CHAPTER V.

OLD LETTERS

I HAVE often noticed that almost every one has his own individual small

economies—careful habits of saving fractions of pennies in some one

peculiar direction—any disturbance of which annoys him more than

spending shillings or pounds on some real extravagance. An old

gentleman of my acquaintance, who took the intelligence of the failure

of a Joint-Stock Bank, in which some of his money was invested, with

stoical mildness, worried his family all through a long summer’s day

because one of them had torn (instead of cutting) out the written leaves

of his now useless bank-book; of course, the corresponding pages at the

other end came out as well, and this little unnecessary waste of paper

(his private economy) chafed him more than all the loss of his money.

Envelopes fretted his soul terribly when they first came in; the only

way in which he could reconcile himself to such waste of his cherished

article was by patiently turning inside out all that were sent to him,

and so making them serve again. Even now, though tamed by age, I see

him casting wistful glances at his daughters when they send a whole

inside of a half-sheet of note paper, with the three lines of acceptance

to an invitation, written on only one of the sides. I am not above

owning that I have this human weakness myself. String is my foible. My

pockets get full of little hanks of it, picked up and twisted together,

ready for uses that never come. I am seriously annoyed if any one cuts

the string of a parcel instead of patiently and faithfully undoing it

fold by fold. How people can bring themselves to use india-rubber

rings, which are a sort of deification of string, as lightly as they do,

I cannot imagine. To me an india-rubber ring is a precious treasure. I

have one which is not new—one that I picked up off the floor nearly six

years ago. I have really tried to use it, but my heart failed me, and I

could not commit the extravagance.

Small pieces of butter grieve others. They cannot attend to

conversation because of the annoyance occasioned by the habit which some

people have of invariably taking more butter than they want. Have you

not seen the anxious look (almost mesmeric) which such persons fix on

the article? They would feel it a relief if they might bury it out of

their sight by popping it into their own mouths and swallowing it down;

and they are really made happy if the person on whose plate it lies

unused suddenly breaks off a piece of toast (which he does not want at

all) and eats up his butter. They think that this is not waste.

Now Miss Matty Jenkyns was chary of candles. We had many devices to use

as few as possible. In the winter afternoons she would sit knitting for

two or three hours—she could do this in the dark, or by firelight—and

when I asked if I might not ring for candles to finish stitching my

wristbands, she told me to “keep blind man’s holiday.” They were

usually brought in with tea; but we only burnt one at a time. As we

lived in constant preparation for a friend who might come in any evening

(but who never did), it required some contrivance to keep our two

candles of the same length, ready to be lighted, and to look as if we

burnt two always. The candles took it in turns; and, whatever we might

be talking about or doing, Miss Matty’s eyes were habitually fixed upon

the candle, ready to jump up and extinguish it and to light the other

before they had become too uneven in length to be restored to equality

in the course of the evening.

One night, I remember this candle economy particularly annoyed me. I

had been very much tired of my compulsory “blind man’s holiday,”

especially as Miss Matty had fallen asleep, and I did not like to stir

the fire and run the risk of awakening her; so I could not even sit on

the rug, and scorch myself with sewing by firelight, according to my

usual custom. I fancied Miss Matty must be dreaming of her early life;

for she spoke one or two words in her uneasy sleep bearing reference to

persons who were dead long before. When Martha brought in the lighted

candle and tea, Miss Matty started into wakefulness, with a strange,

bewildered look around, as if we were not the people she expected to see

about her. There was a little sad expression that shadowed her face as

she recognised me; but immediately afterwards she tried to give me her

usual smile. All through tea-time her talk ran upon the days of her

childhood and youth. Perhaps this reminded her of the desirableness of

looking over all the old family letters, and destroying such as ought

not to be allowed to fall into the hands of strangers; for she had often

spoken of the necessity of this task, but had always shrunk from it,

with a timid dread of something painful. To-night, however, she rose up

after tea and went for them—in the dark; for she piqued herself on the

precise neatness of all her chamber arrangements, and used to look

uneasily at me when I lighted a bed-candle to go to another room for

anything. When she returned there was a faint, pleasant smell of

Tonquin beans in the room. I had always noticed this scent about any of

the things which had belonged to her mother; and many of the letters

were addressed to her—yellow bundles of love-letters, sixty or seventy

years old.

Miss Matty undid the packet with a sigh; but she stifled it directly, as

if it were hardly right to regret the flight of time, or of life either.

We agreed to look them over separately, each taking a different letter

out of the same bundle and describing its contents to the other before

destroying it. I never knew what sad work the reading of old letters

was before that evening, though I could hardly tell why. The letters

were as happy as letters could be—at least those early letters were.

There was in them a vivid and intense sense of the present time, which

seemed so strong and full, as if it could never pass away, and as if the

warm, living hearts that so expressed themselves could never die, and be

as nothing to the sunny earth. I should have felt less melancholy, I

believe, if the letters had been more so. I saw the tears stealing down

the well-worn furrows of Miss Matty’s cheeks, and her spectacles often

wanted wiping. I trusted at last that she would light the other candle,

for my own eyes were rather dim, and I wanted more light to see the

pale, faded ink; but no, even through her tears, she saw and remembered

her little economical ways.

The earliest set of letters were two bundles tied together, and ticketed

(in Miss Jenkyns’s handwriting) “Letters interchanged between my

ever-honoured father and my dearly-beloved mother, prior to their

marriage, in July 1774.” I should guess that the rector of Cranford was

about twenty-seven years of age when he wrote those letters; and Miss

Matty told me that her mother was just eighteen at the time of her

wedding. With my idea of the rector derived from a picture in the

dining-parlour, stiff and stately, in a huge full-bottomed wig, with

gown, cassock, and bands, and his hand upon a copy of the only sermon he

ever published—it was strange to read these letters. They were full of

eager, passionate ardour; short homely sentences, right fresh from the

heart (very different from the grand Latinised, Johnsonian style of the

printed sermon preached before some judge at assize time). His letters

were a curious contrast to those of his girl-bride. She was evidently

rather annoyed at his demands upon her for expressions of love, and

could not quite understand what he meant by repeating the same thing

over in so many different ways; but what she was quite clear about was a

longing for a white “Paduasoy”—whatever that might be; and six or seven

letters were principally occupied in asking her lover to use his

influence with her parents (who evidently kept her in good order) to

obtain this or that article of dress, more especially the white

“Paduasoy.” He cared nothing how she was dressed; she was always lovely

enough for him, as he took pains to assure her, when she begged him to

express in his answers a predilection for particular pieces of finery,

in order that she might show what he said to her parents. But at length

he seemed to find out that she would not be married till she had a

“trousseau” to her mind; and then he sent her a letter, which had

evidently accompanied a whole box full of finery, and in which he

requested that she might be dressed in everything her heart desired.

This was the first letter, ticketed in a frail, delicate hand, “From my

dearest John.” Shortly afterwards they were married, I suppose, from

the intermission in their correspondence.

“We must burn them, I think,” said Miss Matty, looking doubtfully at me.

“No one will care for them when I am gone.” And one by one she dropped

them into the middle of the fire, watching each blaze up, die out, and

rise away, in faint, white, ghostly semblance, up the chimney, before

she gave another to the same fate. The room was light enough now; but

I, like her, was fascinated into watching the destruction of those

letters, into which the honest warmth of a manly heart had been poured

forth.

The next letter, likewise docketed by Miss Jenkyns, was endorsed,

“Letter of pious congratulation and exhortation from my venerable

grandfather to my beloved mother, on occasion of my own birth. Also

some practical remarks on the desirability of keeping warm the

extremities of infants, from my excellent grandmother.”

The first part was, indeed, a severe and forcible picture of the

responsibilities of mothers, and a warning against the evils that were

in the world, and lying in ghastly wait for the little baby of two days

old. His wife did not write, said the old gentleman, because he had

forbidden it, she being indisposed with a sprained ankle, which (he

said) quite incapacitated her from holding a pen. However, at the foot

of the page was a small “T.O.,” and on turning it over, sure enough,

there was a letter to “my dear, dearest Molly,” begging her, when she

left her room, whatever she did, to go _up_ stairs before going _down_:

and telling her to wrap her baby’s feet up in flannel, and keep it warm

by the fire, although it was summer, for babies were so tender.

It was pretty to see from the letters, which were evidently exchanged

with some frequency between the young mother and the grandmother, how

the girlish vanity was being weeded out of her heart by love for her

baby. The white “Paduasoy” figured again in the letters, with almost as

much vigour as before. In one, it was being made into a christening

cloak for the baby. It decked it when it went with its parents to

spend a day or two at Arley Hall. It added to its charms, when it was

“the prettiest little baby that ever was seen. Dear mother, I wish you

could see her! Without any pershality, I do think she will grow up a

regular bewty!” I thought of Miss Jenkyns, grey, withered, and

wrinkled, and I wondered if her mother had known her in the courts of

heaven: and then I knew that she had, and that they stood there in

angelic guise.

There was a great gap before any of the rector’s letters appeared. And

then his wife had changed her mode of her endorsement. It was no longer

from, “My dearest John;” it was from “My Honoured Husband.” The letters

were written on occasion of the publication of the same sermon which was

represented in the picture. The preaching before “My Lord Judge,” and

the “publishing by request,” was evidently the culminating point—the

event of his life. It had been necessary for him to go up to London to

superintend it through the press. Many friends had to be called upon

and consulted before he could decide on any printer fit for so onerous a

task; and at length it was arranged that J. and J. Rivingtons were to

have the honourable responsibility. The worthy rector seemed to be

strung up by the occasion to a high literary pitch, for he could hardly

write a letter to his wife without cropping out into Latin. I remember

the end of one of his letters ran thus: “I shall ever hold the virtuous

qualities of my Molly in remembrance, _dum memor ipse mei_, _dum

spiritus regit artus_,” which, considering that the English of his

correspondent was sometimes at fault in grammar, and often in spelling,

might be taken as a proof of how much he “idealised his Molly;” and, as

Miss Jenkyns used to say, “People talk a great deal about idealising

now-a-days, whatever that may mean.” But this was nothing to a fit of

writing classical poetry which soon seized him, in which his Molly

figured away as “Maria.” The letter containing the _carmen_ was

endorsed by her, “Hebrew verses sent me by my honoured husband. I thowt

to have had a letter about killing the pig, but must wait. Mem., to

send the poetry to Sir Peter Arley, as my husband desires.” And in a

post-scriptum note in his handwriting it was stated that the Ode had

appeared in the _Gentleman’s Magazine_, December 1782.

Her letters back to her husband (treasured as fondly by him as if they

had been _M. T. Ciceronis Epistolæ_) were more satisfactory to an absent

husband and father than his could ever have been to her. She told him

how Deborah sewed her seam very neatly every day, and read to her in the

books he had set her; how she was a very “forrard,” good child, but

would ask questions her mother could not answer, but how she did not let

herself down by saying she did not know, but took to stirring the fire,

or sending the “forrard” child on an errand. Matty was now the mother’s

darling, and promised (like her sister at her age), to be a great

beauty. I was reading this aloud to Miss Matty, who smiled and sighed a

little at the hope, so fondly expressed, that “little Matty might not be

vain, even if she were a bewty.”

“I had very pretty hair, my dear,” said Miss Matilda; “and not a bad

mouth.” And I saw her soon afterwards adjust her cap and draw herself

up.

But to return to Mrs Jenkyns’s letters. She told her husband about the

poor in the parish; what homely domestic medicines she had administered;

what kitchen physic she had sent. She had evidently held his

displeasure as a rod in pickle over the heads of all the ne’er-do-wells.

She asked for his directions about the cows and pigs; and did not

always obtain them, as I have shown before.

The kind old grandmother was dead when a little boy was born, soon after

the publication of the sermon; but there was another letter of

exhortation from the grandfather, more stringent and admonitory than

ever, now that there was a boy to be guarded from the snares of the

world. He described all the various sins into which men might fall,

until I wondered how any man ever came to a natural death. The gallows

seemed as if it must have been the termination of the lives of most of

the grandfather’s friends and acquaintance; and I was not surprised at

the way in which he spoke of this life being “a vale of tears.”

It seemed curious that I should never have heard of this brother before;

but I concluded that he had died young, or else surely his name would

have been alluded to by his sisters.

By-and-by we came to packets of Miss Jenkyns’s letters. These Miss

Matty did regret to burn. She said all the others had been only

interesting to those who loved the writers, and that it seemed as if it

would have hurt her to allow them to fall into the hands of strangers,

who had not known her dear mother, and how good she was, although she

did not always spell quite in the modern fashion; but Deborah’s letters

were so very superior! Any one might profit by reading them. It was a

long time since she had read Mrs Chapone, but she knew she used to think

that Deborah could have said the same things quite as well; and as for

Mrs Carter! people thought a deal of her letters, just because she had

written “Epictetus,” but she was quite sure Deborah would never have

made use of such a common expression as “I canna be fashed!”

[Picture: I made use of the time to think of many other things]

Miss Matty did grudge burning these letters, it was evident. She would

not let them be carelessly passed over with any quiet reading, and

skipping, to myself. She took them from me, and even lighted the second

candle in order to read them aloud with a proper emphasis, and without

stumbling over the big words. Oh dear! how I wanted facts instead of

reflections, before those letters were concluded! They lasted us two

nights; and I won’t deny that I made use of the time to think of many

other things, and yet I was always at my post at the end of each

sentence.

The rector’s letters, and those of his wife and mother-in-law, had all

been tolerably short and pithy, written in a straight hand, with the

lines very close together. Sometimes the whole letter was contained on

a mere scrap of paper. The paper was very yellow, and the ink very

brown; some of the sheets were (as Miss Matty made me observe) the old

original post, with the stamp in the corner representing a post-boy

riding for life and twanging his horn. The letters of Mrs Jenkyns and

her mother were fastened with a great round red wafer; for it was before

Miss Edgeworth’s “patronage” had banished wafers from polite society.

It was evident, from the tenor of what was said, that franks were in

great request, and were even used as a means of paying debts by needy

members of Parliament. The rector sealed his epistles with an immense

coat of arms, and showed by the care with which he had performed this

ceremony that he expected they should be cut open, not broken by any

thoughtless or impatient hand. Now, Miss Jenkyns’s letters were of a

later date in form and writing. She wrote on the square sheet which we

have learned to call old-fashioned. Her hand was admirably calculated,

together with her use of many-syllabled words, to fill up a sheet, and

then came the pride and delight of crossing. Poor Miss Matty got sadly

puzzled with this, for the words gathered size like snowballs, and

towards the end of her letter Miss Jenkyns used to become quite

sesquipedalian. In one to her father, slightly theological and

controversial in its tone, she had spoken of Herod, Tetrarch of Idumea.

Miss Matty read it “Herod Petrarch of Etruria,” and was just as well

pleased as if she had been right.

I can’t quite remember the date, but I think it was in 1805 that Miss

Jenkyns wrote the longest series of letters—on occasion of her absence

on a visit to some friends near Newcastle-upon-Tyne. These friends were

intimate with the commandant of the garrison there, and heard from him

of all the preparations that were being made to repel the invasion of

Buonaparte, which some people imagined might take place at the mouth of

the Tyne. Miss Jenkyns was evidently very much alarmed; and the first

part of her letters was often written in pretty intelligible English,

conveying particulars of the preparations which were made in the family

with whom she was residing against the dreaded event; the bundles of

clothes that were packed up ready for a flight to Alston Moor (a wild

hilly piece of ground between Northumberland and Cumberland); the signal

that was to be given for this flight, and for the simultaneous turning

out of the volunteers under arms—which said signal was to consist (if I

remember rightly) in ringing the church bells in a particular and

ominous manner. One day, when Miss Jenkyns and her hosts were at a

dinner-party in Newcastle, this warning summons was actually given (not

a very wise proceeding, if there be any truth in the moral attached to

the fable of the Boy and the Wolf; but so it was), and Miss Jenkyns,

hardly recovered from her fright, wrote the next day to describe the

sound, the breathless shock, the hurry and alarm; and then, taking

breath, she added, “How trivial, my dear father, do all our

apprehensions of the last evening appear, at the present moment, to calm

and enquiring minds!” And here Miss Matty broke in with—

“But, indeed, my dear, they were not at all trivial or trifling at the

time. I know I used to wake up in the night many a time and think I

heard the tramp of the French entering Cranford. Many people talked of

hiding themselves in the salt mines—and meat would have kept capitally

down there, only perhaps we should have been thirsty. And my father

preached a whole set of sermons on the occasion; one set in the

mornings, all about David and Goliath, to spirit up the people to

fighting with spades or bricks, if need were; and the other set in the

afternoons, proving that Napoleon (that was another name for Bony, as we

used to call him) was all the same as an Apollyon and Abaddon. I

remember my father rather thought he should be asked to print this last

set; but the parish had, perhaps, had enough of them with hearing.”

Peter Marmaduke Arley Jenkyns (“poor Peter!” as Miss Matty began to call

him) was at school at Shrewsbury by this time. The rector took up his

pen, and rubbed up his Latin once more, to correspond with his boy. It

was very clear that the lad’s were what are called show letters. They

were of a highly mental description, giving an account of his studies,

and his intellectual hopes of various kinds, with an occasional

quotation from the classics; but, now and then, the animal nature broke

out in such a little sentence as this, evidently written in a trembling

hurry, after the letter had been inspected: “Mother dear, do send me a

cake, and put plenty of citron in.” The “mother dear” probably answered

her boy in the form of cakes and “goody,” for there were none of her

letters among this set; but a whole collection of the rector’s, to whom

the Latin in his boy’s letters was like a trumpet to the old war-horse.

I do not know much about Latin, certainly, and it is, perhaps, an

ornamental language, but not very useful, I think—at least to judge from

the bits I remember out of the rector’s letters. One was, “You have not

got that town in your map of Ireland; but _Bonus Bernardus non videt

omnia_, as the Proverbia say.” Presently it became very evident that

“poor Peter” got himself into many scrapes. There were letters of

stilted penitence to his father, for some wrong-doing; and among them

all was a badly-written, badly-sealed, badly-directed, blotted note:—“My

dear, dear, dear, dearest mother, I will be a better boy; I will,

indeed; but don’t, please, be ill for me; I am not worth it; but I will

be good, darling mother.”

Miss Matty could not speak for crying, after she had read this note.

She gave it to me in silence, and then got up and took it to her sacred

recesses in her own room, for fear, by any chance, it might get burnt.

“Poor Peter!” she said; “he was always in scrapes; he was too easy.

They led him wrong, and then left him in the lurch. But he was too fond

of mischief. He could never resist a joke. Poor Peter!”