When Miss Rosedew and her niece came in to get ready for dinner, Amy
cried out suddenly, “Oh, only look at the roses, aunt; how they have
opened to–day! What delicious Louise Odier, and just look at General
Jacqueminot! and I do declare Jules Margottin is finer than he was at
Midsummer. I must cut a few, for I know quite well there will come a
great frost if I donʼt, and then where will all my loves be?”
Amyʼs prediction about the weather was as random a guess as we may find
in great authorities, who are never right, although they give the winds
sixteen points of the thirty–two to shuffle in. But it so turned out
that the girl was right—a point of the compass never hit till a day
too late by our weather–clerks.
That very same night such a frost set in as had not been known in
October for very nearly a century. It lasted nine nights and eight
days; twice the mercury fell more than half way from the freezing
point to zero, and the grass was crisp in the shade all day, though
the high sun wiped off the whiteness at noon wherever he found the
way to it. Boys rejoiced, and went mitching, to slide on the pools of
the open furzery: no boys since the time of their great–grandfathers
had done the heel–tap in October. But the birds did not appreciate
it. What in the world did it mean? Why, there were the hips not ripe
yet, and the hollyberries come to no colour, and half the blackberries
still too acid, and, lo! it was freezing hard enough to make a worm
cold for the stomach, even if you could get him! Surely there was some
stupid mistake of two months in the piperʼs almanac. All they could
say was that, if it were so, those impudent free–and–easy birds who
came sponging on them in the winter—and too stuck up, forsooth! to
live with them after sucking all the fat of the land, and winning their
daughters’ affections—those outlandish beggars—be hanged to them—had
got the wrong almanac too.
Why, they had not even heard the chatter, the everlasting high–fashion
clack, of those jerk–tail fieldfares yet; nor had a missel–thrush
come swaggering to bully a decent throstle that had sung hard all
the summer, just because his breast and his coarse–shaped spots were
bigger. Why, they had not even seen a clumsy short–eared owl flopping
out of the dry fern yet—much good might it do him, the fern that
belonged to themselves!—nor a single wedge of grey–lag geese, nor a
woodcock that knew his business. And those nasty dissolute quacking
mallards that floated in bed all day, the sluggards, and then wouldnʼt
let a respectable bird have a chance of a good nightʼs roost—there
they were still on the barley–stubble; please God they might only get
frozen!
And yet, confound it all, what was the weather coming to? You might
dig, and tap, and jump with both feet, and put your head on one side
in the most knowing manner possible, and get behind a tuft of grass,
and wait there ever so long, and devil a worm would come up! And,
as for the slugs, oh, donʼt let me hear of them! Though the thieves
had not all got home yet, they were ten degrees too cold for even an
oyster–catcherʼs stomach: feathers and pip, my dear fellow! it gives me
the colic to think of one. Put your head under my wing, Jenny Wren; oh,
my darling, how cold your beak is!
Such, so far as I could gather them, were the sentiments of the birds,
and their confabulation, when they went to roost, half an hour earlier
than usual—for bed is the warmest place after all; besides, what was
there to do?—on the 24th of October, 1859. And they felt the cold
rime settling down on grey twig, and good brown leaf. Yet some of the
older birds, cocks of long experience, buffers beyond all chaff, perked
one eye at the eastern heavens, before tucking it under the scapular
down—the eastern heavens all barred with murky red. Then they gave a
little self–satisfied tweedle, which meant to the ear of Melampus,
“Ah ha! an old bird like me knows something about the weather! Bless
my drumsticks and merrythought, I shanʼt be so cold and hungry, please
God, this time to–morrow night.”
Oh you little wiseacres, much you know what impendeth! A worse row than
all the mallards you grumble at could make in a thousand years will
spoil your roost to–morrow night. Think it a mercy if you do not get
your very feathers blown off of you—ay, and the tree of your ancestors
snapped beneath your feet—before this time to morrow night.
John Rosedew met the prettiest bird that ever had nest in the
New Forest, his own little duck of an Amy, in the passage by the
parlour–door, at eight oʼclock in the morning of that 25th of October.
He kissed her white forehead lovingly, according to early usage; then
he glanced at the weather–glass, and went nearer, supposing that his
short sight had cheated him.
“Why, Amy dear, you must have forgotten to set the glass last night.”
“No, indeed, papa. I set it very carefully. You know I can do it as
well as you can, since you showed me the way. It was just a little
hollow last night, and I moved the Verrier scale just a hundredth part
of an inch downwards, and then it was ten oʼclock.”
“Then may the Lord have mercy on all seafaring men, especially our poor
boatmen, and the dredging people off Rushford!”
Mr. Rosedew, as has been said before, was parson of Rushford as well as
of Nowelhurst. At the former place he kept a curate, but looked after
the poor people none the less, for the distance was only six miles; and
now, as his legs were getting stiff, he had bought Coræbus to help him.
Rushford lies towards the eastern end of the great Hurst shingle bank,
the most dangerous part of Christchurch Bay, being fully exposed to the
south–west gales, and just in the run of the double tide; in the eddy
of the Needles.
“Why, what is the matter, papa? Even if it rains, it wonʼt hurt them
much. And itʼs as lovely a morning as ever was seen, and the white
frost sparkling beautifully. What a magnificent sunrise! Or, at least,
a very strange one.”
“ʼSibi temperat unda carinis.’ All is smooth for the present. But I
heard the lash of the ground–sea last night, when I lay awake. Fetch
my telescope, darling, and come with me to the green room. We can see
thence to St. Albanʼs Head; but the danger is for those beyond it. All
the ships on this side of it will have time to work up the Solent.
Never before have I known the mercury fall as it has done now. An inch
and a tenth in only ten hours!”
When they went to bed on the previous night, the quicksilver stood at
30° 10´. Now it was at 29°, and cupped like the bottom of a champagne
bottle, which showed that it still fell rapidly. But as yet the silver
of the frost was sparkling on the lawn, and the morning sun looked up
the heavens, as if he felt all right. Nevertheless, it was but show:
he is bound to make the best of it, and, like all other warm–hearted
beings, sometimes has sorry work there.
When they saw that no large craft had rounded St. Albanʼs Head, only
that the poor cement–dredgers were working away at septaria, John and
his daughter went to breakfast, hoping that no harm would be, while
Miss Eudoxia lay in bed, and reflected on her own good qualities.
Amy came out after breakfast, without any bonnet or hat on, to make her
own observations. That girl so loved the open air, the ever glorious
concave, the frank palm of the hand of God—for in cities we get His
knuckles—that she felt as if she had not bowed before her Friend and
Maker, the all–giving, the all–loving One, until she had paid her
orisons and sung her morning hymn with His own ceiling over her. So now
she walked beneath the branches laden with His jewellery, and over the
ground hard–trodden by ministers doing His will, and beside the spear
and the flat–grass, chilled with the awe of His breath, and among the
wailing flowers, wailing and black and shrivelled up, because His face
was cold to them.
For these poor Amy grieved sadly, for she was just beginning to care
again for the things whose roots were outside of her. Lo the bright
chrysanthemums, plumed, reflex, and fimbriate; lo the gorgeous dahlias,
bosses quilled and plaited tight, and wrought with depth of colour;
and then the elegant asters, cushioned, cochleate, praying only to
have their eyes looked into; most of all, her own sweet roses, chosen
flowers of the chosen land—they hung their heads, and stuck together,
as brown as a quartered apple. Who could look at them, who could think
of them, and not feel as if some of herself were dead?
Now, walking there, this youthful maiden, fairest of all His works
and purest, began to observe, as He has taught us, the delicacies,
the pores, and glints of the grand universal footprint. Not that the
girl perceived one–tenth of the things being done around her, any more
than I can tell them; for observation grows from as well as begets
experience; and the girlish mind (and the boyish too, at any rate for
the most part) has very lax and indefinite communion with nature. How
seldom do we meet a lady who knows what way the wind is! They all
believe that it must freeze harder when the sky is cloudy; not one in
fifty but trembles more at the thunder than at the lightning.
Yet Amy, with true womanʼs instinct, being alarmed for the lives of
others, after her fatherʼs prediction, looked around her narrowly. And
first her eyes went upwards, and they were right in doing so. Of the
sky she knew less than nothing—although herself well known there; but
the trees—come now, she was perfectly sure she knew something about
the trees. So you do, you darling; and yet a very wee little; though
more than half the ladies do. You know an elm from a wych–elm, and a
hornbeam from a beech; and what more can we expect of you?
The rime upon the dark tree–boles and the forward push of the branches,
the rime of white fur, newly breathen but an hour ago, when a flaw
from the east came cat–like, and went through without moving anything;
this delicate down from the lips of morning, silk work upon the
night–fleece, was, as all most beautiful is, the first to fleet and
vanish. Changing into a doubtful glister, which you must touch to be
sure of it, then trickling away into beaded drops, like a tear which
will have no denial, it came down the older and harder rime, and
perhaps would bring that into its humour, and perhaps would get colder
and freeze again into little lumps, like a tap leaking. Then the white
face of the rough pillared trunks, pearled with glistening purity, was
bighted into with scoops and dark bays, like the sweep of a scythe in
the morning. On the bars of the gate, the silver harvest, spiked and
cropping infinitely, began to sheave itself away, and then the sheaves
were full ripe tears, and the tears ran down if you thought of them.
But the notable sight of all, at least to a loitering mind the most
striking, was to see how the hoar–frost gradually was lifting its light
wing from the grass. In little tufts and random patches—random to us
who know not why—the spangles, the spears, and the crusted flakes,
the fairy tinsel, the ermine of dew, the very down of moonlight, the
kiss of the sky too pure for snow, and the glittering glance of stars
reflected—all this loveliness, caught and fastened, by the nightʼs
halourgic, in one broad sheet of virgin white, was hovering off in
tufts and patches, as if a blind angel had breathed on it, with his
flight only guided by pity.
But through, and in, and between it all, the boles of the trees, and
the bars of the gate, the ridge of the ruts, and dapples of lawn, one
thing Amy observed which puzzled her, for even she knew that it was
a thing against all usage. The thaw was not on the south side or the
south–east side of anything, though the sickly sun was gazing there;
but the melting came from the north, and took the frost aback. She
wondered vainly about it, but the matter was simple enough, like most
of the things which we wonder at, instead of at our own ignorance. A
flaw of warm air from the north had set in; a lower warp which shot
through and threaded the cold south–eastern woof. This is not a common
occurrence. Since my vague, unguided, and weak observations began, I
have only seen it thrice. And on each of those three times it has been
followed by a fearful tempest. Usually, a frost breaks up with a shift
of the wind to the south–east, a gradual relaxing, a fusion of warmer
air, and a great effusion of damp, a blanket of clouds for the earth,
and a doubt in the sky how to use them. Then the doubt ends—as many
other doubts end—in precipitation. The wind chops round to the west of
south; the moisture condenses outside our windows, instead of starring
the inside; and then come a few spits of rain. But the rain is not
often heavy at first, although it is stinging and biting,—a rain which
is half ashamed of itself, as if it ought to be hail.
But, after all, these things depend on things we cannot depend
upon,—moods of the air to be multiplied into humours of the earth and
sea, and the product traversed, indorsed, divided, touched, and sliced
at every angle by solar, lunar, and astral influences.
“Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas.”
Lucky the man who knows when to take out his umbrella.
That morning, the north wind crept along, sponging the rime from the
grass, and hustling it rudely from the tree–sprays, on many of which
the black leaves draggled, frozen while yet in verdure. Then the sky
began to be slurred across with white clouds breathing out from it,
as a child breathes on the blade of a knife, or on a carriage window.
These blots of cloud threw feelers out, and strung themselves together,
until a broad serried and serrate bar went boldly across the heavens,
from south–east to north–west. It marked the point whence the gale
would begin, and the quarter where it would end. From this great
bar, on either side, dappled and mottled, like the wash of sepia on a
drawing, little offsets straggled away, and began to wisp with a spiral
motion, slow and yet perceptible.
This went on for an hour or two, darkening and deepening continually,
amassing more and more of the sky, gathering vapours to it, and
embodying as it got hold of them; but still there was some white wan
sunshine through the mustering cloud–blots and the spattering mud of
the heavens; and still the good folks who had suffered from chilblains,
and found it so much milder, exclaimed, “What a beautiful day!”
Then about noon a mock sun appeared, feeble, wild, and haggard, whose
mates on the crown and the east of the arc could scarcely keep him in
countenance. Over all this, and over the true sun and the cirrhous
outrunners, heavily drove at one oʼclock the laden and leaden cumulus,
blurred on the outskirts with cumulostrate, and daubed with lumps of
vapour which mariners call “Noahʼs arks.”
Then came the first sough of the wind, a long, prolonged, deep–drawn,
dry sob, a hollow and mysterious sound, that shivered through the brown
leaves, and moaned among the tree–boles. Away went every beast and bird
that knew the fearful signal: the deer lanced away to the holm–frith;
the cattle in huffs came belloking to the lew of the boughy trees; the
hogs ran together, and tossed their snouts, and skittered home from the
ovest; the squirrel hied to his hollow dray, the weasel slunk to his
tuffet lair, and every rabbit skipped home from grass. The crows and
the magpies were all in a churm; the heavy–winged heron flapped off
from the brook–side; the jar–bird flicked out from the ivy–drum; the
yaffingale darted across the ride with his strange discordant laugh;
even the creepers that ply the trees crept into lichened fastnesses,
lay flat to the bark, and listened.
Nor less the solid, heavy powers that have to stay and break the storm,
no less did they, the beechen clump, the funnelled glens, the heathery
breastwork, even the depths of forest night—whence common winds shrink
back affrighted—even the bastions of Norman oak, scarred by many a
tempest–siege, and buckled by the mighty gale of 1703,—one and all
they whispered of the stress of heaven impending.
First came fitful scuds of rain, “flisky” rain they call it, loose
outriders of the storm, spurning the soft ice, as they dashed by, and
lashing the woodmanʼs windows. Then a short dark pause ensued, in which
the sky swirled up with clouds, and the earth lay mute with terror.
Only now and then a murmur went along the uplands.
Suddenly, ere a man might say, “Good God!” or “Where are my children?”
every tree was taken aback, every peat–stack reeled and staggered,
every cot was stripped of its thatch, on the opposite side to that on
which the blow was expected.
The first squall of that great tempest broke from the dark south–east.
It burst through the sleet, and dashed it upwards like an army of
archers shooting; ere a man could stay himself one way, it had caught
him up from another. The leaves from the ground flew up again through
the branches which had dropped them; and then a cloud of all manner of
foliage, whirling, flustering, capering, flitting, soared high over the
highest tree–tops, and drove through the sky like dead shooting–stars.
All that afternoon, the squalls flew faster, screaming onward to one
another, furious maniacs dashing headlong, smiting themselves and
everything. Then there came a lull. So sudden that the silence was more
stunning than the turmoil. A pause for sunset; for brave men countless
to see their last of sunlight. That evening, the sundown gun from
Calshot was heard over all the forest. I remember to have expected
fully that the next flaw of air would come, like a heavy sigh, from the
south–west. The expectation showed how much I underrated the magnitude
of that broad stormʼs area. If the wind had chopped then, it would have
been only a hard gale, not a hurricane.
Like a wave of the sea, it came on solidly, and from the old direction;
no squall, no blast, any more; but one bodily rush of phalanxed air
through a chasm in the firmament. Black, and tossing stone and metal as
a girl jerks up her hat–plume, it swept the breadth of land and sea, as
bisons horded sweep the snow–drifts, as Niagara sweeps the weeds away.
Where the full force of that storm broke, any man must have been mad
drunk who attempted to go to bed. Houses unroofed, great trees snapped
off and flung into another tree, men caught like chaff from the
winnowing and dropped somewhere in pond or gravel–pit, the carrierʼs
van overthrown on the road, and three oaks come down to lie upon
it,—some blown–away people brought news of these things, and fetched
their breath up to tell them.
Our own staunch hearths rocked under us, and we looked for the walls to
fall in upon us, as every mad rush came plunging.
Miss Eudoxia sat with Amy, near the kitchen fire; at least where
the fire should have been, but the wind had quenched it long ago.
Near them cowered Jemima and Jenny, begging not to be sent to bed.
They had crawled up–stairs to see about it, and the floor came up to
them—so they said—like the shifting plate of the oven. The parlour
chimney–stack had fallen; but, in Godʼs mercy, clear and harmless from
the roof of the house. No fear of the thatch taking fire: that wind
would have blown out the fire of London.
Now as they sat, or crouched and sidled, watching the cracks of the
ceiling above, jumping every now and then, as big lumps of mortar
fell down the chimney, and shrinking into themselves, every time the
great stack groaned and laboured so, Miss Eudoxia, full of pluck, was
reading aloud—to little purpose, for she scarcely could hear her own
voice—the prayers which are meant to be used at sea, and the 107th
Psalm. And who shall say that she was wrong, especially as the devil is
supposed to be so busy in a gale of wind?
Jemima and Amy were doing their best to catch her voice at intervals.
As for Jenny, she did not care much what became of her now. She knew
at the last full moon that her sweetheart was thoroughly up for
jilting her; and now when she had ventured out—purely of her own
self–will—the wind had taken her up anyhow, and whisked her like a
snow–flake against the wash–house door. She was sure to have a black
eye in the morning, and then it would be all up with her; and Jemima
might go sweethearting, and she could not keep her company.
The roar through the wood, the yells at the corners, the bellowing
round the chimneys, the thunder of the implacable hurricane; any mortal
voice was less than a whisper into a steam–whistle. Who could tell what
trees were falling? A monster might be hurled on the roof, and not one
of them would know it until it came sheer through the ceiling. Amy
was pale as the cinders before her, but firm as the bars of iron, and
even trying to smile sometimes at the shrieks and queer turns of the
tempest. No candle could be kept alight, and the flame of the parlour
lamp quivered like a shirt badly pinned on a washing–line. But Amy was
thinking dearly of the father of the household, the father of the
parish, out in the blinding wind and rain, and where the wild waves
were lashing. And now and then Amy wondered whether it blew so hard in
London, and hoped they had no big chimneys there.
John Rosedew had taken his little bundle, in a waterproof case, and
set out on foot for Rushford, when the storm became unmistakeable. He
would not ride Coræbus; first because he would have found it impossible
to wipe him dry, secondly because the wind has such purchase upon a
man when he is up there on the pommel. So the rector strode off in his
stoutest manner, an hour or so before nightfall, and the rain went into
him, neck and shoes, before he got to the peat–rick. To a resolute man,
who feels sometimes that the human hide wants tanning, there are few
greater pleasures than getting basted and cracklined by the wet wind;
only it must not come too often, neither last too long.
So John was in excellent spirits, quelching along and going pop like
a ball of India–rubber, when he came on a weaker fellow–mortal, stuck
fast in a chair of beech–roots.
“Why, Robert!” said Mr. Rosedew, and nine–tenths of his voice went to
leeward; “Robert, my boy;—oh dear!”
That last exclamation followed in vain Johnʼs favourite old hat, which
every one in the parish loved, especially the children. The hat went
over the crest of the hill, and leaped into an oak–tree, and was seen
no more but of turtle–doves, who built therein next summer, and for
three or four generations; and all the doves were blessed, for the sake
of the man who sought peace and ensued it.
“Let me go after it,” cried Bob, with his knees and teeth knocking
together.
“To be sure I will,” replied John Rosedew—the nearest approach to
irony that the worst wind ever took him—“now, Robert, come with me.”
He hooked the light stripling, hard and firm, to his own staunch
powerful frame, and, like a steamer lashed alongside, forced him
across the wind–brunt. And so, by keeping the covered ways, by running
the grooves of the hurricane, they both got safe to Rushford; to
which achievement Bobʼs loving knowledge of every inch of the forest
contributed at least as much as the stern strength of the parson.
Pretty Bob had no right, of course, to be out there at that time; but
he had heard of a glorious company of the deathʼs–head caterpillar,
in a snug potato–field, scooped from out the woodlands. He knew that
they must have burrowed now, and so he set out to dig for them with
his little handfork, directly the thaw allowed him. Anything to divert
his mind, or rather revert it into the natural channel. He had dreamed
about sugar–plums, and Amy, and butterfly–nets, and Queens of Spain,
and his father scowling over all, until his brain, at that sensitive
time, was like a sirex, trying to get out but stuck fast by the
antennæ. Now, Bob, though awake to the little tricks and pleasant ways
of Nature, as observed in cricks and crannies, knew nothing as yet of
her broader moods, her purging sweeps, her clearances,—in a word,
he was a stranger to the law of storms. Therefore he got a bitter
lesson, and one which set him a thinking. John Rosedew, with his grand
bare head bent forward to the wind–blow, and the grey locks sweeping
backward—how Amy would have cried!—towed Bob Garnet down the combe
which spreads out to the sea at Rushford. The fall of the waves was
short and hard—no long ocean rollers yet, only an angry beating surf,
sputtering under the gravel–cliff.
They found some shelter in the hollow, which opens to the
south–south–west; for, though it was blowing as hard as ever, the wind
had not canted round yet; and the little village of Rushford, upon
which the sea is gaining so, was happy enough in its “bunney,” and
could keep its candles burning.
“Iʼll go home with the boy at sundown, when the gale breaks, as I hope
it will. His father will be in a dreadful way, and I know what that man
is. But I could not leave the boy there, neither could I go back again.”
So said John Rosedew, lulled by the shelter, feeling as if he had
frightened himself and all his household for nothing; almost ashamed
to show himself at Octavius Pellʼs sea–cottage, the very last dwelling
of the village. But Octave Pell knew better. He had not lived upon
that coast, fagging out as a cricketer of the Church of England, with
his feet and his hands ready always, and his spiked shoes holding
the ground,—he had not been on the outside of all things, hoping
for innings some day, without looking up at the skies sometimes, and
guessing about promotion. So he knew that his rector, whom he revered
beyond all the fathers of men or women—for he too was soft upon
Amy—he saw that his rector was right in coming, except for his own
dear sake.
John came in, with his shapely legs stuck all tight in the shrunk
kerseymere (shrunk, and varnished, and puckered like plaiting, from the
pelt of the rain), and by one hand still he drew the quenched and welyy
Bob. The wind was sucking round the cliff, and the door flew open hard
enough for a weak manʼs legs to go with it. But “Octave” Pell—as he
was called, because he would sing, though he could not—the Reverend
Octavius was of a sturdy order, well–balanced and steady–going. He drew
in his reeking visitors, and dried, and fed, and warmed them; Bob being
lodged in a suit of clothes which he could only inhabit sparsely. Then
Pell laid aside his rose–root pipe out of deference to his rector, and
made Bob drink hot brandy–and–water till he chattered more than his
teeth had done.
That curate was a fine young fellow, a B.A. of John Rosedewʼs college,
to whom John had given a title for orders—not sold it, as some rectors
do, for a twelvemonthʼs stipend. A tall, strong, gentlemanly parson,
stuck up in no wise, nor stuck down; neither of the High nor Low Church
rut, although an improvement on the old type which cared for none of
these things. He did his duty by his parish; and, as follows almost of
necessity, his parish loved and admired him. He never lifted a poor
manʼs pot–lid to know what he had for dinner; he never made much of
sectarian squabbles, nor tried to exorcise dissent. In a word, he kept
his place, because he felt and loved it.
Only two rooms had Pell to boast of, but he was wonderfully happy in
them. He could find all his property in the dark, and had only one
silver spoon. And the man who can be happy with one, was born with it
in his mouth. Those two rooms he rented from old Jacob Thwarthawse, or
rather from Mrs. Jacob, for the old man was a pilot on the Southampton
Water, and scarcely home twice in a twelvemonth. The little cot looked
like a boat–house at the bottom of the bunney; so close it was to the
high–water mark, that the froth of the waves and the drifting skates’
eggs came almost up to the threshold when the tide ran big, and the
wind blew fresh.
And in the gentle summer night—pray what is it in Theocritus? John
Rosedew could tell, but not I—at least, I mean without looking—
“Along the pinched caboose, on every side,
With mincing murmur swam the ocean tide.”
_Id._ xxi. 17.