Cranford

Blind Man’s Holiday

One particular evening, the candle economy exasperates the narrator, who has grown weary of her compulsory “blind man’s holiday,” especially as Miss Matty has dozed off by the fire and she dares not stir it for fear of waking her. Miss Matty, asleep, murmurs names of people long dead, as if dreaming of her youth. When Martha brings in the lighted candle and tea, Miss Matty starts into wakefulness with a bewildered look, briefly wears a sad expression on recognizing the narrator, and then recovers her usual smile. Over tea her conversation drifts to her childhood, and from there to the long-deferred task of sorting through the family letters.

Fetching the Old Letters

Moved by her mood, Miss Matty rises after tea and goes for the old letters—in the dark, since she prides herself on the precise neatness of her rooms and frowns on lighting a bed-candle to fetch anything from another chamber. When she returns, the room carries a faint, pleasant smell of Tonquin beans, a scent the narrator always associates with things that belonged to Miss Matty’s mother. The bundle is made up of yellow love-letters sixty or seventy years old, addressed to the mother, and Miss Matty undoes it with a sigh she immediately stifles, as if it were wrong to regret the passing of time or life.

Reading the Old Letters

The two women agree to look through the letters separately, each drawing one from the same bundle and describing its contents before destroying it. The narrator discovers for the first time what melancholy work reading old letters can be, even happy ones: the letters pulse with such a vivid sense of the present that the warm, living hearts behind them seem immortal, which makes their passing all the sadder. Miss Matty’s tears slip down the well-worn furrows of her cheeks and her spectacles need frequent wiping, but even through her tears she still watches the candle and remembers her economy, refusing to light the second one even when the faded ink is hard to read.