My Lady Ludlow by Elizabeth Gaskell Read Free Book Online

hopeless of cure, and feeling that one must
be a burden to some one all one's life long, would be to an active,
wilful, strong girl of seventeen, anxious to get on in the world, so as,
if possible, to help her brothers and sisters. So I shall only say, that
one among the blessings which arose out of what seemed at the time a
great, black sorrow was, that Lady Ludlow for many years took me, as it
were, into her own especial charge; and now, as I lie still and alone in
my old age, it is such a pleasure to think of her!
    Mrs. Medlicott was great as a nurse, and I am sure I can never be
grateful enough to her memory for all her kindness. But she was puzzled
to know how to manage me in other ways. I used to have long, hard fits
of crying; and, thinking that I ought to go home—and yet what could they
do with me there?—and a hundred and fifty other anxious thoughts, some
of which I could tell to Mrs. Medlicott, and others I could not. Her way
of comforting me was hurrying away for some kind of tempting or
strengthening food—a basin of melted calves-foot jelly was, I am sure
she thought, a cure for every woe.
    "There take it, dear, take it!" she would say; "and don't go on fretting
for what can't be helped."
    But, I think, she got puzzled at length at the non-efficacy of good
things to eat; and one day, after I had limped down to see the doctor, in
Mrs. Medlicott's sitting-room—a room lined with cupboards, containing
preserves and dainties of all kinds, which she perpetually made, and
never touched herself—when I was returning to my bed-room to cry away
the afternoon, under pretence of arranging my clothes, John Footman
brought me a message from my lady (with whom the doctor had been having a
conversation) to bid me go to her in that private sitting-room at the end
of the suite of apartments, about which I spoke in describing the day of
my first arrival at Hanbury. I had hardly been in it since; as, when we
read to my lady, she generally sat in the small withdrawing-room out of
which this private room of hers opened. I suppose great people do not
require what we smaller people value so much,—I mean privacy. I do not
think that there was a room which my lady occupied that had not two
doors, and some of them had three or four. Then my lady had always Adams
waiting upon her in her bed-chamber; and it was Mrs. Medlicott's duty to
sit within call, as it were, in a sort of anteroom that led out of my
lady's own sitting-room, on the opposite side to the drawing-room door.
To fancy the house, you must take a great square and halve it by a line:
at one end of this line was the hall-door, or public entrance; at the
opposite the private entrance from a terrace, which was terminated at one
end by a sort of postern door in an old gray stone wall, beyond which lay
the farm buildings and offices; so that people could come in this way to
my lady on business, while, if she were going into the garden from her
own room, she had nothing to do but to pass through Mrs. Medlicott's
apartment, out into the lesser hall, and then turning to the right as she
passed on to the terrace, she could go down the flight of broad, shallow
steps at the corner of the house into the lovely garden, with stretching,
sweeping lawns, and gay flower-beds, and beautiful, bossy laurels, and
other blooming or massy shrubs, with full-grown beeches, or larches
feathering down to the ground a little farther off. The whole was set in
a frame, as it were, by the more distant woodlands. The house had been
modernized in the days of Queen Anne, I think; but the money had fallen
short that was requisite to carry out all the improvements, so it was
only the suite of withdrawing-rooms and the terrace-rooms, as far as the
private entrance, that had the new, long, high windows put in, and these
were old enough by this time to be draped with roses, and honeysuckles,
and pyracanthus, winter and summer long.
    Well, to go back to that day when I limped into my lady's