CERTAINLY the preceding year, the seventh of my life, had been
weighted for us with comprehensive disaster. I have not yet
mentioned that, at the beginning of my Mother's fatal illness,
misfortune came upon her brothers. I have never known the
particulars of their ruin, but, I believe in consequence of A.'s
unsuccessful speculations, and of the fact that E. had allowed
the use of his name as a surety, both my uncles were obliged to
fly from their creditors, and take refuge in Paris. This happened
just when our need was the sorest, and this, together with the
poignancy of knowing that their sister's devoted labours for them
had been all in vain, added to their unhappiness. It was
doubtless also the reason why, having left England, they wrote to
us no more, carefully concealing from us even their address, so
that when my Mother died, my Father was unable to communicate
with them. I fear that they fell into dire distress; before very
long we learned that A. had died, but it was fifteen years more
before we heard anything of E., whose life had at length been
preserved by the kindness of an old servant, but whose mind was
now so clouded that he could recollect little or nothing of the
past; and soon he also died. Amiable, gentle, without any species
of practical ability, they were quite unfitted to struggle with
the world, which had touched them only to wreck them.
The flight of my uncles at this particular juncture left me
without a relative on my Mother's side at the time of her death.
This isolation threw my Father into a sad perplexity. His only
obvious source of income--but it happened to be a remarkably
hopeful one--was an engagement to deliver a long series of
lectures on marine natural history throughout the north and
centre of England. These lectures were an entire novelty; nothing
like them had been offered to the provincial public before; and
the fact that the newly-invented marine aquarium was the
fashionable toy of the moment added to their attraction. My
Father was bowed down by sorrow and care, but he was not broken.
His intellectual forces were at their height, and so was his
popularity as an author. The lectures were to begin in march; my
Mother was buried on 13 February. It seemed at first, in the
inertia of bereavement, to be all beyond his powers to make the
supreme effort, but the wholesome prick of need urged him on. It
was a question of paying for food and clothes, of keeping a roof
above our heads. The captain of a vessel in a storm must navigate
his ship, although his wife lies dead in the cabin. That was my
Father's position in the spring of 1857; he had to stimulate,
instruct, amuse large audiences of strangers, and seem gay,
although affliction and loneliness had settled in his heart. He
had to do this, or starve.
But the difficulty still remained. During these months what was
to become of me? My Father could not take me with him from hotel
to hotel and from lecture-hall to lecture-hall. Nor could he
leave me, as people leave the domestic cat, in an empty house for
the neighbours to feed at intervals. The dilemma threatened to be
insurmountable, when suddenly there descended upon us a kind, but
little-known, paternal cousin from the west of England, who had
heard of our calamities. This lady had a large family of her own
at Bristol; she offered to find room in it for me so long as ever
my Father should be away in the north; and when my Father,
bewildered by so much goodness, hesitated, she came up to London
and carried me forcibly away in a whirlwind of good-nature. Her
benevolence was quite spontaneous; and I am not sure that she had
not added to it already by helping to nurse our beloved sufferer
through part of her illness. Of that I am not positive, but I
recollect very clearly her snatching me from our cold and
desolate hearthstone, and carrying me off to her cheerful house
at Clifton.
Here, for the first time, when half through my eighth year, I was
thrown into the society of young people. My cousins were none of
them, I believe, any longer children, but they were youths and
maidens busily engaged in various personal interests, all
collected in a hive of wholesome family energy. Everybody was
very kind to me, and I sank back, after the strain of so many
months, into mere childhood again. This long visit to my cousins
at Clifton must have been very delightful; I am dimly aware that
it was--yet I remember but few of its incidents. My memory, so
clear and vivid about earlier solitary times, now in all this
society becomes blurred and vague. I recollect certain pleasures;
being taken, for instance, to a menagerie, and having a practical
joke, in the worst taste, played upon me by the pelican. One of
my cousins, who was a medical student, showed me a pistol, and
helped me to fire it; he smoked a pipe, and I was oddly conscious
that both the firearm and the tobacco were definitely hostile to
my 'dedication'. My girl-cousins took turns in putting me to bed,
and on cold nights, or when they were in a hurry, allowed me to
say my prayer under the bed-clothes instead of kneeling at a
chair. The result of this was further spiritual laxity, because I
could not help going to sleep before the prayer was ended.
The visit to Clifton was, in fact, a blessed interval in my
strenuous childhood. It probably prevented my nerves from
breaking down under the pressure of the previous months. The
Clifton family was God-fearing, in a quiet, sensible way, but
there was a total absence of all the intensity and compulsion of
our religious life at Islington. I was not encouraged--I even
remember that I was gently snubbed--when I rattled forth, parrot-
fashion, the conventional phraseology of 'the saints'. For a
short, enchanting period of respite, I lived the life of an
ordinary little boy, relapsing, to a degree which would have
filled my Father with despair, into childish thoughts and
childish language. The result was that of this little happy
breathing-space I have nothing to report. Vague, half-blind
remembrances of walks, with my tall cousins waving like trees
above me, pleasant noisy evenings in a great room on the ground-
floor, faint silver-points of excursions into the country, all
this is the very pale and shadowy testimony to a brief interval
of healthy, happy child-life, when my hard-driven soul was
allowed to have, for a little while, no history.
The life of a child is so brief, its impressions are so illusory
and fugitive, that it is as difficult to record its history as it
would be to design a morning cloud sailing before the wind. It is
short, as we count shortness in after years, when the drag of
lead pulls down to earth the foot that used to flutter with a
winged impetuosity, and to float with the pulse of Hermes. But in
memory, my childhood was long, long with interminable hours,
hours with the pale cheek pressed against the windowpane, hours
of mechanical and repeated lonely 'games', which had lost their
savour, and were kept going by sheer inertness. Not unhappy, not
fretful, but long,--long, long. It seems to me, as I look back to
the life in the motherless Islington house, as I resumed it in
that slow eighth year of my life, that time had ceased to move.
There was a whole age between one tick of the eight-day clock in
the hall, and the next tick. When the milkman went his rounds in
our grey street, with his eldritch scream over the top of each
set of area railings, it seemed as though he would never
disappear again. There was no past and no future for me, and the
present felt as though it were sealed up in a Leyden jar. Even my
dreams were interminable, and hung stationary from the nightly
sky.
At this time, the street was my theatre, and I spent long
periods, as I have said, leaning against the window. I feel now
that coldness of the pane, and the feverish heat that was
produced, by contrast, in the orbit round the eye. Now and then
amusing things happened. The onion-man was a joy long waited for.
This worthy was a tall and bony Jersey Protestant with a raucous
voice, who strode up our street several times a week, carrying a
yoke across his shoulders, from the ends of which hung ropes of
onions. He used to shout, at abrupt intervals, in a tone which
might wake the dead:
Here's your rope . . . .
To hang the Pope . . . .
And a penn'orth of cheese to choke him.
The cheese appeared to be legendary; he sold only onions. My
Father did not eat onions, but he encouraged this terrible
fellow, with his wild eyes and long strips of hair, because of
his godly attitude towards the 'Papacy', and I used to watch him
dart out of the front door, present his penny, and retire,
graciously waving back the proffered onion. On the other hand, my
Father did not approve of a fat sailor, who was a constant
passer-by. This man, who was probably crazed, used to wall very
slowly up the centre of our street, vociferating with the voice
of a bull,
Wa-a-atch and pray-hay!
Night and day-hay!
This melancholy admonition was the entire business of his life.
He did nothing at all but walk up and down the streets of
Islington exhorting the inhabitants to watch and pray. I do not
recollect that this sailor-man stopped to collect pennies, and my
impression is that he was, after his fashion, a volunteer
evangelist.
The tragedy of Mr. Punch was another, and a still greater
delight. I was never allowed to go out into the street to mingle
with the little crowd which gathered under the stage, and as I
was extremely near-sighted, the impression I received was vague.
But when, by happy chance, the show stopped opposite our door, I
saw enough of that ancient drama to be thrilled with terror and
delight. I was much affected by the internal troubles of the
Punch family; I thought that with a little more tact on the part
of Mrs. Punch and some restraint held over a temper, naturally
violent, by Mr. Punch, a great deal of this sad misunderstanding
might have been prevented.
The momentous close, when a figure of shapeless horror appears on
the stage, and quells the hitherto undaunted Mr. Punch, was to me
the bouquet of the entire performance. When Mr. Punch, losing his
nerve, points to this shape and says in an awestruck, squeaking
whisper, 'Who's that? Is it the butcher?' and the stern answer
comes, 'No, Mr. Punch!' And then, 'Is it the baker?' 'No, Mr.
Punch!' 'Who is it then?' (this in a squeak trembling with emotion
and terror); and then the full, loud reply, booming like a
judgement-bell, 'It is the Devil come to take you down to Hell,'
and the form of Punch, with kicking legs, sunken in epilepsy on
the floor,--all this was solemn and exquisite to me beyond
words. I was not amused--I was deeply moved and exhilarated,
'purged', as the old phrase hath it, 'with pity and terror'.
Another joy, in a lighter key, was watching a fantastic old man
who came slowly up the street, hung about with drums and flutes
and kites and coloured balls, and bearing over his shoulders a
great sack. Children and servant-girls used to bolt up out of
areas, and chaffer with this gaudy person, who would presently
trudge on, always repeating the same set of words--
Here's your toys
For girls and boys,
For bits of brass
And broken glass,
(these four lines being spoken in a breathless hurry)
A penny or a vial-bottell . . . .
(this being drawled out in an endless wail).
I was not permitted to go forth and trade with this old person,
but sometimes our servant-maid did, thereby making me feel that
if I did not hold the rose of merchandise, I was very near it. My
experiences with my cousins at Clifton had given me the habit of
looking out into the world--even though it was only into the
pale world of our quiet street.
My Father and I were now great friends. I do not doubt that he
felt his responsibility to fill as far as might be the gap which
the death of my Mother had made in my existence. I spent a large
portion of my time in his study while he was writing or drawing,
and though very little conversation passed between us, I think
that each enjoyed the companionship of the other. There were two,
and sometimes three aquaria in the room, tanks of sea-water, with
glass sides, inside which all sorts of creatures crawled and
swam; these were sources of endless pleasure to me, and at this
time began to be laid upon me the occasional task of watching and
afterwards reporting the habits of animals.
At other times, I dragged a folio volume of the _Penny Cyclopaedia_
up to the study with me, and sat there reading successive
articles on such subjects as Parrots, Parthians, Passion-flowers,
Passover and Pastry, without any invidious preferences, all
information being equally welcome, and equally fugitive. That
something of all this loose stream of knowledge clung to odd
cells of the back of my brain seems to be shown by the fact that
to this day, I occasionally find myself aware of some stray
useless fact about peonies or pemmican or pepper, which I can
only trace back to the _Penny Cyclopaedia_ of my infancy.
It will be asked what the attitude of my Father's mind was to me,
and of mine to his, as regards religion, at this time, when we
were thrown together alone so much. It is difficult to reply with
exactitude. But so far as the former is concerned, I thinly that
the extreme violence of the spiritual emotions to which my Father
had been subjected, had now been followed by a certain reaction.
He had not changed his views in any respect, and he was prepared
to work out the results of them with greater zeal than ever, but
just at present his religious nature, like his physical nature,
was tired out with anxiety and sorrow. He accepted the
supposition that I was entirely with him in all respects, so far,
that is to say, as a being so rudimentary and feeble as a little
child could be. My Mother, in her last hours, had dwelt on our
unity in God; we were drawn together, she said, elect from the
world, in a triplicity of faith and joy. She had constantly
repeated the words: 'We shall be one family, one song. One song!
one family!' My Father, I think, accepted this as a prophecy, he
felt no doubt of our triple unity; my Mother had now merely
passed before us, through a door, into a world of light, where we
should presently join her, where all things would be radiant and
blissful, but where we three would, in some unknown way, be
particularly drawn together in a tie of inexpressible beatitude.
He fretted at the delay; he would have taken me by the hand, and
have joined her in the realms of holiness and light, at once,
without this dreary dalliance with earthly cares.
He held this confidence and vision steadily before him, but
nothing availed against the melancholy of his natural state. He
was conscious of his dull and solitary condition, and he saw,
too, that it enveloped me. I think his heart was, at this time,
drawn out towards me in an immense tenderness. Sometimes, when
the early twilight descended upon us in the study, and he could
no longer peer with advantage into the depths of his microscope,
he would beckon me to him silently, and fold me closely in his
arms. I used to turn my face up to his, patiently and
wonderingly, while the large, unwilling tears gathered in the
corners of his eyelids. My training had given me a preternatural
faculty of stillness, and we would stay so, without a word or a
movement, until the darkness filled the room. And then, with my
little hand in his, we would walk sedately downstairs to the
parlour, where we would find that the lamp was lighted, and that
our melancholy vigil was ended. I do not think that at any part
of our lives my Father and I were drawn so close to one another
as we were in that summer of 1857. Yet we seldom spoke of what
lay so warm and fragrant between us, the flower-like thought of
our Departed.
The visit to my cousins had made one considerable change in me.
Under the old solitary discipline, my intelligence had grown at
the expense of my sentiment. I was innocent, but inhuman. The
long suffering and the death of my Mother had awakened my heart,
had taught me what pain was, but had left me savage and morose. I
had still no idea of the relations of human beings to one
another; I had learned no word of that philosophy which comes to
the children of the poor in the struggle of the street and to the
children of the well-to-do in the clash of the nursery. In other
words, I had no humanity; I had been carefully shielded from the
chance of 'catching' it, as though it were the most dangerous of
microbes. But now that I had enjoyed a little of the common
experience of childhood, a great change had come upon me. Before
I went to Clifton, my mental life was all interior, a rack of
baseless dream upon dream. But, now, I was eager to look out of
the window, to go out in the streets; I was taken with a
curiosity about human life. Even from my vantage of the window-
pane, I watched boys and girls go by with an interest which began
to be almost wistful.
Still I continued to have no young companions. But on summer
evenings I used to drag my Father out, taking the initiative
myself, stamping in playful impatience at his irresolution,
fetching his hat and stick, and waiting. We used to sally forth
at last together, hand in hand, descending the Caledonian Road,
with all its shops, as far as Mother Shipton, or else winding
among the semi-genteel squares and terraces westward by
Copenhagen Street, or, best of all, mounting to the Regent's
Canal, where we paused to lean over the bridge and watch
flotillas of ducks steer under us, or little white dogs dash,
impotently furious, from stem to stern of the great, lazy barges
painted in a crude vehemence of vermilion and azure. These were
happy hours, when the spectre of Religion ceased to overshadow us
for a little while, when my Father forgot the Apocalypse and
dropped his austere phraseology, and when our bass and treble
voices used to ring out together over some foolish little jest or
some mirthful recollection of his past experiences. Little soft
oases these, in the hard desert of our sandy spiritual life at
home.
There was an unbending, too, when we used to sing together, in my
case very tunelessly. I had inherited a plentiful lack of musical
genius from my Mother, who had neither ear nor voice, and who had
said, in the course of her last illness, 'I shall sing His
praise, _at length_, in strains I never could master here below'.
My Father, on the other hand, had some knowledge of the
principles of vocal music, although not, I am afraid, much taste.
He had at least great fondness for singing hymns, in the manner
then popular with the Evangelicals, very loudly, and so slowly
that I used to count how many words I could read silently,
between one syllable of the singing and another. My lack of skill
did not prevent me from being zealous at these vocal exercises,
and my Father and I used to sing lustily together. The Wesleys,
Charlotte Elliott ('Just as I am, without one plea'), and James
Montgomery ('Forever with the Lord') represented his predilection
in hymnology. I acquiesced, although that would not have been my
independent choice. These represented the devotional verse which
made its direct appeal to the evangelical mind, and served in
those 'Puseyite' days to counteract the High Church poetry
founded on 'The Christian Year'. Of that famous volume I never met
with a copy until I was grown up, and equally unknown in our
circle were the hymns of Newman, Faber and Neale.
It was my Father's plan from the first to keep me entirely
ignorant of the poetry of the High Church, which deeply offended
his Calvinism; he thought that religious truth could be sucked
in, like mother's milk, from hymns which were godly and sound,
and yet correctly versified; and I was therefore carefully
trained in this direction from an early date. But my spirit had
rebelled against some of these hymns, especially against those
written--a mighty multitude--by Horatius Bonar; naughtily
refusing to read Bonar's 'I heard the voice of Jesus say' to my
Mother in our Pimlico lodgings. A secret hostility to this
particular form of effusion was already, at the age of seven,
beginning to define itself in my brain, side by side with an
unctuous infantile conformity.
I find a difficulty in recalling the precise nature of the
religious instruction which my Father gave me at this time. It
was incessant, and it was founded on the close inspection of the
Bible, particularly of the epistles of the New Testament. This
summer, as my eighth year advanced, we read the 'Epistle to the
Hebrews', with very great deliberation, stopping every moment,
that my Father might expound it, verse by verse. The
extraordinary beauty of the language--for instance, the matchless
cadences and images of the first chapter--made a certain
impression upon my imagination, and were (I think) my earliest
initiation into the magic of literature. I was incapable of
defining what I felt, but I certainly had a grip in the throat,
which was in its essence a purely aesthetic emotion, when my
Father read, in his pure, large, ringing voice, such passages as
'The heavens are the works of Thy hands. They shall perish, but
Thou remainest, and they all shall wax old as doth a garment, and
as a vesture shalt Thou fold them up, and they shall be changed;
but Thou art the same, and Thy years shall not fail.' But the
dialectic parts of the Epistle puzzled and confused me. Such
metaphysical ideas as 'laying again the foundation of repentance
from dead works' and 'crucifying the Son of God afresh' were not
successfully brought down to the level of my understanding.
My Father's religious teaching to me was almost exclusively
doctrinal. He did not observe the value of negative education,
that is to say, of leaving Nature alone to fill up the gaps which
it is her design to deal with at a later and riper date. He did
not, even, satisfy himself with those moral injunctions which
should form the basis of infantile discipline. He was in a
tremendous hurry to push on my spiritual growth, and he fed me
with theological meat which it was impossible for me to digest.
Some glimmer of a suspicion that he was sailing on the wrong tack
must, I should suppose, have broken in upon him when we had
reached the eighth and ninth chapters of Hebrews, where,
addressing readers who had been brought up under the Jewish
dispensation, and had the formalities of the Law of Moses in
their very blood, the apostle battles with their dangerous
conservatism. It is a very noble piece of spiritual casuistry,
but it is signally unfitted for the comprehension of a child.
Suddenly by my flushing up with anger and saying, 'Oh how I do
hate that Law,' my Father perceived, and paused in amazement to
perceive, that I took the Law to be a person of malignant temper
from whose cruel bondage, and from whose intolerable tyranny and
unfairness, some excellent person was crying out to be delivered.
I wished to hit Law with my fist, for being so mean and
unreasonable.
Upon this, of course, it was necessary to reopen the whole line
of exposition. My Father, without realizing it, had been talking
on his own level, not on mine, and now he condescended to me. But
without very great success. The melodious language, the divine
forensic audacities, the magnificent ebb and flow of argument
which make the 'Epistle to the Hebrews' such a miracle, were far
and away beyond my reach, and they only bewildered me. Some
evangelical children of my generation, I understand, were brought
up on a work called 'Line upon Line: Here a Little, and there a
Little'. My Father's ambition would not submit to anything
suggested by such a title as that, and he committed, from his own
point of view, a fatal mistake when he sought to build spires and
battlements without having been at the pains to settle a
foundation beneath them.
We were not always reading the 'Epistle to the Hebrews', however;
not always was my flesh being made to creep by having it insisted
upon that 'almost all things are by the Law purged with blood,
and without blood is no remission of sin'. In our lighter moods,
we turned to the 'Book of Revelation', and chased the phantom of
Popery through its fuliginous pages. My Father, I think, missed
my Mother's company almost more acutely in his researches into
prophecy than in anything else. This had been their unceasing
recreation, and no third person could possibly follow the curious
path which they had hewn for themselves through this jungle of
symbols. But, more and more, my Father persuaded himself that I,
too, was initiated, and by degrees I was made to share in all
his speculations and interpretations.
Hand in hand we investigated the number of the Beast, which
number is six hundred three score and six. Hand in hand we
inspected the nations, to see whether they had the mark of
Babylon in their foreheads. Hand in hand we watched the spirits
of devils gathering the kings of the earth into the place which
is called in the Hebrew tongue Armageddon. Our unity in these
excursions was so delightful, that my Father was lulled in any
suspicion he might have formed that I did not quite understand
what it was all about. Nor could he have desired a pupil more
docile or more ardent than I was in my flaming denunciations of
the Papacy.
If there was one institution more than another which, at this
early stage of my history, I loathed and feared, it was what we
invariably spoke of as 'the so-called Church of Rome'. In later
years, I have met with stout Protestants, gallant 'Down-with-the-
Pope' men from County Antrim, and ladies who see the hand of the
Jesuits in every public and private misfortune. It is the habit
of a loose and indifferent age to consider this dwindling body of
enthusiasts with suspicion, and to regard their attitude towards
Rome as illiberal. But my own feeling is that they are all too
mild, that their denunciations err on the side of the anodyne. I
have no longer the slightest wish myself to denounce the Roman
communion, but, if it is to be done, I have an idea that the
latter-day Protestants do not know how to do it. In Lord
Chesterfield's phrase, these anti-Pope men 'don't understand
their own silly business'. They make concessions and allowances,
they put on gloves to touch the accursed thing.
Not thus did we approach the Scarlet Woman in the 'fifties. We
palliated nothing, we believed in no good intentions, we used (I
myself used, in my tender innocency) language of the seventeenth
century such as is now no longer introduced into any species of
controversy. As a little boy, when I thought, with intense
vagueness, of the Pope, I used to shut my eyes tight and clench
my fists. We welcomed any social disorder in any part of Italy,
as likely to be annoying to the Papacy. If there was a custom-
house officer stabbed in a fracas at Sassari, we gave loud thanks
that liberty and light were breaking in upon Sardinia. If there
was an unsuccessful attempt to murder the Grand Duke, we lifted
up our voices to celebrate the faith and sufferings of the dear
persecuted Tuscans, and the record of some apocryphal monstrosity
in Naples would only reveal to us a glorious opening for Gospel
energy. My Father celebrated the announcement in the newspapers
of a considerable emigration from the Papal Dominions by
rejoicing at 'this outcrowding of many, throughout the harlot's
domain, from her sins and her plagues'.
No, the Protestant League may consider itself to be an earnest
and active body, but I can never look upon its efforts as
anything but lukewarm, standing, as I do, with the light of other
days around me. As a child, whatever I might question, I never
doubted the turpitude of Rome. I do not think I had formed any
idea whatever of the character or pretensions or practices of the
Catholic Church, or indeed of what it consisted, or its nature;
but I regarded it with a vague terror as a wild beast, the only
good point about it being that it was very old and was soon to
die. When I turned to Jukes or Newton for further detail, I could
not understand what they said. Perhaps, on the whole, there was
no disadvantage in that.
It is possible that someone may have observed to my Father that
the conditions of our life were unfavourable to our health,
although I hardly think that he would have encouraged any such
advice. As I look back upon this far-away time, I am surprised at
the absence in it of any figures but our own. He and I together,
now in the study among the sea-anemones and starfishes; now on
the canal-bridge, looking down at the ducks; now at our hard
little meals, served up as those of a dreamy widower are likely
to be when one maid-of-all-work provides them, now under the lamp
at the maps we both loved so much, this is what I see--no third
presence is ever with us. Whether it occurred to himself that
such a solitude _a deux_ was excellent, in the long run, for
neither of us, or whether any chance visitor or one of the
'Saints', who used to see me at the Room every Sunday morning,
suggested that a female influence might put a little rose-colour
into my pasty cheeks, I know not. All I am sure of is that one
day, towards the close of the summer, as I was gazing into the
street, I saw a four-wheeled cab stop outside our door, and
deposit, with several packages, a strange lady, who was shown up
into my Father's study and was presently brought down and
introduced to me.
Miss Marks, as I shall take the liberty of calling this person,
was so long a part of my life that I must pause to describe her.
She was tall, rather gaunt, with high cheek-bones; her teeth were
prominent and very white; her eyes were china-blue, and were
always absolutely fixed, wide open, on the person she spoke to;
her nose was inclined to be red at the tip. She had a kind,
hearty, sharp mode of talking, but did not exercise it much,
being on the whole taciturn. She was bustling and nervous, not
particularly refined, not quite, I imagine, what is called 'a
lady'. I supposed her, if I thought of the matter at all, to be
very old, but perhaps she may have been, when we knew her first,
some forty-five summers. Miss Marks was an orphan, depending upon
her work for her living; she would not, in these days of
examinations, have come up to the necessary educational
standards, but she had enjoyed experience in teaching, and was
prepared to be a conscientious and careful governess, up to her
lights. I was now informed by my Father that it was in this
capacity that she would in future take her place in our
household. I was not informed, what I gradually learned by
observation, that she would also act in it as housekeeper.
Miss Marks was a somewhat grotesque personage, and might easily
be painted as a kind of eccentric Dickens character, a mixture of
Mrs. Pipchin and Miss Sally Brass. I will confess that when, in
years to come, I read 'Dombey and Son', certain features of Mrs.
Pipchin did irresistibly remind me of my excellent past
governess. I can imagine Miss Marks saying, but with a facetious
intent, that children who sniffed would not go to heaven. But I
was instantly ashamed of the parallel, because my gaunt old
friend was a thoroughly good and honest woman, not intelligent
and not graceful, but desirous in every way to do her duty. Her
duty to me she certainly did, and I am afraid I hardly rewarded
her with the devotion she deserved. From the first, I was
indifferent to her wishes, and, as much as was convenient, I
ignored her existence. She held no power over my attention, and
if I accepted her guidance along the path of instruction, it was
because, odd as it may sound, I really loved knowledge. I
accepted her company without objection, and though there were
occasional outbreaks of tantrums on both sides, we got on very
well together for several years. I did not, however, at any time
surrender my inward will to the wishes of Miss Marks.
In the circle of our life the religious element took so
preponderating a place, that it is impossible to avoid
mentioning, what might otherwise seem unimportant, the
theological views of Miss Marks. How my Father had discovered
her, or from what field of educational enterprise he plucked her
in her prime, I never knew, but she used to mention that my
Father's ministrations had 'opened her eyes', from which 'scales'
had fallen. She had accepted, on their presentation to her, the
entire gamut of his principles. Miss Marks was accustomed, while
putting me to bed, to dwell darkly on the incidents of her past,
which had, I fear, been an afflicted one. I believe I do her
rather limited intelligence no injury when I say that it was
prepared to swallow, at one mouthful, whatever my Father
presented to it, so delighted was its way-worn possessor to find
herself in a comfortable, or, at least, an independent position.
She soon bowed, if there was indeed any resistance from the
first, very contentedly in the House of Rimmon, learning to
repeat, with marked fluency, the customary formulas and
shibboleths. On my own religious development she had no great
influence. Any such guttering theological rushlight as Miss Marks
might dutifully exhibit faded for me in the blaze of my Father's
glaring beacon-lamp of faith.
Hardly was Miss Marks settled in the family, than my Father left
us on an expedition about which my curiosity was exercised, but
not until later, satisfied. He had gone, as we afterwards found,
to South Devon, to a point on the coast which he had known of
old. Here he had hired a horse, and had ridden about until he saw
a spot he liked, where a villa was being built on speculation.
Nothing equals the courage of these recluse men; my Father got
off his horse, and tied it to the gate, and then he went in and
bought the house on a ninety-nine years' lease. I need hardly say
that he had made the matter a subject of the most earnest prayer,
and had entreated the Lord for guidance. When he felt attracted
to this particular villa, he did not doubt that he was directed
to it in answer to his supplication, and he wasted no time in
further balancing or inquiring. On my eighth birthday, with bag
and baggage complete, we all made the toilful journey down into
Devonshire, and I was a town-child no longer.