The Complete Works. George Eliot

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      Chapter IV.

      Table of Contents

      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.’

      ‘Olterations!’ exclaimed Mrs. Bellamy, in alarm. ‘What olterations!’

      ‘Why,’ answered Mr. Warren, ‘Sir Christopher, as I understand, is going to make a new thing of the old Manor-house both inside and out. And he’s got portfolios full of plans and pictures coming. It is to be cased with stone, in the Gothic style—pretty near like the churches, you know, as far as I can make out; and the ceilings are to be beyond anything that’s been seen in the country. Sir Christopher’s been giving a deal of study to it.’

      ‘Dear heart alive!’ said Mrs. Bellamy, ‘we shall be pisoned wi’ lime an’ plaster, an’ hev the house full o’ workmen colloguing wi’ the maids, an’ makin’ no end o’ mischief.’

      ‘That ye may ley your life on, Mrs. Bellamy,’ said Mr. Bates. ‘Howiver, I’ll noot denay that the Goothic stayle’s prithy anoof, an’ it’s woonderful how near them stoon-carvers cuts oot the shapes o’ the pine apples, an’ shamrucks, an’ rooses. I dare sey Sir Cristhifer’ll meck a naice thing o’ the Manor, an’ there woon’t be many gentlemen’s houses i’ the coonthry as’ll coom up to’t, wi’ sich a garden an’ pleasure-groons an’ wall-fruit as King George maight be prood on.’

      ‘Well, I can’t think as the house can be better nor it is, Gothic or no Gothic,’ said Mrs. Bellamy; ‘an’ I’ve done the picklin’ and preservin’ in it fourteen year Michaelmas was a three weeks. But what does my lady say to’t?’

      ‘My lady knows better than cross Sir Cristifer in what he’s set his mind on,’ said Mr. Bellamy, who objected to the critical tone of the conversation. СКАЧАТЬ