Chapter XVI: In My Solitary Life (2)

“_Granada, April 1--Easter Sunday._--To-day especially I do not feel as if I was at Granada, but in the churchyard at Hurstmonceaux. I am sure Mrs. Medhurst and other loving hands will have decorated our most dear spot with flowers. Aunt Sophy is most kind, only too kind and indulgent always, but the thought of the one for and _through_ whom alone I could really enjoy anything is never absent from me. I feel as if I lived in a life which was not mine--beautiful often, but only a beautiful moonlight: the sunlight has faded.”

* * * * *

“_Toledo, April 11._--We had twelve hours’ diligence from Granada, saw Jaen Cathedral on the way, and joined the railroad at the little station of Mengibar. Next morning found us at Aranjuez, a sort of Spanish Hampton Court, rather quaint and pleasant, four-fifths of the place being taken up by the palace and its belongings, so much beloved by Isabella (II.), but since deserted. We went to bed for four hours, and spent the rest of the day in surveying half-furnished palaces, unkempt gardens, and dried-up fountains, yet pleasant from the winding Tagus, lilacs and Judas-trees in full bloom, and birds singing. It was a nice primitive little inn, and the landlord sat on the wooden gallery in the evening and played the guitar, and all his men and maids sang round him in patriarchal family fashion.

“On the whole, I feel a little disappointed at present with this curious, desolate old city: the cathedral and everything else looks so small after one’s expectations, and the guide-books exaggerate so tremendously all over Spain.

“My last day at Granada was saddened by your mention of what is really a great loss to me--dear old Mr. Liddell’s death,[13] so kind to me ever since I was a little boy, and endeared by the many associations of most happy visits at Bamborough and Easington. I had also sad news from Holmhurst in the death of dear sweet Romo, the Mother’s own little dog, which no other can ever be.”

* * * * *

“_Madrid, April 20._--We like Madrid better than we expected. It is a poor miniature of Paris, the Prado like the Champs Elysées, the Museo answering to the Louvre, though all on the smallest possible scale. It has been everything to us having our kind friends Don Juan and Doña Emilia de Riaño here, and we have seen a great deal of them. They have a beautiful house, full of books and pictures, and every day she has come to take us out, and has gone with us everywhere, taking us to visit all the interesting literary and artistic people, showing us all the political characters on the Prado, escorting us to galleries, &c., and in herself a mine of information of the most beautiful and delightful kind--a sort of younger Lady Waterford. She gives a dreadful picture of the immorality of society in Madrid under the Italian King, the want of law, the hopelessness of redress; that everything is gained by influence in high places, nothing by right. A revolution is expected any day, and then the King must go. The aristocratic Madrilenians all speak of him as ‘the little Italian wretch,’ though they pity his pretty amiable Queen. All seem to want to get rid of him, and, whatever is said by English newspapers, we have never seen any one in Spain who was not hankering after the Bourbons and the handsome young Prince of Asturias, who is sure to be king soon.

“The pleasantest of all the people Madame de Riaño has taken us to visit are the splendid artist Don Juan de Madraza and his most lovely wife.[14]

“The Layards have been very civil. At a party there we met no end of Spanish grandees. The Queen’s lady-in-waiting (she has only two who will consent to take office), Marqueza d’Almena, was quite lovely in white satin and pearls--like an old picture.”

* * * * *

“_Segovia, April 28._--I was quite ill at Madrid with severe sore throat and cough, and this in spite of the care I was always taking of myself, having been so afraid of falling ill. But it is the most treacherous climate, and, from burning heat, changes to fierce ice-laden winds from the Guadarama and torrents of cold rain. I was shut up five days, but cheered by visits from Madame de Riaño, young Arthur Seymour an attaché, and the last day, to my great delight, the well-known Holmhurst faces of Mr. and Mrs. Scrivens (Hastings banker), brimming with Sussex news. Mr. Layard was evidently very anxious to get us and all other travelling English safe out of Spain, but we preferred the alternative, suggested by the Riaños, of coming to this ‘_muy pacifico_’ place, and waiting till the storm was a little blown over. Madrid was certainly in a most uncomfortable state, the Italian King feeling the days of his rule quite numbered, houses being entered night and day, and arrests going on everywhere. I do not know what English papers tell, but the Spanish accounts are alarming of the whole of the north as overrun by Carlists, and that they have taken Vittoria and stopped the tunnel on the main line.

“It was a dreadful journey here. The road was cut through the snow, but there was fifteen feet of it on either side the way on the top of the Guadarama. However, our ten mules dragged us safely along. Segovia is gloriously picturesque, and the hotel a very tolerable--pothouse.”

* * * * *

“_Salamanca, May 5._--One day at the Segovia _table-d’hôte_ we had the most unusual sight of a pleasing young Englishman, who rambled about and drew with us all afternoon, and then turned out to be--the Duchess of Cleveland’s younger son, Everard Primrose.[15]

“May-day we spent at La Granja, one of the many royal palaces, and one which would quite enchant you. It is a quaint old French château in lovely woods full of fountains and waterfalls, quite close under the snow mountains; and the high peaks, one glittering mass of snow, rise through the trees before the windows. The inhabitants were longing there to have the Bourbons back, and only spoke of the present King as ‘the inoffensive Italian.’ Even Cristina and Isabella will be cordially welcomed if they return with the young Alfonso.

* * * * *

“On May 2nd we left Segovia and went for one night to the Escurial--such a gigantic place, no beauty, but very curious, and the relics of the truly religious though cruelly bigoted Philip II. very interesting. Then we were a day at Avila, at an English inn kept by Mr. John Smith and his daughter--kindly, hearty people. Avila is a paradise for artists, and has remains in plenty of Ferdinand and Isabella, in whose intimate companionship one seems to live during one’s whole tour in Spain. It was a most fatiguing night-journey of ten hours to Salamanca, a place I have especially wished to see--not beautiful, but very curious, and we have introductions to all the great people of the place.

“I shall be _very_ glad now to get home again. It is such an immense separation from every one one has ever seen or heard of, and such a long time to be so excessively uncomfortable as one must be at even the best places in Spain. Five-o’clock tea, which we occasionally cook in a saucepan--without milk of course--is a prime luxury, and is to be indulged in to-day as it is Sunday.”

* * * * *

“_Biarritz, May 12._--We are thankful to be safe here, having seen Zamora, Valladolid, and Burgos since we left Salamanca. The stations were in an excited state, the platforms crowded with people waiting for news or giving it, but we met with no difficulties. I cannot say with what a thrill of pleasure I crossed the Bidassoa and left the great discomforts of Spain behind. What a luxury this morning to see once more tea! butter!! cow’s milk!!!”

* * * * *

“_Paris, May 20._--Most lovely does France look after Spain--the flowers, the grass, the rich luxuriant green, of which there is more to be seen from the ugliest French station than in the whole of the Spanish peninsula after you leave the Pyrenees. I have spent the greater part of three days at the Embassy, where George Sheffield is most affectionate and kind--no brother could be more so. We have been about everywhere together, and it is certainly most charming to be with a friend who is always the same, and associated with nineteen years of one’s intimate past.”

* * * * *

“_Dover Station, May 23._--On Monday George drove me in one of the open carriages of the Embassy through the Bois de Boulogne to S. Cloud, and I thought the woods rather improved by the war injuries than otherwise, the bits cut down sprouting up so quickly in bright green acacia, and forming a pleasant contrast with the darker groves beyond. We strolled round the ruined château, and George showed the room whither he went to meet the council, and offer British interference just before war was declared, in vain, and now it is a heap of ruins--blackened walls, broken caryatides.[16] What a lovely view it is of Paris from the terrace: I had never seen it before. Pretty young French ladies were begging at all the park gates for the dishoused poor of the place, as they do at the Exhibition for the payment of the Prussian debt. George was as delightful as only he can be when he likes, and we were perfectly happy together. At 7 P.M. I went again to the Embassy. All the lower rooms were lighted and full of flowers, the corridors all pink geraniums with a mist of white spirea over them. The Duchesse de la Tremouille was there, as hideous as people of historic name usually are. Little fat Lord Lyons was most amiable, but his figure is like a pumpkin with an apple on the top. It is difficult to believe he is as clever as he is supposed to be. He is sometimes amusing, however. Of his diplomatic relations with the Pope he says, ‘It is so difficult to deal diplomatically with the Holy Spirit.’ He boasts that he arrived at the Embassy with all he wanted contained in a single portmanteau, and that if he were called upon to leave it for ever to-day, the same would suffice. He has collected and acquired--nothing! He evidently adores George, and I don’t wonder!”

[17]

* * * * *

_To_ MISS WRIGHT.

“_Holmhurst, May 24, 1872._--You will like to know I am safe here. I found fat John Gidman waiting at the Hastings station, and drove up through the flowery lanes to receive dear Lea’s welcome--most tearfully joyous. The little home looks very lovely, and I cannot be thankful enough--though its sunshine is always mixed with shadow--to have a home in which everything is a precious memorial of my sacred past, where every shrub in the garden has been touched by my mother’s hand, every little walk trodden by her footsteps, and where I can bring up mental pictures of her in every room. In all that remains I can trace the sweet wisdom which for years laid up so much to comfort me, which sought to buy this place when she did, in order to give sufficient association to make it precious to me; above all, which urged her to the supreme effort of returning here in order to leave it for me with the last sacred recollections of her life. In the work of gathering up the fragments from that dear life I am again already engrossed, and Spain and its interests are passing into the far away; yet I look back upon them with much gratitude, and especially upon your long unvaried kindness and your patience with my many faults.”

* * * * *

“_May 26._--To-night it blows a hurricane, and the wind moans sadly. A howling wind, I think, is the most melancholy natural accompaniment which can come to a solitary life. After this, I must give you--to meditate on--a beautiful passage I have been reading in Mrs. Somerville--‘At a very small height above the surface of the earth the noise of the tempest ceases, and the thunder is heard no more in those boundless regions where the heavenly bodies accomplish their periods in eternal and sublime silence.’”

* * * * *

It is partly the relief I experienced after Spain and the animation of ever-changing society which make me look back upon the summer of 1872 as one of the happiest I have spent at Holmhurst. A constant succession of guests filled our little chambers, every one was pleased, and the weather was glorious. I was away also for several short but very pleasant glimpses of London, and began to feel how little the virulence of some of my family signified when there was still so much friendship and affection left to me.

* * * * *

_To_ MISS WRIGHT.

“_Holmhurst, June 21, 1872._--I am feeling ungrateful for never having written since my happy fortnight with you came to a close, a time which I enjoyed more than I ever expected to enjoy anything again, and which made me feel there might still be something worth living on for, so much kindness and affection did I receive from so many. It is pleasant too to think of your comfortable home, which rises before me in a gallery of happy pictures, and I know it all so well now, from the parrot in Mrs. Jarvis’s room to the red geraniums in your window. I have had Mrs. and Miss Kuper here, and now I am alone, no voice but that of the guinea-fowls shrieking ‘Come back’ in the garden. I miss all my London friends very much, but suppose one would not enjoy it if it went on always, and certainly solitude is the time for work: I did eleven hours of it yesterday. As regards my books, I feel more and more with Arnold that a man is only fit to teach as long as he is himself learning daily.”

* * * * *

“_Holmhurst, June 25._--‘Poor Aunt Sophy’ would not have thought she had done nothing to cheer me, could she have seen the interest with which I read her letter and returned to it over and over again. Such a letter is quite delightful, and here has the effect of one reaching Robinson Crusoe in Juan Fernandez, so complete is the silence and solitude when no one is staying here.

‘The flowers my guests, the birds my pensioners,
Books my companions, and but few beside.’[18]

“How I delight in knowing all that the delightful human beings are about, of whom I think now as living in another hemisphere. I should like to see more of people--perhaps another year I may not be so busy: that is, I long for the cream which I enjoyed with you, but I should not care for the milk and water of a country neighbourhood. If one has too much people-seeing, however, even of the London best, one feels that it is ‘a withering world,’[19] and that if--

‘The world is too much with us, late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.’[20]

“I have been made very ill-tempered all day because Murray, during my absence in Spain, has published a second edition of my Oxfordshire Handbook, _greatly_ altered, without consulting me, and it seems to me utterly spoilt and vulgarised. He is obliged by his contract to give me £40, but I would a great deal rather have seen the book uninjured and received nothing.”

* * * * *

_To_ MISS LEYCESTER (after a long visit from her at Holmhurst).

“_Holmhurst, August 18, 1872._--There seems quite a chaos of things already to be said to the dear cousin who has so long shared our quiet life, and who has so much care for the simple interests of this little home. Much have I missed her--in her chair, with her crotchet; sitting on the terrace; and especially in the early morning walk yesterday, when the garden was in its richest beauty, all the crimson and blue flowers twinkling through a veil of dewdrops, and when ‘the gentleness of Heaven was on the sea,’ as Wordsworth would say. I am grieved to think of you in London, instead of in your country home.

“Our visit to Hurstmonceaux was thoroughly enjoyed by Mr. and Mrs. Pile.[21] For myself, I shall always feel such short visits produce such extreme tension of conflicting feelings that they are scarcely a pleasure. Most lovely was the drive for miles through Ashburnham beech and pine woods and by its old timber-yard. At Lime Cross we saw Mrs. Isted at her familiar window, and the dear woman sat there all the afternoon to have another glimpse on our return. We drove to the foot of the hill and walked up to the church. Our sacred spot looked most peaceful, its double hedge of fuchsia in full flower, and the turf as smooth as velvet. We had luncheon in the church porch, and then went to the castle, and back through the park uplands, high with fern, to Hurstmonceaux Place. How often, at Hurstmonceaux especially, I now feel the force of Wordsworth’s lines:

‘Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.’”

* * * * *

_To_ MISS WRIGHT.

“_Holmhurst, Sept. 6, 1872._--If my many guests of the last weeks have liked their visits, I have most entirely enjoyed having them and the pleasant influx of new life and new ideas. Dear old Mrs. Robert Hare is now very happy here, and most grateful for the very small kindness I am able to show. I have pressed her to make a long visit, as it is a real delight to give so much pleasure, though humbling to think that, when one can do it so easily, one does not do it oftener. She is quite stone-deaf, so we sit opposite one another and correspond on a slate.[22] On Tuesday I fetched Marcus Hare from Battle. He also is intensely happy here; but his aunts, the Miss Stanleys, have written to refuse to see him again or allow him to visit them, because he has been to see the author of the ‘Memorials.’ I took him to Hurstmonceaux yesterday, and lovely was the first flush of autumn on our dear woods, while the castle looked most grand in the solemn stillness of its misty hollow. Next week I shall have George Sheffield here.”

[24]

In September I paid a pleasant visit to my cousin Edward Liddell, whom I found married to his sweet wife (Christina Fraser Tytler) and living in the Rectory in Wimpole Park in Cambridgeshire, close to the great house of our cousin Lord Hardwicke, which is very ugly, though it contains many fine pictures.[23] In the beginning of October I was at Ford with Lady Waterford, meeting the Ellices, Lady Marion Alford, and Lady Herbert of Lea, who had much to tell of La Palma, the _estatica_ of Brindisi, who had the stigmata, and could tell wonderful truths to people about their past and future. Lady Herbert had been to America, Trinidad, Africa--in fact, everywhere, and in each country had, or thought she had, the most astounding adventures--living with bandits in a cave, overturned on a precipice, &c. She had travelled in Spain and was brimful of its delights. She had armed herself with a Papal permit to enter all monasteries and convents. She had annexed the Bishop of Salamanca and driven in his coach to Alva, the scene of S. Teresa’s later life. The nuns refused to let her come in, and the abbess declared it was unheard of; but when Lady Herbert produced the bishop and the Papal brief, she got in, and the nuns were so captivated that they not only showed her S. Teresa’s dead body, but dressed her up in all S. Teresa’s clothes, and set her in S. Teresa’s arm-chair, and gave her her supper out of S. Teresa’s porringer and platter. “Can you see Lady Jane Ellice’s face,” I read in a letter from Ford to Miss Leycester, “as Lady Herbert ‘goes on’ about the Blessed Paul of the Cross, the holy shift of S. Teresa, and the saintly privileges of a hermit’s life?” The first evening she was at Ford Lady Herbert said:--

* * * * *

“Did you never hear the story of ‘La Jolie Jambe’? Well, then, I will tell it you. Robert, my brother-in-law, told me. He knew the old lady it was all about in Paris, and had very often gone to sit with her.

“It was an old lady who lived at ‘le pavillon dans le jardin.’ The great house in the Faubourg was given up to the son, you know, and she lived in the pavillon. It was a very small house, only five or six rooms, and was magnificently furnished, for the old lady was very rich indeed, and had a great many jewels and other valuable things. She lived quite alone in the pavillon with her maid, but it was considered quite safe in that high-terraced garden, raised above everything else, and which could only be approached through the house.

“However, one morning the old lady was found murdered, and all her jewels and valuables were gone. Of course suspicion fell upon the maid, for who else could it be? She was taken up and tried. The evidence was insufficient to convict her, and she was released, but every one believed her guilty. Of course she could get no other place, and she was so shunned and pointed at as a murderess that her life was a burden to her.

“One day, eleven years after, the maid was walking down a street when she met a man, who, as she passed, looked suddenly at her and exclaimed, ‘Oh, la jolie jambe!’ She immediately rushed up to a sergeant-de-ville and exclaimed, ‘Arrêtez-moi cet homme.’ The man was confused and hesitated, but she continued in an agony, ‘Arrêtez-le, je vous dis: je l’accuse, je l’accuse du meurtre de ma maîtresse.’ Meanwhile the man had made off, but he was pursued and taken.

“The maid said at the trial, that, on the night of the murder, the windows of the pavilion had been open down to the ground; that they were so when she was going to bed; that as she was getting into bed she sat for a minute on its edge to admire her legs, looked at them, patted one of them complacently, and exclaimed, ‘Oh, la jolie jambe!’

“The man then confessed that while he had been hidden in the bushes of the garden waiting to commit his crime, he had seen the maid and heard her, and that, when he met her in the street, the scene and the words rushed back upon his mind so suddenly, that, as if under an irresistible impulse, his lips framed the words ‘Oh, la jolie jambe.’ The man was executed.”

* * * * *

Lady Herbert also told us that--

* * * * *

“Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, had a sheep-dog to which he was quite devoted, and which used to go out and collect his sheep. One day in winter a thick snow came on, and Hogg was in the greatest anxiety about his flocks. He called his dog and explained all the matter to him, telling him how he was going all round one side of the moors himself to drive in his sheep, and that he was to go the other way and collect. The dog understood perfectly. Late in the evening the Shepherd returned perfectly exhausted, bringing in his flock through the deep snow, but the dog had not come back. Hour after hour passed and the dog did not return. The Shepherd, who was devoted to his dog, was very anxious about it, when at last he heard a whining and scratching at the door, and going out, found the dog bringing all his sheep safe, and in its mouth a little puppy, which it laid at its master’s feet, and instantly darted off through the snow to seek another and bring it in. The poor thing had puppied in the snow, but would not on that account neglect one iota of its duty. It brought in its second puppy, laid it in its master’s lap, looked up wistfully in his face as if beseeching him to take care of it, and--died.”

* * * * *

Lady Marion Alford is a real _grande dame_. Some one, Miss Mary Boyle, I think, wrote a little book called the “Court of Queen Marion,” descriptive of her and her intimate circle. At Ford she talked much of the pleasure of Azeglio’s _Ricordi_, how he was the first Italian writer who had got out of the ‘_conciosiachè_ style,’ and she was delightful with her reminiscences of Italy:--

* * * * *

“Once when I was spending the summer in Italy I wanted models, and I was told by an old general, a friend of mine, that I had better advertise, send up to the priests in the mountains, and tell them to send down all the prettiest children in their villages to be looked at: the lady wanted models; those she chose she should pay, the others should each have sixpence and a cake. I was told I had better prepare for a good many--perhaps a hundred might come. When the day came, I never shall forget our old servant’s face when he rushed in--‘Miladi, Miladi, the lane is full of them.’ There were seven hundred. It was very difficult to choose. We made them pass in at one door of the villa and out at the other. Those we selected we sent into the garden, and from these we chose again. Some were perfect monsters, for every mother thought her own child perfection. Those we selected to come first were a lovely family of three children with their mother. They were to come on a Wednesday. The day came, and they never appeared: the next, and still they did not come. Then we asked our old general about it, and he said, ‘The fact is, I have kicked my carpenter downstairs this morning because he said you were sending for the children to suck their blood, and they all think so.’ They none of them ever came.

“Our old maid Teresa was of a very romantic turn of mind. We used, when I was a child, to live in the Palazzo Sciarra, where the ‘Maddalena della Radice’ is. She used to stand opposite to the picture and exclaim in gulpy tones, ‘Sono bestia io, e non capisco niente, ma questo me pare--pittoresco.’ My little sister, when our father was away, stood one day at the top of the stairs and said, ‘Io son padrona di casa, e no son padrona di casa: voi siete la servitu, e non siete la servitu.’ Teresa exclaimed, ‘Questa diavola, com’ é carina.’ We used to hear Teresa talking to our other maid, and they boasted of the number of times they had been beaten by their husbands. One day--it was during the French occupation, when the bread was doled out--Teresa took her tambourine with her when she went to get it, for they all loved flirting with the soldiers; and when her husband asked her what it was for, she said it was to bring back the bread in. But when she got inside the circle of soldiers, they had a merry _saltarello_. The husband was kept back outside the circle, and stood there furious. At first she laughed at him, but then when he went away and came back again, she got really frightened. And when she came out of the circle he flogged her with a whip all the way back to the Trastevere, and she ran before him screaming.

“How curious it is that ‘_Est locanda_’ is still to be seen in Roman windows of houses to be let--the one little relic of Latin: and how odd the word for lodgings being the same in all languages--Quartier, Quartos, Quartiere, Quarter, &c.”

Lady Marion also said:--

* * * * *

“As we were leaving Gibraltar, three of the shells from the practising fell quite close to our yacht. ‘Are you not very much frightened?’ said a French gentleman on board. ‘Not in the least,’ I said. ‘How could I be? our men are such perfect marksmen;’ but of course I was dreadfully.”

* * * * *

This story is wonderfully characteristic of the speaker: the Empress Catherine might have given such an answer. About ghosts Lady Marion was very amusing:--

* * * * *

“When I went to Belvoir with Lady Caroline Cust, they danced in the evening. I went upstairs early, for I was tired. As I was going to my room, Lady Jersey--it was wrong of her, I think--said, ‘Oh, I see you are put into the ghost-room.’ I said, ‘I am quite happy; there are no real ghosts here, I think.’--‘Well,’ said Lady Jersey, ‘I can only say Miss Drummond slept there last night, and she received letters of importance this morning and left before breakfast.’ Well, I went into my room, and lit the candles and made up the fire, but very soon I gave a great jump, for I heard the most dreadful noise close at my elbow--Oh-o-oo-oo!’ I thought of course that it was a practical joke, and began to examine every corner of the room, thinking some one must be hidden there; then I rang my bell. When my maid came in I said, ‘Now don’t be frightened, but there is some one hidden in this room somewhere, and you must help me to find him.’ Very soon the noise came again. Then Lady Caroline came, and she heard it: then her maid came. The noise occurred about every five minutes. We examined everything and stood in each corner of the room. The noise then seemed close to each of us. At last Lady Caroline said, ‘I can stand this no longer, and I must go,’ and she and her maid went away and shut themselves into the next room. Then I said to my maid, ‘If you are frightened you had better go,’ but she protested that she would rather stay where she was; after what she had heard, anything would be better than facing the long lonely passages alone. However, just at that moment ‘Oh-o-oo-oo!’ went off again close to her ear, and with one spring she darted out of the room and ran off as hard as ever she could. I went courageously to bed and determined to brave it out. But the thing went to bed too, and went off at intervals on the pillow close to my face. And at last it grated on my nerves to such a degree that I could bear it no longer, and I dragged a mattress into Lady Caroline’s room and slept there till dawn. The next morning I also received letters of importance and left before breakfast.

“Before I left, I sent for the housekeeper, and said, ‘You really should not put people into that room,’ and told her what had happened. She was much distressed, and told me that there really was no other room in the house then, but confessed it had often happened so before. Some time after I went over to Belvoir with some friends who wanted to see the castle, and the housekeeper then told me that the same thing had happened again in that room, which was now permanently shut up.”

* * * * *

Other guests at Ford were Mrs. Richard Boyle (known as E. V. B.), and her daughter--very quaint and original, and the mother a capital artist. We went to the Rowting Lynn, a beautiful spot surrounded with rocks overhung by old oak-trees. “Did you enjoy your walk?” said Lady Waterford to Mrs. Boyle as we came in. “Yes, excessively. You never told me you had a waterfall. You offered me a coal-pit, but the waterfall you forgot to mention.”

Lady Waterford was herself more delightful than ever. As Marocetti said of her, “C’est un grand homme, mais une femme charmante.” Here are some scraps from her conversation:--

* * * * *

“That is a sketch of L. H. She did not know I was drawing her. She looks sixteen, but is quite middle-aged. Mama used to say she was like preserved green peas. Preserved green peas are not quite so good as real green peas, but they do very nearly as well.’

“I always take a little book with me in the train and draw the things as I pass them. That is some railings against a sunset sky when it was almost dark: I thought it was like a bit of Tintoret.

“How trying it is to be kept waiting for people. Don’t you know the Italian proverb?--

‘Aspettare e non venire,
Star in letto e non dormire,
Vuol piacer, e non gradire.’

Miss Boyle had a much better one, though--

‘To do, to suffer, is a glorious state,
But a more noble portion is to _wait_.’

“How beautiful the singing was in our young days--Grisi and Mario and Lablache, who went straight to one’s heart and fluttered there.

“Some one, old Madame de Flahault I think it was, asked what she could give as a present. It must be ‘très rare et pas coûteux,’ and it was suggested that she should give a lock of her hair.

“You are like the old lady who said she had never had a ripe peach in her life, because when she was young all the old people had them, and when she grew old all the young people had them.

“I am longing to read ‘Marjory,’[25] but I cannot when I have my house full--my novel _en action_. When people are here and tell me their little stories, that is what I like best to read.”

* * * * *

_To_ MISS WRIGHT.

“_Crook Hall, Lancashire, Oct. 20, 1872._--My visit at Ford was perfectly enchanting, and I made several new friendships there in what you think my sudden way, especially one with Lord Ronald Gower, which I think may become a pleasure. I much enjoyed, too, making friends with Mr. Beaumont and Lady Margaret B., one of the very best types of a fine lady it is possible to meet, almost funnily aristocratic in all her ideas, and high-minded in proportion. Her little person is arrayed in gowns which were as much things of beauty _in their way_ as a mountain landscape; there is such a difference between ‘smart dress,’ and such a lovely harmony of shade and colour, as one can scarcely think of as mere clothing. Then I saw a great deal of the dear Lady Waterford, and am more than ever instructed and touched by her beautiful, noble, holy life. It is absolutely impossible to her to ‘think any evil,’ and so, to her, the best side of every one comes out. As an easier ‘let down’ than anything else, I accepted an invitation from thence to Lord and Lady Grey for three days at Howick on the wild sea-coast, and enjoyed my visit immensely. No one has more completely ‘l’art de narrer’ than Lady Grey, and he is full of old-fashioned courtesy and kindness, such winning manners and heart-whole goodness.

“My ‘Memorials’ are out! Ere this all will have it. I know there will be much abuse and many varieties of opinion, but I am conscious of having carried out the book as I believe to be best for others, not for myself, and in this consciousness can bear what is said. ‘Je laisse couler le torrent,’ as Mme. de Sevigné used to say. One thing I dread is, that people should think I am a better person than I am, on reading the book: for I suppose it is always the fact that a man’s book is the best of him, his thought better than his life. But in any case, it is a relief to have it out (as Arthur and Mary Stanley, at the last moment, persuaded Mr. Murray to go to my publishers to try to stop the publication), yet it is also a wrench to part with the occupation and chief thought of two desolate years.”

* * * * *

“_Dalton Hall, Oct. 28._--A second edition of the ‘Memorials’ was called for before it had been out three days. I have had many letters about it--charming ones from Mrs. Arnold and the old Baroness de Bunsen. The olive-bearing dove has gone out with healing on his wings, and all the mists are cleared off and the long-standing feuds of the Hare family healed by the book. Still the Stanleys make no sign.

‘Alas! how easily things go wrong!
A sigh too much or a kiss too long,
And there follows a mist and a weeping rain,
And life is never the same again.’[26]

“I certainly do suffer very much when people mean me to do so, to a degree which must be quite satisfactory to them; but then in compensation I always enjoy very much when it is the reverse. It is as I read somewhere--‘He who is the first to be touched by the thorns is soonest awake to the flowers.’

“From the Oswald Penrhyns’ at Huyton I saw in the same day two great houses--the vast and hideous Knowsley, which interested me from its connection with my Mother’s youth, and the glorious old hall of Speke, which has an air of venerable beauty quite unrivalled. Then I went for some days to Lord Brougham’s, a delightful place, full of tapestry and pictures, but though it looks old, really a modern castle, with the ruins of the truly ancient castle on the river-bank hard by.”

* * * * *

In November I went north again to stay for the first time at Bretton near Wakefield, a great house in the Black Country, built by the famous “Madam Beaumont,” who followed the example of her ancestors in making an enormous fortune by her skilful management of her lead-mines. It is recorded that when Mr. Pitt was dining with her, and all her magnificent plate was set out, she exclaimed, with pardonable pride, “That is all the lead-mines,” when he replied, “Oh, really, I thought it was silver,” and would talk on, to her great annoyance, and never allow her a moment to explain. I had made friends with her grandson, Wentworth Beaumont, at Ford, when he was there with his wife Lady Margaret, whom I have always regarded as the most thoroughly pleasant specimen in existence of a really fine lady. Her powers of conversation were boundless, her gift of repartee unequalled, and her memory most extraordinary. She was the daughter of Lady Clanricarde, celebrated for her conversational talents, and whom I remember Lady Carnarvon describing as “the most agreeable woman in England, because she was not only massive, but lively.” Lady Margaret was like a little queen amongst her guests, entertaining with the simplicity of real kindness and thoughtfulness for others, whilst her manner was equally agreeable to all, and she never usurped attention, but rather exerted herself to draw others out and to show the best side of them. She could be alarming as an enemy, but she was a most faithful friend, and would exert herself to take definite trouble for her friends, never deserting them unless they were proved to be really unworthy. She was not exactly pretty, but her animation was more charming than mere beauty. Dress with her was not a mere adjunct, but was made as much a thing of poetic beauty as a landscape or a flower. She was devoted to her husband, but theoretically she disapproved of love in a general way. Still she was only worldly in principle and not in practice, and she was ever a devoted mother to her children, seeking their real happiness rather than their advancement before the world.[27] I have often been at Bretton since my first visit there, and always enjoyed it from the constant animation which the hostess shed around her; the excessive comfort of the house and of the thoroughly well-regulated household; the plenty of time for work and writing, and yet the constant variety afforded by the guests coming and going: while with the children of the house I was very intimate, and with the youngest, Hubert, long on terms of almost elder-brotherly affection. Lady Francis Gordon was generally at Bretton when I have been there, rather an amusing than an agreeable person, but an immense talker. One of her first remarks to me was characteristic--“I am quite past the age of blushing: when I want to do anything of that kind, I what they call _flush_ now.” I have frequently seen Colonel Crealock[28] at Bretton, who drew animals so splendidly. He told me once--

* * * * *

“Old Lady Selby of the Mote at Ightham had been out to some grand party in all her diamonds and jewels. She slept in a room which still remains the same, hung all round with tapestry representing events in the life of Julius Caesar. Through this room was the dressing-room, in which she kept her jewels and valuables. On the night of her return from the party, as she was undressing and taking off her jewels, she looked up at the figure of Julius Caesar in the tapestry, and thought she saw something peculiar in one of his eyes. She looked again, and felt sure the eye moved. She quietly proceeded, however, to take off her jewels and put them away. Having done that, she locked the jewel-case, left it in the dressing-room, and went to bed.

“She had not been in bed long when a man appeared in the room with a candle and a knife. Coming up to the bed, he passed the light again and again close before her eyes. She bore it without flinching in the least, only appeared to become restless and turned over in her sleep. Then he proceeded to the dressing-room and became occupied over the jewels. As soon as she was aware that he was entirely engrossed, she darted out of bed, banged to the door of the dressing-room, locked it on the outside, and rang violently for assistance. When help came, and the door was opened, they found the man strangled from trying to get through the iron bars of the window.

“The portrait of old Lady Selby still remains at the Mote.”[29]

* * * * *

_To_ MISS LEYCESTER.

“_Bretton Park, Nov. 21, 1872._--To-day we went--Lady Francis Gordon, Mrs. Lowther, Mr. Doyle, and I--to luncheon at Walton, an extraordinary house in the middle of a lake, which belonged to the Roman Catholic Mr. Waterton, the great ornithologist. It is approached by a long drawbridge and is most curious. A Mr. Hailstone lives there now, a strange man, who spends his large fortune on antiquities, and has a wife who writes on lace, and wonderful collections.[30] Their son has never eaten anything but buttered toast, cheese, and port-wine (has never tasted meat, vegetables, or fruit), but is eight years old and very flourishing.

“Lord and Lady Salisbury are here. The latter can only be described by the word ‘jocund,’ except when she does not wish to make acquaintance or desires to snub people, when she becomes hopelessly impenetrable. There is a party of fourteen, all new to me, but I get on very well. They look upon me as an aboriginal from another hemisphere, and indeed they are that to me; but it is too new a set to feel the least shy in. There is great satisfaction in being only a _background_ figure, and Lady Margaret is quite charming, the house handsome, and the park pretty. We all went to church this morning in a sort of family drawing-room in the grounds, the vulgar herd screened off by red curtains, only the clergyman in his pulpit visible above the screen.”

* * * * *

I made a very interesting excursion with Lady Margaret and some of her guests to Haworth, the wild weird home of the Brontës on the Yorkshire fells, where the steep street with the stones placed edgeways, up which the horses scramble like cats, leads to the wind-stricken churchyard, with its vast pavement of tombstones set close together. On one side of this is the dismal grey stone house where the three unhappy sisters lived, worked, and suffered, with the window at the side through which Patrick Brontë used to climb at night. Not a tree is to be seen in the neighbourhood except the blackened lilac before the Rectory door. Nature is her dreariest self, and offers no ameliorations. The family were buried beneath their pew in the church,[31] so that Charlotte, the last survivor, sat in church over the graves of her brothers and sisters. The people seemed half savage, most of all the Rector, who violently hurled Lady Margaret and Lady Catherine Weyland from his door when they asked to see the house, being bored, I suppose, by the pertinacity of visitors.

The Brontës were really Pronty--Irish--but when old Mr. Brontë went to college, he did the wise thing of changing his name, and the family kept to it.

I went for two days from Bretton to Lord Houghton at Fryston, which has since been burnt, but which was so filled with books of every kind that the whole house was a library, each bookcase being filled with a different subject--the French Revolution, Demonology and Witchcraft, &c., &c. Lady Houghton was living then, a most gentle, kind woman, a sister of Lord Crewe. From Lord Houghton I received constant kindness and protection from my first entering upon a literary life, and, in spite of his excessive vanity, I was always sincerely attached to him. “Butterfly to the hasty eye, he was firm in his friendships, firmest of all in his fearless championship of the weak, the strugglers, the undeservedly oppressed.” As Johnson says of Garth--“he communicated himself through a very wide extent of acquaintance.” His conversation was always interesting, but I have preserved scarcely any notes of my visit to Fryston, and chiefly remember his mentioning that Sydney Smith had said to him, what I have so often thought, “It is one of the great riddles of life to me why good people should always be so dreadfully stupid.” He also spoke of the many proverbs which discouraged exertion in “doing good,” from the Persian “Do no good, and no harm will come of it,” to the French--

“Pour faire du bien
Ne faites rien.”

Talking of the Baroness Burdett Coutts, Lord Houghton said, “Miss Coutts likes me because I never proposed to her. Almost all the young men of good family did: those who did their duty by their family _always_ did. Mrs. Browne (Miss Coutts’ companion) used to see it coming, and took herself out of the way for ten minutes, but she only went into the next room and left the door open, and then the proposal took place, and immediately it was done Miss Coutts coughed, and Mrs. Browne came in again.”

* * * * *

JOURNAL.

“_Dec. 10, 1872._--Went to visit the Ralph Duttons at Timsbury near Romsey. The house is in a flat, and sees nothing but clipped laurel hedges. Mr. Dutton is a sporting politician: Mrs. Dutton a politician too, but _on the other side_. Both are full of pleasant conversation, and most kind. Regarding English country-houses, however, it is as Carlyle truly says, ‘Life may be as well spent there as elsewhere by the owners of them, who have occupations to attend to. For visitors, when large numbers are brought together, some practice is required if they are to enjoy the elaborate idleness.’

“We drove to visit Mr. Cowper Temple at Broadlands--a pleasant liveable house with beautiful flowers and pictures, the most remarkable of the latter being Guercino’s ‘Hagar and the Angel’--an angel which poises and floats, and Sir J. Reynolds’ ‘Infant Academy’ and ‘Babes in the Wood.’ In Mr. Cowper Temple’s room upstairs is Edward Clifford’s family group of the ‘Maimed and Halt’ being called in to the feast, the figures being those of the Cowper-Temples, Augustus Tollemaches, Lord Roden, Lady Palmerston, and Clifford’s favourite drummer. They are wonderful likenesses, but it is a strange picture, with our Saviour looking in at the window.”

* * * * *

“_Dec. 13._--I arrived at Hatfield in the dark. A number of carriages from the house met the guests at the station. As I emerged from it, a little groom touched his hat and said, ‘Please, sir, are you the Lord Chancellor?’ I thought I must have grown in dignity of aspect. The Lord Chancellor was expected, and came later in the evening.

“I found Lord and Lady Salisbury in the library, lined with Burleigh books and MSS. Mr. Richmond the artist was with them. He has the most charming voice, which, quite independently of his conversation, would make him agreeable. He talked of the enormous prices obtained for statues and pictures at the present time, while Michelangelo only got £90 and a block of marble for the great David at Florence, and Titian the same for his Assumption at Venice. He spoke of the amount of chicanery which existed amongst artists even then--how the monks, and the nuns too, would supply them with good ultra-marine for their frescoes, and how they would sell the ultra-marine and use smalt. He described how Gainsborough never could sell anything but portraits: people came to him for those, but would not buy his other pictures, and his house was full of them when he died. Gainsborough gave two pictures to the carrier who brought his other pictures from Clifton to London: the carrier would take no fare, so he painted his waggon and horses and another picture and gave them to him: these two pictures have been sold lately for £18,000.

“Besides the Lord Chancellor Selborne with his two pleasant unaffected daughters, Miss Alderson was here the first day, and Sir Henry and Lady Maine. With the last I rambled in search of adventures in the evening, and we walked in the long gallery, which is splendid, with a gilt ceiling, only it is incongruous to see the old panelled wall brilliantly lighted with gas.

“Lord Salisbury is delightful, so perfectly easy and unaffected: it would be well if little great men would take pattern by him. Lady Salisbury is equally unassuming, sound sense ever dropping from her lips as unconsciously as Lady Margaret Beaumont’s bon-mots.”

* * * * *

“_Dec. 14._--Lady Salisbury showed us the house. In the drawing-room, over the chimney-piece, is a huge statue of James I. of bronze. It is not fixed, but supported by its own weight. A ball was once given in that room. In the midst of the dancing some one observed that the bronze statue was slowly nodding its head, and gave the alarm. The stampede was frightful. All the guests fled down the long gallery.

“In the same room is a glorious portrait of Lord Salisbury’s grandmother by Reynolds. It was this Lady Salisbury who was burnt to death in her old age. She came in from riding, and used to make her maid change her habit and dress her for dinner at once, as less fatiguing. Then she rested for two or three hours with lighted candles near her, and read or nodded in her chair. One evening, from the opposite wing of the house, the late Lord Salisbury saw the windows of the rooms near hers blazing with light, and gave the alarm, but before anybody could reach his mother’s rooms they were entirely burnt--so entirely, that it would have been impossible to identify her ashes for burial but for a ruby which the present Lady Salisbury wears in a ring. A little heap of diamonds was found in one place, but that proved nothing, as all her jewels were burned with her, but the ruby her maid identified as having put on her finger when she dressed her, and the ashes of that particular spot were all gathered up and buried in a small urn. Her two favourite dogs were burnt with her, and they are probably buried with her.[32] It was this Lady Salisbury who was inadvertently thrown down by a couple waltzing violently down the long gallery, when Lord Lytton, who was present, irreverently exclaimed:

‘At Hatfield House Conservatives
Become quite harum-scarum,
For Radical could do no more
Than overturn Old Sarum.’[33]

“In ‘Oliver Twist,’ Bill Sykes is described as having seen the fire at Hatfield as he was escaping from London.