THE MANSION AND THE COTTAGE.
The first bright picture upon my memory was of Greenhurst, Lord Clare’s
ancestral home. It rests in my mind a background of gorgeous and hazy
confusion, indistinct and mellow as a sunset cloud. Then comes a misty
outline of distant mountains melting into the more clearly defined
middle distance, and in the foreground a beautiful stream sleeping
beneath old trees, sparkling through the hollows, and spreading out like
a lake in the green meadows. A lawn rose softly upward from the banks of
this river, broad and green as emerald. If you parted the soft grass, an
undergrowth of the finest moss met your view like velvet beneath a
wealth of embroidery. Clumps of trees shaded the lawn here and there,
and on either hand, so far as the eye could reach, a park of magnificent
old chestnuts, with a fine variety of oaks, filled the eye with the vast
wealth of their foliage.
A dozen avenues led through this park, some of them miles in length, and
almost all commanded some view of the old mansion. One revealed a gable
cutting picturesquely against the sky; another commanded the back
entrance, with its massive stonework, burdened with heavy armorial
bearings, and heaped with quarterings till the herald office itself
would have been puzzled to unravel them. A third opened upon the east
wing, with its broad bay windows curving into old stone balconies
covered with ponderous sculpture, its antique casements filled with
single sheets of plate glass which shone through the ivy like flashes of
a river between the trees that fringe it—thus was blended all that is
gay and cheerful in our times with the sombre magnificence of the long
ago, beautifully as we find the sunshine pouring its glory into the dark
bosom of a forest.
This view I remember best, for it was the first object that ever
fastened itself upon my memory. A waste of flower-beds, clumps of rich
trees, and the wilderness, as we called a tract of land in which all the
wildness of nature was carefully preserved, lay between the little
antique cottage that I was born in and Greenhurst.
Lord Clare had his own rooms in that wing of the building, and a
footpath bordered with wild blossoms, rich ferns, and creeping ivy,
wound from a flight of stone steps that descended from his apartments,
around the circular flower-beds, and through the wilderness to the
jessamine porch of our dwelling. It was a well-trodden path when I first
remember it; and no foot ever passed down its entire length but that of
Lord Clare. Even the gardeners felt that to be in that portion of the
grounds, after the master left his apartments, was an intrusion. Turner,
dear, good old Turner, visited us every day, but he always came down the
chestnut avenue. No other servant from the mansion ever came near us.
A Spanish woman who had learned but little English, was all the domestic
we had. Lord Clare had brought her from Malaga, and had she spoken his
language well, the most prying curiosity could have gained no
information regarding my parents from her.
Our cottage was the loveliest little dwelling on earth. White roses,
rich golden multifloras, and the most fragrant of honeysuckles covered
it to the roof. You were forced to put back a sheet of blossoms with
each hand like drapery every time you opened a casement. The stone porch
was sheeted over and fringed down with white jessamine: and the garden
that surrounded it was a perfect labyrinth of blossoms. Crimson fuchias,
purple and white petunias, verbenas of every tint, roses of every clime,
heliotrope and carnations made the earth gorgeous, and the air soft with
fragrance.
The peaked roof shot up among the branches of a noble elm tree, and when
there was a high wind I loved to watch the old rook’s nest sway to and
fro above the chimney tops, while the birds wheeled and cowered among
the branches like widowers at a funeral.
The interior of the house was like a cabinet. Pictures collected from
abroad, each a gem that might have been piled an inch deep with gold and
its value not yet obtained, hung upon the walls. Antique cabinets of
tortoise-shell and gold, lighted up with precious stones, stood in the
principal room; soft, easy chairs glowing with crimson velvet; tables of
Sèvres china, in which beds of flowers and masses of fruit glowed, as if
just heaped together by some child that had overburdened its little arms
in the garden; others of that fine mosaic only to be found in Italy;
carpets from Persia, from Turkey, and one Gobelin, rendered that cottage
one nest of elegance. Everything was in proportion, and selected with
the most discriminating taste. Small as the building was compared to
Greenhurst, it did not seem crowded, yet there was garnered up
everything that Lord Clare held most precious.
It was well for us, for he could not have lived away from the beautiful.
His taste, his sensuous enjoyment of material things might gain new zest
by brief contrasts of the hard and the coarse, but he would not have
endured them altogether. Thus it was often said that no man sustained
himself under privation or the toil of travel better than he did. He not
only endured but enjoyed it. The effort sharpened his appetite for the
luxurious and the beautiful. In his whole life, heart and soul, he was
an epicure.
Perhaps he had some motive beyond his own convenience in thus
surrounding my mother with objects a queen might have envied. He might
have wished to overwhelm her remembrance of the miserable gipsy cave in
the ravine at Granada by this superb contrast, or possibly it was only a
caprice, a natural desire to surround her and himself with things that
enrich the intellect and charm the sense. My mother thought it a proof
of affection, but she was a child. We often heap material benefits on
the being who has a right to our devotion as an atonement for the deeper
feeling which the heart cannot render. The man who truly loves requires
no stimulant from without. He is always surrounded by the beautiful.
Another might have feared that this sudden change of condition would
have set awkwardly on a creature so untutored as my mother—for remember
she was a mere child, not more than sixteen when I was born—but genius
adapts itself to everything; and if ever a woman of genius lived, that
woman was the gipsy wife of Lord Clare. His wife, I say—his wife!—his
wife! I will repeat it while I have breath; she was his wife. What had
the laws of England to do with a contract made in Spain? What—but I will
not go on. My blood burns—the wild Rommany blood of my mother—it has
turned his blood into fire that smoulders, but will not consume. There
are times when I hate myself for the English half of life that he gave
me. Yet I cannot think of him, so kind, so gentle, so full of
intellectual refinement, without a glow of admiration. It is his
people—his nation—his laws that I hate, not him—not his memory. Indeed,
at times, I feel the tears crowd into my eyes when I think of him. My
hate is a bitter abstraction after all. When I reflect, it glides from
him like rain from the plumage of an eagle.
You should have seen my mother in that beautiful home back of the
wilderness at Greenhurst. The moist climate of England refreshed her
beauty like dew; her lithe figure had become rounded into that graceful
fullness which we find in the antique statues of Greece, still the
elasticity, the wild freedom remained. She was more gentle, more quiet,
almost sleepily tranquil, because the fullness of her content arose from
perfect love and perfect trust. She had left nothing in Spain to regret;
and every hope that she held in existence was centred at Greenhurst.
Never did there exist a creature so isolated. She had no being, no
thought, save in her husband. In the wide, wide world he was her only
friend, her sole acquaintance even.
I do not think that she left the park once during her whole stay in
England. The noble little Arabian that she rode knew every avenue and
footpath in the enclosure, but never went beyond it. She did not seem to
feel that there was a world outside the shadow of those old trees. She
felt not the thralls of society, nor cared for its mandates more than
she had done in the barranco at Granada; but a delicious and broad sense
of freedom—an outgushing of her better nature made this, her new
existence, perfect heaven compared to that.
With time her intellect had started into vigorous life. A teacher so
beloved, with perceptions quick as lightning, had kindled up the rich
ore of her nature, and you could see the flash of awakened genius in
every change of her countenance. Still the world remained a dream to
her; she never thought of human beings except as they were presented to
her in books—and Lord Clare selected every volume that she read. He was
not likely to present knowledge of conventional life to a person
situated as she was, with a mind so acute and imaginative. No, it was
the lore of past ages that she studied. Those noble old authors of
Greece and Rome whom Clare understood so well, became familiar to her as
his own voice. Without having the least idea of it, she was deeply
imbued not only with classical knowledge, but with the lofty feelings
that inspired those ancient authors, who seldom find themselves echoed
with full tone in the mind of woman.
Think what a character hers must have been, with all this grand poetry
grafted into the wild gipsy nature.
Still my mother was not perfectly happy; a vague want haunted even her
tranquil and luxurious existence. It was a feeling, not a thought, the
shadowy longing of a heart loving to the centre, which finds half the
soul that should have answered it clothed in mystery. She could not
account for this hungry feeling. It was not suspicion—it was not a
doubt, but something deeper and intangible. The love which fills a bosom
like hers always flings its own shadow, for love is the sunshine of
genius, and shadows ever follow the pathway of the sun.
Still, her life was very happy, not the less so, perhaps, for these
wandering heart-mists. My birth had its effect also, for it seems to me
that no woman thoroughly sounds the depths of her soul till she becomes
a mother. I have read her journal at this period, and every sentence is
a rich, wild gush of poetry; you can almost feel a torrent of blissful
sighs warming the paper on which she wrote, such as a mother feels when
the first-born sleeps upon her bosom for the first time.