in worship. And to be run away with from school is a thing that may occur to any girl when bootiful. But concerning of Miss Kitty—bless her innocent young face!—what you was pleased to say, ma’am, is most surprising.”
“No, Mrs. Cutthumb, very far from that, when you come to consider what human nature is. I never could do such things myself; I never could sleep easy in my bed if I thought that they ever could be imputed to me. But when we look at things it is our duty to remember that the world is made up of different people from what we are.”
“What experience you have had, ma’am, and yet keeping your complexion so! Ah, if my poor Cutthumb could have kept away from the imperial! But he said it were the duty of a Briton, and he done it. Sally, get away into the back yard with your dolly. I beg your pardon, ma’am, for interrupting you of your words so.”
“Well, one thing I make a point of is,” Mrs. Marker continued with a gentle frown, “never to enter into any domestic affairs, though without any bias of any sort, out of doors. We all have enough, as you know, Mrs. Cutthumb, and sometimes more than we can manage, to regulate our own histories. Miss Coldpepper is a remarkable lady, so very, so highly superior; but her niece, our Miss Kitty, does not seem as yet to take after her in that particular; and scarcely to be wondered at, when you remember that she is not her niece at all of rights. But this is not a question to interest you much, nor any one outside of what I might call the Coldpepper domesticity.”
“What superior words you always do have, as it were, in your muff, Mrs. Marker! But if you please to mean, Miss—being still so young I slips into it naturally—the Coldpepper Manor, why I was born upon it, and so was my parents before me. And that makes it natural, as you might say, and proper for me to have a word to say about them. I remember all the Coldpeppers since I was that high; and it shall never go no further.”
“There is nothing to conceal. You must never fancy that of them. The Coldpeppers always were a haughty race, and headstrong; but bold, and outspoken, and defying of their neighbours. It was bad for any one who crossed them: you know that, if you remember old Squire Nicholas. But Miss Kitty Fairthorn is not a Coldpepper. You see you don’t know everything about them, Mrs. Cutthumb. The captain had been married before he ever saw Miss Monica.”
“Lor’, Mrs. Marker, you quite take my breath away! And yet I might have known it, I was bound almost to know it, the moment one comes to reflection. ‘Kitty’s’ not a name at all becoming to the rank of the Manor of Coldpepper. I’ve been wondering about it many’s the time; Arabella and Monica sounds something like; but Kitty isn’t fit, except for women that has to get their own livelihood. Well, it eases my mind that she is not a Coldpepper.”
“No, Mrs. Cutthumb; but she is a Fairthorn; and from all I hear the Fairthorns are much better known, in the great world of London, than our Coldpeppers. Captain Fairthorn is a man who has discovered more than the whole world knew in our fathers’ days. He can make a bell ring in John o’ Groat’s house, he can blow up a cliff at the Land’s End from London, he knows every wrinkle at the bottom of the sea, he can make a ghost stand at eight corners of the room.”
“Can he save his own soul, ma’am?” the greengrocer asked in a solemn voice, being a strict Wesleyan. “Them vanities, falsely called Science nowadays, is the depth of the snare of the Evil One. A learned man knows all the bottom of the sea, and leaves his own child to be drowned in a brook, without it was for young Kit Orchardson. Can he save his own soul, Mrs. Marker, ma’am?”
“Well, if I was to go by guesswork, I should say that he has not got very much of that to call his own. You know what Miss Monica was; although she has been such a time away from Sunbury. She took her first husband in spite of her father, and the second without a word to anybody. She had a son and two daughters by the Honourable Tom Bulwrag, and within a year after him she carried off poor Captain, who is now called Professor Fairthorn. But there, I am told, though I never set eyes on him, being made up of telegraphs and batteries, and magnesia, and a thing they call hiderography, he is hardly ever at home for a week together, and knows more about the ocean’s bed than about his own. And a lucky thing for him; for wouldn’t she be a nagger, if ever she could get the opportunity?”
“That seems to be most unnatural, and against the will of the Almighty,” Mrs. Cutthumb replied after serious thought, “that a lady should wish to reprove her husband, and yet find no ear to put it into. With all his inventions for doing away distance, he ought to be able to manage it.”
“It would make no difference, if he did, and could she expect him to pay for it? His mind is so taken up when he is at home, that she might as well go on at the bedpost. And if he was to open up his wires, it would be at his discretion to receive it all. This makes her rather harsh, as you can understand, with any one that has no help for it. And our poor Miss Kitty being always in the way, and a rival as it were to her own children, oh she does know what pepper is, hot and cold, and every colour!”
“Poor lamb! And she do look so innocent and sweet, and so deserving of a real mother. No father to look after her, by your own account, ma’am, and a step-mother doing it according to her liking. Why don’t she run away, such a booty as she is?”
“She is too sweet-tempered and well-principled for that. And she thinks all the world of her father; all the more, no doubt, because he cannot attend to her. His time is too precious for him to mind his daughter. Not that he is money-making—far the other way. Those great discoverers, as I have heard say, are the last to discover the holes in their pockets. Money, Mrs. Cutthumb has been too long discovered for him to take any heed of it. And that makes another source of trouble in the household. To think of our sending the big carriage and two footmen, to find a young lady in the third class at Feltham! I took care to keep it from Miss Coldpepper.”
“Oh, it would have been shocking,” cried the widow with her hands up. “Why, the third class ain’t good enough for a dead pig to drain in, any ways on the South-Western line. Well, ma’am, and how did Miss Coldpepper take it?”
“Of these things I never speak out of the house. We are liable to err, the very best of us, I believe, and I know it from my own feelings. Those last twenty boxes of Star matches we had from you, Mrs. Cutthumb, were stars, and no mistake. Shooting stars they should be labelled. They go off like a cannon, I have had to pay for three new aprons, and it was a mercy they didn’t set the house afire.”
“Oh, they hussies—they never know how to strike them; and your Miss Coldpepper, she does change so often. Never so much as a month, ma’am, without some of them giving warning.”
“That is no concern of yours, Mrs. Cutthumb. If you speak in this low style of Coldpepper Manor, it will have to withdraw its custom, ma’am, from your—your little establishment.”
Mrs. Jenny Marker, as she spoke thus, gathered in her jacket, which was plaited with blue velvet—because she was proud of her figure, or at least so some people said who could not well get at her pockets—and although she meant no more by this than to assert her own dignity, Mrs. Cutthumb, with all the fine feelings of a widow, was naturally hurt, and showed it. And strange enough to say, though it seems such a trifle, what ensued made a very great difference to me.
“I am truly grieved, madam,” she said with a curtsey, “that my little house, which is the best I can afford, and my little shop, which was set up for me by very kind neighbours as owned no manors, when it pleased the Almighty to afflict me lo, and deprive me of a good man who could always pay his sent, and never would allow me to be put upon—”
“A model husband, no doubt, Mrs. Cutthumb; except as I fancy you observed just now, for his devotion to the imperial pint—or perhaps I should say gallon.”
“May you never have a worse, if you ever catches any! And high time in life, ma’am, for you, Miss Jenny Marker, or Mrs. whichever you may be, and nobody in Sunbury knows the bottom of it, to be thinking a little now of your soul, ma’am, and less of your body, and the other things that perish. You draw in your cloak, ma’am, or it isn’t a cloak, nothing so suitable and sensible as that, just as if my poor goods wasn’t good enough to touch it! Perhaps that’s the reason why you beats them down so. I beg you to remember,