The Complete Short Stories of Elizabeth Gaskell. Elizabeth Gaskell
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blaming him for not succeeding, and for swearing. “But what could you expect from a sailor?” Mr Brooke asked, even in my lady’s hearing; though he might have known Captain James was my lady’s own personal choice, from the old friendship Mr Urian had always shown for him. I think it was this speech of the Birmingham baker’s that made my lady determine to stand by Captain James, and encourage him to try again. For she would not allow that her choice had been an unwise one, at the bidding (as it were) of a dissenting tradesman; the only person in the neighbourhood, too, who had flaunted about in coloured clothes, when all the world was in mourning for my lady’s only son.
Captain James would have thrown the agency up at once, if my lady had not felt herself bound to justify the wisdom of her choice, by urging him to stay. He was much touched by her confidence in him, and swore a great oath, that the next year he would make the land such as it had never been before for produce. It was not my lady’s way to repeat anything she had heard, especially to another person’s disadvantage. So I don’t think she ever told Captain James of Mr Brooke’s speech about a sailor’s being likely to mismanage the property; and the captain was too anxious to succeed in this, the second year of his trial, to be above going to the flourishing, shrewd Mr Brooke, and asking for his advice as to the best method of working the estate. I dare say, if Miss Galindo had been as intimate as formerly at the Hall, we should all of us have heard of this new acquaintance of the agent’s long before we did. As it was, I am sure my lady never dreamed that the captain, who held opinions that were even more Church and King than her own, could ever have made friends with a Baptist baker from Birmingham, even to serve her ladyship’s own interests in the most loyal manner.
We heard of it first from Mr Gray, who came now often to see my lady, for neither he nor she could forget the solemn tie which the fact of his being the person to acquaint her with my lord’s death had created between them. For true and holy words spoken at that time, though having no reference to aught below the solemn subjects of life and death, had made her withdraw her opposition to Mr Gray’s wish about establishing a village school. She had sighed a little, it is true, and was even yet more apprehensive than hopeful as to the result; but almost as if as a memorial to my lord, she had allowed a kind of rough schoolhouse to be built on the green, just by the church; and had gently used the power she undoubtedly had, in expressing her strong wish that the boys might only be taught to read and write, and the first four rules of arithmetic; while the girls were only to learn to read, and to add up in their heads, and the rest of the time to work at mending their own clothes, knitting stockings and spinning. My lady presented the school with more spinning wheels than there were girls, and requested that there might be a rule that they should have spun so many hanks of flax, and knitted so many pairs of stockings, before they ever were taught to read at all. After all, it was but making the best of a bad job with my poor lady – but life was not what it had been to her. I remember well the day that Mr Gray pulled some delicately fine yarn (and I was a good judge of those things) out of his pocket, and laid it and a capital pair of knitted stockings before my lady, as the first fruits, so to say, of his school. I recollect seeing her put on her spectacles, and carefully examine both productions. Then she passed them to me.
“This is well, Mr Gray. I am much pleased. You are fortunate in your schoolmistress. She has had both proper knowledge of womanly things and much patience. Who is she? One out of our village?”
“My lady,” said Mr Gray, stammering and colouring in his old fashion, “Miss Bessy is so very kind as to teach all those sorts of things – Miss Bessy, and Miss Galindo, sometimes.”
My lady looked at him over her spectacles: but she only repeated the words “Miss Bessy,” and paused, as if trying to remember who such a person could be; and he, if he had then intended to say more, was quelled by her manner, and dropped the subject. He went on to say, that he had thought it his duty to decline the subscription to his school offered by Mr Brooke, because he was a Dissenter; that he (Mr Gray) feared that Captain James, through whom Mr Brooke’s offer of money had been made, was offended at his refusing to accept it from a man who held heterodox opinions; nay, whom Mr Gray suspected of being infected by Dodwell’s heresy.
“I think there must be some mistake,” said my lady, “or I have misunderstood you. Captain James would never be sufficiently with a schismatic to be employed by that man Brooke in distributing his charities. I should have doubted, until now, if Captain James knew him.”
“Indeed, my lady, he not only knows him, but is intimate with him, I regret to say. I have repeatedly seen the captain and Mr Brooke walking together; going through the fields together; and people do say –”
My lady looked up in interrogation at Mr Gray’s pause.
“I disapprove of gossip, and it may be untrue; but people do say that Captain James is very attentive to Miss Brooke.”
“Impossible!” said my lady, indignantly. “Captain James is a loyal and religious man. I beg your pardon Mr Gray, but it is impossible.”
Chapter 14
Like many other things which have been declared to be impossible, this report of Captain James being attentive to Miss Brooke turned out to be very true.
The mere idea of her agent being on the slightest possible terms of acquaintance with the Dissenter, the tradesman, the Birmingham democrat, who had come to settle in our good, orthodox, aristocratic, and agricultural Hanbury, made my lady very uneasy. Miss Galindo’s misdemeanour in having taken Miss Bessy to live with her, faded into a mistake, a mere error of judgment, in comparison with Captain James’s intimacy at Yeast House, as the Brookes called their ugly square-built farm. My lady talked herself quite into complacency with Miss Galindo, and even Miss Bessy was named by her, the first time I had ever been aware that my lady recognised her existence; but – I recollect it was a long rainy afternoon, and I sat with her ladyship, and we had time and opportunity for a long uninterrupted talk – whenever we had been silent for a little while she began again, with something like a wonder how it was that Captain James could ever have commenced an acquaintance with “that man Brooke.” My lady recapitulated all the times she could remember, that anything had occurred, or been said by Captain James which she could now understand as throwing light upon the subject.
“He said once that he was anxious to bring in the Norfolk system of cropping, and spoke a good deal about Mr Coke of Holkham (who, by the way, was no more a Coke than I am – collateral in the female line – which counts for little or nothing among the great old commoners’ families of pure blood), and his new ways of cultivation; of course new men bring in new ways, but it does not follow that either are better than the old ways. However, Captain James has been very anxious to try turnips and bone manure, and he really is a man of such good sense and energy, and was so sorry last year about the failure, that I consented; and now I begin to see my error. I have always heard that town bakers adulterate their flour with bone dust; and, of course, Captain James would be aware of this, and go to Brooke to inquire where the article was to be purchased.”
My lady always ignored the fact which had sometimes, I suspect, been brought under her very eyes during her drives, that Mr Brooke’s few fields were in a state of far higher cultivation than her own; so she could not, of course, perceive that there was any wisdom to be gained from asking the advice of the tradesman turned farmer.
But by-and-by this fact of her agent’s intimacy with the person whom in the whole world she most disliked (with that sort of dislike in which a large amount of uncomfortableness is combined – the dislike which conscientious people sometimes feel to another without knowing why, and yet which they cannot indulge in with comfort to themselves without having a moral reason why), came before my lady in many shapes. For, indeed I am sure that Captain James was not a man to conceal or be ashamed of one of his actions. I cannot fancy his ever lowering his strong loud clear voice, or having a confidental conversation with any one. When his crops had failed, all the village had known it. He complained, he regretted, he was angry, or owned himself a — fool, all down the village street; and the consequence was that, although