The Reflections of Ambrosine: Chapter 1

Chapter 1

I have wondered sometimes if there are not perhaps some disadvantages
in having really blue blood in one's veins, like grandmamma and me.
For instance, if we were ordinary, common people our teeth would
chatter naturally with cold when we have to go to bed without fires in
our rooms in December; but we pretend we like sleeping in "well-aired
rooms"--at least I have to. Grandmamma simply says we are obliged to
make these small economies, and to grumble would be to lose a trick
to fate.

"Rebel if you can improve matters," she often tells me, "but otherwise
accept them with calmness."

We have had to accept a good many things with calmness since papa made
that tiresome speculation in South America. Before that we had a nice
apartment in Paris and as many fires as we wished. However, in spite
of the comfort, grandmamma hated papa's "making" money. It was not the
career of a gentleman, she said, and when the smash came and one heard
no more of papa, I have an idea she was almost relieved.

We came first over to England, and, after long wanderings backward and
forward, took this little furnished place at the corner of Ledstone
Park. It is just a cottage--once a keeper's, I believe--and we have
only Hephzibah and a wretched servant-girl to wait on us. Hephzibah
was my nurse in America before we ever went to Paris, and she is as
ugly as a card-board face on Guy Fawkes day, and as good as gold.

Grandmamma has had a worrying life. She was brought up at the court of
Charles X.--can one believe it, all those years ago!--her family up
to that having lived in Ireland since the great Revolution. Indeed,
her mother was Irish, and I think grandmamma still speaks French with
an accent. (I hope she will never know I said that.) Her name was
Mademoiselle de Calincourt, the daughter of the Marquis de Calincourt,
whose family had owned Calincourt since the time of Charlemagne
or something before that. So it was annoying for them to have had
their heads chopped off and to be obliged to live in Dublin on
nothing a year. The grandmother of grandmamma, Ambrosine Eustasie
de Calincourt, after whom I am called, was a famous character. She
was so good-looking that Robespierre offered to let her retain her
head if she would give him a kiss, but she preferred to drive to the
guillotine in the cart with her friends, only she took a rose to keep
off the smell of the common people, and, they say, ran up the steps
smiling. Grandmamma has her miniature, and it is, she says, exactly
like me.

I have heard that grandmamma's marriage with grandpapa--an
Englishman--was considered at the time to be a very suitable affair.
He had also ancestors since before Edward the Confessor. However,
unfortunately, a few years after their marriage (grandmamma was
really _un peu pass�e_ when that took place) grandpapa made a
_b�tise_--something political or diplomatic, but I have never heard
exactly what; anyway, it obliged them to leave hurriedly and go to
America. Grandmamma never speaks of her life there or of grandpapa,
so I suppose he died, because when I first remember things we were
crossing to France in a big ship--just papa, grandmamma, and I. My
mother died when I was born. She was an American of one of the first
original families in Virginia; that is all I know of her. We have
never had a great many friends--even when we lived in Paris--because,
you see, as a rule people don't live so long as grandmamma, and the
other maids of honor of the court of Charles X. were all buried years
ago. Grandmamma was eighty-eight last July! No one would think it to
look at her. She is not deaf or blind or any of those annoying things,
and she sits bolt-upright in her chair, and her face is not very
wrinkled--more like fine, old, white kid. Her hair is arranged with
such a _chic_; it is white, but she always has it a little powdered as
well, and she wears such becoming caps, rather like the pictures of
Madame du Deffand. They are always of real lace--I know, for I have
to mend them. Some of her dresses are a trifle shabby, but they look
splendid when she puts them on, and her eyes are the eyes of a hawk,
the proudest eyes I have ever seen. Her third and little fingers are
bent with rheumatism, but she still polishes her nails and covers the
rest of her hands with mittens. You can't exactly love grandmamma, but
you feel you respect her dreadfully, and it is a great honor when she
is pleased.

I was twelve when we left Paris, and I am nineteen now. We have lived
on and off in England ever since, part of the time in London--that was
dull! All those streets and faces, and no one to speak to, and the mud
and the fogs!

During those years we have only twice had glimpses of papa--the
shortest visits, with long talks alone with grandmamma and generally
leaving by the early train.

He seems to me to be rather American, papa, and very coarse to be
the son of grandmamma; but I must say I have always had a sneaking
affection for him. He never takes much notice of me--a pat on the head
when I was a child, and since an awkward kiss, as if he was afraid of
breaking a bit of china. I feel somehow that he does not share all
of grandmamma's views; he seems, in fact, like a person belonging to
quite another world than ours. If it was not that he has the same nose
and chin as grandmamma, one would say she had bought him somewhere,
and that he could not be her own son.

Hephzibah says he is good-natured, so perhaps that is why he made a
_b�tise_ in South America. One ought never to be called good-natured,
grandmamma says--as well write one's self down a noodle at once. While
we were in Paris we hardly ever saw papa either; he was always out
West in America, or at Rio, or other odd places. All we knew of him
was, there was plenty of money to grandmamma's account in the bank.

Grandmamma has given me most of my education herself since we came to
England, and she has been especially particular about deportment. I
have never been allowed to lean back in my chair or loll on a sofa,
and she has taught me how to go in and out of a room and how to
enter a carriage. We had not a carriage, so we had to arrange with
footstools for the steps and a chair on top of a box for the seat.
That used to make me laugh!--but I had to do it--into myself. As for
walking, I can carry any sized bundle on my head, and grandmamma says
she has nothing further to teach me in that respect, and that I have
mastered the fact that a gentlewoman should give the impression that
the ground is hardly good enough to tread on. She has also made me go
through all kinds of exercises to insure suppleness, and to move
from the hips. And the day she told me she was pleased I shall never
forget.

There are three things, she says, a woman ought to look--straight as
a dart, supple as a snake, and proud as a tiger-lily.

Besides deportment I seem to have learned a lot of stuff that I am
sure no English girls have to bother about, I probably am unacquainted
with half the useful, interesting things they know.

We brought with us a beautifully bound set of French classics, and
we read Voltaire one day, and La Bruy�re the next, and Pascal, and
Fontenelle, and Moli�re, and F�nelon, and the sermons of Bossuet,
and since I have been seventeen the _Maximes_ of La Rochefoucauld.
Grandmamma dislikes Jean Jacques; she says he helped the Revolution,
and she is all for the _ancien r�gime_. But in all these books she
makes me skip what I am sure are the nice parts, and there are whole
volumes of Voltaire that I may not even look into. For herself
grandmamma has numbers of modern books and papers. She says she must
understand the times. Besides all these things I have had English
governesses who have done what they could to drum a smattering of
everything into my head, but we never were able to afford very good
ones after we left Paris.

There is one thing I can do better than the English girls--I am
English myself, of course, on account of grandpapa--only I mean the
ones who have lived here always--and that is, embroider fine cambric.
I do all our underlinen, and it is quite as nice as that in the shops
in the Rue de la Paix. Grandmamma says a lady, however poor, should
wear fine linen, even if she has only one new dress a year--she calls
the stuff worn by people here "sail-cloth"! So I stitch and stitch,
summer and winter.

I do wonder and wonder at things sometimes: what it would be like to
be rich, for instance, and to have brothers and sisters and friends;
and what it would be like to have a lover _� l'anglaise_. Grandmamma
would think that dreadfully improper until after one was married, but
I believe it would be rather nice, and perhaps one could marry him,
too. However, there is not much chance of my getting one, or a husband
either, as I have no _dot_.

We have an old friend, the Marquis de Rochermont, who pays us
periodical visits. I believe long ago he was grandmamma's lover. They
have such beautiful manners together, and their conversation is so
interesting, one can fancy one's self back in that dainty world of
the engravings of Moreau le Jeune and Freudenberg which we have. They
are as gay and witty as if they were both young and his feet were not
lumpy with gout and her hands crooked with rheumatism. They discuss
morals and religion, and, above all, philosophy, and I have learned
a great deal by listening. And for morals, it seems one may do what
one pleases as long as one behaves like a lady. And for religion, the
first thing is to conform to the country one lives in and to conduct
one's self with decency. As for Philosophy (I put a great big "P" to
that, for it appears to be the chief)--Philosophy seems to settle
everything in life, and enables one to take the ups and downs of fate,
the good and the bad, with a smiling face. I mean to study it always,
but I dare say it will be easier when I am older.

On the days when Monsieur de Rochermont comes grandmamma wears the
lavender silk for dinner and the best Alen�on cap, and Hephzibah stays
so long dressing her that I often have to help the servant to lay
the table for dinner. The Marquis never arrives until the afternoon,
and leaves within a couple of days. He brings an old valet called
Theodore, and they have bandboxes and small valises, and I
believe--only I must not say it aloud--that the bandboxes contain his
wigs. The one for dinner is curled and scented, and the travelling one
is much more ordinary. I am sent to bed early on those evenings.

Each time the Marquis brings a present of game or fine fruit for
grandmamma and a box of bonbons for me. I don't like sweets much, but
the boxes are charming. These visits happen twice a year, in June and
December, wherever we happen to be.

The only young men in this part of the world are the curate and two
hobbledehoys, the sons of a person who lives in the place beyond
Ledstone, and they are common and uninteresting and _parvenu_. All
these people came to call as soon as we arrived, and parsons and old
maids by the dozen, but grandmamma's exquisite politeness upsets them.
I suppose they feel that she considers they are not made of the same
flesh and blood as she is, so we never get intimate with anybody
whatever places we are in.

Hephzibah has a lover. You can get one in that class no matter how
ugly you are, it seems, and he is generally years and years younger
than you are. Hephzibah's is the man who comes round with the grocer's
cart for orders, and he is young enough to be her son. I have
seen them talking when I have been getting the irons hot to iron
grandmamma's best lace. Hephzibah's face, which is a grayish yellow
generally, gets a pale beet-root up to her ears, and she looks so coy.
But I dare say it feels lovely to her to stand there at the back door
and know some one is interested in what she does and says.

Ledstone Park is owned by some people of the name of Gurrage--does not
it sound a fat word! They are a mother and son, but they have been
at Bournemouth ever since we came, six months ago. It is a frightful
place, and although it is miles in the country it looks like a
suburban villa; the outside is all stucco, and nasty, common-looking
pots and bad statues ornament the drive. They pulled down the smaller
original Jacobean house that was there when they bought the place, we
have heard. They are coming home soon, so perhaps we shall see them,
but I can't think Gurrage could be the name of really nice people.
The parson, of the church came to call at once, but grandmamma nearly
made him spoil his hat, he fidgeted with it so, and he hardly dared to
ask for more than one subscription--she is so beautifully polite, and
she often is laughing in her sleeve. She says so few people can see
the comic side of things and that it is a great gift and chases away
foolish _migraines_. I think she has a grand scheme in her head for
me, and that is what we are saving up every penny for.

Grandpapa's people lived in the next county to this, in a place
called Dane Mount. He was a younger son and in the diplomatic service
before he made his _b�tise_, but if he was alive now he would be over
a hundred years old, so during that time the family has naturally
branched off a good deal, and we can't be said to be very nearly
related to them. The place was not entailed, and went with the female
line into the Thornhirst family, who live there now. They are rather
new baronets, created by George II. However, I believe grandmamma's
scheme is for us to become acquainted with them, and for me to marry
whichever of them is the right age. The present baronet's name is Sir
Antony; it is a pretty name, I think. How this is to come about I do
not know, and of course I dare not question grandmamma.

How I wish it was summer again! I hate these damp, cold days, and the
east winds, and the darkness. I wish I might stay in bed until eleven,
as grandmamma does. We have our chocolate at seven, which Hephzibah
brings up, and then when I am dressed I practise for an hour; after
that there are the finishing touches to be put to our sitting-room,
and the best S�vres and the miniatures to be dusted. Grandmamma would
not trust any one to do it but me, but by ten I can get out for a
walk.

It used to be dreadfully tiresome until we came here, because I was
never allowed to go out without Hephzibah, and she was so busy we
never got a chance in the morning, but since we came here I have
had such a pleasure. A dear, clever collie for a friend--we got him
from the lost dogs' home, and no one can know the joy he is to me.
Grandmamma considers him a kind of chaperon, and I am allowed to go
alone for quite long walks now, and when we are out of sight and no
one is looking we run, and it is such fun. Yesterday there was an
excitement--the hunt passed! It is the first time I have seen one
close. That must be delightful to rush along on horseback! I could
feel my heart beating just looking at them, and my dear Roy barked all
the time, and if I had not held his collar I am sure he would have
joined the other dogs to go and catch the fox. Some of the men in
their red coats looked so handsome, and there was one all covered with
mud; he must have had a tumble. His stirrup-leather gave way just
as he got up to the mound where Roy and I were standing, and he was
obliged to get off his horse and settle it. I am sure by his face
he was swearing to himself at being delayed. His fall had evidently
broken some strap and he was fumbling in his pocket for a knife to
mend it.

I always wear a little gold chatelaine that belonged to Ambrosine
Eustasie de Calincourt and is marked with her coronet and initials;
it has a tiny knife among the other things hanging from it. The muddy
hunter could not find one; he searched in every pocket. At last he
turned to me and said: "Do you happen to have a knife by chance?" and
then when he saw I was a girl he took off his hat. It was gray with
clay, and so was half of his face, it looked so comic I could not help
smiling as I caught his one eye; the other was rather swollen. The
one that was visible was a grayish-greeny-blue eye with a black edge.
I quickly gave him my knife and he laughed as he took it. "Yes, I do
look a guy, don't I?" he said, and we both laughed again. Even through
the mud one could see he was a gentleman. He fixed his stirrup so
quickly and neatly, but it broke the blade of my little gold knife.

He apologized profusely, and said he must have it mended, and where
should he send it? but at that moment there was the sound of the hunt
coming across a field near again. He had no time for more manners, but
jumped on his horse and was off in a few seconds--and alas! my knife
went with him! And just as I was turning to go home I picked up the
broken blade, which was lying in the road. I hope grandmamma won't
notice it and ask about it. As I said before, there are disadvantages
in being well born--one cannot tell lies like servants.

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