The Retrospect Part 5

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 but thee."

"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 and fought, For it was a duelling age; But the gay cavalier quite scorn'd the idea Of 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 ropes She 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-tree And 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 pride I 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 dispa.s.sionately from this long, long distance, I see that she was an exceptionally correct and accomplished woman, but a certain circ.u.mstance 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 fas.h.i.+on--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 a.s.sembled 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 gla.s.s. 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 antic.i.p.ated.

"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 G.o.dmother--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 pa.s.sion for dolls. It was the first pa.s.sion 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 surpa.s.sing 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 s.h.i.+ny 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 companions.h.i.+p, 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 antic.i.p.ation, 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 ravis.h.i.+ng wax doll and laid it in my arms.

"There," said she, "that is for a good girl."

Naturally I a.s.sumed 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 p.r.o.nounced to be irrevocably my own--_because_ I 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 pa.s.sionate 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 inc.u.mbent on a father who would do his duty to be cruel to his sons (and how hard the tradition dies!); it was inc.u.mbent 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 s.h.i.+rt for her father--and the amount of fine sewing in a whole s.h.i.+rt 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, sc.r.a.ps 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 pa.s.sage 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 cas.e.m.e.nts, 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 cl.u.s.ters, 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 t.i.tle 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 nonent.i.ty 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 cla.s.s) 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 ill.u.s.trated 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 pa.s.sage 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 e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n, "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 antic.i.p.ates, 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 e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.ns 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' b.r.e.a.s.t.s. 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.

CHAPTER VII

OLD TIMES AND NEW

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 cla.s.s; 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 b.u.t.ter. 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 b.u.t.ton 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 fas.h.i.+on. She wore ap.r.o.ns to protect her neat gowns--a black silk ornamental ap.r.o.n in the afternoon. Her best silk dress was best for a dozen years, the Paisley shawl of her marriage outfit never out of fas.h.i.+on. 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 was.h.i.+ng 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 b.a.l.l.s 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 pa.s.sing rich, but actually was so. A farmer--a "gentleman-farmer,"

as he was called, the cla.s.s 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 const.i.tutionally 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 n.o.body 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 s.h.i.+vers 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.