Lark Rise to Candleford (44 page)

On the other hand, there were old nurses and trusted maids
who had come to be regarded as individuals and loved as true friends,
irrespective of class, by those they served. And the name of 'friend', when
applied to them in words, gave them a deeper satisfaction than any material
benefit. A retired lady's maid, whom Laura knew later, spoke to her many times
with much feeling of what she evidently regarded as the crown of her experiences.
She had been for many years maid to a titled lady moving in high society, had
dressed her for royal courts, undressed and put her to bed in illness,
travelled with her, indulged her innocent vanities, and knew, for she could not
help knowing, being so near her person, her most intimate griefs. At last 'Her
Ladyship', grown old, lay upon her deathbed and her maid, who was helping to
nurse her, happened to be alone in the room with her, her relatives, none of
whom were very near ones, being downstairs at dinner. '"Raise me up,"
she said, and I raised her up, and when she put her arms round my neck to help
lift her, she kissed me and said, "
My friend
,"' and Miss
Wilson, twenty years after, considered that kiss and those two words a more
ample reward for her years of devotion than the nice cottage and annuity she
received under the will of the poor lady.

When Laura said she had seen a ghost coming out of the
clothes closet in the bedroom she had not meant to tell a lie. She really
believed she had seen one. One evening, before it was quite dark and yet the
corners of the room were shadowy her mother had sent her upstairs to fetch
something out of the chest, and, as she leant over it, with one eye turned apprehensively
towards the clothes closet corner, she thought she saw something move. At the
time she felt sure she saw something move, though she had no clear idea of what
it was that was moving. It may have been a lock of her own hair, or the end of
a window-curtain stirring, or merely a shadow seen sideways; but, whatever it
was, it was sufficient to send her screaming and stumbling downstairs.

At first, her mother was sorry for her, for she thought she
had fallen down a step or two and hurt herself; but when Laura said that she
had seen a ghost she put her off her lap and began to ask questions.

At that point the fibbing began. When asked what the ghost
was like, she first said it was dark and shaggy, like a bear; then that it was
tall and white, adding as an after-thought that it had eyes like lanterns and
she thought it was carrying one, but was not sure. 'I don't suppose you are
sure,' said her mother dryly. 'If you ask me, it's all a parcel of fibs, and if
you don't look out you'll be struck dead, like Ananias and Sapphira in the
Bible,' and she proceeded to tell their story as a warning.

After that, Laura never spoke of the closet to any one else
but Edmund; but she was still desperately afraid of it, as she had been as long
as she could remember. There was something terrifying about a door which was
never unlocked, and a door in such a dark corner. Even her mother had never
seen inside it, for the contents belonged to their landlady, Mrs. Herring, who
when she moved out of the house had left some of her belongings there, saying
she would fetch them as soon as possible. 'What was inside it?' the children
used to ask each other. Edmund thought there was a skeleton, for he had heard
his mother say, 'There's a skeleton in every cupboard,' but Laura felt it was
nothing as harmless.

After they were in bed and their mother had gone downstairs
at night, she would turn her back on the door, but, if she peeped round, as she
often did—for how otherwise could she be sure that it was not slowly
opening?—all the darkness in the room seemed to be piled up in that corner.
There was the window, a grey square, with sometimes a star or two showing, and
there were the faint outlines of the chair and the chest, but where the closet
door should have been was only darkness.

'Afraid of a locked door!' her mother exclaimed one night
when she found her sitting up in bed and shivering. 'What's inside it? Only a
lot of old lumber, you may be sure. If there was anything much good, she'd have
fetched it before now. Lie down and go to sleep, do, and don't be silly!'
Lumber!
Lumber!
What a queer word, especially when said over and over beneath the
bedclothes. It meant odds and ends of old rubbish, her mother had explained,
but, to her, it sounded more like black shadows come alive and ready to bear
down on one.

Her parents disliked the closet, too. They paid the rent of
the house and did not see why even a small part of it should be reserved for
the landlady's use; and, until the closet was cleared, they could not carry out
their plan of removing the front, throwing the extra space into the room, and
then running up a wooden partition to make a small separate bedroom for Edmund.
So her father wrote to Mrs. Herring, and one day she arrived and turned out to
be a little, lean old lady with a dark brown mole on one leathery cheek and
wearing a black bonnet decorated with jet dangles, like tiny fishing rods. The
children's mother had asked her when she arrived if she would not like to take
off her bonnet, but she had said she could not, for she had not brought her
cap; and, to make it look less formal for indoor wear, she had untied the
ribbon bow beneath her chin and flung a bonnet string over each shoulder. Thus
unmoored, the bonnet had grown more and more askew, which went oddly with her
genteel manner.

Edmund and Laura sat on the bed and watched her shake out old
garments and examine them for moth holes and blow the dust off crockery with
her bellows which she had borrowed, until the air of the clean, bright room was
as thick with dust as that of a lime kiln. 'Plenty of dust!' their mother said,
wrinkling her pretty nose distastefully. But Mrs. Herring did nothing to abate
it. Why should she? She was in her own house; her tenants were privileged to be
allowed to live there. At least that was what Laura read in the upward movement
of her little pointed nose.

Now that the closet door was thrown back it revealed a deep,
whitewashed den going back to the eaves of the cottage. It was crammed with the
hoarding of years, with old clothes and shoes, legless chairs, empty picture
frames, handleless cups and spoutless teapots. The best things had gone
downstairs already; the lace-pillow on a stand, the huge green gig umbrella
with whale-bone ribs, and the nest of copper preserving pans that Laura's
mother said afterwards were worth a mint of money. From the window, Mr. Herring
could be seen arranging them in the spring cart, his thin legs straddling in
drab gaiters. There would not be room in the cart for everything, and the hire
of it for the day was too costly to make another journey possible. The time had
come for Mrs. Herring to decide what was best worth taking.

'I wonder what I'd better do,' she kept saying to the
children's mother, but she got no helpful suggestions from one who detested
what she called 'a lot of old clutter laid up in dark corners'.

'She's an old hoarder: A regular old hoarder!' she whispered
to Laura when Mrs. Herring had gone downstairs to consult her husband. 'And
don't let me see you mess with that old rubbish she's given you. Put it down,
and when she's gone it can be cleaned or burnt.' They put down their presents
reluctantly. Edmund had been pleased with his broken corkscrew and coil of
short lengths of string, and Laura had admired her flannel-leaved needlebook
with 'Be Diligent' worked in cross-stitch on its canvas cover. The needles
inside were all rusty, but that did not matter; it was as a work of art she
valued it. But before they had time to protest, Mrs. Herring's head appeared
round the banisters, her bonnet more than ever askew by that time and her face
smutted by cobwebs. 'Would these be any good to you, my dear?' she asked,
handing down a coil of light steel hoops from a nail in the wall of the closet.

'It's very kind of you, I'm sure,' was the guarded response;
'but, somehow, I don't see myself wearing a crinoline again.'

'No. Right out of fashion,' Mrs. Herring admitted. 'Pity,
too, for it was a handy fashion for young married women. I've known some,
wearing a good-sized crinoline, go right up to the day of their confinement
without so much as their next-door neighbour suspecting. Now look at the brazen
trollops! And here's a lovely picture of the Prince Consort, and that's
somebody you've never heard of, I'll lay,' turning to the children.

Oh, yes, they had. Their mother had told them that when the
Prince Consort died every lady in the land had gone into mourning, and, no
matter how often they were told this, they always asked, 'And did you go into
mourning, too, Mother?' and were told that she had been only a girl at the
time, but she had had a black sash and ribbons. And they knew he had been the
Queen's husband, though, oddly enough, not the King, and that he had been so
good that nobody had liked him in his lifetime, excepting the Queen, who
'fairly doted'. They had heard all this by degrees because a neighbour called
'Old Queenie' had portraits of him and the Queen on the lid of her snuffbox.

But Mrs. Herring was back in the closet and, since she could
not take all her things away with her, was determined to be generous. 'Now,
here's a nice little beaded footstool. Come out of Tusmore House that time the
fire was, so you may be sure it's good. You have it, my dear. I'd like you to
have it.' Their mother eyed the little round stool with the claw legs and
beaded cover. She would really have liked that, but had made up her mind to
accept nothing. Perhaps she reflected, too, that it would be hers in any case,
as what Mrs. Herring could not take she would have to leave, for she said
again: 'It's very kind of you, I'm sure, but I don't know that I've any use for
it.'

'Use! Use!' echoed Mrs. Herring. 'Keep a thing seven years
and you'll always find a use for it! Besides,' she added, rather sharply, 'it's
just the thing to have under your feet when you're suckling, and you can't
pretend you'll not be doing that again,
and
a good many times, too, at
your age.'

Fortunately, at that moment, Mr. Herring was heard calling
upstairs that the cart was so chock-a-block that he couldn't get so much as
another needle in edgeways, and, with a deep sigh his wife said she supposed
she'd have to leave the rest. 'Perhaps you could sell some of the best things
and send the money on with the rent,' she suggested hopefully, but the
children's mother thought a bonfire in the garden would be the best way of
disposing of them. However, after she had gone, a number of things were picked
out and cleaned and kept, including the beaded footstool, a brass ladle, and a
little travelling clock, which, when repaired, delighted the children by
playing a little tune after striking the hours. 'Tinkle, tinkle, tinkle, tink,
tink, tink' it went, night and day, for another forty years! then, its works
worn out at last, retired to a shelf in Laura's attic.

Downstairs, the table was laid with a 'visitor's tea'. There
were the best tea things with a fat pink rose on the side of each cup; hearts
of lettuce, thin bread and butter, and the crisp little cakes that had been
baked in readiness that morning. Edmund and Laura sat very upright on their
hard windsor chairs. Bread and butter first. Always bread and butter first:
they had been told that so many times that it had the finality of a text of
Scripture. But Mr. Herring, who was the eldest present and ought to have set a
good example, began with the little cakes, picking up and examining each one
closely before disposing of it in two bites. However, while there were still a
few left, Mrs. Herring placed bread and butter on his plate and handed him the
lettuce meaningly; and when he twisted the tender young hearts of lettuce into
tight rolls and dipped them into the salt-cellar she took the spoon and put
salt on the side of his plate.

Mrs. Herring ate very genteelly, crumbling her cake on her
plate and picking out and putting aside the currants, because, she explained,
they did not agree with her. She crooked the little finger of the hand which
held her teacup and sipped its contents like a bird, with her eyes turned up to
the ceiling.

While they sat there, the door wide open, with the scent of
flowers and the humming of bees and the waving of fruit-tree tops, seeming to
the children to say that the stiff, formal tea-drinking would soon be over and
that they were all waiting for them in the garden, a woman paused at the gate,
looked the spring cart well over, set down her water-buckets and opened the
gate. 'Why, it's Rachel. Whatever can she want?' said the children's mother,
rather vexed at the intrusion. What Rachel wanted was to know who the visitors
were and why they had come.

'Why, if it ain't Mrs. Herring—and Mr. Herring, too!' she
cried in a tone of joyful recognition as she reached the door. 'An' you've come
to clear out that old closet of yours, I'll be bound. I thought to meself when
I saw the spring cart at th' gate, "That's Mrs. Herring come to fetch away
her old lumber at last." But I weren't quite sure, because you've got that
waterproof cover over it all. How be ye both, and how do ye like it up yonder?'

During this speech Mrs. Herring had frozen visibly. 'We are
well, thank you,' she said, 'and we like our present residence very much,
though what business it is of yours to inquire, I
don't
know.'

'Oh, no offence intended, no offence,' said Rachel, somewhat
abashed. 'I only come to inquire, just friendly like,' and off she stumped down
the path, throwing another inquisitive glance at the cart as she passed it.

'There! Did you ever!' Mrs. Herring exclaimed. 'I never saw
such a lot of heathen Turks in my life! A woman I took good care barely to pass
the time of day with when I lived here to come hail-fellow-well-metting me like
that!'