Set in Silver Part 17

XIII

AUDRIE BRENDON TO HER MOTHER

_Lulworth Cove_, _July 30th_

Why aren't you with me, dearest, seeing what I am seeing?

It's all very well for you to write that my letters make a panorama pa.s.s before your eyes, and I'm flattered, but I want you. Although I am enjoying life, I'm more excited than happy, and I don't sleep well. I dream horrid dreams about Mrs. Senter and d.i.c.k Burden, and about Ellaline, too, but I always laugh when I wake up.

Thank you so much for telling me that you think I'm behaving pretty well, considering. But I wonder what you'll say in your next, after my last?

Every day since then I've been meaning to write, if only a short note, but we've had early starts and late stops; and then, from not sleeping at night, I'm often so tired when the end of the day comes that I feel too stupid to try and earn your compliments.

It is morning, and I'm writing out of doors, sitting on a rock, close by the sea. But before I begin to describe Lulworth, I must tell you a little about the glorious things of which I've had flying glimpses since the letter dated Compton Arms. This is our first all-night stopping place since we left Stony Cross "for good," but I've picked up many a marvellous memory by the way.

People who haven't seen the New Forest haven't seen England.

I had no idea what it was like till we stayed there. I knew from guide-books that there were thousands of acres of woodland still, though much had been "deforested"; but I didn't know it hid many beautiful villages, and even towns. It's a heavenly place for motoring, but I'm not sure it wouldn't be even better to walk, because you could eke out the joy of it longer. I should like a walking honeymoon (a whole round moon) in the New Forest--if it were with just the right man.

Oh, I mustn't forget to say I'm glad I didn't see Rufus's Stone by daylight. Mrs. Senter and d.i.c.k went the morning after I wrote to you, but I wouldn't go again, because I didn't want to lose the enchanted picture in my mind. She laughed when I refused. I could have slapped her. But never mind.

When they came back they were disgusted, and said there was a ginger-beer woman and a man with the game of "Aunt Sally," and a crowd of c.o.c.kney excursionists round them and the Stone. Talk of malfays!

Sir Lionel had made out an itinerary for the day, and we were to start for Lyndhurst, Beaulieu Abbey, Lymington, Brockenhurst, and Mark Ash, all of which we were to visit before evening, coming back by way of Lyndhurst again, and stopping there for tea. But before we got off, such a comic thing happened.

I didn't think to mention it in a letter, but one day we pa.s.sed a motor-car that was having tire trouble by the side of the road. The chauffeur was rolling on a new tire, with a curious-looking machine, in which Young Nick was pa.s.sionately interested, as he'd never seen one before. Sir Lionel explained that it was an American tool, not very long invented, and said to be good. He added, in an evil moment, that he wished he'd thought to buy one like it before leaving London, as probably the thing couldn't be got in the Provinces.

Well, just as we were about to spin away in great style from the Compton Arms, one of our tires sighed, and settled down for an unearned rest.

But instead of looking black-browed and murderous, as he did when the same thing occurred before, Nick smiled gleefully. He jumped down, and without a word produced a machine exactly like the one his master admired a few days ago.

"Where did you get that?" asked Sir Lionel.

"Last night, sahib," returned Nick, imperturbably. (He can speak quite good English.)

"What! Since we had our trouble?"

"Yes, sahib." An odd expression now began to play among Nick's brown features, like a breeze over a field of growing wheat.

"How's that? There's no shop."

"The sahib says true. I found this thing."

"Where?" sharply.

"But a little way from here. In the road."

"You rascal," exclaimed Sir Lionel. "You stole it."

Young Nick made Buddha eyebrows and a Buddha gesture. "The sahib knows all. But if I did take it? Those men, they were going again to the big city. We away. They never miss this. They buy another. It is better we have it."

Trying to look very angry, though I knew he was dying to laugh, Sir Lionel reproached Nick for breaking a solemn promise. "You swore you'd never do such a thing in England if I brought you with me. Now you've begun again, the same old game. I shall have to send you back, that is all."

"Then I die, and _that_ is all," replied Young Nick, calmly.

The end of the story is, that Sir Lionel found out the names of the men, who had spent the night at the Compton Arms, and had written their address in the visitors' book. He sent the tool to them, with an explanation which I should have loved to read. And it appears that, though Nick is honest personally, he is a thief for the car, and in Bengal took anything new and nice which other motors had and his hadn't.

Now, Mrs. Norton is afraid that, if Sir Lionel scolds him much, he will commit hari-kari on the threshold of the hotel, which would be embarra.s.sing. And it does no good to tell her that hari-kari is a j.a.panese or Chinese trick. She says, if Nick would not do that he might do something worse.

Gliding over the perfect roads of the Forest, Apollo seemed actually to float. I never felt anything so delicious, and so like being a G.o.ddess reclining on a wind-blown cloud. No wonder motorists' faces, when you can see them, almost always look madly happy. So different from "hay motorists," as The Blot says. _They_ generally look grumpy.

The little wild ponies were one of the Forest's surprises for me. We met lots of them, mostly miniature mothers giving their innocent-faced, rough babies an airing; delightful beastkins. And I almost liked Mrs.

Senter for having a cousin who owns one of these ponies as a pet, a dwarf one, no bigger than a St. Bernard dog. It wears a collar with silver bells, follows her everywhere, thinks nothing of curling up on a drawing-room sofa, and once was found on its mistress's bed, asleep on a new Paris hat.

The enticing rose-bowered cottages we pa.s.sed ought to have told me that we were back in Hampshire again, if the New Forest hadn't seemed to a poor little foreigner like a separate county all by itself. It would be no credit to a bride to clamour for love in such a cottage, and turn up her nose at palaces. She might be married at the beautiful church of Lyndhurst (a most immediate jewel of a church, with an exquisite altar-piece by Lord Leighton, a Flaxman, and a startlingly fine piece of sculpture by an artist named c.o.c.kerell), then, safely wedded, plunge with her bridegroom into the Forest, and be perfectly happy without ever coming out again. I wish I had had the "Forest Lovers" to re-read while we were there. I think Maurice Hewlett must have got part of his inspiration in those mysterious green "walks" which lead away into that land where fairy lore and historic legend go hand in hand.

Lyndhurst, which King George III. loved, is pretty, but we didn't stop to look at it, because we were coming back that way. After seeing the church which, though modern, I wouldn't have missed for a great deal, we spun on to Beaulieu Abbey, the home of a hero of motoring. There we saw a perfect house, rising among trees, and sharing with the sky a clear sheet of water as a mirror. Once this was a guest-house for the Abbey; now it's called the Palace House, and deserves its name. Its looking-gla.s.s is really only a long creek, which spills out of the Solent, but it seems like a lake; and you've only to walk along a meadow path to the refectory of the old abbey. From there you go through a mysterious door into the ruined cloisters, which used to belong to the Cistercians--the "White Monks." King John provided money for the building; which proves that it's an ill wind which blows no one any good, because the stingy, tyrannical old king wouldn't have given a penny to the abbots if they hadn't scourged him in a nightmare he had. I shan't soon forget the magnolia and the myrtle in the quadrangle, and if I were one of the long-vanished monks, I should haunt the place. There couldn't be a lovelier one.

From Beaulieu we went to Lymington, a quaint and ancient town, with a picturesque port. Everything there looked happy and sleepy, except the postillions on the Bournemouth coach, which was stopping at the hotel where we had an early lunch. They were wide awake and jolly, under their old-fashioned, broad-brimmed beaver hats.

After Lymington, we skimmed through the Forest, hardly knowing or caring whither, though we did manage to find Brockenhurst, and Mark Ash, which was almost the finest of all with its glorious trees. Our one wish was to avoid highways, and Sir Lionel was clever about that. The sweetest bit was a mere by-path, hardly to be called a road, though the surface was superb. Young Nick had to get down and open a gate, which led into what seemed a private place, and no one who hadn't been told to go that way would have thought of it. On the other side of the gate it was just another part of forest fairyland, whose inhabitants turned themselves into trees as we, in our motor-car, intruded on them. I never saw such extraordinary imitations of the evergreen family as they contrived on the spur of the moment. It was a glamorous wood, and throughout the whole forest I had more and more the feeling that England isn't so small as it's painted. There are such vast s.p.a.ces not lived in at all, yet haunted with legend and history. One place we pa.s.sed--hardly a place, it was so small--was called Tyrrel's Ford; and there Sir Walter Tyrrel is said to have stopped to have his horse's shoes reversed by a blacksmith, on his flight to the sea, after killing the Red King. Or no, now I remember, this was next day, between Ringwood and Christchurch!

When we were having tea at Lyndhurst on our way back, at a hotel like a country house in a great garden, we found out that it once had been the home of your forty-second cousin, the Duc de Stacpoole, who came to England with Louis Philippe. There's his beautiful tapestry, to this day, in the dining-room, and his gorgeous magnolia tree looking wistfully into the window, as if asking why he isn't there to admire its creamy flowers, big as fat s...o...b..a.l.l.s.

On our way home the rabbits of the New Forest were having a party, and were annoyed with us for coming to it without invitations. They kept "crossing our path," as people in melodramas say, so that we had to go slowly, not to run over them, and sometimes they galloped ahead, just in front of us, exactly in the middle of the road, so that we couldn't pa.s.s them. d.i.c.k kept longing to "pot" at the poor little pets, but Sir Lionel said he had lived out of England long enough to find a good deal of pleasure in life without taking that of any other creature. That isn't a very dragonish sentiment, is it?

Next day we had a delicious run (there's no other adjective which quite expresses it) through Ringwood, which is a door of the Forest, to Christchurch, another Abbey--(no, it's a Priory; but to me that's a detail) which stands looking at its own beauty in a crystal mirror. It's Augustan, not Cistercian, like Beaulieu; and it's august, as well; very n.o.ble; finer to see than many a cathedral. You and I, in other lands, have industriously travelled many miles to visit churches without half as many "features" as Christchurch. One of its quaintest is a leper's window; and a few of the beauties are the north transept, with unique "hatchet" ornamentation; a choir with wonderful old oak carvings--and the tomb of the Countess of Salisbury, of whom you read aloud to me when I was small, in a book called "Some Heroines of History." She came last in the volume because she was only a countess, and not a queen, but I cried when she said she didn't mind being killed, only being touched by a horrid, common axe, and wanted them to cut off her head with a sword.

There are lots of other beautiful things in the church, too, and a nice legend about an oak beam which grew long in the night, and building materials which came down from a hill of their own accord, because one of the builders was Christ himself. That's why they named it Christchurch, you see, instead of Twyneham, as it would otherwise have been.

We stopped only long enough, after we had seen the Priory, to pay our respects to a splendid old Norman house near by, and then dashed away toward Bos...o...b.. and Bournemouth, which reminded me a little of Baden-Baden, with its gardens and fountains and running waters; its charming trees and exciting-looking shops. Just because it's modern, we didn't pause, but swept on, through scenery which suddenly degenerated.

However, as I heard Sir Lionel say to Mrs. Senter: "You can't go far in this country without finding beauty"; and presently she was her own lovely self again, fair as Nature intended her to be. I mean England, not Mrs. Senter, who is lovelier than Nature made her.

We ran through miles of dense pine forests, where rhododendrons grew wild; where gulls spread silver wings and trailed coral feet a few yards above our heads; and the tang of the sea mingled with pine-balsam in our nostrils.

Soon after dull, but historic Wareham we came quite into the heart of Thomas Hardy's country. Scarcely had we turned our backs on Wareham (which I wasn't sorry to do), when I cried out at something on a distant height--something which was like a background in a mediaeval picture. It was Corfe Castle, of which I'd been thinking ever since Amesbury, because of the wicked Elfrida; but the glimpse was delusive, for the dark shape hid in a moment, and we didn't see it again for a long time--not until our curving road ran along underneath the castle's towering hill. Then it soared up with imposing effect, giving an impression of grisly strength which was heightened the nearer we approached. Distance lends no enchantment to Corfe, for the castle dominates the dour, gray town that huddles round it, and is never n.o.bler than when you tap for admittance at its gates.

I tried to think, as we waited to go in, how young Edward felt--Edward the Martyr--when he stood at the gates, waiting to go in and visit his half-brother whom he loved, and his step-mother Elfrida, whom he hated.

He never left the castle alive, poor boy! Afterward, in the ruins, I went to the window where Elfrida was supposed to have watched the young king's coming, before she ran down to the gates and directed the murder which was planned to give her own son the kingdom. It made the story seem almost too realistic, because, as you often tell me, my imagination carries me too fast and too far. There's nothing easier than to send it back ten or twelve centuries in the same number of minutes--and it's such a cheap way of travelling, too!

Corfe is in Dorset, you must know, a county as different from others as I am different from the real Ellaline Lethbridge, and the castle is at the very centre of the Isle of Purbeck, which makes it seem even more romantic than it would otherwise. I'm afraid it wasn't really even begun in the days of Elfrida, or "aelfrith," who had only a hunting lodge there; but if people _will_ point out her window, am I to blame if I try to make firm belief attract shy facts? Besides, facts are such dull dogs in the historical kennels until they've been taught a few tricks.

Anyhow, Corfe is Norman, at worst, and not only did King John keep much treasure there, but one supposes there's some hidden still. If I could only have found it, I'd be buying a castle for you and me to live in.

Sir Lionel thinks that I, as his ward, will live in his castle; and he was telling me at Corfe about the Norman tower at Graylees. But, alas, I knew better. Oh, I didn't mean that "alas"! Consider it erased; and the other silly things I wrote you the other night, please. They're all so _useless_.

There were loads of interesting prisoners in Corfe Castle, at one time or another, knights from France, and fair ladies, the fairest of all, the beautiful "Damsel of Brittany," who had claims to the English crown.

And kings have visited there; and in Cromwell's day a lady and her daughters successfully defended it in a great siege. It was such a splendid and brave defence that it seems sad, even to this day, to think how the castle fell after all, a year later, and to see the great stones and ma.s.ses of masonry lying, far below the height, exactly where they rolled when Parliament ordered the conquered towers to be blown up by gunpowder. The Bankes family, who still own Corfe, must be proud of that Lady Bankes, their ancestress, who held the castle. And isn't it nice, the Bankes still have the old keys, where they live, at Kingston Lacy?