I passed the very spot that afternoon, and it was just the same; only now it rained, and the trees were in full leaf, and there was no fox, nor hound, nor horse.
The dignified figure in the Hunt is, of course, the last-named animal. He never sees the quarry, probably, or knows there is one, or cares. It is not the lust of chasing and killing that inspires him to his gallant deeds—neither in fox-hunting nor in war. Watch a soldier's horse in the evolutions of a review. A colonel of my acquaintance has told me that the moment the band of the regiment begins to play he feels his charger's heart bound against his boot; so it is the music of the pack, telling of glorious effort and exercise, which fires the blood of the hunting horse that only hunts by proxy. The "scent of battle" is the scent of the old primitive life in free air and space, the "Call of the Wild" to the still half-tamed.
Horses were a passion in my family on both sides of the house. As a girl I have had my maternal grandfather named to me by strangers as "the doctor who drove the beautiful horses." His were not the requirements of the hunting man; he demanded the perfect form and action, the satin coat, the faultless turn-out. He was a very tall, high-nosed, stern-looking man, strikingly resembling the Iron Duke, and I used to see him come out to inspect the work of his groom before starting to ride or drive. He would not say a word, but would take his handkerchief to wipe some infinitesimal speck, visible to his eagle eye alone, and show the resultant stain to the guilty man; it covered him with confusion and dismay.
This martinet handled the reins himself, except at night, when other and less valuable animals were used—"Nightmare" was the name of one of them—until the state of his health obliged him to go abroad in a closed carriage. He hated this, and the necessity for giving his horses over to a hired coachman; and he was always putting his head out of window into the cold winds and fogs, that were so bad for him, forcibly to reprimand that much-to-be-pitied man. One raw winter day the grandfather's short patience gave out; he mounted the box himself and drove the empty brougham home, regardless of consequences, which proved fatal to him. He caught pneumonia or something of that sort, and died in a few days.
As I may not be speaking of him again, I should like to say that, haughty old man as he was, taking the high hand with patients of all grades, he was most attentive to the poor, and never took a fee from them. The tradition is that he never sent an account for attendance to anyone—would not condescend to it (having traditions of his own behind him, along with a pedigree stretching back to the mists of prehistoric time)—but that's as may be; he certainly left a very comfortable fortune, which, like that of the other grandfather, never reached the legatees. A son with whom he had been over-strict had run away from home many years before, and never afterwards been heard of. It was deemed impossible to fulfil the direction of the will to divide the property between the testator's children until the missing one was produced, or irrefragable proof of his death. Through all the period between my childhood and womanhood the newspapers of the world were calling through their agony columns for one or the other, and in vain. It was reported at intervals that his grave had been found, in New Zealand or Kamstchatka, or some equally remote corner of the earth; or that someone had met somebody who knew him or where he was; at which times the lawyers were put upon the trail to hunt the matter down. Each of the producible children had her separate batch of lawyers, and Chancery took charge of the steadily dwindling estate. Many years elapsed before the missing one was officially assumed to be dead, and the dregs of their patrimony allotted to his sisters; and then the portion that would have been ours was gone. How well I understand now little incidents that were devoid of meaning to me when they occurred: mother, in tears, confiding to a bosom friend: "'Do you sign this of your own free will?' he asked me before us both, and what could I say?" Poor mother; who struggled for us so hard! And the Married Woman's Property Act is of very little use to wives like her, who still cling to the old ideals of family life.
So we were always tantalised with "expectations" that never materialised in cash. We children, as we developed the faculty for romancing, beguiled ourselves with a special one of our own. Some day, in some dramatic manner, the vanished uncle—lost long, long before we were born—was to reappear, with his pockets full of gold, to play godfather to his impoverished relatives. We were always looking out for him. A strange step on the gravel, an unexpected knock at the door would instantly suggest to us that the psychological moment had arrived. But no one could ever have been lost more thoroughly than that poor boy, who ran away at night because his father had been too hard on him. From that day to this;—covering something like three-quarters of a century—he has made no sign.
If my grandfather's love of horses caused his death, the working of the same passion in my father's weaker nature was rather more unfortunate. He sacrificed to it and its kindred fascinations the important interests of his life, including those he held in trust for his wife and children. I do not say it to blame him, who was so kind-hearted and well-meaning; he was as he was made—happy-go-lucky, careless, thoughtless, sanguine, a boy to the last—and it was bad for such an one to have the illusion of "money coming to him" to encourage and excuse folly. In the fifties he was not a poor man, but he was too poor for the company he kept, too poor to afford to neglect business and indulge in the expensive pastimes of those who had none. But if he could be at M—— with the beloved "Harry" V., who was so generous with mounts, he would not be at home with uninteresting ploughmen. Norfolk folk who are my contemporaries will not need to have that "Harry" more fully named to them, especially when I add that I heard him spoken of as "The Old Squire" all over the western part of the country, although he had been dead so long. M—— House, his once hospitable home, was quite close to my cousin's Abbey, and, although my father had been there so much, it was the first time I had seen it. I walked around the walls and grounds that were so familiar to him, but did not attempt to enter, the family being in residence. Since my return to Australia I have learned from a mutual friend that they remember his name and the old companionship; so I might have been, and regret that I was not, less modest. The old squire and the golden age of fox-hunting in Norfolk, it seems, passed together, and the one is said to be as likely to return as the other.
But a rather probable reason for this seems to lie in the fact that Norfolk has become such an extensive game preserve. Passing the old estates, whose old owners wore the pink as a winter livery, I noted the little colonies of coops by the gamekeepers' cottages. At Sandringham I saw pheasants sauntering about the royal domain like domestic poultry, and caught the gleam of their bronzy plumage again and again in the twilight of the thick woods. Evidently they are brought up in the lap of luxury as well as in swarms, and are too precious to be scared and scattered by trampling hosts of horses and hounds.
Times have changed for the one sport as for the other. And, thinking of the difference, I am drawn to the conclusion (though it is not for me to have opinions, I know) that the shooting season cannot be to the common run of sportsmen what it used to be to their fathers. They may shoot better, and at more birds—they do, and so they ought—and for rich men, as one can understand, the old system is not comparable to the new; but the sport was more genuinely sport—was it not, my fellow-fogies of sporting blood?—and it must have had more charm for the many, if not for the few, than is the case now. When the stubble was left for partridges, and not ploughed up as soon as cut, and the fields and plantations lay quiet, through all that golden month which I believe is virtually useless to the scientific gunner to-day—when the autumn was still young and lovely and the red leaves on the trees—that must have been a pleasanter surrounding for the sportsman who was a lover of nature than murky skies and naked woods. To have the companionship of dogs, such as dogs used to be, cleverer than the masters with whom they were in such perfect sympathy and partnership—as a dog lover I cannot understand how men can have bettered sport by leaving them out of it. To wander at will over field and along hedgerow, with the muzzle-loader of the period over shoulder, the sufficient game-bag on hip, powder and shot in pocket, and the trusty scout ahead, undisturbed by steam-ploughs or the fear of fluttering preserves, no restriction whatever upon one's liberty and inclinations; this must have been as good a form of recreation as the drilled sharpshooting of to-day, although it may not have been as good business.
At any rate, my father loved it—at such times as he could not be following the hounds.
And so the winter came on, and the whist parties of an evening; and presently the exciting preparations for Christmas. Then Christmas itself—the holly, the mistletoe, the resplendent tree, the feasts and dances and miscellaneous merrymakings. The old year passed with these cheerful obsequies; the birth of the new year was celebrated in loving family conclave and with chimes from the village belfry (we could not have midnight services in a church with no lighting apparatus); another year of the same uneventfulness, which yet was to be as full of interest as ever.
I have been looking over a batch of new magazines, and the heading of a paper in one of them gives a sentence borrowed from a letter of Thomas Bailey Aldrich to William Dean Howells, which I will borrow again for an opening to this chapter: "I've a theory that every author while living has a projection of himself, a sort of eidolon, that goes about in near and distant places and makes friends and enemies for him out of folk who never knew him in the flesh. When the author dies this phantom fades away ... then the dead writer lives only in the impression made by his literature." Having written this down and looked at it, I feel that it is not so profound a saying as I thought. The first proposition is as obvious as can be; your eidolon is in the pages of your book, and the more directly you speak to your affinity the more quickly he responds (and he cannot respond effectively unless you are there to know it); the second seems to pass over the fact that when these spirit friendships materialise they become as other friendships, independent of literature or any outside thing. What I set out to show, by my quotation, was that the friends my eidolon had made for me in England outnumbered the friends of corporeal origin, and that some of them gave me my happiest English days. I flew to their arms as naturally and fearlessly as if I had lived with them in the flesh for as many years as we had otherwise known each other, and when I am dead I shall not be a dead author to them, but a dead woman. Alas! the phantom fades away in any event.
This I have found to be the prime joy of authorship—the knowledge that, when you are projecting yourself into your book, although nobody around you may know or care what you are talking about, you are still bound to reach some who will perfectly understand. You are speaking to your unknown kindred in the near and distant places; if you do not know it at the time—but you do know it—the proof comes later in the letters of some of them, who tell you they have been impelled to write. Precious recognition! And letters are so eloquent between the lines that you rarely make mistakes about them. They tell you that the wireless message has got "home" to where it belongs—or otherwise.
At the beginning of this century I published a volume of personal reminiscences, entitled "Thirty Years in Australia." Coincident with the conversion of the colony of Victoria into a state of the new Commonwealth, the thirtieth year of my sojourn within her borders was completed in 1900, and it seemed a good time to say something of what in our young country we call the "old days," the "good old times," the old pioneer colonial life of which the records are so few at home and the ignorance abroad so vast. Although, when I come to think of it, I believe it was merely as a rest from novel-writing that I started upon the work. I gossiped through the casual chapters—drivelled, some may say, much as I am doing now—with no idea that the completed book would be other than a trifling by-product (my London agent agreeing with this view), of little interest to readers outside Australia. But behold! Of the score or more of "works" to which I must plead guilty, this one has brought me more happiness than all the others put together, on each of which the profit in love has been more considerable than the profit in money. Old friends of the seventies, long passed from sight and knowledge although not from mind, recognised themselves in the guarded initials of their names, and they or their widowed partners or their children wrote to tell me where they were, to recall past companionships, to urgently beg and hospitably plan for a renewal of them. And thus came delightful reunions, mendings of gaps, comparing of experiences, comradeships for old age such as can never be for those who have not spent some of their youth together.
But far beyond the number of these were the friends not made by accident but by the design of Nature, although the accident of the book discovered them—friends altogether unknown until it found them for me in the near and distant places—also to be lost no more.
Away in Ireland lived a retired colonel of Hussars, who one day took it from the shelves of his local library. He did not fancy the title—Australia was not a name to conjure with in the British Isles, British though she was—but, after turning a few leaves, he thought it might serve for an idle hour. He read it aloud to his wife after dinner, and when he had finished it he wrote to me. It was the beginning of a correspondence which, by the time I started for England, gave me the hope of seeing them as one of the joys before me. And when I arrived their welcoming letter was amongst the first batch to come on board, and notified that he was himself in London, "at my service." As was the case in every situation of this kind, sanguine anticipations were fulfilled, and something left over. Never once was I disappointed in a spirit friend made flesh. I met him first at luncheon in the house of the beloved friend who had set herself to give me the time of my life, and he helped her to do it. I shall not forget the Ascot week of 1908. Certainly I have not much time to remember it in, but if I had a hundred years it would be the same. After we had "done" London—the restaurant dinners and the plays, the pictures, the flip-flap and the Sports' Club at the Franco-British Exhibition, little gaieties of a world I had not known but took to like a duck to water—he planned out my route to Ireland. That would have been the crown of all, but time and money would not stretch to it. Never mind. I still expect to go there some day.
Then away in Boston—Boston in Massachusetts—there lives another dear friend, discovered just as he was. For years we have corresponded intimately, and every line that I write for the press I can regard as a letter to her. She would come to Australia to see me, if she could; the possibility of such an enterprise on the part of a much-engaged wife and mother has been considered; but her promise to meet me in England, should I ever be there, was absolute. One does not allow for the "visitation of God" in making one's engagements, and it was only that which abrogated this one. I heard from her that she had been ready to start, not for London but for my ship at the docks, to be the first to receive me, bringing over a motor for my English use; and illness in her family had stopped her. She begged me to wait for the following spring, but I could not; and so we have not materialised each other yet. If we never do so, we shall love each other to the end. But we are hoping still.
And there were other friends of the eidolon in England and inaccessible, whose letters of welcome awaited me at Gravesend. One of them lived, as she still lives, at that watering-place on the Norfolk coast where I spent happy summers with my family when a child. That is to say, she lives in the new watering-place (not in existence then) which is an offshoot of the one I knew, still an old village, which its modern neighbour was from the first forbidden to touch. The lord of the manor comprising both—he who kept drinking houses and dissenting chapels off his land for so long—had a sense of the fitness of things so fine that it was almost a fad. When he allowed the new watering-place on the cliff where but one solitary house—an inn—had stood in my time, he laid the plan of the town himself and permitted only a beautiful brown stone of the locality to be used for the houses. Now vulgar bricks and jerry-building are creeping in, because his son, the present squire, cannot help it; but the good taste of the founder can stand up against them for a long time to come. It was never the typical fashionable watering-place, and, thanks to him, never can be until his work is swept away.
It is a great place, however, to have grown up in the interval since I walked to it from old H——, with my governess, to inquire at the "New Inn" (old then, and a beautiful house now) whether by chance they had such a things as "Revalenta Arabica," which a doctor or somebody had recommended for our dying baby, and for which we had ransacked the village in vain. I think that was my last sight of "The Green" that now is, which the local guide-book describes as "a standing reminder of the artistic mind that conceived and executed the formation of H——." To the people of this part,theyare H—— now, and the ancient village a mile away is Old H——; more often it is insultingly referred to as the Old End; to me the village is H——, and this New H——. Of course this H—— monopolises all the luxuries of civilisation; not only the old "New Inn" (with a new name and enlarged and important), on one side of the Green, but a huge G.E.R. Hotel, with the railway station under it, on the other; a great Town Hall, a grand pier with pavilion at the end of it, a fine stone-balustraded "Sea Walk" above the beach, public gardens, public tennis-courts; a splendid church, with its independent vicar and curate, and (which should surely make the late squire turn in his grave) a Wesleyan Chapel and a "Union" Chapel, the latter evidently some other irregular denomination, since I do not think New H—— has a workhouse yet; besides gas and telephones and all such things.
And so here lived my friend, where she could be quite comfortable. But in the days when she was not a widow, but wife of a rector of the neighbourhood—and before that, as a member of an old Norfolk family (she married into another)—she knew all about the H—— of my day; and when she chanced to read "Thirty Years in Australia," and penetrated my dark allusions to the locality and my unprinted thoughts about it, the kindly notion came into her head to tell me that my old H—— of cherished memory was still there, unchanged. With the divination of a spirit friend she knew just what it would mean to me to know that. Not only did she write to tell me, she sent me a bundle of photographs to prove her words. When I received them, I had no ghost of an idea that I should ever see H—— again with my bodily eyes, and they gushed tears over the little postcard scenes, so full of sad and sweet reminders of vanished hands and days that were no more. I kept them on a table by my Australian bedside, and used to strike matches in the middle of the night and light a candle to look at them once more, and again once more. Little did I foresee the day when I should buy them at their place of origin (fourpence a dozen) for myself!
Of course I wrote to thank her, although I could not find words to thank her adequately; it was the beginning of a correspondence signifying a lasting friendship.
And, amongst the many unexpected things that have happened to me of late was my visit to H—— and to her, just a year ago from this date of writing about it.
For once letters had not revealed the writer; she was not at all the type of woman they had suggested to my mind; nevertheless we suited each other, to use an expressive vulgarism, "down to the ground." In spite of a constitutional objection to strangers and dislike of "company" as such, common to us both, and in spite of marked differences of view upon important points between us, a very short time sufficed to bring us to that state of mutual trust and understanding in which we could say anything we liked to one another. And that is a state that many lifelong friends, the vast majority of them indeed, not to speak of near and dear relations, do not attain to.
But I must not talk here of our private affairs. Nor can I dwell as I would like to dwell upon the domestic aspect of the fortnight we spent together. I can say this much, however, she has the instinct for home-making that is so surprisingly lacking (according to my experience) in nine housewives out of ten. The stupidity of my sex in this important business is one of the perennial annoyances of my life. It is not a question—or in but a very small degree a question—of money. Mrs B. would know how to make a bark hut comfortable, or a fork of the ancestral tree. So would I. I could not have loved her as I do if her house had been disordered and her habits out of drawing; I am sure she must have cared less for me if I had not appreciated the refined simplicity combined with luxurious comfort of her ménage. I do like comfort, and see no reason to apologise for it as for a gross taste and a low. When I go into splendid rooms that are not used, or that have no fire in them on a chilly day, I feel as cross as when I see someone sitting by the open door of a railway carriage when the train moves, without putting out a hand to shut it. When I passed through Mrs B.'s kitchen (at such times as it was convenient to us to return home by way of the back gate), and looked upon M.'s shining range and twinkling dish-covers, the clear, dustless fire, the bright rug on the spotless floor, the cheerful red tablecloth, and her little tea, as dainty as ours, set out—that to me was a beautiful room, surpassing the saloons of palaces.
Our days were ordered perfectly, for real, downright comfort, when that was all that needed to be considered, as was then the case with Mrs B. and me. She knew intuitively that I would like my tea at half-past six better than at seven or later—as she did herself—and brought it to me then in her own hands, which had prepared the delicious tray. This was to strike the keynote of the harmonious hours. Having refreshed myself I had an hour or two of reverie in my soft bed, my brain cleared to brightness by the tea, the freshness of the summer morning about me. It was the only house except my own in which I had ever found it possible to do a bit of professional work, and it was in that peaceful interval between tea and bath that ideas for it were born and shaped themselves. At eleven the pony-carriage came round. She is a fine whip, but never used the implement on her own pony, a half Arab, wholly aristocratic animal, not quite in his first youth; he and she were on the footing of mother and son, with a complete understanding between them. Just to keep him in his place she would pretend to draw the whip from its socket occasionally, and although he had no eyes in the back of his head it was enough to recall him to zealous duty. He nuzzled in her coat pockets for sugar, and he knew her voice when he could not see her, whinnying wildly from his stall at the livery stables, where she sometimes visited him. Almost daily he arrived to take us out, always in a fresh direction, always over country that I had known and loved and never hoped to see again, until I began to forget I had ever left it.
At one o'clock we returned—I ravenously hungry—to the ever-perfect meal. Thereafter more or less subdued and somnolent we repaired to the drawing-room and two seductive resting-places therein; one was a remarkably comfortable long sofa, the other a remarkably comfortable deep easy-chair, and each of us took one, and it did not matter which. The day's newspapers lay at hand, and our respective work-bags, but we frankly allowed ourselves to drop asleep, which was perhaps the most profitable occupation for a pair of grandmothers at that period of the day, although one I was not accustomed to indulge in. At half-past four came M., with the tea-table, her transparent bread-and-butter, her memorable cakes and hot cakes, her jug of freshest cream, the boiling kettle and the caddy. And after such a tea as that, it was well that the next item of the programme was a walk, to prepare us for the equally appealing little dinner to be engaged in at eight.
It was in these walks that I drew nearest to the ghosts of the old days that thronged the place. Some obscure spinal delicacy prevented my hostess from going far on her own feet, although she was so majestically erect and so strong and young to look at; so she would carry book or knitting to a seat upon the Green (a grassy plateau at the top of the cliff, sloping seaward), or to one of the glass-walled shelters, useful Queen's Jubilee Memorials, planted at intervals alongside the cliff path, between the Green and the Lighthouse, and there rest and amuse herself while I wandered as I liked. We were so entirely at ease with each other that no apologies for such casual separations were required.
Naturally I walked away towards the Old End every time. And as soon as the last Jubilee Shelter was behind me I was in the world of my youth, where almost nothing was changed. How many hundreds of times had my feet scampered along that dear cliff path—to come back, after such far wanderings, to find it just the same! Only a track in the sea grass, a little more hollowed out perhaps, a little nearer to the cliff face, which the waves below had nibbled away until there was barely room to get past the lighthouse wall. The same wild scabiouses that we found there in bygone Augusts were blooming, richly purple as the clematis on Mrs B.'s house front, along the cliff edge. Half-a-century was gone like a passing puff of wind as I stooped to gather them. A dozen times I had to stop and wheel to look across the sea so different from every other sea; and in the evening fight, especially in clear shining after rain, the old "Stump" stood up like a pencil-mark on the far-distant horizon, and I saw again the ravelled threads that meant Skegness on the one hand and "The Deeps" on the other, familiar as the nose on my own face. This cliff path used to be the beat of our old friends, the coastguardsmen, who paced it solemnly day and night, with their telescopes under their arms. I saw no coastguard now, or I must have accosted him, and asked him to let me peep through his glass, for old sake's sake. He used to go on one knee and steady the instrument on his shoulder, and we used to stand behind him to gaze and exclaim.
Down below lay the great green-haired boulders, the tumbled rocks of the hard conglomerate that outlasted the superimposed strata of the rainbow-cake-like cliff, where doubtless the contraband cask or case found—or but for him would have found—temporary storage in the good old times; but I did not go down, because now the trippers pervaded the beach (leaving to the residents their more aristocratic terraces and Green), and the squalid litter of their picnics defiled the place. Half-a-century ago it was our happy hunting ground, and almost all our own. Here we plied bucket and spade from morn to eve; gathered marvellous treasures from the clear wells and pools between the rocks, ammonites out of the grey marl, "thunderbolts" out of the red chalk; chased crabs and shrimps and little fishes, built forts and castles, sailed boats and nursed dolls, and so on and so on; busy and happy the livelong day. At this point we were caught by the tide one day, and had to sit on a rock ledge till it uncovered the way home. In that archipelago of boulder-islands my foot once slipped into a crevice and was crushed, and the landlady of our lodgings rubbed salt into the bleeding wounds because, she said, that was the way to prevent mortification. Every flat stone, all up and down the beach, was eloquent of mid-morning and mid-afternoon meals, when mother or nurse came down to us with loaded basket to stay our little stomachs between breakfast and dinner and dinner and high tea. Oh, how magnificently hungry we were in those days! And what digestions we had!
The first old landmark that I came to after leaving New H—— behind me was the ruin of St Edmund's Chapel. A little fragment of a building that looks, almost as primitive as the cliff supporting it, I should think it could be carted away in a day by a couple of labourers who set their minds to the job; yet there it stood, not a stone displaced, that I could see, since I had played about it as a child. King Edmund the Martyr, say the old chroniclers, built the hermitage of which this is all remaining to commemorate the spot where he landed and to make himself a private study in which to learn the whole Book of Psalms by heart. Think of the hundreds of years of its history, back of the fifty of mine! I used not to think of it, but I thought of it a great deal when I stood on the hallowed ground again.
Then came the lighthouse—still the old lighthouse to the best of my recollection, but with a Marconi installation and a few cottages and their families added to it. And once it seemed to stand away in a field, and now it is so near to the cliff edge that there is scarcely room to get past the wall. The wall may be breached at any moment, and it will not be long after that before they will have to rebuild the tower.
I leaned over that low wall and looked into the enclosure. The men were having a game of cricket—such a natural thing to see where one sees a group of official Englishmen doing as they like in their off time (they were playing cricket at Aden and at Suez, regardless of the sweltering heat). When these lighthouse men, coming and going in their game, glanced towards me, watching them, it struck me as such a strange thing that they did not know who I was. I felt almost as if I had more right to be there than they. But when I totted up the years of my absence and the years of the oldest man amongst them, I knew I could be nothing to him but a stranger and an outsider, even as any other summer visitor out for a walk along the cliff. Yet how I longed to beckon him to the wall and ask him if he remembered the old times!
Beyond the lighthouse the cliff fell away gradually to a gradually diminishing sand-bank—as, of course, it had always done; and, descending the sloping path, I saw below me my old village, my own old beach, untouched by the hand of "improvement" which had been so busy near by. No, not quite untouched; the old village inn and coaching-house (when we first frequented the place there was no railway, and we coached the fifteen miles from L——) was now "The Golf Links Hotel," enlarged and modernised, and it had absorbed into its new grounds an old lane between hedges, along which we used to go and come, and which I had desired to perambulate again; but neither the hotel nor the links obtruded into the picture, which was substantially the same as I had known and remembered it. The bathing-machines had been moved from their former prominent position, and they had been a great feature. Every morning a couple of them rolled us into the water, where the bathing-woman was sometimes cruelly employed to dip us under, and haul us out again; and a picture of a little brother squatted naked on the roof of one of them, whither he had leaped from the wheel to evade her, and whence he refused to budge for any threats or blandishments, was plain before me when I looked for the machines where they used to be.
But this was the real thing—this was the old place, sacred to the old times. Once more I waded through heavy sand, that sifted into my boots, as we did before New H——, with its greens and esplanades and Jubilee Shelters, was dreamed of; I had to look about before I could find a clump of sea-grass on which to rest after my walk, while I surveyed and meditated upon the scene.
As was the case with other haunts of childhood and youth revisited, the actual place was not half the size nor of half the importance that I had supposed. To think that this little patch of beach and sandbank, with one occasional sail-boat (old Sam'sRose in June), a few donkeys and four or five bathing-machines for all its furnishing, should have been such a dream of romance, such a memory of joy, for more than half-a-century! But there was no doubt about it, and less than ever now. All the year round, in those old years, from late summer to early summer, I used to be counting days to "the seaside" again; and the rapture of each first evening when, the coach having dropped us at our lodgings, and our tea having been unpacked and eaten, we trooped to the beach (buying our spades and buckets at the post office on the way), to make sure that the sea was there before we went to bed—I could not outlive it in a thousand years. If ever I was happy in this mortal life, I was happy here, although I did break my heart over the corpse of a baby brother and have salt rubbed into a cut foot—also a governess in attendance and lesson-books, at times. But notthegoverness, fortunately; otherwise old H—— would not have called me back like this.
The tide was in, peacefully lapping the smooth shore. When it went out it went a long way, uncovering many acres of fine ribbed sand, strewn over with sea jewels; and great dark patches, that were mussel beds, the treasure ground of all. What multi-coloured sea-anemones we found there! And how hard it was to remember that the returning tide, with its unseen flank movements, would assuredly drown us if in our absorption we lost count of time! And away there, also hidden under the silver sheet, lay the mysterious buried forest—post-glacial trees with their black trunks and limbs intact, in one of which a stone axe was found sticking, just as the Stone Age man had left it. There were, I had been told, ebon gateposts, dug from this submerged woodland, on farm lands of the neighbourhood, and fragments came into our possession, fashioned into brooches and bracelets, as presents from local friends. I used not to consider the significance of these things. Now I read the buried forest into the pedigree of my native country, the splendour of which is lost upon those who stay at home.
When I was rested and had gazed my fill, I rose and turned to the right, up the low bank, towards the village—to find our old camping-places, if they existed still. I ought to have gone through a wicket at the top of the bank, through the narrow, high-hedged lane, past the windows of the old coaching inn, through which Honor W. used to lean and chat with the casual wayfarer and her father's guests. Where is that pleasant-voiced, happy-faced daughter of the old inn now? Does she sit somewhere, in cap and spectacles, darning socks for her grandchildren, amongst those who never realise that she was once young and handsome? I gave her memory greeting, while I turned my head from her transformed home. Just here I found myself rather alien and astray, but only for a few steps.
For there, across the road, were the coastguard quarters, as surely their old selves as I was. And no feature of the place could have appealed to me more eloquently, if only because in one of them the antiseptic surgery I have spoken of was practised on my foot. That was in a summer when all of the few regular lodging-places had been bespoken ahead of us, and we could only get in by the desperate expedient of subsidising the coastguard. Three of the little dwellings divided the family amongst them, the largest available parlour being the rendezvous for meals. I slept with two sisters in a four-post bed with blue-and-white-checked curtains, and the dispossessed rightful occupiers used to cross a corner of the room to get to their makeshift couch elsewhere, after we had retired and were supposed to be asleep. We did not like to miss the event of the stealthy passage of our coastguardsman from door to door, creeping in his stockinged feet, shading his candle with his hand, on such nights as he was off duty.
One of his brother officials was a clever worker in jet, amber and cornelian, found on the coast; his jewel-trays, prepared for summer visitors, held ornaments that were an ever-recurring joy to inspect and finger, especially if we could buy something—a cross or heart or string of beads for the neck, or a "faith-hope-and-charity" to add to one's bunch of charms. Another and particularly dear coastguardsman employed his genius and leisure for years upon a large model of a battleship of the period. It was the glory of his spotless parlour, which it quite monopolised. He said he was going to present it to the boy Prince of Wales—afterwards Edward our King. Crowns and palaces would be as naught to him, we were sure, when he found himself in possession of this wonder of the world. And did he ever?
Wandering on, I came to the cobbled courtyard, closed with a wide door at night, in the recesses of which we kept house through another summer. The very cobbles were there still! And farther on, the terrace of larger houses—thehouses, snapped up by the early birds—where we sojourned for the summer of several years, and where the little brother died. Dear little golden-head! Dolls were nowhere in the season when he reigned. It was the end of the summer, through which his sunny beauty had been the admiration of the beach and the adoration of his family, that he was snatched from us. The terrace reminded me of one forgotten shadow upon the shining picture of the Past—the black day when father and mother drove away with the little coffin in a closed carriage, to lay him with his baby forerunners in the churchyard at H——, leaving us behind with our governess in a paradise despoiled. Miss W. it was, father's favourite, she of the Rowland's Kalydor-and-ink affair. And, by the way, I remember that, soon after our return home that year, I went to L—— with her, and accompanied her when she paid a call on the lady principal of the school where she had been educated, who had recommended her to us. This lady had an imposing presence—I can see her now—in dark blue poplin or black moire antique, adorned with a collar of choice lace. She and Miss W. were brightly chatting together, when I interposed with the great and solemn news that I had been bursting to impart: "Our baby is dead." I think I expected her to collapse under the shock, but the shock was mine. She glanced at me casually, then turned to Miss W. with a laugh. "Well," said she, "it's one less for you to be bothered with." And Miss W. laughed back as she replied that, yes, it was. Oh, no doubt she was a cat, the pretty and amiable Miss W. And the lady principal, a wife and mother, was just the sort to have had the training of her.
I did not get as far as the old church on these occasions, when I rambled alone between tea and dinner. The pony carriage took me there, when we drove about for two hours between breakfast and luncheon, and through the beautiful old park, that even now was so proudly exclusive that the public might pass through the gates on but one day of the week. But I had not forgotten the tombs of the old family—fourteenth and fifteenth and sixteenth century monuments—and its great home, where it had dwelt since William the Conqueror, when the Norman founder took a Saxon lady to wife. Never, from that day to this, has the line of descent been broken, or the lord of that line been dispossessed of these lands. The charters that gave them are still in the muniment-room of the Hall, and Mrs B. showed me an enclosed copse, a dark piece of wild woodland, which she said was Saxon land that had never been touched since a Saxon kingdom owned it. The key was a sacred heirloom of the family, and one of the articles of the family creed was that no feet should enter there except its own. The whole history of England had passed it by—this one bit, probably the only bit in all England, of virgin Saxon territory!
O England! England! How wonderful she is!
I had a day of days before I left H——.
It was the 17th August, and the weather the very best that England could do. Roses were still plentiful in the beautifully kept English gardens—Dorothy Perkins painted herself on the landscape far and near—and mauve and purple clematis foamed over tawny house walls in delicious contrast of colour, with as little reserve as in our more ardently wooing air. A favourite ribbon-work of the little dark blue campanula was noticeable everywhere, bordering flower-beds and window-boxes; it was as positive as the blue pencil-marks of the Customs on my travelling baggage, and these oddly remind me of it. Withal a hint of autumn, gentle and gracious, mellowed the summer scene—aredrowan-tree in one fine country garden; that splendid burning-bush, the Virginian sumach, in another; above all—the sweetest "note" to me—the little wild, incomparable harebell, the English harebell, thick in the grass of the roadsides. And the corn was ripe and ready, the hand-cut lane cleared for the reaping-machine around nearly all the fields.
Well, on this perfect morning Mrs B. escorted me to the livery stables where her pony was boarded out. A more notable fact in connection with them was that the elderly proprietor was once the young son of an elderly proprietor of stables in old H——, whence we derived the donkeys and the donkey chaises of bygone times. She took me to see him on the very day of my arrival, that we might indulge in mutual reminiscences of the Golden Age. Now he had a great establishment, many horses and fine carriages glittering in their modern elegance, and his sons in their turn were the acting directors of the business—smart men in well-cut riding breeches, to whom a donkey would be as amusing a little animal as it is to me.
Amongst the many excellent vehicles of the firm, to which satin-skinned teams were being harnessed, a large brake was out for an excursion to a famous show place of the county. I was going with it, and going "on my own," Mrs B.'s back not being strong enough for the expedition. Usually I do not enjoy what we call pleasures all alone by myself, but for once I was able to make a happy day without the aid of a companion.
The seat of honour beside the coachman was reserved for me. He sat high in the air on his folded overcoat, and, becushioned and berugged, with a stool for my feet, I snuggled under his elbow, comfort personified. A fine man he was, with a fine old weather-toughened English face, and he was a fine whip; I knew it as soon as I saw him gather his four-in-hand together, and an Australian bushwoman of my experience is a fair judge. He was not a garrulous person, but ready with his information when I wanted it, and I could not have wished for a more congenial Jehu. He confided to me his opinion of the motor that was "bouncing us off the road," his mournful view of a future when the horse should be no more. It occurred to me that the next generation will find C.'s livery stables dealing only with motors and chauffeurs, and Mr H. had the air of a man who would hope to be in his grave before he could see it. Certainly there was much need of the horn that brayed a notice of our coming at the approach of every turning. English roads and village streets are so narrow that at times our great drag seemed to fill them from side to side; only an experience of London traffic enabled me to believe it possible that another vehicle could pass us; and the corners were so masked by the hedges that one could not see around them. Mrs B. and I, trundling about in her pony-carriage of a morning, had many sudden encounters with goggle-eyed drivers who did not trouble to toot a warning that they were near. Fortunately, her high-born pony treated the mushroom automobile with contempt.
But, oh, those English roads! And the joy of that twelve-mile drive behind that spanking team! We passed over the route by which our stage-coach of old brought us to and from old H—— before the railroad from L—— was made, and I could lean back in my comfortable seat and dream of the dear Past to my heart's content. Mr H., while keeping me conscious that I was in his good care, only spoke when he was spoken to; on the other side of me were a lady and her daughter, who confined their low-voiced conversation to themselves. There may have been, in the seats behind, a dozen persons more, who did not in the least disturb me.
We threaded five lovely villages, with much horn-blowing and twisting and turning, before we came to royal Sandringham, which I had already seen, but not on this side of it; every house and church and garden and green and pond and tree was a picture, to raise in my mind the unceasing question: "Why did I never know that England was like this?" I had not forgotten, I had simply never known it. No English person can ever know it so long as he stays at home. The callousness of the native, who was used to it, to the beauty of his dwelling-place, the value of his privileges, was a continual surprise to me, although I knew the reason for it. To be as the King at Sandringham, without the suggestion of an unfinished or imperfect detail in the whole scheme of one's domestic life, would be to have too oppressively much of a good thing, but I felt as if I would give my ears to live in one of his tenants' cottages.
By the way, even royal Sandringham had its message from the Past for me. I had known the place in childhood, and had my memories of the family from whom it was acquired; but I had always understood that Edward VII. had "rebuilt" the old mansion, which implied that he had first pulled it down. Instead of that, I found it had been built on to, which is quite a different thing. There it was, at the end of the immensely long facade, and, to my thinking, the most beautiful although the least ornate part of it. The photographers are not of the same opinion, for, having so much to get into a picture, they cut off what they consider can be spared at that end, never at the other; so it was a complete surprise to me to find the old house standing, and I had great difficulty in getting a photograph of the royal residence which took it in. But I did not cease from the search until I found one.
Lest I should seem to be sailing under false colours as a royal guest or otherwise privileged person, let me explain that I paid my visit to Sandringham as a cheap tripper on the occasion of the Cottage Flower Show of the estate. This was the day of the year—and in that favoured summer it was a day of unsurpassable weather, the 22nd of July—when the most generous of kings permitted any number of his humble subjects to overrun his domain right up to the house walls. The blinds were down—that was all, and the very least that could be done, in the way of decent reserve—but there was nothing save one's own sense of propriety to prevent one from flattening ones nose against the window-glass and trying to see around the edges. Policemen were there, of course, quantities of them, I daresay; but they drifted about as if they had no interest in the proceedings except to render themselves as inconspicuous as possible. Never once did I find one exercising his profession, and it was evident that they had their orders not to do so, except in the last extremity. Surely if anybody knew how to do the graceful thing gracefully, it was that consummate gentleman, Edward VII. And the miscellaneous crowd to whose honour he trusted justified his courtesy and confidence in them; they strolled about, free and easy, as if the place belonged to them, but not the smallest unauthorised liberty was taken with it, that I could see.
It was very striking, the sort of tribal, patriarchal sentiment, the almost family feeling, prevailing all over this estate and as far as the royal landlord's influence as such extended. Here the man behind the monarch was known as probably he could not be elsewhere in his own dominions or in the world—here, where he was in the special sense at home, and where he could be himself in freedom. Behind his back it was easy to gather the facts of the situation. There was no servile, old-world awe in the enormous and adoring respect paid to their great squire by those who "lived under" him; in their evidently boundless affection there was not a scrap of fear. When the milk gave out in the refreshment tents, because the fine day had brought more tea-drinkers than were expected, messengers ran to the Queen's dairy, as naturally as they would have run home if home had been as near, for more; and the little incident was typical. As a cheap tripper I gained an interesting experience and some valuable knowledge which as a privileged guest I must have missed. Also—in the retrospect—a delightful memory.
At the time, there was a disadvantage attached to the position which almost spoiled my day. The excursion train started early in the morning and returned late in the evening, giving us the whole day "out," and I was not strong enough to stand all that. I knew just how it would be, but I had not seen the time-table when I committed myself to the expedition by inviting a niece-in-law to accompany me. Otherwise I should not have come. And so now I am very thankful that I did invite her. As I said to her, when I tumbled, half dead, out of the train at D—— (cutting off what I could of the return journey, half of which she had still to make), "I'm glad I've done it—now that it is over."
It was all right, the getting there. The drive from Wolferton Station was full of joy, the beautiful modern woodland road not withholding glimpses of the wild heath of my young days, that was wild heath still, splashed with pinky-purple heather delightfully blending with dark fir wood and tawny sand. The tented meadows, and the sweet gardens beyond them, the views of the great house from this side and that, the glorious trees, the glorious grass, the glorious sunshine which Australia could not beat—as long as I escaped with my life to tell the tale—or, rather, to remember the feast of loveliness that it was—it is absurd to talk of what it cost me.
I do not grudge anything. I did not then; at any rate I knew I was not going to. But the fact remains that by one o'clock (with no train till after seven) I was dead beat.
For the sake of my young companion I "stuck it out" as long as possible. We went to a restaurant tent and had a good lunch. That put into me a certain amount of spurious vitality, sufficient to carry me along for half-an-hour more. Then I sat on a bench in front of the house, while she flitted up and down terrace steps and explored nooks and corners, my eye of the chaperon keeping her in sight. Then I made a great effort and we went to the Flower Show proper. I dragged myself up and down the fragrant alley-ways and looked at everything, and made appreciative remarks to the exhibitors, who, I am able to testify, did themselves and the estate credit. Then the heat and crush in the tents overpowered me and I had to get outside in haste.
Sinking upon a bench in the grateful air I said to my niece: "My dear, do you happen to see amongst all these people anyone you know?" She did. Almost as I spoke she spied a friend. It was a man alone, but fortunately an elderly man, yet not too old to be agreeable to her; married, the father of a family, a connection of her own by marriage; quite safe. So I turned her over to him that she might continue to enjoy herself, and they seemed both obliged to me. "Meet me at the church at four," said I (there was to be an organ recital at that hour). "Meanwhile I will just sit and rest."
And here—if I may be forgiven by my gracious host for mentioning it—I seemed to find out one little weak spot in his scheme of perfection. There were seats in plenty scattered over the broad acres of lawn. They were built around the trunks of many of the splendid trees, and they were excellently made of gnarled and twisted wood, and they were sylvanly picturesque; but I cannot allow that they were quite "right"—what one may term legitimately artistic. Because the essential principle of true art is that a thing shall be frankly what it professes to be, and these pretty rustic benches professed to be resting-places, and there was no rest in them. I tried one after another, until I must have gone the round of them all, in search of a niche for my tired back where a hard elbow would not poke into it, and there simply wasn't one. I could not afford to be thought too intoxicated to sit or stand, or I must have slipped down and laid my manifold aches upon the soft grass; so in despair I crawled to the church, where the seats, however hard, would not be knobby; and there for an hour or two, before it was crowded to suffocation for the organ recital, I sat by the open door to endure my fatigue. As I was never so long without the relief of a recumbent or reclining attitude since a carriage accident in 1877, when I was young and comparatively strong, gave me a permanent weak back, I was never so painfully tired in all my life. When the organ recital was over I made for the road where the vehicles were assembling for train time—still a long way off—and chartered a comfortable old landau, not only to take us to the station, but for use as a sofa in the meantime. I climbed in, leaned back luxuriously, put up my feet, and was in terrestrial heaven. It was hard to make my coachman believe that, far from being in a hurry to start, I wanted to stay where I was to the last moment, and he was too zealous in spite of me; but for an hour I reposed happily, and could have done so for two or three more, watching the break-up of the festival—the exhibitors stacking their country carts, carrying off their loaded baskets, exchanging their felicitations before they scattered for their homes. Physically I enjoyed myself more than I had done all day.
But now I take no count of cost. I congratulate myself that I was forced to pay it. May I be a cheap tripper and go through it all again, if I can make the same profit in material for the imagination. As I write, my mind is suffused with the golden beauty of that day. It basks again in such English sunshine as an old Australian could not credit without seeing it; it revels in those summer woods, with their peeps of purple heathland, their pheasants tranquilly meandering in and out amongst the rhododendrons. In those miles of shaven lawn, like a continuous carpet, with their ornamentation of single trees and clumps, their dells and rockeries and lake and pretty nooks, all so flawless; in the delightful garden beds and bowers, that are still so simply English, flowering hardily in the open air; in the various aspects of the richly featured house, which is yet no more than an English country house, as comfort-breathing, cheerful and homely as one's own. The little headstone (to a dog) under the windows; the pergola in the kitchen garden; York Cottage on its sunny slope; the charming rectory, its French windows open to the view of its ideal surroundings; the baby's grave in mother earth under the wall of the family church, the pathetic family memorials within—above all, that plate let into one end of the family pew, which I could not bear to see anyone look at who was not a "mother dear," bereaved of her grown son, like me—each and all are the picture gallery of Memory, that blessed haunt of the soul in the aging years. And not so much as a sketch-book scrawl of a weary woman seeking rest on knobbly rustic seats in vain.
However, in this chapter I set out to tell the tale of another adventure. And now it was August, and I was several-weeks-of-England stronger than I had been that day at Sandringham. And all I saw of the royal seat I saw from the public road—and I think we went over a part of the new road that a month earlier had been a-making—the road necessitated by the destruction of the famous avenue in a gale, the removal of the screen of trees leaving the house too much exposed to the passer-by along the original highway. The King had been obliged to set his boundaries further out to preserve his privacy, and he had taken in the old road; at that time he was building miles of wall outside of it, and the Norwich gates were in pieces on the ground; by this time they will be set in the new wall, and another landmark of the old times be gone. It was the best that he could do, since even a king cannot set a fallen avenue up again. Workmen were very busy round about, and it was odd to see the King's name, like that of any other Norfolk farmer, on the drays and carts that carried material to and fro. He was "running down" frequently, we learned, to inspect the works, as well as some improvements going on in the off-season at the house itself, like any other domestic person whose heart is in his home.
As we passed the raw opening which displayed the royal residence in its temporary nakedness, Mr H. checked his horses to give his excursionists a view; it was one of the advertised features of the trip. Then we swept on through the remainder of the lovely villages—Dersingham, Wolferton (it is no use pretending to maintain anonymity here, since the mention of Sandringham, for which a mere "S——" would not serve, gives me away)—to the Black Horse Inn at Castle Rising, which was the goal of our journey so far as he was concerned.
I remembered the Black Horse, as I remembered the great castle—eagerly looked for on each of those stage-coach drives of the fifties—and I felt glad that I had no companion when I set out to explore the latter for absolutely the first time. "Oh, if we could only gocloseto it! Oh, if we could only gointoit!" we children used to sigh, as we were hurried through the most romantic piece of our known world, our eyes upon the mighty keep that held such store of history; and never had that wish been gratified till now.
I went first into the inn ("hotel" is not to be thought of as applying to these English villages), to brush up a little after my drive and inquire about luncheon arrangements. I found it was not the old Black Horse but a descendant of the same name; however, it was a pleasant little hostelry, blending not too crudely with its venerable surroundings. A maid informed me that the rural table d'hôte would not be ready for half-an-hour, so I set off to get a preliminary peep at the great "lion" of those parts.
A short walk brought me to the wicket entrance, where an old man admitted me to the once sternly guarded fortress. And once more I found myself overwhelmed with a reality beyond all anticipations. The great castle was far, far greater than I had supposed.
The antiquaries seem agreed that the earthworks are of Roman origin; their plan is still quite plain to trace—nearly circular, with jutting squares to east and west; and to think of that, as one stands on the very embankments, looking down into the very ditch, so wide and deep that one looks on the tops of trees that have grown huge and hoary in the bottom of it, is to think of something that rather takes away one's breath. The British who appropriated the ready-made entrenchments, and the Normans who ousted them, seem, for once, but mushroom peoples.
But the castle within the ancient ramparts——! I am afraid to begin to tell how it affected me, seeing it at last, after all these years.
Its human interest to me in childhood was almost exclusively connected with a royal prisoner once immured there. In my earliest reading days Miss Strickland's "Queens of England" was my favourite history book—romance all through, made alive and convincing by the fascinating steel-engraved portraits of the ladies in their habits as they lived; and Miss Strickland said—so did everybody at that time—that Queen Isabella, widow of Edward the Second, was for her sins shut up in Rising Castle by Edward the Third, there to linger in captivity for twenty-seven years, until merciful death released her. I never passed under the great keep without gazing up at the few holes in the wall to wonder which was the window through which her wild eyes of despair looked in vain for rescue to the road we travelled. Now that story has gone the way of so many old stories. Isabella, it seems, had not much to complain of beyond banishment from Court to a residence in a dull neighbourhood. She paid visits to her friends from time to time, to relieve the monotony, and she died quite comfortably in another part of the country, in a castle of her own. But no single figure is needed to create human interest for a dwelling-place of the age of this one.
In the reign of William Rufus it was that the castle was built by one William d'Albini—just about the time when a brother knight of Normandy "took up his selection" at old H——, on which his descendants have sat continuously to this present day. Doubtless William and his neighbour had the equivalent of a pipe and glass together many a time, and inspected the works in company—these works which were to stand for a thousand years! Whether both gentlemen married ladies of the land I know not, but a Cecily (which sounds Saxonish) of William's line and name in the thirteenth century took the castle and manor of Rising into the family of Lord Montalt, her husband, where they remained for a good while. Then it appears to have become royal property, as witness Queen Isabella consigned thereto by her son.
The Black Prince and Richard the Second are mentioned as owners, if not occupiers, and it is said that King Richard exchanged it with the Duke of Brittany for the castle of Brest. In the spacious days of great Elizabeth it was the Dukes of Norfolk who were in possession, off and on. Since then it has seemed to belong to Howards—sometimes one branch, sometimes another—and it belongs to Howards now. What volumes of history are written between the lines of this brief pedigree!
I went over the bridge and through the Norman gatehouse. I looked about at the magnificence within, crossed the greensward and turned the corner to the entrance door. I walked in and up the great staircase of stone to the splendid archway under which the dead people passed to their great hall, now roofless and ruined. I surveyed the vaulted stone room with the Norman windows that was once its vestibule (and at the last a caretaker's lodging); opened a little door in a corner which disclosed a stony shaft round which a stony newel stairway corkscrewed up and up to narrow stony passages and chambers and long arcaded galleries tunnelled in the thickness of the walls—the steps so worn away by the many centuries of use that one could not keep foothold on them without the hand-rope on the wall, the dimensions so circumscribed that one thought of the burrows in the Egyptian Pyramids. Then I considered that further exploration would impair the pleasure of an extended rummage at leisure in the afternoon; also that luncheon would now be ready. And I returned through the village to the Black Horse.
Looking about I found thesalle-à-manger, chill, and empty of life. A long table was set for a meal, but was still without food and without company. Further investigation brought me to a garden beside the house where stood a few small tables, at one of which two ladies—mother and daughter who had shared the box seat of the drag with me—were taking a light luncheon in peace and privacy. They were having eggs and salad and bread-and-butter and tea, with green grass under their feet and the sweet air and sunshine round them; and at once I perceived that this was the sort of thing, and not the table d'hôte, for me. I took a table at a distance from them, but, no waitress forthcoming, I went across to ask them how they had obtained their provisions, which resulted in our joining forces and having a pleasant meal together. No one else came to the garden, except the maid who served us, and we chatted together as do callers at the same house on an At Home day, finding themselves isolated for the moment on contiguous chairs. One thing leading to another, it transpired that the young lady, who wore fine diamonds on her engagement finger, was going to be married in five weeks. A chance allusion to my own circumstances evoked the further information that her intended husband was a Melbourne man! That is to say, Melbourne was his birthplace and the place of business of his firm for which he acted as London manager. They mentioned his name and I knew it well. I see it in large letters on a factory wall every time I pass over the railway between the city and my home, and now I never see it without thinking of her. By this time if all went right she will have been married a long time. I hope she is well and happy.
I resumed my explorations of the castle, where I had several chance encounters with my friends of the inn garden on break-neck stairs and in stony corridors where there was scarce space for us to pass each other, while still wandering in the solitude I desired, companioned only by my thoughts. It was a memorable afternoon. I had never before been in such close touch with the people of the past, makers of the History of England which is the lay bible of the British race. The very chambers they slept in and where they were born and died; the same floors and walls and stone-ribbed ceilings, the same outlook from the same windows and loopholes over heath and marsh to distant sea and the dim line of the coast of Lincolnshire; the Chapel of their penances and dispensations, where they dedicated the swords of slaughter; the Hall where they brawled and feasted, the dark holes at blind ends of the stony labyrinth, which silently witnessed to unthinkable dark deeds. If I had been better acquainted with old castles than I was, I might have been less impressed by these things and the reflections they evoked. As it was, the whole place seemed so thronged with ghosts that I felt as if I had not room to move amongst them.
And yet I learned from a little talk with those who knew, that a caretaker—a lady "custodian," moreover—had kept house and home in the very middle of it all, up to a quite recent date. Howcouldshe? Her bedroom was the "Queen's Room" where Isabella herself had slept (next door to her "Confession Room"); another that she used was the "Priest's Chamber," up at the top of that slant-stepped newel stairway. The room at the top of the great main staircase, with the three Norman windows and the great dog-toothed Norman archway that once gave entrance to the hall, was her sitting-room. The evidences were there—archway bricked up, and a little iron stove (how little it did look, to be sure, in more ways than one) set against the bricks; windows glazed, boards (I think) laid down over the flagged floor. I tried to fancy how the lady custodian had furnished it—to picture her sitting at her book or needlework under that mighty overmantel above the hearth! I had not then seen the quarters of the chaplain of Malling Abbey, and how charmingly ancient and modern can be made to blend in the composition of a home by a person of intelligence, means and taste. Yet the gatehouse at Malling, apart from the chaplain's "treatment" of it, is snug and cosy indeed compared with this. I could live there delightfully myself. But here——! From kitchen to parlour, from parlour to bedroom the lady custodian had to make pilgrimages through ruins open to the sky and up stairways and along tunnel-passages such as one shuddered to think of in connection with dark nights. Imagine the wind rising after you have gone to bed, sighing and sobbing like ghosts of tortured captives come back to the scene of their Mediæval woes, whistling through the loopholes like the arrows of a besieging army. Think of hearing an owl hoot in the desolate great hall—the creepings and scratchings of things alive that you cannot account for—the deadly silence in between, that feels like the silence of a tiger watching you and crouched to spring!
I was not surprised to learn that the last woman to defy the associations of the place had found them too much for her, and that since her time the caretaker had lodged outside the castle instead of in. Her husband had died in that room of the bricked-up arch and the little iron stove, and what she went through in the nights of his last illness, when she had to sit up to watch him, and on the night when she was left with his coffined corpse for company, nearly drove her out of her mind. So I was told, and I quite believed it.
I came down at last from the wonderful place, having still time before me in which to explore the village. Mrs B. had warned me not to neglect this duty.
It is a beautiful village. As one saw "The King" written all over West Newton, Dersingham, Wolferton, every acre within a radius of miles from the royal seat, so here the impress of "The Howards" was plain upon Rising from end to end. The home of the family is in it; of course, withdrawn from the gaze of trippers. I passed its guardian walls and spoke to a gardener who came through a high gate, wheeling his barrowful of stuff from the grounds within. I think he said that his lady was in residence. I strolled on to the village green to look at an ancient cross which Mrs B. had mentioned as an important feature. So it is—a very interesting example of the wayside shrine. I could find no special story attached to it, but one felt sure that it commemorated "The Howards" in some way. The rectory near by—a home of dignified leisure, also withdrawn from the gaze of trippers—is in their gift. The church is full of memorials of them. If I know little of castles I know much of the churches of my native country, and how remarkable they are. This one must be ranked with the ecclesiastical gems of Norfolk, which is so rich in them—although I found that it had been very thoroughly "restored," which generally means in some points altered from the original plan, within late years. By the way, Mrs B. has a valuable collection of the etchings of John Sells Cotman, whose work is, for architects and antiquaries, an authority on Norfolk churches and cathedrals, abbeys and castles, as they were a century ago; and I am not sure, but I think that one of them shows the square tower of Rising church without the singular roof which now covers it. However, it is a beautiful building, plainly Norman throughout; with all its richness of ornamentation, massively simple and sincere, worthy to stand beside its great neighbour, which has defied the chances and changes of a thousand years. The hand of the Howards may be seen all over it, inside and out, but they have written only their love and taste, and said as little as possible about their own importance.
Just across the road from the church is another Howard institution of the past, in which I was deeply interested—Trinity Hospital, otherwise the Bede House, otherwise almshouses for decayed females of the working families on the estate. Here the gaze of the tripper is not objected to—is probably welcomed, since an alms-dish stands on the table at which the "Governess" (which I think is the correct title of the lady superintendent) gives you final items of information about the place; the vessel dumbly suggesting a donation from the visitor, to be devoted to the comfort of the old ladies in providing them with such little extra luxuries as they can enjoy. I did not need the hint, and I should think the offerings of visitors ought to almost "keep" the old ladies, who want so little.
It is a charming bit of architecture, and to me it seemed immensely old. I said so to the lady superintendent, and you should have seen her amused smile at my ignorance! "Oh dear, no," she politely corrected me, "thisis not old; not more than three or four hundred years at the most." From her way of saying it, you would have supposed it had been jerry-built last week. But she was right; in Rising village, a neighbour of the great castle, an appanage of the Howards, it was a mere mushroom. Henry Howard, Earl of Northampton, erected it in the reign of King James the Second.
Nevertheless, it is a charming bit of architecture. She could not shake me in that belief. A sort of gatehouse of two storeys, capped with three pointed roofs, two square and a saddle-back between them, gives entrance through an open archway to the most delightfully green and peaceful quadrangle, which was a picture indeed that golden summer afternoon. Exactly fronting me as I entered was another block of buildings, comprising a little chapel, a reception-room, and the quarters of the "Governess." Between this block and the gateway block, and joined to each on both sides and to one another, the dwellings of the pensioners made out the square, which was edged with the ever-beautiful English flower-border, the middle being filled in with the ever-matchless English lawn. All the roofs were large, steep, massive and heavily tiled; the chimneys on the same scale, the walls (except in the two blocks mentioned) low, and pierced with square latticed windows and the cottage doors—a pair to each pensioner—most of which stood open, with the old ladies, at their knitting or what not, sunning themselves at some of them. There was about everything that sober orderliness, scrupulous neatness and finish, so striking and so grateful to the eye of the old colonist, and such an enhancement and completion of the charm of rural England in characteristic scenes like this. It was a reproduction on a small scale of the college quadrangles at Cambridge, the composition of which had so enchanted me. I was enchanted with the Howard Almshouse, and inclined to envy the Howard protégée her haven of repose.
But the twentieth-century cosmopolitan, who has more or less gone with the times, has strange conflicts of feeling within the breast on being shown the uniform of the Howard protégée, the wearing of which is a condition of her tenure of one of these picture-book homes. Out of cardboard boxes and swathings of tissue paper the lady superintendent brought forth the brand-new cloak and hat that appeared to be kept for display to visitors; and I looked at them. Taken as a garment, and not a symbol, the cloak of scarlet cloth with the Howard badge embroidered on it is quite beautiful; the hat is another matter. It seems made of the stuff used for the modern gentleman's bell topper, and in shape resembles the Welsh peasant hat; one has seen it also in pictures of witches, of the time when they were tried by fire and millponds. It has a towering and tapering sugarloaf crown, and a round, narrow brim, and is worn over a white cap with a full border. In other words, the uniform is a costume of the time of James the Second.
Now....
Well, I mentioned the matter in local circles once or twice. My non-committal attitude did not fail to evoke disparaging remarks upon the Howard Bede House fashions, and especially the hat. "They don't like wearing it," I was told. Who can wonder? "But for them things, there's a many would like to go in, and ought to go in, as can't bring theirselves to do it."
In Ely, when I left that town for Australia, there was a pious foundation which similarly persisted in making its beneficiaries wear the costume of the founder's age. Long past the middle of the nineteenth century though it was, unfortunate little boys had to run the gauntlet of the street in old-man beaver hats and full-skirted old-man coats with great flap-pockets—spectacles to make the humane heart bleed. When I returned, I found the old free school building extant and unchanged, but the preposterous uniform no more. Now that the twentieth century has passed its first decade, I think it would be a fair thing to let the witch's hat, and the "badge" that has lost its meaning, go.
I was dreamily making my way back to the Black Horse when I spied the village post office—the "open door" to all persons and peoples into the great world of living human affairs that I had been feeling so remote from. Something within me sprang awake at the sight—it was the instinctive although often unconscious desire for human sympathy that accompanies any unusually impressive experience. I stepped into the tiny place, and sought pen and ink. I drew a postcard from a packet I had bought of the old man at the gate of the castle grounds, and wrote under a picture of the great stone staircase: "Here I am, and I wish you were with me," or words to that effect. I addressed it to my friend at Boston in Massachusetts, who had sent many a token of the same kind to me, stamped it, and dropped it into the letter-slot. Then, feeling no longer alone—only just as much so as I liked to be—I stepped back into the sunshine, happy in my thoughts of her and of how she would understand.