Wives and Daughters | Page 2

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 railways, and it was well
for a place where the powerful family, who thus overshadowed it, were
of so respectable a character as the Cumnors. They expected to be
submitted to, and obeyed; the simple worship of the townspeople was
accepted by the earl and countess as a right; and they would have stood
still in amazement, and with a horrid memory of the French
sansculottes who were the bugbears of their youth, had any inhabitant
of Hollingford ventured to set his will or opinions in opposition to
those of the earl. But, yielded all that obeisance, they did a good deal
for the town, and were generally condescending, and often thoughtful
and kind in their treatment of their vassals. Lord Cumnor was a
forbearing landlord; putting his steward a little on one side sometimes,
and taking the reins into his own hands now and then, much to the
annoyance of the agent, who was, in fact, too rich and independent to
care greatly for preserving a post where his decisions might any day be
overturned by my lord's taking a fancy to go 'pottering' (as the agent
irreverently expressed it in the sanctuary of his own home), which,
being interpreted, meant that occasionally the earl asked his own
questions of his own tenants, and used his own eyes and ears in the

management of the smaller details of his property. But his tenants liked
my lord all the better for this habit of his. Lord Cumnor had certainly a
little time for gossip, which he contrived to combine with the failing of
personal intervention between the old land-steward and the tenantry.
But, then, the countess made up by her unapproachable dignity for this
weakness of the earl's. Once a year she was condescending. She and the
ladies, her daughters, had set up a school; not a school after the manner
of schools now-a-days, where far better intellectual teaching is given to
the boys and girls of labourers and workpeople than often falls to the
lot of their betters in worldly estate; but a school of the kind we should
call 'industrial', where girls are taught to sew beautifully, to be capital
housemaids, and pretty fair cooks, and, above all, to dress neatly in a
kind of charity uniform devised by the ladies of Cumnor
Towers;--white caps, white tippets, check aprons, blue gowns, and
ready curtseys, and 'please, ma'ams', being de rigueur.
Now, as the countess was absent from the Towers for a considerable
part of the year, she was glad to enlist the sympathy of the Hollingford
ladies in this school, with a view to obtaining their aid as visitors
during the many months that she and her daughters were away. And the
various unoccupied gentlewomen of the town responded to the call of
their liege lady, and gave her their service as required; and along with it,
a great deal of whispered and fussy admiration. 'How good of the
countess! So like the dear countess--always thinking of others!' and so
on; while it was always supposed