He Knew He Was Right by Anthony Trollope (ebook reader with internet browser txt) 📖

CHAPTER VII

MISS JEMIMA STANBURY, OF EXETER

 

Miss Jemima Stanbury, the aunt of our friend Hugh, was a maiden

lady, very much respected, indeed, in the city of Exeter. It is to

be hoped that no readers of these pages will be so un-English as

to be unable to appreciate the difference between county society

and town society, the society, that is, of a provincial town,

or so ignorant as not to know also that there may be persons so

privileged, that although they live distinctly within a provincial

town, there is accorded to them, as though by brevet rank, all the

merit of living in the county. In reference to persons so privileged,

it is considered that they have been made free from the contamination

of contiguous bricks and mortar by certain inner gifts, probably of

birth, occasionally of profession, possibly of merit. It is very

rarely, indeed, that money alone will bestow this acknowledged

rank; and in Exeter, which by the stringency and excellence of its

well-defined rules on such matters, may perhaps be said to take

the lead of all English provincial towns, money alone has never

availed. Good blood, especially if it be blood good in Devonshire,

is rarely rejected. Clergymen are allowed within the pale though

by no means as certainly as used to be the case; and, indeed, in

these days of literates, clergymen have to pass harder examinations

than those ever imposed upon them by bishops’ chaplains, before

they are admitted ad eundem among the chosen ones of the city of

Exeter. The wives and daughters of the old prebendaries see well to

that. And, as has been said, special merit may prevail. Sir Peter

Mancrudy, the great Exeter physician, has won his way in, not

at all by being Sir Peter, which has stood in his way rather than

otherwise, but by the acknowledged excellence of his book about

saltzes. Sir Peter Mancrudy is supposed to have quite a metropolitan,

almost a European reputation and therefore is acknowledged to belong

to the county set, although he never dines out at any house beyond

the limits of the city. Now, let it be known that no inhabitant of

Exeter ever achieved a clearer right to be regarded as ‘county,’

in opposition to ‘town,’ than had Miss Jemima Stanbury. There was

not a tradesman in Exeter who was not aware of it, and who did

not touch his hat to her accordingly. The men who drove the flies,

when summoned to take her out at night, would bring oats with them,

knowing how probable it was that they might have to travel far.

A distinct apology was made if she was asked to drink tea with

people who were simply ‘town’. The Noels of Doddescombe Leigh, the

Cliffords of Budleigh Salterton, the Powels of Haldon, the Cheritons

of Alphington—all county persons, but very frequently in the

city—were greeted by her, and greeted her, on terms of equality.

Her most intimate friend was old Mrs MacHugh, the widow of the

last dean but two, who could not have stood higher had she been

the widow of the last bishop. And then, although Miss Stanbury

was intimate with the Frenches of Heavitree, with the Wrights of

Northernhay, with the Apjohns of Helion Villa, a really magnificent

house, two miles out of the city on the Crediton Road, and with

the Crumbies of Cronstadt House, Saint Ide’s, who would have been

county people, if living in the country made the difference, although

she was intimate with all these families, her manner to them was

not the same, nor was it expected to be the same, as with those of

her own acknowledged set. These things are understood in Exeter so

well!

 

Miss Stanbury belonged to the county set, but she lived in a large

brick house, standing in the Close, almost behind the Cathedral.

Indeed it was so close to the eastern end of the edifice that a

carriage could not be brought quite up to her door. It was a large

brick house, very old, with a door in the middle, and five steps

ascending to it between high iron rails. On each side of the door

there were two windows on the ground floor, and above that there

were three tiers of five windows each, and the house was double

throughout, having as many windows looking out behind into a gloomy

courtyard. But the glory of the house consisted in this, that there

was a garden attached to it, a garden with very high walls, over

which the boughs of trees might be seen, giving to the otherwise

gloomy abode a touch of freshness in the summer, and a look of space

in the winter, which no doubt added something to the reputation

even of Miss Stanbury. The fact for it was a fact that there was

no gloomier or less attractive spot in the whole city than Miss

Stanbury’s garden, when seen inside, did not militate against this

advantage. There were but half-a-dozen trees, and a few square

yards of grass that was never green, and a damp ungravelled path on

which no one ever walked. Seen from the inside the garden was not

much; but, from the outside, it gave a distinct character to the

house, and produced an unexpressed acknowledgment that the owner

of it ought to belong to the county set.

 

The house and all that was in it belonged to Miss Stanbury herself,

as did also many other houses in the neighbourhood. She was the

owner of the ‘Cock and Bottle,’ a very decent second class inn

on the other side of the Close, an inn supposed to have clerical

tendencies, which made it quite suitable for a close. The choristers

took their beer there, and the landlord was a retired verger. Nearly

the whole of one side of a dark passage leading out of the Close

towards the High Street belonged to her; and though the passage be

narrow and the houses dark, the locality is known to be good for

trade. And she owned two large houses in the High Street, and a

great warehouse at St. Thomas’s, and had been bought out of land

by the Railway at St. David’s much to her own dissatisfaction, as

she was wont to express herself, but, undoubtedly, at a very high

price. It will be understood therefore, that Miss Stanbury was

wealthy, and that she was bound to the city in which she lived by

peculiar ties.

 

But Miss Stanbury had not been born to this wealth, nor can she

be said to have inherited from her forefathers any of these high

privileges which had been awarded to her. She had achieved them

by the romance of her life and the manner in which she had carried

herself amidst its vicissitudes. Her father had been vicar of

Nuncombe Putney, a parish lying twenty miles west of Exeter, among

the moors. And on her father’s death, her brother, also now dead,

had become vicar of the same parish—her brother, whose only son,

Hugh. Stanbury, we already know, working for the ‘D. R.’ up in

London. When Miss Stanbury was twenty-one she became engaged to

a certain Mr Brooke Burgess, the eldest son of a banker in Exeter

or, it might, perhaps, be better said, a banker himself; for at the

time Mr Brooke Burgess was in the firm. It need not here be told

how various misfortunes arose, how Mr Burgess quarrelled with the

Stanbury family, how Jemima quarrelled with her own family, how,

when her father died, she went out from Nuncombe Putney parsonage,

and lived on the smallest pittance in a city lodging, how her lover

was untrue to her and did not marry her, and how at last he died

and left her every shilling that he possessed.

 

The Devonshire people, at the time, had been much divided as to

the merits of the Stanbury quarrel. There were many who said that

the brother could not have acted otherwise than he did; and that Miss

Stanbury, though by force of character and force of circumstances

she had weathered the storm, had in truth been very indiscreet.

The results, however, were as have been described. At the period

of which we treat, Miss Stanbury was a very rich lady, living by

herself in Exeter, admitted, without question, to be one of the

county set, and still at variance with her brother’s family. Except

to Hugh, she had never spoken a word to one of them since her

brother’s death. When the money came into her hands, she at that

time being over forty, and her nephew being then just ten years old,

she had undertaken to educate him, and to start him in the world.

We know how she had kept her word, and how and why she had withdrawn

herself from any further responsibility in the matter.

 

And in regard to this business of starting the young man she had

been careful to let it be known that she would do no more than start

him. In the formal document, by means of which she had made the

proposal to her brother, she had been careful to let it be understood

that simple education was all that she intended to bestow upon him

‘and that only,’ she had added, ‘in the event of my surviving till

his education be completed.’ And to Hugh himself she had declared

that any allowance which she made him after he was called to

the Bar, was only made in order to give him room for his foot, a

spot of ground from whence to make his first leap. We know how he

made that leap, infinitely to the disgust of his aunt, who, when

he refused obedience to her in the matter of withdrawing from the

Daily Record, immediately withdrew from him, not only her patronage

and assistance, but even her friendship and acquaintance. This was

the letter which she wrote to him:

 

‘I don’t think that writing radical stuff for a penny newspaper is

a respectable occupation for a gentleman, and I will have nothing

to do with it. If you choose to do such work, I cannot help it;

but it was not for such that I sent you to Harrow and Oxford, nor

yet up to London and paid 100 pounds a year to Mr Lambert. I think

you are treating me badly, but that is nothing to your bad treatment

of yourself. You need not trouble yourself to answer this, unless

you are prepared to say that you will not write any more stuff for

that penny newspaper. Only I wish to be understood. I will have

no connection that I can help, and no acquaintance at all, with

radical scribblers and incendiaries.

 

JEMIMA STANBURY. The Close, Exeter, April 15, 186 .’

 

Hugh Stanbury had answered this; thanking his aunt for past favours,

and explaining to her or striving to do so that he felt it to be

his duty to earn his bread, as a means of earning it had come within

his reach. He might as well have spared himself the trouble. She

simply wrote a few words across his own letter in red ink: ‘The

bread of unworthiness should never be earned or eaten;’ and