The Weeping Ash (22 page)

April will be here in a few days, Fanny thought, her heart lifting; and she remembered how young and untroubled the April of last year had found her. What a gulf of experience stretched between then and now! But daffodils and cherry blossom remained forever the same, and she murmured (for she had read immense quantities of poetry in her father's library and had a fund of it by heart):

“Fair daffodils, we weep to see

You haste away so soon;

As yet the early-rising sun

Has not attained his noon…”

And then, as had so often happened at her childhood home, or in the walks and fields of Sway and the New Forest, notes of music danced, unsummoned, into Fanny's head and supplied an accompaniment for the lines she had just spoken. They sang themselves to her, words and tune knitting indissolubly together into a little spring of refreshment that seemed to come straight from something exterior to herself—the house, perhaps, she fancifully thought; perhaps this strain of music was the method the house found to communicate its feeling of good will. For she still—despite many periods of utter, black unhappiness—had this abiding impression that the house was her friend—it had something to say to her, a message of warmth, of reassurance. We are here for each other; my time, too, is short, but while I am here I will enfold and cherish you, as you cherish and care for me. Something of this nature the house imparted to her, and Fanny, listening, did take comfort.

A tap sounded at the door: Tess, to help with her hair.

“Come in!” Fanny called.

The little maid crept into the room, and Fanny turned in quick concern.

“Why, Tess, what is the matter? You look dreadful.”

Tess Goodger, the underservant, was a pale, gaunt little fourteen-year-old who looked hardly more than ten or eleven. Her thin, sharp features were half concealed by her cap; mostly she went about her work in the quiet apathy of timidity and undernourishment. It was plain that something was very wrong, for her drawn cheeks were the color of whey and there were great purple hollows under her eyes; the hands that combed out her mistress's ringlets were shaking uncontrollably.

“It's n-nothing, ma'am; I don't wish to worrit ye.”

“But indeed I am worried, Tess; are you sick? You look so weary.”

“No, I bean't sick, ma'am, but—b-but—”

Tess burst into tears, and the story came out.

Her household duties began at five, when she had to get up and light the Rumford stove in the kitchen for the servants' breakfast, sweep and scrub the kitchen, heat water for the housekeeper and menservants to wash, lay the kitchen table, rake out the ashes in all the downstairs fireplaces, and prepare the servants' breakfast of bread and porridge. Kate, the previous housekeeper, had owned a small clock which she had allowed Tess to take to her room every night (if room it could be called; Tess slept in the loft at the top of the house, reached by a ladder) so as to ensure that she woke in time.

“Just having the clock by me bed, ma'am—I set it up on a pair o' bricks—helped me so's I never did overlie. But Kate, she took her clock with her when she was turned off—an' I ast Missus Strudwick but she won't loan me her clock acos she live at home—an' it is so hard to know when five o'clock come—I worrit about it all night long. Ten, fifteen times o'night I slips down the stair to look at the grandfather clock in the hall; once or twice I has just set down there, say from 'alf three to five, for I dassn't go back up, 'case I oversleep. I did, once or twice, and Missus Strudwick was
that
angry—”

“But this is ridiculous! Why can you not take the kitchen clock upstairs to bed?”

“There bain't no kitchen clock, ma'am. It got busted in the move, simmingly, an' master said 'twasn't worth getting another, for we can see the church clock do we step out into the garden.”

This was true, Fanny knew; there was just a little more justification than usual for Thomas's parsimony.

“Can you not hear the church clock strike during the night, Tess?” she asked gently. “I have heard it myself, many and many a time.” She shivered a little.

“No, ma'am. There bain't no window, see, where I sleep; an' to tell truth,” Tess said nervously, glancing at her mistress past the strand of hair she was gently combing out, “to tell truth, I'm a bit deef; I believe it was on account of my auntie useter belt me over the ear'ole with a rolling pin if I riled her—”

“I see.” That accounted, of course, for the occasions when Thomas, irritated, had shouted at Tess for not obeying him more promptly; doubtless the poor child had not heard his order the first tune.

“Well, you must certainly have a clock,” Fanny resolved. “Here, now—let me see—”

During her illness, Thomas had abandoned his former practice of giving Fanny a small sum of housekeeping money daily; instead this had been handed, first to Kate, latterly to Mrs. Strudwick. She, when applied to, said she had no cash to spare for a clock; master had given her only enough to buy the meat, candles, green baize, and soda that were immediately required. Her expression indicated very fully that the purchase of a clock was the most wasteful, indulgent, frivolous notion that she had ever heard in her entire life.

Then Fanny was visited by a hopeful notion.

“Perhaps the old lady, Thomas's mother, will have a clock. She after all had a whole houseful of furniture; she must have brought some of her belongings with her. In any case it is certainly my duty to wait on her and find how she goes on.”

Accordingly, Fanny made her slow and cumbrous way up the flight of stairs that led to the top floor and the two attic bedrooms where Thomas's mother and her attendant had been housed.

This had seemed to Fanny most unsuitable quarters for an invalid; it meant that food, slops, coals, and laundry all had to be carried up and down two flights of stairs, many times daily; and how was the poor old lady ever to be conveyed down, when she recovered from her journey enough to wish to go out of doors and take the air? Thomas, however, did not concern himself with the fatigue of domestics and did not anticipate that his mother would ever need to leave the house; indeed he thought it better that she should not, for exercise could only wear out shoe leather and increase her appetite. At present, in any case, there was no question of such a thing, for yesterday's removal had greatly exhausted the old lady and she lay in her bed, hardly able to move.

Inconvenient the attic may have been, but the view from its window was certainly superior; it faced southeast, down the valley, and commanded a prospect of the long, gradually ascending road that came into the town from Byworth and the newer gentlemen's residences which were building along the valleyside beyond the Angel Inn. Close at hand were some young apple trees, planted by the Countess van Welcker, but their tops were far below the level of the window, and the only tree that gave any promise of ever reaching to such a height was the weeping ash, now so severely constrained, which grew directly outside.

The other garden trees, the hedge of young yews, and the oaks and willows in the valley were all gaily tossing their branches in a March wind; only the ash, like a prisoner with arms tied to his sides, remained motionless. To Fanny's impressionable mind the tree appeared to be brooding darkly on its wrongs: hunched, silent, immobile, it seemed to be sending vibrations of ill will toward the house. It was not the first time she had thought this.

However her business was not with trees, and she moved past the window toward the bed with its recumbent figure. Thomas's mother had been housed in the smaller of the two attics, because it was the one that possessed a fireplace (in which a very meager fire now burned); there was exceedingly little space in the room; an armchair, a washstand, a tiny table, and the bed almost completely filled it; the old lady's clothes had apparently to be accommodated in the nurse's chamber. Fanny, glancing about, could see no clock; the appointments here were sparse indeed: a clean cloth on the washstand, a hairbrush, comb, and washing utensils; nothing more.

Nobody had answered her knock, and Thomas had, in fact, warned her that his mother was somewhat hard of hearing, so she walked up to the bed and said in her clear, pretty voice:

“Good morning, ma'am! I hope that you find yourself recovered from your journey? Welcome to the Hermitage!” in a somewhat louder tone than she would normally have employed.

“Eh? Eh, what's that? What did you say?” came in a faint quaver—nervous, weak, mistrustful—from the bunched-up figure on the bed; and the old lady, who had been lying with her face to the wall, slowly turned over to peer at her visitor.

“I am sorry, ma'am, that I was indisposed and not able to greet you yesterday, on your arrival. I have not been very well,” Fanny explained apologetically. A pair of pale blue, bewildered eyes surveyed her, and she held out a hand, saying with a friendly smile, “I daresay you may have guessed by now that I am your new daughter-in-law: Thomas's wife, Fanny.”

“Eh—what's that? Didn't quite catch. Brandy, do you say?”

“No, ma'am, I am FANNY, your daughter-in-law.”

“Daughter-in-law? Where's Emma, then? The girls' mother?”

“She has—has died, ma'am, I fear. I am Thomas's new wife.”

“His new wife? Eh, yes, he did say something about her. I disremembered it.” The old lady slanted a look at Fanny under her eyelids in which slyness, apprehension, and timidity seemed equally mixed; then, after a moment, she brought from under the covers, and extended, a thin, yellow, blotched claw which was visibly trembling; Fanny took it in a firm clasp and smiled at Thomas's mother as reassuringly as she could.

“I do hope that you will be happy with us, ma'am; I will try my best to see that you are so, I promise.”

Did the old lady hear? It was difficult to be sure. Her faded eyes had a restless, wandering, agitated stare; they hardly dwelt on Fanny but were off around the room, like those of some animal that finds itself in a trap. Indeed the predominating element in her character was fear—fear of the people with whom she had to deal, of her husband, her son, the nurse, her daughter-in-law—she feared all, trusted none. Only one person had not inspired fear in her, and he was dead.

“Thank you, dear, thank you,” she murmured vaguely now, apprehending that some response was expected from her. “Seems strange—poor dear Emma—married to Thomas for so long—now all gone and forgotten—Eh, dear me!”

Fanny pulled up the little straight-backed padded nursing chair, which had been bought for her by direction of Dr. Chilgrove, but which she had instructed Tess to take up for the old lady, and sat down on it.

“I hope we shall soon see you out of bed, ma'am, and coming downstairs among us,” she said.

“Eh, dear? No, no, Thomas would never allow it, never hear of it,” said the old lady, with a fearful glance toward the door.

“Thomas is out all day, ma'am,” Fanny said coaxingly. “And I am persuaded that it would be better for you to take the air, now and again—we may procure you a basket chair, you know, and Jem bootboy can push you in it—or at least you could come and sit in the parlor. Will you not do that? Did you not walk out of doors where you lived before, in the Isle of Wight?”

“Eh? Yes, out all the time—shops, circulating library—haberdashers,” replied the old lady when the question had been repeated a couple of times. She showed, now, a gleam of pleasure and intelligence as she made the reply, confirming, had she but known it, all her son's worst fears about her spendthrift habits.

“What should I call you, ma'am?—for Thomas, I am afraid, omitted to tell me your married name—I know it is not Paget.”

This question, however, appeared too complicated for the old lady; she frowned, shaking her head so perplexedly that her nightcap almost fell off, and Fanny had to help her retie the strings over her scanty white hair, which was scraped back into a plait.

“Well, I will call you Mother—may I do that? For my own mother died at my birth, so I never had the comfort of one and shall be glad to do so now.”

It was plain, however, that most of the comforting would have to be on the other side, but a nod presently indicated that the purport of these words had found its way into the old lady's bewildered mind and she timidly returned Fanny's clasp.

“What can I do for you now?” Fanny inquired. “Shall I read to you—or is there any service I can render you?”

This question, also, took some time to penetrate, but presently, when it did, the old lady intimated that she would be glad to have her back rubbed, for it was paining her severely after the long, unaccustomed ferry and coach journey, or, as she herself put it, “It do fairly give me the jip, dearie.”

Fanny who, due to her advanced pregnancy, frequently suffered from pain in her own back, had every sympathy with this request and had been gently massaging her mother-in-law's lower spine for seven or eight minutes, and making such simple conversation as occurred to her, when there was a brisk step on the stair, a clink of crockery, and the door was unceremoniously thrust open.

“Lord! I'm sorry, I'm sure, ma'am—I'd no notion that anybody was in the room,” said the newcomer, dumping a tray with a basin of bread and milk on the table, and she went on, addressing the old lady in a loud cheerful voice as if she had been a small child. “There we are, then, missus, all right and tight! Nice breakfast for you! You just set up in bed and eat it as quick as you can. Why, fancy that—has Mrs. Paget here been a-rubbing of you—that was monstrous kind, now, wasn't it! Fancy your demeaning yourself to do such a thing, ma'am!” and she darted a glance at Fanny that was half-scornful, half-condescending.

Fanny, quietly removing herself from the bedside, said that she would intrude no longer but asked the nurse to let her know if anything lacked in her own quarters or the sickroom. From the somewhat contemptuous smile bestowed on her, she inferred that it had already been made abundantly plain that all orders and supplies must be expected from the master of the house or Mrs. Strudwick, and her own insignificant role had evidently been conveyed to the nurse, who, however, curtsied slightly and said missus was very kind and obliging, but nothing was needed.