with beautiful and dear children, and with the love of the best
husband in the world. I praise God with a full heart for His gifts;
but how often in the night I have wakened heart-hungry for the little
ones, and have held my breath and crushed back my sobs lest the dear
soul sleeping so placidly by my side should discover my inexplicable
trouble. In the nurseries that I shall have no more after to-day, the
memories of them have crowded about my knees like gentle little
ghosts. There were the screened fire-place and the tiny chairs which
in winter they drew near the blaze, and the window overlooking the
pleasance and a strip of the garden, where the wee faces crowded if I
were walking below. Things are just as they were: the little beds
huddled about the wall; the cheap American clock, long done ticking,
on the mantelshelf; the doll's house, staring from all its forlorn
windows, as lonely as a human habitation long deserted; the cupboard,
through the open doors of which you may see the rose-bedecked cups
that were specially bought for the nursery tea. Am I the same woman
that used to rustle so cheerfully down the nursery corridor to share
that happy afternoon tea? From the door, half denuded of its paint,
peachy little faces used to peep joyfully at my coming; while inside
there waited my little delicate one, long gone to God, who never ran
and played with the others. I can see her still, with the pleasure
lighting up her little, thin face, where she sat sedately, her scarlet
shoes to the blaze and her doll clasped to a tenderly maternal
breast.
They will tear down the wall paper to-morrow, and the pictures of
Beauty and the Beast, and those fine-coloured prints of children and
doggies and beribboned pussy-cats that the children used to love.
There is one of a terrier submitting meekly to be washed by an
imperious small mistress. One of my babies loved that terrier so
tenderly that he had to be lifted morning and night to kiss the black
nose, whence the oily shine of the picture is much disfigured at that
point. He is grown now and a good boy, but less fond of kissing, and
somehow independent of his father and of me. There on the window
shutter is a drawing my baby, Nella, made the year she died, a strange
and wonderful representation of a lady and a dog. I have never allowed
it to be washed out, and perhaps only mothers will understand me when
I say that I have kissed it often with tears.
I shall miss my nurseries bitterly. No one ever came there but myself
in those quiet afternoon hours, and my old Mary, my nurse, who nursed
them all from first to last. She surprised me once as I sat strangling
with sobs amid the toys I had lifted from their shelves, the
dilapidated sheep, the Noah's Ark, the engine, which for want of a
wheel lies on its side, and a whole disreputable regiment of battered
dolls and tin soldiers. On my lap there were dainty garments of linen
and wool, every one of which I kissed so often with a passion of
regret. I have kept my baby clothes selfishly till now, hidden away in
locked drawers, sweet with lavender. To-day I have parted with them.
They are gone to dress the Christmas babies at a great maternity
hospital. Each one I set aside to go tore my heart intolerably. May
the Christmas Babe who lacked such clothing in the frost and snow,
love the little ones, living or dead, to whom those tiny frocks and
socks and shirts once belonged! Giving them away, I seem to have
wrenched my heart from the dead children; each gift was a separate
pang. The toys, too, go to-morrow to the Sisters of Charity, who have
a great house near at hand. A Sister, a virginal creature whom I have
seen holding the puny babies of the poor to a breast innocently
maternal, has told me of the children who at Christmastide have no
toys. This year they shall not go without; so I am sending them
all--the doll's house and the rocking-horse, and all the queer
contents of the nursery shelves, and the fairy stories well thumbed,
with here and there a loose page, and the boxes of bricks and the
clockwork mouse--all, all my treasures.
Yet, if the children had all lived, I might yet have had my nurseries.
The three youngest died one after another: my smallest boy, whom I
have not ceased yet to regard as my baby, I kept in the nurseries as
long as I could. He has not yet outgrown his guinea-pigs, and his
bantams, his squirrels, and his litter of puppies. When he went to
school he commended each to my care, with tears he in vain tried
manfully to wink away. Dear little sweetheart, he gave way at last,
and we cried together passionately. But I wish he need not have gone
for another year. He was more babyish than the others, more content to
remain long my baby. His first letters from school were tear-stained
and full of babyish thoughts and reminiscences. But he is growing
ashamed of the softness, I can see, and talks of 'fellows,' and
'fielding,' and 'runs,' and 'wickets' in a way that shows me that my
baby has put on the boy.
It was not fair, I see, to have kept the nurseries so long. The boys
at the University, the girls, enjoying their first introduction to the
gay world, have wanted rooms for their friends, and generous as the
big house is, it does not do much more than hold its own happy brood.
The nurseries are to be made into a couple of charming rooms, the one
with a paper of tea-roses on a white satin ground, and yellow and
white hangings, and paint and tiles in the pretty grate. The other is
to be green and pink, with a suite of green furniture and rosy
hangings. I entered into it with zest as my girls debated it. But all
the time my heart cried out against the devastation of its dreams.
To-morrow, when they begin to dismantle my nurseries, I do not know
how I shall bear it. I feel to-night as if they were going to turn the
gentle inhabitants out into the night and rain, the shades of my
little children who used to sit round the fire of winter evenings, or
by the window in the long, exquisite summer days. It is like long,
long ago, when Nella and Cuckoo and Darling died.
XV
THE FIELDS OF MY CHILDHOOD
They lie far away, gray with the mists of memory, under a veil of
distance, half-silver, half-gold, like the gossamer, so far that they
might never have been save only in dreams. They are not nearly so real
as the Eastern world of the stories I read yesterday, but I know where
they lie--common fields nowadays, and seldom visited. Yet, there was a
child once who knew every inch of them as well as the ant her anthill,
or the silvery minnow her brown well under the stone cover, to which
one descends by ancient water-stained steps.
The fields are there, but their face somewhat changed, as other things
are changed. We were little ones when we came to live among them, in a
thatched house full of little nests of rooms, the walls of which were
run over by flowery trellises that made them country-like even by
candle-light. Of candle-light I have not much memory, for we went to
bed in the gloaming, when the long, long day had burned itself out and
the skies were washed with palest green that held the evening star;
and we slept dreamlessly till the golden day shot through the chinks
of the shutters, and we leapt to life again with a child's zest for
living. At the back of the house there was an overgrown orchard, a
dim, delicious place where the gnarled boughs made a roof against
heaven. It was our adventure, time and again, to escape through our
windows and wash our feet in the May dew before we were discovered.
One whole summer, indeed, these revels were hindered by a bull which
was pastured on the lush herbage. But how entrancing it was to hear
him roar at night, close by our bed's head, or to see his great shadow
cross the chink of moonlight in the shutter! Sometimes he ate the
rose-bushes that wreathed our window, and, rubbing his gigantic
flanks against the house-wall, bellowed, while we shook in bed in
delicious tremors, and imagined our cosy nest a tent in the African
desert, with lions roaring outside. I remember the rooms so well: the
chilly parlour, only used when we had grown-up visitors, for we were
there in charge of a nurse; the red-tiled kitchen, with its settle and
its little windows opening inward; the door that gave on a grass-grown
approach; and the stone seat outside, where we sat to shell peas, or
made 'plays' with broken bits of crockery and the shreds of shining
tin pared by the travelling tinker when he mended the porringers. I
remember the very cups and saucers from which we drank our rare
draughts of tea--delicate china, with sea-shells on it in tones of
gray, the varied shapes of which gave us ever-new interest.
As I look back, I can never see that house in unwinking daylight,
though it was perpetual summer then, and never a rainy day. Rooms and
passages are always dim with a subdued green light, the reflection, I
suppose, through the narrow windows wreathed with verdure, and from
the grass and the plaited apple-boughs. But the spirit of improvement
has laid all waste, has thrown the wee rooms into ample ones, has
changed the narrow windows for bays and oriels, has thinned the
apple-trees for the sake of the grass. There was once a pond, long and
green, with a little island in the midst, where a water-hen had her
nest. I always thought of it as the pond in Hans Andersen's _Ugly
Duckling_, and never watched the ducks paddling among the reeds that I
did not look to the sky to see the wild geese, that were
contemptuously friendly with the poor hero, flecking the pearl-strewn
blue. The pond is filled up now with the macadam of a model farmyard.
Iron and stone have replaced the tumble-down yellow sheds, where we
drank sheep's milk in a gloom powdered with sun-rays; the two
shrubberies have gone, and the hedge of wild roses that linked the
trees in the approach to the house. Naught remains save the thatched
roof, many feet deep, the green porch over the hall door, the stone
seat round the streaky apple-tree at the garden gate, and the garden
itself, where the largest lilies I have ever seen stand in the sun,
and the apple-trees are in the garden-beds, the holly-hocks elbow the
gooseberries, and the violets push out their little clumps in the
celery-bed.
But the fields. It is only to the ignorant all fields are the same; as
there are some who see no individualities in animals because they have
no heart for them. Here and there hedges have been levelled and dykes
filled, and now their places are marked by a long dimple in the land's
face. The well in the midst of one has been filled up, despite the
warning of an old mountain farmer that ill-luck would surely follow
whosoever demolished the fairy well. Over it grew a clump of briar and
thorn-trees, where one found the largest, juiciest blackberries; that
too is gone, but, practically, the fields remain the same. There is
the Ten Acre field, stretching so far as to be weirdly lonely at the
very far end. Every part of it was distinct. You turned to the left as
you entered by a heavy hedge of wild-rose and blackberry. There the
wild convolvulus blew its white trumpet gloriously and violets ran
over the bank under the green veil, and stellaria and speedwell made
in May a mimic heaven. I remember a meadow there, and yet again a
potato-digging, where we picked our own potatoes for dinner and grew
sun-burnt as the brown men and women who required so many cans of
well-water to drink at their work. Where the hedge curved there was a
little passage, through which the dyke-water flowed into the next
field. It was delightful to set little boats of leaf and grass upon
the stream, and to see them carried gaily by the current down that
arcade of green light. Some of the inquisitive ones waded after them,
and emerged wet and muddy in the next field. I preferred to keep the
mystery of the place, and to believe it went a long, long way. For
half the length of the field the water flowed over long grass that lay
face downward in it. To see it you had to lift the grass and the
meadow flowers. Once we were startled there in a summer dusk before
the hay was cut, when all the corn-crakes were crying out that summer
was in the land. As we threaded the meadow aisles, a heavy, dark body
leapt from its lair and into the dyke. It was a badger, we learnt
afterwards, and its presence there gave the place an attractive
fearsomeness. Half-way down, where a boundary hedge had once made two
fields of the Ten Acres, the low hedge changed to a tall wall of
stately thorn trees. Below their feet the stream ran, amber, pellucid,
over a line of transformed pebbles. By this we used to lie for hours,
watching the silver-scaled minnows as they sailed on. At the far end
there was watercress, and over the hedge a strange field, good for
mushrooms, but which bore with us a somewhat uncanny reputation.
Across it you saw the gray house-chimneys of the lonely house reputed
to be haunted. Opposite its door stood an old fort on a little hill, a
noted resort of the fairies. Any summer gloaming at all, you might see
their hundreds of little lamps threading a fantastic measure in and
out on the rath. I never heard that any one saw more of them than
those lights, which floated away if any were bold enough to approach
them, like glorified balls of that thistledown of which children
divine what's o'clock.
At the other side of the Ten Acres was a fantastic corner of grass,
which was always a miniature meadow. There swung the scarlet and black
butterflies which have flown into Fairyland, and there the corn-crake
built her nest in the grass. It was a famous corner for
bird's-nesting, which with us took no crueller form than liking to
part the thick leaves to peep at the pretty, perturbed mother-thrush
on her clutch. Sometimes we peeped too often, and she flew away and
left the eggs cold. We saw the world from that corner, for one could
see through the hedge on to the road by lying low where the roots of
the hedge-row made a thinness. We should not have cared about this if
it were not that we could look, unseen ourselves, at the infrequent
passer-by, for the hedge grew luxuriantly. Further down it became
partly a clay bank, and there on the coarse grass used to hang
snail-shells of all sizes, and, as I remember them, of shining gold
and silver. The inhabitant was the drawback to all that beauty, yet
when we found an empty house, it was cold, dull, and with the sheen
vanished.
Across the road was the moat-field, the great fascination of which was
in the wild hill that gave it its name. What the moat originally was I
know not. I think, now, it must have been a gravel-hill, for it was
full of deep gashes, of pits and quarries, run over by briar, alight
with furze-bushes. It must have been long disused, for the hedge that
was set around it--to keep the cattle out, perhaps--was tall and
sturdy, and grew up boldly towards the trees that studded it at
intervals. There was no other entry to it except by gaps we made in
the close hedge, and, wriggling through these, we climbed among briars
and all kinds of vegetation that made a miniature jungle overhead.
Near the top we emerged on stunted grass, with the wide sky over us,
and before us the champaign country stretching to the plains of
Meath, and the smoke of the city, and the misty sea. Southwards there
were the eternal hills which grow so dear to one, yet never so
intimate that they have not fresh exquisite surprises in store. We
threaded the moat by paths between the furze, on the golden
honey-hives of which fluttered moths like blue turquoise. The
dragon-fly was there, and the lady-bird and little beetles in emerald
coats of mail. And over that the lark soared in a wide field of air to
hail God at His own very gates. Bitter little sloes grew on the moat,
and blackberries in their season; and if you had descended into one of
the many cups of the place, even long before the sun had begun to
slant, you liked to shout to your companions and be answered cheerily
from the human world. The moat had an uncanniness of its own; it was
haunted by leaping fires that overran it and left no trace. You might
see it afar, suffused by a dull glare, any dim summer night. So have I
myself beheld it when I have crept through the dews on a nocturnal
expedition: and though one of the commonplace suggested that it might
have been the new moon rising scarlet behind the luxuriant vegetation
of the moat, that was in the unimaginative next day, and not when we
discussed the marvel in the scented darkness that comes between summer
eve and dawn.
Then there was the well-field, where a little stream that fed the well
clattered over pebbles, made leaps so sudden down tiny inclines that
we called the commotion a waterfall, and widened under a willow-tree
into a pool, brown and still, where, tradition said, had once been
seen a trout. For sake of this glorious memory we fished long with
squirming worms and a pin, but caught not even the silliest little
minnow. This small game we used to bag, by the way, at will, by simply
lowering a can into the green depths of the well, where there was
always a tiny silver fin a-sailing. Once we kept a pair three days in
the water-jug, and finally restored them to their emerald dark. The
well-field was in part marshy and ended in a rushy place, where
water-cresses grew thick, and a little bridge led into the
neighbour's fields. There we found yellow iris, and the purple bee
orchis, and fox-gloves.
Hard by was Nano's Field, which we affected only in the autumn, for
then we gathered crab-apples, of a yellow and pink, most delightful to
the eye. And also the particular variety of blackberry which ripens
first, and is large and of irregular shape, but, to the common
blackberry, what purple grapes are to the thin, green variety. And
again, there was the front lawn, where the quicken-berry hung in
drooping scarlet clusters above us, as we sat on a knoll, and a sea of
gold and white washed about us in May. But the fields make me
garrulous, and if I were to go on they that never tired the children
might weary the grown listener. Said I not they were seldom visited?
Yet their enchantment is still there for happy generations unborn. The
children and the fields and the birds we have always with us. I would
that for every child there might be the fields, to make long after a
dream of green beauty, though the world has grown arid. Because the
dream seems so sweet to me I have gossiped of it, but have not named
half its delicate delights, nor some of the great ones: as the romps
in the hay fields, the voyage of discovery after hens' nests, the
mysteries of that double hedge that is the orchard boundary, and the
hidden places in gnarled boughs, where you perched among the secrets
of the birds and the leaves, and saw the crescent moon through a
tender veil of enchantment while yet the orange of the sunset was in
the west.
THE END
Some of these stories have made their first appearance in the
pages of _The Pall Mall Gazette_, _The Speaker_, _The
Englishwoman_, _The Monthly Packet_, _Black and White_, and _The
Family Circle_, to the Editors of which I am indebted for their
courteous permission to reproduce them here.
_Printed by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh_.
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