heavy steel helmets with large red plumes, which caused the Mahrattas to
nickname them “The Red Headed Rascals.” On their shoulders were simple
epaulettes made of chains of some common white metal, one of which I
retrieved from a heap of rubbish fifty years after Assaye, and still
wear as a bracelet. The men could scarcely have deserved the name of
_Light_ if many of them weighed, as did my father at 18, no less than 18
stone, inclusive of his saddle and accoutrements! The fashion of long
hair, tied in “pig tails,” still prevailed; and my father often
laughingly boasted that the mass of his fair hair, duly tied with black
ribbon, had descended far enough to reach his saddle and to form an
efficient protection from sabre cuts on his back and shoulders. Mr.
Hooper estimates the total number of the British army at Assaye at
5,000; my father used to speak of it as about 4,500; while the _cavalry_
alone, of the enemy were some 30,000. The infantry were seemingly
innumerable, and altogether covered the plain. There was also a
considerable force of artillery on Scindias’ side, and, commanding them,
was a French officer whose name my father repeatedly mentioned, but
which I have unfortunately forgotten.[12] The handful of English troops
had done a full day’s march under an Indian sun before the battle began.
When the Nineteenth received orders to charge they had been sitting long
on their horses in a position which left them exposed to the _ricochet_
of the shot of the enemy, and the strain on the discipline of the men,
as one after another was picked off, had been enormous; not to prevent
them from _retreating_—they had no such idea,—but to stop them from
charging without orders. At last the word of command to charge came from
Wellesley, and the whole regiment responded with a _roar_! Then came the
fire of death and men and officers fell all around, as it seemed almost
every second man. Among the rest, as I have said, the colour-sergeant
was struck down, and my father, as was his duty, seized the flag from
the poor fellow’s hands as he fell and carried it, waving in front of
the regiment up to the guns of the enemy.
In one or other of the repeated charges which the Nineteenth continued
to make even after their commanding officer, Colonel Maxwell, had been
killed, my father found himself in hand to hand conflict with the French
General who was in command of the Mahratta artillery. He wore an
ordinary uniform and my father, having struck him with his sabre at the
back of his neck, expected to see terrible results from the blow of a
hand notorious all his life for its extraordinary strength. But
fortunately the General had prudently included a coat of armour under
his uniform; and the blow only resulted in a considerable dent in the
blade of my father’s sabre; a dent which (in Biblical language) “may be
seen unto this day,” where the weapon hangs in the study at Newbridge.
At another period of this awful battle the young Cornet dismounted
beside a stream to drink, and to allow his horse to do the same. While
so occupied, Colonel Wellesley came up to follow his example, and they
conversed for a few minutes while dipping their hands and faces in the
brook (or river). As they did so, there slowly oozed down upon them,
trickling through the water, a streamlet of blood. Of course they both
turned away in horror and remounted to return to the battle.
At last the tremendous struggle was over. An army of 4,500 or 5,000
tired English troops, had routed five times as many horsemen and perhaps
twenty times as many infantry of the warlike Mahrattas. The field was
clear and the English flag waved over the English Marathon.
After this the poor, wearied soldiers were compelled to ride back _ten
miles_ to camp for the night; and when they reached their ground and
dismounted, many of them—my father among the rest—fell on the earth and
slept where they lay. Next morning they marched back to the field of
Assaye and the scene which met their eyes was one which no lapse of
years could efface from memory. The pomp and glory and joy of victory
were past; the horror of it was before them in mangled corpses of men
and horses, over which hung clouds of flies and vultures. Fourteen
officers of his own regiment, whose last meal on earth he had shared in
convivial merriment, my father saw buried together in one grave. Then
the band of the regiment played “_The Rose Tree_” and the men marched
away with set faces. Long years afterwards I happened to play that old
air on the piano, but my father stopped me, “Do not play _that_ tune,
pray! I cannot bear the memories it brings to me.”
After Assaye my father fought at Argaon (or Argaum), a battle which Mr.
Turner describes as “even more decisive than the last”; and on December
14th he joined in the terrific storming of the great fortress of
Gawiljarh, with which the war in the Deccan terminated. He received
medals for Assaye and Argaum, just fifty years after those battles were
fought!
[Illustration:
_Charles Cobbe_,
1857.
]
After his return from India, my father remained at his mother’s house in
Bath till 1809, when he married my dear mother, then living with her
guardians close by, at 29, Royal Crescent; and brought her to Newbridge,
where they both lived, as I have described, with few and short
interruptions till she died in October, 1847, and he in November, 1857.
For all that half century he acted nobly the part to which he was
called, of landlord, magistrate and head of a family. There was nothing
in him of the ideal Irish, fox-hunting, happy-go-lucky, much indebted
Squire. There never was a year in his life in which every one of his
bills was not settled. His books, piled on his study table, showed the
regular payment, week by week, of all his labourers for fifty years. No
quarter day passed without every servant in the house receiving his, or
her wages. So far was Newbridge from a Castle Rackrent that though much
in it of the furniture and decorations belonged to the previous century,
everything was kept in perfect order and repair in the house and in the
stables, coach-houses and beautiful old garden. Punctuality reigned
under the old soldier’s _régime_; clocks and bells and gongs sounded
regularly for prayers and meals; and dinner was served sharply to the
moment. I should indeed be at a loss to say in what respect my father
betrayed his Anglo-Irish race, if it were not his high spirit.
At last, and very soon after the photograph which I am inserting in this
book was taken, the long, good life drew to its end in peace. I have
found a letter which I wrote to Harriet St. Leger a day or two after his
death, and I will here transcribe part of it, rather than narrate the
event afresh.
“Nov. 14th, 1857.
“Dearest Harriet,
“My poor father’s sufferings are over. He died on Wednesday evening,
without the least pain or struggle, having sunk gradually into an
unconscious state since Sunday morning. At all events it proved a most
merciful close to his long sufferings, for he never seemed even aware
of the terrible state into which the poor limbs fell, but became
weaker and weaker, and as the mortification advanced, died away as if
in the gentlest sleep he had known for many a day. It is all very
merciful, I can feel nothing else, though it is very sad to have had
no parting words of blessing, such as I am sure he would have given
me. All those he loved best were near him. He had Dotie till the last
day of his consciousness, and the little thing continually asked
afterwards to go to his study, and enquired, ‘Grandpa ‘seep?’ When he
had ceased to speak at all comprehensibly, the morning before he died
he pointed to her picture, and half smiled when I brought it to him.
Poor old father! He is free now from all his miseries—gone home to God
after his long, long life of good and honour! Fifty years he has lived
as master here. Who but God knows all the kind and generous actions he
has done in that half century! To the very last he completed
everything, paying his labourers and settling his books on Saturday;
and we find all his arrangements made in the most perfect and
thoughtful way for everybody. There was a letter left for me. It only
contained a £100 note and the words, ‘The last token of the love and
affection of a father to his daughter.’... ‘He is now looking so noble
and happy, I might say, so handsome; his features seem so glorified by
death, that it does one good to go and sit beside him. I never saw
Death look so little terrible. Would that the poor form could lie
there, ever! The grief will be far worse after to-day, when we shall
see it for the last time. Jessie has made an outline of the face as it
is now, very like. How wonderful and blessed is this glorifying power
of death; taking away the lines of age and weak distension of muscles,
and leaving only, as it would seem, the true face of the man as he was
beneath all surface weaknesses; the ‘garment by the soul laid by’
smoothed out and folded! My cousins and Jessie and I all feel very
much how blessedly this face speaks to us; how it is _not him_, but a
token of what he is now. I grieve that I was not more to him, that I
did not better win his love and do more to deserve it; but even this
sorrow has its comfort. Perhaps he knows now that with all my heart I
did feel the deepest tenderness for his sufferings and respect for his
great virtues. At all events the wall of _creed_ has fallen down from
between our souls for ever, and I believe that was the one great
obstacle which I could never overthrow entirely. Forbearing as he
proved himself, it was never forgotten. Now _all_ that divided us is
over.... It seems all very dream-like just now, long as we have
thought of it, and I know the waking will be a terrible pang when
_all_ is over and I have left _everything_ round which my heart roots
have twined in five and thirty years. But I don’t fear—how can I, when
my utmost hopes could not have pointed to an end so happy as God has
given to my poor old father? Everything is merciful about it—even to
the time when we were all together here, and when I am neither young
enough to need protection, or old enough to feel diminished
energies....”
I carried out my long formed resolution, of course, and started on my
pilgrimage just three weeks after my father’s death. Leaving Newbridge
was the worst wrench of my life. The home of my childhood and youth, of
which I had been mistress for nineteen years, for every corner of which
I had cared, and wherein there was not a room without its tender
associations,—it seemed almost impossible to drag myself away. To strip
my pretty bedroom of its pictures and books and ornaments, many of them
my mother’s gifts, and my mother’s work; to send off my harp to be sold;
and make over to my brother my private possessions of ponies and
carriage,—(luckily my dear dog was dead,)—and take leave of all the dear
old servants and village people, formed a whole series of pangs. I
remember feeling a distinct regret and smiling at myself for doing so,
when I locked for the last time the big, old-fashioned tea-chest out of
which I had made the family breakfast for twenty years. Then came the
last morning and as I drove out of the gates of Newbridge I felt I was
leaving behind me all and everything in the world which I had loved and
cherished.
I was going also, it must be said, not only from a family circle to
entire solitude, but also from comparative wealth to poverty.
Considering the interests of my eldest brother as paramount, and the
seriousness of his charge of keeping up the house and estate, my father
left me but a very small patrimony; amounting, at the rate of interest
then obtainable, to a trifle over £200 a year. For a woman who had
always had every possible service rendered to her by a regiment of
well-trained servants, and had had £130 a year pocket-money since she
left school, it must be confessed that this was a narrow provision. My
father intended me to continue to live at Newbridge with my brother and
sister-in-law; but such a plan was entirely contrary to my view of what
my life should thenceforth become, and I accepted my poverty cheerfully
enough, with the help of a little ready money wherewith to start on my
travels. I cut off half my hair, being totally unable to grapple with
the whole without a maid, and faced the future with the advantage of the
great calm which follows any immediate concern with Death. While that
Shadow hangs over our heads we perceive but dimly the thorns and pebbles
on our road.
A week after leaving Ireland I spent one night with Harriet St. Leger in
lodgings which she and her friend, Miss Dorothy Wilson, occupied on the
Marina at St. Leonard’s.
When I had gone to my room rather late that evening, I opened my window
and looked out for the last time before my exile, on an English scene.
There was the line of friendly lamps close by, but beyond it the sea,
dark as pitch on that December night, was only revealed by the sound of
the slow waves breaking sullenly on the beach beneath. It was like a
black wall before me; the sea and sky undistinguishable. I thought:
“To-morrow I shall go out into that darkness! How like to death is
this!”
CHAPTER
IX.
_LONG JOURNEY._
The journey which I undertook when my home duties ended at the death of
my father, would be considered a very moderate excursion in these latter
days, but in 1857 it was still accounted somewhat of an enterprise for a
“lone woman.” When I told my friends that I was going to Egypt and
Jerusalem, they said: “Ah, you will get as far as Rome and Naples, and
that will be very interesting; but you will find too many difficulties
in the way of going any further,” “When I say” (I replied) “that I am
going to Egypt and Jerusalem, I mean that to Egypt and Jerusalem I shall
go.” And so, as it proved, a wilful woman had her way; and I came back
after a year with the ever-delightful privilege of observing: “I told
you so.”
I shall not dream of dragging the reader again over the well-worn ground
at the slow pace of a writer of “_Impressions de Voyage_.” The best of
my reminiscences were given to the world, in _Fraser’s_ Magazine, and
reprinted in my _Cities of the Past_, before there was yet a prospect of
a railway to Jerusalem except in Martin’s picture of the “End of the
World”; or of a “_Service d’omnibus_” over the wild solitudes of
Lebanon, where I struggled ‘mid snows and torrents which nearly whelmed
me and my horse in destruction. I rejoice to think that I saw those holy
and wonderful lands of Palestine and Egypt while Cook’s tourists were
yet unborn, and Cairo had only one small English hotel and one solitary
wheel carriage; and the solemn gaze of the Sphinx encountered no
Golf-games on the desert sands.
My proceedings were very much like those of certain birds of the
farmyard (associated particularly with Michaelmas), who very rarely are
seen to rise on the wing but when they are once incited to do so, are
wont to take a very wide circle in their flight before they come back to
the barn door!
Paris, Marseilles, Rome, Naples, Messina, Malta, Alexandria, Cairo,
Jaffa, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Hebron, Dead Sea, Jordan, Beyrout, Lebanon,
Baalbec, Cyprus, Rhodes, Smyrna, Athens, Constantinople, Cape Matapan,
Corfu, Trieste, Adelsberg, Venice, Florence, Milan, Lucerne, Geneva,
Wiesbaden, Antwerp, London—such was my “swoop,” accomplished in 11
months and at a cost of only £400. To say that I brought home a crop of
new ideas would be a small way of indicating the whole harvest of them
wherewith I returned laden. There were (I think I may summarise), as the
results of such a journey, the following great additions to my mental
stock.
First. A totally fresh conception of the glory and beauty of Nature.
When crossing the Channel I fell into talk with a charming old lady and
told her how I was looking forward to seeing the great pictures and
buildings of Italy. “Ah,” she said, “but there is Italian _Nature_ to be
seen also. Do not miss it, looking only at works of art. _I_ go to Italy
to see it much more than the galleries and churches.” I was very much
astonished at this remark, but I came home after some months spent in a
villa on Bellosguardo entirely converted to her view. Travellers there
are who weary their feet and strain their eyes till they can no longer
see or receive impressions from the miles of painted canvas, the
regiments of statues, and the streets of palaces and churches wherewith
Italy abounds; yet have never spent a day riding over the desolate
Campagna with the far off Apennines closing the horizon, or enjoyed
nights of paradise, sitting amid the cypresses and the garlanded vines,
with the stars overhead, the nightingales singing, and the fireflies
darting around among the _Rose de Maggio_. Such travellers may come back
to England proud of having verified every line of _Murray_ on the spot,
yet they have failed to “see Italy” altogether. Never shall I forget the
revelation of loveliness of the Ægean and Ionian seas, of the lower
slopes of Lebanon, and of the Acropolis of Athens, seen, as I saw it
first, at sunrise. But when my heaviest journeys were done and I paused
and rested in Villa Niccolini, with Florence below and the Val d’ Arno
before me, I felt as if the beauty of the world, as I then and there saw
it, were joy enough for a lifetime. The old lines (I know not whose they
are) kept ringing in my ears.—
“And they shall summer high in bliss
Upon the hills of God.”
I shall quote here some verses which I wrote at that time, as they
described the scene in which I lived and revelled.
THE FESTA OF THE WORLD.
A Princess came to a southern strand,
Over a summer sea;
And the sky smiled down on the laughing land,
For that land was Italy.
The fruit trees bent their laden boughs
O’er the fields with harvest gold,
And the rich vines wreathed from tree to tree,
Like garlands in temples old.
And over all fell the glad sunlight,
So warm, so bright, so clear!
The earth shone out like an emerald set
In the diamond atmosphere.
Then down to greet that lady sweet
Came the Duke from his palace hall:
“I thank thee, gentle Sire,” she cried,
“For thy princely festival.”
“For honoured guests have towns ere now
Been decked right royally;
But thy whole land is garlanded
One bower of bloom for me!”
Then smiled the Duke at the lady’s thought,
And the thanks he had lightly won;
For Nature’s eternal Festa-day
She deemed for her alone!
A Poet stood by the Princess’s side;
“O lady raise thine eye,
The Giver of this great Festival,
He dwelleth in yon blue sky.
“Thy kinsman Prince hath welcomed thee,
But God hath His world arrayed
Not more for thee than yon beggar old
Who sleeps ‘neath the ilex shade.
“His sun doth shine on the peasant’s fields,
His rain on his vineyard pour,
His flowers bloom by the worn wayside
And creep o’er the cottage door.
“For each, for all is a welcome given
And spread the world’s great feast;
And the King of Kings is the loving Host
And each child of man a guest.”[13]
The beauty of Switzerland has at no time touched me as that of Italy has
always done. There is something in the sharp, hard atmosphere of
Switzerland (and I may add in the sharp, hard characters of the Swiss)
which disenchants me in the grandest scenes.
The second thing one learns in a journey like mine is, of course, the
wondrous achievements of human Art,—Temples and Churches, fountains and
obelisks, pyramids and statues and pictures without end. But on this
head I need say nothing. Enough has been said and to spare by those far
more competent than I to write of it.
Lastly, there is a thing which I, at all events, learned by knocking
about the world. It is the enormous amount of pure _human good nature_
which is to be found almost everywhere. I should weary the reader to
tell all the little kindnesses done to me by fellow-passengers in the
railways and steamers, and by the Captains of the vessels in which I
sailed; and of the trouble which strangers took to help me out of my
small difficulties. Of course men do not meet—because they do not
want,—such services; and women, who travel with men, or even two or
three together, seldom invite them. But for viewing human nature _en
beau_, commend me to a long journey by a woman of middle age, of no
beauty, and travelling as cheaply as possible, alone.
I believe the Psychical Society has started a theory that when places
where crimes have been committed are ever after “haunted” the
apparitions are not exactly good, old-fashioned _real_ ghosts, if I may
use such an expression, but some sort of atmospheric photographs (the
term is my own) left by the parties concerned, or sent telepathically
from their present _habitat_ (wherever that may be) to the scene of
their earthly suffering or wickedness. The hypothesis, of course,
relieves us from the very unpleasant surmise that the actual soul of the
victims of assassination and robbery may have nothing better to do in a
future life than to stand guard perpetually at the dark and dank
corners, cellars, and bottoms of stone staircases, where they were
cruelly done to death fifty or a hundred years before; or to loaf like
detectives about the spots where their jewelry and cash-boxes (_so_
useful and important to a disembodied spirit!) lie concealed. But the
atmospheric photograph or magic-lantern theory, whatever truth it may
hold, exactly answers to a sense which I should think all my readers
must have experienced, as I have done, in certain houses and cities; a
sense as if the crimes which had been committed therein have left an
indescribable miasma, a lurid, impalpable shadow, like that of the ashes
of the Polynesian volcano which darkened the sun for a year; or shall we
say, like the unrecognised effluvium which probably caused Mrs. Sleeman,
in her tent, to dream she was surrounded by naked murdered men, while 14
corpses were actually lying beneath her bed and were next day
disinterred?[14] Walking once through Holyrood with Dr. John Brown (who
had not visited the place for many years), I was quite overcome by this
sense of ancient crime, perpetuated as it seemed, almost like a physical
phenomenon in those gloomy chambers; and on describing my sensations,
Dr. Brown avowed that he experienced a very similar impression. It would
almost seem as if moral facts of a certain intensity, begin to throw a
cloudy shadow of Evil, as Romist saints were said to exhale an odour of
sanctity.
If there be a city in the world where this sense is most vivid, I think
it is Rome. I have felt it also in Paris, but Rome is worst. The air
(not of the Campagna with all its fevers, but of the city itself) seems
foul with the blood and corruption of a thousand years. On the finest
spring day, in the grand open spaces of the Piazza del Popolo, San
Pietro, and the Forum, it is the same as in the darkest and narrowest
streets. No person sensitive to this impression can be genuinely
light-hearted and gay in Rome, as we often are even in our own gloomy
London. Perhaps this is sheer fancifulness on my part, but I have been
many times in Rome, twice for an entire winter, and the same impression
never failed to overcome me. On my last visit I nearly died there and it
was not to be described how earnestly I longed to emerge, as if out of
one of Dante’s _Giri_, “anywhere, anywhere out of” this Rome!
On the occasion of my first journey at Christmas, 1857, I stopped only
three weeks in the Eternal City and then went on by sea to Naples. I was
ill from the fatigues and anxieties of the previous weeks, and after a
few half-dazed visits to the Colosseum, the Vatican, and Shelley’s
grave, I found myself unable to leave my solitary fourth-floor room in
the _Europa_. A card was brought to me one day while thus imprisoned,
bearing names (unknown to me) of “Mr. and Mrs. Robert Apthorp,” and with
the singular message: “Was I the Miss Cobbe who had corresponded with
Theodore Parker in America?” My first impression was one of alarm.
“What! more trouble about my heresies still?” It was, however, quite a
different matter. My visitors were a gentleman (a _real_ American
gentleman) and his wife, with two ladies who were all among Parker’s
intimate friends in America, and to whom he had showed my letters. They
came to hold out to me the right hands of fellowship; and friends indeed
we became, in such thorough sort that, after seven-and-thirty years I am
corresponding with dear Mrs. Apthorp still. She and her sister nursed me
through my illness; and thus my solitude in Rome came to an end.