WHILE Lady Stanton spread the news of the arrival of the Musgrave children among the upper classes, this information was given to the lower, an equally or perhaps even more important influence in their history, by an authority of a very different kind, to whom, indeed, it would have been bitter to think that she was the channel of communication with the lower orders. But such is the irony of circumstances that it was Mrs. Pennithorne, who prided herself upon her gentility, and who would have made any sacrifice rather than descend to a sphere beneath her, who conveyed the report, which ran through the village like wildfire, and which spread over the surrounding country as rapidly and effectually as if it had been made known by beacons on the hill-tops. The village was more interested in the news than any other circle in the county could be, partly because the reigning house in a village is its standing romance, the drama most near to it, and most exciting when there is any drama at all; and partly for still more impressive personal reasons. The Castle had done much for the district in this way, having supplied it with more exciting food in the way of story and incident than any other great house in the north country. There had been a long interval of monotony, but now it appeared to all concerned that the more eventful circle of affairs was about to begin again. The manner in which the story fully reached the village was simple enough. Mrs. Pennithorne had, as might have been expected, failed entirely with Mary’s frock. It would not “come” as she wanted it to come, let her do what she would; and when all her own efforts had failed, and the stuff was effectually spoiled, soiled, and crumpled, and incapable of ever looking better than second-hand under any circumstances, she called in the doctor, as people are apt to do when they have cobbled at themselves in vain. The dress doctor in Penninghame and the neighbourhood, the rule of fashion, the grand authority for everything in the way of chiffons, was a certain Miss Price, a lively little old woman, who had one of the best houses in the village, where she let lodgings on occasion, but always made dresses. She had been in business for a great many years, and was an authority both up and down the water. It was not agreeable to Miss Price to be called in at the last moment, as it were, to heal the ailments of Mary’s frock; but partly because it was the clergyman’s house, and partly because of the gossip which was always involved, she obeyed the summons, as she had done on many previous occasions. And she did her best, as Mrs. Pennithorne had done her worst, upon the little habiliment. “Ladies know nothing about such things,” the little dressmaker said, pinning and unpinning with energetic ease and rapidity. And the Vicar’s wife, who looked on helpless but admiring, accepted the condemnation because of the flattery involved; for Mrs. Pen was elevated over Miss Price by so brief an interval that this accusation was a kind of acknowledgment of her gentility, and did her good, though it was not meant to be complimentary. She liked to feel that hers was that ladylike uselessness which is only appropriate to high position. She simpered a little, and avowed that indeed she had never been brought up to know about such things; and while Miss Price put the spoiled work to rights the Vicar’s wife did her best to entertain the beneficent fairy who was bringing the chaos into order. She did not blurt out suddenly the news with which she was overbrimming, but brought it forth cunningly in the course of conversation in the most agreeable way.
“Is there any news, Miss Price?” she said; “but I tell the Vicar that nothing ever happens here. The people don’t even die.”
“I beg your pardon, ma’am. There’s two within the last three months; but to be sure they were long past threescore and ten.”
“That is what I say. It’s so healthy at Penninghame. Look at the old Squire now, how hale and hearty he is—and after all he has come through.”
“Yes, he has come through a deal,” said Miss Price, putting her pins in her mouth, “and that’s too true.”
“Poor old man; and still more and more to put up with. Have you seen the children, Miss Price? Oh dear! didn’t you know? Perhaps I ought not to have mentioned it; but people cannot hide up children as they hide secrets. I have been living here for ten years, and I scarcely know the rights of the story about John Musgrave yet.”
“Children!” said Miss Price, with a start which shook the pins out of her fingers. “To be sure—that came in a coach from Pennington with a play-acting sort of a woman? But what has that to do with Mr. John?”
The dressmaker dropped Mary’s frock upon her knees in the excitement of her feelings. There was more than curiosity involved. “To be sure,” she said. “To be sure!” going on with her own thoughts, “where should they come but to the Castle? and who should have them but his family? ’Lizabeth Bampfylde is an honest woman, but not even me, I wouldn’t trust the children to her. His children! though they would be hers too—— ”
“What do you mean, Miss Price?” said Mrs. Pen, half offended; “are you going out of your senses? I tell you something about the Squire’s family, and you get into a way about it as if it could be anything to you.”
Miss Price recovered her composure with a rapid effort, but her little pale countenance reddened.
“Nothing to me, ma’am,” she said, with what she felt to be a proper pride. “But if Mr. John has children, they had a mother as well as a father; and there was a time when that was something to me.”
“Oh!” cried the Vicar’s wife, “then you knew Mrs. John? tell me about her. She was a low girl, that is all I know.”
“She was no low girl, whoever told you,” cried the little dressmaker. “She was one as folks were fond of, as fond as if she had been a princess. She was no more low than—I am; she was—— ”
“Oh, I did not mean to offend you, Miss Price. Of course I know how respectable you are—but not the equal of the Squire, you know, or of—— ”
Miss Price looked at the woman who had spoiled Mary’s frock. There she stood, limp, and faded, and genteel, with no capacity in her fingers and not much in her head, with a smile of conscious superiority yet condescension. Miss Price was not her equal. “Good Lord! as if I would be that useless,” she said to herself, “for all the money in the world! or to be as grand as the Queen!” But though she was at once exasperated and contemptuous, politeness and policy at once forbade her to say anything. She would not “set up her face to a lady,” even when so very unimpressive as Mrs. Pennithorne; and it did not become the dressmaker in the village to be openly scornful of the Vicar’s wife. She saved herself by taking up again with energy and devotion the scattered pins and the miserable little spoiled bodice of Mary’s frock.
“I am glad you know about this girl,” said Mrs. Pen, satisfied to have subdued her opponent, “for I want so much to hear about her. One cannot get much information from a gentleman, Miss Price. They tell you, ‘Oh yes, she was a pretty creature!’ as if that is all you cared to know.”
“It’s what tells most with the gentlemen, ma’am,” said Miss Price, recovering her composure. “Yes, that she was. I’ve looked at her many a time and said just the same to myself. ‘Well, you are a pretty creature!’ I don’t wonder if their heads get turned when they are as pretty as that; though it isn’t only the pretty ones that get their heads turned. The girls that I’ve had through my hands! and not one in ten that went through with the business and kept it up as it ought to be kept up.”
“Was Mrs. John Musgrave in the business? Was she in your hands? I declare! Did he marry her from your house?”
“She was come of wild folks,” said Miss Price; “there was gipsy blood in them. They had a little bit of a sheep farm up among the hills in their best days, and a lone house, where there wasn’t a stranger to be seen twice in a year. ’Lizabeth Bampfylde, that’s her mother, comes about the village still. I can’t tell you what she does, she sells her eggs and chickens, and maybe she does tell fortunes. I won’t say. She never told me mine. I took a fancy to the lass, and I said, ‘Bring her to me. I’ll take her; I’ll train her a bit. Oh, how little we know! If I had but let her bide on the fells!—but what a pretty one she was! Such eyes as she had; and a skin that wasn’t to say dark—it was brown, but so clear! like the water when the sun is in it.”
“You seem to think a great deal of people being pretty.”
“So I do, ma’am, more than I ought. A woman should have more sense. I’m near as easy led away as the gentlemen. But there’s different kinds of beauty, and that is what they never see as want it most. There’s pretty faces that I can’t abide. They seem to give me a turn. Now that’s where the men fails,” said the little dressmaker; “all’s one to them, good or bad, they never see any difference. Lily was never one of the bad ones, poor dear. Lily? yes, that was the young woman; but she’s not such a young woman, not a girl now. She’ll be thirty-seven or eight, close upon that, if she’s living this day.”
“She is not living—she died five years ago; and Miss Musgrave won’t believe me that she ought to go into black for her,” said Mrs. Pennithorne.
“Ah!” said Miss Price with a sharp cry. She dropped her work at her feet with an indifference to it which deeply aggrieved Mrs. Pen. The announcement took her altogether by surprise, and went to her heart. “Dead! oh my poor Lily, my poor Lily! Was I thinking ill o’ thee? Dead! and so many left—and her in her prime!” Sudden sobs stopped the good little woman’s speech, with which she struggled as she went on, making a brave effort to recover herself as she picked up the little dress. “I beg your pardon, ma’am, but it was so sudden; it took me unprepared. Oh, ma’am, that’s the worst of it when you have to do with girls. Few of them go through with the business, though it would be best for them; they turn every one to her own way; that’s Scripture, but I mean it. They marry, and they think themselves so grand with their children, and it kills ’em. Oh, if I had but left her on the fells! or if she had stuck by the business like me!”
“I did not think you took so much interest in her,” said Mrs. Pen, feeling guilty. “If I had known you cared, I would have been more careful what I said. But nobody seemed to think much of her. It is always the Musgraves the Vicar speaks of.”
“The Vicar thought of nothing but Miss Mary,” said Miss Price hastily; then she corrected herself, “I mean of womanfolk,” she said; “the Musgraves, ma’am, as you say, that was all he thought of. And that’s always the way, as far as I can judge. The gentry thinks of their own side, and we that are but small folks, we think of ours; it’s natural. Miss Musgrave was not much to me. I never made her but one thing, and that was a cotton, a common morning frock; she was too grand to have her things made by the likes of me; but Lily, she sat by my side and sewed at the same seam. And she’s dead! the bonniest lass on all the water, as the village folks say.”
“You don’t talk like the village folks, Miss Price.”
“No. I’m from the south, as they call it—except when a word creeps in now and again through being so long here. It’s all pinned and straight, ma’am, now. It was done almost before I heard the news—and I’m glad of it, for my eyesight goes when I begin to cry. I don’t think you can go wrong now,” said Miss Price with a sigh, knowing the powers of her patroness in that direction. “It’s as well as I can make it—pinned and basted, and straight before your hand. No, thank you kindly, nothing for me. I’m that put out that the best thing I can do is to get home.”
“But dear me, Miss Price—as she is not even a relation!”
“A relation, what’s that? A girl that you’ve brought up is more than a relation,” cried the dressmaker, forgetting her manners. And she made up her patterns tremulously in a little bundle, and hurried out with the briefest leavetaking, which was not civil, Mrs. Pennithorne said indignantly. But Miss Price, in her way, was as important as the Vicar’s wife herself, being alone in her profession, and enjoying a monopoly. It is possible to be rude, when you are a monopolist, without damage to your trade; but this, to do her justice, was not the motive which actuated the little dressmaker, who, in her nature, was anxiously polite, and indisposed to offend any one; but the news she had heard was too much for all her little decorums. She made a long round out of her way to pass by the Castle, though she could scarcely tell why she did so—nor it was not the children that were most in her mind. Indeed she scarcely remembered them at all, in her excitement of pain and hot grief which took the shape of a kind of fiery resentment against life and nature. Children! what was the good of the children—helpless things that took a woman’s life, and made even the rest of death bitter to her, wringing her heart with misery to leave them after costing her her life! She was an old maid not by accident, but by nature; and what were a couple of miserable little children in exchange for the life of Lily! But when, not expecting to see them, not thinking of them save in this bitter way, Miss Price saw the two children at the door of the hall, another quick springing sensation rose suddenly in her hasty soul. She went slowly past, gazing at them, trying to say to herself that she hated the sight of them, Lily’s slayers! But her kind heart was too much for her quick temper, and as soon as they were out of sight, the little dressmaker sat down by the wayside and cried, sobbing like a child. Little dreadful creatures, who had worn their mother to death, and killed her in her prime! Poor little forlorn orphans, without a mother! She did not know which feeling was the warmest and strongest. But she reached home so shaken between the two emotions, that her present assistant, who filled the place to which Miss Price had hoped to train Lily, and who was a good girl with no nonsense in her head, fully intending to go through with the business, was frightened by the appearance of her principal, who stumbled into the little parlour all garlanded with paper patterns, with tremulous step and blanched cheeks, as if she had seen a ghost.
“Something’s to do!” cried the girl.
Miss Price made no immediate reply, but sank into a chair to get her breath.
“Oh nothing; nothing you know of,” she said at last, “nothing that need trouble you;” and then after a pause, “nothing that will warn you even, not one of you, silly things. You’d all do just the same to-morrow, though it was to cost you your lives.”
“I’ll run and get you a cup of tea,” said Sarah, which showed her to be a young woman of sense. Where lives the woman to whom this cordial, promptly and as it were accidentally administered, does not do good? Miss Price gradually recovered herself as she sipped the fragrant tea, and told her story with many sighs and lamentations, yet not without a certain melancholy pleasure.
“If girls would only think,” she said; “if they would take a warning; but ne’er a one of you will do that. You think it’s grand to marry a gentleman; but it would be far better to go through with the business like I’ve done, far better! though you’ll never think so.”
Sarah was respectfully sympathetic; she shook her head with a look of awe and melancholy acquiescence; but nevertheless she did not think so. She was only twenty, and thirty-seven was a good age. To marry a gentleman, even at the risk of dying at thirty-seven like Lily, was better than living till sixty like Miss Price; but she did not say so. She acquiesced, and even cried over the lost Lily, whom she had never seen, with the easy emotion of a girl. She herself meant sincerely to go through with the business; but anyhow Sarah was as much excited by the news as heart could desire. Miss Price was very determined that it should not be talked of, that the story should not be spread in the village. “Don’t let them say again it came from us,” she said; but however that might be, before the next morning it had spread through the parish, and beyond the parish. Such things get into the atmosphere. What can conceal a secret? It is the one thing certain to be found out, and which every one is bound to know. There was nothing else talked about in the cottages or when neighbours met, for some days. The men talked of it over their beer, even, in the public-houses. “She were a bonnie lass,” the elder ones said; and all the girls in the district felt that they individually might have been Lily, and felt sad for her. The children (who could not be hid) were followed by eager looks of curiosity when they appeared, and the resemblance of Lilias to her mother was too remarkable not to strike every one who had known her; and the entire story which had excited the district so deeply in its time, and which, with its mixture of all the sentiments which are most interesting to humanity, was almost as exciting still as ever, was retold, a hundred times over, for the benefit of the younger generation. In these lower regions, as was natural, the interest all centred in the beautiful girl, who, though “come of wild folk,” and not even an appropriate bride for a well-to-do hopeful of the village, had “the offer of” two gentlemen, one the young lord, and the other the young squire. Had such fortune ever come before to a lass from the fells? How she had been courted! not as the village lovers wooed with a sense of equality, at least, if not perhaps something more; but John Musgrave and young Lord Stanton had thought nobody in the world like her. And the young lord, poor fellow! had even broken his word for her, a sin which was but a glory the more to Lily in the eyes of the village critics—however bitterly it might have been condemned had his forsaken bride been a village maiden too. That this rivalry should have gone the length of blood, all for Lily’s sweet looks, was a thing the middle-aged narrators shook their heads over with many a moral, “You see what the like of that comes to, lasses,” they said. But the lasses only put their heads closer, and felt their hearts beat higher. To be fought for, to be died for! It was terrible, no doubt, but glorious. “Such things never happen nowadays” they said to themselves with a sigh.
And the news did not stop down below in the plain, but mounted with the winds and the clouds, and reached lone places in the fells, where it raised a wilder excitement still—at least in one melancholy and solitary place.