Cranford Page #5

								

and clean packs of cards, were arranged on each table.  The fire was made
up; the neat maid-servant had received her last directions; and there we
stood, dressed in our best, each with a candle-lighter in our hands,
ready to dart at the candles as soon as the first knock came.  Parties in
Cranford were solemn festivities, making the ladies feel gravely elated
as they sat together in their best dresses.  As soon as three had
arrived, we sat down to “Preference,” I being the unlucky fourth.  The
next four comers were put down immediately to another table; and
presently the tea-trays, which I had seen set out in the store-room as I
passed in the morning, were placed each on the middle of a card-table.
The china was delicate egg-shell; the old-fashioned silver glittered with
polishing; but the eatables were of the slightest description.  While the
trays were yet on the tables, Captain and the Miss Browns came in; and I
could see that, somehow or other, the Captain was a favourite with all
the ladies present.  Ruffled brows were smoothed, sharp voices lowered at
his approach.  Miss Brown looked ill, and depressed almost to gloom.
Miss Jessie smiled as usual, and seemed nearly as popular as her father.
He immediately and quietly assumed the man’s place in the room; attended
to every one’s wants, lessened the pretty maid-servant’s labour by
waiting on empty cups and bread-and-butterless ladies; and yet did it all
in so easy and dignified a manner, and so much as if it were a matter of
course for the strong to attend to the weak, that he was a true man
throughout.  He played for threepenny points with as grave an interest as
if they had been pounds; and yet, in all his attention to strangers, he
had an eye on his suffering daughter—for suffering I was sure she was,
though to many eyes she might only appear to be irritable.  Miss Jessie
could not play cards: but she talked to the sitters-out, who, before her
coming, had been rather inclined to be cross.  She sang, too, to an old
cracked piano, which I think had been a spinet in its youth.  Miss Jessie
sang, “Jock of Hazeldean” a little out of tune; but we were none of us
musical, though Miss Jenkyns beat time, out of time, by way of appearing
to be so.

It was very good of Miss Jenkyns to do this; for I had seen that, a
little before, she had been a good deal annoyed by Miss Jessie Brown’s
unguarded admission (à propos of Shetland wool) that she had an uncle,
her mother’s brother, who was a shop-keeper in Edinburgh.  Miss Jenkyns
tried to drown this confession by a terrible cough—for the Honourable Mrs
Jamieson was sitting at a card-table nearest Miss Jessie, and what would
she say or think if she found out she was in the same room with a
shop-keeper’s niece!  But Miss Jessie Brown (who had no tact, as we all
agreed the next morning) would repeat the information, and assure Miss
Pole she could easily get her the identical Shetland wool required,
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