Читать книгу Wenderholme - Philip Gilbert Hamerton - Страница 12

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Mrs. Ogden's desire to bring about a renewal of the acquaintance between her son Isaac and Mr. Prigley was not an unwise one, even if considered independently of his religious interests. Mr. Prigley, though by no means a man of first-rate culture or capacity, was still the only gentleman in Shayton—the only man in the place who resolutely kept himself up to the standard of the outer world, and refused to adopt the local dialect and manners. No doubt the Doctor was in a certain special sense a gentleman, and much more than a gentleman—he was a man of high attainment, and had an excellent heart. But, so far from desiring to rise above the outward ideal of the locality, he took a perverse pleasure in remaining a little below it. His language was a shade more provincial than that of the neighboring manufacturers, and his manners somewhat more rugged and abrupt than theirs. Perhaps he secretly enjoyed the contrast between the commonplace exterior which he affected, and the elaborate intellectual culture which he knew himself to possess. He resembled the house he lived in, which was, as to its exterior, so perfectly commonplace that every one would pass it without notice, yet which contained greater intellectual riches, and more abundant material for reflection, than all the other houses in Shayton put together. Therefore, if I say that Mr. Prigley was the only gentleman in the place, I mean externally—in language and manner.

The living of Shayton was a very meagre one, and Mr.

Prigley had great difficulty in keeping himself above water; but there is more satisfaction in struggling with the difficulties of open and avowed poverty than in maintaining deceitful appearances, and Mr. Prigley had long since ceased to think about appearances at all. It had happened some time ago that the carpets showed grievous signs of wear, and in fact were so full of holes as to be positively dangerous. They had been patched and mended over and over again, and an ingenious seamstress employed by Mrs. Prigley, and much valued by her, had darned them with variously colored wools in continuation of the original patterns, so that (unless on close inspection) the repairs were not very evident. Now, however, both Mrs. Prigley and the seamstress, notwithstanding all their ingenuity and skill, had reluctantly come to the conclusion that to repair the carpets in their present advanced stage of decay it would be necessary to darn nothing less than the whole area of them, and Mrs. Prigley declared that she would rather manufacture new ones with her knitting-needles. But if buying carpets was out of the question, so it was not less out of the question for Mrs. Prigley to fabricate objects of luxury, since her whole time was taken up by matters of pressing necessity; indeed, the poor lady could only just keep up with the ceaseless accumulations of things that wanted mending; and whenever she was unwell for a day or two, and unable to work, there rose such a heap of them as made her very heart sink. In this perplexity about the carpets, nature was left to take her course, and the carpets were abandoned to their fate, but still left upon the floors; for how were they ever to be replaced? By a most unfortunate coincidence, Mr. Prigley discovered about the same time that his shirts, though apparently very sound and handsome shirts indeed, had become deplorably weak in the tissue; for if, in dressing himself in a hurry, his hand did not just happen to hit the orifice of the sleeve, it passed through the fabric of the shirt itself, and that with so little difficulty that he was scarcely aware of any impediment; whilst if once the hem were severed, the immediate consequence was a rent more than a foot long. Poor Mrs. Prigley had mended these patiently for a while; but one day, after marvelling how it happened that her husband had become so violent in his treatment of his linen, she tried the strength of it herself, and, to use her own expressive phrase, "it came in two like a sheet of wet paper." It was characteristic of the Prigleys that they determined to renew the linen at once, and to abandon carpets for ever.

Shayton is not in France, and to do without carpets in Shayton amounts to a confession of what, in the middle class, is looked upon as a pitiable destitution. Mr. Prigley did not care much about this; but his wife was more sensitive to public opinion, and, long after that heroic resolution had been taken, hesitated to put it in execution. Day after day the ragged remnants remained upon the floor; and still did Mrs. Prigley procrastinate.

Whilst things were in this condition at the parsonage, the conversation took place at Milend which we have narrated in the preceding chapter; and as soon as Mrs. Ogden had seen things straight in the kitchen, she "bethought her," as she would have herself expressed it, that it might be a step towards intercourse between Isaac Ogden and the clergyman if she could make little Jacob take a fancy to the parsonage. There was a little boy there nearly his own age, and as Jacob was far too much isolated, the acquaintance would be equally desirable for him. The idea was by no means new to her; indeed, she had long been anxious to find suitable playmates for her grandson, a matter of which Isaac did not sufficiently perceive the importance; and she had often intended to take steps in this direction, but had been constantly deterred by the feelings of dislike to Mr. Prigley, which both her sons did not hesitate to express. What had Mr. Prigley done to them that they should never be able to speak of him without a shade of very perceptible aversion or contempt? They had no definite accusation to make against him; they did not attempt to justify their antipathy, but the antipathy did not disguise itself. In an agricultural district the relations between the parson and the squire are often cordial; in a manufacturing district the relations between the parson and the mill-owners are usually less intimate, and have more the character of accidental neighborship than of natural alliance.

The intercourse between Milend and the parsonage had been so infrequent that Mrs. Prigley was quite astonished when Betty, the maid-of-all-work, announced Mrs. Ogden as she pushed open the door of the sitting-room. But she was much more astonished when Mrs. Ogden, instead of quietly advancing in her somewhat stiff and formal manner, fell forward on the floor with outstretched arms and a shriek. Mrs. Prigley shrieked too, little Jacob tried manfully to lift up his grandmother, and poor Betty, not knowing what to say under circumstances so unexpected, but vaguely feeling that she was likely to incur blame, and might possibly (though in some manner not yet clear to her) deserve it, begged Mrs. Ogden's pardon. Mr. Prigley was busy writing a sermon in his study, and being suddenly interrupted in the midst of what seemed to him an uncommonly eloquent passage on the spread of infidelity, rushed to the scene of the accident in a state of great mental confusion, which for some seconds prevented him from recognizing Mrs. Ogden, or Mrs. Ogden's bonnet, for the lady's face was not visible to him as he stood amazed in the doorway. "Bless me!" thought Mr. Prigley, "here's a woman in a fit!" And then came a dim and somewhat unchristian feeling that women liable to fits need not just come and have them in the parlor at the parsonage. "It's Mrs. Ogden, love," said Mrs. Prigley; "and, oh dear, I am so sorry!"

By the united efforts of the parson and his wife, joined to those of Betty and little Jacob, Mrs. Ogden was placed upon the sofa, and Mr. Prigley went to fetch some brandy from the dining-room. On his way to the door, the cause of the accident became apparent to him in the shape of a yawning rent in the carpet, which was dragged up in great folds and creases several inches high. He had no time to do justice to the subject now, and so refrained from making any observation; but he fully resolved that, whether Mrs. Prigley liked it or not, all ragged old carpets should disappear from the parsonage as soon as Mrs. Ogden could be got out of it. When Mrs. Prigley saw the hole in her turn, she was overwhelmed with a sense of culpability, and felt herself to be little better than a murderess.

"Betty, run and fetch Dr. Bardly as fast as ever you can."

"Please let me go," said little Jacob; "I can run faster than she can."

The parson had a professional disapproval of Dr. Bardly because he would not come to church, and especially, perhaps, because on the very rare occasions when he did present himself there, he always contrived to be called out in time to escape the sermon; but he enjoyed the Doctor's company more than he would have been willing to confess, and had warmly seconded Mrs. Prigley's proposal that, since Mrs. Ogden, in consequence of her accident, was supposed to need the restoration of "tea and something to it," the Doctor should stay tea also. The arrival of Isaac and Jacob gave a new turn to the matter, and promised an addition to the small tea-party already organized.

It was rather stiff and awkward just at first for Isaac and Jacob when they found themselves actually in the parson's house, and forced to stop there to tea out of filial attention to their mother; but it is wonderful how soon Mr. Prigley contrived to get them over these difficulties. He resolved to take advantage of his opportunity, and warm up an acquaintance that might be of eminent service in certain secret projects of his. Shayton church was a dreary old building of the latest and most debased Tudor architecture; and, though it sheltered the inhabitants well enough in their comfortable old pews, it seemed to Mr. Prigley a base and degraded sort of edifice, unfit for the celebration of public worship. He therefore nourished schemes of reform; and when he had nothing particular to do, especially during the singing of the hymns, he could not help looking up at the flat ceiling and down along the pew-partitioned floor, and thinking what might be done with the old building—how it would look, for instance, if those octagon pillars that supported those hateful longitudinal beams were crowned with beautiful Gothic arches supporting a lofty clerestory above; and how the organ, instead of standing just over the communion-table, and preventing the possibility of a creditable east window, might be removed to the west end, to the inconvenience, it is true, of all the richest people in the township, who held pews in a gallery at that end of the church, but to the general advancement of correct and orthodox principles. Once the organ removed, a magnificent east window might gleam gorgeously over the renovated altar, and Shayton church might become worthy of its incumbent.

And now, as he saw, by unhoped-for good-luck, these three rich Ogdens in his own parlor, it became Mr. Prigley's earnest wish to keep them there as long as possible, and cultivate their acquaintance, and see whether there was not some vulnerable place in those hard practical minds of theirs. As for the Doctor, he scarcely hoped to get any money out of him; he had preached at him over and over again, and, though the Doctor only laughed and took care to keep out of the way of these sermons, it was scarcely to be expected that he should render good for evil—money for hard language. Nobody in Shayton precisely knew what the Doctor's opinions were; but when Mr. Prigley was writing his most energetic onslaughts on the infidel, it is certain that the type in the parson's mind had the Doctor's portly body and plain Socratic face.

Mrs. Prigley had rather hesitated about asking the man to stay tea at the parsonage, for her husband freely expressed his opinion of him in privacy, and when in a theological frame of mind spoke of him with much the same aversion that Mrs. Prigley herself felt for rats and toads and spiders. And as she looked upon the Doctor's face, it seemed to her at first the face of the typical "bad man," in whose existence she firmly believed. The human race, at the parsonage, was divided into sheep and goats, and Dr. Bardly was amongst the goats. Was he not evidently a goat? Had not nature herself stamped his badness on his visage! His very way of laughing had something suspicious about it; he seemed always to be thinking more than he chose to express. What was he thinking? There seemed to be something doubtful and wrong even about his very whiskers, but Mrs. Prigley could not define it, neither can we. On the contrary, they were respectable and very commonplace gray whiskers, shaped like mutton-chops, and no doubt they would have seemed only natural to Mrs. Prigley, if they had been more frequently seen in Shayton church.

It was a very pleasant-looking tea-table altogether. Mrs. Prigley, who was a Miss Stanburne of Byfield, a branch of the Stanburnes of Wenderholme, possessed a little ancestral plate, a remnant, after much subdivision, of the magnificence of her ancestors. She had a tea-pot and a coffee-pot, and a very quaint and curious cream-jug; she also possessed a pair of silver candlesticks, of a later date, representing Corinthian columns, and the candles stood in round holes in their graceful acanthus-leaved capitals. Many clergymen can display articles of contemporary manufacture bearing the most flattering inscriptions, but Mr. Prigley had never received any testimonials, and, so long as he remained in Shayton, was not in the least likely to enrich his table with silver of that kind. Mrs. Prigley, whilst apparently listening with respectful attention to Mrs. Ogden's account of a sick cow of hers (in which Mrs. Ogden seemed to consider that she herself, and not the suffering animal, was the proper object of sympathy), had in fact been debating in her own mind whether she ought to display her plate on a mere chance occasion like the present; but the common metal tea-pot was bulged and shabby, and the thistle in electro-plate, which had once decorated its lid, had long since been lost by one of the children, who had fancied it as a plaything. The two brass candlesticks were scarcely more presentable; indeed, one of them would no longer stand upright, and Mrs. Prigley had neglected to have it repaired, as one candle sufficed in ordinary times; and when her husband wrote at night, he used a tin bed-candlestick resembling a frying-pan, with a tin column, not of the Corinthian order, sticking up in the middle of it, and awkwardly preventing those culinary services to which the utensil seemed naturally destined. As these things were not presentable before company, Mrs. Prigley decided to bring forth her silver, but in justice to her it is necessary to say that she would have preferred something between the two, as more fitted to the occasion. For similar reasons was displayed a set of old china, of whose value the owner herself was ignorant; and so indeed would have been the present writer, if he had not recognized Mrs. Prigley's old cups and saucers in Jacquemart's 'Histoire de la Porcelaine.'

The splendor of Mrs. Prigley's tea-table struck Mrs. Ogden with a degree of surprise which she had not art enough to conceal, for the manners and customs of Shayton had never inculcated any kind of reticence as essential to the ideal of good-breeding. The guests had scarcely taken their places round this brilliant and festive board when Mrs. Ogden said—

"You've got some very 'andsome silver, Mrs. Prigley. I'd no idea you'd got such 'andsome silver. Those candlesticks are taller than any we've got at Milend."

A slight shade of annoyance passed across the countenance of the hostess as she answered, "It came from Wenderholme; there's not much of it except what is on the table; there were six of us to divide it amongst."

"Those are the Stanburne arms on the tea-pot," said the Doctor; "I've hoftens noticed them at Wendrum 'all. They have them all up and down. Young Stanburne's very fond of his coat-of-arms, but he's a right to be proud of it, for it's a very old one. He's quite a near relation of yours, isn't he, Mrs. Prigley?"

"My father and his grandfather were brothers, but there was a coolness between them on account of a small estate in Yorkshire, which each thought he'd a right to, and they had a lawsuit. My father lost it, and never went to Wenderholme again; and they never came from Wenderholme to Byfield. When my Uncle Reginald died, my father was not even asked to the funeral, but they sent him gloves and a hatband."

"Have you ever been at Wenderholme, Mrs. Prigley?" said Isaac.

"Never! I've often thought I should like to see it, just once; it's said to be a beautiful place, and I should like to see the house my poor father was born in."

"Why, it's quite close to Shayton, a great deal nearer than anybody would think. It isn't much more than twelve or fourteen miles off, and my house at Twistle is within nine miles of Wenderholme, if you go across the moor. There is not a single building of any kind between. But it's thirty miles to Wenderholme by the turnpike. You have to go through Sootythorn."

"It's a very nice estate," said Uncle Jacob; and, to do him justice, he was an excellent judge of estates, and possessed a great fund of information concerning all the desirable properties in the neighborhood, for he made it his business to acquire this sort of knowledge beforehand, in case such properties should fall into the market. So that when Uncle Jacob said an estate was "very nice," you may be sure it was so.

"There are about two thousand acres of good land at Wendrum," he continued, "all in a ring-fence, and a very large moor behind the house, with the best shooting anywhere in the whole country. Our moors join up to Mr. Stanburne's, and, if the whole were put together, it would be a grand shooting."

"That is," said Mr. Prigley, rather maliciously, "if Mr. Stanburne were to buy your moor, I suppose. Perhaps he might feel inclined to do so if you wished to sell."

Mrs. Ogden could not endure to hear of selling property, even in the most remote and hypothetical manner. Her back was generally as straight as a stone wall, but it became, if possible, straighter and stiffer, as, with a slight toss of the head, she spoke as follows:—

"We don't use selling property, Mr. Prigley; we're not sellers, we are buyers."

These words were uttered slowly, deliberately, and with the utmost distinctness, so that it was not possible for any one present to misunderstand the lady's intention. She evidently considered buying to be the nobler function of the two, as implying increase, and selling to be a comparatively degrading operation—a confession of poverty and embarrassment. This feeling was very strong, not only in Shayton, but for many miles round it, and instances frequently occurred of owners who clung to certain properties against their pecuniary interest, from a dread of it being said of them that they had sold land. There are countries where this prejudice has no existence, and where a rich man sells land without hesitation when he sees a more desirable investment for his money; but in Shayton a man was married to his estate or his estates (for in this matter polygamy was allowed); and though the law, after a certain tedious and expensive process, technically called conveyancing, permitted divorce, public opinion did not permit it.

Mr. Prigley restored the harmony of the evening by admitting that the people who sold land were generally the old landowners, and those who bought it were usually in trade—not a very novel or profound observation, but it soothed the wounded pride of Mrs. Ogden, and at the same time flattered a shade of jealousy of the old aristocracy which coexisted with much genuine sympathy and respect.