WIVES AND DAUGHTERS

CHAPTER I

THE DAWN OF A GALA DAY


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 'scromfished' (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 landowners
over humbler neighbours in those days before railway