Chapter III: Keeping House Together

Lady Bell and Mrs. Sundon were so well pleased with each other, that they agreed finally to take up house together. They liked the air and aspect of Nutfield so well, that they fixed on dwelling in the neighbourhood, though no longer under the wing of Miss Kingscote.

The two ladies rented one of the cottages _ornés_ which were beginning to be built between the town of Lumley and Nutfield.

Summerhill had for its nucleus a one-storeyed erection of black and white timber, to which a wooden verandah had been added all round. The whole was set in a large enough garden and paddock to afford room for ingenuity to propose and execute a number of wonderful performances in the shape of winding walks, mounds, grottos, bowers, even a dovecot and a dairy.

The house was unfurnished, so that the tenants had another gain in fitting it up according to their tastes. Everything that Lady Bell and Mrs. Sundon ordered for their use was bright and tasteful. There was a good deal of white painted wood and white dimity, relieved by warm, deep-coloured carpet-work and rich embroidery.

The ladies gave evidence in the decorations of their house of ability and refinement, according to the standard of their day. There were home-manufactured brackets, sconces, card-baskets, and music-trays in abundance. These things supplied Lady Bell with endless employment, and were sources of pride and delight to her.

Lady Bell had thought to herself, first when she became a widow, that she should go softly mourning for her sins and her strife with Squire Trevor all her days. She was perfectly sincere then, as well as afterwards, and she did not cease to be sorry for having done wrong; but to her surprise, and a little to her shame, not only did her youthful spirits soon recover their elasticity and throw off the load of contrition and melancholy reflections; but in addition she was very happy—happier than she had ever been in her life before, not even excepting her early days with Lady Lucie Penruddock.

Lady Bell was not merely like one of those graceful creatures of the air which, casting the slough of the chrysalis, rises buoyant in its elegance and beauty. She had found a true mate, a companion and friend, a natural equal and ally.

Eventful as the last year had been, and calculated to develop her nature, Lady Bell was not past the age when girls like her have the strongest tendency to contract friendship with members of their own sex, and when indeed for the most part the closest, firmest, womanly friendships are formed. And that was the generation of women’s friendships, crowned by the sacrifice of the world for each other, made by the two ladies of Llangollen.

There was just the amount of superiority in years, experience, and acquirements on Mrs. Sundon’s part, and the kind of essential difference between the young women to confirm Lady Bell’s romantic admiration for her friend, without preventing a free and full interchange of sentiment and opinion.

Lady Bell resumed gladly and with grateful acknowledgment of the support which she received from Mrs. Sundon, all Lady Bell’s native pursuits, which had been so continually interrupted and baulked.

A modern girl commanding a thousand modes of cultivation, until she is oppressed by them, will find it hard to comprehend the self-respect and satisfaction with which Lady Bell returned to her studies; her French—in which Mrs. Sundon was a better qualified assistant, so far as speaking went, than Mr. Greenwood at St. Bevis’s—her thrumming on a spinet, her warbling of “Hark, the lark,” and “Waft her, angels.”

Mrs. Sundon kept up her connection with town and the world, and had not only fashions, but newspapers and parcels of books forwarded to her by the carrier and the bookseller in Lumley.

The ladies were abreast of their times (in which the war with America was taking more and more serious proportions), and of the literature of the day.

“Sir Charles Grandison” was becoming an oldish book, and “Evelina” had not yet come out. But Mr. Brooke’s “Fool of Quality” was making its mark, and was warmly welcomed as a step in the right direction by all good men and women, including Mrs. Sundon and Lady Bell. In sermons the ladies read Porteous or Blair. In poetry they studied Mason’s “Flower Garden” and Goldsmith’s “Deserted Village,” while in travels, Pennant’s “Tour” seemed to them to have extended to the extremity of the civilised world.

The absence, except at short intervals, of even a provincial theatre, which figured so largely as an intellectual influence at the close of the last century, was supplied in a degree to Mrs. Sundon and Lady Bell. They had the vigorous notices and criticisms of the most popular plays and players in the town newspapers; so that even while living at a distance, the ladies could enjoy at second-hand the heroics of “Douglas” and the nonsense of “Polly Honeycomb.”

Lady Bell made many charming new attainments, and that season at Summerhill was, after all, in the fullest sense, the spring-time of her life, when she was learning something new every day, and was fast budding into fresh promise.

All Lady Bell’s fine-lady gifts and graces had been originally overmuch of the town, townish. But Mrs. Sundon had been a fine lady of the country, as well as of the town, and could lead Lady Bell into elegant rurality, and even inoculate the girl with a true love of the country and of country life.

Under Mrs. Sundon’s superintendence, Lady Bell became a lady gardener, and advanced with rapid strides from an apprentice to a journeyman, until, in addition to her old power of embroidering facsimiles of leaves and flowers, she could make carpets and canopies of the plants themselves, hang the verandah with them, and grow living orange-trees in the window alcove of the sitting-room. She laid carnations and budded roses, and was as intent on getting seeds of Canterbury bells and slips of geraniums, as ever she had been on procuring patterns for aprons and chair-covers.

Lady Bell and Mrs. Sundon had a kitchen as well as a flower-garden. They had a white cow in the paddock in summer for their own and their baby’s use, and they borrowed a brood of chickens from Miss Kingscote, that they might be sure of new-laid eggs for breakfast.

The ladies did not commit these acquisitions to their establishment entirely to the care of their modest retinue of two maids and a man.

Lady Bell learnt, and did not dream that the learning was derogatory to her, to pull peas and pick gooseberries—actually to milk the cow (in a perfunctory and not very effectual manner, it must be confessed), so that she could aver from her personal knowledge that the syllabub, which she had also made with her own hands, was compounded as it ought to have been, of milk warm from the cow. She made gooseberry-fool, as well as syllabub, and was very conceited about the deed and its success.

Had poor Squire Trevor been alive and at Summerhill, his flighty young wife could even have supplied him with his desiderated tansy pudding, at this higher stage of her education, and in her greater wisdom.

Mrs. Sundon and Lady Bell dabbled in all sorts of washes, balsams, simples, hot drinks, blackberry cheeses, and sticks of saffron. Not being godless selfish unbelievers, and having ignorant and helpless poor neighbours, the two ladies became in their own way unquestionable Christian Ladies Bountiful—clothing the naked, feeding the hungry, tending the sick, and softening the rude, so far as their light and power went.

Lady Bell and Mrs. Sundon were the two women of highest rank and polish for a considerable circuit of miles, but they were not on that account disdainful and unsocial in their intercourse with their middle-class neighbours, such as the Vicar and Mayor of Lumley, the retired military or naval officers and their families, who occupied good houses in the town, and cottages similar to Summerhill on the outskirts. On the contrary, the two ladies were rightly judged models of urbanity, a reputation which no doubt they enjoyed, being gracious where nobody presumed on their graciousness, while they countenanced the Lumley weddings, house-warmings, and christenings.

Mrs. Sundon and Lady Bell had a hay-making on their own lawn, to which the whole population, so far as the Summerhill grounds would hold them, were invited, and came and went in ecstasies with the entertainment.

Mrs. Sundon and Lady Bell became the reigning toasts of the neighbourhood.

It does not follow that the old world and the old town were sycophantish; consider the women and their circumstances.

Lady Bell Trevor, the daughter of Lord Etheredge and the widow of Squire Trevor, of Trevor Court, in the adjoining shire, was a beautiful, graceful, intelligent young woman of seventeen.

Mrs. Sundon was not more than four years older, at twenty-one very handsome, with an air of command, which had been born with her—command too well assured to be other than simple and self-denying, or to require haughtiness and arrogance to back its claims.

Mrs. Sundon was a woman living in separation from her husband, it is true, but by an act quite different from poor Lady Bell’s hushed-up escapade. Mrs. Sundon’s separation from Gregory Sundon did not affect her social position in the least—in effect rather elevated it.

It was perfectly well understood through the Mayor that the details did the greatest honour to Mrs. Sundon’s dignity and discretion. And dignity and discretion were qualities very highly, but not unjustly, valued in a generation liable to run into extravagant flights and excesses.

Mrs. Sundon showed the same appreciable discretion in refraining from accusing her husband, and in adopting, along with a chosen friend, a life of retirement as well as of virtue in the flower of her youth, and in bringing up her little girl—as it was quite understood Mrs. Sundon was bringing up the child, when Caro was not yet three months old—in the most meritorious manner.

The very peculiarity of the two ladies’ position with the union of their forces, gave them a freedom and weight in the society in which they moved that they could not have commanded had they been single women, that they could hardly have possessed had they been separate, though each had dwelt in the house of her husband.

With Nutfield Lady Bell and Mrs. Sundon maintained the most kindly, cheerful relations, long after use and wont had hardened Miss Kingscote to the sound of “my lady.” When the ladies of Summerhill wished a little variety in their domestic routine, they had only to stroll over to Nutfield to bask in its homely cordiality, and to get a little permissible fun out of Miss Kingscote’s uncouth whimsicalities.

Lady Bell and Mrs. Sundon could not have managed for themselves without Master Charles to act the part of a brother to them.

In those days, when walking on country roads was not always safe for ladies, when they could not attend a single public place with propriety, unless they were supported by male attendance, a gentleman who was a privileged friend proved indispensable in every household of women.

Sometimes the friendships thus entertained were of a peculiarly gentle and chivalrous character, which the very scandal-loving world admitted and respected. Thus it saw no objection—not even that of age—in the intimate association of a young man like Master Charles with two charming young women only a little above him in rank, since the one was a wife and the other a widow, and both were deprived of their natural protectors.