Grandmother Cardover’s house stood near the harbor; from the street we could see the bare masts of the shipping lying at rest. In the front on the ground-floor was the shop, piled high with the necessaries of sea-going travel. There were coils of rope in the doorway, and anchors and sacks of ship’s biscuits; a little further in tarpaulin and oil-skin jackets hung from the ceiling, interspersed with smoked hams; and, at the back, stood rows of cheeses and upturned barrels on which ear-ringed sailor-men would sit and chat.
Behind the counter was a door, with windows draped with red curtains. It led into what was called the keeping-room, a cozy parlor in which we took our meals, while through the window in the door we could watch the customers enter. The keeping-room had its own peculiar smell, comfortable and homelike. I scarcely know how to describe it; it was a mixture of ozone, coffee, and baking bread. Out of the keeping-room lay the kitchen, with its floor of red bricks and its burnished pots and pans hung in rows along the walls. It was my grandmother’s boast that the floor was so speckless that you could eat a meal off it. Across the courtyard at the back lay the bakehouse, with its great hollow ovens and troughs in which men with naked feet trod out the dough.
Grandmother had never been out of Ransby save to visit us at Pope Lane, and this rarely. Even then, after a fortnight she was glad to get back. She said that Ransby was better than London; you weren’t crowded and knew everyone you met. The streets of London were filled with stranger-windows and stranger-faces, whereas in Ransby every house was familiar and had its story.
She carried, strung from a belt about her waist, all the keys of her bins and cupboards. You knew when she was coming by the way they jangled. She was a widow, and perfectly happy. On Sundays she attended the Methodist Chapel in the High Street, with its grave black pulpit and high-backed pews. On week-days she marshaled her sea-captains, handsome bearded men, and entertained them at her table. In spite of younger rivals, who tried to win their patronage from her by cuts in prices, she held their custom by her honest personality. I believe many of them made her offers of marriage, for she was still comely to look at; she refused them as lovers and kept them as friends. She usually dressed in black, with a gold locket containing the hair of her husband, many years dead, hung about her neck. Her hair was arranged in two rows of corkscrew curls, which reached down to her shoulders from under a prim white cap. She had a trick of making them waggle when she wished to be emphatic. She was a good deal of a gossip, was by instinct an antiquary, and had a lively sense of wit which was kept in check by a genuine piety—in short, she was a thoroughly wholesome, capable, loving woman. The type to which she belonged is now quickly vanishing—that of the more than middle-aged person who knows how to grow old usefully and graciously: a woman of the lower-middle class not chagrined by her station, who acknowledged cheerfully that she had her superiors and, demanding respect from others, gave respect ungrudgingly where it was due. She was a shop-keeper proud of her shop-keeping.
That week at Ransby was a kind of tiptoe glory. My Grannie took me very seriously; she had under her roof a boy who would surely be a baronet, perhaps a lord, and maybe an earl. What had only been an expectation with us was for her a certainty. The floodgate of her reminiscence was opened wide; she swept me far out into the romantic past with her accounts of my mother’s ancestry. The Evrards were no upstart nobility; they had their roots in history. She could tell me how they returned from exile with King Charles, or how they sailed out with Raleigh to destroy the Armada. But I liked to hear best about my mother, how she rode into Ransby under her scarlet plumes, on her great gray horse, with her flower face; and how my father caught sight of her and loved her.
I began to understand my father in a new way, entirely sympathetic. He was a man who had tasted the best of life at the first. There was something epic about his sorrow.
These conversations usually took place in the keeping-room at night. The shutters of the shop had been put up. The gas was unlighted. The flames of the fire, dancing in the grate, split the darkness into shadows which groped across the walls. Everything was hushed and cozy. My Grannie, seated opposite to me, on the other side of the fireplace, would bend forward in her chair as she talked; when she came to exciting passages her little gray curls would bob, or to passages of sentiment she would remove her shiny spectacles to wipe her eyes. If she stopped at a loss for the next topic, all I had to say was, “And how did Sir Charles Evrard look, Grannie, when he came to you that first morning after they had run away?”
“He looked, as he has always looked, my dear, an aristocrat.”
“But how did he treat you? Wasn’t he angry?”
“Angry with a woman! Certainly not. He treated me like a courtly gentleman—with respect. He dismounts and comes into my shop as leisurely as though he had only stepped in to exchange the greetings of the day. He raises his hat to me as he enters. ‘A fine day, Mrs. Cardover,’ he says.