I went on from D—— into the deeper and more beautiful recesses of my native county, the localities associated with my earliest years, the most sacred places of them all. It was early in July, when the rhododendrons, so thick in the woods, had done their flowering, but the trees were in full perfection, and the honeysuckles of the hedges scented the highways.
Two large families of cousins had grown up thereabouts, and some were still clinging to their native soil. All had been unknown to me from the time of our paternal grandfather's death, in 1856, which precipitated the estranging lawsuit—all, that is to say, excepting E., who married from our house. As children we used to shoot veiled glances at each other in church, but that was all the intercourse permitted to us. However, in later years, when we had sense of our own to judge the merits of this old quarrel, one and another of my cousins claimed acquaintance with me through my publishers, and I came to England with several long-standing invitations from them to visit them when I could. M.G., a widow a few years older than myself, was one who had never deserted Norfolk, and whose charming home was in the very heart of my own country, within a drive of all the places I most desired to see again. An "abbey," it was called, a farmhouse now, divorced from its lands, one of those beautiful English dwellings, several hundreds of years old, that I was always adoringly and enviously in love with; and attached to it were the ruins of a religious house, which the county directory informed me was founded for Cistercians in 1251, and granted at the Dissolution to the family whose present representative, of the same name, owns it still, my cousin's friend and landlord. From the old garden, out of the stupendous trees (are there trees in England to rival Norfolk trees?), rose fragments of the walls of that old abbey, broken arches and windows with some stone tracery left in them; and there were damp depressions in which lumps of carved stone were jumbled up with weeds and ragged bushes, the crypts which Time had filled, but not wholly filled, with the rain-washings of centuries. Imagine my joy in such surroundings! And within the comparatively modern but still antique (it looked to me Elizabethan) residence, nothing to clash with the grey stone walls and mullioned and labelled windows, all simple dignity, frugal refinement, warmth, ease, comfort. It was a delight to me merely to walk up and down the stairs, wide and shallow and solid, echoing the footfalls of generations of gentlefolk at every step; especially when at the top lay the cosiest of beds and at the bottom the cheeriest of quiet firesides.
Although it was July we had a fire all the time—the little touch that made us kin, my cousin and me. The old prejudice against lighting a fire after spring cleaning or before a certain fixed date in autumn, coincident with the exchange of lace window-curtains for stuff ones, or some such annual domestic rite, had not died out in rural England since I had been away; but here—as soon as I walked in out of the rain on the afternoon of my arrival—the sight of a ruddy blaze, and a well-furnished tea-table beside it, told me that in this remote village I had struck an enlightened woman.
It was so remote a village that there was no way of getting to it from D—— but by driving the whole eight miles. M. sent the landlord of her local inn, her accustomed coachman, an intelligent man whose ancestors had been in service with mine, to fetch me; and he entertained me on the way with the history of the old families whose homes we passed and with whom my family had had more or less intimate relations in the years before he was born, as that history had been enacted within his lifetime and during the later part of mine. The soft grey rain came straight down, and we were both coated and mackintoshed to the eyes. I had to peer from under the edge of my dripping umbrella at the well-known gateways (the lodges more modernised than the mansions they belonged to, so far as I could see the latter through their splendid woods and avenues), the familiar farms and villages, with their fine old churches, all the dear, historic landscape; but, wet as it was, I had to struggle not to make it wetter—and my handkerchief hopelessly buried under my wraps. I tell you, dear sympathetic elderly reader, the memories that flocked along that road to greet me were all but overwhelming. It was, for peculiar and precious charm, the drive of my life—to date; only the one I had next day surpassed it.
It did not rain next day, and Mr B. drove up to the abbey, spick and span, in plum-coloured livery and shiny hat, to take us out for the afternoon. Nice man that he was, with his old family traditions so entwined with mine, he entered with respectful zeal into the spirit of the expedition, undertaking that I should miss nothing of interest to me through default of his. He and M. mapped out the route with care, and as we pursued it he turned on his box seat at intervals of a few minutes, to name each feature as we approached or passed it, and make such comments as seemed called for. Half the time I was standing up in the carriage behind him, straining my eyes to see, at the direction of his outstretched whip, something in the dim distance not yet plain enough to see. And yet, by accident or design, the latter I suspect, in collusion with M., he was driving slowly past the very face of T——, the goal of this pilgrimage, without word or sign, when my roving eye lighting upon it recognised it instantly, without anybody's aid.
Would that I had a photograph of it! For not only was it a good old house surpassing my fancy dreams of it, but it had not visibly changed in the least degree, nor had any of its farm surroundings. Just as I had left it when I was a child I saw it again when I was an old woman; and the whole scene was as familiar to the last detail as if I had been seeing it all the time. The big road gate, the pond within, the barn, the garden (raised above the surrounding meadow), the house itself, its generous front windows as wide as they were deep, and the kitchen at the side, and the dairy running back to the elder-tree where they used to kill the fowls—everything was in its old place, and no sign of decadence visible from the point at which I viewed it. This permanence of English things was so remarkable to me—because in Australia nothing is permanent, but altering itself to bigger or better every minute of the time.
As at the moment of sudden death the complete panorama of one's past life is before the mental eye—as one dreams a whole story in multitudinous detail between the housemaid's morning knock at one's door and the echo of it that wakes one (if those legendary happenings are to be believed)—so I seemed to live all my little childhood over again in the few minutes that Mr B. held his horse on the highroad, and I stood at his shoulder to gaze at the place, which, although not my birthplace, still meant for me the beginning of all things. Memory could go no further back than to an infancy that was put to bed in the middle of the day and given meals on its nurse's lap with a spoon. I looked at the nursery window, and instantly thought of a little thing left to cry in its crib, untended and unheard, with feelings so acutely hurt by the unprecedented neglect that the mark was left for evermore; and the occasion, there is evidence to show, was the birth of a sister three years younger than herself.
I looked at the "parlour" window and it was crowded with her. She was just old enough to be "shown off" as the usual prodigy of intelligence by adoring parents. My second earliest memory of myself is as a public singer. They stood me on the big round "centre table" that they might see me as I sang. I did not know the meaning of the words I lisped, yet I had remembered many fragments of them, and the tunes entirely, in spite of having heard neither during the many intervening years. And now an unknown friend in England, General Sir M.G., who fought in the Mutiny, who used to sing them himself before he went to that business, probably at the same time as I sang them, has filled up for me the gaps in the verses of one of my favourite songs, with the remark, which I can so feelingly endorse on my own account, that he wishes he could remember what he reads now as well as he does what attracted him in those old days. Almost simultaneously another friend in England, one of his Majesty's Privy Councillors, did me the very same kindness; and thus the old ballad seems to have a claim to be given a place in these reminiscences, for the sake of other of our contemporaries who may share our sentiment about it.
"'Twas a beautiful night, and the stars shone bright,And the moon on the waters play'd,When a gay cavalier to a bower drew nearA lady to serenade.To tenderest words he swept the chords,And many a sigh breath'd he.While o'er and o'er he fondly swore:Sweet maid, I love but thee."
With a lingering lilt at the end:
"Sweet mai-aid, sweet mai-aid, I lov-ove, I lov-ove butthee.""When he turn'd his eye to the lattice high,And fondly breath'd his hopes,In amazement he sees, swing about in the breeze,All ready, a ladder of ropes.Up, up, he has gone. The bird she has flown.'What's this on the ground?' quoth he.''Tis plain that she loves. Here's some gentleman's gloves,And they never belong'd to me.These gloves, these gloves, they never belong'd to me.'Of course you'd have thought he'd have followed andfought,For it was a duelling age;But the gay cavalier quite scorn'd the ideaOf putting himself in a rage.So wiser by far, he pack'd up his guitar,And as homeward he went sang he,'When a lady elopes down a ladder of ropesShe may go to Hongkong for me.She may go, she may go, she may go to Hongkong for me.'"
I do not know if it was the same cavalier to the same lady—but I think not, and General G. thinks not—who thus mourned by my infant lips:
"I'll hang my harp on a willow-treeAnd go off to the wars again.A peaceful life has no charms for me,The battlefield no pain.For the lady I love will soon be a bride,With a diadem on her brow,Oh, had she not flattered my boyish prideI might have been happy now!"
Or:
"Oh, why did she flatter my boyish pride?She is going to leave me now!"
Looking through that wide window into the old parlour as it used to be, how plainly I could see the ring of benign or ecstatic faces around the centre table, visitors and grandparents and uncles and aunts gathered to behold and applaud the prodigy! Even the formidable youngest aunt would grant a provisional smile to a display she could not have approved of; because it was really rather notable, I believe, considering my time of life, and even she had her soft moments. Besides, she was then young herself.
When she came to see us at this house—she had not time to come much to any of the others—she made it her business to show our mother how we should be brought up. She must have known something about it, seeing that afterwards she was governess to young royalties at two of the courts of Europe, but we, while compelled to bow to her authority, had no respect for it or for her. Regarding her image dispassionately from this long, long distance, I see that she was an exceptionally correct and accomplished woman, but a certain circumstance that took place behind that parlour window fixed another view of her upon my infant mind too firmly to be obliterated in a lifetime.
I was just old enough to go to church, and my doting mother had provided me with a lovely Sunday bonnet. It covered the whole head closely, in the height of fashion—responsible for many ear-aches, by the way—and it had two little tails of ribbon on one side of it, each end fringed out. When this bonnet was tied on, the pelisse that covered the bareness of the indoor costume being also adjusted, I was as conscious of my striking appearance as the proud parent herself. She still had her own toilet to make, and while she dressed I went down to the hall where the family assembled for the procession to the village church. It was early, and I was first at the rendezvous, so I went into the drawing-room to look at myself. A large mirror that had gilt candelabra branching out on either side, and a fierce gilt eagle on the point of flight from the apex, hung on the wall by the window, with a sort of divan that was also a receptacle for music sheets and other things in front of it. Laboriously I climbed that ottoman and stood as a statue on a pedestal before that convex glass. Then I lost count of time in the contemplation of my charms, and especially of those two fringed ends of ribbon drooping gracefully to my shoulder. My head was screwed round to bring them well into view, when I was suddenly petrified by a vision of the youngest aunt in the doorway. I was caught red-handed, as it were. It was impossible to evade conviction on the charge that I saw levelled at me from her pitiless calm eyes. I stood silent, trembling, wondering what she would do. "She will tell mother," was my first thought. But she did worse. She sought the nearest work-box, she approached me—still standing on the ottoman—with unsheathed scissors in her hand. She lifted one end of fringed ribbon and sliced it off; she lifted the other and served that the same. In two seconds my bonnet in which I now had to go to church (impotently raging and heart-broken) was ruined, and my vice of vanity supposed to have been destroyed at its source. I cannot recall the effect of the transaction upon my mother's mind, but I know that its effect on mine was not what the youngest aunt anticipated. "Some day you will thank me for it," said she. It was a formula of hers. She was quite wrong. In half-a-century I have not learned to thank her for it. She did not kill vanity with those scissors, as she supposed, but love. It is a mistake common to educationalists the world over.
The eldest aunt, my godmother—she of the Marble Arch episode—was quite a different sort of person. She too, being also a single woman, thought she could improve upon her married sister's methods of managing children, but her pills were so sugared that it was a pleasure to swallow them; at any rate, it was so here at T——, before young men, or even boys, could trouble her. One instance of a lesson prepared and administered for my good, when I was still little more than a baby, stands out very distinctly.
I had a passion for dolls. It was the first passion of my life, and lasted until I was so old as to be ashamed to be seen with them. The first of my family were just any articles that came to hand, but soon we had a nurse (the first five of us being born in six years, our mother was not always able to attend to everything, as she desired), who gave shape and form, of a sort, to my maternal ideals. She stuffed bags with chaff or sawdust and sewed them together, a round ball to a larger round ball, and four sausage-shaped ones to that. This body had the surpassing merit of bigness; clothed in a real child's cast-off clothes, it seemed itself more real. When nurse had done her part I used to carry it downstairs to father for him to put a face and hair on it with pen and ink. Although I always pleaded with him to make her as pretty as possible, the spirit of mischief sometimes prompted him to draw the countenance of a goblin or an idiot. I would open my arms to embrace a lovely baby girl and find a horrible monster with cross eyes and grinning teeth; at which I would at once break into a wail and a flood of tears. Then he would be very sorry, would hasten to somebody for a fresh layer of calico and sit down and make the face again—this time his very best (and he was a clever draughtsman) with which I would be quite satisfied. The breed of dolls improved, of course, with my own development in taste and knowledge; the rag doll gave place to the wooden Dutch creature with the pegged joints and shiny black head, and that to the waxen angel with floss-silk hair and smiling carmine lips, eyes like the sky and cheeks like the rose, which seemed almost too good and beautiful for this world. Indeed that was too often the view taken of her by the authorities. Wrapped in silver paper she would repose in a drawer in the spare room under lock and key, while I pined for her companionship, and would only be granted to me as a sort of distinguished visitor on high days and holidays.
Well, the eldest aunt never came to see us without bringing presents. As soon as it was known upstairs that she had arrived we were thrown into a fever of greedy anticipation, wondering what they would be this time. I can remember the scene of her entrance into the nursery on two or three occasions, each time in the evening in her indoor costume, after she had kept us waiting for some time. She carried her gifts in her arms. But one day instead of coming to the nursery she sent for us to her room. I, the eldest niece, was summoned first, and after greetings she took from her box a ravishing wax doll and laid it in my arms.
"There," said she, "that is for a good girl."
Naturally I assumed it mine. I sat down and nursed it and gloated over it, while she smiled benignly on me. Then, while at the dizziest summit of my joy, I was informed that the doll was not for me but for my next sister. Little did I guess what hung upon my behaviour under this sore trial! As little can I account for the luck—merit it could not have been—which led me to take the blow submissively. I handed back the doll with a sigh, perhaps a tear, but without a murmur. Straightway another doll, twice as big and fine, was extracted from the aunt's box and pronounced to be irrevocably my own—becauseI had not shown myself selfish under a temptation carefully calculated to test my character in that respect. The eldest aunt explained her moral lesson with the result of which she was so proud—as I was. She made me understand that the smaller doll would have remained mine had I grudged it to my sister, who would then have received the big one. As with the lesson of the youngest aunt (who would have given neither doll to one so undeserving as, by the merest accident, I might have shown myself), it impressed itself indelibly on my mind—the profitableness of virtue to oneself, and never mind what it costs other people. It would have made an excellent text for one of the children's story-books of the period.
Compared with these disciplinarians my dear mother was nowhere. She could hardly bring herself to scold a child. As far as I was concerned my father was the same. His weak indulgence of me, the open favouritism with which he distinguished me from my brothers and sisters was—I know now—scandalous. Harsh to his boys, and too ready to box the ears of the little girls when they were old enough, he never laid an angry finger on me. One punishment only was mine, and I must have been bad indeed at the times when it was inflicted; I was sent to sit on the stairs. That does not sound like punishment at all, but the treadmill was not dreaded more by those condemned to it. To sit on the stairs meant to sit on the bottom step of the front stairs, just facing the hall door, in dread expectation of a visitor who should be witness of the unspeakable ignominy of my position—akin to that of one exposed in the village stocks to the insults of a hostile populace. I could not look at that front door, that I used to watch in such agonies of fear, without seeing behind it the huddled little figure, quaking in terror of the caller who hardly ever came.
If I was let off so lightly myself, I suffered horribly in the punishments of my nursery companions, particularly in the case of my one-year-older brother—a thoughtful, gifted, sensitive boy, with a fragile body and a spirit that could not be bent or intimidated, who, from his babyhood until he came to his deathbed at seventeen, was in constant collision with a passionate father who had not the capacity to understand him. I remember once beating out with a poker the panels of a door behind which he sat in darkness, a prisoner on bread and water, proud and silent, with a bleeding back but a dry eye, that I might get to him to weep over him and comfort him. It makes me feel wicked, even now, to think of it. And to think of his poor, delicate, devoted mother, who did understand him, and to whom he was so precious, more helpless than I to prevent or mitigate these tragic blunders, makes my own mother-blood run cold.
In the generations before my own it seems to have been incumbent on a father who would do his duty to be cruel to his sons (and how hard the tradition dies!); it was incumbent on a mother to be stern and distant with her young daughters, if she could—and there is ample evidence that she forced herself to it. What the conception of parental duty now is we know. Thinking the matter over, it seems to me that the happy mean between the two extremes may have been struck somewhere about the time when I was a child myself. I am not citing my own experiences in proof of this—far from it—but the broad general rules that applied to all respectable households of the period.
The iron hand had taken on the velvet glove. Discipline—still a synonym for decency, for civilisation, for religion, in the average parent's mind—was enforced, not pitilessly, as aforetime, but with firmness, and as a rule in moderate and reasonable ways. The child, even the spoilt child, remained completely subject to its natural rulers, whose sense of responsibility for its well-being seemed never out of their minds; but while "duty" was still the watchword—and the word stood for a real thing—the weakness of the weak side was more justly allowed for—not pandered to, you understand; only not treated as a crime to be cured by punishment. Duty—duty—how one loathed the word! But how good for character to be trained to recognise the thing! The very infant, if able to employ itself usefully, had a daily task of some kind—was taught that life was meant for work, and that play was unlawful save as a reward for work. Even at T—— it was my duty, and I knew it, to spend certain hours with a long seam or hem, stabbing my finger, weeping over repeated unpickings and admonishments, just as it was my duty to make a joyless breakfast of bread and milk. Every little girl must know how to manufacture, single-handed, a whole shirt for her father—and the amount of fine sewing in a whole shirt of those days must now be seen to be believed—or hide her head amongst her peers and cause her mother to be ashamed of her. I was well on the way with this laborious undertaking before I could read.
Utter drudgery it was, because the scheme of "plain-work" was too vast, and its details too minute and complicated, for my understanding, but it did not destroy my inherited love of the needle. When it ceased to be an instrument of discipline, it became my favourite toy. I could be kept "good" at any time with beads to thread, or some wools and a bit of canvas for a kettle-holder, or, above all, scraps with which to dress dolls. What girl-child makes dolls' clothes—proper dolls' clothes—now? In my child days it was an occupation as constant as it was delightful. All the year round I was stocking a little trunk with elaborate costumes for my children, against they went with me a-visiting, or in the family party to the seaside. It was thus that I learned to be independent of dressmakers for myself in later years. A particularly bright memory of my life at T—— is the way I "spent the day"—a regular-recurring holiday—at a neighbouring farmhouse. My hostesses kept a doll for me. I never took it home—it lived in a drawer in their spare bedroom—but it was brought out as soon as I arrived, together with such odds and ends of material as were available at the moment; and down I sat to reclothe the puppet anew, in a costume of fresh design, the completion of which would synchronise with the call of parent or nurse to fetch me home. Now, when a houseful of grown-ups has a child to entertain for many hours at a stretch, what labour and strain to keep it amused and happy! These people had only to give me a doll, a rag or two, and sewing materials, and I was amused for the whole day, and so happy that I have never forgotten how happy I was.
On account of that doll—which, after all, was not more than six inches long—I had been most anxious to see the house belonging to it. I knew it had been near T——, and, as I remembered it, almost unique in rustic charm. Often, amid the lightly run up homes of Australia, I had thought of its solid, old-world, if humble, beauty, and on this particular afternoon I had purposed to feast my artistic sense upon it with a satisfaction unknown to me when I was young and ignorant. It was quite a shock—so accustomed had I become to finding all I looked for—to discover that it was no more; the one thing gone, of which no trace at all remained. Its garden was wholly obliterated, and on the site of the old house stood a new house, the commonest of the common, from which I turned in disappointment and disgust. Dear, dear old vanished home! I could not have believed I should feel its loss so much.
But I can say of it, in the words of the obituary column, that, although gone, it is not forgotten. In my gallery of Memory the picture of it hangs, no line or tint bedimmed by the passage of the years.
Behold it with me, my reader. In the foreground an oval lawn, carefully kept (for I was frequently employed to weed the daisies out): it is ringed with gravelled path, then squared box borders, then flower-beds, behind which on one side rises a thick belt of fir-trees, and on the other lie the farmyards, over a dividing wall. From the little green gate in the roadway fence (lined with a clipped hedge) one views the old dwelling at the top of the lawn; long and low, its walls a mat of ivy, pierced with latticed casements, opening outward, and a front door under a little porch; a large, steep, thatched roof, with dormer windows to the row of four bedrooms, and old ornamental chimneys in clusters, tall and fat. On the side of the trees, wooden lattices in the ivy let sunless light into the dairy (robber rats used to squeeze through the interstices and get caught fast on their return), and the finest violets and primroses grow underneath. Also, farther into the green shade, pet hedgehogs live that a little girl feeds with milk, and that uncurl and scuffle along at her heels through the pine-needles to show their cupboard love. And along that side the bees feed from the foxgloves, in the bells of which little boys entrap them, to chase the little girl with the buzzing prisoners, helpless in their silken bags. The backyard, unseen, has red-brick pathways through it, ringing with the clink of pattens and milk-pails; one leads to a green door, portal of a paradise of unforbidden fruit; another branches off to the gate of nearest access to the deeply mired cowyard, which is also the pigyard and poultry-yard—which, by the way, should suggest an effluvium to be remembered, but does not, possibly because the windows of the period were used, not to let air in, but to keep it out. Sweet old house—altogether sweet, smelling only of lavender and cabbage roses and pot-pourri and fragrant cookings....
The title of the picture is "The House of the Doll."
For the doll's sake, Mrs H., its mistress, and H.M. (the two Christian names never dissociated), her daughter, stand out from the shadowy crowd of my earliest acquaintances in high relief. So small a society as we were in our village and adjacent hamlets—miles and miles from any railway—we had, of course, our cliques. Some of the half-dozen or so of farmers' families were not to be familiarly recognised on any account; with two or three we were distantly fraternal, confining our amenities to cake-and-wine calls; one or two were on such a footing with us that we "dropped in" on each other at uncanonical hours, and conducted intercourse in our "keeping" rooms and in our ordinary attire, but still with the perfect understanding that the precise etiquette of the time forbade the dearest friend to stay to meals unless previously invited and prepared for; excepting, of course, in crises of trouble, when etiquette must ever give way to primitive impulse. The H. family were amongst these intimates, and chief of them all to me on account of that doll.
There was a Mr H., but he was a nonentity in his domestic circle, a slow, fat, white old man, with a large pimple on his nose, and whom his wife addressed and referred to by his surname only; from all that I can remember, it seems plain that she (a notable person amongst us, vigorous, dressy, authoritative, I should say a perfect exponent of the "proper" in her class) held the purse-strings. I know that she left home at stated intervals to "collect her rents"—not his. There was also H., the bushy-whiskered, towny son, apple of his mother's eye—the same H. who married cousin E.—but he was not much at his home when I was going there to dress my doll. When he was, he illustrated the awkwardness of the architectural plan of that and many of the old houses of the time. The row of upper chambers, whose dormer windows poked out of the thatched roof, opened one into the other; Mrs H. and her spouse had command of the staircase, but H.M. had to go through their room to hers, and H. through both to his; beyond his lay the spare bedroom, which had a little newel staircase, no wider than the doors that masked it, in one corner, going down to the corresponding corner of what was superfluously styled the "spare" parlour; but these two stately and sacred rooms were not meant to be made a passage of, and as such no one thought of using them. So H. came and went by way of his mother's and sister's rooms, and when I spent the night with them (sleeping with H. M.) the excitement of his appearances was a great part of the entertainment. H.M.'s favourite ejaculation, "Lawk-a-daisy-me!" signalled his approach; if she was in bed she threw the sheet over her head, if she was up she hid in a closet. She never seemed to get over the novelty of the thing, which must have been going on since she was born. And, although she was probably a young woman, she seemed quite old to me.
Poor H.H.! How history repeats, and also anticipates, itself! Too elegant for a farmer, and so a corn-merchant, with a desk in the Exchange at L——, it was quite a condescension on his part to make a sojourn under the paternal roof; and his mother seemed to glory in the fact. He was the fine gentleman of the village, bringing the latest thing in trouser-cut and hat-brim to the rustic youth. How appropriate his ideals to his end!
Dress, I may remark by the way, although so far less complicated and costly than it now is, was an equally important matter to us all. Red-letter days were those on which we met our intimate acquaintances, at each house in turn, to inspect the new attire procured twice a year from L——. All the ladies seemed to set themselves up at once, possibly because fixed days were observed for bringing out their finery, Easter Sunday being one, but also they may have wished to avoid the appearance of copying or forestalling each other. I know there was a great comparing of notes at the various private views, and ejaculations of admiration signifying polite surprise. A new dress per season was then a thing unheard of, but a new bonnet, or, more often, one that had been cleaned and retrimmed, was forthcoming for every female head. I can see those bonnets now, with their flowered caps in front and their flouncy curtains behind, and their strings that used to be rolled up and pinned in paper when not spread in bow and ends upon the wearers' breasts. I think Mrs H. and her daughter must have been our great exemplars in the matter of dress, so numerous seemed the mantles and fal-lals in addition to the bonnets of their bi-annual show, and such an impression of their rustling magnificence on Sundays remains with me.
It struck me, as I stood up in Mr B.'s carriage to look at the old house which had so well survived the changes and chances of half-a-century, that at the beginning of that half-century the cash cost of happiness was very much lighter than it is at the end; and not the cash cost of happiness only, but of material well-being, domestic plenty, social position, everything necessary to the comfort and dignity of a gentleman. I do not speak of the poor labouring class; I do not say—I do not for a moment think—that the old times on the whole were better than the new; but I believe they were better in a few things, and amongst other things in this—the good taste of people in the matter of money.
Five hundred a year was then a good income. The fortunate possessor did not usually thirst for more. He could keep a large, substantial house amply provided, and take his family for an outing yearly, and still save something. He had not fifty thousand trivial drains upon his purse, as we have, consuming our substance we know not how; he saw his return for what he spent, and he knew what he wanted, and it was not much. His good home, his county town, his local meet of hounds—they were not necessarily duller than the crush of interests in our more fevered world. He grew his own fruit and vegetables, if not his own pork and butter. Housekeeping was thrifty, as a matter of duty, apart from any thought of saving. I knew an earl who took a lump of meat out of a pig-tub and ordered it to be washed and cooked for his dinner, by way of pointing a moral to wasteful kitchenmaids. Out of five hundred pounds a year, the wife would ask, perhaps, twenty pounds as her personal allowance. Her clothes were always good, with rarely a button or a darn wanting, but they were made at home or in the National School—fine linen under-garments (with, of course, silk stockings) and white calico petticoats, seamed and tucked exquisitely, but not "enriched" with miles of lace, as in our own costly fashion. She wore aprons to protect her neat gowns—a black silk ornamental apron in the afternoon. Her best silk dress was best for a dozen years, the Paisley shawl of her marriage outfit never out of fashion. The local dressmaker came to sew for the children—eighteenpence a day and her meals; she remade the same frock twice or thrice: turning it on the first occasion, putting it together after washing on the second, cutting it down for a younger child on the third; and everything was lined throughout, to enhance the durability of those everlasting stuffs. Girls went to balls in white book-muslin and a pink or blue sash; the whole costume, with shoes and gloves, might have cost a pound; yet we were supposed to be well dressed—we really were, according to the modest requirements of the time. So that it is easy to understand why the possessor of five hundred pounds a year not only felt himself passing rich, but actually was so. A farmer—a "gentleman-farmer," as he was called, the class to which we belonged—with half that income clear of farm expenses, was in a position to envy no man. I fancy that was something like my father's situation when we were at T——. But he was constitutionally incapable of managing money—he could not hold it—and it is mother I think of when I think how ample and orderly that old home was. The housewife of those days—so humbly inferior to her lord and master as she was content to consider herself, although he might not be worthy to tie her shoes (to adjust her sandals, rather)—she was the home-maker, the heroine of her day, although nobody knew it, herself least of all. Certainly she had the advantage over her descendants of those good old contented servants which are never heard of nowadays, because the feudal age is past; they were the foundation-stones of the domestic edifice, which for lack of them is now unsettled, decaying, in some sort out of date. But apart altogether from consideration of such conditions as were of the times and not of her individual choice, did she not know her business well? I ask you, dear friends, who were young with me.
Her grand-daughters laugh at her little fads and nostrums, but they had their value and meaning to her and us. I have known of a modern lady, a collector of curios, getting hold of that, to her, amusing article, a copper warming-pan. Having been so lucky as to get hold of it, she hung it up on a wall by a ribbon round its handle, for an ornament. The housewife of the fifties did know better than that. She raked red coals into it, poked it between the sheets at the bottom of a bed, and in a few minutes made that bed the cosiest, the blissfullest, the most sleep-compelling nest to tuck an ailing child into on a winter's night that was ever contrived by human intelligence in any generation. I would like once more to hear that smothered rattle up and down, to smell that delicious scorchy odour of the warmed sheets, to feel that sensation of transcendent comfort as I sank to rest; but, of course, I never shall. Now, when I fear to be kept awake with the shivers of a raw night, I fall back on a hot-water bottle or a brick baked in the kitchen oven. The magic warming-pan, where still extant, hangs cold and useless on the wall. The present generation does not know its value; no, not even in chilly England, where I found so many unexpected survivals of things I had supposed for ages out of date. It seems to me—not always, of course, nor even often, but now and then—that the homes of my childhood were more really comfortable than the corresponding homes of to-day. That there was real comfort in them, and that at a price far less than we pay for our comfort, is, at any rate, indisputable.
Deadly dull they would be to us to-day, I know. I saw something of the life, about the eastern counties, in several families that had brought it down unchanged to the twentieth century, and I asked myself, "How could I stand this now?" I could not stand it, with all my love of peace and quiet, of which I have never been able to get enough. It would drive me melancholy mad. But in the days to which these self-contained and unawakened homes belong, it was not dull. Was it, reader? To the best of my recollection, we did not know what boredom meant.
The procession of the hours passed before my eyes when I looked at my old home—one day so like another that I could not lose myself amongst them.
No morning tea, of course. I blush to add, no bath. I do not remember a bathroom in any house—not even that of my maternal grandfather, a physician of some distinction in his day, who dictated the laws of hygiene not only to us but to many county families. A portable bath was part of the furniture of every decent house—we had one so large that the frequent monthly nurse made her bed in it—but, like the warming-pan, it was not for common use; it was a medical appliance chiefly. Such is the case, I find, in many English houses still. We children were severely scrubbed and scoured in washing-tubs every Saturday night—"tub night"—and we did a great deal of sea bathing in summer; between whiles we ran constant risk of being sent from table to obliterate the line of demarcation between the washed and unwashed portions of face and neck. Dirty little pigs! We used to dress first, and then seek the sparing sponge. This was after the nurse of infancy had been replaced by the nursery governess, who, to the best of my recollection, was no more particular herself.
There was some excuse for us in those bitter English winters. To go warm from the "keeping-room" fire to the ice-cold linen sheets was bad enough—I recall the nightly struggle for courage to put feet down into them; to have to get out again into a temperature that froze the towels on the horse so that they would stand up by themselves like boards—that froze one's breath on the sheets so that I have scratched my face on the crystals as on pins—was a sharper ordeal. Small wonder that we hurried into our clothes, or that the stiff, blue, chilblained fingers shrank from wet on the top of cold. I remember a winter night when my ewer split in halves with a loud report, and the water within rolled out upon the floor like a lump of glass; there had been a fire in the room overnight too, a luxury dispensed with, as a rule, in the case of children who had passed out of the nursery into rooms of their own. It was in the same winter that I inadvertently touched an iron railing with my bare hand, and skin and metal stuck together. This, however, was not at T——.
My doctor-grandfather did not pull-to the curtains round his and grandmother's bed. I know, because I used to sleep in their room when visiting them by myself, and gaze upon them from my cot in the corner as they slept—both in nightcaps, hers deeply frilled over the face, his cone-shaped, with the tasselled point hanging over one ear. But it was the the rule to draw them—that is what they were there for—and my father and mother did so. The room itself was made airtight first. To have slept with a window open would have seemed to them the act of a deliberate suicide. Curtains having been drawn over bolted windows, six more (of flowered damask, very thick) were drawn round the canopied four-poster, turning it into a small tent; a pleated valance round the top obviated the danger of ventilation where the rings ran upon the rods. The occupants entered the enclosure by an aperture on either side, closed it carefully, sank into the yielding depths of the billowy feather-bed, and slept like tops. At any rate, I never heard that they did not. More than that, there are people who can sleep under almost the same conditions still. I had had an idea that feather-beds had been extinct for thirty years, at least, but last year I reposed on no less than four separate ones in four separate houses; yes, and slept well upon them all. I got so used to feather-beds at last that on my return home I had to send my hair mattress to be teased before I could reconcile myself to it again. Almost everywhere I went in England I used to go up to bed to find the windows of my room closed and locked under the drawn blinds—part of the housemaid's preparations for the night; whereas I am accustomed to sleep with three wide open, and to wish that roof and walls could be dispensed with. Although I adjusted myself so easily to the feather-bed, I drew the line at the shut-up room; the fresh night air was indispensable. But I would sometimes find the bedclothes damp in the morning, and the clothes I had taken off too clammy to put on again. I had forgotten that peculiarity of English nights.
My mother, when I knew her first, did her hair of a morning in two parts; the hinder half was brushed back, tied tightly, and disposed in braids around a high comb; the front drooped in beautiful golden ringlets on either side of her face. But when she was thirty or so she dressed like the sedate old lady that we took her then to be. She tucked her fair hair under a cap—a large cap, with streamers of ribbon hanging down from below the ears like untied bonnet-strings. There was a dummy head of pasteboard (which went by the name of Jane Winter), with a proper face to it, and a hollow neck with an opening within which to stow away materials, on which her caps were made. It may possibly have been because she was perennially convalescing from confinements that she wore caps as a habit at so early an age, but I think not; I believe them to have been the sign of departed youth. When you became a mother, though you might be still in your teens, a large cap was part of the "sitting-up" costume. I remember standing at mother's side by open drawers, while Cousin E., "expecting" for the first and last time, displayed the elaborate preparations made for her infant and herself. I did not know what they meant, but I see now the white cap of blond lace and gauze ribbon that she twirled about on her doubled fist. I saw her in it too on the happy day when I was first allowed to sit on a stool at her feet and nurse the baby. She looked beautiful in it, with her girlish face and mass of dark hair. On emerging from invalid retirement she left it off, so I suppose it was a sort of glorified substitute for the universal nightcap.
With regard to other clothing, all persons claiming to be gentlefolk—the division of classes was strongly marked in those days—wore Irish linen shifts and shirts and silk stockings; no matter how poor nor how outwardly shabby they went, they must conform in those particulars or lose caste. My two grandmothers, both wealthier than we were, were sticklers for the finest material, and some of their silk stockings (white, like all stockings) and exquisite under-garments came down to their descendants to be darned and darned as long as they would hold together. When they were worn out—no cotton; a lady would live on bread and water sooner than come to that. Much of this linen nether-wear was made in the National Schools, where sewing was an important feature in the education of the poor. The ladies of the neighbourhood gave their material and instructions, and from time to time inspected the process of manufacture. Often have I accompanied a village patroness on this errand, stood shyly by while she studied the fine stitching—one thread drawn and the tiny beading done on the crossing threads, two backward and two forward—and the tiny gathers "stroked" to a regularity that no machine could better, the little craftswomen dropping their dutiful curtsies to her when she deigned to commend their work. I do not know who was paid for it when it was done.
Winter and summer these linen garments were, I believe, worn next the skin. I forget what the fashion of the early fifties decreed to be worn immediately over them, except stays that had busks of solid wood, and had to be laced down the back every time they were put on. But I remember watching, in that room up yonder, my mother tying her bustle round her waist. It was a stuffed roll like a sand-bag, reaching from hip to hip, designed to set her skirts out behind; and the skirts hanging under and over it were numerous and full. As for gowns—the deep point in front, the patterned flounces, bell sleeves combined with white muslin bishop sleeves, large lace collars fastened under a spreading ribbon bow or cameo brooch the size of a small plate, "habit-shirts" (for filling in the long and narrow V of an open-fronted bodice)—memory supplies but a jumble of these things. It does not matter. History has preserved the modes of the time, and I presume we kept up with them as well as country-folk could do.
In the nursery our clothes were more defined in style. Though snow lay on the ground, we went bare-armed and bare-necked—down to the latest baby, whose little sleeves would be tied up with ribbons at the shoulders. To put long sleeves to a child's frock was a thing unheard of; they were given to us with the first "gown," which, with its lengthened skirt and fastenings in front, signified the estate of womanhood. Sandalled shoes, very thin in the sole, were correct indoor wear. The other end of me was showered over with tubular ringlets hanging nearly to my waist. The painful process of preparing them—the relentless thoroughness with which our nurse (mother was gentler) rolled up a strand of hair a few inches, "chucked" it tight upon its rag, rolled it a little more and chucked it again, and finally tied it close to the stretched scalp, with odd hairs dragging at their too tenacious roots, continuing the torture for half-an-hour or more—this was one of the sorrows of childhood in the fifties, and no small one either. Our nursery toilet was completed by the "feeder" tied on before each meal and removed after. We went downstairs—when mother was "about"—to the row of bread-and-milk basins that I, for one, hated the sight of, except in the season when a sprinkle of strawberries or raspberries and a little sugar were dropped into them; the youngest aunt being unaware of such a weak relaxation of rules. Discipline imposed that bread-and-milk upon us every day of our lives, no matter how we rebelled against it. We might be bribed to get it down by promises of a taste of the adults' dishes afterwards—the fat gravy from the bacon was a valued perquisite; but there was no dispensing with the nauseous preliminary. I have not been able to eat bread-and-milk since.
Mother came downstairs with her key-basket. What she did with all those keys I do not know, but they were evidently precious. She carried them, with the plate-basket, to her room, nightly; a maid retrieved the latter when she took up father's shaving water, but the little brown basket of keys was never beyond reach of the mistress's hand. She set it down beside the tea-tray while she administered breakfast. And I had not been three days in England before I saw the exact duplicate of that little brown basket, with all the keys in it, go through exactly the same performance. How oddly it struck me. For in Australia we know not key-baskets—never have done so far as I know. If you were to lock sideboard or store-closet against your respectable maids in this country they would not stay with you. And I should not blame them.
I suppose mother's tea-caddy was locked—certainly tea was a terrible price those days. I often opened the lid of the quaint box, which had two lidded receptacles inside, one for black tea, one for green, and a special caddy spoon to ladle it out with. She made the tea herself from a blending of the two kinds, to which she added a dust of carbonate of soda, apparently to increase the look of strength. She drew the water from the hissing urn, kept at the boil by a red-hot metal core slipped into a cylinder in the middle of it. She and father, like many others, drank the decoction pure, without sugar or milk.
After breakfast he went to his farm work; she also—and she was the better farmer of the two, although he was bred to the trade and she was not. His soul was in the hunting-field and the lighter distractions of his life, and money slid through his pockets as water through a sieve; it was she, from first to last, who kept things together as best she could. She had had the sheltered and dainty girlhood of the well-born and well-to-do, who had such (to us, and especially to us who are British colonists) strange ideas of the privileges and immunities of their class; needless to say she had never done "work," in the real sense of the word, for that was the portion of the "common people." But now she sent fowls and eggs to market; and butter of her own manufacture—butter in large quantities, as I remember, for I used to sit on a high chair in the dairy with her and watch her make it. She always made a special pat for me, with no salt in it; which is how I like butter to this day. I could see again, as I looked along the side of the old house, that cool dairy, with the shelf of crockery pans all round it and the big churn in the middle, on the red-flagged floor; I leaned again on the edge of the table where she worked under my studious eye, her white arms bare to above the elbow, the dim green light on her lily-fair face—light filtered through a wooden lattice and the shadows of an elderberry-tree, from the fruit of which was made yearly many a stone jarful of strong wine, for mulling with sugar and spices to warm us for bed o' winter nights and before going to an unheated church on winter Sunday mornings.
Besides elderberry wine mother made gooseberry wine, currant wine, ginger wine, cowslip wine—all manner of wines; the cellar was kept stocked with a large variety, costing next to nothing. She used them where the modern hostess uses tea in the entertainment of company. Afternoon callers had cake and wine offered to them, and the careful wife of a wasteful husband did not squander the port and sherry. They were for the solemn dinners—to swim upon a shining mahogany sea in the best decanters, set in baize-bottomed boats of pierced silver—and for Christmas and other festivals. There was always a "best" of everything—glass, china, silver, napery—sacred to state occasions.
Every year also she brewed beer in the brew-house, barrels of it, for the supply of the field labourers (to whom it was given at eleven A.M. to wash down their luncheon of bread and pork), as well as for household use. Her cordials, her jams and jellies, her pickles of all sorts, her mushroom "ketchup," her raspberry vinegar and cherry brandy, her bottles of capers (the seeds of nasturtiums), her jars of garnered honey, her ropes of onions, her carefully cured hams and bacons, hanging thickly from the beams of the timbered kitchen ceiling—punctually were all these things stocked in their season, excellently prepared, by her own hands, when illness did not compel her to use a deputy. She and the other village ladies were rival cooks. Each had her special family recipes, and they took pride in comparing them.
Baking day occurred twice a week. Then was the great oven in the wall filled with blazing faggots, and the kitchen tables with the dough of bread and pastry and the batter of cakes; anon the smouldering ashes were raked out, and the long-handled flat shovel fed loaves and meat pies and sweet confectionery into the warm-breathing cavern; presently the house was odorous with appetising scents, and the pantry was stocked for the time being. Amongst the delicacies would be a little cake of my own making. I would spend the morning over that bit of material, brought to the colour of a slate pencil, while mother manipulated the rest, going and coming, flushed and busy, but loving to keep me by her, to prattle to her while she worked. It seems to me that I must have been her constant companion before the governesses came.
The joint for dinner was not baked—never. It was hung by a "jack" over a dripping-pan before the square red fire, which roasted it crisp and brown as the machine slowly turned it round and round. Sometimes the machine went wrong (it wound up like a clock), and sometimes a coal would fall into the pan and make the gravy gritty, but, on the whole, I fancy that way of cooking meat has not been much improved upon. The outside fat seemed to take on layers of richness with every spoonful of fire-cleared dripping poured over it. The gravy that was the residue of this had a surpassing quality, particularly when upheaved upon the bosom of a puffy-edged Yorkshire pudding, or when mingled with the cream that hares were basted with. Unsoddened and undiluted by the steam of the ovens, the whole goodness was preserved to flesh and juice. Unless it is that distance lends enchantment to this roast of old.
The Yorkshire pudding or the roast gravy with some other plain pudding—boiled batter or Norfolk dumplings—made the first course of the midday dinner (as it does still in some conservative families), and the midday dinner was moved on to three o'clock for company and on state occasions. The meat and vegetables made the second course; after these the sweets and cheese (home-made), as now, with dessert only on Sundays and holidays. A jug of brown ale, drawn from a barrel perennially on tap, would grace the table, which had no decoration of flowers, but relied for distinction upon the quality of its napery and silver. We dined with our parents mostly, and were not oppressively treated in respect of good things, unless the youngest aunt was present.
After dinner father took his arm-chair and his long-stemmed churchwarden, mother her indefatigable needle. Or perhaps she and I would walk out together to call upon our neighbours—those who received us in the keeping-room (aptly named), where we could enjoy the informal intercourse that was in character with the place, or those who invited us to the parlour, the primness, comfortlessness, reserve and artificiality of which were reflected in our demeanour, as in that of the lady of the house. When Mrs H. was summoned without notice to interview a caller here, she kept that caller waiting while she changed her gown, put on her best cap, got out her best decanters and silver cake-basket; her daughter similarly revised her costume before she allowed herself to be seen, although they always "dressed" for midday dinner and the afternoon, after their kitchen and farm work of the morning. But when we appeared unexpectedly, Mrs H.'s up-thrown hands and H.M.'s "Lawk-a-daisy-me!" would express not consternation but ready welcome; and in that dear old keeping-room, with its beamed ceiling almost on our heads, we were friends and not company, and could open hearts and mouths as freely as we liked. That is, the grown-ups could—not I. "Little girls must be seen and not heard," was the admonition addressed to me when I attempted to join in the conversation. My part was to listen, which I did so well that I could almost fill a book with the interesting family secrets and village scandals unconsciously confided to my retentive child's memory.
There was a lady spoken of who went to bed when her baby was dying, and who, on rising in the morning, showed disappointment that it was not dead, and resentment towards the Good Samaritan (H.M. herself) who had sat up with it all night, and whose skill had pulled it through. There was another lady who, having come into a fortune of thousands, had wept because a hundred or two belonging to it had been left to someone else, the reason of those tears being that the odd money would have enabled the weeper to refurnish her house without breaking into the rounded bulk of the big legacy. There was yet another, a devoted whist-player, who had been caught by some extraordinarily smart person in the practice of an ingenious swindle. She would say to her husband, clearly her partner in guilt as in the game, although somehow he escaped censure: "Dear, it is your turn," or: "How warm the room is!" or: "Come, go on," or "See what the time is "—i.e.drop some seeming innocent remark beginning with a certain letter, according as she wanted him to lead diamonds, hearts, clubs or spades. This was evidently regarded as a most horrifying tale, and I could not see why—for a long time. Nor was it easy to fathom the significance of that one about the governess and tutor, who were expelled together from a great house in the neighbourhood, because they had been discovered love-making when they should have been attending to their duties. The warning about "little pitchers"—dropped, it was fondly supposed, unnoticed by me—would now and then spoil the dénouement of a story; but there were dozens and dozens that came to me complete, to be understood in later years, if not at the time. On our way home from these casual symposia I would question mother upon points that puzzled me. Often she would say: "Never mind," or: "You would not understand"; but more often she gave me the information I wanted. She excused herself for this unfashionable weakness in a mother of the period by explaining (the plea for all indulgence) that I was "different from other children."
Five-o'clock tea was not afternoon tea. It was the family evening meal. Ham, brawn (we called it pork-cheese), or some fancy meat, cold, and laid out in slices on a plate, was there for sandwiching between bread and butter similarly prepared; or the savoury might be shrimps or crab, or radishes or cress; jams of great variety, and particularly cakes, filled the rest of the table space that was not occupied by the tea-tray, crowned with its hissing urn. And for this meal no white cloth was used; nor do I remember such a thing as a finger-napkin at any meal. It seemed to be the adjunct of the finger-glass, which we did not aspire to.
Tea was made as at breakfast, but not for us; we had ours in the nursery, of bread-and-treacle or bread-and-dripping, and our mugs held milk and water—except only on such great occasions as Christmas days and birthdays, when we were allowed what we called "gunpowder tea," which was our milk-and-water sugared and slightly coloured with a few spoonfuls from the grown-ups' teapot. In winter a pair of tallow candles illuminated the scene. The grandparents used wax candles—one grandfather used four at a time, and six for company, in six big silver candlesticks—but ours were usually made, like so much else that other people bought at shops, by mother's ingenious hands. Snuffers accompanied them. Some that I have seen were such works of art as well as curiosities that I wonder I have not heard of them amongst the hoards of bric-à-brac collectors. We possessed one beautiful pair in chased and pierced silver, the box patterned like a watch-case; and another of the same metal, finely worked, which had a spring inside the little door that snuffed the black wick into the receiver; and the trays of both matched in style and workmanship. I do not know what became of them—thrown away, probably, as antiquated rubbish, when oil lamps came in.
It was by the light of a tallow candle that mother did the exquisite needlework that nobody can do now, in these effulgent evenings. You almost need a microscope to see the stitches of her fairy-like baby-clothes. Father read his paper quite comfortably by the same dim flame. And people wore spectacles in old age only, and never complained, in my hearing, of ailing or deficient eyes. Why was that?
Although mother, when not needed for social purposes, sewed on until supper-time, my interminable seam was laid aside. I might thread beads or dress dolls or make kettle-holders. Also, the rule that barred story-books, as one would bar cards or dancing, during the serious work hours of the day, was relaxed after tea, and I could batten on "Peter Parley" andThe Child's Companionand "The Swiss Family Robinson"—when I was old enough—without incurring the reproach attaching to the dissipated and idle. My earliest fairyland I found in pictures, about which I wove stories of my own. We took a small penny periodical filled with descriptions and illustrations of the contents of the Great Exhibition; this did not much appeal to me, although I remember its woodcuts well. I preferred the lovely Annuals, with their large-eyed and small-mouthed Lady Blessingtons, and the pocket-books, annuals also, which, in addition to their blank pages, contained prize poems and a variety of things, chief amongst them engravings of the country seats of the nobility and gentry. In these palaces and gardens I wandered in fancy, the possessor of them all. But the book I loved most, at the beginning of books, was a handsomely bound collection of tales or sketches, the author of which was (I think) a Mrs Ellis, and the moral—interpreted at a later age—something to do with the temperance question. The letterpress was a blank to me; the steel engravings bound together at the end of the volume I pored over by the hour. One was called "Lady Montfort parting from her Children." She was a beautiful creature in a spacious bare neck and a chaplet of roses, tearing herself wildly from the embraces of a large family trying to hold her back. She was going to have an operation for something, and the doctor was going to perform it with the drunkard's shaking hand and kill her. All I then knew was that she was parting from her children for the last time, and I used to weep over their fate and dream about it. Another picture represented a girl in a high-waisted, pillow-case-like gown and flowered coal-scuttle bonnet (a fashion gone out before I came in), accompanied by another, her maid, similarly but more plainly attired, leaning, from the outside road, over a gate belonging to an ideal parsonage house. I do not know whether drink had caused the late incumbent to die prematurely or to be expelled from his living, but in any case it was responsible for throwing his daughter upon the world. "Looking towards my home and knowing I nevermore should call it mine," was the touching legend inscribed upon the page. I would have given worlds to know how she got on, poor thing. The picture of an after-dinner gentleman being supported out of the dining-room by the butler and footman, and meeting some outraged relative at the door, was too subtly tragic for my understanding.
Children (according to their view) were sent to bed too soon; they always have been, and always will be. But that was not a grievance of mine. As a nursery child, not yet at the stage of learning letters, I practically lived downstairs with my parents—at such times as the youngest aunt was not there to prevent it. Father took me out on horseback about the farm, seated on a pad in front of him within his arms, mother in the gig with her when she went to her old home or shopping to L——; and I believe I could always manage to sit up to supper, if I begged hard and long enough. I was a thoroughly spoilt child. Father's excuse was that I "could not spoil," but I am discounting that fond belief by displaying the spoilt child's base ingratitude—remembering how love carried to extremes indulged my heart's desires, and blaming that love in print! If, while shopping with my mother, I lost my heart to a ducky little parasol (it was of grey watered silk, with white silk lining, deep fringe and a handle jointed in the middle), I would find it next day, springing out on me from some artful ambush, "With Father's Love." For years, on opening the piano for practice, I used to find one spring day the first cucumber of the season, because I was particularly fond of cucumbers. He did not care what it cost, if only he could be the first to treat me. And I purse my lips at their dear shades and shake a reproving head. Still, the fact remains that I sat up of a night when I ought to have been in bed, and even at times when we had "parlour company."
For well I remember the whist tables that entertained our circle on winter evenings, in that room to the left of the hall at T——, and myself sitting at the elbow of one of my parents to watch the mysterious cards and the mutations in the four little piles of coin. It was the rigour of the game, without a doubt—no talk, no levity, but a still and solemn concentration upon the play; and I think I must have been rather a good child, after all, to have been allowed to be there to look on at it.
I remember one other evening pastime of the grown-ups at this period, and my curious participation in it—table-turning. There was an epidemic—probably the first—of enthusiasm for this method of occult research. And round the heavy "centre table," which was a feature of the drawing-rooms of the time, friends gathered to consult the oracle or to deride it, as the case might be. In our house they compromised on an open-minded curiosity tempered with the feeling that "there really must be something in it"—something supernatural, they meant. Interests and credulity were strengthened by my performances at the game. I was supposed to be a mere onlooker, "to be seen and not heard," as usual, but perhaps the chain of hands was not long enough, or perhaps I wanted to join in, and the let-the-little-dear-do-what-she-likes habit of the house admitted me to a place accordingly; at any rate, I one day found myself perched on a book-piled chair in the circle of earnest inquirers round the centre table, my thumbs in contact, the tips of my fourth fingers overlapping the tips of those on either side of me.
Long had the company sat in silent suspense, the solid piece of furniture—round-topped, and supported by a stout pedestal and claw feet resting on mahogany lions' backs—refusing to make a sign; but no sooner was my influence brought to bear upon it than it began to creak and groan, and was presently lumbering like a Wombwell elephant about the room, with us after it, scrambling over stools and other impedimenta to hold fast to it as long as possible. In recording events of so long ago, and particularly a matter of this kind, I wish to make full allowance for unconscious exaggeration; but that the table was declared too heavy to be pushed into such movements, and that I was frequently sent for to start them when older hands failed to do so, are circumstances that seem particularly clear to me.
I suppose, as my fellow-tableturners said at the time, there must have been "something" in me, as well as in "it," if I have rightly described what happened. I mentioned in my "Thirty Years in Australia" a German doctor who in his old age became a spiritualist, and tried hard to persuade me to lend myself to séance purposes, because, he said, I had that in me which marked me out as a medium. Might it possibly have been the same "something" that he divined? Well, I neither know nor care. The little mysteries are all embraced in the big Mystery, which would not be mysterious if we had the power to understand it. I was always that kind of a sceptic which believes in there being a reason for everything. When I was a girl I saw ghosts—unmistakably visible ghosts—and even in their presence, certain that they could not be flesh and blood creatures, and paralysed with horror to know it, I was able to keep this attitude of mind. Since nothing else ailed me that I knew of, I said to myself, "I am going mad"; and I was quite correct in my diagnosis, since what was really happening to me was the beginning of brain fever. I never had or showed the slightest leaning towards or interest in so-called supernatural phenomena. Occult "science" is to me what Mrs Harris was to Betsy Prig. The table-turning craze soon passed, as far as my people were concerned, and I never, even to that extent, dabbled in the black arts again.
The social evening, in those old days, began after the five-o'clock tea and ended with the nine-o'clock supper. This was a great meal, always. The cloth was spread for it as for dinner, and chairs drawn up and carving-knives flourished. The cold joint, with pickles, cold fowl, meat pie, the occasional crab or lobster, the cucumber in its season, any left-over trifles of sweet pastry and creams, cheese—with beer, of course—that was the meal which our forebears found it possible to sleep on, and (which is much more surprising) some of their descendants enjoy without discomfort to this day. In the four houses of the four feather-beds the custom has never been abrogated.
Supper over, and dishes returned to the pantry, the elders at once prepared for bed—to burrow in those mounds of feathers with their heads in nightcaps, and nothing but their own exhausted breath to live on the long night through. Doors and windows—the latter barricaded at nightfall with wooden shutters (hinged and flattened into the wainscoted window-frame by day) drawn over them and fixed with an iron bar across—were severally examined in the most careful manner by whoever was head of the establishment for the time being. Servants might shut the house, but the responsibility of making sure that it was safe for the dark hours was too great to be left to them. I suppose there was some reason for this in the social conditions of the time. Perhaps father's military (yeomanry) accoutrements—which I never saw him wear, but which he was said to have worn, and certainly possessed—had some connection with his actions in preparing his house of a night as if for an expected siege. I know that any suspicious noise occurring after he had done so brought him and his blunderbuss upon the scene in the shortest possible space of time. And that raids did sometimes take place was proved by the sad story of a friend of ours, whose melancholy visage was accounted for by the fact that he had once shot a burglar dead without meaning it. He saw an unlawful hand intruded through a sawn-out gap in his window-shutter, and, calculating that the hand was well above the owner's body, fired at it from within the room. Alas! On the shoulders of him who worked from the ground was an unsuspected second man, and he received the charge in his breast. It was told us of the heart-broken doer of that deed that "he never smiled again."
So, the guard having gone the rounds, the humdrum duties of the day—that never palled—were ended. Master and mistress, bearing key-basket and plate-basket (the plate having been duly counted), trudged upstairs to that bed which was virtually their bedroom also. And slept!