The Retrospect Part 2

can hardly be dragged by an ox chain where he does not want to go, and he did not want to go to D----, which had no a.s.sociations for him, even to see his sister. "Why couldn't she have settled in some decent place?"

he wanted to know, when her affectionate calls to him to come and be entertained evoked the spectre of boredom which never in any circ.u.mstances appeared to me. The pretty town of her adoption was, from his point of view, a "hole," with "nothing in it." But my luck was in when she drifted thither. It was the first court of the sanctuary, so to speak; the way by which I entered the hallowed places of the past. Every inch of the old streets, every brick and chimney-pot over fifty years old, was sacred to me. The bulk of life lay between that past and now, and the intervening years dropped away as if they had never been.

Over the road from my bedroom window in her house stood a fine old dwelling, with a sundial on a prominent gable, and a high-walled garden of which I caught beautiful glimpses through the tall iron gates and between the ancient trees--quite unchanged. There, when I was a child, Miss M. kept her Preparatory School for Young Gentlemen, still mentioned with pride in the local handbooks, although long extinct. "Many of her old pupils have attained high positions in the world," say they; and I wonder if these were any of the little men with whom we little women of eight or nine or thereabouts exchanged furtive glances over the pew-tops in the old parish church on Sundays. I can see some of their faces now, and hers, so serene and lofty, as she stood amongst them, her ringlets showering down out of her bonnet like two bunches of laburnum, a narrow silken scarf about her well-boned bust. Young Nelsons of the great admiral's family were amongst Miss M.'s "young gentlemen"; the hero himself was at school in D----, although his schoolhouse is no more; and the c.o.c.ked hat, with two bullet holes through it, in which he fought the Battle of the Nile, has belonged to the neighbourhood since before Trafalgar. "Well, Beechey, I'm off after the French again. What shall I leave my G.o.dson?" The hat was asked for, and, says Nelson, "He shall have it," and the granddaughter of the honoured infant has it still. It takes a Norfolk person to appreciate the importance of these historic a.s.sociations to a little Norfolk town.

On the Denes at Yarmouth there is a tall column, something like one hundred and fifty feet high, with Britannia ruling the waves from the apex, that in my time stood majestically alone between river and sea, and part of its dedicatory inscription, which is in Latin, runs thus:

HORATIO LORD NELSON

Whom, as her first and proudest champion in naval fight, Britain honoured, while living, with her favour, and, when lost, with her tears; Of whom, signalised by his triumphs in all lands, the whole earth stood in awe on account of the tempered firmness of his counsels, and the undaunted ardour of his courage; This great man NORFOLK boasts her own, not only as born there of a respectable family, and as there having received his early education, but her own also in talents manners and mind.

This will show how little D----, which a.s.sisted at his early education, deserves to be called a "hole, with nothing in it."

Miss M. died or retired in time to leave another set of memories for me around that old house. I laughed to myself as I looked at the gate through which a most das.h.i.+ng, black-whiskered gentleman of the D'Orsay type used to issue of a Sunday morning, gloved in primrose kid, crowned with glossiest beaver, the gla.s.s of fas.h.i.+on to his s.e.x and the admiration of ours, and thought of his little secret which I daresay he never knew had been surprised.

His pew in the old church (all open benches now) was close to ours, and we little girls used to watch him as he entered and stood, turned to the wall, with his hat before his face, to say his preliminary prayer.

Something aroused our suspicions, and a burning desire to see the lining of that hat. Patience and perseverance rewarded us with a peep, and there was a little round mirror fixed to the inside of the crown.

And then I sighed, remembering his sister--I think it was his sister--a rather swarthy, dark-browed, Juno-like creature, as I recall her; knowing that I had just been within a touch of meeting her again; an old old woman....

Once, in the far past, at the first known home, some miles from D----, we gave a dance. You remember those dances of the fifties, dear reader who went to them? They were simple affairs; no caterer from outside the house, no outlay for flowers or band or champagne, or the hire of public rooms (except for county or hunt b.a.l.l.s, and then the claim was light on the individual pocket). But if they were not as delightful to go to as the more expensive corresponding functions of these days, I have no memory worth trusting. I am sure you will say the same.

The guests were dancing by eight o'clock to the strains of the domestic piano, the polka and the schottische and the varsoviana alternating with quadrilles and lancers, the waltz a stately gyration round and round.

They were not staled and blase, those simple people, but as fresh as children for the game in hand. They had time to play it then. Whole love stories were enacted in a night, and there was one in which I played a part which I was too young to appreciate at the time, and of which that handsome girl of the house opposite was the heroine. In my ringlets and sandalled shoes, my full-skirted book-muslin frock and blue sash and shoulder-knots--a little spoiled child allowed to see the fun for an hour or two when she ought to have been in bed--I was pa.s.sed from knee to knee, petted to my heart's content by the adult guests, the gentlemen especially; and the festive scene is as clear before me now as it was then. The drawing-room was festooned with wreaths of evergreen and paper flowers, out of which branched candles in hidden sconces made of tin; the nursery guard was before the fire; the mirror with the gilt eagle on the top reflected moving figures that had s.p.a.ce to swim in the mazy dance without jostling each other.

"Do you see that lady in the white dress?" a whiskered nurse of mine whispered in my ear.

I did--I see her now--her dark eyes flas.h.i.+ng, dark cheek glowing, deep breast visibly swelling with the triumph of the hour--the undoubted belle of the ball. Her dress was of white tulle, flounced to the waist and trimmed with a long spray, running obliquely from neck to hem, of white artificial roses sprinkled with gla.s.s dewdrops. A cl.u.s.ter of the same was set in her abundant dusky hair.

"I want you to take something to her," said he, fumbling. "Don't show it to anybody, and don't give it to anybody but her."

He closed my little fist over a wad of folded paper, and I dodged through the crowd and delivered it, and returned to report.

"Did she read it?"

"Yes."

"Did she say anything?"

"No."

"Didn't she take any notice at all?"

"She only laughed."

He fell into sombre reverie, and I left him for more cheerful companions.h.i.+p.

Later in the evening I was in the vicinity of the belle of the ball, and she beckoned me, stooped, and whispered. "Take this to Mr G. Don't let anyone see it. Give it to him when n.o.body is looking."

I brought him the note, and straightway he forgot me and my services.

The next I saw of him he was sitting in her pocket under the stairs.

And she did not marry him, after all! And now she is an old, old woman!

There was another member of the family (a cousin of these two), whose portrait in my mental picture gallery has been cla.s.sed always as a gem of romantic art.

I only saw her once, and that was after another ball given at the same old country house where the lady of the tulle dress and dew-sprinkled roses disported herself with Mr G. I do not think I could have attended this ball myself, for I have no recollection of seeing the girl I refer to, who was there, until the following day. Her chaperon, whoever it was, had left her over in my mother's care, probably to get thoroughly rested before taking the journey home. In the morning we only heard of her. She was in bed, being a.s.siduously coddled. Before she came forth mother gathered her little ones together and thus admonished them:

"Yes, you will see her at dinner, and if you are very good you may take her for a walk with you this afternoon. But, mind, you must be very gentle with her. You must take the greatest care of her, because she is in a decline and very soon she is going to die." We were further commanded on no account to disclose our knowledge of her sad fate to the invalid.

She come down to the midday farmhouse dinner, and it was then I took my indelible picture of her. She was probably eighteen, a willowy slip of a girl, and with the pathos of her doom about her, the loveliest creature my eyes (with such an idealising quality in them) had ever seen. That was the impression, made permanent. Very fair of skin, with golden hair arranged Madonna-wise in smooth bands; and dressed all in white, looking the part my mother had given her to perfection--an angel at large, granted to gross mortals for a little while to be jealously recalled to her proper place. Her white muslin bodice was long-waisted and stiffly-boned, and cut to a deep point in front over the bunchy skirt; but it was lovely. And the gold watch at her side, and the long gold chain round her neck to which it was attached, gave just the touch of radiance to the unearthly purity of her appearance, as effective as a Fra Angelico halo.

We took her for a walk through our fields and lanes, and with awe and reverence laid ourselves out to take care of her. I remember that we gathered mushrooms and that she ate some raw, which was unwise of her in her delicate condition. I also remember (only it spoils the picture to include such a squalid detail) that some of the little party ate more than she did, and that one was deadly sick and had to be carried home.

At that point she fades from the scene--went away to die, as I supposed.

This one tragic vision of her made such an impression upon my imagination that I have thought of her when anything reminded me, for over half-a-century; but I have never thought of her as being other than half angel in heaven and half dust of the earth all the time. I thought of her when I looked out of my window in my sister-in-law's house at the old house opposite, when first I returned to D----, still with an ache of pity for a young life defrauded of the common heritage, which we others, not more deserving, had come into.

But almost immediately afterwards my hostess asked me to go with her to call upon one of her new acquaintances, a lady who had known me as a child, had heard of my coming, and wished to see me. She bore the name of the family which had followed Miss M. at the house with the sundial on the wall, but as she was a widow that was the name of her husband's family, and so I had no clue to her.

We found her in the pretty garden of her handsome house close by, and she welcomed me warmly.

"You remember me?" she queried, when I had taken a basket chair beside her. "I once stayed at your house at T----. I went to a party your mother gave, and remained overnight. Don't you remember?"

I said I did, because I knew as soon as I looked at her that I had seen her before. The forehead and the set of the eyes came back to me from the past, unmistakably familiar. But the whole time I was there, although she kept talking of the old times and the old people, I was cudgelling my brains to place her and I could not. She told me she had married her cousin and had not changed her name, so that I knew where she belonged; and yet I could not think of any member of the family answering to her personal reminiscences. She took me round her garden, she showed me the rooms she lived in, spoke of her life with her husband, recently dead, but with her long enough for them to celebrate their golden wedding together; and yet I could not get myself on to the right track. I went home with my sister-in-law quite worried and bothered about it, and lay awake at night to continue my search in the holes and corners of Memory when the public, so to speak, had left the building.

Suddenly I discovered her. The face of the deaf old lady of over seventy, and the angular body that had to lean on an arm or a stick when it walked abroad, were suddenly transfigured like Faust in the play, and there hung before my eyes in the dark the beautiful vision of that golden-haired girl in white whom we had been told to take care of and be good to because she was to die soon. There was no doubt about it. That forehead and those eyes, that I had instantly recognised, although I could not identify them, were hers. She had not been dust of the earth for half-a-century, but alive all the time--yes, and well and happy; and now she was in the most comfortable circ.u.mstances and apparently far from her journey's ending still. It was a delightful discovery. Quite an appreciable sorrow seemed to have been lifted from my heart.

Unfortunately I had no opportunity to see her again, to talk with her of the old times now that I should know what I was talking about. When you have but six months in England in which to make up the arrears of about three-quarters of a lifetime, every visit is a flying visit, every taste of the old friends.h.i.+ps but a tantalising sip.

Down the road from the walled garden of the house I have been speaking of, another high wall with a door at one end and a carriage gate at the other, the spreading crown of a great chestnut-tree overtopping the middle, bounded the street side of another garden, and sheltered from public view another house which cried to me with a thousand tongues of memory every time I pa.s.sed it on my way to and from the railway station.

It was one of my own old homes--the third, not counting my birthplace (which I left as a baby, and therefore have no knowledge of). The tenant of this house in D---- was now my sister-in-law's landlord, and I could have gone through it if there had been time for a polite process of siege; but because an Englishman's house is his castle, and you cannot march into it without notice as if it was yours, I was able to see only the outside of any of my old homes. Perhaps it was as well.

When no one was looking I lingered by the carriage gate, through which all the front of the house was visible--the pillared porch and flight of steps within it, the windows of the rooms where we lived when we were a family of seven or eight, and not of two as we are now; and behind them I could see with the eyes of imagination all I wanted to know.

The garden had been rearranged. There were greenhouses in it that used not to be, and the stone lions were gone. In my time two large heraldic lions, that came from the piers of a park entrance to an estate that had been brought to the hammer, sat on square pedestals in front of the house, ornaments of a semicircular lawn that now spread over ground once cut off for strawberry beds and espalier apple-trees. Under the belly of one of those lions, whose forepaws served for doorway and his haunches for shelter from wind and rain, I had my summer reading place. There I wept over the death of the Heir of Redclyffe, and s.h.i.+vered at the ghastly imaginings of Edgar Allan Poe. There also I made the little secret scribblings that were to lead eventually to the writing of this book. I could not see round to the arbour under the big chestnut-tree--or where the arbour was--with its processioning groups of ghosts; nor the thickets of syringa bushes, the scent of which has never come to my nose without the suggestion of this place to my mind, and never will. The nose is as sensitive to poetic impressions as the eye with its rose-coloured spectacles, if not more so. There is a poem of W.W. Story's which begins:

"O faint, delicious, spring-time violet!

Thine odour, like a key, Turns noiselessly in memory's wards to let A thought of sorrow free.

The breath of distant fields upon my brow Blows through that open door ..."

And just so it is, and was, with me. Every exhalation of English earth was a magic potion to conjure visions and dreams. It did not need to be a perfume for the handkerchief, syringa or violet, jasmine or lily-of-the-valley; the smell of the little herb-robert, whose other name is something with "stink" in it, was to me--who had not smelt it for forty years--the most exquisite of all.

But the shrubbery walk around the fruit garden where the syringas grew was all open border now, not shady and secluded as when I used to pace it in dusk and dark with the earliest of those fairy emissaries that come to a girl when she is pa.s.sing into her teens.... For the peculiar charm of this garden is that it was the scene of the great transition.

Here I received my first proposal. Heavens! what a shock it gave me. In fact I was horrified and terrified out of my wits. It came in a letter surrept.i.tiously conveyed to me through servants. "I love you with my whole heart. Dare I hope that I am loved in return?"--the startling words were but the commencement of a long outpouring, but I was so frightened by them that I dared not read another. In frantic haste I destroyed the letter, and thereafter went in fear and dread of the writer--quite a grown man to me, perhaps eighteen--as of an ogre waiting to devour me. I may point out, by the way, that it is a mistake not to read letters through--one that I did not make again. This unread letter contained a request that I would, if I favoured my lover's suit, indicate the same to him by a certain sign that he alone would understand, and in my ignorance I made that sign, placing myself where he could find me, when all my aim was to get as far away from him as possible. How I hated him for his attentions no words can tell. On the other hand I rather "cottoned" to a brother of his, who did not write me love-letters. For little girls do cotton to little boys, and vice versa, and why not? "I confess I get consolation ... in seeing the artless little girls walking after the boys to whom they incline ... this is as it should be," said Thackeray, writing of children's parties. But the boy to whom I was secretly inclined was never aware of the compliment paid him, and, almost before I was aware of it myself, he was sadly removed from my path by an accidental gun-shot. And the boy who inclined, much more than inclined, to me I took every precaution that was in my power never to speak to again. I cannot remember that I ever did so.

But the reader who knows anything at all of human nature does not need to be told that when I found myself in D---- again, after an interval of nearly half-a-century, my inclination was rather to see him than to avoid him. It would be a piquant moment, I felt, that of meeting now, if his memory of early happenings was as good in old age as mine; even although no reference to them should be permitted. I quite looked forward to it.