“And how has little Eleanor enjoyed herself?” asked Mr. Ormerod, in rather a deep voice, stepping into the room and with a slight air of heat and of fatigue upon his face.
“Papa,” said Eleanor almost interrupting her father in her eagerness to impart her observations, “I saw one of the grubs fall down and the rest came and ate him!”
“Nonsense, Eleanor,” said Mr. Ormerod. “You are not telling the truth.” He looked severely at the tumbler in which the beetles were still gyrating as before.
“Papa, it was true!”
“Eleanor, little girls are not allowed to contradict their fathers,” said Mrs. Ormerod, coming in through the window, and closing her green parasol with a snap.
“Let this be a lesson,” Mr. Ormerod began, signing to the other children to approach, when the door opened, and the servant announced,
“Captain Fenton.”
Captain Fenton “was at times thought to be tedious in his recurrence to the charge of the Scots Greys in which he had served at the battle of Waterloo.”
But what is this crowd gathered around the door of the George Hotel in Chepstow? A faint cheer rises from the bottom of the hill. Up comes the mail coach, horses steaming, panels mud-splashed. “Make way! Make way!” cries the ostler and the vehicle dashed into the courtyard, pulls up sharp before the door. Down jumps the coachman, the horses are led off, and a fine team of spanking greys is harnessed with incredible speed in their stead. Upon all this – the crowd looked with gaping admiration every Wednesday evening all through the year. But to-day, the twelfth of March, 1852, as the coachman settled his rug, and stretched his hands for the reins, he observed that instead of being fixed upon him, the eyes of the people of Chepstow darted this way and that. Heads were jerked. Arms flung out. Here a hat swooped in a semi-circle. Off drove the coach almost unnoticed. As it turned the corner all the outside passengers craned their necks, and one gentleman rose to his feet and shouted, “There! there! there!” before he was bowled into eternity. It was an insect – a red-winged insect. Out the people of Chepstow poured into the high road; down the hill they ran; always the insect flew in front of them; at length by Chepstow Bridge a young man, throwing his bandanna over the blade of an oar, captured it alive and presented it to a highly respectable elderly gentleman who now came puffing upon the scene – Samuel Budge, doctor, of Chepstow. By Samuel Budge it was presented to Miss Ormerod; by her sent to a professor at Oxford. And he, declaring it “a fine specimen of the rose underwinged locust” added the gratifying information that it “was the first of the kind to be captured so far west.”
And so, at the age of twenty-four Miss Eleanor Ormerod was thought the proper person to receive the gift of a locust.
When Eleanor Ormered appeared at archery meetings and croquet tournaments young men pulled their whiskers and young ladies looked grave. It was so difficult to make friends with a girl who could talk of nothing but black beetles and earwigs – “Yes, that’s what she likes, isn’t it queer? – Why, the other day Ellen, Mama’s maid, heard from Jane, who’s under-kitchenmaid at Sedbury House, that Eleanor tried to boil a beetle in the kitchen saucepan and he wouldn’t die, and swam round and round, and she got into a terrible state and sent the groom all the way to Gloucester to fetch chloroform – all for an insect my dear! – and she gives the cottagers shillings to collect beetles for her – and she spends hours in her bedroom cutting them up – and she climbs trees like a boy to find wasps” nests – oh, you can’t think what they don’t say about her in the village – for she does look so odd, dressed anyhow, with that great big nose and those bright little eyes, so like a caterpillar herself, I always think – but of course she’s wonderfully clever and very good, too, both of them. Georgiana has a lending library for the cottagers, and Eleanor never misses a service – but there she is – that short pale girl in the large bonnet. Do go and talk to her, for I’m sure I’m too stupid, but you’d find plenty to say – “But neither Fred nor Arthur, Henry nor William found anything to say –
“… probably the lecturer would have been equally well pleased had none of her own sex put in an appearance.”
This comment upon a lecture delivered in the year 1889 throws some light, perhaps, upon archery meetings in the ’fifties.
It being nine o’clock on a February night some time about 1862 all the Ormerods were in the library; Mr. Ormerod making architectural designs at a table; Mrs. Ormerod lying on a sofa making pencil drawings upon grey paper; Eleanor making a model of a snake to serve as a paper weight; Georgiana making a copy of the font in Tidenham Church; some of the others examining books with beautiful illustrations; while at intervals someone rose, unlocked the wire book case, took down a volume for instruction or entertainment, and perused it beneath the chandelier.
Mr. Ormerod required complete silence for his studies. His word was law, even to the dogs, who, in the absence of their master, instinctively obeyed the eldest male person in the room. Some whispered colloquy their might be between Mrs. Ormerod and her daughters –
“The draught under the pew was really worse than ever this morning, Mama –
“And we could only unfasten the latch in the chancel because Eleanor happened to have her ruler with her –”
“– hm – m – m. Dr Armstrong – Hm – m – m –”
“– Anyhow things aren’t as bad with us as they are at Kinghampton. They say Mrs. Briscoe’s Newfoundland dog follows her right up to the chancel rails when she takes the sacrament –”
“And the turkey is still sitting on its eggs in pulpit.”
“The period of incubation for a turkey is between three and four weeks” – said Eleanor thoughtfully looking up from her cast of the snake and forgetting, in the interest of her subject, to speak in a whisper.