Talmash, and the Foreign Person, held a service apart. I was called
"Little Master," and went with the footman. The fellow's name, I
remember, was Jeremy. He used to talk to me, going and coming, as I sat,
in my fine Laced Clothes, and my hat with a plume in it, and my little
rapier with the silver hilt, perched on his broad shoulder. He used to
tell me that he had been a soldier, and had fought under Colonel Kirk;
and that he had a wife, who washed bands and ruffles for the gentlemen
of the Life Guard, and drank strong waters till she found herself in the
Roundhouse. Always on a Sunday morning, as the church-bells began to
ring, the Unknown Lady would give me a Guinea to put into the plate
after service. I remember that the year before she died, when I was big
enough to walk with my hand in Jeremy's, instead of being carried, that
he told me on Easter-Sunday morning that his wife was dead, and that he
had two children in a cellar who had no bread to eat. He cried a good
deal; and before we reached the church, took me into a strange room in a
back-street, where there were a number of men and women shouting and
quarrelling, and another, without his wig and with a great gash in his
forehead, sprawling on the ground, and crying out "Lillibulero!" and two
more playing cards on a pair of bellows. And they were all drinking from
mugs and smoking tobacco. Here Jeremy had something to drink, too, from
a mug. He put the vessel to my lips, and I tasted something Hot, which
made me feel very faint and giddy. When we were in the open air again,
he cried worse than ever. What could I do but give him my guinea? On our
return, to Hanover Square, the Lady asked me, according to her custom,
what was the text, and whether I had put my money into the plate. She
was not strict about the first; for I was generally, from my tenderness
of years, unable to tell her more than that the gentleman in the wig
seemed very angry with me, and the Pope, and the Prince of Darkness;
but she alway taxed me smartly about the Guinea. This was before the
time that I had learned to Lie; and so I told her how I had given the
piece of gold to Jeremy, for that his wife was no more, and his children
were in a cellar with nothing to eat. She stayed a while looking at me
with those blue eyes, which had first their bright fierceness in them
and then their kind and sweet tenderness. It was the first time that I
marked her eyes more than her dress and her diamonds. She took me in her
lap, and printed her lips--which were very soft, but cold--upon my
forehead.
"Child," she said, "did I use thee as is the custom, thou shouldst be
Whipped, not Kissed, for thy folly and disobedience. But you knew not
what you did. Here are two guineas to put into the plate next Sunday;
and let no rogues cozen you out of it. As for Jeremy," she continued,
turning to Mistress Talmash, "see that the knave be stripped of his
livery, and turned out of the house this moment, for robbing my
Grandson, and taking him on a Sabbath morning to taverns, among grooms,
and porters, and fraplers, and bullies."
Yes; the Unknown Lady was my Grandmother. I purpose now to relate to you
her History, revealed to me many years after her death, in a manner to
be mentioned at the proper time.
CHAPTER THE THIRD.
THE HISTORY OF MY GRANDMOTHER, WHO WAS A LADY OF CONSEQUENCE IN THE WEST
COUNTRY.
MY Grandmother was born at Bristol, about the year 1630, and in the
reign of King Charles the First. She came of a family noted for their
long lives, and of whom there was, in good sooth, a proverb in the West
setting forth that "Bar Gallows, Glaive, and the Gout, every Greenville
would live to a hundred." Her maiden name was Greenville: she was
baptised Arabella; and she was the only daughter of Richard Greenville,
an Esquire of a fair estate between Bath and Bristol, where his
ancestors had held their land for three hundred years, on a Jocular
Tenure of presenting the king, whenever he came that way, with a
goose-pie, the legs sticking through the crust. It was Esquire
Greenville's misfortune to come to his patrimony just as those unhappy
troubles were fomenting which a few years after embroiled these kingdoms
in one great and dismal Quarrel. It was hard for a gentleman of
consequence in his own county, and one whose forefathers had served the
most considerable offices therein,--having been of the Quorum ever since
the reign of King Edward the Third,--to avoid mingling in some kind or
another in the dissensions with which our beloved country was then torn.
Mr. Greenville was indeed a person of a tranquil and placable humour, to
whom party janglings were thoroughly detestable; and although he leant
naturally, as beseemed his degree, towards the upholding of his
Majesty's Crown and Dignity, and the maintenance in proper Honour and
Splendour of the Church, he was too good a Christian and citizen not to
shrink from seeing his native land laid waste by the blind savageness
of a Civil War. And although, he paid Cess and Ship-money without
murmuring, and, on being chosen a Knight of the Shire, did zealously
speak up in the Commons House of Parliament on the King's side (refusing
nevertheless to make one of the lip-serving crowd of courtiers of
Whitehall), and although, when churchwarden in his parish, he ever
preserved the laudable custom of Whitsun and Martinmas ales for the good
of the poor, and persisted in having the Book of Sports read from the
pulpit,--he was averse from all high-handed measures of musketooning,
and calivering, and gambriling those of the meaner sort, or those of
better degree (as Mr. Hampden, Mr. Pym, and Another whom I shudder to
mention), who, for Conscience' sake, opposed themselves to the King's
Government. He was in this wise at issue with some of his hotter
Cavalier neighbours, as, for instance, Sir Basil Fauconberg, who,
whenever public matters were under question, began with "Neighbour, you
must first show me Pym, Hampden, Haslerigge, and the rest, swinging as
the Sign of the Rogue's Head, and then I will begin to chop Logic with
you." For a long time Mr. Greenville, my Great-grandfather (and my
enemies may see from this that I am of no Rascal Stock), cherished hopes
that affairs might be brought to a shape without any shedding of Blood;
but his hope proved a vain and deceiving one; ungovernable passions on
either side caused not alone the drawing of the Sword, but the flinging
away of the Scabbard; and my Grandmother was yet but a schoolmaid at
Madam Ribotte's academy for gentlewomen at Bristol when that dreadful
sinful war broke out which ended in the barbarous Murther of the Prince,
and the Undoing of these kingdoms.
Mr. Greenville had two children: a son, whose name, like his own, was
Richard, and who was born some five years before his sister Arabella.
Even as a child this last named person was exceedingly beautiful, very
gracious, fair, grave, and dignified of deportment, with abundant brown
hair, and large and lustrous blue eyes, which, when the transient
tempests of childhood passed over her, were ever remarked as having the
wild, fierce look, shared in sometimes by the males of her family. Her
mother, to her sorrow, died when she was quite a babe. The Esquire was
passionately fond of this his only daughter; but although it was torture
for him to part with her, and he retained her until she was thirteen
years of age in his mansion-house, where she was instructed in reading
and devotion, pickling and preserving (and the distilling of strong
waters), sampler work, and such maidenly parts of education, by the
housekeeper, and by a governante brought from London,--he had wisdom
enough to discern and to admit that his daughter's genius was of a
nature that required and demanded much higher culture than could be
given to her in an old Country Seat, and in the midst of talk about
dogs, and horses, and cattle, and gunning and ploughing, and the
continual disputes of hot-headed Cavaliers or bitter Parliamentarians,
who were trying who should best persuade my Great-grandfather to cast in
his lot with one or the other of the contending parties. His son Richard
had already made his election, and, it is feared, by taking up supplies
on post obit from usurious money-scriveners in Bristol and London, had
raised a troop of horse for the service of the King. Moreover, Arabella
Greenville was of a very proud stomach and unbending humour. She might
be Led, but would not be Driven. She adored her father, but laughed at
the commands of the governante, and the counsels of the housekeeper, who
knew not how either to lead or to rule her. It was thus determined to
send her to Madam Ribotte's academy at Bristol,--for even so early as
King Charles's time had outlandish and new-fangled names been found for
Schools; and thither she was accordingly sent, with instructions that
she was to learn all the polite arts and accomplishments proper to her
station, that she was to be kept under a strict regimen, and corrected
of her faults; but that she was not to be thwarted in her reasonable
desires. She was to have her pony, with John coachman on the skewball
sent to fetch her every Saturday and holiday; was not to be overweighted
with tedious and dragging studies; and was by no means to be subject to
those shameful chastisements of the Ferula and the Rod, which, even
within my own time, I blush to say had not been banished from schools
for young gentlewomen. To sum up, Miss Arabella Greenville went to
school with a pocketful of gold pieces, and a play-chest full of
sweet-cakes and preserved fruits, and with a virtual charter for
learning as little as she chose, and doing pretty well as much as she
liked.
Of course my Grandmother ran a fair chance of being wholly spoiled, and
growing up to one of those termagant, mammythrept romps we used to laugh
at in Mr. Colley Cibber's plays. The schoolmistress fawned upon her,
for, although untitled, Esquire Greenville (from whom my descent is
plain), and he was so much respected in the West, that the innkeepers
were used to beseech him to set up achievements of his arms at the
hotels where he baited on his journeys, was one of the most considerable
of the County Gentry; the teachers were glad when she would treat them
from her abundant store of play-money; and she was a kind of divinity
among the schoolmaids her companions, to whom she gave so many cakes and
sweetmeats that the apothecary had to be called in about once a week to
cure many of surfeit. But this fair young flower-bed was saved from
blight and choking weeds, first, by the innate rectitude and nobility of
her disposition, which (save only when that dangerous look was in her
eyes) taught her to keep a rein over her caprices, and subdue a too warm
and vigorous imagination; next, by the entire absence of Vanity and
Self-Conceit in her mind,--a happy state, which made her equally alive
to her own faults and to the excellences of others; and, last, by her
truly prodigious aptitude for polite learning. I have often been told
that but for adverse circumstances Mrs. Greenville must have proved one
of the most learned, as she was one of the wittiest and best-bred, women
of her Age and Country. In the languages, in all manner of fine
needlework, in singing and fingering instruments of music, in medicinal
botany and the knowledge of diseases, in the making of the most cunning
electuaries and syllabubs, and even in Arithmetic,--a science of which
young gentlewomen were then almost wholly deficient,--she became, before
she was sixteen years of age, a truly wonderful proficient. A Bristol
bookseller spoke of printing her book of recipes (containing some
excellent hints on cookery, physic, the casting of nativities, and
farriery); and some excellent short hymns she wrote are, I believe, sung
to this day in one of the Bristol free-schools. But the talent for which
she was most shiningly remarkable was in that difficult and laborious
art of Painting in Oils. Her early drawings, both in crayons and Chinese
ink, were very noble; and there are in this House now some miniatures of
her father, brother, and school-companions, limned by her in a most
delicate and lovely fashion; but 'twas in oils and in portraiture of the
size of life that she most surpassed. She speedily out-went all that the
best masters of this craft in Bristol could teach her; and her
pictures--especially one of her Father, in his buff coat and
breastplate, as a Colonel of the Militia--were the wonder, not only of
Bristol, but of all Somerset and the counties adjacent.
About this time those troubles in the West, with which the name of
Prince Rupert is so sadly allied, grew to be of such force and fury as
to decide Mr. Greenville on going to London, taking his daughter
Arabella with him, to make interest with the Parliament, so that peril
might be averted from his estate. For although his son was in arms for
King Charles, and he himself was a gentleman of approved loyalty, he had
done nothing of an overt kind to favour King or Parliament. He thus
hoped, having ever been a peaceable and law-worthy gentleman, to
preserve his lands from peril, and himself and family from prosecution;
and it is a great error to suppose that many honest gentlemen did not so
succeed in the very fiercest frenzy of the civil wars in keeping their
houses over their heads, and their heads upon their shoulders. Witness
worthy Mr. John Evelyn of Wotton and Sayes Court, and many other persons
of repute.
While the Esquire was intent on his business at Westminster, and
settling the terms of a Fine, without which it seemed even his peaceable
behaviour could not be compounded, he lay at the house of a friend, Sir
Fortunatus Geddings, a Turkey merchant, who had a fair house in the
street leading directly to St. Paul's Church, just without Ludgate. The
gate has been pulled down this many a day, and the place where he dwelt
is now called Ludgate Hill. As he had much going to and fro, and was
afraid that his daughter might come to hurt, both in the stoppage to her
schooling, and in the unquietness of the times, he placed her for a
while at a famous school at Hackney, under that notable governante Mrs.
Desaguiliers. And here Mrs. Greenville had not been for many weeks ere
the strangest adventure in the world--as strange as any one of my
own--befel her. The terrible battle of Naseby had by this time been
fought, and the King's cause was wholly ruined. Among other Cavaliers
fortunate enough to escape from that deadly fray, and who were in hiding
from the vengeance of the usurping government, was the Lord Francis
V----s, younger son to that hapless Duke of B----m who was slain at
Portsmouth by Captain F----n. It seems almost like a scene in a comedy
to tell; and, indeed, I am told that Tom D'Urfey did turn the only merry
portion of it into a play; but it appears that, among other shifts to
keep his disguise, the Lord Francis, who was highly skilled in all the
accomplishments of the age, was fain to enter Mrs. Desaguiliers' school
at Hackney in the habit of a dancing-master, and that as such he taught
corantoes and rounds and qyres to the young gentlewomen. Whether the
governante, who was herself a stanch royalist, winked at the deception,
I know not; but her having done so is not improbable. Stranger to
relate, the Lord Francis brought with him a Companion who was, forsooth,
to teach French and the cittern, and who was no other than Captain
Richard, son to the Esquire of the West country, and who was likewise
inveterately pursued by the Usurper. The brother recognised his
sister--to what joy and contentment on both their parts I need not say;
but ere the false Dancing-Master had played his part many days, he fell
madly in love with Arabella Greenville. To her sorrow and wretchedness,
my poor Grandmother returned his Flame. Not that the Lord Francis stands
convicted of any Base Designs upon her. I am afraid that he had been as
wild and as reckless as most of the young nobles of his day; but for
this young woman at least his love was pure and honourable. He made no
secret of it to his fast friend, Captain Richard (my Grand-uncle), who
would soon have crossed swords with the Spark had any villany been
afloat; and he made no more ado, as was the duty of a Brother jealous of
his sister's fair fame, but to write his father word of what had
chanced. The Esquire was half terrified and half flattered by the honour
done to his family by the Lord Francis. The poor young man was under the
very sternest of proscriptions, and it was openly known that if the
Parliament laid hold on him his death was certain. But, on the other
hand, the Esquire loved his daughter above all things; and one short
half-hour, passed with her alone at Hackney, persuaded him that he must
either let Arabella's love-passion have its vent, or break her heart for
ever. And, take my word for it, you foolish parents who would thwart
your children in this the most sacred moment of their lives,--thwart
them for no reasonable cause, but only to gratify your own pride of
purse, avarice, evil tempers, or love of meddling,--you are but
gathering up bunches of nettles wherewith to scourge your own shoulders,
and strewing your own beds with shards and pebbles. Take the advice of
old John Dangerous, who suffered his daughter to marry the man of her
choice, and is happy in the thought that she enjoys happiness; and I
should much wish to know if there be any Hatred in the world so dreadful
as that curdled love, as that reverence decayed, as that obedience in
ruins, you see in a proud haughty daughter married against her will to
one she holds in loathing, and who points her finger, and says within
herself, "My father and mother made me marry that man, and I am
Miserable."
It was agreed amongst those who had most right to come to an agreement
in the matter, that as a first step the Lord Francis V----s should
betake himself to some other place of hiding, as more in keeping with
Mrs. Greenville's honour; but that, with the consent of her father and
brother, he should be solemnly betrothed to her; and that, so soon as
the troubles were over, or that the price which was upon his head were
taken off, he should become her husband. And there was even a saving
clause added, that if the national disturbances unhappily continued,
Mrs. Greenville should be privately conveyed abroad, and that the Lord
Francis should marry her so soon after a certain lapse of time as he
could conveniently get beyond sea. My Lord Duke of B----m had nothing to
say against the match, loving his brother, as he did, very dearly; and
so, in the very roughest of times, this truest of true loves seemed to
bid fair to have a smooth course.
But alas the day! My Grandmother's passion for the young Lord was a very
madness. On his part, he idolised her, calling her by names and writing
her letters that are nonsensical enough in common life, but which are
not held to be foolish pleas in Love's Chancery. When the boy and
girl--for they were scarcely more--parted, she gave him one of her rich
brown tresses; he gave her one of his own dainty love-locks. They broke
a broad piece in halves between them; each hung the fragment by a ribbon
next the heart. They swore eternal fidelity, devotion. Naught but Death
should part them, they said. Foolish things to say and do, no doubt; but
I look at my grizzled old head in the glass, and remember that I have
said and done things quite as foolish forty--fifty years ago.
Nothing but Death was to part them; and nothing but Death so parted
them. The Esquire Greenville, his business being brought to a pleasant
termination, having paid his Fine and gotten his Safe-Conduct and his
Redemption from Sequestration, betook himself once more to the West. His
daughter went with him, nourishing her love and fondling it, and
dwelling, syllable by syllable, on the letters which the Lord Francis
sent her from time to time. He was in hopes, he said, to get away to
Holland.
Then came that wicked business of the King's Murder. Mr. Greenville, as
became a loyal gentleman, was utterly dismayed at that horrid crime; but
to Arabella the news was as of the intelligence of the death of some
loved and revered friend. She wept, she sobbed, she called on Heaven to
shower down vengeance on the Murderers of her gracious Prince. She had
not heard from her betrothed for many days, and those who loved and
watched her had marked a strange wild way with her.
It was on the fourth of February that the dreadful news of the Whitehall
tragedy came to her father's house. She was walking on the next day very
moodily in the garden, when the figure of one booted and spurred, and
with the stains of many days' travel on his dress, stood across her
path. He was but a clown, a mere boor; he had been a ploughboy on her
father's lands, and had run away to join Captain Richard, who had made
him a trumpeter in his troop. What he had to say was told in clumsy
speech, in hasty broken accents, with sighs and stammerings and
blubberings; but he told his tale too well.
The Lord Francis V----s and Captain Richard Greenville--Arabella's
lover, Arabella's brother--were both Dead. On the eve of the fatal
thirtieth of January they had been taken captives in a tilt-boat on the
Thames, in which they were endeavouring to escape down the river. They
had at once been tried by a court-martial of rebel officers; and on the
thirtieth day of that black month, by express order sent from the Lord
General Cromwell in London, these two gallant and unfortunate gentlemen
had been shot to death by a file of musketeers in the courtyard of
Hampton Court Palace. The trumpeter had by a marvel escaped, and lurked
about Hampton till the dreadful deed was over. He had sought out the
sergeant of the firing party, and questioned him as to the last moments
of the condemned. The sergeant said that they died as Malignants, and
without showing any sign of Penitence; but he could not gainsay that
their bearing was soldier-like.
Arabella heard this tale without moving.
"Did the Captain--did my brother--say aught before they slew him?" she
asked.
"Nowt but this, my lady: 'God forgive us all!'"
"And the Lord Francis, said he aught?"
"Ay; but I dunno loike to tell."
"Say on."
"'Twas t' Sergeant tould un. A' blessed the King, and woud hev' t'
souldiers drink 's health, but they wouldno'. And a' wouldno' let un
bandage uns eyes; an' jest befwoar t' red cwoats foired, a' touk a long
lock o' leddy's hair from 's pocket and kissed un, and cried out 'Bloud
for Bloud!' and then a' died all straight along."
Mrs. Arabella Greenville drew from her bosom a long wavy lock of silken
hair,--his hair, poor boy!--and kissed it, and crying out "Blood for
Blood!" she fell down in the garden-path in a dead faint.
She did not Die, however, being spared for many Purposes, some of them
Terrible, until she was nearly ninety years of age. But her first state
was worse than death; she lying for many days in a kind of trance or
lethargy, and then waking up to raving madness. For the best part of
that year, she was a perfect maniac, from whom nothing could be got but
gibberings and plungings, and ceaseless cries of "Blood for Blood!" The
heir-at-law to the estate, now that the Esquire's son was dead, watched
her madness with a cautelous avaricious desire. He was a sour Parliament
man, who had pinned his faith to the Commonwealth, and done many
Awakening things against the Cavaliers, and he thought now that he
should have his reward, and Inherit.
It was so destined, however, that my Grandmother should recover from
that Malady. On her beauty it left surprisingly few traces. You could
only tell the change that had taken place in her by the deathly paleness
of her visage, by her never smiling, and by that Fierce Expression in
her eyes being now an abiding instead of a passing one. Beyond these,
she was herself again; and after a little while went to her domestic
concerns, and chiefly to the cultivation of that pleasing art of
Painting in Oils in which she had of old time given such fair promise of
excellence. Her father would have had several most ingenious examples of
History and Scripture pieces by the Italian and Flemish masters bought
for her to study by,--such copies being then very plentiful, by reason
of the dispersing of the collections of many noblemen and gentlemen on
the King's side; but this she would not suffer, saying that it were
waste of time and money, and, with astonishing zeal, applied herself to
the branch of portraiture. From a little miniature portrait of her
dead Lord, drawn by Mr. Cooper, she painted in large many fair and noble
presentments, varying them according to her humour,--now showing the
Lord Francis in his panoply as a man of war, now in a court habit, now
in an embroidered night-gown and Turkish cap, now leaning on the
shoulder of her brother, the Captain, deceased. And anon she would make
a ghastly image of him lying all along in the courtyard at Hampton
Court, with the purple bullet-marks on his white forehead, and a great
crimson stain on his bosom, just below his bands. This was the one she
most loved to look upon, although her father sorely pressed her to put
it by, and not dwell on so uncivil a theme, the more so as, in Crimson
Characters, on the background she had painted the words "Blood for
Blood," But whatever she did was now taken little account of, for all
thought her to be distraught.