Kit and Kitty: A Story of West Middlesex

A LITTLE TIFF

Everybody knows, as he reads his newspaper, that nothing has ever yet happened in the world with enough of precision and accuracy to get itself described, by those who saw it, in the same, or in even a similar manner. No wonder then that my little adventure – if I have any right to call it mine – presented itself in many different lights, not only to the people among whom it spread, but even to the few who were present there and then. Mrs. Jenny Marker’s account of what had happened was already very grand that Sunday eve; but as soon as she had slept and dreamed upon it, her great command of words proved unequal to the call made at the same moment by the mind and heart. Everybody listened, for her practice was to pay every little bill upon a Monday morning; and almost everybody was convinced that she was right.

“Miraculous is the only word that I can think of,” she said to Mrs. Cutthumb, who sold tin-tacks and cabbages; “not a miracle only of the sandy desert, but of the places where the trees and waters grow.”

“The Jordan perhaps you means, Mrs. Marker, ma’am? Or did you please to have in your mind the Red Sea?”

“They were both in my mind, and both come uppermost at the same moment, Mrs. Cutthumb. But the best authorities inform us now that we must not look for more than we can understand. Yet I cannot understand how Kit Orchardson contrived after pulling me out to pull out our Miss Kitty. But look, here he comes! Why, he is everywhere almost. He seems to swing along so. His uncle ought to work him harder. Not that he is impudent. No one can say that of him. Too bashful for a man, in my opinion. But he seems to have taken such a liking to me; and I must be his senior by a considerable time. I will go into your parlour, my dear Mrs. Cutthumb, and then I can look out for our poor Miss Kitty – ah, she is so very young, and no one to stand up for her!”

“Excuse me, Miss Marker, if you please,” said Mrs. Cutthumb; “but if I may make so bold to say, you are very young yourself, Miss, in years, though not in worship. And to be run away with from school is a thing that may occur to any girl when bootiful. But concerning of Miss Kitty – bless her innocent young face! – what you was pleased to say, ma’am, is most surprising.”

“No, Mrs. Cutthumb, very far from that, when you come to consider what human nature is. I never could do such things myself; I never could sleep easy in my bed if I thought that they ever could be imputed to me. But when we look at things it is our duty to remember that the world is made up of different people from what we are.”

“What experience you have had, ma’am, and yet keeping your complexion so! Ah, if my poor Cutthumb could have kept away from the imperial! But he said it were the duty of a Briton, and he done it. Sally, get away into the back yard with your dolly. I beg your pardon, ma’am, for interrupting you of your words so.”

“Well, one thing I make a point of is,” Mrs. Marker continued with a gentle frown, “never to enter into any domestic affairs, though without any bias of any sort, out of doors. We all have enough, as you know, Mrs. Cutthumb, and sometimes more than we can manage, to regulate our own histories. Miss Coldpepper is a remarkable lady, so very, so highly superior; but her niece, our Miss Kitty, does not seem as yet to take after her in that particular; and scarcely to be wondered at, when you remember that she is not her niece at all of rights. But this is not a question to interest you much, nor any one outside of what I might call the Coldpepper domesticity.”

“What superior words you always do have, as it were, in your muff, Mrs. Marker! But if you please to mean, Miss – being still so young I slips into it naturally – the Coldpepper Manor, why I was born upon it, and so was my parents before me. And that makes it natural, as you might say, and proper for me to have a word to say about them. I remember all the Coldpeppers since I was that high; and it shall never go no further.”

“There is nothing to conceal. You must never fancy that of them. The Coldpeppers always were a haughty race, and headstrong; but bold, and outspoken, and defying of their neighbours. It was bad for any one who crossed them: you know that, if you remember old Squire Nicholas. But Miss Kitty Fairthorn is not a Coldpepper. You see you don’t know everything about them, Mrs. Cutthumb. The captain had been married before he ever saw Miss Monica.”

“Lor’, Mrs. Marker, you quite take my breath away! And yet I might have known it, I was bound almost to know it, the moment one comes to reflection. ‘Kitty’s’ not a name at all becoming to the rank of the Manor of Coldpepper. I’ve been wondering about it many’s the time; Arabella and Monica sounds something like; but Kitty isn’t fit, except for women that has to get their own livelihood. Well, it eases my mind that she is not a Coldpepper.”

“No, Mrs. Cutthumb; but she is a Fairthorn; and from all I hear the Fairthorns are much better known, in the great world of London, than our Coldpeppers. Captain Fairthorn is a man who has discovered more than the whole world knew in our fathers’ days. He can make a bell ring in John o’ Groat’s house, he can blow up a cliff at the Land’s End from London, he knows every wrinkle at the bottom of the sea, he can make a ghost stand at eight corners of the room.”

“Can he save his own soul, ma’am?” the greengrocer asked in a solemn voice, being a strict Wesleyan. “Them vanities, falsely called Science nowadays, is the depth of the snare of the Evil One. A learned man knows all the bottom of the sea, and leaves his own child to be drowned in a brook, without it was for young Kit Orchardson. Can he save his own soul, Mrs. Marker, ma’am?”

“Well, if I was to go by guesswork, I should say that he has not got very much of that to call his own. You know what Miss Monica was; although she has been such a time away from Sunbury. She took her first husband in spite of her father, and the second without a word to anybody. She had a son and two daughters by the Honourable Tom Bulwrag, and within a year after him she carried off poor Captain, who is now called Professor Fairthorn. But there, I am told, though I never set eyes on him, being made up of telegraphs and batteries, and magnesia, and a thing they call hiderography, he is hardly ever at home for a week together, and knows more about the ocean’s bed than about his own. And a lucky thing for him; for wouldn’t she be a nagger, if ever she could get the opportunity?”

“That seems to be most unnatural, and against the will of the Almighty,” Mrs. Cutthumb replied after serious thought, “that a lady should wish to reprove her husband, and yet find no ear to put it into. With all his inventions for doing away distance, he ought to be able to manage it.”

“It would make no difference, if he did, and could she expect him to pay for it? His mind is so taken up when he is at home, that she might as well go on at the bedpost. And if he was to open up his wires, it would be at his discretion to receive it all. This makes her rather harsh, as you can understand, with any one that has no help for it. And our poor Miss Kitty being always in the way, and a rival as it were to her own children, oh she does know what pepper is, hot and cold, and every colour!”

“Poor lamb! And she do look so innocent and sweet, and so deserving of a real mother. No father to look after her, by your own account, ma’am, and a step-mother doing it according to her liking. Why don’t she run away, such a booty as she is?”

“She is too sweet-tempered and well-principled for that. And she thinks all the world of her father; all the more, no doubt, because he cannot attend to her. His time is too precious for him to mind his daughter. Not that he is money-making – far the other way. Those great discoverers, as I have heard say, are the last to discover the holes in their pockets. Money, Mrs. Cutthumb has been too long discovered for him to take any heed of it. And that makes another source of trouble in the household. To think of our sending the big carriage and two footmen, to find a young lady in the third class at Feltham! I took care to keep it from Miss Coldpepper.”

“Oh, it would have been shocking,” cried the widow with her hands up. “Why, the third class ain’t good enough for a dead pig to drain in, any ways on the South-Western line. Well, ma’am, and how did Miss Coldpepper take it?”

“Of these things I never speak out of the house. We are liable to err, the very best of us, I believe, and I know it from my own feelings. Those last twenty boxes of Star matches we had from you, Mrs. Cutthumb, were stars, and no mistake. Shooting stars they should be labelled. They go off like a cannon, I have had to pay for three new aprons, and it was a mercy they didn’t set the house afire.”

“Oh, they hussies – they never know how to strike them; and your Miss Coldpepper, she does change so often. Never so much as a month, ma’am, without some of them giving warning.”

“That is no concern of yours, Mrs. Cutthumb. If you speak in this low style of Coldpepper Manor, it will have to withdraw its custom, ma’am, from your – your little establishment.”

Mrs. Jenny Marker, as she spoke thus, gathered in her jacket, which was plaited with blue velvet, – because she was proud of her figure, or at least so some people said who could not well get at her pockets – and although she meant no more by this than to assert her own dignity, Mrs. Cutthumb, with all the fine feelings of a widow, was naturally hurt, and showed it. And strange enough to say, though it seems such a trifle, what ensued made a very great difference to me.

“I am truly grieved, madam,” she said with a curtsey, “that my little house, which is the best I can afford, and my little shop, which was set up for me by very kind neighbours as owned no manors, when it pleased the Almighty to afflict me lo, and deprive me of a good man who could always pay his sent, and never would allow me to be put upon – ”

“A model husband, no doubt, Mrs. Cutthumb; except as I fancy you observed just now, for his devotion to the imperial pint, – or perhaps I should say gallon.”

“May you never have a worse, if you ever catches any! And high time in life, ma’am, for you, Miss Jenny Marker, or Mrs. whichever you may be, and nobody in Sunbury knows the bottom of it, to be thinking a little now of your soul, ma’am, and less of your body, and the other things that perish. You draw in your cloak, ma’am, or it isn’t a cloak, nothing so suitable and sensible as that, just as if my poor goods wasn’t good enough to touch it! Perhaps that’s the reason why you beats them down so. I beg you to remember, Jenny Marker, that I consider myself as good as you are, madam, though I am not tricked out with gew-gaws and fal-lals. And what I eats, I earns, ma’am, and not the bread of servitude.”

“That will do, my good woman. I never lose my temper; though I have never been insulted before like this, even by the lowest people. Send in your little bill, this very afternoon, if one of your wonderful neighbours will be good enough to make it out for you, as you have never been taught to write, poor thing! But whoever does it must not forget to deduct the price of three rotten French eggs.”

CHAPTER VI.

THE BEAUTIES OF NATURE

While that bitter war was raging, I enjoyed a peaceful and gentle season. It happened that I had come up our village, on a matter of strict business, at a time of day not at all unlikely to be the very time of day mentioned over-night, as the one that would suit Mrs. Marker and Miss Fairthorn for doing a little business in our village. This might be explained, without any imputation on any one I have the pleasure of knowing, for all of them will admit at once that it needs no explanation. It is enough to say, that when I had the honour of seeing two ladies safe home last night, after pulling them out of the flood – as they both maintained, though never in it – no little gratitude had been expressed, and much good-will had been felt all round. And it would have been hard upon that state of things, if any “Good-bye” had been said for ever.

For my part, although I had no great fear of being knocked on the head by Sam Henderson, it might have seemed haughty and even unfeeling, if I had insisted too strongly upon my ability to take care of myself. Therefore I allowed them to consider me in peril; and to this I was partly indebted perhaps for the opportunity of meeting them on Monday. It is true that I had not learned half as much, about matters of the deepest interest to me, as Mrs. Cutthumb, without any claim to such knowledge, was now possessed of; but this might fairly be expected, for women have always been convinced that men have no right to know half as much as themselves. “Let him find it out, I am not going to tell him,” is their too frequent attitude, while they feel it a duty to their own sex to pour out almost everything.

However, I have no desire to complain, and perhaps it is better thus; for if we knew all of their affairs, we might think less about them. And I was in a very deep condition of interest and wonder, not only from the hints I had received, but also from the manifold additions of my fancy. In fact, it was far more than I could do, to confine my heart to its proper work when I saw those two ladies come to do a little shopping.

At that time, there were only about a dozen of the houses, in the narrow street that runs along the river, which allowed the importance of selling to compete with the necessity of dwelling. And the few, that did appear inclined to do a little trade, if coaxed into it, were half ashamed of their late concession to the spirit of the age. No man had yet appeared who shatters the ancestral sense of congruity, who routs up the natives, as a terrier bullies mastiffs, and scarcely even leaves them their own bones. And it may be maintained, that people got things better, and found them last longer than they ever do now. And this was only natural, because it always took a much longer time to buy them.

This enabled me to take my time about my own business, without any risk of being left behind by the lady housekeeper and her fair companion. From time to time I assured myself by a glance between flower-pots, or among drapery, that my quest was not gone astray, that as yet I had not lost all that I cared to see, and that I could keep in my own background, while thinking of things far beyond me.

It never had been my manner yet to be much afraid of anything; not that I stood at all upon my valour, but simply because, to the best of my knowledge, I had no enemy anywhere. Yet now, very much to my own surprise, instead of proper courage, I was full of little doubts, and more misgivings than I can at all describe, and even a tendency to run away, and try to forget the very thing I was longing for. And I knew for a certainty that if the matter came to the very best opportunity, I was quite sure to do my very worst, and cut a despicable figure, to my own undoing.

I tried to recover myself, by doing a few strokes of business on my own account, going into the butcher’s, and complaining sadly that he now weighed the foot in with the leg of mutton – a privilege only to be claimed by lamb – but he said that it now was ordained by nature, and asked how I expected a poor sheep to walk. I knew that his logic would not go upon all-fours, but my wits were so loose that I let it pass; and at that very moment I discovered, betwixt the hearts of two bullocks, something very near my own. Miss Kitty Fairthorn had been set free by Mrs. Jenny Marker, while the housekeeper was driving a bargain in soft goods, unfit for young comprehension. After that, she was to go on for a talk with Widow Cutthumb, and meanwhile the young lady might look at the river, which was now rolling grandly in turbulent flood.

It was rather a shy and a delicate thing for me to go also in that direction; and the butcher (who never confined his attention to his own mutton) was as sure as could be to come out of his door, and look all up the lane. For Sunbury people, as long as I have known them, take a deep interest in one another’s doings; and all the more so, when they happen to perceive that their sympathy is not requested. Wherefore I hurried back to ask another question, as if there were nothing in my mind but meat, and then turned up an alley, which would lead me round the back of some houses to the Halliford Road further on.

There were many things now that I might have done, more sensible haply than what I did. I might have gone home, and had bread and cheese, and a glass of mild ale with Uncle Corny; or if that had seemed a little too ignoble, why not wander along the upper road, and thence survey, as from a terrace – which used to be the origin of the word “contemplate” – the many distant mazes of the flooded river, the trees along the margin bowing over their foundations, the weak smile of autumnal sunshine over the wrongs of its own neglect, and perhaps in the foreground a slender figure, standing as if it were nothing in the mass?

However, what I did was to go straight on towards the one in the world who was all the world to me. By what process of reason, or unreason, or pure stupid heart, I was come in such haste to this state of mind, is more than I can explain to any, and I did not even try to explain it to myself. There was my condition, right or wrong; and those who cannot understand it may be proud of their cool wisdom; and I without harm may be sorry for them.

She wore a grey cloak looking wonderfully simple, yet gathered in small at her beautiful waist, and trimmed at the skirts, and over two little pockets, with a soft blue fur called Vicunha. And she carried a little muff of the same material, and the strings of her hat (which was like a sea-shell) were also of a blue tint very sweetly matching. But the blue that was sweetest and richest of all was that of her large, soft, loving eyes, than which it is impossible for any poet to imagine anything in heaven more lovely.

However, I shall not go on any more about her, though things may slip out unawares; and without being rude, I may say plainly, that I have a right to keep such matters to myself. For a short time, I was at a loss for the commonest presence of mind, and stood wondering; hoping that she would turn round, and yet fearing that she might think I had no business there. Her whole attention was taken up, as I knew by her attitude – for already I seemed to have a gift of understanding her – not with any thought of people near her, but with the grandeur of the rolling flood, and the breadth of quiet lake beyond it. She was saying to herself – so far as I could tell – “What is the use of such a little dot as I am, and what is the value of my little troubles, when the mighty world goes on like this, and all I can do would not make a wrinkle and scarcely a flutter on the vast expanse?”

Then suddenly, an if in dread of her own thoughts, she turned round and saw me within a landyard of her. As if she had been taken in a rosy fog – for we are all ashamed of large thoughts, when caught in them – she coloured to the tint of one of Uncle Corny’s peaches, though without any of the spots he was so proud of; and then she drew one hand from her blue muff, and I found it so soft and warm and precious, that I almost forgot to let it go again.

“Oh, how I am surprised to see you here!” she said, as if my general place of residence was the moon; and probably I looked as if it should be so.

“And I am even more amazed to see you here,” I answered without any of my wits to help me, “but I came to do a little bit of business with the butcher. He has been doing things he had no right to do.”

“I have often been told that they are inclined to take advantage,” she replied, with a look which convinced me at once that she would make a first-rate housekeeper, for what butcher could resist it? “My dear father would have much trouble with them, if, if – I mean if he were at all allowed to have it. But he is always so full of great things.”

“Oh, what a happy man he must be! I have heard that he is the most clever, and learned, and one of the most celebrated men in London.”

I may not have heard all that, but still I was perfectly justified in saying it, for it made her talk; and every time she spoke, her voice sounded sweeter than it did the time before.

“You have been told the truth; it is acknowledged universally,” she went on as if there were no fame to equal his, and with a sparkle in her blue eyes, as if a star had flashed in heaven; “there seems to be nothing that he does not know, and nothing that he does not improve by his knowledge, and make useful for – I mean for the world at large. How I can be his child, and yet so stupid and slow-witted, is a thing that amazes me, and I am trying always not to think of it.”

“I am sure you are not stupid. I am sure you are very quick-witted. I never saw any one half so clever, and accomplished, and ladylike, and gentle, and” – “lovely” was the word I was about to use; but she stopped me, with a smile that would have stopped a rushing bull.