Chantry House
by Charlotte M. Yonge · English · Gutenberg #7378 · 606,878 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Chantry House
Author: Charlotte M. Yonge
Release date: January 1, 2005 [eBook #7378]
Most recently updated: November 14, 2014
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7378
Credits: Transcribed from the 1905 Macmillan and Co. edition by David Price
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CHANTRY HOUSE ***
Transcribed from the 1905 Macmillan and Co. edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org
[Picture: What I do remember, is my mother reading to me as I lay in my
crib. p. 3]
CHANTRY HOUSE
BY
CHARLOTTE M. YONGE
AUTHOR OF ‘THE HEIR OF REDCLYFFE,’ ‘UNKNOWN TO HISTORY,’ ETC.
[Picture: A feeble water-coloured drawing of the trio. p. 2]
ILLUSTRATED BY W. J. HENNESSY
* * * * *
London
MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited
NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1905
_All rights reserved_
* * * * *
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
PAGE
A NURSERY PROSE 1
CHAPTER II.
SCHOOLROOM DAYS 11
CHAPTER III.
WIN AND SLOW 17
CHAPTER IV.
UBI LAPSUS, QUID FECI 25
CHAPTER V.
A HELPING HAND 34
CHAPTER VI.
THE VALLEY OF HUMILIATION 43
CHAPTER VII.
THE INHERITANCE 50
CHAPTER VIII.
THE OLD HOUSE 59
CHAPTER IX.
RATS 67
CHAPTER X.
OUR TUNEFUL CHOIR 73
CHAPTER XI.
‘THEY FORDYS’ 82
CHAPTER XII.
MRS. SOPHIA’S FEUD 89
CHAPTER XIII.
A SCRAPE 96
CHAPTER XIV.
THE MULLION CHAMBER 107
CHAPTER XV.
RATIONAL THEORIES 117
CHAPTER XVI.
CAT LANGUAGE 126
CHAPTER XVII.
THE SIEGE OF HILLSIDE 136
CHAPTER XVIII.
THE PORTRAIT 149
CHAPTER XIX.
THE WHITE FEATHER 159
CHAPTER XX.
VENI, VIDI, VICI 171
CHAPTER XXI.
THE OUTSIDE OF THE COURTSHIP 179
CHAPTER XXII.
BRISTOL DIAMONDS 186
CHAPTER XXIII.
QUICKSANDS 198
CHAPTER XXIV.
AFTER THE TEMPEST 208
CHAPTER XXV.
HOLIDAY-MAKING 217
CHAPTER XXVI.
C. MORBUS, ESQ. 229
CHAPTER XXVII.
PETER’S THUNDERBOLT 236
CHAPTER XXVIII.
A SQUIRE OF DAMES 245
CHAPTER XXIX.
LOVE AND OBEDIENCE 251
CHAPTER XXX.
UNA OR DUESSA 260
CHAPTER XXXI.
FACILIS DESCENSUS 269
CHAPTER XXXII.
WALY, WALY 278
CHAPTER XXXIII.
THE RIVER’S BANK 284
CHAPTER XXXIV.
NOT IN VAIN 293
CHAPTER XXXV.
GRIFF’S BIRD 299
CHAPTER XXXVI.
SLACK WATER 307
CHAPTER XXXVII.
OUTWARD BOUND 316
CHAPTER XXXVIII.
TOO LATE 328
CHAPTER XXXIX.
A PURPOSE 337
CHAPTER XL.
THE MIDNIGHT CHASE 344
CHAPTER XLI.
WILLS OLD AND NEW 350
CHAPTER XLII.
ON A SPREE 357
CHAPTER XLIII.
THE PRICE 364
CHAPTER XLIV.
PAYING THE COST 371
CHAPTER XLV.
ACHIEVED 378
CHAPTER XLVI.
RESTITUTION 385
CHAPTER XLVII.
THE FORDYCE STORY 392
CHAPTER XLVIII.
THE LAST DISCOVERY 399
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
‘What I do remember, is my mother reading to me as _Frontispiece_.
I lay in my crib’
A feeble water-coloured drawing of the trio _Vignette_.
‘That is poor Margaret who married your ancestor’ _Page_ 154
Lady Margaret’s ghost 346
CHAPTER I.
A NURSERY PROSE.
‘And if it be the heart of man
Which our existence measures,
Far longer is our childhood’s span
Than that of manly pleasures.
‘For long each month and year is then,
Their thoughts and days extending,
But months and years pass swift with men
To time’s last goal descending.’
ISAAC WILLIAMS.
THE united force of the younger generation has been brought upon me to
record, with the aid of diaries and letters, the circumstances connected
with Chantry House and my two dear elder brothers. Once this could not
have been done without more pain than I could brook, but the lapse of
time heals wounds, brings compensations, and, when the heart has ceased
from aching and yearning, makes the memory of what once filled it a
treasure to be brought forward with joy and thankfulness. Nor would it
be well that some of those mentioned in the coming narrative should be
wholly forgotten, and their place know them no more.
To explain all, I must go back to a time long before the morning when my
father astonished us all by exclaiming, ‘Poor old James Winslow! So
Chantry House is came to us after all!’ Previous to that event I do not
think we were aware of the existence of that place, far less of its being
a possible inheritance, for my parents would never have permitted
themselves or their family to be unsettled by the notion of doubtful
contingencies.
My father, John Edward Winslow, was a barrister, and held an appointment
in the Admiralty Office, which employed him for many hours of the day at
Somerset House. My mother, whose maiden name was Mary Griffith, belonged
to a naval family. Her father had been lost in a West Indian hurricane
at sea, and her uncle, Admiral Sir John Griffith, was the hero of the
family, having been at Trafalgar and distinguished himself in cutting out
expeditions. My eldest brother bore his name. The second was named
after the Duke of Clarence, with whom my mother had once danced at a ball
on board ship at Portsmouth, and who had been rather fond of my uncle.
Indeed, I believe my father’s appointment had been obtained through his
interest, just about the time of Clarence’s birth.
We three boys had come so fast upon each other’s heels in the Novembers
of 1809, 10, and 11, that any two of us used to look like twins. There
is still extant a feeble water-coloured drawing of the trio, in nankeen
frocks, and long white trowsers, with bare necks and arms, the latter
twined together, and with the free hands, Griffith holding a bat,
Clarence a trap, and I a ball. I remember the emulation we felt at
Griffith’s privilege of eldest in holding the bat.
The sitting for that picture is the only thing I clearly remember during
those earlier days. I have no recollection of the disaster, which, at
four years old, altered my life. The catastrophe, as others have
described it, was that we three boys were riding cock-horse on the
balusters of the second floor of our house in Montagu Place, Russell
Square, when we indulged in a general _mêlée_, which resulted in all
tumbling over into the vestibule below. The others, to whom I served as
cushion, were not damaged beyond the power of yelling, and were quite
restored in half-an-hour, but I was undermost, and the consequence has
been a curved spine, dwarfed stature, an elevated shoulder, and a
shortened, nearly useless leg.
What I do remember, is my mother reading to me Miss Edgeworth’s _Frank
and the little do Trusty_, as I lay in my crib in her bedroom. I made
one of my nieces hunt up the book for me the other day, and the story
brought back at once the little crib, or the watered blue moreen canopy
of the big four-poster to which I was sometimes lifted for a change; even
the scrawly pattern of the paper, which my weary eyes made into purple
elves perpetually pursuing crimson ones, the foremost of whom always
turned upside down; and the knobs in the Marseilles counterpane with
which my fingers used to toy. I have heard my mother tell that whenever
I was most languid and suffering I used to whine out, ‘O do read _Frank
and the little dog Trusty_,’ and never permitted a single word to be
varied, in the curious childish love of reiteration with its soothing
power.
I am afraid that any true picture of our parents, especially of my
mother, will not do them justice in the eyes of the young people of the
present day, who are accustomed to a far more indulgent government, and
yet seem to me to know little of the loyal veneration and submission with
which we have, through life, regarded our father and mother. It would
have been reckoned disrespectful to address them by these names; they
were through life to us, in private, papa and mamma, and we never
presumed to take a liberty with them. I doubt whether the petting,
patronising equality of terms on which children now live with their
parents be equally wholesome. There was then, however, strong love and
self-sacrificing devotion; but not manifested in softness or cultivation
of sympathy. Nothing was more dreaded than spoiling, which was viewed as
idle and unjustifiable self-gratification at the expense of the objects
thereof. There were an unlucky little pair in Russell Square who were
said to be ‘spoilt children,’ and who used to be mentioned in our nursery
with bated breath as a kind of monsters or criminals. I believe our
mother laboured under a perpetual fear of spoiling Griff as the eldest,
Clarence as the beauty, me as the invalid, Emily (two years younger) as
the only girl, and Martyn as the after-thought, six years below our
sister. She was always performing little acts of conscientiousness,
little as we guessed it.
Thus though her unremitting care saved my life, and was such that she
finally brought on herself a severe and dangerous illness, she kept me in
order all the time, never wailed over me nor weakly pitied me, never
permitted resistance to medicine nor rebellion against treatment,
enforced little courtesies, insisted on every required exertion, and
hardly ever relaxed the rule of Spartan fortitude in herself as in me.
It is to this resolution on her part, carried out consistently at
whatever present cost to us both, that I owe such powers of locomotion as
I possess, and the habits of exertion that have been even more valuable
to me.
When at last, after many weeks, nay months, of this watchfulness, she
broke down, so that her life was for a time in danger, the lack of her
bracing and tender care made my life very trying, after I found myself
transported to the nursery, scarcely understanding why, accused of having
by my naughtiness made ray poor mamma so ill, and discovering for the
first time that I was a miserable, naughty little fretful being, and with
nobody but Clarence and the housemaid to take pity on me.
Nurse Gooch was a masterful, trustworthy woman, and was laid under
injunctions not to indulge Master Edward. She certainly did not err in
that respect, though she attended faithfully to my material welfare; but
woe to me if I gave way to a little moaning; and what I felt still
harder, she never said ‘good boy’ if I contrived to abstain.
I hear of carpets, curtains, and pictures in the existing nurseries.
They must be palaces compared with our great bare attic, where nothing
was allowed that could gather dust. One bit of drugget by the fireside,
where stood a round table at which the maids talked and darned stockings,
was all that hid the bare boards; the walls were as plain as those of a
workhouse, and when the London sun did shine, it glared into my eyes
through the great unshaded windows. There was a deal table for the meals
(and very plain meals they were), and two or three big presses painted
white for our clothes, and one cupboard for our toys. I must say that
Gooch was strictly just, and never permitted little Emily, nor
Griff—though he was very decidedly the favourite,—to bear off my beloved
woolly dog to be stabled in the houses of wooden bricks which the two
were continually constructing for their menagerie of maimed animals.
Griff was deservedly the favourite with every one who was not, like our
parents, conscientiously bent on impartiality. He was so bright and
winning, he had such curly tight-rolled hair with a tinge of auburn, such
merry bold blue eyes, such glowing dimpled cheeks, such a joyous smile
all over his face, and such a ringing laugh; he was so strong, brave, and
sturdy, that he was a boy to be proud of, and a perfect king in his own
way, making every one do as he pleased. All the maids, and Peter the
footman, were his slaves, every one except nurse and mamma, and it was
only by a strong effort of principle that they resisted him; while he
dragged Clarence about as his devoted though not always happy follower.
Alas! for Clarence! Courage was not in him. The fearless infant boy
chiefly dwells in conventional fiction, and valour seldom comes before
strength. Moreover, I have come to the opinion that though no one
thought of it at the time, his nerves must have had a terrible and
lasting shock at the accident and at the sight of my crushed and deathly
condition, which occupied every one too much for them to think of
soothing or shielding him. At any rate, fear was the misery of his life.
Darkness was his horror. He would scream till he brought in some one,
though he knew it would be only to scold or slap him. The housemaid’s
closet on the stairs was to him an abode of wolves. Mrs. Gatty’s tale of
_The Tiger in the Coal-box_ is a transcript of his feelings, except that
no one took the trouble to reassure him; something undefined and horrible
was thought to wag in the case of the eight-day clock; and he could not
bear to open the play cupboard lest ‘something’ should jump out on him.
The first time he was taken to the Zoological Gardens, the monkeys so
terrified him that a bystander insisted on Gooch’s carrying him away lest
he should go into fits, though Griffith was shouting with ecstasy, and
could hardly forgive the curtailment of his enjoyment.
Clarence used to aver that he really did see ‘things’ in the dark, but as
he only shuddered and sobbed instead of describing them, he was punished
for ‘telling fibs,’ though the housemaid used to speak under her breath
of his being a ‘Sunday child.’ And after long penance, tied to his stool
in the corner, he would creep up to me and whisper, ‘But, Eddy, I really
did!’
However, it was only too well established in the nursery that Clarence’s
veracity was on a par with his courage. When taxed with any
misdemeanour, he used to look round scared and bewildered, and utter a
flat demur. One scene in particular comes before me. There were strict
laws against going into shops or buying dainties without express
permission from mamma or nurse; but one day when Clarence had by some
chance been sent out alone with the good natured housemaid, his fingers
were found sticky.
‘Now, Master Clarence, you’ve been a naughty boy, eating of sweets,’
exclaimed stern Justice in a mob cap and frills.
‘No—no—’ faltered the victim; but, alas! Mrs. Gooch had only to thrust
her hand into the little pocket of his monkey suit to convict him on the
spot.
The maid was dismissed with a month’s wages, and poor Clarence underwent
a strange punishment from my mother, who was getting about again by that
time, namely, a drop of hot sealing-wax on his tongue, to teach him
practically the doom of the false tongue. It might have done him good if
there had been sufficient encouragement to him to make him try to win a
new character, but it only added a fresh terror to his mind; and nurse
grew fond of manifesting her incredulity of his assertions by always
referring to Griff or to me, or even to little Emily. What was worse,
she used to point him out to her congeners in the Square or the Park as
‘such a false child.’
He was a very pretty little fellow, with a delicately rosy face, wistful
blue eyes, and soft, light, wavy hair, and perhaps Gooch was jealous of
his attracting more notice than Griffith, and thought he posed for
admiration, for she used to tell people that no one could guess what a
child he was for slyness; so that he could not bear going out with her,
and sometimes bemoaned himself to me.
There must be a good deal of sneaking in the undeveloped nature, for in
those days I was ashamed of my preference for Clarence, the naughty one.
But there was no helping it, he was so much more gentle than Griff, and
would always give up any sport that incommoded me, instead of calling me
a stupid little ape, and becoming more boisterous after the fashion of
Griff. Moreover, he fetched and carried for me unweariedly, and would
play at spillekins, help to put up puzzles, and enact little dramas with
our wooden animals, such as Griff scorned as only fit for babies. Even
nurse allowed Clarence’s merits towards me and little Emily, but always
with the sigh: ‘If he was but as good in other respects, but them quiet
ones is always sly.’
Good Nurse Gooch! We all owe much to her staunch fidelity, strong
discipline, and unselfish devotion, but nature had not fitted her to deal
with a timid, sensitive child, of highly nervous temperament. Indeed,
persons of far more insight might have been perplexed by the fact that
Clarence was exemplary at church and prayers, family and
private,—whenever Griff would let him, that is to say,—and would add
private petitions of his own, sometimes of a startling nature. He never
scandalised the nursery, like Griff, by unseemly pranks on Sundays, nor
by innovations in the habits of Noah’s ark, but was as much shocked as
nurse when the lion was made to devour the elephant, or the lion and wolf
fought in an embrace fatal to their legs. Bible stories and Watt’s hymns
were more to Clarence than even to me, and he used to ask questions for
which Gooch’s theology was quite insufficient, and which brought the
invariable answers, ‘Now, Master Clarry, I never did! Little boys should
not ask such questions!’ ‘What’s the use of your pretending, sir! It’s
all falseness, that’s what it is! I hates hypercrīting!’ ‘Don’t worrit,
Master Clarence; you are a very naughty boy to say such things. I shall
put you in the corner!’
Even nurse was scared one night when Clarence had a frightful screaming
fit, declaring that he saw ‘her—her—all white,’ and even while being
slapped reiterated, ‘_her_, Lucy!’
Lucy was a kind elder girl in the Square gardens, a protector of little
timid ones. She was known to be at that time very ill with measles, and
in fact died that very night. Both my brothers sickened the next day,
and Emily and I soon followed their example, but no one had it badly
except Clarence, who had high fever, and very much delirium each night,
talking to people whom he thought he saw, so as to make nurse regret her
severity on the vision of Lucy.
CHAPTER II.
SCHOOLROOM DAYS.
‘In the loom of life-cloth pleasure,
Ere our childish days be told,
With the warp and woof enwoven,
Glitters like a thread of gold.’—JEAN INGELOW.
Looking back, I think my mother was the leading spirit in our household,
though she never for a moment suspected it. Indeed, the chess queen must
be the most active on the home board, and one of the objects of her life
was to give her husband a restful evening when he came home to the six
o’clock dinner. She also had to make both ends meet on an income which
would seem starvation at the present day; but she was strong, spirited,
and managing, and equal to all her tasks till the long attendance upon
me, and the consequent illness, forced her to spare herself—a little—a
very little.
Previously she had been our only teacher, except that my father read a
chapter of the Bible with us every morning before breakfast, and heard
the Catechism on a Sunday. For we could all read long before young
gentlefolks nowadays can say their letters. It was well for me, since
books with a small quantity of type, and a good deal of frightful
illustration, beguiled many of my weary moments. You may see my special
favourites, bound up, on the shelf in my bedroom. Crabbe’s _Tales_,
_Frank_, _the Parent’s Assistant_, and later, Croker’s _Tales from
English History_, Lamb’s _Tales from Shakespeare_, _Tales of a
Grandfather_, and the _Rival Crusoes_ stand pre-eminent—also _Mrs.
Leicester’s School_, with the ghost story cut out.
Fairies and ghosts were prohibited as unwholesome, and not unwisely. The
one would have been enervating to me, and the other would have been a
definite addition to Clarence’s stock of horrors. Indeed, one story had
been cut out of Crabbe’s _Tales_, and another out of an Annual presented
to Emily, but not before Griff had read the latter, and the version he
related to us probably lost nothing in the telling; indeed, to this day I
recollect the man, wont to slay the harmless cricket on the hearth, and
in a storm at sea pursued by a gigantic cockroach and thrown overboard.
The night after hearing this choice legend Clarence was found crouching
beside me in bed for fear of the cockroach. I am afraid the vengeance
was more than proportioned to the offence!
Even during my illness that brave mother struggled to teach my brothers’
daily lessons, and my father heard them a short bit of Latin grammar at
his breakfast (five was thought in those days to be the fit age to begin
it, and fathers the fit teachers thereof). And he continued to give this
morning lesson when, on our return from airing at Ramsgate after our
recovery from the measles, my mother found she must submit to transfer us
to a daily governess.
Old Miss Newton’s attainments could not have been great, for her answers
to my inquiries were decidedly funny, and prefaced _sotto voce_ with,
‘What a child it is!’ But she was a good kindly lady, who had the
faculty of teaching, and of forestalling rebellion; and her little thin
corkscrew curls, touched with gray, her pale eyes, prim black silk apron,
and sandalled shoes, rise before me full of happy associations of tender
kindness and patience. She was wise, too, in her own simple way. When
nurse would have forewarned her of Clarence’s failings in his own
hearing, she cut the words short by declaring that she should like never
to find out which was the naughty one. And when habit was too strong,
and he had denied the ink spot on the atlas, she persuasively wiled out a
confession not only to her but to mamma, who hailed the avowal as the
beginning of better things, and kissed instead of punishing.
Clarence’s queries had been snubbed into reserve, and I doubt whether
Miss Newton’s theoretic theology was very much more developed than that
of Mrs. Gooch, but her practice and devotion were admirable, and she
fostered religious sentiment among us, introducing little books which
were welcome in the restricted range of Sunday reading. Indeed, Mrs.
Sherwood’s have some literary merit, and her _Fairchild Family_ indulged
in such delicious and eccentric acts of naughtiness as quite atoned for
all the religious teaching, and fascinated Griff, though he was apt to be
very impatient of certain little affectionate lectures to which Clarence
listened meekly. My father and mother were both of the old-fashioned
orthodox school, with minds formed on Jeremy Taylor, Blair, South, and
Secker, who thought it their duty to go diligently to church twice on
Sunday, communicate four times a year (their only opportunities), after
grave and serious preparation, read a sermon to their household on Sunday
evenings, and watch over their children’s religious instruction, though
in a reserved undemonstrative manner. My father always read one daily
chapter with us every morning, one Psalm at family prayers, and my mother
made us repeat a few verses of Scripture before our other studies began;
besides which there was special teaching on Sunday, and an abstinence
from amusements, such as would now be called Sabbatarian, but a walk in
the Park with papa was so much esteemed that it made the day a happy and
honoured one to those who could walk.
There was little going into society, comparatively, for people in our
station,—solemn dinner-parties from time to time—two a year, did we give,
and then the house was turned upside down,—and now and then my father
dined out, or brought a friend home to dinner; and there were so-called
morning calls in the afternoon, but no tea-drinking. For the most part
the heads of the family dined alone at six, and afterwards my father read
aloud some book of biography or travels, while we children were expected
to employ ourselves quietly, threading beads, drawing, or putting up
puzzles, and listen or not as we chose, only not interrupt, as we sat at
the big, central, round, mahogany table. To this hour I remember
portions of Belzoni’s Researches and Franklin’s terrible American
adventures, and they bring back tones of my father’s voice. As an
authority ‘papa’ was seldom invoked, except on very serious occasions,
such as Griffith’s audacity, Clarence’s falsehood, or my obstinacy; and
then the affair was formidable, he was judicial and awful, and, though he
would graciously forgive on signs of repentance, he never was
sympathetic. He had not married young, and there were forty years or
more between him and his sons, so that he had left too far behind him the
feelings of boyhood to make himself one with us, even if he had thought
it right or dignified to do so,—yet I cannot describe the depth of the
respect and loyalty he inspired in us nor the delight we felt in a word
of commendation or a special attention from him.
The early part of Miss Newton’s rule was unusually fertile in such
pleasures, and much might have been spared, could Clarence have been
longer under her influence; but Griff grew beyond her management, and was
taunted by ‘fellows in the Square’ into assertions of manliness, such as
kicking his heels, stealing her odd little fringed parasol, pitching his
books into the area, keeping her in misery with his antics during their
walks, and finally leading Clarence off after Punch into the Rookery of
St. Giles’s, where she could not follow, because Emily was in her charge.
This was the crisis. She had to come home without the boys, and though
they arrived long before any of the authorities knew of their absence,
she owned with tears that she could not conscientiously be responsible
any longer for Griffith,—who not only openly defied her authority, but
had found out how little she knew, and laughed at her. I have reason to
believe also that my mother had discovered that she frequented the
preachings of Rowland Hill and Baptist Noel; and had confiscated some
unorthodox tracts presented to the servants, thus being alarmed lest she
should implant the seeds of dissent.
Parting with her after four years under her was a real grief. Even Griff
was fond of her; when once emancipated, he used to hug her and bring her
remarkable presents, and she heartily loved her tormentor. Everybody
did. It remained a great pleasure to get her to spend an evening with us
while the elders were gone out to dinner; nor do I think she ever did us
anything but good, though I am afraid we laughed at ‘Old Newton’ as we
grew older and more conceited. We never had another governess. My
mother read and enforced diligence on Emily and me, and we had masters
for different studies; the two boys went to school; and when Martyn began
to emerge from babyhood, Emily was his teacher.
CHAPTER III.
WIN AND SLOW.
‘The rude will shuffle through with ease enough:
Great schools best suit the sturdy and the rough.’
COWPER.
AT school Griffith was very happy, and brilliantly successful, alike in
study and sport, though sports were not made prominent in those days, and
triumphs in them were regarded by the elders with doubtful pride, lest
they should denote a lack of attention to matters of greater importance.
All his achievements were, however, poured forth by himself and Clarence
to Emily and me, and we felt as proud of them as if they had been our
own.
Clarence was industrious, and did not fail in his school work, but when
he came home for the holidays there was a cowed look about him, and
private revelations were made over my sofa that made my flesh creep. The
scars were still visible, caused by having been compelled to grasp the
bars of the grate bare-handed; and, what was worse, he had been suspended
outside a third story window by the wrists, held by a schoolfellow of
thirteen!
‘But what was Griff about?’ I demanded, with hot tears of indignation.
‘Oh, Win!—that’s what they call him, and me Slow—he said it would do me
good. But I don’t think it did, Eddy. It only makes my heart beat fit
to choke me whenever I go near the passage window.’
I could only utter a vain wish that I had been there and able to fight
for him, and I attacked Griff on the subject on the first opportunity.
‘Oh!’ was his answer, ‘it is only what all fellows have to bear if
there’s no pluck in them. They tried it on upon me, you know, but I soon
showed them it would not do’—with the cock of the nose, the flash of the
eyes, the clench of the fist, that were peculiarly Griff’s own; and when
I pleaded that he might have protected Clarence, he laughed scornfully.
‘As to Slow, wretched being, a fellow can’t help bullying him. It comes
as natural as to a cat with a mouse.’ On further and reiterated
pleadings, Griff declared, first, that it was the only thing to do Slow
any good, or make a man of him; and next, that he heartily wished that
Winslow junior had been Miss Clara at once, as the fellows called him—it
was really hard on him (Griff) to have such a sneaking little coward tied
to him for a junior!
I particularly resented the term Slow, for Clarence had lately been the
foremost of us in his studies; but the idea that learning had anything to
do with the matter was derided, and as time went on, there was vexation
and displeasure at his progress not being commensurate with his
abilities. It would have been treason to schoolboy honour to let the
elders know that though a strong, high-spirited popular boy like ‘Win’
might venture to excel big bullying dunces, such fair game as poor ‘Slow’
could be terrified into not only keeping below them, but into doing their
work for them. To him Cowper’s ‘Tirocinium’ had only too much sad truth.
As to his old failing, there were no special complaints, but in those
pre-Arnoldian times no lofty code of honour was even ideal among
schoolboys, or expected of them by masters; shuffling was thought
natural, and allowances made for faults in indolent despair.
My mother thought the Navy the proper element of boyhood, and her uncle
the Admiral promised a nomination,—a simple affair in those happy days,
involving neither examination nor competition. Griffith was, however,
one of those independent boys who take an aversion to whatever is forced
on them as their fate. He was ready and successful with his studies, a
hero among his comrades, and preferred continuing at school to what he
pronounced, on the authority of the nautical tales freely thrown in our
way, to be the life of a dog, only fit for the fool of the family;
besides, he had once been out in a boat, tasted of sea-sickness, and been
laughed at. My father was gratified, thinking his brains too good for a
midshipman, and pleased that he should wish to tread in his own steps at
Harrow and Oxford, and thus my mother could not openly regret his
degeneracy when all the rest of us were crazy over _Tom Cringle’s Log_,
and ready to envy Clarence when the offer was passed on to him, and he
appeared in the full glory of his naval uniform. Not much choice had
been offered to him. My mother would have thought it shameful and
ungrateful to have no son available, my father was glad to have the boy’s
profession fixed, and he himself was rejoiced to escape from the miseries
he knew only too well, and ready to believe that uniform and dirk would
make a man of him at once, with all his terrors left behind. Perhaps the
chief drawback was that the ladies _would_ say, ‘What a darling!’
affording Griff endless opportunities for the good-humoured mockery by
which he concealed his own secret regrets. Did not even Selina Clarkson,
whose red cheeks, dark blue eyes, and jetty profusion of shining curls,
were our notion of perfect beauty, select the little naval cadet for her
partner at the dancing master’s ball?
In the first voyage, a cruise in the Pacific, all went well. The good
Admiral had carefully chosen ship and captain; there were an excellent
set of officers, a good tone among the midshipmen, and Clarence, who was
only twelve years old, was constituted the pet of the cockpit. One lad
in especial, Coles by name, attracted by Clarence’s pleasant gentleness,
and impelled by the generosity that shields the weak, became his guardian
friend, and protected him from all the roughnesses in his power. If
there were a fault in that excellent Coles, it was that he made too much
of a baby of his _protégé_, and did not train him to shift for himself:
but wisdom and moderation are not characteristics of early youth. At
home we had great enjoyment of his long descriptive letters, which came
under cover to our father at the Admiralty, but were chiefly intended for
my benefit. All were proud of them, and great was my elation when I
heard papa relate some fact out of them with the preface, ‘My boy tells
me, my boy Clarence, in the _Calypso_; he writes a capital letter.’
How great was our ecstasy when after three years and a half we had him at
home again; handsome, vigorous, well-grown, excellently reported of,
fully justifying my mother’s assurances that the sea would make a man of
him. There was Griffith in the fifth form and a splendid cricketer, but
Clarence could stand up to him now, and Harrovian exploits were tame
beside stories of sharks and negroes, monkeys and alligators. There was
one in particular, about a whole boat’s crew sitting down on what they
thought was a fallen tree, but which suddenly swept them all over on
their faces, and turned out to be a boa-constrictor, and would have
embraced one of them if he had not had the sail of the boat coiled round
the mast, and palmed off upon him, when he gorged it contentedly, and
being found dead on the next landing, his skin was used to cover the
captain’s sea-chest. Clarence declined to repeat this tale and many
others before the elders, and was displeased with Emily for referring to
it in public. As to his terrors, he took it for granted that an officer
of H.M.S. _Calypso_, had left them behind, and in fact, he naturally
forgot and passed over what he had not been shielded from, while his
hereditary love of the sea really made those incidental to his profession
much more endurable than the bullying he had undergone at school.
We were very happy that Christmas, and very proud of our boys. One
evening we were treated to a box at the pantomime, and even I was able to
go to it. We put our young sailor and our sister in the forefront, and
believed that every one was as much struck with them as with the
wonderful transformations of Goody-Two-Shoes under the wand of Harlequin.
Brother-like, we might tease our one girl, and call her an affected
little pussy cat, but our private opinion was that she excelled all other
damsels with her bright blue eyes and pretty curling hair, which had the
same chestnut shine as Griff’s—enough to make us correct possible vanity
by terming it red, though we were ready to fight any one else who
presumed to do so. Indeed Griff had defended its hue in single combat,
and his eye was treated for it with beefsteak by Peter in the pantry. We
were immensely, though silently, proud of her in her white embroidered
cambric frock, red sash and shoes, and coral necklace, almost an
heirloom, for it had been brought from Sicily in Nelson’s days by my
mother’s poor young father. How parents and doctors in these days would
have shuddered at her neck and arms, bare, not only in the evening, but
by day! When she was a little younger she could so shrink up from her
clothes that Griff, or little Martyn, in a mischievous mood, would put
things down her back, to reappear below her petticoats. Once it was a
dead wasp, which descended harmlessly the length of her spine! She was a
good-humoured, affectionate, dear sister, my valued companion, submitting
patiently to be eclipsed when Clarence was present, and everything to me
in his absence. Sturdy little Martyn too, was held by us to be the most
promising of small boys. He was a likeness of Clarence, only stouter,
hardier, and without the delicate, girlish, wistful look; imitating Griff
in everything, and rather a heavy handful to Emily and me when left to
our care, though we were all the more proud of his high spirit, and were
fast becoming a mutual admiration society.
What then were our feelings when Griff, always fearless, dashed to the
rescue of a boy under whom the ice had broken in St. James’ Park, and
held him up till assistance came? Martyn, who was with him, was sent
home to fetch dry clothes and reassure my mother, which he did by dashing
upstairs, shouting, ‘Where’s mamma? Here’s Griff been into the water and
pulled out a boy, and they don’t know if he is drowned; but he looks—oh!’
Even after my mother had elicited that Martyn’s _he_ meant the boy, and
not Griff, she could not rest without herself going to see that our
eldest was unhurt, greet him, and bring him home. What happy tears stood
in her eyes, how my father shook hands with him, how we drank his health
after dinner, and how ungrateful I was to think Clarence deserved his
name of Slow for having stayed at home to play chess with me because my
back was aching, when he might have been winning the like honours! How
red and gruff and shy the hero looked, and how he entreated no one to say
any more about it!
He would not even look publicly at the paragraph about it in the paper,
only vituperating it for having made him into ‘a juvenile Etonian,’ and
hoping no one from Harrow would guess whom it meant.
I found that paragraph the other day in my mother’s desk, folded over the
case of the medal of the Royal Humane Society, which Griff affected to
despise, but which, when he was well out of the way, used to be exhibited
on high days and holidays. It seems now like the boundary mark of the
golden days of our boyhood, and unmitigated hopes for one another.
CHAPTER IV.
UBI LAPSUS, QUID FECI.
‘Clarence is come—false, fleeting, perjured Clarence.’
_King Richard III_.
THERE was much stagnation in the Navy in those days in the reaction after
the great war; and though our family had fair interest at the Admiralty,
it was seven months before my brother went to sea again. To me they were
very happy months, with my helper of helpers, companion of companions,
who made possible to me many a little enterprise that could not be
attempted without him. My father made him share my studies, and thus
they became doubly pleasant. And oh, ye boys! who murmur at the Waverley
Novels as a dry holiday task, ye may envy us the zest and enthusiasm with
which we devoured them in their freshness. Strangely enough, the last
that we read together was the _Fair Maid of Perth_.
Clarence and his friend Coles longed to sail together again, but Coles
was shelved; and when Clarence’s appointment came at last, it was to the
brig _Clotho_, Commander Brydone, going out in the Mediterranean Fleet,
under Sir Edward Codrington. My mother did not like brigs, and my father
did not like what he heard of the captain; but there had been jealous
murmurs about appointments being absorbed by sons of officials—he durst
not pick and choose; and the Admiral pronounced that if the lad had been
spoilt on board the _Calypso_, it was time for him to rough it—a dictum
whence there was no appeal.
Half a year later the tidings of the victory of Navarino rang through
Europe, and were only half welcome to the conquerors; but in our
household it is connected with a terrible recollection. Though more than
half a century has rolled by, I shrink from dwelling on the shock that
fell on us when my father returned from Somerset House with such a
countenance that we thought our sailor had fallen; but my mother could
brook the fact far less than if her son had died a gallant death. The
_Clotho_ was on her way home, and Midshipman William Clarence Winslow was
to be tried by court-martial for insubordination, disobedience, and
drunkenness. My mother was like one turned to stone. She would hardly
go out of doors; she could scarcely bring herself to go to church; she
would have had my father give up his situation if there had been any
other means of livelihood. She could not talk; only when my father
sighed, ‘We should never have put him into the Navy,’ she hotly replied,
‘How was I to suppose that a son of mine would be like that?’
Emily cried all day and all night. Some others would have felt it a
relief to have cried too. In more furious language than parents in those
days tolerated, Griff wrote to me his utter disbelief, and how he had
punched the heads of fellows who presumed to doubt that it was not all a
rascally, villainous plot.
When the time came my father went down by the night mail to Portsmouth.
He could scarcely bear to face the matter; but, as he said, he could not
have it on his conscience if the boy did anything desperate for want of
some one to look after him. Besides, there might be some explanation.
‘Explanation,’ said my mother bitterly. ‘That there always is!’
The ‘explanation’ was this—I have put together what came out in evidence,
what my father and the Admiral heard from commiserating officers, and
what at different times I learned from Clarence himself. Captain Brydone
was one of the rough old description of naval men, good sailors and stern
disciplinarians, but wanting in any sense of moral duties towards their
ship’s company. His lieutenant was of the same class, soured, moreover,
by tardy promotion, and prejudiced against a gentleman-like, fair-faced
lad, understood to have interest, and bearing a name that implied it. Of
the other two midshipmen, one was a dull lad of low stamp, the other a
youth of twenty, a born bully, with evil as well as tyrannical
propensities;—the crew conforming to severe discipline on board, but
otherwise wild and lawless. In such a ship a youth with good habits,
sensitive conscience, and lack of moral or physical courage, could not
but lead a life of misery, losing every day more of his self-respect and
spirit as he was driven to the evil he loathed, dreading the
consequences, temporal and eternal, with all his soul, yet without
resolution or courage to resist.
As every one knows, the battle of Navarino came on suddenly, almost by
mistake; and though it is perhaps no excuse, the hurly-burly and horror
burst upon him at unawares. Though the English loss was comparatively
very small, the _Clotho_ was a good deal exposed, and two men were
killed—one so close to Clarence that his clothes were splashed with
blood. This entirely unnerved him; he did not even know what he did, but
he was not to be found when required to carry an order, and was
discovered hidden away below, shuddering, in his berth, and then made
some shallow excuse about misunderstanding orders. Whether this would
have been brought up against him under other circumstances, or whether it
would have been remembered that great men, including Charles V. and Henri
IV., have had their _moment de peur_, I cannot tell; but there were other
charges. I cannot give date or details. There is no record among the
papers before me; and I can only vaguely recall what could hardly be read
for the sense of agony, was never discussed, and was driven into the most
oblivious recesses of the soul fifty years ago. There was a story about
having let a boat’s crew, of which he was in charge, get drunk and
over-stay their time. One of them deserted; and apparently prevarication
ran to the bounds of perjury, if it did not overpass them. (N.B.—Seeing
seamen flogged was one of the sickening horrors that haunted Clarence in
the _Clotho_.) Also, when on shore at Malta with the young man whose
name I will not record—his evil genius—he was beguiled or bullied into a
wine-shop, and while not himself was made the cat’s-paw of some insolent
practical joke on the lieutenant; and when called to account, was so
bewildered and excited as to use unpardonable language.
Whatever it might have been in detail, so much was proved against him
that he was dismissed his ship, and his father was recommended to
withdraw him from the service, as being disqualified by want of nerve.
Also, it was added more privately, that such vicious tendencies needed
home restraint. The big bully, his corrupter, bore witness against him,
but did not escape scot free, for one of the captains spoke to him in
scathing tones of censure.
Whenever my mother was in trouble, she always re-arranged the furniture,
and a family crisis was always heralded by a revolution of chairs,
tables, and sofas. She could not sit still under suspense, and, during
these terrible days the entire house underwent a setting to rights.
Emily attended upon her, and I sat and dusted books. No doubt it was
much better for us than sitting still. My father’s letter came by the
morning mail, telling us of the sentence, and that he and our poor
culprit, as he said, would come home by the Portsmouth coach in the
evening.
One room was already in order when Sir John Griffith kindly came to see
whether he could bring any comfort to a spirit which would infinitely
have preferred death to dishonour, and was, above all, shocked at the
lack of physical courage. Never had I liked our old Admiral so well as
when I heard how his chief anger was directed against the general
mismanagement, and the cruelty of blighting a poor lad’s life when not
yet seventeen. His father might have been warned to remove him without
the public scandal of a court-martial and dismissal.
‘The guilt and shame would have been all the same to us,’ said my mother.
‘Come, Mary, don’t be hard on the poor fellow. In quiet times like these
a poor boy can’t look over the wall where one might have stolen a horse,
ay, or a dozen horses, when there was something else to think about!’
‘You would not have forgiven such a thing, sir.’
‘It never would have happened under me, or in any decently commanded
ship!’ he thundered. ‘There wasn’t a fault to be found with him in the
_Calypso_. What possessed Winslow to let him sail with Brydone? But the
service is going,’ etc. etc., he ran on—forgetting that it was he himself
who had been unwilling, perhaps rightly, to press the Duke of Clarence
for an appointment to a crack frigate for his namesake. However, when he
took leave he repeated, as he kissed my mother, ‘Mind, Mary, don’t be set
against the lad. That’s the way to make ’em desperate, and he is a mere
boy, after all.’
Poor mother, it was not so much hardness as a wounded spirit that made
her look so rigid. It might have been better if the return could have
been delayed so as to make her yearn after her son, but there was nowhere
for him to go, and the coach was already on its way. How strange it was
to feel the wonted glow at Clarence’s return coupled with a frightful
sense of disgrace and depression.
The time was far on in October, and it was thus quite dark when the
travellers arrived, having walked from Charing Cross, where the coach set
them down. My father came in first, and my mother clung to him as if he
had been absent for weeks, while all the joy of contact with my brother
swept over me, even though his hand hung limp in mine, and was icy cold
like his cheeks. My father turned to him with one of the little set
speeches of those days. ‘Here is our son, Mary, who has promised me to
do his utmost to retrieve his character, as far as may be possible, and
happily he is still young.’
My mother’s embrace was in a sort of mechanical obedience to her
husband’s gesture, and her voice was not perhaps meant to be so severe as
it sounded when she said, ‘You are very cold—come and warm yourself.’
They made room for him by the fire, and my father stood up in front of
it, giving particulars of the journey. Emily and Martyn were at tea in
the nursery, in a certain awe that hindered them from coming down;
indeed, Martyn seems to have expected to see some strange transformation
in his brother. Indeed, there was alteration in the absence of the blue
and gold, and, still more, in the loss of the lightsome, hopeful
expression from the young face.
There is a picture of Ary Scheffer’s of an old knight, whose son had fled
from the battle, cutting the tablecloth in two between himself and the
unhappy youth. Like that stern baron’s countenance was that with which
my mother sat at the head of the dinner-table, and we conversed by jerks
about whatever we least cared for, as if we could hide our wretchedness
from Peter. When the children appeared each gave Clarence the shyest of
kisses, and they sat demurely on their chairs on either side of my father
to eat their almonds and raisins, after which we went upstairs, and there
was the usual reading. It is curious, but though none of us could have
told at the time what it was about, on turning over not long ago a copy
of Head’s _Pampas and Andes_, one chapter struck me with an intolerable
sense of melancholy, such as the bull chases of South America did not
seem adequate to produce, and by and by I remembered that it was the book
in course of being read at that unhappy period. My mother went on as
diligently as ever with some of those perpetual shirts which seemed to be
always in hand except before company, when she used to do tambour work
for Emily’s frocks. Clarence sat the whole time in a dark corner, never
stirring, except that he now and then nodded a little. He had gone
through many wakeful, and worse than wakeful, nights of wretched
suspense, and now the worst was over.
Family prayers took place, chill good-nights were exchanged, and nobody
interfered with his helping me up to my bedroom as usual; but there was
something in his face to which I durst not speak, though perhaps I
looked, for he exclaimed, ‘Don’t, Ned!’ wrung my hand, and sped away to
his own quarters higher up. Then came a sound which made me open my door
to listen. Dear little Emily! She had burst out of her own room in her
dressing-gown, and flung herself upon her brother as he was plodding
wearily upstairs in the dark, clinging round his neck sobbing, ‘Dear,
dear Clarry! I can’t bear it! I don’t care. You’re my own dear
brother, and they are all wicked, horrid people.’
That was all I heard, except hushings on Clarence’s part, as if the
opening of my door and the thread of light from it warned him that there
was risk of interruption. He seemed to be dragging her up to her own
room, and I was left with a pang at her being foremost in comforting him.
My father enacted that he should be treated as usual. But how could that
be when papa himself did not know how changed were his own ways from his
kindly paternal air of confidence? All trust had been undermined, so
that Clarence could not cross the threshold without being required to
state his object, and, if he overstayed the time calculated, he was
cross-examined, and his replies received with a sigh of doubt.
He hung about the house, not caring to do much, except taking me out in
my Bath chair or languidly reading the most exciting books he could
get;—but there was no great stock of sensation then, except the Byronic,
and from time to time one of my parents would exclaim, ‘Clarence, I
wonder you can find nothing more profitable to occupy yourself with than
trash like that!’
He would lay down the book without a word, and take up Smith’s _Wealth of
Nations_ or Smollett’s _England_—the profitable studies recommended, and
speedily become lost in a dejected reverie, with fixed eyes and drooping
lips.
CHAPTER V.
A HELPING HAND.
‘Though hawks can prey through storms and winds,
The poor bee in her hive must dwell.’—HENRY VAUGHAN.
IN imagination the piteous dejection of our family seems to have lasted
for ages, but on comparison of dates it is plain that the first
lightening of the burthen came in about a fortnight’s time.
The firm of Frith and Castleford was coming to the front in the Chinese
trade. The junior partner was an old companion of my father’s boyhood;
his London abode was near at hand, and he was a kind of semi-godfather to
both Clarence and me, having stood proxy for our nominal sponsors. He
was as good and open-hearted a man as ever lived, and had always been
very kind to us; but he was scarcely welcome when my father, finding that
he had come up alone to London to see about some repairs to his house,
while his family were still in the country, asked him to dine and
sleep—our first guest since our misfortune.
My mother could hardly endure to receive any one, but she seemed glad to
see my father become animated and like himself while Roman Catholic
Emancipation was vehemently discussed, and the ruin of England hotly
predicted. Clarence moped about silently as usual, and tried to avoid
notice, and it was not till the next morning—after breakfast, when the
two gentlemen were in the dining-room, nearly ready to go their several
ways, and I was in the window awaiting my classical tutor—that Mr.
Castleford said,
‘May I ask, Winslow, if you have any plans for that poor boy?’
‘Edward?’ said my father, almost wilfully misunderstanding. ‘His
ambition is to be curator of something in the British Museum, isn’t it?’
Mr. Castleford explained that he meant the other, and my father sadly
answered that he hardly knew; he supposed the only thing was to send him
to a private tutor, but where to find a fit one he did not know and
besides, what could be his aim? Sir John Griffith had said he was only
fit for the Church, ‘But one does not wish to dispose of a tarnished
article there.’
‘Certainly not,’ said Mr. Castleford; and then he spoke words that
rejoiced my heart, though they only made my father groan, bidding him
remember that it was not so much actual guilt as the accident of
Clarence’s being in the Navy that had given so serious a character to his
delinquencies. If he had been at school, perhaps no one would ever have
heard of them, ‘Though I don’t say,’ added the good man, casting a new
light on the subject, ‘that it would have been better for him in the
end.’ Then, quite humbly, for he knew my mother especially had a disdain
for trade, he asked what my father would think of letting him give
Clarence work in the office for the present. ‘I know,’ he said, ‘it is
not the line your family might prefer, but it is present occupation; and
I do not think you could well send a youth who has seen so much of the
world back to schooling. Besides, this would keep him under your own
eye.’
My father was greatly touched by the kindness, but he thought it right to
set before Mr. Castleford the very worst side of poor Clarence; declaring
that he durst not answer for a boy who had never, in spite of pains and
punishments, learnt to speak truth at home or abroad, repeating Captain
Brydone’s dreadful report, and even adding that, what was most grievous
of all, there was an affectation of piety about him that could scarcely
be anything but self-deceit and hypocrisy. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘my eldest
son, Griffith, is just a boy, makes no profession, is not—as I am afraid
you have seen—exemplary at church, when Clarence sits as meek as a mouse,
but then he is always above-board, frank and straightforward. You know
where to have a high-spirited fellow, who will tame down, but you never
know what will come next with the other. I sometimes wonder for what
error of mine Providence has seen fit to give me such a son.’
Just then an important message came for Mr. Winslow, and he had to hurry
away, but Mr. Castleford still remained, and presently said,
‘Edward, I should like to know what your eyes have been trying to say all
this time.’
‘Oh, sir,’ I burst out, ‘do give him a chance. Indeed he never means to
do wrong. The harm is not in him. He would have been the best of us all
if he had only been let alone.’
Those were exactly my own foolish words, for which I could have beaten
myself afterwards; but Mr. Castleford only gave a slight grave smile, and
said, ‘You mean that your brother’s real defect is in courage, moral and
physical.’
‘Yes,’ I said, with a great effort at expressing myself. ‘When he is
frightened, or bullied, or browbeaten, he does not know what he is doing
or saying. He is quite different when he is his own self; only nobody
can understand.’
Strange that though the favoured home son and nearly sixteen years old,
it would have been impossible to utter so much to one of our parents.
Indeed the last sentence felt so disloyal that the colour burnt in my
cheeks as the door opened; but it only admitted Clarence, who, having
heard the front door shut, thought the coast was clear, and came in with
a load of my books and dictionaries.
‘Clarence,’ said Mr. Castleford, and the direct address made him start
and flush, ‘supposing your father consents, should you be willing to turn
your mind to a desk in my counting-house?’
He flushed deeper red, and his fingers quivered as he held by the table.
‘Thank you, sir. Anything—anything,’ he said hesitatingly.
‘Well,’ said Mr. Castleford, with the kindest of voices, ‘let us have it
out. What is in your mind? You know, I’m a sort of godfather to you.’
‘Sir, if you would only let me have a berth on board one of your vessels,
and go right away.’
‘Aye, my poor boy, that’s what you would like best, I’ve no doubt; but
look at Edward’s face there, and think what that would come to at the
best!’
‘Yes, I know I have no right to choose,’ said Clarence, drooping his head
as before.
‘’Tis not that, my dear lad,’ said the good man, ‘but that packing you
off like that, among your inferiors in breeding and everything else,
would put an end to all hope of your redeeming the past—outwardly I mean,
of course—and lodge you in a position of inequality to your brothers and
sister, and all—’
‘That’s done already,’ said Clarence.
‘If you were a man grown it might be so,’ returned Mr. Castleford, ‘but
bless me, how old are you?’
‘Seventeen next 1st of November,’ said Clarence.
‘Not a bit too old for a fresh beginning,’ said Mr. Castleford cheerily.
‘God helping you, you will be a brave and good man yet, my boy—’ then as
my master rang at the door—‘Come with me and look at the old shop.’
Poor Clarence muttered something unintelligible, and I had to own for him
that he never went out without accounting for himself. Whereupon our
friend caused my mother to be hunted up, and explained to her that he
wanted to take Clarence out with him—making some excuse about something
they were to see together.
That walk enabled him to say something which came nearer to cheering
Clarence than anything that had passed since that sad return, and made
him think that to be connected with Mr. Castleford was the best thing
that could befall him. Mr. Castleford on his side told my father that he
was sure that the boy was good-hearted all the time, and thoroughly
repentant; but this had the less effect because plausibility, as my
father called it, was one of the qualities that specially annoyed him in
Clarence, and made him fear that his friend might be taken in. However,
the matter was discussed between the elders, and it was determined that
this most friendly offer should be accepted experimentally. It was
impressed on Clarence, with unnecessary care, that the line of life was
inferior; but that it was his only chance of regaining anything like a
position, and that everything depended on his industry and integrity.
‘Integrity!’ commented Clarence, with a burning spot on his cheek after
one of these lectures; ‘I believe they think me capable of robbing the
office!’
We found out, too, that the senior partner, Mr. Frith, a very crusty old
bachelor, did not like the appointment, and that it was made quite
against his will. ‘You’ll be getting your clerks next from Newgate!’ was
what some amiable friend reported him to have said. However, Mr.
Castleford had his way, and Clarence was to begin his work with the New
Year, being in the meantime cautioned and lectured on the crime and
danger of his evil propensities more than he could well bear. ‘Oh!’ he
groaned, ‘it serves me right, I know that very well, but if my father
only knew how I hate and abhor all those things—and how I loathed them at
the very time I was dragged into them!’
‘Why don’t you tell him so?’ I asked.
‘That would make it no better.’
‘It is not so bad as if you had gone into it willingly, and for your own
pleasure.’
‘He would only think that another lie.’
No more could be said, for the idea of Clarence’s untruthfulness and
depravity had become so deeply rooted in our father’s mind that there was
little hope of displacing it, and even at the best his manner was full of
grave constrained pity. Those few words were Clarence’s first approach
to confidence with me, but they led to more, and he knew there was one
person who did not believe the defect was in the bent of his will so much
as in its strength.
All the time the prospect of the counting-house in comparison with the
sea was so distasteful to him that I was anxious whenever he went out
alone, or even with Griffith, who despised the notion of, as he said,
sitting on a high stool, dealing in tea, so much that he was quite
capable of aiding and abetting in an escape from it. Two considerations,
however, held Clarence back; one, the timidity of nature which shrank
from so violent a step, and the other, the strong affections that bound
him to his home, though his sojourn there was so painful. He knew the
misery his flight would have been to me; indeed I took care to let him
see it.
And Griffith’s return was like a fresh spring wind dispersing vapours.
He had gained an excellent scholarship at Brazenose, and came home
radiant with triumph, cheering us all up, and making a generous use of
his success. He was no letter-writer, and after learning that the
disaster and disgrace were all too certain, he ignored the whole, and
hailed Clarence on his return as if nothing had happened. As eldest son,
and almost a University man, he could argue with our parents in a manner
we never presumed on. At least I cannot aver what he actually uttered,
but probably it was a revised version of what he thundered forth to me.
‘Such nonsense! such a shame to keep the poor beggar going about with
that hang dog look, as if he had done for himself for life! Why, I’ve
known fellows do ever so much worse of their own accord, and nothing come
of it. If it was found out, there might be a row and a flogging, and
there was an end of it. As to going about mourning, and keeping the
whole house in doleful dumps, as if there was never to be any good again,
it was utter folly, and so I’ve told Bill, and papa and mamma, both of
them!’
How this was administered, or how they took it, there is no knowing, but
Griff would neither skate nor go to the theatre, nor to any other
diversion, without his brother; and used much kindly force and banter to
unearth him from his dismal den in the back drawing-room. He was only
let alone when there were engagements with friends, and indeed, when
meetings in the streets took place, by tacit agreement, Clarence would
shrink off in the crowd as if not belonging to his companion; and these
were the moments that stung him into longing to flee to the river, and
lose the sense of shame among common sailors: but there was always some
good angel to hold him back from desperate measures—chiefly just then,
the love between us three brothers, a love that never cooled throughout
our lives, and which dear old Griff made much more apparent at this
critical time than in the old Win and Slow days of school. That return
of his enlivened us all, and removed the terrible constraint from our
meals, bringing us back, as it were, to ordinary life and natural
intercourse among ourselves and with our neighbours.
CHAPTER VI.
THE VALLEY OF HUMILIATION.
‘But when I lay upon the shore,
Like some poor wounded thing,
I deemed I should not evermore
Refit my wounded wing.
Nailed to the ground and fastened there,
This was the thought of my despair.’
ABP. TRENCH.
CLARENCE’S debut at the office was not wholly unsuccessful. He wrote a
good hand, and had a good deal of method and regularity in his nature,
together with a real sense of gratitude to Mr. Castleford; and this bore
him through the weariness of his new employment, and, what was worse, the
cold reception he met with from the other clerks. He was too quiet and
reserved for the wilder spirits, too much of a gentleman for others, and
in the eyes of the managers, and especially of the senior partner, a
disgraced, untrustworthy youth foisted on the office by Mr. Castleford’s
weak partiality. That old Mr. Frith had, Clarence used to say, a
perfectly venomous way of accepting his salute, and seemed always
surprised and disappointed if he came in in time, or showed up correct
work. Indeed, the old man was disliked and feared by all his
subordinates as much as his partner was loved; and while Mr. Castleford,
with his good-natured Irish wife and merry family, lived a life as
cheerful as it was beneficent, Mr. Frith dwelt entirely alone, in rooms
over the office, preserving the habits formed when his income had been
narrow, and mistrusting everybody.
At the end of the first month of experiment, Mr. Castleford declared
himself contented with Clarence’s industry and steadiness, and permanent
arrangements were made, to which Clarence submitted with an odd sort of
passive gratitude, such as almost angered my father, who little knew how
trying the position really was, nor how a certain home-sickness for the
seafaring life was tugging at the lad’s heart, and making each morning’s
entrance at the counting-house an effort—each merchant-captain, redolent
of the sea, an object of envy. My mother would have sympathised here,
but Clarence feared her more than my father, and she was living in
continual dread of some explosion, so that her dark curls began to show
streaks of gray, and her face to lose its round youthfulness.
Lent brought the question of Confirmation. Under the influence of good
Bishop Blomfield, and in the wave of evangelical revival—then at its
flood height—Confirmation was becoming a more prominent subject with
religious people than it had probably ever been in our Church, and it was
recognised that some preparation was desirable beyond the power of
repeating the Church Catechism. This was all that had been required of
my father at Harrow. My mother’s godfather, a dignified clergyman, had
simply said, ‘I suppose, my dear, you know all about it;’ and as for the
Admiral, he remarked, ‘Confirmed! I never was confirmed anything but a
post-captain!’
Our incumbent was more attentive to his duties, or rather recognised more
duties, than his predecessor. He preached on the subject, and formed
classes, sixteen being then the limit of age,—since the idea of the vow,
having become far more prominent than that of the blessing, it was held
that full development of the will and understanding was needful.
I was of the requisite age, and my father spoke to the clergyman, who
called, and, as I could not attend the classes, gave me books to read and
questions to answer. Clarence read and discussed the questions with me,
showing so much more insight into them, and fuller knowledge of Scripture
than I possessed, that I exclaimed, ‘Why should you not go up for
Confirmation too?’
‘No,’ he answered mournfully. ‘I must take no more vows if I can’t keep
them. It would just be profane.’
I had no more to say; indeed, my parents held the same view. It was good
Mr. Castleford who saw things differently. He was a clergyman’s son, and
had been bred up in the old orthodoxy, which was just beginning to put
forth fresh shoots, and, as a quasi-godfather, he held himself bound to
take an interest in our religious life, while the sponsors, whose names
stood in the family Bible, and whose spoons reposed in the plate-chest,
never troubled themselves on the matter. I remember Clarence leaning
over me and saying, ‘Mr. Castleford thinks I might be confirmed. He says
it is not so much the promise we make as of coming to Almighty God for
strength to keep what we are bound by already! He is going to speak to
papa.’
Perhaps no one except Mr. Castleford could have prevailed over the fear
of profanation in the mind of my father, who was, in his old-fashioned
way, one of the most reverent of men, and could not bear to think of holy
things being approached by one under a stigma, nor of exposing his son to
add to his guilt by taking and breaking further pledges. However, he was
struck by his friend’s arguments, and I heard him telling my mother that
when he had wished to wait till there had been time to prove sincerity of
repentance by a course of steadiness, the answer had been that it was
hard to require strength, while denying the means of grace. My mother
was scarcely convinced, but as he had consented she yielded without a
protest; and she was really glad that I should have Clarence at my side
to help me at the ceremony. The clergyman was applied to, and consented
to let Clarence attend the classes, where his knowledge, comprehension,
and behaviour were exemplary, so that a letter was written to my father
expressive of perfect satisfaction with him. ‘There,’ said my father, ‘I
knew it would be so! It is not _that_ which I want.’
The Confirmation seemed at the time a very short and perfunctory result
of our preparation; and, as things were conducted or misconducted then,
involved so much crowding and distress that I recollect very little but
clinging to Clarence’s arm under a strong sense of my infirmities,—the
painful attempt at kneeling, and the big outstretched lawn sleeves while
the blessing was pronounced over six heads at once, and then the struggle
back to the pew, while the silver-pokered apparitor looked grim at us, as
though the maimed and halt had no business to get into the way. Yet this
was a great advance upon former Confirmations, and the Bishop met my
father afterwards, and inquired most kindly after his lame son.
We were disappointed, and felt that we could not attain to the feelings
in the Confirmation poem in the _Christian Year_—Mr. Castleford’s gift to
me. Still, I believe that, though encumbered with such a drag as myself,
Clarence, more than I did,
‘Felt Him how strong, our hearts how frail,
And longed to own Him to the death.’
But the evangelical belief that dejection ought to be followed by a full
sense of pardon and assurance of salvation somewhat perplexed and dimmed
our Easter Communion. For one short moment, as Clarence turned to help
my father lift me up from the altar-rail, I saw his face and eyes radiant
with a wonderful rapt look; but it passed only too fast, and the more
than ordinary glimpse his spiritual nature had had made him all the more
sad afterwards, when he said, ‘I would give everything to know that there
was any steadfastness in my purpose to lead a new life.’
‘But you are leading a new life.’
‘Only because there is no one to bully me,’ he said. Still, there had
been no reproach against him all the time he had been at Frith and
Castleford’s, when suddenly we had a great shock.
Parties were running very high, and there were scurrilous papers about,
which my father perfectly abhorred; and one day at dinner, when
declaiming against something he had seen, he laid down strict commands
that none should be brought into the house. Then, glancing at Clarence,
something possessed him to say, ‘You have not been buying any.’
‘No, sir,’ Clarence answered; but a few minutes later, when we were alone
together, the others having left him to help me upstairs, he exclaimed,
‘Edward, what is to be done? I didn’t buy it; but there is one of those
papers in my great-coat pocket. Pollard threw it on my desk; and there
was something in it that I thought would amuse you.’
‘Oh! why didn’t you say so?’
‘There I am again! I simply could not, with his eye on me! Miserable
being that I am! Oh, where is the spirit of ghostly strength?’
‘Helping you now to take it to papa in the study and explain!’ I cried;
but the struggle in that tall fellow was as if he had been seven years
old instead of seventeen, ere he put his hand over his face and gave me
his arm to come out into the hall, fetch the paper, and make his
confession. Alas! we were too late. The coat had been moved, the paper
had fallen out; and there stood my mother with it in her hand, looking at
Clarence with an awful stony face of mute grief and reproach, while he
stammered forth what he had said before, and that he was about to give it
to my father. She turned away, bitterly, contemptuously indignant and
incredulous; and my corroborations only served to give both her and my
father a certain dread of Clarence’s influence over me, as though I had
been either deceived or induced to back him in deceiving them. The
unlucky incident plunged him back into the depths, just as he had begun
to emerge. Slight as it was, it was no trifle to him, in spite of
Griffith’s exclamation, ‘How absurd! Is a fellow to be bound to give an
account of everything he looks at as if he were six years old? Catch me
letting my mother pry into my pockets! But you are too meek, Bill; you
perfectly invite them to make a row about nothing!’
CHAPTER VII.
THE INHERITANCE.
‘For he that needs five thousand pound to live
Is full as poor as he that needs but five.
But if thy son can make ten pound his measure,
Then all thou addest may be called his treasure.’
GEORGE HERBERT.
IT was in the spring of 1829 that my father received a lawyer’s letter
announcing the death of James Winslow, Esquire, of Chantry House,
Earlscombe, and inviting him, as heir-at-law, to be present at the
funeral and opening of the will. The surprise to us all was great. Even
my mother had hardly heard of Chantry House itself, far less as a
possible inheritance; and she had only once seen James Winslow. He was
the last of the elder branch of the family, a third cousin, and older
than my father, who had known him in times long past. When they had last
met, the Squire of Chantry House was a married man, with more than one
child; my father a young barrister; and as one lived entirely in the
country and the other in town, without any special congeniality, no
intercourse had been kept up, and it was a surprise to hear that he had
left no surviving children. My father greatly doubted whether being
heir-at-law would prove to avail him anything, since it was likely that
so distant a relation would have made a will in favour of some nearer
connection on his wife’s or mother’s side. He was very vague about
Chantry House, only knowing that it was supposed to be a fair property,
and he would hardly consent to take Griffith with him by the Western
Royal Mail, warning him and all the rest of us that our expectations
would be disappointed.
Nevertheless we looked out the gentlemen’s seats in _Paterson’s Road
Book_, and after much research, for Chantry House lay far off from the
main road, we came upon—‘Chantry House, Earlscombe, the seat of James
Winslow, Esquire, once a religious foundation; beautifully situated on a
rising ground, commanding an extensive prospect—’
‘A religious foundation!’ cried Emily. ‘It will be a dear delicious old
abbey, all Gothic architecture, with cloisters and ruins and ghosts.’
‘Ghosts!’ said my mother severely, ‘what has put such nonsense into your
head?’
Nevertheless Emily made up her mind that Chantry House would be another
Melrose, and went about repeating the moonlight scene in the _Lay of the
Last Minstrel_ whenever she thought no one was there to laugh at her.
My father and Griffith returned with the good news that there was no
mistake. Chantry House was really his own, with the estate belonging to
it, reckoned at £5000 a year, exclusive of a handsome provision to Miss
Selby, the niece of the late Mrs. Winslow, a spinster of a certain age,
who had lived with her uncle, and now proposed to remove to Bath. Mr.
Winslow had, it appeared, lost his only son as a schoolboy, and his
daughters, like their mother, had been consumptive. He had always been
resolved that the estate should continue in the family; but reluctance to
see any one take his son’s place had withheld him from making any
advances to my father; and for several years past he had been in broken
health with failing faculties.
Of course there was much elation. Griff described as charming the place,
perched on the southern slope of a wooded hill, with a broad fertile
valley lying spread out before it, and the woods behind affording every
promise of sport. The house, my father said, was good, odd and
irregular, built at different times, but quite habitable, and with plenty
of furniture, though he opined that mamma would think it needed
modernising, to which she replied that our present chattels would make a
great difference; whereat my father, looking at the effects of more than
twenty years of London blacks, gave a little whistle, for she was always
the economical one of the pair.
Emily, with glowing cheeks and eager eyes, entreated to know whether it
was Gothic, and had a cloister! Papa nipped her hopes of a cloister, but
there were Gothic windows and doorway, and a bit of ruin in the garden, a
fragment of the old chapel.
My father could not resign his office without notice, and, besides, he
wished Miss Selby to have leisure for leaving her home of many years;
after which there would be a few needful repairs. The delay was not a
great grievance to any of us except little Martyn. We were much more
Cockney than almost any one is in these days of railways. We were
unusually devoid of kindred on both sides, my father’s holidays were
short, I was not a very movable commodity, and economy forbade long
journeys, so that we had never gone farther than Ramsgate, where we
claimed a certain lodging-house as a sort of right every summer.
Real country was as much unknown to us as the backwoods. My father alone
had been born and bred to village life and habits, for my mother had
spent her youth in a succession of seaport towns, frequented by
men-of-war. We heard, too, that Chantry House was very secluded, with
only a few cottages near at hand—a mile and a half from the church and
village of Earlscombe, three from the tiny country town of Wattlesea,
four from the place where the coach passed, connecting it with the
civilisation of Bath and Bristol, from each of which places it was about
half a day’s distance, according to the measures of those times. It was
a sort of banishment to people accustomed to the stream of life in
London; and though the consequence and importance derived from being
raised to the ranks of the Squirearchy were agreeable, they were a dear
purchase at the cost of being out of reach of all our friends and
acquaintances, as well as of other advantages.
To my father, however, the retirement from his many years of drudgery was
really welcome, and he had preserved enough of country tastes to rejoice
that it was, as he said, a clear duty to reside on his estate and look
after his property. My mother saw his relief in the prospect, and
suppressed her sighs at the dislocation of her life-long habits, and the
loss of intercourse with the acquaintance whom separation raised to the
rank of intimate friends, even her misgivings as to butchers, bakers, and
grocers in the wilderness, and still worse, as to doctors for me.
‘Humph!’ said the Admiral, ‘the boy will be all the better without them.’
And so I was; I can’t say they were the subject of much regret, but I was
really sorry to leave our big neighbour, the British Museum, where there
were good friends who always made me welcome, and encouraged me in
studies of coins and heraldry, which were great resources to me, so that
I used to spend hours there, and was by no means willing to resign my
ambition of obtaining an appointment there, when I heard my father say
that he was especially thankful for his good fortune because it enabled
him to provide for me. There were lessons, too, from masters in
languages, music, and drawing, which Emily and I shared, and which she
had just begun to value thoroughly. We had filled whole drawing-books
with wriggling twists of foliage in B B B marking pencil, and had just
been promoted to water-colours; and she was beginning to sing very
prettily. I feared, too, that I should no longer have a chance of
rivalling Griffith’s university studies. All this, with my sister’s girl
friends, and those kind people who used to drop in to play chess, and
otherwise amuse me, would all be left behind; and, sorest of all,
Clarence, who, whatever he was in the eyes of others, had grown to be my
mainstay during this last year. He it was who fetched me from the
Museum, took me into the gardens, helped me up and down stairs, spared no
pains to rout out whatever my fanciful pursuits required from shops in
the City, and, in very truth, spoilt me through all his hours that were
free from business, besides being my most perfect sympathising and
understanding companion.
I feared, too, that he would be terribly lonesome, though of late he had
been less haunted by longings for the sea, had made some way with his
fellows, and had been commended by the managing clerk; and it was painful
to find the elders did not grieve on their own account at parting with
him. My mother told the Admiral that she thought it would be good for
Mr. Winslow’s spirits not to be continually reminded of his trouble; and
my father might be heard confiding to Mr. Castleford that the separation
might be good for both her and her son, if only the lad could be trusted.
To which that good man replied by giving him an excellent character; but
was only met by a sigh, and ‘Well, we shall see!’
Clarence was to be lodged with Peter, whose devotion would not extend to
following us into barbarism, where, as he told us, he understood there
was no such thing as a ‘harea,’ and master would have to kill his own
mutton.
Peter had been tranquilly engaged to Gooch for years untold. They were
to be transformed into Mr. and Mrs. Robson, with some small appointment
about the Law Courts for him, and a lodging-house for her, where Clarence
was to abide, my mother feeling secure that neither his health, his
morals, nor his shirts could go much astray without her receiving warning
thereof.
Meanwhile, by the help of an antiquarian friend of my father, Mr.
Stafford, who was great in county history, I hunted up in the Museum
library all I could discover about our new possession.
The Chantry of St. Cecily at Earlscombe, in Somersetshire, had, it
appeared, been founded and endowed by Dame Isabel d’Oyley, in the year of
grace 1434, that constant prayers might be offered for the souls of her
husband and son, slain in the French wars. The poor lady’s intentions,
which to our Protestant minds appeared rather shocking than otherwise,
had been frustrated at the break up of such establishments, when the
Chantry, and the estate that maintained its clerks and bedesmen, was
granted to Sir Harry Power, from whom, through two heiresses, it had come
to the Fordyces, the last of whom, by name Margaret, had died childless,
leaving the estate to her stepson, Philip Winslow, our ancestor.
Moreover, we learnt that a portion of the building was of ancient date,
and that there was an ‘interesting fragment’ of the old chapel in the
grounds, which our good friend promised himself the pleasure of
investigating on his first holiday.
To add to our newly-acquired sense of consideration and of high pedigree,
the family chariot, after taking Miss Selby to Bath, came up post to
London to be touched up at the coachbuilder’s, have the escutcheon
altered so as to impale the Griffith coat instead of the Selby, and
finally to convey us to our new abode, in preparation for which all its
boxes came to be packed.
A chariot! You young ones have as little notion of one as of a British
war-chariot armed with scythes. Yet people of a certain grade were as
sure to keep their chariot as their silver tea-pot; indeed we knew one
young couple who started in life with no other habitation, but spent
their time as nomads, in visits to their relations and friends, for
visits _were_ visits then.
The capacities of a chariot were considerable. Within, there was a
good-sized seat for the principal occupants, and outside a dickey behind,
and a driving box before, though sometimes there was only one of these,
and that transferable. The boxes were calculated to hold family luggage
on a six months’ tour. There they lay on the spare-room floor, ready to
be packed, the first earnest of our new possessions—except perhaps the
five-pound note my father gave each of us four elder ones, on the day the
balance at the bank was made over to him. There was the imperial, a
grand roomy receptacle, which was placed on the top of the carriage, and
would not always go upstairs in small houses; the capbox, which fitted
into a curved place in front of the windows, and could not stand alone,
but had a frame to support it; two long narrow boxes with the like
infirmity of standing, which fitted in below; square ones under each
seat; and a drop box fastened on behind. There were pockets beneath each
window, and, curious relic in name and nature of the time when every
gentleman carried his weapon, there was the sword case, an excrescence
behind the back of the best seat, accessible by lifting a cushion, where
weapons used to be carried, but where in our peaceful times travellers
bestowed their luncheon and their books.
Our chariot was black above, canary yellow below, beautifully varnished,
and with our arms blazoned on each door. It was lined with dark blue
leather and cloth, picked out with blue and yellow lace in accordance
with our liveries, and was a gorgeous spectacle. I am afraid Emily did
not share in Mistress Gilpin’s humility when
‘The chaise was brought,
But yet was not allowed
To drive up to the door, lest all
Should say that she was proud!’
It was then that Emily and I each started a diary to record the events of
our new life. Hers flourished by fits and starts; but I having perforce
more leisure than she, mine has gone on with few interruptions till the
present time, and is the backbone of this narrative, which I compile and
condense from it and other sources before destroying it.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE OLD HOUSE.
‘Your history whither are you spinning?
Can you do nothing but describe?
A house there is, and that’s enough!’
GRAY.
How we did enjoy our journey, when the wrench from our old home was once
made. We did not even leave Clarence behind, for Mr. Castleford had
given him a holiday, so that he might not appear to be kept at a
distance, as if under a cloud, and might help me through our travels.
My mother and I occupied the inside of the carriage, with Emily between
us at the outset; but when we were off the London stones she was often
allowed to make a third on the dickey with Clarence and Martyn, whose
ecstatic heels could be endured for the sake of the free air and the
view. Of course we posted, and where there were severe hills we indulged
in four horses. The varieties of the jackets of our post-boys, blue or
yellow, as supposed to indicate the politics of their inns, were
interesting to us, as everything was interesting then. Otherwise their
equipment was exactly alike—neat drab corduroy breeches and top-boots,
and hats usually white, and they were all boys, though the red faces and
grizzled hair of some looked as if they had faced the weather for at
least fifty years.
It was a beautiful August, and the harvest fields were a sight perfectly
new, filling us with rapture unspeakable. At every hill which offered an
excuse, our outsiders were on their feet, thrusting in their heads and
hands to us within with exclamations of delight, and all sorts of
discoveries—really new to us three younger ones. Ears of corn, bearded
barley, graceful oats, poppies, corn-flowers, were all delicious
novelties to Emily and me, though Griff and my father laughed at our
ecstasies, and my mother occasionally objected to the wonderful
accumulation of curiosities thrust into her lap or the door pockets, and
tried to persuade Martyn that rooks’ wings, dead hedgehogs, sticks and
stones of various merits, might be found at Earlscombe, until Clarence,
by the judicious purchase of a basket at Salisbury, contrived to satisfy
all parties and safely dispose of the treasures. The objects that stand
out in my memory on that journey were Salisbury Spire, and a long hill
where the hedgebank was one mass of the exquisite rose-bay willow herb—a
perfect revelation to our city-bred eyes; but indeed, the whole route was
like one panorama to us of _L’Allegro_ and other descriptions on which we
had fed. For in those days we were much more devoted to poetry than is
the present generation, which has a good deal of false shame on that
head.
Even dining and sleeping at an inn formed a pleasing novelty, though we
did not exactly sympathise with Martyn when he dashed in at breakfast
exulting in having witnessed the killing of a pig. As my father
observed, it was too like realising Peter’s forebodings of our return to
savage life.
Demonstrations were not the fashion of these times, and there was a good
deal of dull discontent and disaffection in the air, so that no tokens of
welcome were prepared for us—not even a peal of bells; nor indeed should
we have heard them if they had been rung, for the church was a mile and a
half beyond the house, with a wood between cutting off the sound, except
in certain winds. We did not miss a reception, which would rather have
embarrassed us. We began to think it was time to arrive, and my father
believed we were climbing the last hill, when, just as we had passed a
remarkably pretty village and church, Griffith called out to say that we
were on our own ground. He had made his researches with the game keeper
while my father was busy with the solicitor, and could point to our
boundary wall, a little below the top of the hill on the northern side.
He informed us that the place we had passed was Hillside—Fordyce
property,—but this was Earlscombe, our own. It was a great stony bit of
pasture with a few scattered trees, but after the flat summit was past,
the southern side was all beechwood, where a gate admitted us into a
drive cut out in a slant down the otherwise steep descent, and coming out
into an open space. And there we were!
The old house was placed on the widest part of a kind of shelf or natural
terrace, of a sort of amphitheatre shape, with wood on either hand, but
leaving an interval clear in the midst broad enough for house and
gardens, with a gentle green slope behind, and a much steeper one in
front, closed in by the beechwoods. The house stood as it were sideways,
or had been made to do so by later inhabitants. I know this is very
long-winded, but there have been such alterations that without minute
description this narrative will be unintelligible.
The aspect was northwards so far as the lie of the ground was concerned,
but the house stood across. The main body was of the big symmetrical
Louis XIV. style—or, as it is now the fashion to call it, Queen
Anne—brick, with stone quoins, big sash-windows, and a great square hall
in the midst, with the chief rooms opening into it. The principal
entrance had been on the north, with a huge front door and a flight of
stone steps, and just space enough for a gravel coach ring before the
rapid grassy descent. Later constitutions, however, must have eschewed
that northern front door, and later nerves that narrow verge, and on the
eastern front had been added that Gothic porch of which Emily had
heard,—and a flagrantly modern Gothic porch it was, flanked by two
comical little turrets, with loopholes, from which a thread-paper or Tom
Thumb might have defended it. Otherwise it resembled a church porch,
except for the formidable points of a sham portcullis; but there was no
denying that it greatly increased the comfort of the house, with its two
sets of heavy doors, and the seats on either side. The great hall door
had been closed up, plastered over within, and rendered inoffensive.
Towards the west there was another modern addition of drawing and dining
rooms, and handsome bedchambers above, in Gothic taste, _i.e._ with
pointed arches filled up with glass over the sash-windows. The
drawing-room was very pretty, with a glass door at the end leading into
an old-fashioned greenhouse, and two French windows to the south opening
upon the lawn, which soon began to slope upwards, curving, as I said,
like an amphitheatre, and was always shady and sheltered, tilting its
flower-beds towards the house as if to display them. The dining-room
had, in like manner, one west and two north windows, the latter
commanding a grand view over the green meadow-land below, dotted with
round knolls, and rising into blue hills beyond. We became proud of
counting the villages and church towers we could see from thence.
There was a still older portion, more ancient than the square _corps de
logis_, and built of the cream-coloured stone of the country. It was at
the south-eastern angle, where the ground began sloping so near the house
that this wing—if it may so be called—containing two good-sized rooms
nearly on a level with the upper floor, had nothing below but some open
stone vaultings, under which it was only just possible for my tall
brothers to stand upright, at the innermost end. These opened into the
cellars which, no doubt, belonged to the fifteenth-century structure.
There seemed to have once been a door and two or three steps to the
ground, which rose very close to the southern end; but this had been
walled up. The rooms had deep mullioned windows east and west, and very
handsome groined ceilings, and were entered by two steps down from the
gallery round the upper part of the hall. There was a very handsome
double staircase of polished oak, shaped like a Y, the stem of which
began just opposite the original front door—making us wonder if people
knew what draughts were in the days of Queen Anne, and remember Madame de
Maintenon’s complaint that health was sacrificed to symmetry. Not far
from this oldest portion were some broken bits of wall and stumps of
columns, remnants of the chapel, and prettily wreathed with ivy and
clematis. We rejoiced in such a pretty and distinctive ornament to our
garden, and never troubled ourselves about the desecration; and certainly
ours was one of the most delightful gardens that ever existed, what with
green turf, bright flowers, shapely shrubs, and the grand beech-trees
enclosing it with their stately white pillars, green foliage, and the
russet arcades beneath them. The stillness was wonderful to ears
accustomed to the London roar—almost a new sensation. Emily was found,
as she said, ‘listening to the silence;’ and my father declared that no
one could guess at the sense of rest that it gave him.
[Picture: Map of the house]
Of space within there was plenty, though so much had been sacrificed to
the hall and staircase; and this was apparently the cause of the modern
additions, as the original sitting-rooms, wainscotted and double-doored,
were rather small for family requirements. One of these, once the
dining-room, became my father’s study, where he read and wrote, saw his
tenants, and by and by acted as Justice of the Peace. The opposite one,
towards the garden, was termed the book-room. Here Martyn was to do his
lessons, and Emily and I carry on our studies, and do what she called
keeping up her accomplishments. My couch and appurtenances abode there,
and it was to be my retreat from company,—or on occasion could be made a
supplementary drawing-room, as its fittings showed it had been the
parlour. It communicated with another chamber, which became my
own—sparing the difficulties that stairs always presented; and beyond
lay, niched under the grand staircase, a tiny light closet, a
passage-room, where my mother put a bed for a man-servant, not liking to
leave me entirely alone on the ground floor. It led to a passage to the
garden door, also to my mother’s den, dedicated to housewifely cares and
stores, and ended at the back stairs, descending to the servants’ region.
This was very old, handsomely vaulted with stone, and, owing to the fall
of the ground, had ample space for light on the north side,—where, beyond
the drive, the descent was so rapid as to afford Martyn infinite delight
in rolling down, to the horror of all beholders and the detriment of his
white duck trowsers.
I don’t know much about the upper story, so I spare you that. Emily had
a hankering for one of the pretty old mullioned-windowed rooms—the
mullion chambers, as she named them; but Griff pounced on them at once,
the inner for his repose, the outer for his guns and his studies—not
smoking, for young men were never permitted to smoke within doors, nor
indeed in any home society. The choice of the son and heir was
undisputed, and he proceeded to settle his possessions in his new
domains, where they made an imposing appearance.
CHAPTER IX.
RATS.
‘As louder and louder, drawing near,
The gnawing of their teeth he could hear.’
SOUTHEY.
‘WHAT a ridiculous old fellow that Chapman is,’ said Griff, coming in
from a conference with the gaunt old man who acted as keeper to our not
very extensive preserves. ‘I told him to get some gins for the rats in
my rooms, and he shook his absurd head like any mandarin, and said,
“There baint no trap as will rid you of them kind of varmint, sir.”’
‘Of course,’ my father said, ‘rats are part of the entail of an old
house. You may reckon on them.’
‘Those rooms of yours are the very place for them,’ added my mother. ‘I
only hope they will not infest the rest of the house.’
To which Griff rejoined that they perpetrated the most extraordinary
noises he had ever heard from rats, and told Emily she might be thankful
to him for taking those rooms, for she would have been frightened out of
her little wits. He meant, he said, to get a little terrier, and have a
thorough good rat hunt, at which Martyn capered about in irrepressible
ecstasy.
This, however, was deferred by the unwillingness of old Chapman, of whom
even Griff was somewhat in awe. His fame as a sportsman had to be made,
and he had had only such practice as could be attained by shooting at a
mark ever since he had been aware of his coming greatness. So he was
desirous of conciliating Chapman, and not getting laughed at as the
London young gentleman who could not hit a hay-stack. My father, who had
been used to carrying a gun in his younger days, was much amused, in his
quiet way, at seeing Griff watch Chapman off on his rounds, and then
betake himself to the locality most remote from the keeper’s ears to
practise on the rook or crow. Martyn always ran after him, having
solemnly promised not to touch the gun, and to keep behind. He was too
good-natured to send the little fellow back, though he often tried to
elude the pursuit, not wishing for a witness to his attempts; and he
never invited Clarence, who had had some experience of curious game but
never mentioned it.
Clarence devoted himself to Emily and me, tugging my garden-chair along
all the paths where it would go without too much jolting, and when I had
had enough, exploring those hanging woods, either with her or on his own
account. They used to come home with their hands full of flowers, and
this resulted in a vehement attack of botany,—a taste that has lasted all
our lives, together with the _hortus siccus_ to which we still make
additions, though there has been a revolution there as well as everywhere
else, and the Linnæan system we learnt so eagerly from Martin’s _Letters_
is altogether exploded and antiquated. Still, my sister refuses to own
the scientific merits of the natural system, and can point to school-bred
and lectured young ladies who have no notion how to discover the name or
nature of a live plant.
On the Friday after our arrival the noises had been so fearful that Griff
had been exasperated into going off across the hills, accompanied by his
constant shadow, Martyn, in search of the professional ratcatcher of the
neighbourhood, in spite of Chapman’s warning—that Tom Petty was the
biggest rascal in the neighbourhood, and a regular out and out poacher;
and as to the noises—he couldn’t ‘tackle the like of they.’ After
revelling in the beauty of the beechwoods as long as was good for me or
for Clarence, I was left in the garden to sketch the ruin, while my two
companions started on one of their exploring expeditions.
It was getting late enough to think of going to prepare for the six
o’clock dinner when Emily came forth alone from the path between the
trees, announcing—‘An adventure, Edward! We have had such an adventure.’
‘Where’s Clarence?’
‘Gone for the doctor! Oh, no; Griff hasn’t shot anybody. He is gone for
the ratcatcher, you know. It is a poor little herdboy, who tumbled out
of a tree; and oh! such a sweet, beautiful, young lady—just like a book!’
When Emily became less incoherent, it appeared that on coming out on the
bit of common above the wood, as she and Clarence were halting on the
brow of the hill to admire the view, they heard a call for help, and
hurrying down in the direction whence it proceeded they saw a stunted
ash-tree, beneath which were a young lady and a little child bending over
a village lad who lay beneath moaning piteously. The girl, whom Emily
described as the most beautiful creature she ever saw, explained that the
boy, who had been herding the cattle scattered around, had been climbing
the tree, a limb of which had broken with him. She had seen the fall
from a distance, and hurried up; but she hardly knew what to do, for her
little sister was too young to be sent in quest of assistance. Clarence
thought one leg seriously injured, and as the young lady seemed to know
the boy, offered to carry him home. School officers were yet in the
future; children were set to work almost as soon as they could walk, and
this little fellow was so light and thin as to shock Clarence when he had
been taken up on his back, for he weighed quite a trifle. The young lady
showed the way to a wretched little cottage, where a bigger girl had just
come in with a sheaf of corn freshly gleaned poised on her head. They
sent her to fetch her mother, and Clarence undertook to go for a doctor,
but to the surprise and horror of Emily, there was a demur. Something
was said of old Molly and her ‘ile’ and ‘yarbs,’ or perhaps Madam could
step round. When Clarence, on this being translated to him, pronounced
the case beyond such treatment, it was explained outside the door that
this was a terribly poor family, and the doctor would not come to parish
patients for an indefinite time after his summons, besides which, he
lived at Wattlesea. ‘Indeed mamma does almost all the doctoring with her
medicine chest,’ said the girl.
On which Clarence declared that he would let the doctor know that he
himself would be responsible for the cost of the attendance, and set off
for Wattlesea, a kind of town village in the flat below. He could not
get back till dinner was half over, and came in alarmed and apologetic;
but he had nothing worse to encounter than Griff’s unmerciful banter (or,
as you would call it, chaff) about his knight errantry, and Emily’s
lovely heroine in the sweetest of cottage bonnets.
Griff could be slightly tyrannous in his merry mockery, and when he found
that on the ensuing day Clarence proposed to go and inquire after the
patient, he made such wicked fun of the expectations the pair entertained
of hearing the sweet cottage bonnet reading a tract in a silvery voice
through the hovel window, that he fairly teased and shamed Clarence out
of starting till the renowned Tom Petty arrived and absorbed all the
three brothers, and even their father, in delights as mysterious to me as
to Emily. How she shrieked when Martyn rushed triumphantly into the room
where we were arranging books with the huge patriarch of all the rats
dangling by his tail! Three hopeful families were destroyed; rooms,
vaults, and cellars examined and cleared; and Petty declared the race to
be exterminated, picturesque ruffian that he was, in his shapeless hat,
rusty velveteen, long leggings, a live ferret in his pocket, and festoons
of dead rats over his shoulder.
Chapman, who regarded him much as the ferret did the rat, declared that
the rabbits and hares would suffer from letting ‘that there chap’ show
his face here on any plea; and, moreover, gave a grunt very like a scoff;
at the idea of slumbers in the mullion rooms (as they were called) being
secured by his good offices.
And Chapman was right. The unaccountable noises broke out
again—screaming, wailing, sobbing—sounds scarcely within the power of cat
or rat, but possibly the effect of the wind in the old building. At any
rate, Griff could not stand them, and declared that sleep was impossible
when the wind was in that quarter, so that he must shift his bedroom
elsewhere, though he still wished to retain the outer apartment, which he
had taken pleasure in adorning with his special possessions. My mother
would scarcely have tolerated such fancies in any one else, but Griff had
his privileges.
CHAPTER X.
OUR TUNEFUL CHOIR.
‘The church has been whitewashed, but right long ago,
As the cracks and the dinginess amply doth show;
About the same time that a strange petrifaction
Confined the incumbent to mere Sunday action.
So many abuses in this place are rife,
The only church things giving token of life
Are the singing within and the nettles without—
Both equally rampant without any doubt.’
F. R. HAVERGAL.
ALL Griff’s teasing could not diminish—nay, rather increased—Emily’s
excitement in the hope of seeing and identifying the sweet cottage bonnet
at church on Sunday. The distance we had to go was nearly two miles, and
my mother and I drove thither in a donkey chair, which had been hunted up
in London for that purpose because the ‘pheeāton’ (as the servants
insisted on calling it) was too high for me. My father had an
old-fashioned feeling about the Fourth Commandment, which made him
scrupulous as to using any animal on Sunday; and even when, in bad
weather, or for visitors, the larger carriage was used, he always walked.
He was really angry with Griff that morning for mischievously maintaining
that it was a greater breach of the commandment to work an ass than a
horse.
It was a pretty drive on a road slanting gradually through the brushwood
that clothed the steep face of the hillside, and passing farms and
meadows full of cattle—all things quieter and stiller than ever in their
Sunday repose. We knew that the living was in Winslow patronage, but
that it was in the hands of one of the Selby connection, who held it,
together with it is not safe to say how many benefices, and found it
necessary for his health to reside at Bath. The vicarage had long since
been turned into a farmhouse, and the curate lived at Wattlesea. All
this we knew, but we had not realised that he was likewise assistant
curate there, and only favoured Earlscombe with alternate morning and
evening services on Sundays.
Still less were we prepared for the interior of the church. It had a
picturesque square tower covered with ivy, and a general air of fitness
for a sketch; indeed, the photograph of it in its present beautified
state will not stand a comparison with our drawings of it, in those days
of dilapidation in the middle of the untidy churchyard, with little boys
astride on the sloping, sunken lichen-grown headstones, mullein spikes
and burdock leaves, more graceful than the trim borders and zinc crosses
which are pleasanter to the mental eye.
The London church we had left would be a fearful shock to the present
generation, but we were accustomed to decency, order, and reverence; and
it was no wonder that my father was walking about the churchyard,
muttering that he never saw such a place, while my brothers were full of
amusement. Their spruce looks in their tall hats, bright ties, dark
coats, and white trowsers strapped tight under their boots, looked
incongruous with the rest of the congregation, the most distinguished
members of which were farmers in drab coats with huge mother-of-pearl
buttons, and long gaiters buttoned up to their knees and strapped up to
their gay waistcoats over their white corduroys. Their wives and
daughters were in enormous bonnets, fluttering with ribbons; but then
what my mother and Emily wore were no trifles. The rest of the
congregation were—the male part of it—in white or gray smock-frocks, the
elderly women in black bonnets, the younger in straw; but we had not long
to make our observations, for Chapman took possession of us. He was
parish clerk, and was in great glory in his mourning coat and hat, and
his object was to marshal us all into our pew before he had to attend
upon the clergyman; and of course I was glad enough to get as soon as
possible out of sight of all the eyes not yet accustomed to my figure.
And hidden enough I was when we had been introduced through the little
north chancel door into a black-curtained, black-cushioned, black-lined
pew, well carpeted, with a table in the midst, and a stove, whose pipe
made its exit through the floriated tracery of the window overhead. The
chancel arch was to the west of us, blocked up by a wooden parcel-gilt
erection, and to the east a decorated window that would have been very
handsome if two side-lights had not been obscured by the two Tables of
the Law, with the royal arms on the top of the first table, and over the
other our own, with the Fordyce in a scutcheon of pretence; for, as an
inscription recorded, they had been erected by Margaret, daughter of
Christopher Fordyce, Esquire, of Chantry House, and relict of Sir James
John Winslow, Kt., sergeant-at-law, A.D. 1700—the last date, I verily
believe, at which anything had been done to the church. And on the wall,
stopping up the southern chancel window, was a huge marble slab,
supported by angels blowing trumpets, with a very long inscription about
the Fordyce family, ending with this same Margaret, who had married the
Winslow, lost two or three infants, and died on 1st January 1708, three
years later than her husband.
Thus far I could see; but Griff was standing lifting the curtain, and
showing by the working of his shoulders his amazement and diversion, so
that only the daggers in my mother’s eyes kept Martyn from springing up
after him. What he beheld was an altar draped in black like a coffin,
and on the step up to the rail, boys and girls eating apples and
performing antics to beguile the waiting time, while a row of
white-smocked old men occupied the bench opposite to our seat, conversing
loud enough for us to hear them.
My father and Clarence came in; the bells stopped; there was a sound of
steps, and in the fabric in front of us there emerged a grizzled head and
the back of a very dirty surplice besprinkled with iron moulds, while
Chapman’s back appeared above our curtain, his desk (full of dilapidated
prayer-books) being wedged in between us and the reading-desk.
The duet that then took place between him and the curate must have been
heard to be credible, especially as, being so close behind the old man,
we could not fail to be aware of all the remarkable shots at long words
which he bawled out at the top of his voice, and I refrain from
recording, lest they should haunt others as they have done by me all my
life. Now and then Chapman caught up a long switch and dashed out at
some obstreperous child to give an audible whack; and towards the close
of the litany he stumped out—we heard his tramp the whole length of the
church, and by and by his voice issued from an unknown height,
proclaiming—‘Let us sing to the praise and glory — in an anthem taken
from the 42d chapter of Genesis.’
There was an outburst of bassoon, clarionet, and fiddle, and the
performance that followed was the most marvellous we had ever heard,
especially when the big butcher—fiddling all the time—declared in a
mighty solo, ‘I am Jo—Jo—Jo—Joseph!’ and having reiterated this
information four or five times, inquired with equal pertinacity,
‘Doth—doth my fa-a-u-ther yet live?’ Poor Emily was fairly ‘convulsed;’
she stuffed her handkerchief into her mouth, and grew so crimson that my
mother was quite frightened, and very near putting her out at the little
door of excommunication. To our last hour we shall never forget the
shock of that first anthem.
The Commandments were read from the desk, Chapman’s solitary response
coming from the gallery; and while the second singing—four verses from
Tate and Brady—was going on, we beheld the surplice stripped off,—like
the slough of a May-fly, as Griff said,—when a rusty black gown was
revealed, in which the curate ascended the pulpit and was lost to our
view before the concluding verse of the psalm, which we had reason to
believe was selected in compliment to us, as well as to Earlscombe,—
‘My lot is fall’n in that blest land
Where God is truly know,
He fills my cup with liberal hand;
’Tis He—’tis He—’tis He—supports my throne.’
We had great reason to doubt how far the second line could justly be
applied to the parish! but there was no judging of the sermon, for only
detached sentences reached us in a sort of mumble. Griff afterwards
declared churchgoing to be as good as a comedy, and we all had to learn
to avoid meeting each other’s eyes, whatever we might hear. When the
scuffle and tramp of the departing congregation had ceased, we came forth
from our sable box, and beheld the remnants of a once handsome church,
mauled in every possible way, green stains on the walls, windows bricked
up, and a huge singing gallery. Good bits of carved stall work were
nailed anyhow into the pews; the floor was uneven; no font was visible;
there was a mouldy uncared-for look about everything. The curate in
riding-boots came out of the vestry,—a pale, weary-looking man, painfully
meek and civil, with gray hair sleeked round his face. He ‘louted low,’
and seemed hardly to venture on taking the hand my father held out to
him. There was some attempt to enter into conversation with him, but he
begged to be excused, for he had to hurry back to Wattlesea to a funeral.
Poor man! he was as great a pluralist as his vicar, for he kept a boys’
school, partially day, partially boarding, and his eyes looked hungrily
at Martyn.
If the ‘sweet cottage bonnet’ had been at church there would have been
little chance of discovering her, but we found that we were the only
‘quality,’ as Chapman called it, or things might not have been so bad.
Old James Winslow had been a mere fox-hunting squire till he became a
valetudinarian; nor had he ever cared for the church or for the poor, so
that the village was in a frightful state of neglect. There was a
dissenting chapel, old enough to be overgrown with ivy and not too
hideous, erected by the Nonconformists in the reign of the Great
Deliverer, but this partook of the general decadence of the parish, and,
as we found, the chapel’s principal use was to serve as an excuse for not
going to church.
My father always went to church twice, so he and Clarence walked to
Wattlesea, where appearances were more respectable; but they heard the
same sermon over again, and, as my father drily remarked, it was not a
composition that would bear repetition.
He was much distressed at the state of things, and intended to write to
the incumbent, though, as he said, whatever was done would end by being
at his own expense, and the move and other calls left him so little in
hand that he sighed over the difficulties, and declared that he was
better off in London, except for the honour of the thing. Perhaps my
mother was of the same opinion after a dreary afternoon, when Griff and
Martyn had been wandering about aimlessly, and were at length betrayed by
the barking of a little terrier, purchased the day before from Tom Petty,
besieging the stable cat, who stood with swollen tail, glaring eyes, and
thunderous growls, on the top of the tallest pillar of the ruins. Emily
nearly cried at their cruelty. Martyn was called off by my mother, and
set down, half sulky, half ashamed, to _Henry and his Bearer_; and Griff,
vowing that he believed it was that brute who made the row at night, and
that she ought to be exterminated, strolled off to converse with Chapman,
who was a quaint compound of clerk and keeper—in the one capacity
upholding his late master, in the other bemoaning Mr. Mears’
unpunctualities, specially as regarded weddings and funerals; one ‘corp’
having been kept waiting till a messenger had been sent to Wattlesea, who
finding both clergy out for the day, had had to go to Hillside, ‘where
they was always ready, though the old Squire would have been mad with him
if he’d a-guessed one of they Fordys had ever set foot in the parish.’
The only school in the place was close to the meeting-house, ‘a very
dame’s school indeed,’ as Emily described it after a peep on Monday.
Dame Dearlove, the old woman who presided, was a picture of Shenstone’s
schoolmistress,—black bonnet, horn spectacles, fearful birch rod,
three-cornered buff ’kerchief, checked apron and all, but on meddling
with her, she proved a very dragon, the antipodes of her name. Tattered
copies of the _Universal Spelling-Book_ served her aristocracy, ragged
Testaments the general herd, whence all appeared to be shouting aloud at
once. She looked sour as verjuice when my mother and Emily entered, and
gave them to understand that ‘she wasn’t used to no strangers in her
school, and didn’t want ’em.’ We found that in Chapman’s opinion she
‘didn’t larn ’em nothing.’ She had succeeded her aunt, who had taught
him to read ‘right off,’ but ‘her baint to be compared with she.’ And
now the farmers’ children, and the little aristocracy, including his own
grand-children,—all indeed who, in his phrase, ‘cared for
eddication,’—went to Wattlesea.
CHAPTER XI.
‘THEY FORDYS.’
‘Of honourable reckoning are you both,
And pity ’tis, you lived at odds so long.’
SHAKESPEARE.
MY father had a good deal of business in hand, and was glad of Clarence’s
help in writing and accounts,—a great pleasure, though it prevented his
being Griff’s companion in his exploring and essays at shooting. He had
time, however, to make an expedition with me in the donkey chair to
inquire after the herdboy, Amos Bell, and carry him some kitchen physic.
To our horror we found him quite alone in the wretched cottage, while
everybody was out harvesting; but he did not seem to pity himself, or
think it otherwise than quite natural, as he lay on a little bed in the
corner, disabled by what Clarence thought a dislocation. Miss Ellen had
brought him a pudding, and little Miss Anne a picture-book.
He was not so dense and shy as the children of the hamlet near us, and
Emily extracted from him that Miss Ellen was ‘Our passon’s young lady.’
‘Mr. Mears’!’ she exclaimed.
‘No: ourn be Passon Fordy.’
It turned out that this place was not in Earlscombe at all, but in
Hillside, a different parish; and the boy, Amos, further communicated
that there was old Passon Fordy, and Passon Frank, and Madam, what was
Mr. Frank’s lady. Yes, he could read, he could; he went to Sunday
School, and was in Miss Ellen’s class; he had been to school worky days,
only father was dead, and Farmer Hartop gave him a job.
It was plain that Hillside was under a very different rule from
Earlscombe; and Emily was delighted to have discovered that the sweet
cottage bonnet’s owner was called Ellen, which just then was the pet
Christian name of romance, in honour of the _Lady of the Lake_.
In the midst of her raptures, however, just as we were about to turn in
at our own gate into the wood, we heard horses’ hoofs, and then came,
careering by on ponies, a very pretty girl and a youth of about the same
age. Clarence’s hand rose to his hat, and he made his eager bow; but the
young lady did not vouchsafe the slightest acknowledgment, turned her
head away, and urged her pony to speed.
Emily broke out with an angry disappointed exclamation. Clarence’s face
was scarlet, and he said low and hoarsely, ‘That’s Lester. He was in the
_Argus_ at Portsmouth two years ago;’—and then, as our little sister
continued her indignant exclamations, he added, ‘Hush! Don’t on any
account say a word about it. I had better get back to my work. I am
only doing you harm by staying here.’
At which Emily shed tears, and together we persuaded him not to curtail
his holiday, which, indeed, he could not have done without assigning the
reason to the elders, and this was out of the question. Nor did he
venture to hang back when, as our service was to be on Sunday afternoon,
my father proposed to walk to Hillside Church in the morning. They came
back well pleased. There was care and decency throughout. The psalms
were sung to a ‘grinder organ’—which was an advanced state of things in
those days—and very nicely. Parson Frank read well and impressively, and
the old parson, a fine venerable man, had preached an excellent
sermon—really admirable, as my father repeated. Our party had been
scarcely in time, and had been disposed of in seats close to the door,
where Clarence was quite out of sight of the disdainful young lady and
her squire, of whom Emily begged to hear no more.
She looked askance at the cards left on the hall table the next day—‘The
Rev. Christopher Fordyce,’ and ‘The Rev. F. C. Fordyce,’ also ‘Mrs. F. C.
Fordyce, Hillside Rectory.’
We had found out that Hillside was a family living, and that there was
much activity there on the part of the father and son—rector and curate;
and that the other clerical folk, ladies especially, who called on us,
spoke of Mrs. F. C. Fordyce with a certain tone, as if they were afraid
of her, as Sir Horace Lester’s sister,—very superior, very active, very
strict in her notions,—as if these were so many defects. They were an
offshoot of the old Fordyces of Chantry House, but so far back that all
recollection of kindred or connection must have worn out. Their
property—all in beautiful order—marched with ours, and Chapman was very
particular about the boundaries. ‘Old master he wouldn’t have a bird
picked up if it fell over on they Fordys’ ground—not he! He couldn’t
abide passons, couldn’t the old Squire—not Miss Hannah More, and all they
Cheddar lot, and they Fordys least of all. My son’s wife, she was for
sending her little maid to Hillside to Madam Fordys’ school, but, bless
your heart, ’twould have been as much as my place was worth if master had
known it.’
The visit was not returned till after Clarence had gone back to his
London work. Sore as was the loss of him from my daily life, I could see
that the new world and fresh acquaintances were a trial to him, and
especially since the encounter with young Lester had driven him back into
his shell, so that he would be better where he was already known and had
nothing new to overcome. Emily, though not yet sixteen, was emancipated
from schoolroom habits, and the dear girl was my devoted slave to an
extent that perhaps I abused.
Not being ‘come out,’ she was left at home on the day when we set out on
a regular progress in the chariot with post-horses. The britshka and
pair, which were our ambition, were to wait till my father’s next rents
came in. Morning calls in the country were a solemn and imposing
ceremony, and the head of the family had to be taken on the first
circuit; nor was there much scruple as to making them in the forenoon, so
several were to be disposed of before fulfilling an engagement to
luncheon at the farthest point, where some old London friends had
borrowed a house for the summer, and had included me in their invitation.
Here alone did I leave the carriage, but I had Cooper’s _Spy_ and my
sketch-book as companions while waiting at doors where the inhabitants
were at home. The last visit was at Hillside Rectory, a house of
architecture somewhat similar to our own, but of the soft creamy stone
which so well set off the vine with purple clusters, the myrtles and
fuchsias, that covered it. I was wishing we had drawn up far enough off
for a sketch to be possible, when, from a window close above, I heard the
following words in a clear girlish voice—
‘No, indeed! I’m not going down. It is only those horrid Earlscombe
people. I can’t think how they have the face to come near us!’
There was a reply, perhaps that the parents had made the first visit, for
the rejoinder was—‘Yes; grandpapa said it was a Christian duty to make an
advance; but they need not have come so soon. Indeed, I wonder they show
themselves at all. I am sure I would not if I had such a dreadful son.’
Presently, ‘I hate to think of it. That I should have thanked him.
Depend upon it, he will never pay the doctor. A coward like that is
capable of anything.’
The proverb had been realised, but there could hardly have been a more
involuntary or helpless listener. Presently my parents came back,
escorted by both the gentlemen of the house, tall fine-looking men, the
elder with snowy hair, and the dignity of men of the old school; the
younger with a joyous, hearty, out-of-door countenance, more like a
squire than a clergyman.
The visit seemed to have been gratifying. Mrs. Fordyce was declared to
be of higher stamp than most of the neighbouring ladies; and my father
was much pleased with the two clergymen, while as we drove along he kept
on admiring the well-ordered fields and fences, and contrasting the
pretty cottages and trim gardens with the dreary appearance of our own
village. I asked why Amos Bell’s home had been neglected, and was
answered with some annoyance, as I pointed down the lane, that it was on
our land, though in Hillside parish. ‘I am glad to have such
neighbours!’ observed my mother, and I kept to myself the remarks I had
heard, though I was still tingling with the sting of them.
We heard no more of ‘they Fordys’ for some time. The married pair went
away to stay with friends, and we only once met the old gentleman, when I
was waiting in the street at Wattlesea in the donkey chair, while my
mother was trying to match netting silk in the odd little shop that
united fancy work, toys, and tracts with the post office. Old Mr.
Fordyce met us as we drew up, handed her out with a grand seigneur’s
courtesy, and stood talking to me so delightfully that I quite forgot it
was from Christian duty.
My father corresponded with the old Rector about the state of the parish,
and at last went over to Bath for a personal conference, but without much
satisfaction. The Earlscombe people were pronounced to be an ungrateful
good-for-nothing set, for whom it was of no use to do anything; and
indeed my mother made such discoveries in the cottages that she durst not
let Emily fulfil her cherished scheme of visiting them. The only
resemblance to the favourite heroines of religious tales that could be
permitted was assembling a tiny Sunday class in Chapman’s lodge; and it
must be confessed that her brothers thought she made as much fuss about
it as if there had been a hundred scholars.
However, between remonstrances and offers of undertaking a share of the
expense, my father managed to get Mr. Mears’ services dispensed with from
the ensuing Lady Day, and that a resident curate should be appointed, the
choice of whom was to rest with himself. It was then and there decided
that Martyn should be ‘brought up to the Church,’ as people then used to
term destination to Holy Orders. My father said he should feel justified
in building a good house when he could afford it, if it was to be a
provision for one of his sons, and he also felt that as he had the charge
of the parish as patron, it was right and fitting to train one of his
sons up to take care of it. Nor did Martyn show any distaste to the
idea, as indeed there was less in it then than at present to daunt the
imagination of an honest, lively boy, not as yet specially thoughtful or
devout, but obedient, truthful, and fairly reverent, and ready to grow as
he was trained.
CHAPTER XII.
MRS. SOPHIA’S FEUD.
‘O’er all there hung the shadow of a fear,
A sense of mystery the spirit daunted,
And said as plain as whisper in the ear,
The place is haunted.’—HOOD.
WE had a houseful at Christmas. The Rev. Charles Henderson, a Fellow of
Trinity College, Oxford, lately ordained a deacon, had been recommended
to us by our London vicar, and was willing not only to take charge of the
parish, but to direct my studies, and to prepare Martyn for school. He
came to us for the Christmas vacation to reconnoitre and engage lodgings
at a farmhouse. We liked him very much—my mother being all the better
satisfied after he had shown her a miniature, and confided to her that
the original was waiting till a college living should come to him in the
distant future.
Admiral Griffith could not tear himself from his warm rooms and his club,
but our antiquarian friend, Mr. Stafford, came with his wife, and
revelled in the ceilings of the mullion room, where he would much have
liked to sleep, but that its accommodations were only fit for a bachelor.
Our other visitor was Miss Selby, or rather Mrs. Sophia Selby, as she
designated herself, according to the becoming fashion of elderly
spinsters, which to my mind might be gracefully resumed. It irked my
father to think of the good lady’s solitary Christmas at Bath, and he
asked her to come to us. She travelled half-way in a post-chaise, and
then was met by the carriage. A very nice old lady she was, with a meek,
delicate babyish face, which could not be spoilt by the cap of the
period, one of the most disfiguring articles of head gear ever devised,
though nobody thought so then. She was full of kindness; indeed, if she
had a fault it was the abundant pity she lavished on me, and her
determination to amuse me. The weather was of the kind that only the
healthy and hardy could encounter, and when every one else was gone out,
and I was just settling in with a new book, or an old crabbed Latin
document, that Mr. Stafford had entrusted to me to copy out fairly and
translate, she would glide in with her worsted work on a charitable
mission to enliven poor Mr. Edward.
However, this was the means of my obtaining some curious enlightenments.
A dinner-party was in contemplation, and she was dismayed at the choice
of the fashionable London hour of seven, and still more by finding that
the Fordyces were to be among the guests. She was too well-bred to
manifest her feelings to her hosts, but alone with me, she could not
refrain from expressing her astonishment to me, all the more when she
heard this was reciprocity for an invitation that it had not been
possible to accept. Her poor dear uncle would never hear of intercourse
with Hillside. On being asked why, she repeated what Chapman had said,
that he could not endure any one connected with Mrs. Hannah More and her
canting, humbugging set, as the ungodly old man had chosen to call them,
imbuing even this good woman with evil prejudices against their noble
work at Cheddar.
‘Besides this, Fordyces and Winslows could never be friends, since the
Fordyces had taken on themselves to dispute the will, and say it had been
improperly obtained.’
‘What will?’
‘Mrs. Winslow’s—Margaret Fordyce that was. She was the heiress, and had
every right to dispose of her property.’
‘But that was more than a hundred years ago!’
‘So it was, my dear; but though the law gave it to us—to my uncle’s
grandfather (or great-grandfather, was it?)—those Fordyces never could
rest content. Why, one of them—a clergyman’s son too—shot young Philip
Winslow dead in a duel. They have always grudged at us. Does your papa
know it, my dear Mr. Edward? He ought to be aware.’
‘I do not know,’ I said; ‘but he would hardly care about what happened in
the time of Queen Anne.’
It was curious to see how the gentle little lady espoused the family
quarrel, which, after all, was none of hers.
‘Well, you are London people, and the other branch, and may not feel as
we do down here; but I shall always say that Madam Winslow’s husband’s
son had every right to come before her cousin once removed.’
I asked if we were descended from her, for, having a turn for heraldry
and genealogy, I wanted to make out our family tree. Mrs. Sophia was
ready to hold up her hands at the ignorance of the ‘other branch.’ This
poor heiress had lost all her children in their infancy, and bequeathed
the estate to her stepson, the Fordyce male heir having been endowed by
her father with the advowson of Hillside and a handsome estate there,
which Mrs. Selby thought ought to have contented him, ‘but some people
never know when they have enough;’ and, on my observing that it might
have been a matter of justice, she waxed hotter, declaring that what the
Winslows felt so much was the accusation of violence against the poor
lady. She spoke as if it were a story of yesterday, and added, ‘Indeed,
they made the common people have all sorts of superstitious fancies about
the room where she died—that old part of the house.’ Then she added in a
low mysterious voice, ‘I hear that your brother Mr. Griffith Winslow
could not sleep there;’ and when the rats and the wind were
mentioned—‘Yes, that was what my poor dear uncle used to say. He always
called it nonsense; but we never had a servant who would sleep there.
You’ll not mention it, Mr. Edward, but I could not help asking that very
nice housemaid, Jane, whether the room was used, and she said how Mr.
Griffith had given it up, and none of the servants could spend a night
there when they are sleeping round. Of course I said all in my power to
dispel the idea, and told her that there was no accounting for all the
noises in old houses; but you never can reason with that class of
people.’
‘Did you ever hear the noises, Mrs. Selby?’
‘Oh, no; I wouldn’t sleep there for thousands! Not that I attach any
importance to such folly,—my poor dear uncle would never hear of such a
thing; but I am such a nervous creature, I should lie awake all night
expecting the rats to run over me. I never knew of any one sleeping
there, except in the gay times when I was a child, and the house used to
be as full as, or fuller than, it could hold, for the hunt breakfast or a
ball, and my poor aunt used to make up ever so many beds in the two
rooms, and then we never heard of any disturbance, except what they made
themselves.’
This chiefly concerned me, because home cosseting had made me old woman
enough to be uneasy about unaired beds; and I knew that my mother meant
to consign Clarence to the mullion chamber. So, without betraying Jane,
I spoke to her, and was answered, ‘Oh, sir, I’ll take care of that; I’ll
light a fire and air the mattresses well. I wish that was all, poor
young gentleman!’
To the reply that the rats were slaughtered and the wind stopped out,
Jane returned a look of compassion; but the subject was dropped, as it
was supposed to be the right thing to hush up, instead of fostering, any
popular superstition; but it surprised me that, as all our servants were
fresh importations, they should so soon have become imbued with these
undefined alarms.
My father was much amused at being successor to this family feud, and
said that when he had time he would look up the documents.
Mrs. Sophia was a sight when Mr. Fordyce and his son and daughter-in-law
were announced; she was so comically stiff between her deference to her
hosts and her allegiance to her poor dear uncle; but her coldness melted
before the charms of old Mr. Fordyce, who was one of the most delightful
people in the world. She even was his partner at whist, and won the
game, and that she _did_ like.
Parson Frank, as we naughty young ones called him, was all good-nature
and geniality—a thorough clergyman after the ideas of the time, and a
thorough farmer too; and in each capacity, as well as in politics, he
suited my father or Mr. Henderson. His lady, in a blonde cap, exactly
like the last equipment my mother had provided herself with in London,
and a black satin dress, had much more style than the more gaily-dressed
country dames, and far more conversation. Mr. Stafford, who had dreaded
the party, pronounced her a sensible, agreeable woman, and she was
particularly kind and pleasant to me, coming and talking over the botany
of the country, and then speaking of my brother’s kindness to poor Amos
Bell, who was nearly recovered, but was a weakly child, for whom she
dreaded the toil of a ploughboy in thick clay with heavy shoes.
I was sorry when, after Emily’s well-studied performance on the piano,
Mrs. Fordyce was summoned away from me to sing, but her music and her
voice were both of a very different order from ordinary drawing-room
music; and when our evening was over, we congratulated ourselves upon our
neighbours, and agreed that the Fordyces were the gems of the party.
Only Mrs. Sophia sighed at us as degenerate Winslows, and Emily reserved
to herself the right of believing that the daughter was ‘a horrid girl.’
CHAPTER XIII.
A SCRAPE.
‘Though bound with weakness’ heavy chain
We in the dust of earth remain;
Not all remorseful be our tears,
No agony of shame or fears,
Need pierce its passion’s bitter tide.’
_Verses and Sonnets_.
PERHAPS it was of set purpose that our dinner-party had been given before
Clarence’s return. Griffith had been expected in time for it, but he had
preferred going by way of London to attend a ball given by the daughter
of a barrister friend of my father’s. Selina Clarkson was a fine showy
girl, with the sort of beauty to inspire boyish admiration, and Griff’s
had been a standing family joke, even my father condescending to tease
him when the young lady married Sir Henry Peacock, a fat vulgar old man
who had made his fortune in the commissariat, and purchased a baronetcy.
He was allowing his young wife her full swing of fashion and enjoyment.
My mother did not think it a desirable acquaintance, and was restless
until both the brothers came home together, long after dark on Christmas
Eve, having been met by the gig at the corner where the coach stopped.
The dinner-hour had been put off till half-past six, and we had to wait
for them, the coach having been delayed by setting down Christmas guests
and Christmas fare. They were a contrast; Griffith looking very handsome
and manly, all in a ruddy glow from the frosty air, and Clarence, though
equally tall, well-made, and with more refined features, looked pale and
effaced, now that his sailor tan was worn off. The one talked as eagerly
as he ate, the other was shy, spiritless, and with little appetite; but
as he always shrank into himself among strangers, it was the less wonder
that he sat in his drooping way behind my sofa, while Griffith kept us
all merry with his account of the humours of the ‘Peacock at home;’ the
lumbering efforts of old Sir Henry to be as young and gay as his wife, in
spite of gout and portliness; and the extreme delight of his lady in her
new splendours—a gold spotted muslin and white plumes in a diamond
agraffe. He mimicked Sir Henry’s cockneyisms more than my father’s
chivalry approved towards his recent host, as he described the complaints
he had heard against ‘my Lady being refused the hentry at Halmack’s, but
treated like the wery canal;’ and how the devoted husband ‘wowed he would
get up a still more hexclusive circle, and shut hout these himpertinent
fashionables who regarded Halmack’s as the seventh ’eaven.’
My mother shook her head at his audacious fun about Paradise and the
Peri, but he was so brilliant and good-humoured that no one was ever long
displeased with him. At night he followed when Clarence helped me to my
room, and carefully shutting the door, Griff began. ‘Now, Teddy, you’re
always as rich as a Jew, and I told Bill you’d help him to set it
straight. I’d do it myself, but that I’m cleaned out. I’d give ten
times the cash rather than see him with that hang-dog look again for just
nothing at all, if he would only believe so and be rational.’
Clarence did look indescribably miserable while it was explained that he
had been commissioned to receive about £20 which was owing to my father,
and to discharge therewith some small debts to London tradesmen. All
except the last, for a little more than four pounds, had been paid, when
Clarence met in the street an old messmate, a good-natured rattle-pated
youth,—one of those who had thought him harshly treated. There was a
cordial greeting, and an invitation to dine at once at a hotel, where
they were joined by some other young men, and by and by betook themselves
to cards, when my poor brother’s besetting enemy prevented him from
withdrawing when he found the points were guineas. Thus he lost the
remaining amount in his charge, and so much of his own that barely enough
was left for his journey. His salary was not due till Lady Day; Mr.
Castleford was in the country, and no advances could be asked from Mr.
Frith. Thus Griff had found him in utter despair, and had ever since
been trying to cheer him and make light of his trouble. If I advanced
the amount, which was no serious matter to me, Clarence could easily get
Peter to pay the bill, and if my father should demand the receipt too
soon, it would be easy to put him off by saying there had been a delay in
getting the account sent in.
‘I couldn’t do that,’ said Clarence.
‘Well, I should not have thought you would have stuck at that,’ returned
Griff.
‘There must be no untruth,’ I broke in; ‘but if without _that_, he can
avoid getting into a scrape with papa—’
Clarence interrupted in the wavering voice we knew so well, but growing
clearer and stronger.
‘Thank you, Edward, but—but—no, I can’t. There’s the Sacrament
to-morrow.’
‘Oh—h!’ said Griff, in an indescribable tone. But he will never believe
you, nor let you go.’
‘Better so,’ said Clarence, half choked, ‘than go profanely—deceiving—or
not knowing whether I shall—’
Just then we heard our father wishing the other gentlemen good-night, and
to our surprise Clarence opened the door, though he was deadly white and
with dew starting on his forehead.
My father turned good-naturedly. ‘Boys, boys, you are glad to be
together, but mamma won’t have you talking here all night, keeping her
baby up.’
‘Sir,’ said Clarence, holding by the rail of the bed, ‘I was waiting for
you. I have something to tell you—’
The words that followed were incoherent and wrong end foremost; nor had
many, indeed, been uttered before my father cut them short with—
‘No false excuses, sir; I know you too well to listen. Go. I have
ceased to hope for anything better.’
Clarence went without a word, but Griff and I burst out with entreaties
to be listened to. Our father thought at first that ours were only the
pleadings of partiality, and endeavours to shield the brother we both so
heartily loved; but when he understood the circumstances, the real amount
of the transgression, and Clarence’s rejection of our united advice and
assistance to conceal it, he was greatly touched and softened. ‘Poor
lad! poor fellow!’ he muttered, ‘he is really doing his best. I need not
have cut him so short. I was afraid of more falsehoods if I let him open
his mouth. I’ll go and see.’
He went off, and we remained in suspense, Griff observing that he had
done his best, but poor Bill always would be a fool, and that no one who
had not always lived at home like me would have let out that we had been
for the suppression policy. As I was rather shocked, he went off to bed,
saying he should look in to see what remained of Clarence after the
pelting of the pitiless storm he was sure to bring on himself by his
ridiculous faltering instead of speaking out like a man.
I longed to have been able to do the same, but my father kindly came back
to relieve my mind by telling me that he was better satisfied about
Clarence than ever he had been before. When encouraged to speak out, the
narrative of the temptation had so entirely agreed with what we had said
as to show there had been no prevarication, and this had done more to
convince my father that he was on the right track than the having found
him on his knees. He had had a patient hearing, and thus was able to
command his nerves enough to explain himself, and it had ended in my
father giving entire forgiveness for what, as Griff truly said, would
have been a mere trifle but for the past. The voluntary confession had
much impressed my father, and he could not help adding a word of gentle
reproof to me for having joined in aiding him to withhold it, but he
accepted my explanation and went away, observing, ‘By the by, I don’t
wonder at what Griffith says of that room; I never heard such strange
effects of currents of air.’
Clarence was in my room before I was drest, full of our father’s
‘wonderful goodness’ to him. He had never experienced anything like it,
he said. ‘Why! he really seemed hopeful about me,’ were words uttered
with a gladness enough to go to one’s heart. ‘O Edward, I feel as if
there was some chance of “steadfastly purposing” this time.’
It was not the way of the family to say much of religious feeling, and
this was much for Clarence to utter. He looked white and tired, but
there was an air of rest and peace about him, above all when my mother
met him with a very real kiss. Moreover, Mr. Castleford had taken care
to brighten our Christmas with a letter expressive of great satisfaction
with Clarence for steadiness and intelligence. Even Mr. Frith allowed
that he was the most punctual of all those young dogs.
‘I do believe,’ said my father, ‘that his piety is doing him some good
after all.’
So our mutual wishes of a happy Christmas were verified, though not much
according to the notions of this half of the century. People made their
Christmas day either mere merriment, or something little different from
the grave Sunday of that date. And ours, except for the Admiral’s dining
with us, had always been of the latter description, all the more that
when celebrations of the Holy Communion were so rare they were treated
with an awe and reverence which frequency has perhaps diminished, and a
feeling (possibly Puritanical) prevailed which made it appear incongruous
to end with festivity a day so begun. That we had a Christmas Day
Communion at all at Earlscombe was an innovation only achieved by Mr.
Henderson going to assist the old Rector at Wattlesea; and there were no
communicants except from our house, besides Chapman, his daughter-in-law,
and five old creatures between whom the alms were immediately divided.
We afterwards learnt that our best farmer and his wife were much
disappointed at the change from Sunday interfering with the family
jollification; and Mrs. Sophia Selby was annoyed at the contradiction to
her habits under the rule of her poor dear uncle.
Of the irregularities, irreverences, and squalor of the whole I will not
speak. They were not then such stumbling-blocks as they would be now,
and many passed unperceived by us, buried as we were in our big pew, with
our eyes riveted on our books; yet even thus there was enough evident to
make my mother rejoice that Mr. Henderson would be with us before Easter.
Still this could not mar the thankful gladness that was with us all that
day, and which shone in Clarence’s eyes. His countenance always had a
remarkable expression in church, as if somehow his spirit went farther
than ours did, and things unseen were more real to him.
Hillside, as usual, had two services, and my father and his friend were
going to walk thither in the afternoon, but it was a raw cold day,
threatening snow, and Emily was caught by my mother in the hail and
ordered back, as well as Clarence, who had shown symptoms of having
caught cold on his dismal journey. Emily coaxed from her permission to
have a fire in the bookroom, and there we three had a memorably happy
time. We read our psalms and lessons, and our _Christian Year_, which
was more and more the lodestar of our feelings. We compared our
favourite passages, and discussed the obscurer ones, and Clarence was led
to talk out more of his heart than he had ever shown to us before.
Perhaps he had lost some of his reserve through his intercourse with our
good old governess, Miss Newton, who was still grinding away at her daily
mill, though with somewhat failing eyesight, so that she could do nothing
but knit in the long evenings, and was most grateful to her former pupil
for coming, as often as he could, to talk or read to her.
She was a most excellent and devout woman, and when Emily, who in
youthful _gaieté de cœur_ had got a little tired of her, exclaimed at his
taste, and asked if she made him read nothing but Pike’s Early _Piety_,
he replied gravely, ‘She showed me where to lay my burthen down,’ and
turned to the two last verses of the poem for ‘Good Friday’ in the
_Christian Year_, as well as to the one we had just read on the Holy
Communion.
My father’s kindness had seemed to him the pledge of the Heavenly
Father’s forgiveness; and he added, perhaps a little childishly, that it
had been his impulse to promise never to touch a card again, but that he
dreaded the only too familiar reply, ‘What availed his promises?’
‘Do promise, Clarry!’ cried Emily, ‘and then you won’t have to play with
that tiresome old Mrs. Sophia.’
‘That would rather deter me,’ said Clarence good-humouredly.
‘A card-playing old age is despicable,’ pronounced Miss Emily, much to
our amusement.
After that we got into a bewilderment. We knew nothing of the future
question of temperance _versus_ total abstinence; but after it had been
extracted that Miss Newton regarded cards as the devil’s books, the
inconsistent little sister changed sides, and declared it narrow and
evangelical to renounce what was innocent. Clarence argued that what
might be harmless for others might be dangerous for such as himself, and
that his real difficulty in making even a mental vow was that, if broken,
there was an additional sin.
‘It is not oneself that one trusts,’ I said.
‘No,’ said Clarence emphatically; ‘and setting up a vow seems as if it
might be sticking up the reed of one’s own word, and leaning on
_that_—when it breaks, at least mine does. If I could always get the
grasp of Him that I felt to-day, there would be no more bewildered heart
and failing spirit, which are worse than the actual falls they cause.’
And as Emily said she did not understand, he replied in words I wrote
down and thought over, ‘What we _are_ is the point, more than even what
we _do_. We _do_ as we _are_; and yet we form ourselves by what we
_do_.’
‘And,’ I put in, ‘I know somebody who won a victory last night over
himself and his two brothers. Surely _doing_ that is a sign that he _is_
more than he used to be.’
‘If he were, it would not have been an effort at all,’ said Clarence, but
with his rare sweet smile.
Just then Griff called him away, and Emily sat pondering and impressed.
‘It did seem so odd,’ she said, ‘that Clarry should be so much the best,
and yet so much the worst of us.’
I agreed. His insight into spiritual things, and his enjoyment of them,
always humiliated us both, yet he fell so much lower in practice,—‘But
then we had not his temptations.’
‘Yes,’ said Emily; ‘but look at Griff! He goes about like other young
men, and keeps all right, and yet he doesn’t care about religious things
a bit more than he can help.’
It was quite true. Religion was life to the one and an insurance to the
other, and this had been a mystery to us all our young lives, as far as
we had ever reflected on the contrast between the practical failure and
success of each. Our mother, on the other hand, viewed Clarence’s
tendencies as part of an unreal, self-deceptive nature, and regretted his
intimacy with Miss Newton, who, she said, had fostered ‘that kind of
thing’ in his childhood—made him fancy talk, feeling, and preaching were
more than truth and honour—and might lead him to run after Irving,
Rowland Hill, or Baptist Noel, about whose tenets she was rather
confused. It would be an additional misfortune if he became a fanatical
Evangelical light, and he was just the character to be worked upon.
My father held that she might be thankful for any good influence or safe
resort for a young man in lodgings in London, and he merely bade Clarence
never resort to any variety of dissenting preacher. We were of the
school called—a little later—high and dry, but were strictly orthodox
according to our lights, and held it a prime duty to attend our parish
church, whatever it might be; nor, indeed, had Clarence swerved from
these traditions.
Poor Mrs. Sophia was baulked of the game at whist, which she viewed as a
legitimate part of the Christmas pleasures; and after we had eaten our
turkey, we found the evening long, except that Martyn escaped to
snapdragon with the servants; and, by and by, Chapman, magnificent in
patronage, ushered in the church singers into the hall, and clarionet,
bassoon, and fiddle astonished our ears.
CHAPTER XIV.
THE MULLION CHAMBER.
‘A lady with a lamp I see,
Pass through the glimmering gloom,
And flit from room to room.’
LONGFELLOW.
FOR want of being able to take exercise, the first part of the night had
always been sleepless with me, though my dear mother thought it wrong to
recognise the habit or allow me a lamp. A fire, however, I had, and by
its light, on the second night after Christmas, I saw my door noiselessly
opened, and Clarence creeping in half-dressed and barefooted. To my
frightened interrogation the answer came, through chattering teeth, ‘It’s
I—only I—Ted—no—nothing’s the matter, only I can’t stand it any longer!’
His hands were cold as ice when he grasped mine, as if to get hold of
something substantial, and he trembled so as to shake the bed. ‘That
room,’ he faltered. ‘’Tis not only the moans! I’ve seen her!’
‘Whom?’
‘I don’t know. There she stands with her lamp, crying!’ I could
scarcely distinguish the words through the clashing of his teeth, and as
I threw my arms round him the shudder seemed to pass to me; but I did my
best to warm him by drawing the clothes over him, and he began to gather
himself together, and speak intelligibly. There had been sounds the
first night as of wailing, but he had been too much preoccupied to attend
to them till, soon after one o’clock, they ended in a heavy fall and long
shriek, after which all was still. Christmas night had been undisturbed,
but on this the voices had begun again at eleven, and had a strangely
human sound; but as it was windy, sleety weather, and he had learnt at
sea to disregard noises in the rigging, he drew the sheet over his head
and went to sleep. ‘I was dreaming that I was at sea,’ he said, ‘as I
always do on a noisy night, but this was not a dream. I was wakened by a
light in the room, and there stood a woman with a lamp, moaning and
sobbing. My first notion was that one of the maids had come to call me,
and I sat up; but I could not speak, and she gave another awful
suppressed cry, and moved towards that walled-up door. Then I saw it was
none of the servants, for it was an antique dress like an old picture.
So I knew what it must be, and an unbearable horror came over me, and I
rushed into the outer room, where there was a little fire left; but I
heard her going on still, and I could endure it no longer. I knew you
would be awake and would bear with me, so I came down to you.’
Then this was what Chapman and the maids had meant. This was Mrs. Sophia
Selby’s vulgar superstition! I found that Clarence had heard none of the
mysterious whispers afloat, and only knew that Griff had deserted the
room after his own return to London. I related what I had learnt from
the old lady, and in that midnight hour we agreed that it could be no
mere fancy or rumour, but that cruel wrong must have been done in that
chamber. Our feeling was that all ought to be made known, and in that
impression we fell asleep, Clarence first.
By and by I found him moving. He had heard the clock strike four, and
thought it wiser to repair to his own quarters, where he believed the
disturbance was over. Lucifer matches as yet were not, but he had always
been a noiseless being, with a sailor’s foot, so that, by the help of the
moonlight through the hall windows, he regained his room.
And when morning had come, the nocturnal visitation wore such a different
aspect to both our minds that we decided to say nothing to our parents,
who, said Clarence, would simply disbelieve him; and, indeed, I inclined
to suppose it had been an uncommonly vivid dream, produced in that
sensitive nature by the uncanny sounds of the wind in the chinks and
crannies of the ancient chamber. Had not Scott’s _Demonology and
Witchcraft_, which we studied hard on that day, proved all such phantoms
to be explicable? The only person we told was Griff, who was amused and
incredulous. He had heard the noises—oh yes! and objected to having his
sleep broken by them. It was too had to expose Clarence to them—poor
Bill—on whom they worked such fancies!
He interrogated Chapman, however, but probably in that bantering way
which is apt to produce reserve. Chapman never ‘gave heed to them
fictious tales,’ he said; but, when hard pressed, he allowed that he had
‘heerd that a lady do walk o’ winter nights,’ and that was why the garden
door of the old rooms was walled up. Griff asked if this was done for
fear she should catch cold, and this somewhat affronted him, so that he
averred that he knew nought about it, and gave no thought to such like.
Just then they arrived at the Winslow Arms, and took each a glass of ale,
when Griff, partly to tease Chapman, asked the landlady—an old Chantry
House servant—whether she had ever met the ghost. She turned rather
pale, which seemed to have impressed him, and demanded if he had seen it.
‘It always walked at Christmas time—between then and the New Year.’ She
had once seen a light in the garden by the ruin in winter-time, and once
last spring it came along the passage, but that was just before the old
Squire was took for death,—folks said that was always the way before any
of the family died—‘if you’ll excuse it, sir.’ Oh no, she thought
nothing of such things, but she had heard tell that the noises were such
at all times of the year that no one could sleep in the rooms, but the
light wasn’t to be seen except at Christmas.
Griff with the philosophy of a university man, was certain that all was
explained by Clarence having imbibed the impression of the place being
haunted; and going to sleep nervous at the noises, his brain had shaped a
phantom in accordance. Let Clarence declare as he might that the legends
were new to him, Griff only smiled to think how easily people forgot, and
he talked earnestly about catching ideas without conscious information.
However, he volunteered to sit up that night to ascertain the exact
causes of the strange noises and convince Clarence that they were nothing
but the effects of draughts. The fire in his gunroom was surreptitiously
kept up to serve for the vigil, which I ardently desired to share. It
was an enterprise; it would gratify my curiosity; and besides, though
Griffith was good-natured and forbearing in a general way towards
Clarence, I detected a spirit of mockery about him which might break out
unpleasantly when poor Clarry was convicted of one of his unreasonable
panics.
Both brothers were willing to gratify me, the only difficulty being that
the tap of my crutches would warn the entire household of the expedition.
However, they had—all unknown to my mother—several times carried me about
queen’s cushion fashion, as, being always much of a size, they could do
most handily; and as both were now fine, strong, well-made youths of
twenty and nineteen, they had no doubt of easily and silently conveying
me up the shallow-stepped staircase when all was quiet for the night.
Emily, with her sharp ears, guessed that something was in hand, but we
promised her that she should know all in time. I believe Griff, being a
little afraid of her quickness, led her to suppose he was going to hold
what he called a symposium in his rooms, and to think it a mystery of
college life not intended for young ladies.
He really had prepared a sort of supper for us when, after my father’s
resounding turn of the key of the drawing-room door, my brothers, in
their stocking soles, bore me upstairs, the fun of the achievement for
the moment overpowering all sense of eeriness. Griff said he could not
receive me in his apartment without doing honour to the occasion, and
that Dutch courage was requisite for us both; but I suspect it was more
in accordance with Oxford habits that he had provided a bottle of sherry
and another of ale, some brandy cherries, bread, cheese, and biscuits, by
what means I do not know, for my mother always locked up the wine. He
was disappointed that Clarence would touch nothing, and declared that
inanition was the preparation for ghost-seeing or imagining. I drank his
health in a glass of sherry as I looked round at the curious old room,
with its panelled roof, the heraldic devices and badges of the Power
family, and the trophy of swords, dirks, daggers, and pistols, chiefly
relics of our naval grandfather, but reinforced by the sword, helmet, and
spurs of the county Yeomanry which Griff had joined.
Griff proposed cards to drive away fancies, especially as the sounds were
beginning; but though we generally yielded to him we _could_ not give our
attention to anything but these. There was first a low moan. ‘No great
harm in that,’ said Griff; ‘it comes through that crack in the wainscot
where there is a sham window. Some putty will put a stop to that.’
Then came a more decided wail and sob much nearer to us. Griff hastily
swallowed the ale in his tumbler, and, striking a theatrical attitude,
exclaimed, ‘Angels and ministers of grace defend us!’
Clarence held up his hand in deprecation. The door into his bedroom was
open, and Griff, taking up one of the flat candlesticks, pursued his
researches, holding the flame to all chinks or cracks in the wainscotting
to detect draughts which might cause the dreary sounds, which were much
more like suppressed weeping than any senseless gust of wind. Of
draughts there were many, and he tried holding his hand against each
crevice to endeavour to silence the wails; but these became more human
and more distressful. Presently Clarence exclaimed, ‘There!’ and on his
face there was a whiteness and an expression which always recurs to me on
reading those words of Eliphaz the Temanite, ‘Then a spirit passed before
my face, and the hair of my flesh stood up.’ Even Griff was awestruck as
we cried, ‘Where? what?’
‘Don’t you see her? There! By the press—look!’
‘I see a patch of moonlight on the wall,’ said Griff.
‘Moonlight—her lamp. Edward, don’t you see her?’
I could see nothing but a spot of light on the wall. Griff (plainly
putting a force on himself) came back and gave him a good-natured shake.
‘Dreaming again, old Bill. Wake up and come to your senses.’
‘I am as much in my senses as you are,’ said Clarence. ‘I see her as
plainly as I see you.’
Nor could any one doubt either the reality of the awe in his voice and
countenance, nor of the light—a kind of hazy ball—nor of the choking
sobs.
‘What is she like?’ I asked, holding his hand, for, though infected by
his dread, my fears were chiefly for the effect on him; but he was much
calmer and less horror-struck than on the previous night, though still he
shuddered as he answered in a low voice, as if loth to describe a lady in
her presence, ‘A dark cloak with the hood fallen back, a kind of lace
headdress loosely fastened, brown hair, thin white face, eyes—oh, poor
thing!—staring with fright, dark—oh, how swollen the lids! all red below
with crying—black dress with white about it—a widow kind of look—a glove
on the arm with the lamp. Is she beckoning—looking at us? Oh, you poor
thing, if I could tell what you mean!’
I felt the motion of his muscles in act to rise, and grasped him. Griff
held him with a strong hand, hoarsely crying, ‘Don’t!—don’t—don’t follow
the thing, whatever you do!’
Clarence hid his face. It was very awful and strange. Once the thought
of conjuring her to speak by the Holy Name crossed me, but then I saw no
figure; and with incredulous Griffith standing by, it would have been
like playing, nor perhaps could I have spoken. How long this lasted
there is no knowing; but presently the light moved towards the walled-up
door and seemed to pass into it. Clarence raised his head and said she
was gone. We breathed freely.
‘The farce is over,’ said Griff. ‘Mr. Edward Winslow’s carriage stops
the way!’
I was hoisted up, candle in hand, between the two, and had nearly reached
the stairs when there came up on the garden side a sound as of tipsy
revellers in the garden. ‘The scoundrels! how can they have got in?’
cried Griff, looking towards the window; but all the windows on that side
had peculiarly heavy shutters and bars, with only a tiny heart-shaped
aperture very high up, so they somewhat hurried their steps downstairs,
intending to rush out on the intruders from the back door. But suddenly,
in the middle of the staircase, we heard a terrible heartrending woman’s
shriek, making us all start and have a general fall. My brothers managed
to seat me safely on a step without much damage to themselves, but the
candle fell and was extinguished, and we made too heavy a weight to fall
without real noise enough to bring the household together before we could
pick ourselves up in the dark.
We heard doors opening and hurried calls, and something about pistols,
impelling Griff to call out, ‘It’s nothing, papa; but there are some
drunken rascals in the garden.’
A light had come by this time, and we were detected. There was a general
sally upon the enemy in the garden before any one thought of me, except a
‘You here!’ when they nearly fell over me. And there I was left sitting
on the stair, helpless without my crutches, till in a few minutes all
returned declaring there was nothing—no signs of anything; and then as
Clarence ran up to me with my crutches my father demanded the meaning of
my being there at that time of night.
‘Well, sir,’ said Griff, ‘it is only that we have been sitting up to
investigate the ghost.’
‘Ghost! Arrant stuff and nonsense! What induced you to be dragging
Edward about in this dangerous way?’
‘I wished it,’ said I.
‘You are all mad together, I think. I won’t have the house disturbed for
this ridiculous folly. I shall look into it to-morrow!’
CHAPTER XV.
RATIONAL THEORIES.
‘These are the reasons, they are natural.’
_Julius Cæsar_.
IF anything could have made our adventure more unpleasant to Mr. and Mrs.
Winslow, it would have been the presence of guests. However, inquiry was
suppressed at breakfast, in deference to the signs my mother made to
enjoin silence before the children, all unaware that Emily was nearly
frantic with suppressed curiosity, and Martyn knew more about the popular
version of the legend than any of us.
Clarence looked wan and heavy-eyed. His head was aching from a bump
against the edge of a step, and his cold was much worse; no wonder, said
my mother; but she was always softened by any ailment, and feared that
the phantoms were the effect of coming illness. I have always thought
that if Clarence could have come home from his court-martial with a brain
fever he would have earned immediate forgiveness; but unluckily for him,
he was a very healthy person.
All three of us were summoned to the tribunal in the study, where my
father and my mother sat in judgment on what they termed ‘this
preposterous business.’ In our morning senses our impressions were much
more vague than at midnight, and we betrayed some confusion; but Griff
and I had a strong instinct of sheltering Clarence, and we stoutly
declared the noises to be beyond the capacities of wind, rats, or cats;
that the light was visible and inexplicable; and that though we had seen
nothing else, we could not doubt that Clarence did.
‘Thought he did,’ corrected my father.
‘Without discussing the word,’ said Griff, ‘I mean that the effect on his
senses was the same as the actual sight. You could not look at him
without being certain.’
‘Exactly so,’ returned my mother. ‘I wish Dr. Fellowes were near.’
Indeed nothing saved Clarence from being consigned to medical treatment
but the distance from Bath or Bristol, and the contradictory advice that
had been received from our county neighbours as to our family doctor.
However, she formed her theory that his nervous imaginings—whether
involuntary or acted, she hoped the former, and wished she could be
sure—had infected us; and, as she was really uneasy about him, she would
not let him sleep in the mullion room, but having nowhere else to bestow
him, she turned out the man-servant and put him into the little room
beyond mine, and she also forbade any mention of the subject to him that
day.
This was a sore prohibition to Emily, who had been discussing it with the
other ladies, and was in a mingled state of elation at the romance, and
terror at the supernatural, which found vent in excited giggle, and moved
Griff to cram her with raw-head and bloody-bone horrors, conventional
enough to be suspicious, and send her to me tearfully to entreat to know
the truth. If by day she exulted in a haunted chamber, in the evening
she paid for it by terrors at walking about the house alone, and, when
sent on an errand by my mother, looked piteous enough to be laughed at or
scolded on all sides.
The gentlemen had more serious colloquies, and the upshot was a
determination to sit up together and discover the origin of the
annoyance. Mr. Stafford’s antiquarian researches had made him familiar
with such mysteries, and enough of them had been explained by natural
causes to convince him that there was a key to all the rest. Owls,
coiners, and smugglers had all been convicted of simulating ghosts. In
one venerable mansion, behind the wainscot, there had been discovered
nine skeletons of cats in different stages of decay, having trapped
themselves at various intervals of time, and during the gradual
extinction of their eighty-one lives having emitted cries enough to
establish the ghastly reputation of the place. Perhaps Mr. Henderson was
inclined to believe there were more things in heaven and earth than were
dreamt of in even an antiquary’s philosophy. He owned himself perplexed,
but reserved his opinion.
At breakfast Clarence was quite well, except for the remains of his sore
throat, and the two seniors were gruff and brief as to their watch. They
had heard odd noises, and should discover the cause; the carpenter had
already been sent for, and they had seen a light which was certainly due
to reflection or refraction. Mr. Henderson committed himself to nothing
but that ‘it was very extraordinary;’ and there was a wicked look of
diversion on Griff’s face, and an exchange of glances. Afterwards, in
our own domain, we extracted a good deal more from them.
Griff told us how the two elders started on politics, and denounced
Brougham and O’Connell loud enough to terrify any save the most undaunted
ghost, till Henderson said ‘Hush!’ and they paused at the moan with which
the performance always commenced, making Mr. Stafford turn, as Griff
said, ‘white in the gills,’ though he talked of the wind on the stillest
of frosty nights. Then came the sobbing and wailing, which certainly
overawed them all; Henderson called them ‘agonising,’ but Griff was in a
manner inured to this, and felt as if master of the ceremonies. Let them
say what they would by daylight about owls, cats, and rats, they owned
the human element then, and were far from comfortable, though they would
not compromise their good sense by owning what both their younger
companions had perceived—their feeling of some undefinable presence.
Vain attempts had been made to account for the light or get rid of it by
changing the position of candles or bright objects in the outer room; and
Henderson had shut himself into the bedroom with it; but there he still
only saw the hazy light—though all was otherwise pitch dark, except the
keyhole and the small gray patch of sky at the top of the
window-shutters. ‘You saw nothing else?’ said Griff. ‘I thought I heard
you break out as Clarence did, just before my father opened the door.’
‘Perhaps I did so. I had the sense strongly on me of some being in
grievous distress very near me.’
‘And you should have power over it,’ suggested Emily.
‘I am afraid,’ he said, ‘that more thorough conviction and comprehension
are needed before I could address the thing with authority. I should
like to have stayed longer and heard the conclusion.’
For Mr. Stafford had grown impatient and weary, and my father having
satisfied himself that there was something to be detected, would not
remain to the end, and not only carried his companions off, but locked
the doors, perhaps expecting to imprison some agent in a trick, and find
him in the morning.
Indeed Clarence had a dim remembrance of having been half wakened by some
one looking in on him in the night, when he was sleeping heavily after
his cold and the previous night’s disturbance, and we suspected, though
we would not say, that our father might have wished to ascertain that he
had no share in producing these appearances. He was, however, fully
acquitted of all wilful deception in the case, and he was not surprised,
though he was disappointed, that his vision of the lady was supposed to
be the consequence of excited imagination.
‘I can’t help it,’ he said to me in private. ‘I have always seen or
felt, or whatever you may call it, things that others do not. Don’t you
remember how nobody would believe that I saw Lucy Brooke?’
‘That was in the beginning of the measles.’
‘I know; and I will tell you something curious. When I was at Gibraltar
I met Mrs. Emmott—’
‘Mary Brooke?’
‘Yes; I spent a very happy Sunday with her. We talked over old times,
and she told me that Lucy had all through her illness been very uneasy
about having promised to bring me a macaw’s feather the next time we
played in the Square gardens. It could not be sent to me for fear of
carrying the infection, but the dear girl was too light-headed to
understand, and kept on fretting and wandering about breaking her word.
I have no doubt the wish carried her spirit to me the moment it was
free,’ he added, with tears springing to his eyes. He also said that
before the court-martial he had, night after night, dreams of sinking and
drowning in huge waves, and his friend Coles struggling to come to his
aid, but being forcibly withheld; and he had since learnt that Coles had
actually endeavoured to come from Plymouth to bear testimony to his
previous character, but had been refused leave, and told that he could do
no good.
There had been other instances of perception of a presence and of a
prescient foreboding. ‘It is like a sixth sense,’ he said, ‘and a very
uncomfortable one. I would give much to be rid of it, for it is
connected with all that is worst in my life. I had it before Navarino,
when no one expected an engagement. It made me believe I should be
killed, and drove me to what was much worse—or at least I used to think
so.’
‘Don’t you now?’ I asked.
‘No,’ said Clarence. ‘It was a great mercy that I did not die then.
There’s something to conquer first. But you’ll never speak of this, Ted.
I have left off telling of such things—it only gives another reason for
disbelieving me.’
However, this time his veracity was not called in question,—but he was
supposed to be under a hallucination, the creation of the noises acting
on his imagination and memory of the persecuted widow, which must have
been somewhere dormant in his mind, though he averred that he had never
heard of it. It had now, however, made a strong impression on him; he
was convinced that some crime or injustice had been perpetrated, and
thought it ought to be investigated; but Griffith made us laugh at his
championship of this shadow of a shade, and even wrote some mock heroic
verses about it,—nor would it have been easy to stir my father to seek
for the motives of an apparition which no one in the family save Clarence
professed to have seen.
The noises were indisputable, but my mother began to suspect a cause for
them. To oblige a former cook we had brought down with us as stable-boy
her son, George Sims, an imp accustomed to be the pet and jester of a
mews. Martyn was only too fond of his company, and he made no secret of
his contempt for the insufferable dulness of the country, enlivening it
by various acts of monkey-mischief, in some of which Martyn had been
implicated. That very afternoon, as Mrs. Sophia Selby was walking home
in the twilight from Chapman’s lodge, in company with Mr. Henderson, an
eldritch yell proceeding from the vaults beneath the mullion chambers
nearly frightened her into fits. Henderson darted in and captured the
two boys in the fact. Martyn’s asseveration that he had taken the pair
for Griff and Emily would have pacified the good-natured clergyman, but
Mrs. Sophia was too much agitated, or too spiteful, as we declared, not
to make a scene.
Martyn spent the evening alone and in disgrace, and only his
unimpeachable character for truth caused the acceptance of his
affirmation that the yell was an impromptu fraternal compliment, and that
he had nothing to do with the noises in the mullion chamber. He had been
supposed to be perfectly unconscious of anything of the kind, and to have
never so much as heard of a phantom, so my mother was taken somewhat
aback when, in reply to her demand whether he had ever been so naughty as
to assist George in making a noise in Clarence’s room, he said, ‘Why,
that’s the ghost of the lady that was murdered atop of the steps, and
always walks every Christmas!’
‘Who told you such ridiculous nonsense?’
The answer ‘George’ was deemed conclusive that all had been got up by
that youth; and there was considerable evidence of his talent for
ventriloquism and taste for practical jokes. My mother was certain that,
having heard of the popular superstition, he had acted ghost. She
appealed to _Woodstock_ to prove the practicability of such feats; and
her absolute conviction persuaded the maids (who had given warning _en
masse_) that the enemy was exorcised when George Sims had been sent off
on the Royal Mail under Clarence’s guardianship.
None of the junior part of the family believed him guilty, but he had
hunted the cows round the paddock, mounted on my donkey, had nearly shot
the kitchen-maid with Griff’s gun, and, if not much maligned, knew the
way to the apple-chamber only too well,—so that he richly deserved his
doom, rejoiced in it himself, and was unregretted save by Martyn.
Clarence viewed him in the light of a victim, and tried to keep an eye on
him, but he developed his talent as a ventriloquist, made his fortune,
and retired on a public-house.
My mother would fain have had the vaults under the mullion rooms bricked
up, but Mr. Stafford cried out on the barbarism of such a proceeding.
The mystery was declared to be solved, and was added to Mr. Stafford’s
good stories of haunted houses.
And at home my father forbade any further mention of such rank folly and
deception. The inner mullion chamber was turned into a lumber-room, and
as weeks passed by without hearing or seeing any more of lady or of lamp,
we began to credit the wonderful freaks of the goblin page.
CHAPTER XVI.
CAT LANGUAGE.
Soon as she parted thence—the fearful twayne,
That blind old woman and her daughter deare,
Came forth, and finding Kirkrapine there slayne,
For anguish greate they gan to rend their heare
And beate their breasts, and naked flesh to teare;
And when they both had wept and wayled their fill,
Then forth they ran, like two amazèd deere,
Half mad through malice and revenging will,
To follow her that was the causer of their ill.’—SPENSER.
THE Christmas vacation was not without another breeze about Griffith’s
expenses at Oxford. He held his head high, and declared that people
expected something from the eldest son of a man of property, and my
father tried to convince him that a landed estate often left less cash
available than did the fixed salary of an office. Griff treated all in
his light, good-humoured way, promised to be careful, and came to me to
commiserate the poor old gentleman’s ignorance of the ways of the new
generation.
There ensued some trying weeks of dark days, raw frost, and black east
wind, when the home party cast longing, lingering recollections back to
the social intercourse, lamp-lit streets, and ready interchange of books
and other amenities we had left behind us. We were not accustomed to
have our nearest neighbours separated from us by two miles of dirty lane,
or road mended with excruciating stones, nor were they very congenial
when we did see them. The Fordyce family might be interesting, but we
younger ones could not forget the slight to Clarence, and, besides, the
girls seemed to be entirely in the schoolroom, Mrs. Fordyce was delicate
and was shut up all the winter, and the only intercourse that took place
was when my father met the elder Mr. Fordyce at the magistrates’ bench;
also there was a conference about Amos Bell, who was preferred to the
post left vacant by George Sims, in right of his being our tenant, but
more civilised than Earlscombers, a widow’s son, and not sufficiently
recovered from his accident to be exposed to the severe tasks of a
ploughboy in the winter.
Mrs. Fordyce was the manager of a book-club, which circulated volumes
covered in white cartridge paper, with a printed list of the subscribers’
names. Two volumes at a time might be kept for a month by each member in
rotation, novels were excluded, and the manager had a veto on all orders.
We found her more liberal than some of our other neighbours, who looked
on our wants and wishes with suspicion as savouring of London notions.
Happily we could read old books and standard books over again, and we
gloated over _Blackwood_ and the _Quarterly_, enjoying, too, every
out-of-door novelty of the coming spring, as each revealed itself. Emily
will never forget her first primroses, nor I the first thrush in early
morning.
Blankets, broth, and what were uncomfortably termed broken victuals had
been given away during the winter, and a bewildering amount of begging
women and children used to ask interviews with ‘the Lady Winslow,’ with
stories that crumbled on investigation so as to make us recollect the
Rector’s character of Earlscombe.
However, Mr. Henderson came in the second week of Lent, and what our
steps towards improvement introduced would have seemed almost as shocking
to you youngsters, as what they displaced. For instance, a plain crimson
cloth covered the altar, instead of the rags in the colours of the
Winslow livery, presented, according to the queer old register, by the
unfortunate Margaret. There was talk of velvet and the gold monogram,
surrounded by rays, alternately straight and wavy, as in our London
church, but this was voted ‘unfit for a plain village church.’ Still,
the new hangings of pulpit, desk, and altar were all good in quality and
colour, and huge square cushions were provided as essential to each.
Moreover, the altar vessels were made somewhat more respectable,—all this
being at my father’s expense.
He also carried in the Vestry, though not without strong opposition from
a dissenting farmer, that new linen and a fresh surplice should be
provided by the parish, which surplice would have made at least six of
such as are at present worn. The farmers were very jealous of the
interference of the Squire in the Vestry—‘what he had no call to,’ and of
church rates applied to any other object than the reward of birdslayers,
as thus, in the register—
Hairy Wills, 1 score sprows heds 2d.
Jems Brown, 1 poulcat 6d.
Jarge Bell, 2 howls 6d.
It was several years before this appropriation of the church rates could
be abolished. The year 1830, with a brand new squire and parson, was too
ticklish a time for many innovations.
Hillside Church was the only one in the neighbourhood where Holy Week or
Ascension Day had been observed in the memory of man. When we proposed
going to church on the latter day the gardener asked my mother ‘if it was
her will to keep Thursday holy,’ as if he expected its substitution for
Sunday. Monthly Communions and Baptisms after the Second Lesson were
viewed as ‘not fit for a country church,’ and every attempt at even more
secular improvements was treated with the most disappointing distrust and
aversion. When my father laid out the allotment grounds, the labourers
suspected some occult design for his own profit, and the farmers objected
that the gardens would be used as an excuse for neglecting their work and
stealing their potatoes. Coal-club and clothing-club were regarded in
like manner, and while a few took advantage of these offers in a grudging
manner, the others viewed everything except absolute gifts as ‘me-an’ on
our part, the principle of aid to self-help being an absolute novelty.
When I look back to the notes in our journals of that date I see how much
has been overcome.
Perhaps we listened more than was strictly wise to the revelations of
Amos Bell, when he attended Emily and me on our expeditions with the
donkey. Though living over the border of Hillside, he had a family of
relations at Earlscombe, and for a time lodged with his grandmother
there. When his shyness and lumpishness gave way, he proved so bright
that Emily undertook to carry on his education. He soon had a wonderful
eye for a wild flower, and would climb after it with the utmost agility;
and when once his tongue was loosed, he became almost too communicative,
and made us acquainted with the opinions of ‘they Earlscoom folk’ with a
freedom not to be found in an elder or a native.
Moreover, he was the brightest light of the Sunday school which Mr.
Henderson opened at once—for want of a more fitting place—in the disused
north transept of the church. It was an uncouth, ill-clad crew which
assembled on those dilapidated paving tiles. Their own grandchildren
look almost as far removed from them in dress and civilisation as did my
sister in her white worked cambric dress, silk scarf, huge Tuscan bonnet,
and the little curls beyond the lace quilling round her bright face, far
rosier than ever it had been in town. And what would the present
generation say to the odd little contrivances in the way of cotton
sun-bonnets, check pinafores, list tippets, and print capes, and other
wonderful manufactures from the rag-bag, which were then grand prizes and
stimulants?
Previous knowledge or intelligence scarcely existed, and then was not due
to Dame Dearlove’s tuition. Mr. Henderson pronounced an authorised
school a necessity. My father had scruples as to vested rights, for the
old woman was the last survivor of a family who had had recourse to
primer and hornbook after their ejection on ‘black Bartholomew’s Day;’
and when the meeting-house was built after the Revolution, had combined
preaching with teaching. Monopoly had promoted degeneracy, and this last
of the race was an unfavourable specimen in all save outward
picturesqueness. However, much against Henderson’s liking, an
accommodation was proposed, by which books were to be supplied to her,
and the Church Catechism be taught in her school, with the assistance of
the curate and Miss Winslow.
The terms were rejected with scorn. No School Board could be more
determined against the Catechism, nor against ‘passons meddling wi’ she;’
and as to assistance, ‘she had been a governess this thirty year, and
didn’t want no one trapesing in and out of her school.’
She was warned, but probably did not believe in the possibility of an
opposition school; and really there were children enough in the place to
overfill both her room and that which was fitted up after a very humble
fashion in one of our cottages. H.M. Inspector would hardly have thought
it even worth condemnation any more than the attainments of the mistress,
the young widow of a small Bristol skipper. Her qualifications consisted
in her piety and conscientiousness, good temper and excellent needlework,
together with her having been a scholar in one of Mrs. Hannah More’s
schools in the Cheddar district. She could read and teach reading well;
but as for the dangerous accomplishments of writing and arithmetic, such
as desired to pass beyond the rudiments of them must go to Wattlesea.
So nice did she look in her black that Earlscombe voted her a mere town
lady, and even at a penny a week hesitated to send its children to her.
Indeed it was currently reported that her school was part of a deep and
nefarious scheme of the gentlefolks for reducing the poor-rates by
enticing the children, and then shipping them off to foreign parts from
Bristol.
But the great crisis was one unlucky summer evening when Emily and I were
out with the donkey, and Griffith, just come home from Oxford, was airing
the new acquisition of a handsome black retriever.
Close by the old chapel, a black cat was leisurely crossing the road. At
her dashed Nero, stimulated perhaps by an almost involuntary
scss—scss—from his master, if not from Amos and me. The cat flew up a
low wall, and stood at bay on the top on tiptoe, with bristling tail,
arched back, and fiery eyes, while the dog danced round in agony on his
hind legs, barking furiously, and almost reaching her. Female sympathy
ever goes to the cat, and Emily screamed out in the fear that he would
seize her, or even that Griff might aid him. Perhaps Amos would have
done so, if left to himself; but Griff, who saw the cat was safe, could
not help egging on his dog’s impotent rage, when in the midst, out flew
pussy’s mistress, Dame Dearlove herself, broomstick in hand, using
language as vituperative as the cat’s, and more intelligible.
She was about to strike the dog—indeed I fancy she did, for there was a
howl, and Griff sprang to his defence with—‘Don’t hurt my dog, I say! He
hasn’t touched the brute! She can take care of herself. Here, there’s
half-a-crown for the fright,’ as the cat sprang down within the wall, and
Nero slunk behind him. But Dame Dearlove was not so easily appeased.
Her blood was up after our long series of offences, and she broke into a
regular tirade of abuse.
‘That’s the way with you fine folk, thinking you can tread down poor
people like the dirt under your feet, and insult ’em when you’ve taken
the bread out of the mouths of them that were here before you. Passons
and ladies a meddin’ where no one ever set a foot before! Ay, ay, but
ye’ll all be down before long.’
Griff signed to us to go on, and thundered out on her to take care what
she was about and not be abusive; but this brought a fresh volley on him,
heralded by a derisive laugh. ‘Ha! ha! fine talking for the likes of
you, Winslows that you are. But there’s a curse on you all! The poor
lady as was murdered won’t let you be! Why, there’s one of you, poor
humpy object—’
At this savage attack on me, Griff waxed furious, and shouted at her to
hold her confounded tongue, but this only diverted the attack on himself.
‘And as for you—fine chap as ye think yourself, swaggering and swearing
at poor folk, and setting your dog at them—your time’s coming. Look out
for yourself. It’s well known as how the curse is on the first-born.
The Lady Margaret don’t let none of ’em live to come after his father.’
Griff laughed and said, ‘There, we have had enough of this;’ and in fact
we had already moved on, so that he had to make some long steps to
overtake us, muttering, ‘So we’ve started a Meg Merrilies! My father
won’t keep such a foul-mouthed hag in the parish long!’
To which I had to respond that her cottage belonged to the trustees of
the chapel, whereat he whistled. I don’t think he knew that we had heard
her final denunciation, and we did not like to mention it to him,
scarcely to each other, though Emily looked very white and scared.
We talked it over afterwards in private, and with Henderson, who
confessed that he had heard of the old woman’s saying something of the
kind to other persons. We consulted the registers in hopes of confuting
it, but did not satisfy ourselves. The last Squire had lost his only son
at school. He himself had been originally second in the family, and in
the generation before him there had been some child-deaths, after which
we came back to a young man, apparently the eldest, who, according to
Miss Selby’s story, had been killed in a duel by one of the Fordyces. It
was not comfortable, till I remembered that our family Bible recorded the
birth, baptism, and death of a son who had preceded Griffith, and only
borne for a day the name afterwards bestowed on me.
And Henderson, who was so little our elder as to discuss things on fairly
equal grounds, had some very interesting talks with us two over ancestral
sin and its possible effects, dwelling on the 18th of Ezekiel as a
comment on the Second Commandment. Indeed, we agreed that the
uncomfortable state of disaffection which, in 1830, was becoming only too
manifest in the populace, was the result of neglect in former ages, and
that, even in our own parish, the bitterness, distrust, and ingratitude
were due to the careless, riotous, and oppressive family whom we
represented.
CHAPTER XVII.
THE SIEGE OF HILLSIDE.
‘Ferments arise, imprisoned factions roar,
Represt ambition struggles round the shore;
Till, overwrought, the general system feels
Its motion stop, or frenzy fire the wheels.’
GOLDSMITH.
GRIFFITH had come straight home this year. There were no Peacock
gaieties to tempt him in London, for old Sir Henry had died suddenly soon
after the ball in December; nor was there much of a season that year,
owing to the illness and death of George IV.
A regiment containing two old schoolmates of his was at Bristol, and he
spent a good deal of time there, and also in Yeomanry drill. As autumn
came on we rejoiced in having so stalwart a protector, for the
agricultural riots had begun, and the forebodings of another French
Revolution seemed about to be realised. We stayed on at Chantry House.
My father thought his duty lay there as a magistrate, and my mother would
not leave him; nor indeed was any other place much safer, certainly not
London, whence Clarence wrote accounts of formidable mobs who were
expected to do more harm than they accomplished; though their hatred of
the hero of our country filled us with direful prognostications, and made
us think of the guillotine, which was linked with revolution in our
minds, before we had I beheld the numerous changes that followed upon the
thirty years of peace in which we grew up.
The ladies did not much like losing so stalwart a defender when Griff
returned to Oxford; and Jane the housemaid went to bed every night with
the pepper-pot and a poker, the first wherewith to blind the enemy, the
second to charge them with. From our height we could more than once see
blazing ricks, and were glad that the home farm was not in our own hands,
and that our only stack of hay was a good way from the house. When the
onset came at last, it was December, and the enemy only consisted of
about thirty dreary-looking men and boys in smock-frocks and chalked or
smutted faces, armed only with sticks and an old gun diverted from its
purpose of bird-scaring. They shouted for food, money, and arms; but my
father spoke to them from the hall steps, told them they had better go
home and learn that the public-house was a worse enemy to them than any
machine that had ever been in
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