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 protegée, 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, this 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 4
In three months from the time of Caterina’s adoption—namely, in the late autumn of 1773—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 half-circle 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 boottons!’ 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 hands 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 ever 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’ and 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 hand 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’ pictures o’ men an’ women a-showing themselves 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.’