Читать книгу Mad: A Story of Dust and Ashes - Fenn George Manville - Страница 13

The people of Somesham, whom Doctor Hardon regulated as to their internal economy, were of opinion that there was not such another town as theirs in the whole kingdom; and no doubt they were right. It was situated at the foot of a range of chalky wolds, and in dry weather always gave the visitors an idea that its inhabitants were a slovenly race, and had not dusted their town lately. There was a long, white, dusty road that led to it on one side, and a long, dusty road that led to or from it on the other side; there was one long, dusty street, with shops and private houses mixed up anyhow; there were a few dusty cross streets which led nowhere; a market-place where pigs squealed and butter was sold on Tuesdays; a town-hall, combined with a corn-exchange and an assembly-room, forming an ugly dust-coloured building, which was like the memoranda and papers in people’s pocket-books when they are advertised as lost – of no value to anyone but the owners; and the sole use it would have been to them was to sell it for old building-materials. There were public-houses, and, above all, a commercial inn, kept by one Mrs Lower, a stout, elderly lady, who had formerly occupied the post of nurse in Octavius Hardon’s house until such times as a nurse was no longer required, when she did needlework, and helped in the domestic concerns till her mistress died, and then acted as housekeeper up to the advent of Agnes Hardon, when one John Lower, keeper of the County Arms in Somesham market-place, persuaded her to say “Yes” to the question he had so many times asked her, and she became landlady of the goodly inn; nurse again to the failing old man her husband; and lastly, sole owner of the goods, chattels, and tenements of the said John Lower, who went to his long sleep with a blessing upon his lips for the good woman who had smoothed the last hours of his life.

Mrs Lower made a very comfortable widow – one whose hostelry was much frequented by commercial gentlemen, and those given to running down from town once or twice a week for the purpose of having a turn with the Low Wold hounds; stout, as a matter of course, for no woman could be expected to make a good landlady who was angular or pointed in her person. Mrs Lower was stout, but not uncomfortably so, and this stoutness she kept in its proper proportion by a comfortable diet, and by being a woman without one of those unpleasant parasites known as cares. Doubtless she had plenty of the little troubles of life to encounter – those little three-cornered affairs that bother everyone – matters that to some people would be cares; but in her case, being a mild, cheerful, and amiable woman, they made but little impression, the consequence being that these acidities of life never ate into her countenance, running down it in wrinkles, and puckers, and channels; and at an age one never dare mention in her presence, or out of it either, for fear of not being believed, she was plump of face, rosy, and comfortable-looking, to an extent that made more than one well-to-do farmer, and tradesman too, make her an offer that she would not accept.