Wives and Daughters

								
CHAPTER I.

THE DAWN OF A GALA DAY.


[Illustration (untitled)]

To begin with the old rigmarole of childhood. In a country there was
a shire, and in that shire there was a town, and in that town there
was a house, and in that house there was a room, and in that room
there was a bed, and in that bed there lay a little girl; wide awake
and longing to get up, but not daring to do so for fear of the unseen
power in the next room--a certain Betty, whose slumbers must not
be disturbed until six o'clock struck, when she wakened of herself
"as sure as clockwork," and left the household very little peace
afterwards. It was a June morning, and early as it was, the room was
full of sunny warmth and light.

On the drawers opposite to the little white dimity bed in which Molly
Gibson lay, was a primitive kind of bonnet-stand on which was hung a
bonnet, carefully covered over from any chance of dust with a large
cotton handkerchief, of so heavy and serviceable a texture that if
the thing underneath it had been a flimsy fabric of gauze and lace
and flowers, it would have been altogether "scomfished" (again to
quote from Betty's vocabulary). But the bonnet was made of solid
straw, and its only trimming was a plain white ribbon put over the
crown, and forming the strings. Still, there was a neat little
quilling inside, every plait of which Molly knew, for had she not
made it herself the evening before, with infinite pains? and was
there not a little blue bow in this quilling, the very first bit of
such finery Molly had ever had the prospect of wearing?

Six o'clock now! the pleasant, brisk ringing of the church bells told
that; calling every one to their daily work, as they had done for
hundreds of years. Up jumped Molly, and ran with her bare little feet
across the room, and lifted off the handkerchief and saw once again
the bonnet; the pledge of the gay bright day to come. Then to the
window, and after some tugging she opened the casement, and let in
the sweet morning air. The dew was already off the flowers in the
garden below, but still rising from the long hay-grass in the meadows
directly beyond. At one side lay the little town of Hollingford,
into a street of which Mr. Gibson's front door opened; and delicate
columns, and little puffs of smoke were already beginning to rise
from many a cottage chimney where some housewife was already up, and
preparing breakfast for the bread-winner of the family.

Molly Gibson saw all this, but all she thought about it was, "Oh! it
will be a fine day! I was afraid it never, never would come; or that,
if it ever came, it would be a rainy day!" Five-and-forty years ago,
children's pleasures in a country town were very simple, and Molly
had lived for twelve long years without the occurrence of any event
so great as that which was now impending. Poor child! it is true
that she had lost her mother, which was a jar to the whole tenour of
her life; but that was hardly an event in the sense referred to; and
besides, she had been too young to be conscious of it at the time.
The pleasure she was looking forward to to-day was her first share in
a kind of annual festival in Hollingford.

The little straggling town faded away into country on one side close
to the entrance-lodge of a great park, where lived my Lord and Lady
Cumnor: "the earl" and "the countess," as they were always called by
the inhabitants of the town; where a very pretty amount of feudal
feeling still lingered, and showed itself in a number of simple ways,
droll enough to look back upon, but serious matters of importance
at the time. It was before the passing of the Reform Bill, but a
good deal of liberal talk took place occasionally between two or
three of the more enlightened freeholders living in Hollingford;
and there was a great Tory family in the county who, from time to
time, came forward and contested the election with the rival Whig
family of Cumnor. One would have thought that the above-mentioned
liberal-talking inhabitants would have, at least, admitted the
possibility of their voting for the Hely-Harrison, and thus trying to
vindicate their independence. But no such thing. "The earl" was lord
of the manor, and owner of much of the land on which Hollingford was
built; he and his household were fed, and doctored, and, to a certain
measure, clothed by the good people of the town; their fathers'
grandfathers had always voted for the eldest son of Cumnor Towers,
and following in the ancestral track, every man-jack in the place
gave his vote to the liege lord, totally irrespective of such
chimeras as political opinion.

This was no unusual instance of the influence of the great
land-owners over humbler neighbours in those days before railways,
and it was well for a place where the powerful family, who thus
overshadowed it, were of so respectable a character as the Cumnors.
They expected to be submitted to, and obeyed; the simple worship of
the townspeople was accepted by the earl and countess as a right; and
they would have stood still in amazement, and with a horrid memory
of the French sansculottes who were the bugbears of their youth, had
any inhabitant of Hollingford ventured to set his will or opinions
in opposition to those of the earl. But, yielded all that obeisance,
they did a good deal for the town, and were generally condescending,
and often thoughtful and kind in their treatment of their vassals.
Lord Cumnor was a forbearing landlord; putting his steward a little
on one side sometimes, and taking the reins into his own hands now
and then, much to the annoyance of the agent, who was, in fact, too
rich and independent to care greatly for preserving a post where his
decisions might any day be overturned by my lord's taking a fancy
to go "pottering" (as the agent irreverently expressed it in the
sanctuary of his own home), which, being interpreted, meant that
occasionally the earl asked his own questions of his own tenants,
and used his own eyes and ears in the management of the smaller
details of his property. But his tenants liked my lord all the better

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