The Retrospect Part 11

Just across the road from the church is another Howard inst.i.tution 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 t.i.tle 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, "_this_ is 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, ma.s.sive 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 protegee 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 protegee, 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 att.i.tude 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 pa.s.sed 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 Ma.s.sachusetts, 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.

And, as I was crossing the road, thus bemused and absentminded, a lady, evidently sight-seeing by herself as I was, crossed it from the other side, and in pa.s.sing stopped me to ask some question about the way to somewhere. She turned out to be one of our driving party, although I had not noticed her. When I had replied to her introductory query, she said: "I saw you with Mrs B. this morning. You are Mrs C., are you not?" Then she told me she had a sister living in Melbourne, married to a Melbourne doctor, and she wondered if by chance I knew them. I did not know her sister, but the name of her distinguished brother-in-law every Australian knew. This little encounter, opening the lines of the "wireless" to my dear home on the other side of the world, filled up the measure of emotional satisfaction that was so abundantly vouchsafed to me that day.

Or almost. The drive home (by a different route) was as delightful as the drive out. And when I reached Mrs B.'s and the capacious arm-chair, and M.'s most charming tea-table ...

I am afraid I must confess, after all my sentimental rhapsodies, that the crowning joy of my expedition to Rising Castle was the heavenly cup of tea that awaited my return to the starting point.

CHAPTER XIII

A TRIP SOUTH

There are people, and they seem to me the vast majority, who have no curiosity about or interest in anything or anywhere outside their business and domestic boundaries; who "wouldn't cross the street," as they say, to look at the Parthenon or the Sphinx, or see anything in them if they did; to whom a guide-book, with photographs, means a map and a railway time-table and an indicator of the tariffs of different hotels. But the pa.s.sion for travel--to "see the world"--has possessed me from my youth up. It has grown with my growth, and has not waned with the waning years. As long as the faculties of vision and locomotion remain to me, I shall cherish dreams of the Sphinx and the Parthenon, Venice, the Swiss Alps, the castles of the Loire, the thousand and one beauty spots of the all-beautiful world, which I have yet to see--trusting in the Fates, which have begun to indulge me, to give me a sight of some of them before I die.

I do not think they could drop me down anywhere and leave me altogether ignorant of where I was, so far and wide has an exploring imagination led me, and so much has it made of its every opportunity, since I first began to read and to look at picture-books. After thirty years of life in the Australian Bush, I went one day to a tea-party in Melbourne, where one of the entertainments provided was a guessing compet.i.tion. One wall of a room was covered with prints and photographs of public buildings of the world; they were of miscellaneous character, old and new, selected so as not to be too obviously familiar or to give an unfair advantage to experienced travellers amongst the guests. I had never travelled; I do not think I had seen one place of the many represented--except the Wilson Hall of the Melbourne University, which was the only one to puzzle me; yet I won the first prize easily.

Happily, the beauty of a beauty spot is not dependent on human or historical a.s.sociations, and the Australian Bush fed fancy well when it had no other inspiration. Likewise, when the opportunity to return to England came, unprovided with means for much sight-seeing within the country, or any whatever outside of it, I was too happy in what I had to miss what I had not. It seemed almost as much as I could bear to roam my native county, and see the homes of childhood, Old H---- and Rising Castle as I did; after that satisfaction I felt like being now able to depart in peace--that I had not lived in vain. And when in the month of September--still golden weather, for that English summer was made on purpose for me--I set forth to visit Devonshire, then I felt that Aladdin's Lamp and the Philosopher's Stone were not "in it" with my command of luck.

In my young days, be it understood, with this spirit of enterprise so strong within me, I saw nothing of the world outside the eastern counties, and not much of them, except when the dear eldest aunt mothered me so much too carefully in London now and then; nor had I when, in 1870, I was abruptly detached from my belongings to be taken to the other side of the world--not to see another inch of it until I arrived. But all through those early years I was storing up knowledge of the beauties of England, putting together mental pictures of scenes which I had fair hope of beholding with the eyes of the flesh in time--although, as a matter of fact, I have not seen a tenth of them even yet. As they seemed to come under the head of things attainable that were unattainable, and not, like foreign places, of things unattainable that were unattainable, a reasonable hope was justified.

Nor did I stop at hoping. I weeded the garden and gathered snails for pennies, went without sugar for sixpence a week, while my brain seethed with plans for better business, in the effort to give substance to some of my dreams.

All the places in Scott's novels--my first romances, read aloud to us little girls by our mother as we sat at our sewing tasks about her knee; all the castles in the English histories; the lakes and fells of the north, the soft hills and dales of Derbyshire, the moorlands of Jane Eyre and Katherine Earnshaw, the Devon of Lorna Doone and Amyas Leigh....

I cannot count them. But, of them all, Devonshire was my dream of dreams.

My grandmother lived her last years there, and there she died. From her and the aunts we had descriptions of the county and its manifold charms; they only ratified what I had already learned. I think this must have been before the youngest aunt became a royal governess, or it may have been there was an interregnum in her career as such; anyway, she had her home in Devonshire at this time, which may have been a reason why I did not go there. However much I might long to see a place of dreams, I could not have wanted to see it in her company. Besides which, to go to Devonshire from Norfolk, in those days and to untravelled persons of our means, loomed as huge an undertaking as it would now be (not to me, but to rural stay-at-homes) to go to Egypt or Madeira from the same place.

At any rate, I did not go. I communed with my favourite Blackmore (as I now commune with his successor in my regard, delightful Eden Phillpotts), and dreamed of going some day. And when the some day came, it was my last in England for eight and thirty years. For the first time I crossed the land from east to west, on my journey to the ship in Plymouth Sound. Leaving Paddington at night, darkness (not sleep) hid the most of the way, but the light of the May morning came early enough to show me the part I had most longed to see. Pale dawn it was, and the train rushing along, but in all my years of exile I treasured the impressions of the little that I saw; they but fixed the old dream and made it permanent. I still had scarcely begun to realise it, but I seemed to know better what it would be to realise it. "We are to return in five years," I remarked to my drowsy partner, for so we had promised to do, in the innocence of our hearts. "Then we must see Devonshire."

We did not return in seven times five years, and when we did I might never have seen Devonshire, as I have never seen the lakes and fells, or Kenilworth, or hosts of things, but for one of those little happenings which come without warning us of the great ones in their train.

Some few summers ago I went to a new place to spend the Long Vacation with a son whom I was accustomed to companion at such times. Alone of our family, we chose, when choice was ours, the wilds of nature for our holiday resorts; and he sent for me to join him on an island that he had discovered, in a cottage that stood on its own lone beach, where we could live the simple life like Robinson Crusoes, plus the advantages of a general store (only one) and a daily steamer to and from the mainland, within the distance of a healthy walk from our abode. I went, and we had a great time--then and on several subsequent occasions in the same locality. No maids, no dressing; no constraint imposed and no effort required in the heat of the year (the Long Vacation of Australian universities begins in December and ends in March); absolute repose, combined with delightful occupation. We walked out of our beds into our morning bath in the sea, and returned for a plunge or an idle wallow at any time of day that the whim took us. We never failed to bathe (in this only bathroom at our disposal) before sitting down to our evening meal, and more than once I have risen in a hot night to soothe restless nerves in moonlit water. The sea was almost at our threshold, gently lapping a beach as smooth to naked feet as a ballroom floor. On the other side of the island, where it faces the south, the Pacific hurls its weight upon rocky headlands and thunders in rocky caverns as stern and wild as Caledonia's coasts can show. It was there we went for picnics.

Of course, we were not quite alone. The island had been discovered by others and had boasted a tiny watering-place for years. Two hotels and several boarding houses cl.u.s.tered about the single store (there are two now) and the little pier where the little steamer called twice daily, going to and returning from the source of fresh meat and newspapers; and these houses were filled in the summer season, and we numbered friends amongst their guests.

But the point to be mentioned is that our delightfully remote cottage belonged to a gentleman through whom--although we never met or knew each other--I came to realise my dream of some day seeing Devonshire. I often wish I had known him; for by all accounts he was a rare and original person.

In the oldest of our old times, the pre-gold times, when these lands were being "taken up" by a gallant set of young men, cadets of what we call "good" British families, he had been a pioneer squatter. But then, while the days of our history were still the "early days"--before or soon after my own arrival--he went back, married, settled and lived the bulk of his life like any other English gentleman of wealth and social standing, in accordance with the habits and customs of his family. I do not know for how many years he had inhabited his fine house in Devonshire, at which I was a happy guest so recently, but I know they were a great many. Then, a widower, approaching a late old age, he divided his large fortune amongst his nine daughters (reserving what he deemed to be sufficient for his remaining needs), settled the family house upon them for their joint use, and came back to Australia--to the little island on the Victorian coast where by such a small chance we found him.

Still farther along the lonely beach from our little cottage he had built his last home, much of it with his own hands. A four-roomed weather-board house, bare-floored, unceiled--sufficient, and no more.

Here he had been living for some time, with one man for his whole establishment--the uncrowned king of the island, who could not meet a child without giving it a coin, or hear of a necessity that he did not exercise all his gentlemanly ingenuity to relieve, as when he sent a sack of sugar to a struggling mother "to make lollies for the little girl"--when two of his eight daughters in England (one was married in New South Wales) came out to see how he was getting on. I think it was not until they arrived that he built new rooms for their accommodation, and it is significant that at the same time he built himself another room quite detached from the house, which he left to their more civilised control, and the maid who was now added to the establishment; but, whether he invited them or not, he had reason to bless their coming. Unless he was the sort of man who would just as soon die alone and untended as not, which he very likely was.

I joined my son on the island the day after the old man met with the accident which caused his death. One of the many children who put themselves in his way at every possible opportunity had been to see him, to announce a birthday and receive the inevitable half-crown, and in the course of the proceedings had spied a small rifle leaning against the wall. It had just been used, or was going to be used, on minahs that were eating the orchard fruit. Unseen by his host, the boy picked up the weapon, and, "fooling" with it, shot his benefactor in the leg. I heard of the mishap, and of the periodical inquiries from our cottage as to the patient's state. No alarm was manifested, and his daughters came to see me. Later, as the wound seemed obstinate, it was thought wise to take it to Melbourne for treatment; and one morning they carried the unwilling invalid along the beach before our cottage to the steamer that was to take him thither. He raised himself from his stretcher, and waved his hand to us, and that was all I ever saw of him. He died in Melbourne some weeks later. But the island, all aweep and heart-broken, got his body back; and his grave on the sandy hill, in the midst of sea waters, seems an appropriate resting-place for such a man--more so than the monumental vaults and tombs that hold the dust of his kin of England.

To his one Australian daughter he left his Australian home. I rented it from her for a year or two. The daughters who had come out to see him returned to their sisters in Devonshire. I stayed with them for some time before they left, and we parted as friends, and with the mutual hope that we might meet again. There was small prospect of a reunion in England then.

But the time came. To my unutterable surprise I found myself there, engaged to pay them a visit. One of them, that is the elder, with her father's nomadic blood in her veins, voyaged back again after a couple of years and set up her tent on the island much as he did, only rather more luxuriously. Her return coincided with my departure, and for the moment I missed her at both ends of the world. But M. was at home, and to her I set forth joyfully on a morning of September, about a year ago from this date of writing.

I took that once formidable journey alone, my husband being absorbed in the pursuit of partridges, which was happiness enough for him. He had been marking them down all the summer and had brought his favourite gun across the world for their sakes; by the same token I had to pack it amongst my clothes because he had not room for it in his own baggage, stuffed with the rest of his sporting paraphernalia. And at first it looked as if the Fates were still inclined to head me off from Devonshire. I was all ready to start a week before I did when I slipped on the stairs and sprained my foot. I signified the necessary postponement by telegram with a foreboding heart, and as soon as I could hobble, in a slipper, flung all regard for appearance to the winds and got ready again, before more accidents could happen. And then I had, so to speak, to fight my way.

I had never travelled any distance alone, having no vocation for independence, but I a.s.sured my caretakers that any fool or baby could get about on English railways without risk or trouble. It was otherwise at home, where porters regard themselves, and with reason regard themselves, as your gracious patrons, who do not seek you, but have to be sought.

"All I shall have to do," said I, remembering my drive from Liverpool Street to Eaton Place for half-a-crown, "is to take a hansom to Paddington Station. The porters will do all the rest for me."

"Oh, nonsense," said they, "to waste time and money on cabs, when there is an Underground that will take you straight across the city from one point to the other." They would not hear of it.

By the Underground I was to go, and so carefully was I provided for that an important official of Liverpool Street Station was engaged in a friendly way to meet me there and personally conduct me from train to train. The salient points in my appearance were described to him and his to me, and when he readily undertook the job a.s.signed to him it was reasonably a.s.sumed that I was safeguarded as far as human means could do it. That I went wrong after all was not their fault nor mine. It was in the first place the fault of one who told my friend who was the friend of the Liverpool Street official--to whom he immediately forwarded the false information--that I was going by another train. In the second place it was the fault of a porter. Poor, dear porter! In whatever form he waited upon me he was an ideal servant to my Australian notions, although I was sufficiently altruistic to wish him for his own sake the standing of his antipodean brother who is not a servant but a potentate, self-respecting to hauteur in his conscious command of the situation. In the present instance he was but human and over-zealous, and I would not blame him for the world.

When my train from Cambridgeshire drew up at its London platform he was ready for me at the carriage door, as usual. And when I looked beyond him for his superior who was to take charge of me, and saw no one resembling our mutual friend's description of him, I was relieved and pleased. For I had rebelled against the waste of his precious time and the obligation I should be under to him, although overruled by a.s.surances that the favour would be on my side. I had protested that the English porter was all-sufficient for every possible need that could arise.

So now I put myself into his hands with as complete a trust as the highest official or a whole Board of Directors could have inspired; and I told him I wanted to go to Praed Street by the Underground, and asked him to see to everything and put me on the right train. And I gave him sixpence.

Perhaps that was a mistake. I was always being told that I had no business to give a porter more than twopence (the Australian porter will condescend to pocket sixpence, but I never dared insult him with less), and I used to make it threepence when no one was looking, without feeling that I had been too generous, in deference to the customs of the country. It is certainly an odd thing that the only two little railway accidents that befell me in England were due to the only porters I gave sixpences to. It would almost seem as if so much prosperity turned their heads.

On this occasion it was to make a.s.surance of the right train on the Underground doubly sure that I tipped my man the first sixpence; and he laid himself out to earn it in such a way that I was ashamed not to have made it a shilling. He bought me my ticket for Praed Street--that was all right; he put my luggage on the train and myself into the special care of the conductor. He did all that man could do. But it was the wrong train.

I discovered presently that I had been along that same Underground before, on one of my visits to the Franco-British Exhibition. I had not taken much notice of the names of pa.s.sing stations then, having the usual escort; but now I did. And Praed Street seemed an immense time coming along, whereas Paddington was left farther and farther behind us, and signs of our approach to Shepherd's Bush acc.u.mulated. So I spoke to the conductor. Imagine the feelings of an innocent abroad! "There's no Praed Street on this line," said he. "You are in the wrong train."

I kept my head fairly in an experience unprecedented in my career. I confided in the conductor--because I had found that in England you can go to any official in a difficulty, with the certainty of getting good advice and every possible a.s.sistance, and he told me what to do. I did it (with my luggage and my lame foot) in the sweat of my brow, somehow.

I got out at the next station. For once, no porter, until a pa.s.sing civilian, appealed to, sought one out for me, who, when he appeared, acted as the dear man invariably did. I returned to the station the conductor had told me to return to; exactly the same thing happened. The civilian in this case connected me with an elderly, slow porter, who seemed to have all the business of the train and platform to himself. I knew what the time was. I thought of where I was in London and of my friends in Devonshire, driving three miles to meet me; and I cried to that poor, doddering old man that I would give half-a-crown to anybody who would help me to catch the Exeter express. He stared at me as if he wanted time to get such a stupendous proposition into his brain; then he sadly realised that he could not do it. But from somewhere out of the ground sprang a vigorous young porter who without loss of time took the matter in hand.

"You run along as hard as you can run," said he, "and I'll meet you under the big clock."

I did run, although in other circ.u.mstances I should have believed it almost impossible to put my left foot to the ground. And I ran the right way too, although I did not know it, and although I have a natural genius for taking wrong ones; up and down stairs and along devious pa.s.sages, sped by the directing fingers and shouts that answered my gasping query to every railway man I pa.s.sed; and so I came out on a high gallery in the great arena of Paddington Station--to see my train below me, but still far away, and the big clock that was my rendezvous with the luggage porter (nowhere to be seen) pointing to the very minute that the time-table fixed for its departure!

I flew along that bridge to the end, hurled myself almost headlong down the stairs to the platform, reached my train; and there was still no sign of the luggage porter, far or near, and they were shutting the carriage doors, and the guard was lifting his hand to give the signal to start. He was a fine, big, important-looking man--I shall not forget him--and but for my experience of English railway officers it would not have occurred to me to approach him at such a moment; but I had the happy inspiration to do so, and was thereby saved.

"He will be here directly," said that guard with the manners of a prince. "I will hold the train a moment."