Castle Rackrent | Page 6

I remembered that in Miss Edgeworth's
MEMOIRS it was described how the snow lay upon the ground and
upon the land, when the family came home in June to take possession
of Edgeworthstown.
As I put out my candle in the spacious guest-chamber I wondered
which of its past inhabitants I should wish to see standing in the middle
of the room. I must confess that the thought of the beautiful Honora
filled me with alarm, and if Miss Seward had walked in in her pearls
and satin robe I should have fled for my life. As I lay there
experimentalising upon my own emotions I found that after all, natural
simple people do not frighten one whether dead or alive. The thought

of them is ever welcome; it is the artificial people who are sometimes
one thing, sometimes another, and who form themselves on the
weaknesses and fancies of those among whom they live, who are really
terrifying.
The shadow of the bird's wing flitted across the window of my
bedroom, and the sun was shining next morning when I awoke. I could
see the cows, foot deep in the grass under the hawthorns. After
breakfast we went out into the grounds and through an arched doorway
into the kitchen garden. It might have been some corner of Italy or the
South of France; the square tower of the granary rose high against the
blue, the gray walls were hung with messy fruit trees, pigeons were
darting and flapping their wings, gardeners were at work, the very
vegetables were growing luxuriant and romantic and edged by thick
borders of violet pansy; crossing the courtyard, we came into the
village street, also orderly and white-washed. The soft limpid air made
all things into pictures, into Turners, into Titians. A Murillo-like boy,
with dark eyes, was leaning against a wall, with his shadow, watching
us go by; strange old women, with draperies round their heads, were
coming out of their houses. We passed the Post- Office, the village
shops, with their names, the Monaghans and Gerahtys, such as we find
again in Miss Edgeworth's novels. We heard the local politics discussed
over the counter with a certain aptness and directness which struck me
very much. We passed the boarding-house, which was not without its
history--a long low building erected by Mr. and Miss Edgeworth for a
school, where the Sandfords and Mertons of those days were to be
brought up together: a sort of foreshadowing of the High Schools of the
present. Mr. Edgeworth was, as we know, the very spirit of progress,
though his experiment did not answer at the time. At the end of the
village street, where two roads divide, we noticed a gap in the decent
roadway--a pile of ruins in a garden. A tumble-down cottage, and
beyond the cottage, a falling shed, on the thatched roof of which a hen
was clucking and scraping. These cottages Mr. Edgeworth had, after
long difficulty, bought up and condemned as unfit for human habitation.
The plans had been considered, the orders given to build new cottages
in their place, which were to be let to the old tenants at the old rent, but
the last remaining inhabitant absolutely refused to leave; we saw an old

woman in a hood slowly crossing the road, and carrying a pail for water;
no threats or inducements would move her, not even the sight of a neat
little house, white-washed and painted, and all ready for her to step into.
Her present rent was 10d. a week, Mr. Edgeworth told me, and she had
been letting the tumble- down shed to a large family for 1s. 4d. This
sub-let was forcibly put an end to, but the landlady still stops there, and
there she will stay until the roof tumbles down upon her head. The old
creature passed on through the sunshine, a decrepit, picturesque figure
carrying her pail to the stream, defying all the laws of progress and
political economy and civilisation in her feebleness and determination.
Most of the women came to their doors to see us go by. They all looked
as old as the hills--some dropt curtseys, others threw up their arms in
benediction. From a cottage farther up the road issued a strange, shy
old creature, looking like a bundle of hay, walking on bare legs. She
came up with a pinch of snuff, and a shake of the hand; she was of the
family of the man who had once saved Edgeworthstown from being
destroyed by the rebels. 'Sure it was not her father,' said old Peggy,' it
was her grandfather did it!' So she explained, but it was hard to believe
that such an old, old creature had ever had a grandfather in the memory
of man.
The