will move him, Miss Lilian: he has discovered that Mr Harry’s
father is a Puseyite, and his aunt a nun in Ireland. His conviction
is that Mr Harry is a treacherous foe who has got into intimacy
with him for the purpose of stealing his papers and spying upon his
conduct. Nothing will move him!”
“I am aware of it, so I have made up my mind to marry without his
knowledge.”
“Without his knowledge! But who will marry you?”
“You, Mr Jedediah!”
“Me!”
“Yourself, my good, my dear Jedediah!”
“But,” went on Jedediah, after a moment’s consideration, “even if I
were weak enough to consent to so culpable an action, such a union
would not be valid in the eye of the law. Not being a member of the
Established Church, I cannot celebrate a civil marriage. You must
go before the Registrar; and, as you are both under age, this
official will not marry you without your father’s authorisation in
writing.”
“Alas! what are we to do?”
Jedediah reflected.
“What would you say if I undertook to get this authorisation for
you?”
“I should say that you are our good angel.”
“Then, let me manage.”
I held out my hand and he kissed it. His glasses were moist with
tears.
Three days later, he brought me the document which I required. He
was very pale. I would have asked questions, but he let me
understand that he would not answer. “I have done wrong for your
sake, Miss Lilian,” he said.
I learned afterwards that he had procured my father’s _blanc-seing_
under pretext of a petition addressed to the Government against the
Ritualists, and especially against the use of surplices, baldaquins
over altars, and confessionals.
I do not know to what stratagems Harry had recourse for obtaining
the necessary papers. What is certain is that we were married on
Easter Tuesday, before the Registrar of the county, after which
Jedediah gave us the nuptial benediction in a little chapel of the
Baptist communion situated in the environs of Plymouth
(_Portsmouth_). He married us without looking at us. I have never
seen a scene more strange, nor a man more unfortunate.
He refused to come and share the wedding-cake with us, which we ate
at my sister’s.
But those English love-marriages between rash young people by no mean
always end in living happily all the rest of their days; and the story
soon turns tragic, its scene shifting from the Island. After that secret
wedding, Harry returns to London, leaving his wife in an awkward
position, where Jedediah is her only comfort. Love still blinds her eyes
to the selfishness of Harry; but the reader sees how she might have been
better off with poor Jedediah, who is not such a villain after all, but
only the Dobbin or Seth Bede of the tale. The time comes when her
marriage can no longer be hidden. Harry takes lodgings for her in London
at the house of a Mrs Benson, whose husband, being employed at the
Bricklayers’ Arms Goods Station, finds it convenient to live in a
four-roomed house in Shoreditch, too large for a quiet couple.
To this sympathetic landlady, Lilian relates the foregoing story, with
many tears and gulps of _tisane_, a refreshment, it seems, known to
Shoreditch sickbeds. Her child is born dead. The young mother in her
feverish weakness fancies that Jedediah has revengefully contrived some
defect in the ceremony, and cries out to have her marriage made legally
complete at the parish church. Harry, moved by her delirium, writes to
both parents, confessing the truth. A curate is sent for, who politely
but hastily says a few prayers at the sick-bed, then hurries off to a
tea-party at the West-end. Lilian dies the same night. Harry weeps, to
be sure, but soon grows tired of sitting up with the dead, and comes
down to smoke a pipe with the landlord.
Next day Gordon _père_ arrives in a great rage, but, at the sight of his
dead daughter-in-law, he is touched to the point of taking off his hat,
as English gentlemen, it appears, will do on such special occasions. Mr
North, on his arrival, shows natural grief, which is soon turned to
wrath by the sight of a crucifix laid on his daughter’s breast, contrary
to “the statute of the fifteenth year of Elizabeth,” as he knows well;
and he gives up all hope of her eternal welfare, on hearing how her last
moments had been corrupted by the prayers of an Anglican priest. Mrs
Benson, who takes that wide view of religion spread in France by such
divines as the Savoyard Vicar and such poets as Beranger, in vain tries
to comfort him.
“What! Is she lost for such a small matter? The curate did not stay ten
minutes. I know nothing about any of your sects; but I am sure that
there is only one _bon Dieu_ for all of us; and Benson thinks so too.”
Jedediah’s grief is not less deep but more reasonable. It is he who
performs the service when, on a snowy evening, Lilian is buried in
Bethnal Green Cemetery.
But the sensational story has a cynical epilogue. Kind Mrs Benson, _qui
sent son Dickens_, never forgets her young lodger. One Sunday, as her
husband is reading _Lloyd’s News_, which he spells out conscientiously
from the “_premier Londres_ of M. Jerrold to the last line of the
advertisements,” he exclaims at a paragraph stating that a clergyman,
named North, formerly of the Isle of Wight, had been caught trying to
break images over the altar of Exeter Cathedral, and sent to an asylum
as a madman. Nothing is heard of Jedediah, and we can only trust that he
duly succeeded to the Newport pastorate and found some consoling
helpmeet in the congregation. Of Harry there is no news till some years
later, when the Bensons go to Cardiff to meet a married daughter
returning from New Zealand. Calling at the Gordons’ house, they learn
that the father is dead, and that Harry, now his own master, is about to
marry a Miss Jones of Ryde, not indeed the proud Arabella, but her
younger sister Florence, to whom time has transferred his facile
affections.
The last scene introduces Miss Florence going over the house soon to be
her own, and finding in a drawer an old black glove torn and soiled.
Harry denies all knowledge of it, but when his new beloved proposes to
throw it away, he shows that it has some value for him. The suspicious
damsel sulks, plays off on his jealousy a cousin in the Scots Greys,
refuses to waltz with her _fiancé_, except at the price of his giving up
that glove. He sighs as a widower, but obeys as a wooer. Giving one
secret kiss to poor Lilian’s glove, he resigns it to the triumphant Miss
Jones, who flings it on the fire, and holds out her white fingers for
the forgiven Harry to kiss, yet not without a smiling stab at that
unknown rival’s memory--“Her hand was larger than mine!”
Now for the moral of this realistic romance. “Let him who has never
committed a cowardice of the kind, who has never sacrificed a memory to
a hope, the forgotten love to the fresh one, the dead to the living, let
him cast at Harry the first stone!” To which poor Jedediah will not say
_Amen_.
The latest scene for fiction set in the Isle of Wight--_All Moonshine_,
by Richard Whiteing--is no photograph of actual society like that just
reduced, but a most imaginative romance, not to say a wild nightmare
inspired by the dangers of over-population, and based on the statistical
claim quoted in my first chapter, that the world’s eighteen hundred
millions or so could all find room to meet in this Island. The author,
falling asleep at Ventnor, dreams of such a universal rendezvous as
coming about in the form of astral bodies from all ends of the earth,
when some very strange things happen among the unsubstantial multitude.
At one moment it seems as if the ghostly armies of England and Germany
were about to close here in a lurid Armageddon; but they are fain to
fraternise before the general peril of an earthquake announced at Shide
as threatening to crack the globe and overwhelm civilisation in waves of
fire let loose from hell. The dreamer awakes to find the world what it
is, with nations and classes seeking to fatten on their neighbours’
poverty, kings and statesmen watching each other’s armaments in mutual
suspicion, priests hoisting flags on their churches in exultation over
the slaughter of fellow-Christians, and only an unpractical poet or
romancer to cry here and there--
Ah! when shall all men’s good
Be each man’s rule, and universal peace
Lie like a shaft of light across the land,
And like a lane of beams athwart the sea,
Thro’ all the circle of the golden year.
[Illustration: CALBOURNE]
COWES
We now come to one of the most important places in the Island, a place
that holds up its double head for second to none in the way of dignity
and fashion, though it began life as two small castles built by Henry
VIII. at the Medina’s mouth to protect the harbour of Newport.
The two great Cows that in loud thunder roar,
This on the eastern, that the western shore,
Where Newport enters stately Wight.
“I knew when there was not above three or four houses at Cowes,” says
Sir John Oglander, who yet had counted three hundred ships at anchor
there; “and I was and am persuaded that if our wars and troubles had not
unfortunately happened, it would have grown as famous as Newport.”
Another scourge of the Island in his time was the activity of lawyers to
stir up strife, whereas the first attorney who ventured himself here had
been ignominiously charivaried out of this Arcadian scene by order of
the Governor. But it might be, he admits, that lawyers were no more to
blame than the absence of ships of war, once such good customers for
the Islanders’ produce. “Now peace and law hath beggared us all, so
that within my memory many of the gentlemen and almost all the yeomanry
are undone.” One observes the distinction drawn by this rule of thumb
economist between the ruinous effects of civil war and the profitable
accidents of helping to ruin another country.
It is easy to understand how Cowes came to be the Tilbury and Gravesend
of Newport, then by and by to supplant it as the Island’s chief port. In
the days of small vessels, such a harbour as Newport offers was roomy
and accessible enough, while it had the advantage of being more out of
the way of hostile attack. London, Glasgow, Newcastle, Exeter, Bristol
are only a few examples of great ports lying some way up navigable
rivers; then on the larger scale of the world, one at once thinks of
Calcutta, Canton, Montreal, New Orleans, Rosario, and so on. Some of
these inland havens have kept their commercial position only by pains
and cost hardly worth while to save half-a-dozen miles of water
carriage; so, as ships grew too big for the tiny wharves of Newport,
they would unload at the mouth of the river that makes the one good
harbour on the Island. Thus Cowes grew apace; and a century ago it bid
fair to be at least the second Wight town, till Ryde took a sudden start
in prosperity. Like Ryde and Yarmouth it throve by victualling the great
war fleets and convoys that often lay wind-bound in the Solent. But
Cowes got a special string to its bow in the ship-building industry
rooted here, then another in its position as headquarters of Solent
yachting; and royal favour went to bring it into fashion. There was a
time when it aspired to be a mere Margate or Sandown, in honour of which
a Georgian poet named Jones is moved to predict--
No more to foreign baths shall Britain roam
But plunge at Cowes and find rich health at home!
To tell the truth, Cowes hardly shines in this capacity. Its bathing is
not everywhere safe in the currents of the Solent; and to pick out a
sandy oasis on the rough beach one must go eastward towards Gurnard Bay.
Nowadays, indeed, the place is so spoilt by the patronage of European
royalties and American millionaires, that it does not much care to lay
itself out for the holiday-making _bourgeois_ and his olive branches.
The straggling town, divided by the Medina, has no particular charm
unless that of a marine flavour. It is far from being so picturesque as
Ventnor, or so imposing as Ryde; and apart from the artificial beauties
of the parks enclosing it, its surroundings are commonplace beside those
of Newport. Its main interest is on the sea-face looking over the
shallow waters of the Solent, beside which East Cowes huddles along a
narrow main street, that winds up and down, in and out, here and there,
making a quaint show of houses old and new, half and half, dwellings
mixed with shops, an unusual proportion of them providing refreshments,
when they do not display such wares as ship’s lanterns, and other
sea-fittings from cordage to carronades. The central point is the
steamboat pier opposite the station; then further west comes the
Victoria Pier with its pavilion, on a scale that shows how little Cowes
cares to cater for your common Saturday to Monday visitor.
Cowes makes the Mecca of the yachtsman, as St Andrews of the golfer. It
is the most famous station of those idle craft that in our day diverge
into two different forms--the steam vessels, models of comfort and
elegance, even luxury, some of them fitted for making pleasure-cruises
all over the world; and the mere sailing boats, that seem utterly
useless but as racing machines to skim like butterflies over some quiet
sea, with their decks as often as not half under water--“a sort of metal
torpedo with two or three balloons fixed on to it.” This is a pastime as
expensive as the turf, and sometimes as unsatisfactory to the amateurs
who seek social glory thereby. Not all the gentlemen who swagger about
in blue jackets here are so much at home on the ocean wave as for the
nonce they would fain appear. Not all those big and smart craft so much
admired in the roads of Cowes are very familiar with the breeze or the
billow of the open sea. The sailing masters and crews of some of them
must have a good easy time of it; and one suspects they prefer being in
the service of a fine-weather sailor, whose purse is his main
qualification for seamanship, to taking orders from some old salt who
knows the ropes as well as they do. We remember Jack Brag and his
skipper Bung. But there are yachtsmen of another school, whose blood has
the salt in it that goes so far to make England what it is, men who,
without having the means to own idle vessels, dearly love playing the
mariner in good earnest, and can spend no happier holiday than in
working some small craft with their own hands, taking rough and smooth
as it comes, getting health and pleasure out of return for a month or so
to something like the old Viking life, and all its tingling charm of a
struggle with the forces of nature. Sailors of this stamp can here buy
or hire craft of all kinds, but perhaps more cheaply at other ports on
the Solent, for it is not only at regatta-time that Cowes has a name for
high charges.
The Solent with its almost landlocked waters, its many creeks, and its
havens of refuge never more than a few miles off, makes a good
cruising-ground for small craft such as can be sailed by the owner with
the help of one or two hands working for love or money. Yet there are
special difficulties here in the broken shore-line, the shifting banks,
the shallows, and the treacherous currents, that call for some nautical
ability, and even local experience to interpret the many buoys and
beacons marking the channels of a watery labyrinth. The chief danger,
apart from an occasional rough sea and squalls to be looked out for
through openings in the land, is the violence of the tides, that
encounter one another from each end of the Solent, so as to produce the
peculiar result of a double high water--the ebb, after an hour or so,
being driven back up to Southampton by a fresh flow.
There are, of course, various yacht clubs that take the Solent for their
province; but the admiral of them all is the “Squadron,” one of the most
exclusive clubs in the world, whose members have the much coveted right
to fly St George’s white pennant on their yachts, and other privileges.
Its membership is the port for which some of the most sumptuous yachts
are fitted out. Many a millionaire would give a large slice of his
fortune for admission to this body; but ill-gotten gold that buys
titles, social advantages, and lordly yachts, is not an _Open Sesame_
here; and there are aspirants who know, like Spenser, what it is in this
matter “to have thy Prince’s grace and want _his_ peers’.” Princely,
royal or imperial patronage is seldom wanting for the regatta at the
beginning of August, with which, passing on to the coast from Goodwood,
the fashionable world disperses itself for the season in the blaze of
fireworks that marks the end of “Cowes week.” During this week, Cowes
becomes the focus of “smart” society, money and champagne flying over it
like sea spray, and all its accommodation crammed; indeed, it would have
no room for half its visitors, if not a few of them did not bring their
own quarters in the shape of the innumerable yachts that by day are
radiant with rainbow bunting, and by night illuminate the waters of
the
[Illustration: YACHTING AT COWES]
Solent with thousands of lights. It is said indeed that, of late years,
yachting begins to decline in fashion; that the expensive craft are
allowed to take longer holidays, and that “Cowes week” is not filled
with such a cloud of canvas. It may well be that our “smart set” find
the winds and waves disturbing to the calculations of Bridge.
During Cowes’ water-carnival, some of the finest yachts afloat may still
be seen at anchor off the R. Y. S. Clubhouse, standing out prominently
on the sea-front, with its flagstaff and jetty, at which only members
and officers of the navy are privileged to land, under the muzzles of a
miniature battery brought from Virginia Water for holiday service. This
building, whose glass gallery is the grand stand of yacht racing, has
been adapted from the old castle of Henry VIII., in the seventeenth
century used as a state prison. Here Sir William Davenant spent his
hours of confinement in writing an heroic poem, _Gondibert_, which one
fears to be hardly read nowadays, unless it makes part of prison
libraries. There are some score cantos of it, filling eight score or so
of folio pages; and this, as in the contemporary case of the bear and
the fiddle, brings the story only to the middle, for as the author puts
it in metaphors readily suggested at Cowes, “‘tis high time to strike
Sail, and cast Anchor (though I have run but half my Course) when at the
helm I am threatened with Death, who, though he can visit us but once,
seems troublesome, and even in the Innocent may beget such a gravity as
diverts the Musick of Verse.”
The parade of Cowes runs on beyond the castle, past gardened villas, to
open out as the Green, a strip of sward set with seats that make the pit
of the open-air theatre for which the Solent is stage in its
yacht-racing season. At the end of this is the point marked by a brick
ivy-clad mansion called Egypt, why so called, one knows not, unless that
the name, occurring elsewhere in England, seems sometimes connected with
gipsy memories. Did one wish to go gipsying, this end of Cowes was once
fairly well adapted for such purposes; but cottages of gentility keep on
spreading along the sea edge.
At Egypt is the bathing beach, from which the sea wall extends onward
towards a bank of wild shrubbery called the “Copse,” a miniature
Undercliff, where, rooted in singularly tenacious mud, an almost
impassable jungle offers scope for the adventurous imagination of youth.
This is skirted by a rough path above the shore, where at morn and eve
may be seen flesh and blood _replicas_ of Frederick Walker’s “Bathers,”
or of Mr Tuke’s “August Blue” scene, exhibited “without the formality of
an apparatus,” as the Oxford man in _Humphrey Clinker_ has it. As for
the bathing-machines further back, a guide-book of his generation states
that “from the manner in which they are constructed, and the position
they occupy, a person may safely commit himself to the bosom of Neptune
at almost any state of the tide.” Yet one may hint to strangers not
desirous of committing themselves to Abraham’s bosom, that the currents
run strong here, and that some parts of the shallow shore deepen
suddenly.
One of the sandiest bathing-places on this shore is at Gurnard’s Bay,
about two miles along, which has an hotel of its own and other
beginnings of a seaside resort. This used to be a landing-place from the
mainland; and here was the site of another Roman villa. The guide-books
of a future generation may have more to say about Gurnard’s Bay; but I
must ask the reader now to turn back to Cowes.
At the back of the town is its Church, built in the time of the
Commonwealth, that did not much foster church architecture; and behind
this stands the manorial mansion of Northwood Park in somewhat gloomy
grounds opened by funereally classical gates. The older parish church is
that of Northwood, some way inland, which itself, in its day, had been
an offshoot of Carisbrooke. Northwood Park hived for a time the foreign
nuns who lately swarmed to other quarters at Ryde. This mansion had long
been looked on by true blue Protestants as a half-way house to Rome,
when it was the home of William George Ward, a prominent name in the
“Oxford Movement” that so much shifted the Anglican establishment’s
centre of gravity. He went over to the Roman Church, and moved to
another house near Totland Bay, where his neighbour Tennyson had warm
words to say over his grave--
My friend, the most unworldly of mankind,
Most generous of all ultramontanes, Ward,
How subtle at tierce and quart of mind with mind,
How loyal in the following of thy Lord!
The chief hotels and lodging-houses are found on that part of the parade
east of the “Squadron,” which at one time occupied the Gloucester Hotel.
The crooked main street leads us to the river suburb of Mill Hill, and
to the floating bridge by which the Medina is crossed to East Cowes.
There has been talk of a tunnel here, as under broader channels; but the
amphibious folk of this port are still content with their ferry.
East Cowes, though at one time the more important side, has long been
eclipsed by its western neighbour. It may be described as a suburb of
ambitious roads mounting the wooded background from a rather mean
frontage, so as to bring into curious juxtaposition some characteristics
of Norwood and Rotherhithe. At the seaward end it has a short esplanade
of its own, from which is to be had a fine sunset view over the Solent.
The old fortress on this side has entirely disappeared. The most
interesting house here is Slatwoods, the boyhood’s home of Dr Arnold of
Rugby, his father having been collector of customs at this port. Arnold,
born in a house at West Cowes now marked by a tablet, but brought up on
the other side, always had
[Illustration: OSBORNE HOUSE]
an affection for Slatwoods, and slips of its great willow tree were
transplanted to his successive homes at Laleham, Rugby, and Fox How.
East Cowes is shut in by the grounds of East Cowes Castle and Norris
Castle, mansions of the modern Gothic period, that have had noble
occupants and royal guests. Norris Castle, at the point of the estuary
open to briny breezes from every quarter, was in 1833 tenanted by the
Duchess of Kent, sea-air having been ordered for her daughter’s precious
health. The Princess Victoria made here a collection of sea-weeds which
she presented to her friend Maria da Gloria, the girl-queen of Portugal;
and no doubt in this sequestered nook she was able to go about more
freely than at Bognor or Brighton. She seems to have much enjoyed her
stay on the Solent, probably then taking a fancy to this neighbourhood,
which in later life led to the purchase of Osborne, her favourite
residence when Balmoral was too bleakly bracing. The park begins beyond
the ascent out of East Cowes, extending along the wooded northern shore
towards the small inlet called King’s Quay, that pretends to be a
landing-place of King John, who, after signing Magna Charta, is
dubiously said to have sulked here among the pirates of the Island.