"ElizabethGaskell-ThePoorClare" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gaskell Elizabeth C)

THE POOR CLARE

by Elizabeth Gaskell




CHAPTER I.



December 12th, 1747.--My life has been strangely bound up with
extraordinary incidents, some of which occurred before I had any
connection with the principal actors in them, or indeed, before I
even knew of their existence. I suppose, most old men are, like me,
more given to looking back upon their own career with a kind of fond
interest and affectionate remembrance, than to watching the events--
though these may have far more interest for the multitude--
immediately passing before their eyes. If this should be the case
with the generality of old people, how much more so with me! . . . If
I am to enter upon that strange story connected with poor Lucy, I
must begin a long way back. I myself only came to the knowledge of
her family history after I knew her; but, to make the tale clear to
any one else, I must arrange events in the order in which they
occurred--not that in which I became acquainted with them.

There is a great old hall in the north-east of Lancashire, in a part
they called the Trough of Bolland, adjoining that other district
named Craven. Starkey Manor-house is rather like a number of rooms
clustered round a gray, massive, old keep than a regularly-built
hall. Indeed, I suppose that the house only consisted of a great
tower in the centre, in the days when the Scots made their raids
terrible as far south as this; and that after the Stuarts came in,
and there was a little more security of property in those parts, the
Starkeys of that time added the lower building, which runs, two
stories high, all round the base of the keep. There has been a grand
garden laid out in my days, on the southern slope near the house; but
when I first knew the place, the kitchen-garden at the farm was the
only piece of cultivated ground belonging to it. The deer used to
come within sight of the drawing-room windows, and might have browsed
quite close up to the house if they had not been too wild and shy.
Starkey Manor-house itself stood on a projection or peninsula of high
land, jutting out from the abrupt hills that form the sides of the
Trough of Bolland. These hills were rocky and bleak enough towards
their summit; lower down they were clothed with tangled copsewood and
green depths of fern, out of which a gray giant of an ancient forest-
tree would tower here and there, throwing up its ghastly white
branches, as if in imprecation, to the sky. These trees, they told
me, were the remnants of that forest which existed in the days of the
Heptarchy, and were even then noted as landmarks. No wonder that