Free My Lady Ludlow by Elizabeth Gaskell Page A

Hemming's face, as he tried to
swallow the first morsel, and make believe as though he thought it very
good; but I could not look again, for shame, although my grandfather
laughed, and kept asking us all round if we knew what could have become
of the parson's appetite."
    "And did he finish it?" I asked.
    "O yes, my dear. What my grandfather said was to be done, was done
always. He was a terrible man in his anger! But to think of the
difference between Parson Hemming and Mr. Gray! or even of poor dear Mr.
Mountford and Mr. Gray. Mr. Mountford would never have withstood me as
Mr. Gray did!"
    "And your ladyship really thinks that it would not be right to have a
Sunday-school?" I asked, feeling very timid as I put time question.
    "Certainly not. As I told Mr. Gray. I consider a knowledge of the
Creed, and of the Lord's Prayer, as essential to salvation; and that any
child may have, whose parents bring it regularly to church. Then there
are the Ten Commandments, which teach simple duties in the plainest
language. Of course, if a lad is taught to read and write (as that
unfortunate boy has been who was here this morning) his duties become
complicated, and his temptations much greater, while, at the same time,
he has no hereditary principles and honourable training to serve as
safeguards. I might take up my old simile of the race-horse and cart-
horse. I am distressed," continued she, with a break in her ideas,
"about that boy. The whole thing reminds me so much of a story of what
happened to a friend of mine—Clement de Crequy. Did I ever tell you
about him?"
    "No, your ladyship," I replied.
    "Poor Clement! More than twenty years ago, Lord Ludlow and I spent a
winter in Paris. He had many friends there; perhaps not very good or
very wise men, but he was so kind that he liked every one, and every one
liked him. We had an apartment, as they call it there, in the Rue de
Lille; we had the first-floor of a grand hotel, with the basement for our
servants. On the floor above us the owner of the house lived, a Marquise
de Crequy, a widow. They tell me that the Crequy coat-of-arms is still
emblazoned, after all these terrible years, on a shield above the arched
porte-cochere, just as it was then, though the family is quite extinct.
Madame de Crequy had only one son, Clement, who was just the same age as
my Urian—you may see his portrait in the great hall—Urian's, I mean." I
knew that Master Urian had been drowned at sea; and often had I looked at
the presentment of his bonny hopeful face, in his sailor's dress, with
right hand outstretched to a ship on the sea in the distance, as if he
had just said, "Look at her! all her sails are set, and I'm just off."
Poor Master Urian! he went down in this very ship not a year after the
picture was taken! But now I will go back to my lady's story. "I can
see those two boys playing now," continued she, softly, shutting her
eyes, as if the better to call up the vision, "as they used to do five-
and-twenty years ago in those old-fashioned French gardens behind our
hotel. Many a time have I watched them from my windows. It was,
perhaps, a better play-place than an English garden would have been, for
there were but few flower-beds, and no lawn at all to speak about; but,
instead, terraces and balustrades and vases and flights of stone steps
more in the Italian style; and there were jets-d'eau, and little
fountains that could be set playing by turning water-cocks that were
hidden here and there. How Clement delighted in turning the water on to
surprise Urian, and how gracefully he did the honours, as it were, to my
dear, rough, sailor lad! Urian was as dark as a gipsy boy, and cared
little for his appearance, and resisted all my efforts at setting off his
black eyes and tangled curls; but Clement, without ever showing that he
thought about himself and his dress, was always dainty and elegant, even
though his clothes were sometimes but threadbare. He used to be dressed
in a kind of hunter's green suit,