by George Eliot
child: he tended it, he dandled it, he chatted to it, living with it alone in
his one room above the fruit-shop, only asking his landlady to take care of the
marmoset during his short absences in fetching and carrying home work. Customers
frequenting that fruit-shop might often see the tiny Caterina seated on the
floor with her legs in a heap of pease, which it was her delight to kick about;
or perhaps deposited, like a kitten, in a large basket out of harm's way.
Sometimes, however, Sarti left his little one with another kind of protectress.
He was very regular in his devotions, which he paid thrice a-week in the great
cathedral, carrying Caterina with him. Here, when the high morning sun was
warming the myriad glittering pinnacles without, and struggling against the
massive gloom within, the shadow of a man with a child on his arm might be seen
flitting across the more stationary shadows of pillar and mullion, and making
its way towards a little tinsel Madonna hanging in a retired spot near the
choir. Amid all the sublimities of the mighty cathedral, poor Sarti had fixed on
this tinsel Madonna as the symbol of Divine mercy and protection,�just as a
child, in the presence of a great landscape, sees none of the glories of wood
and sky, but sets its heart on a floating feather or insect that happens to be
on a level with its eye. Here, then, Sarti worshipped and prayed, setting
Caterina on the floor by his side; and now and then, when the cathedral lay near
some place where he had to call, and did not like to take her, he would leave
her there in front of the tinsel Madonna, where she would sit, perfectly good,
amusing herself with low crowing noises and see-sawings of her tiny body. And
when Sarti came back, he always found that the Blessed Mother had taken good
care of Caterina.
That was briefly the history of Sarti, who fulfilled so well the orders Lady
Cheverel gave him, that she sent him away again with a stock of new work. But
this time, week after week passed, and he neither reappeared nor sent home the
music intrusted to him. Lady Cheverel began to be anxious, and was thinking of
sending Warren to inquire at the address Sarti had given her, when one day, as
she was equipped for driving out, the valet brought in a small piece of paper
which he said had been left for her ladyship by a man who was carrying fruit.
The paper contained only three tremulous lines, in Italian:�
"Will the Eccelentissima, for the love of God, have pity on a dying man, and
come to him?"
Lady Cheverel recognised the handwriting as Sarti's in spite of its
tremulousness, and, going down to her carriage, ordered the Milanese coachman to
drive to Strada Quinquagesima, Numero 10. The coach stopped in a dirty narrow
street opposite La Pazzini's fruit-shop, and that large specimen of womanhood
immediately presented herself at the door, to the extreme disgust of Mrs Sharp,
who remarked privately to Mr Warren that La Pazzini was a "hijeous porpis." The
fruit-woman, however, was all smiles and deep curtsies to the Eccelentissima,
who, not very well understanding her Milanese dialect, abbreviated the
conversation by asking to be shown at once to Signor Sarti. La Pazzini preceded
her up the dark narrow stairs, and opened a door through which she begged her
ladyship to enter. Directly opposite the door lay Sarti, on a low miserable bed.
His eyes were glazed, and no movement indicated that he was conscious of their
entrance.
On the foot of the bed was seated a tiny child, apparently not three years old,
her head covered by a linen cap, her feet clothed with leather boots, above
which her little yellow legs showed thin and naked. A frock, made of what had
once been a gay flowered silk, was her only other garment. Her large dark eyes
shone from out her queer little face, like two precious stones in a grotesque
image carved in old ivory. She held an empty medicine-bottle in her hand, and
was amusing herself with putting the cork in and drawing it out again, to hear
how it would pop.
La Pazzini went up to the bed, and said, "Ecco la nobilissima donna!" but
directly after screamed out, "Holy mother! he is dead!"
It was so. The entreaty had not been sent in time for Sarti to carry out his
project of asking the great English lady to take care of his Caterina. That was
the thought which haunted his feeble brain as soon as he began to fear that his
illness would end in death. She had wealth�she was kind�she would surely do
something for the poor orphan. And so, at last, he sent that scrap of paper,
which won the fulfilment of his prayer, though he did not live to utter it. Lady
Cheverel gave La Pazzini money that the last decencies might be paid to the dead
man, and carried away Caterina, meaning to consult Sir Christopher as to what
should be done with her. Even Mrs Sharp had been so smitten with pity by the
scene she had witnessed when she was summoned up-stairs to fetch Caterina, as to
shed a small tear, though she was not at all subject to that weakness; indeed,
she abstained from it on principle, because, as she often said, it was known to
be the worst thing in the world for the eyes.
On the way back to her hotel, Lady Cheverel turned over various projects in her
mind regarding Caterina, but at last one gained the preference over all the
rest. Why should they not take the child to England, and bring her up there?
They had been married twelve years, yet Cheverel Manor was cheered by no
children's voices, and the old house would be all the better for a little of
that music. Besides, it would be a Christian work to train this little Papist
into a good Protestant, and graft as much English fruit as possible on the
Italian stem.
Sir Christopher listened to this plan with hearty acquiescence. He loved
children, and took at once to the little black-eyed monkey�his name for Caterina
all through her short life. But neither he nor Lady Cheverel had any idea of
adopting her as their daughter, and giving her their own rank in life. They were
much too English and aristocratic to think of anything so romantic. No! The
child would be brought up at Cheverel Manor as a proteg�e, to be ultimately
useful, perhaps, in sorting worsteds, keeping accounts, reading aloud, and
otherwise supplying the place of spectacles when her ladyship's eyes should wax
dim.
So Mrs Sharp had to procure new clothes, to replace the linen cap, flowered
frock, and leathern boots; and now, strange to say, little Caterina, who had
suffered many unconscious evils in her existence of thirty moons, first began to
know conscious troubles. "Ignorance," says Ajax, "is a painless evil;" so, I
should think, is dirt, considering the merry faces that go along with it. At any
rate, cleanliness is sometimes a painful good, as any one can vouch who has had
his face washed the wrong way, by a pitiless hand with a gold ring on the third
finger. If you, reader, have not known that initiatory anguish, it is idle to
expect that you will form any approximate conception of what Caterina endured
under Mrs Sharp's new dispensation of soap-and-water. Happily, thi
s purgatory
came presently to be associated in her tiny brain with a passage straightway to
a seat of bliss �the sofa in Lady Cheverel's sitting-room, where there were toys
to be broken, a ride was to be had on Sir Christopher's knee, and a spaniel of
resigned temper was prepared to undergo small tortures without flinching.
CHAPTER IV.
In three months from the time of Caterina's adoption�namely, in the late autumn
of 1763� the chimneys of Cheverel Manor were sending up unwonted smoke, and the
servants were awaiting in excitement the return of their master and mistress
after a two years' absence. Great was the astonishment of Mrs Bellamy, the
housekeeper, when Mr Warren lifted a little black-eyed child out of the
carriage, and great was Mrs Sharp's sense of superior information and
experience, as she detailed Caterina's history, interspersed with copious
comments, to the rest of the upper servants that evening, as they were taking a
comfortable glass of grog together in the housekeeper's room.
A pleasant room it was, as any party need desire to muster in on a cold November
evening. The fireplace alone was a picture: a wide and deep recess with a low
brick altar in the middle, where great logs of dry wood sent myriad sparks up
the dark chimney-throat; and over the front of this recess a large wooden
entablature bearing this motto, finely carved in old English letters, "Fear God
and honour the King." And beyond the party, who formed a half-moon with their
chairs and well-furnished table round this bright fireplace, what a space of
chiaroscuro for the imagination to revel in! Stretching across the far end of
the room, what an oak table, high enough surely for Homer's gods, standing on
four massive legs, bossed and bulging like sculptured urns! and, lining the
distant wall, what vast cupboards, suggestive of inexhaustible apricot jam and
promiscuous butler's perquisites! A stray picture or two had found their way
down there, and made agreeable patches of dark brown on the buff-coloured walls.
High over the loud-resounding double door hung one which, from some indications
of a face looming out of blackness, might, by a great synthetic effort, be
pronounced a Magdalen. Considerably lower down hung the similitude of a hat and
feathers, with portions of a ruff, stated by Mrs Bellamy to represent Sir
Francis Bacon, who invented gunpowder, and, in her opinion, "might ha' been
better emplyed."
But this evening the mind is but slightly arrested by the great Verulam, and is
in the humour to think a dead philosopher less interesting than a living
gardener, who sits conspicuous in the halfcircle round the fireplace. Mr Bates
is habitually a guest in the housekeeper's room of an evening, preferring the
social pleasures there�the feast of gossip and the flow of grog�to a bachelor's
chair in his charming thatched cottage on a little island, where every sound is
remote but the cawing of rooks and the screaming of wild geese: poetic sounds,
doubtless, but, humanly speaking, not convivial.
Mr Bates was by no means an average person, to be passed without special notice.
He was a sturdy Yorkshireman, approaching forty, whose face Nature seemed to
have coloured when she was in a hurry, and had no time to attend to nuances, for
every inch of him visible above his neckcloth was of one impartial redness; so
that when he was at some distance your imagination was at liberty to place his
lips anywhere between his nose and chin. Seen closer, his lips were discerned to
be of a peculiar cut, and I fancy this had something to do with the peculiarity
of his dialect, which, as we shall see, was individual rather than provincial.
Mr Bates was further distinguished from the common herd by a perpetual blinking
of the eyes; and this, together with the red-rose tint of his complexion, and a
way he had of hanging his head forward, and rolling it from side to side as he
walked, gave him the air of a Bacchus in a blue apron, who, in the present
reduced circumstances of Olympus, had taken to the management of his own vines.
Yet, as gluttons are often thin, so sober men are often rubicund; and Mr Bates
was sober, with that manly, British, churchman-like sobriety which can carry a
few glasses of grog without any perceptible clarification of ideas.
"Dang my boottens!" observed Mr Bates, who, at the conclusion of Mrs Sharp's
narrative, felt himself urged to his strongest interjection, "it's what I
shouldn't ha' looked for from Sir Cristhifer an' my ledy, to bring a furrin
child into the coonthry; an' depend on't, whether you an' me lives to see't or
noo, it'll coom to soom harm. The first sitiation iver I held�it was a hold,
hancient habbey, wi' the biggest orchard o'apples an' pears you ever see�there
was a French valet, an' he stool silk stoockins, an' shirts, an' rings, an'
iverythin' he could ley his hans on, an' run awey at last wi' th' missis's
jewl-box. They're all alaike, them furriners. It roons i' th' blood."
"Well," said Mrs Sharp, with the air of a person who held liberal views, but
knew where to draw the line, "I'm not a-going to defend the furriners, for I've
as good reason to know what they are as most folks, an' nobody 'll iver hear me
say but what they're next door to heathens, and the hile they eat wi' their
victuals is enough to turn any Christian's stomach. But for all that� an' for
all as the trouble in respect o' washin' an' managin' has fell upo' me through
the journey� I can't say but what I think as my Lady an' Sir Cristifer's done a
right thing by a hinnicent child as doesn't know its right han' from its left,
i' bringing it where it'll learn to speak summat better nor gibberish, and be
brought up i' the true religion. For as for them furrin churches as Sir
Cristifer is so unaccountable mad after, wi' picturs o' men an' women a-showin'
therselves just for all the world as God made 'em, I think, for my part, as it's
welly a sin to go into 'em."
"You're likely to have more foreigners, however," said Mr Warren, who liked to
provoke the gardener, "for Sir Christopher has engaged some Italian workmen to
help in the alterations in the house."
"Olterations!" exclaimed Mrs Bellamy, in alarm. "What olterations?"
"Why," answered Mr Warren, "Sir Christopher, as I understand, is going to make a
clean new thing of the old Manor-house, both inside and out. And he's got
portfolios full of plans and pictures coming. It is to be cased with stone, in
the Gothic style�pretty near like the churches, you know, as far as I can make
out; and the ceilings are to be beyond anything as has been seen in the country.
Sir Christopher's been giving a deal of study to it."
"Dear heart alive!" said Mrs Bellamy, "we shall be pisined wi' lime an' plaster,
an' hev the house full o'workmen colloguing wi' the maids, an' meckin' no end o'
mischief."
"That ye may ley your life on, Mrs Bellamy," said Mr Bates. "Howiver, I'll noot
denay that the Goothic stayle's prithy anoof, an' it's woonderful how near them
stoon-carvers cuts oot the shapes o' the pine apples, an' shamrucks, an' rooses.
I dare sey Sir Cristhifer 'll me
ck a naice thing o' the Manor, an' there woont
be many gentlemen's houses i' the coonthry as 'll coom up to't, wi' sich a
garden an' pleasure-groons an' wallfruit as King George maight be prood on."
"Well, I can't think as th' house can be better nor it is, Gothic or no Gothic,"
said Mrs Bellamy; "an' I've done the picklin' an' preservin' in it fourteen year
Michaelmas was a three weeks. But what does my lady say to't?"
"My lady knows better than cross Sir Cristifer in what he's set his mind on,"
said Mr Bellamy, who objected to the critical tone of the conversation. "Sir
Cristifer 'll hev his own way, that you may tek your oath. An' i' the right on't
too. He's a gentleman born, an's got the money. But come, Mester Bates, fill
your glass, an' my lady, an' then you shall give us a sung. Sir Cristifer
doesn't come hum from Italy ivery night."
This demonstrable position was accepted without hesitation as ground for a
toast; but Mr Bates, apparently thinking that his song was not an equally
reasonable sequence, ignored the second part of Mr Bellamy's proposal. So Mrs
Sharp, who had been heard to say that she had no thoughts at all of marrying Mr
Bates, though he was "a sensable fresh-coloured man as many a woman 'ud snap at
for a husband," enforced Mr Bellamy's appeal.
"Come, Mr Bates, let us hear 'Roy's Wife.' I'd rether hear a good old sung like
that, nor all the fine 'talian toodlin'."
Mr Bates, urged thus flatteringly, stuck his thumbs into the armholes of his
waistcoat, threw himself back in his chair with his head in that position in
which he could look directly towards the zenith, and struck up a remarkably
staccato rendering of "Roy's Wife of Aldivalloch." This melody may certainly be
taxed with excessive iteration, but that was precisely its highest
recommendation to the present audience, who found it all the easier to swell the
chorus. Nor did it at all diminish their pleasure that the only particular
concerning "Roy's Wife" which Mr Bates's enunciation allowed them to gather, was
that she "chated" him,�whether in the matter of garden stuff or of some other
commodity, or why her name should, in consequence, be repeatedly reiterated with
exultation, remaining an agreeable mystery.
Mr Bates's song formed the climax of the evening's good-fellowship, and the
party soon after dispersed �Mrs Bellamy, perhaps, to dream of quicklime flying
among her preserving-pans, or of lovesick housemaids reckless of unswept
corners�and Mrs Sharp to sink into pleasant visions of independent housekeeping
in Mr Bates's cottage, with no bells to answer, and with fruit and vegetables ad
libitum.
Caterina soon conquered all prejudices against her foreign blood; for what
prejudices will hold out against helplessness and broken prattle? She became the
pet of the household, thrusting Sir Christopher's favourite bloodhound of that
day, Mrs Bellamy's two canaries, and Mr Bates's largest Dorking hen, into a
merely secondary position. The consequence was, that in the space of a summer's
day she went through a great cycle of experiences, commencing with the somewhat
acidulated goodwill of Mrs Sharp's nursery discipline. Then came the grave
luxury of her ladyship's sitting-room, and, perhaps, the dignity of a ride on
Sir Christopher's knee, sometimes followed by a visit with him to the stables,
where Caterina soon learned to hear without crying the baying of the chained
bloodhounds, and to say, with ostentatious bravery, clinging to Sir
Christopher's leg all the while, "Dey not hurt Tina." Then Mrs Bellamy would
perhaps be going out to gather the roseleaves and lavender, and Tina was made
proud and happy by being allowed to carry a handful in her pinafore; happier
still, when they were spread out on sheets to dry, so that she could sit down
like a frog among them, and have them poured over her in fragrant showers.
Another frequent pleasure was to take a journey with Mr Bates through the