don’t know how we should have paid
our bill at the ‘Rising Sun’ but for the money he sends; but people must know
very little about art if they can take him for my husband. Why, Miss, in
the ball trick, where my husband spreads his fingers wide, and throws out his
little finger with quite an air and a grace, Thomas just clumps up his hand
like a fist, and might have ever so many balls hidden in it. Besides, he
has never been in India, and knows nothing of the proper sit of a turban.”
“Have you
been in India?” said I, rather astonished.
“Oh, yes!
many a year, ma’am. Sam was a sergeant in the 31st; and when the regiment
was ordered to India, I drew a lot to go, and I was more thankful than I can
tell; for it seemed as if it would only be a slow death to me to part from my
husband. But, indeed, ma’am, if I had known all, I don’t know whether I
would not rather have died there and then than gone through what I have done
since. To be sure, I’ve been able to comfort Sam, and to be with him;
but, ma’am, I’ve lost six children,” said she, looking up at me with those
strange eyes that I’ve never noticed but in mothers of dead children—with a
kind of wild look in them, as if seeking for what they
never more might find. “Yes! Six children died off, like little
buds nipped untimely, in that cruel India. I thought, as each died, I
never could—I never would—love a child again; and when the next came, it had
not only its own love, but the deeper love that came from the thoughts of its
little dead brothers and sisters. And when Phoebe was coming, I said to
my husband, ‘Sam, when the child is born, and I am strong, I shall leave you;
it will cut my heart cruel; but if this baby dies too, I shall go mad; the
madness is in me now; but if you let me go down to Calcutta, carrying my baby
step by step, it will, maybe, work itself off; and I will save, and I will
hoard, and I will beg—and I will die, to get a passage home to England, where
our baby may live?’ God bless him! he said I might go; and he saved up
his pay, and I saved every pice I could get for washing or any way; and when
Phoebe came, and I grew strong again, I set off. It was very lonely;
through the thick forests, dark again with their heavy trees—along by the
river’s side (but I had been brought up near the Avon in Warwickshire, so that
flowing noise sounded like home)—from station to station, from Indian village
to village, I went along, carrying my child. I had seen one of the
officer’s ladies with a little picture, ma’am—done by a Catholic foreigner,
ma’am—of the Virgin and the little Saviour, ma’am. She had him on her
arm, and her form was softly curled round him, and their cheeks touched.
Well, when I went to bid good-bye to this lady, for whom I had washed, she
cried sadly; for she, too, had lost her children, but she had not another to
save, like me; and I was bold enough to ask her would she give
me that print. And she cried the more, and said her children were with
that little blessed Jesus; and gave it me, and told me that she had heard it
had been painted on the bottom of a cask, which made it have that round
shape. And when my body was very weary, and my heart was sick (for there
were times when I misdoubted if I could ever reach my home, and there were
times when I thought of my husband, and one time when I thought my baby was
dying), I took out that picture and looked at it, till I could have thought the
mother spoke to me, and comforted me. And the natives were very
kind. We could not understand one another; but they saw my baby on my
breast, and they came out to me, and brought me rice and milk, and sometimes
flowers—I have got some of the flowers dried. Then, the next morning, I
was so tired; and they wanted me to stay with them—I could tell that—and tried
to frighten me from going into the deep woods, which, indeed, looked very
strange and dark; but it seemed to me as if Death was following me to take my
baby away from me; and as if I must go on, and on—and I thought how God had
cared for mothers ever since the world was made, and would care for me; so I
bade them good-bye, and set off afresh. And once when my baby was ill,
and both she and I needed rest, He led me to a place where I found a kind
Englishman lived, right in the midst of the natives.”
“And you
reached Calcutta safely at last?”
“Yes,
safely! Oh! when I knew I had only two days’ journey more before me, I
could not help it, ma’am—it might be idolatry, I cannot tell—but I was near one
of the native temples, and I went into it with my baby to
thank God for His great mercy; for it seemed to me that where others had prayed
before to their God, in their joy or in their agony, was of itself a sacred
place. And I got as servant to an invalid lady, who grew quite fond of my
baby aboard-ship; and, in two years’ time, Sam earned his discharge, and came
home to me, and to our child. Then he had to fix on a trade; but he knew
of none; and once, once upon a time, he had learnt some tricks from an Indian
juggler; so he set up conjuring, and it answered so well that he took Thomas to
help him—as his man, you know, not as another conjuror, though Thomas has set
it up now on his own hook. But it has been a great help to us that
likeness between the twins, and made a good many tricks go off well that they
made up together. And Thomas is a good brother, only he has not the fine
carriage of my husband, so that I can’t think how he can be taken for Signor
Brunoni himself, as he says he is.”
“Poor
little Phoebe!” said I, my thoughts going back to the baby she carried all
those hundred miles.
“Ah! you
may say so! I never thought I should have reared her, though, when she fell
ill at Chunderabaddad; but that good, kind Aga Jenkyns took us in, which I
believe was the very saving of her.”
“Jenkyns!”
said I.
“Yes,
Jenkyns. I shall think all people of that name are kind; for here is that
nice old lady who comes every day to take Phoebe a walk!”
But an
idea had flashed through my head; could the Aga Jenkyns be
the lost Peter? True he was reported by many to be dead. But,
equally true, some had said that he had arrived at the dignity of Great Lama of
Thibet. Miss Matty thought he was alive. I would make further
inquiry.
To be continued
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