‘The village doctor is coming,’ said some one near. ‘How she raves! Is it delirium?’
‘It is no delirium,’ said Bessy’s mother. ‘Would to Heaven it were!’
Theresa had a happy day with her husband at Brighthelmstone before he set off on his return to London. She watched him riding away, his servant following with his portmanteau. Often and often did Duke look back at the figure of his wife, waving her handkerchief, till a turn of the road hid her from his sight. He had to pass through a little village not ten miles from his home, and there a servant, with his letters and further luggage, was to await him. There he found a mysterious, imperative note, requiring his immediate presence at Crowley Castle. Something in the awe-stricken face of the servant from the castle, led Duke to question him. But all he could say was, that Victorine lay dying, and that Madam Hawtrey had said that after that letter the master was sure to return, and so would need no luggage. Something lurked behind, evidently. Duke rode home at speed. The vicar was looking out for him. ‘My dear boy,’ said he, relapsing into the old relations of tutor and pupil, ‘prepare yourself.’
‘What for?’ said Duke, abruptly: for the being told to prepare himself, without being told for what, irritated him in his present mood. ‘Victorine is dead?’
‘No! She says she will not die until she has seen you, and got you to forgive her, if Madam Hawtrey will not. But first read this: it is a terrible confession, made by her before me, a magistrate, believing herself to be on the point of death!’
Duke read the paper - containing little more in point of detail than I have already given - the horrible words taken down in the short-hand in which the vicar used to write his mild prosy sermons: his pupil knew the character of old. Duke read it twice. Then he said: ‘She is raving, poor creature!’ But for all that, his heart’s blood ran cold, and he would fain not have faced the woman, but would rather have remained in doubt to his dying day.
He went up the stairs three steps at a time, and then turned and faced the vicar, with a look like the stern calmness of death. ‘I wish to see her alone.’ He turned out all the watching women, and then he went to the bedside where Victorine sat, half propped up with pillows, watching all his doings and his looks, with her hollow awful eyes. ‘Now, Victorine, I will read this paper aloud to you. Perhaps your mind has been wandering; but you understand me now?’ A feeble murmur of assent met his listening ear. ‘If any statement in this paper be not true, make me a sign. Hold up your hand - for God’s sake hold up your hand. And if you can do it with truth in this, your hour of dying, Lord have mercy upon you; but if you cannot hold up your hand, then Lord have mercy upon me!’
He read the paper slowly; clause by clause he read the paper. No sign; no uplifted hand. At the end she spoke, and he bent his head to listen. ‘The Countess - Theresa you know - she who has left me to die alone - she’ - then mortal strength failed, and Duke was left alone in the chamber of death.
He stayed in the chamber many minutes, quite still. Then he left the room, and said to the first domestic he could find, ‘The woman is dead. See that she is attended to.’ But he went to the vicar, and had a long long talk with him. He sent a confidential servant for little Mary - on some pretext, hardly careful, or plausible enough; but his mood was desperate, and he seemed to forget almost everything but Bessy, his first wife, his innocent girlish bride.
Theresa could ill spare her little darling, and was perplexed by the summons; but an explanation of it was to come in a day or two. It came.
‘Victorine is dead; I need say no more. She could not carry her awful secret into the next world, but told all. I can think of nothing but my poor Bessy, delivered over to the cruelty of such a woman. And you, Theresa, I leave you to your conscience, for you have slept in my bosom. Henceforward I am a stranger to you. By the time you receive this, I, and my child, and that poor murdered girl’s mother, will have left England. What will be our next step I know not. My agent will do for you what you need.’
Theresa sprang up and rang her bell with mad haste. ‘Get me a horse!’ she cried, ‘and bid William be ready to ride with me for his life - for my life - along the coast, to Dover!’
They rode and they galloped through the night, scarcely staying to bait their horses. But when they came to Dover, they looked out to sea upon the white sails that bore Duke and his child away. Theresa was too late, and it broke her heart. She lies buried in Dover churchyard. After long years Duke returned to England; but his place in parliament knew him no more, and his daughter’s husband sold Crowley Castle to a stranger.
CUMBERLAND SHEEP-SHEARERS
Three or four years ago we spent part of a summer in one of the dales in the neighbourhood of Keswick. We lodged at the house of a small Statesman, who added to his occupation of a sheep-farmer that of a woollen manufacturer. His own flock was not large, but he bought up other people’s fleeces, either on commission, or for his own purposes; and his life seemed to unite many pleasant and various modes of employment, and the great jolly burly man throve upon all, both in body and mind.
One day, his handsome wife proposed to us that we should accompany her to a distant sheep-shearing, to be held at the house of one of her husband’s customers, where she was sure we should be heartily welcome, and where we should see an old-fashioned shearing, such as was not often met with now in the Dales. I don’t know why it was, but we were lazy, and declined her invitation. It might be that the day was a broiling one, even for July, or it might be a fit of shyness; but whichever was the reason, it very unaccountably vanished soon after she was gone, and the opportunity seemed to have slipped through our fingers. The day was hotter than ever; and we should have twice as much reason to be shy and self-conscious, now that we should not have our hostess to introduce and chaperone us. However, so great was our wish to go, that we blew these obstacles to the winds, if there were any that day; and, obtaining the requisite directions from the farm-servant, we set out on our five mile walk, about one o’clock on a cloudless day in the first half of July.
Our party consisted of two grown up persons and four children, the youngest almost a baby, who had to be carried the greater part of that weary length of way. We passed through Keswick, and saw the groups of sketching, boating tourists, on whom we, as residents for a month in the neighbourhood, looked down with some contempt as mere strangers, who were sure to go about blundering, or losing their way, or being imposed upon by guides, or admiring the wrong things, and never seeing the right things. After we had dragged ourselves through the long straggling town, we came to a part of the highway where it wound between copses sufficiently high to make a green gloom in a green shade; the branches touched and interlaced overhead. While the road was so straight, that all the quarter-of-an-hour that we were walking we could see the opening of blue light at the other end, and note the quivering of the heated luminous air beyond the dense shade in which we moved. Every now and then, we caught glimpses of the silver lake that shimmered through the trees; and, now and then, in the dead noon-tide stillness, we could hear the gentle lapping of the water on the pebbled shore--the only sound we heard, except the low deep hum of myriads of insects revelling out their summer lives. We had all agreed that talking made us hotter, so we and the birds were very silent. Out again into the hot bright sunny dazzling road, the fierce sun above. Our heads made us long to be at home, but we had passed the half-way, and to go on was shorter than to return. Now we left the highway, and began to mount. The ascent looked disheartening, but at almost every step we gained increased freshness of air; and the crisp short mountain grass was soft and cool in comparison with the high road. The little wandering breezes, that came every now and then athwart us, were laden with fragrant scents--now of wild thyme--now of the little scrambling creeping white rose, which ran along the ground and pricked our feet with its sharp thorns; and now we came to a trickling streamlet, on whose spongy banks grew great bushes of the bog-myrtle, giving a spicy odour to the air. When our breath failed us during t
hat steep ascent, we had one invariable dodge by which we hoped to escape the ‘fat and scant of breath’ quotation; we turned round and admired the lovely views, which from each succeeding elevation became more and more beautiful.
At last, perched on a level which seemed nothing more than a mere shelf of rock, we saw our destined haven--a grey stone farmhouse, high over our heads, high above the lake as we were--with out-buildings enough around it to justify the Scotch name of a ‘town;’ and near it one of those great bossy sycamores, so common in similar situations all through Cumberland and Westmoreland. One more long tug and then we should be there. So, cheering the poor tired little ones, we set off bravely for that last piece of steep rocky path; and we never looked behind till we stood in the coolness of the deep porch, looking down from our natural terrace on the glassy Derwent Water, far, far below, reflecting each tint of the blue sky, only in darker fuller colours every one. We seemed on a level with the top of Cat Bell; and the tops of great trees lay deep down--so deep that we felt as if they were close enough together and solid enough to bear our feet if we chose to spring down and walk upon them. Right in front of where we stood, there was a ledge of the rocky field that surrounded the house. We had knocked at the door, but it was evident that we were unheard in the din and merry clatter of voices within, and our old original shyness returned. By and by, someone found us out, and a hearty burst of hospitable welcome ensued. Our coming was all right; it was understood in a minute who we were; our real hostess was hardly less urgent in her civilities than our temporary hostess, and both together bustled us out of the room upon which the outer door entered, into a large bedroom which opened out of it--the state apartment, in all such houses in Cumberland--where the children make their first appearance, and where the heads of the household lie down to die if the Great Conqueror gives them sufficient warning for such decent and composed submission as is best in accordance with the simple dignity of their lives.
Into this chamber we were ushered, and the immediate relief from its dark coolness to our overheated bodies and dazzled eyes was inexpressibly refreshing. The walls were so thick that there was room for a very comfortable window-seat in them, without there being any projection into the room; and the long low shape prevented the sky-line from being unusually depressed, even at that height, and so the light was subdued, and the general tint through the room deepened into darkness, where the eye fell on that stupendous bed, with its posts, and its head-piece, and its foot-board, and its trappings of all kinds of the deepest brown; and the frame itself looked large enough for six or seven people to lie comfortably therein, without even touching each other. In the hearth-place, stood a great pitcher filled with branches of odorous mountain flowers; and little bits of rosemary and lavender were strewed about the room; partly, as I afterwards learnt, to prevent incautious feet from slipping about on the polished oak floor. When we had noticed everything, and rested, and cooled (as much as we could do before the equinox), we returned to the company assembled in the house-place.
This house-place was almost a hall in grandeur. Along one side ran an oaken dresser, all decked with the same sweet evergreens, fragments of which strewed the bedroom floor. Over this dresser were shelves, bright with most exquisitely polished pewter. Opposite to the bedroom door was the great hospitable fireplace, ensconced within its proper chimney corners, and having the ‘master’s cupboard’ on its right hand side. Do you know what a ‘master’s cupboard’ is? Mr Wordsworth could have told you; ay, and have shown you one at Rydal Mount, too. It is a cupboard about a foot in width, and a foot and a half in breadth, expressly reserved for the use of the master of the household. Here he may keep pipe and tankard, almanac, and what not; and although no door bars the access of any hand, in this open cupboard his peculiar properties rest secure, for is it not ‘the master’s cupboard’? There was a fire in the house-place, even on this hot day; it gave a grace and a vividness to the room, and being kept within proper limits, it seemed no more than was requisite to boil the kettle. For, I should say, that the very minute of our arrival, our hostess (so I shall designate the wife of the farmer at whose house the sheep-shearing was to be held) proposed tea; and although we had not dined, for it was but little past three, yet, on the principle of ‘Do at Rome as the Romans do,’ we assented with a good grace, thankful to have any refreshment offered us, short of water-gruel, after our long and tiring walk, and rather afraid of our children ‘cooling too quickly.’
While the tea was preparing, and it took six comely matrons to do it justice, we proposed to Mrs C. (our real hostess), that we should go and see the sheep-shearing. She accordingly led us away into a back yard, where the process was going on. By a back yard I mean a far different place from what a Londoner would so designate; our back yard, high up on the mountainside, was a space about forty yards by twenty, overshadowed by the noble sycamore, which might have been the very one that suggested to Coleridge--
This sycamore (oft musical with bees--
Such tents the Patriarchs loved) &c., &c.
And in this deep, cool, green shadow sat two or three grey-haired sires, smoking their pipes, and regarding the proceedings with a placid complacency, which had a savour of contempt in it for the degeneracy of the present times--a sort of ‘Ah! they don’t know what good shearing is nowadays’ look in it. That round shadow of the sycamore tree, and the elders who sat there looking on, were the only things not full of motion and life in the yard. The yard itself was bounded by a grey stone wall, and the moors rose above it to the mountain top; we looked over the low walls on to the spaces bright with the yellow asphodel, and the first flush of the purple heather. The shadow of the farmhouse fell over this yard, so that it was cool in aspect, save for the ruddy faces of the eager shearers, and the gay-coloured linsey petticoats of the women, folding the fleeces with tucked-up gowns.
When we first went into the yard, every corner of it seemed as full of motion as an antique frieze, and, like that, had to be studied before I could ascertain the different actions and purposes involved. On the left hand was a walled-in field of small extent, full of sunshine and light, with the heated air quivering over the flocks of panting bewildered sheep, who were penned up therein, awaiting their turn to be shorn. At the gate by which this field was entered from the yard stood a group of eager-eyed boys, panting like the sheep, but not like them from fear, but from excitement and joyous exertion. Their faces were flushed with brown-crimson, their scarlet lips were parted into smiles, and their eyes had that peculiar blue lustre in them, which is only gained by a free life in the pure and blithesome air. As soon as these lads saw that a sheep was wanted by the shearers within, they sprang towards one in the field--the more boisterous and stubborn an old ram the better--and tugging, and pulling, and pushing, and shouting--sometimes mounting astride of the poor obstreperous brute, and holding his horns like a bridle--they gained their point and dragged their captive up to the shearer, like little victors as they were, all glowing and ruddy with conquest. The shearers sat each astride on a long bench, grave and important--the heroes of the day. The flock of sheep to be shorn on this occasion consisted of more than a thousand, and eleven famous shearers had come, walking in from many miles’ distance to try their skill one against the other; for sheep-shearings are a sort of rural Olympics. They were all young men in their prime, strong, and well-made; without coat or waistcoat, and with upturned shirt-sleeves. They sat each across a long bench or narrow table, and caught up the sheep from the attendant boys, who had dragged it in; they lifted it on to the bench, and placing it by a dexterous knack on its back, they began to shear the wool off the tail and under parts; then they tied the two hind legs and the two fore legs together, and laid it first on one side and then on the other, till the fleece came off in one whole piece; the art was to shear all the wool off, and yet not to injure the sheep by any awkward cut: if such an accident did occur, a mixture of tar and butter was immediately applied; but every wound was a blemish on the shearer’s fame. To s
hear well and completely, and yet to do it quickly, shows the perfection of the clippers. Some can finish off as many as six score sheep in a summer’s day; and if you consider the weight and uncouthness of the animal, and the general heat of the weather, you will see that, with justice, clipping or shearing is regarded as harder work than mowing. But most good shearers are content with despatching four or five score; it is only on unusual occasions, or when Greek meets Greek, that six score are attempted or accomplished.
When the sheep is divided into its fleece and itself, it becomes the property of two persons. The women seize the fleece, and, standing by the side of a temporary dresser (in this case made of planks laid across barrels, beneath what sharp scant shadow could be obtained from the eaves of the house), they fold it up. This again is an art, simple as it may seem; and the farmer’s wives and daughters about Langdale Head are famous for it. They begin with folding up the legs, and then roll the whole fleece up, tying it with the neck; and the skill consists, not merely in doing this quickly and firmly, but in certain artistic pulls of the wool so as to display the finer parts, and not, by crushing up the fibre, to make it appear coarse to the buyer. Six comely women were thus employed; they laughed, and talked, and sent shafts of merry satire at the grave and busy shearers, who were too earnest in their work to reply, although an occasional deepening of colour, or twinkle of the eye, would tell that the remark had hit. But they reserved their retorts, if they had any, until the evening, when the day’s labour would be over, and when, in the licence of country humour, I imagine, some of the saucy speakers would meet with their match. As yet, the applause came from their own party of women; though now and then one of the old men, sitting under the shade of a sycamore, would take his pipe out of his mouth to spit, and, before beginning again to send up the softly curling white wreaths of smoke, he would condescend on a short deep laugh, and a ‘Well done, Maggie!’ ‘Give it him, lass!’ for with the not unkindly jealousy of age towards youth, the old grandfathers invariably took part with the women against the young men. These sheared on, throwing the fleeces to the folders, and casting the sheep down on the ground with gentle strength, ready for another troop of boys to haul it to the right hand side of the farmyard, where the great out-buildings were placed; where all sorts of country vehicles were crammed and piled, and seemed to throw up their scarlet shafts into the air, as if imploring relief from the crowd of shandries and market carts that pressed upon them. Out of the sun, in the dark shadow of the cart-house, a pan of red-hot coals glowed in a trivet; and upon them was placed an iron basin holding tar and raddle, or ruddle. Hither the right hand troop of boys dragged the poor naked sheep to be ‘smitten’--that is to say, marked with the initials or cypher of the owner. In this case, the sign of the possessor was a circle or spot on one side, and a straight line on the other; and after the sheep were thus marked, they were turned out to the moor, and the crowd of bleating lambs that sent up an incessant moan for their lost mothers; each found out the ewe to which it belonged the moment she was turned out of the yard, and the placid contentment of the sheep that wandered away up the hillside, with their little lambs trotting by them, gave just the necessary touch of peace and repose to the scene. There were all the classical elements for the representation of life; there were the ‘Old men and maidens, young men and children’ of the Psalmist; there were all the stages and conditions of being that sing forth their farewell to the departing crusaders in the ‘Saint’s Tragedy.’
Delphi Complete Works of Elizabeth Gaskell Page 423