Читать книгу Caught in a Trap - John C. Hutcheson - Страница 7

Only a simple, and yet special name and appellation—

“Mrs Hartshorne,

The Poplars.”

That is all.

Nothing much in the name certainly, at first sight, nor yet such a very extraordinary address, either in the nomenclature of the mansion, or in its surroundings; but the two taken together were something entirely out of the common. Mrs Hartshorne by herself, or the Poplars, considered merely as a residence, were neither of them grand or startling phenomena; but one could not well do without the other, and the dual in unity formed a complete and unique integrity. In other words, “Mrs Hartshorne, of the Poplars,” was an “institution” in the land, to quote an Americanism, although neither a thing of beauty nor a joy for ever. She was a rara avis in terris, a millionaire Hecate, a rich and slightly-over-middle-aged eccentric, a Xantipical Croesus—no less a personage, in fact, than the “Sussex Dowager.”

Far and wide throughout this county—over a considerable portion of which she owned manorial rights of vassalage, and ruled with sovereign sway in the matter of leases and titheholds and rackrents—amongst the lesser farmers and villagers she was known by this title; although, it must be confessed, her more intimate dependents and rustic neighbours dubbed her by far less elegant sobriquets.

Any one meeting her about the country lanes, where she was to be found at all hours, would have taken Mrs Hartshorne to be a shabby little dried-up, poor old woman. She always dressed in dark grey garments of antediluvian cut, somewhat brown and rusty from age and wear. Her bonnet was a marvellous specimen of the hideous old coal-scuttle form used by our grandmothers. She always carried a reticule of similar date, which, by her demeanour when emporting it, might have contained a hundred death-warrants, or keys of dungeons—if she had lived some three centuries or so ago: a bulgy umbrella in all weathers, wet or fine: thick shoes of rough country make: dark woollen gloves; and no veil to disguise the thin sharp features and piercing bead-like black eyes, overhung with bushy grey eyebrows, and the wrinkled forehead above, covered with scanty white locks, braided puritanically on each side, and there you have Mrs Hartshorne.

She was not a handsome old woman, nor a prepossessing old woman, nor would her face impress you as being either benevolent or pious; but shrewdness, cleverness, and hardness of set purpose, were ingrained in every line of its expression; and in truth—she was a hard, shrewd, clever old woman.

A quarter of a century seems a somewhat long time to look back, but twenty-five years ago Mrs Hartshorne was a young and handsome woman. Time had not dealt kindly with her as he does to some: none would dream of calling hers a graceful or a winning old age. She seemed to wrestle with the Destroyer, instead of ignoring his approach as most of us do, and quietly and placidly submitting to his encroachments. The result was not to her advantage. Every line on her face, every crow’s-foot in the corners of her twinkling little eyes, every wrinkle on her careworn brow, every silvery hair on her head, marked the issue of some unsuccessful struggle; and the strong passions of her nature, even as they had embittered her life, seemed now, when her youth was passed, to war with death.

She had a quick way of speaking, running her words and sentences into one another, so that they resembled one of those compound, Dutch jaw-breaking words that occupy several lines in extent, and almost fill up a paragraph. Her temper was not a sweet one. It might suit “namby pamby,” milk-and-water, bread-and-butter girls—“hussies,” she would have called them—to mince their words and moderate their utterances; but she, “thank God, was none of those!” She said what she meant, sharp and straight to the point, and did not care what any one thought about it. Her voice, mode of speech, and general manner, resembled the barking of a wiry little Scotch terrier, and terrified most with whom she had any dealings. “Good Lord!” as old Doctor Jolly, the most hearty, jovial, loud and cheery-voiced of country surgeons—the only visitor who had entrance within her gates, and who used at fixed intervals to beard the lioness in her den—used to say; “but she has a temper. I would not be her husband, or her son, or her daughter for something! God bless my soul! sir, but she could hold a candle to the devil himself.” And so she could, and hold her own, too!

Old Roger Hartshorne—the “squire”—had married her late in life some twenty-five years ago, and brought her home to the Poplars in all state and ceremony as befitted the lady of so great a landowner. The old squire was a very good-natured, liberal sort of man, whose only amusement was in following the harriers—there were no hounds and scarlet-coated foxhunters in those parts—and he was generally liked throughout the county, for he kept a sort of open house, and was hail-fellow-well-met with everyone; but when he married—and no one knew where he picked up his wife, people said that she married him—all this was changed. A new regime was instituted, and the sporting breakfasts, and hunting dinners, and open-house festivities at the Poplars became as a thing of the past. Mrs Hartshorne said she would not have any such “scandalous goings on” in her house: she wasn’t going to be “eaten out of house and home.” Every expense of the ménage was cut down. Instead of some seven or eight grooms and gardeners and domestic servants, only three were retained—an old woman to mind the house, an old butler, whom the squire insisted on keeping, and a groom and gardener, who combined both situations in one. When the children came—a girl and a boy—the squire thought things would be altered; but they were not. Mrs Hartshorne said they must save, and pinch and pinch more now for them—although goodness knows the estate was rich enough; and shortly after the birth of Tom, the old squire died, worn out it was said by the temper and treatment of his wife. It was, perhaps, a happy release to Roger of that Ilk, for the poor old gentleman had been sadly changed since his marriage, and used to look a piteous spectacle when he took his solitary rides around the village lanes on his old cob, the sole relict of his handsome stud which he had been proudly fond of displaying across country.

With the death of the squire, Mrs Hartshorne became more saving and pinching, and miserly than ever. The first thing she did was to dismiss the old butler, who had been in the family for some forty years, saying she “could not afford to support a lazy, useless pauper;” the next was to tell the bailiff and estate agent that their services were no longer required, for “she would have no curious eyes prying into her property, and telling everyone how much she was worth.” The house was almost shut up and buried in seclusion, and no one but Doctor Jolly ever went there. He said he “would not be denied by any woman in creation,” and although the “dowager,” as she now came to be termed, used to put on her most vinegar-like expression for him, and address him in the snappiest and most provoking and insulting manner, he would call at the Poplars at least once a month in obedience to the promise he had given to the old squire on his death-bed to “look after his poor children.” It must be said that Mrs Hartshorne tolerated the doctor in a sort of way—her way; and if she liked anyone, liked him who was a favourite with the whole county round. She had said to him when he first used to come, that she supposed he “came there because he might charge for his visits, and get something by it;” but when she found this was not the case, and that Doctor Jolly had no base intentions towards her money bags, she tolerated him, and allowed him to come and go as he pleased, without bestowing on him more than her customary amount of sweet temper.

When Tom grew old enough he was sent to school, only coming home for one week every year by express stipulation with the proprietor of the school! and when he became eighteen, at his earnest wish, and after continual wranglings with the old lady—who was passionately fond of him, although at the same time possessing an inordinate affection for money—he was allowed to go into the army. His mother said that he would “ruin her” when she gave an order on her banker to the doctor, who was Tom’s guardian, for the sum required for his commission and outfit, but she did not behave illiberally, and gave master Tom a very fair allowance, satisfying her conscience by raising all the rents of her poorer tenants, and grinding down the household expenses more than ever. Of Tom she was not only fond but proud: it was the only one womanly trait in her character; and although she was not a very motherly kind of woman, and did not display her affection in the manner customary to the feminine sex—ruling her household, even Tom, with a rod of iron and a stern sense of duty—yet her son was very much attached to her, notwithstanding he did not exhibit any strong partiality for visiting her. He knew that the less he saw of her the better: they both understood each other well.

The daughter, however, Mrs Hartshorne hated and disliked in the strongest manner possible. She grew up uncared for, except as regarded frequent and summary corrections for childish misdemeanours; and if it had not been for the boy Tom she would have been altogether neglected. Little Susan was an eyesore to her mother in consequence of her being the only one provided for in Roger Hartshorne’s will independently of the mother, to whom all the rest of the property, excepting of course the entail, was bequeathed without reservation. Mrs Hartshorne considered her own child as a species of interloper or invader of her rights, and treated her accordingly with neglect and almost cruelty when the squire was no longer able to look after and protect her. The very fondness of the old man for his little girl had been even an additional incentive for her ill-treatment. When Susan had reached her fifteenth year—she was little more than a year older than Tom—the dislike of her mother culminated in an accident, which indeed might be characterised in worse terms, that somewhat checked the ill-treatment and harshness she had previously suffered. She had done some trifling thing or other one day which had offended her mother to fury, and she consequently, after beating her most unmercifully, had locked her up all one night in a solitary part of the house by herself. The little thing was of a very nervous, tender organisation; and the fright she suffered in the lonely darkness throughout the long hours of the night drove away her poor little wits. When the child was let out the next day she was in a raging fever, and when she recovered from that, thanks to old Doctor Jolly (who was unremitting in his care, after frightening the mother by declaring her to be almost a murderess), she was never herself again. She remained quietly passive under any or every treatment of the mother “half-silly,” as the poor folks say, and half-silly she was now still, although she was almost one-and-twenty. Her mental disorder was of a pathetic description—a sort of melancholia, and although her mother had procured governesses for her, and she knew, like a parrot, as much as most girls of her age in the matter of education, she never exhibited any likes or dislikes, or preferences, except for music, of which she was passionately fond: everything else that was taught her she learnt in a machine-like way. Susan would spend hours each day, particularly in the evening, playing on an old chamber-organ, which occupied one of the disused rooms of the house, wild, weird, melancholy melodies which appeared to soothe her, and give her the only sense of enjoyment she seemed to possess. Tom and Doctor Jolly were the only people she cared to see; her mother she disliked greatly, and had a sort of trembling fit whenever she came across her or passed her in the passages of the house; and the old female domestics she barely tolerated, although she liked old George, a simple, uneducated Sussex countryman (the county is great for its “chawbacons”), who now did all the odd jobs and outdoor work about the house since the establishment had been reduced.

Mrs Hartshorne always had a governess or special person to look after Susan, and she was careful to put down all the expenses of the said individual to be charged against and deducted from the portion which her daughter was to inherit in accordance with the terms of the squire’s will.

These governesses were always being changed, for few persons, even those who have taught themselves to submit, as governesses have to teach themselves, could long bear with the temper of the dowager. A new face was consequently ever coming and going within the narrow range of Susan Hartshorne’s horizon.

Doctor Jolly used to say that perhaps some sudden shock of grief or joy might restore the poor girl to the full possession of her senses.

“But then,” he would remark, “I don’t know how that is going to happen, unless the old lady kicks the bucket.”

Thus was Mrs Hartshorne placed, and it must be owned that a skeleton such as she had in her closet would not tend to sweeten her disposition. Hard and stern she was with all around her. She was her own farm agent, her own bailiff, her own man of business. If she had been entirely alone she would probably have had not a soul in the house with her, not even a domestic. She collected her own rents, and was never forgetful of a farthing owed to her. When the leases granted by the squire expired she would not let them be renewed, but kept her tenants under fear and trembling, with only a year’s certainty of possession of their homes; and she waxed rich, did the dowager, and had by this time a goodly pile of ready money at her bankers’. This was all for Tom, and, faith! the young sir would have a splendid inheritance when the dowager departed for the happy hunting grounds. The squire’s property, before the advent of Mrs Hartshorne, had been worth some ten thousand a year. It was now worth nearly half as much again, and the savings of the yearly income amounted to more than a hundred thousand pounds. “A very comfortable little sum of ready money, sir!” as the doctor would say.

The residence of the dowager was situated about a mile from the picturesque little village of Hartwood, which boasted not only of a special little station to itself on the S.C. Rail, but also of its own little church, quite independent of the sacred episcopal edifice general to the parish under whose jurisdiction it came. The dowager owned the church as well as the village, and the right of presentation being in her gift, she had recently inducted the most extreme Ritualistic divine she could procure into the pulpit of Hartwood, just purely out of opposition to the rector of the district, whom she disliked, and who was supposed to be of strong evangelical principles.

The Poplars—there can be no mistake in saying it—was an extremely ugly house. Its architecture was neither Gothic nor Norman, Elizabethan or Tudor; it was an heterogeneous pile of stones and brickwork, scrambled together without any style or design. Inside it was comfortable enough, and roomy and rambling; without it seemed nothing but a collection of eaves and chimneys, and its sole redeeming point consisted in the lofty and spreading poplar trees which surrounded it on all sides, as well as gave it its name, and concealed its native ugliness from strangers and passers-by.

There you have “The Poplars” and its mistress.