|Jenny Lind sleeps in Malvern Priory Church; but Wynd's Point where she
died is four miles away up on the hills, in the middle of that noble
range of the Malverns that marches north and south from Worcester beacon
to Gloucester beacon.
It lies just where the white ribbon of road that has wound its way
up from Malvern reaches the slopes of Hereford beacon, and begins its
descent into the fat pastures and deep woodlands of the Herefordshire
country.
Across the dip in the road Hereford beacon, the central point of the
range, rises in gracious treeless curves, its summit ringed with the
deep trenches from whence, perhaps on some such cloudless day as
this, the Britons scanned the wide plain for the approach of the Roman
legions. Caractacus himself is credited with fortifying these natural
ramparts; but the point is doubtful. There are those who attribute the
work to----. But let the cabman who brought me up to Wynd's Point tell
his own story.
He was a delightful fellow, full of geniality and information which he
conveyed in that rich accent of Worcestershire that has the strength of
the north without its harshness and the melody of the south without its
slackness. He had also that delicious haziness about the history of
the district which is characteristic of the native. As we walked up
the steep road side by side by the horse's head he pointed out the
Cotswolds, Gloucester Cathedral, Worcester Cathedral, the Severn and
the other features of the ever widening landscape. Turning a bend in the
road, Hereford beacon came in view.
“That's where Cromwell wur killed, sir.”
He spoke with the calm matter-of-factness of a guide-book.
“Killed?” said I, a little stunned.
“Yes, sir, he wur killed hereabouts. He fought th' battle o' Worcester
from about here you know, sir.”
“But he came from the north to Worcester, and this is south. And he
wasn't killed at all. He died in his bed.”
The cabman yielded the point without resentment.
“Well, sir, happen he wur only captured. I've heard folks say he wur
captured in a cave on Hereford beacon. The cave's there now. I've never
sin it, but it's there. I used to live o'er in Radnorshire and heard
tell as he wur captured in a cave on Hereford beacon.”
He was resolute on the point of capture. The killing was a detail; but
the capture was vital. To surrender that would be to surrender the whole
Cromwellian legend. There is a point at which the Higher Criticism must
be fought unflinchingly if faith is not to crumble utterly away.
“He wur a desperate mischieful man wur Cromwell,” he went on. “He blowed
away Little Malvern Church down yonder.”
He pointed down into the woody hollow below where an ancient tower was
visible amid the rich foliage. Little Malvern Priory! Here was historic
ground indeed, and I thought of John Inglesant and of the vision of
Piers Plowman as he lay by the little rivulet in the Malverns.
“Left the tower standing he did, sir,” pursued the historian. “Now, why
should th' old varmint a' left th' tower standing, sir?”
And the consideration of this problem of Cromwellian psychology brought
us to Wynd's Point.
The day before our arrival there had been a visitor to the house, an
old gentleman who had wandered in the grounds and sat and mused in the
little arbour that Jenny Lind built, and whence she used to look out
on the beacon and across the plain to the Cots-wolds. He had gently
declined to go inside the house. There are some memories too sacred
to disturb. It was the long widowed husband of the Swedish saint and
singer.
It is all as she made it and left it. There hangs about it the sense of
a vanished hand, of a gracious spirit. The porch, with its deep, sloping
roof, and its pillars of untrimmed silver birch, suggesting a mountain
chalet, “the golden cage,” of the singer fronting the drawing-room
bowered in ivy, the many gables, the quaint furniture, and the quainter
pictures of saints, that hang upon the walls--all speak with mute
eloquence of the peasant girl whose voice thrilled two hemispheres,
whose life was an anthem, and whose magic still lingers in the sweet
simplicity of her name.
“Why did you leave the stage?” asked a friend of Jenny Lind, wondering,
like all the world, why the incomparable actress and singer should
surrender, almost in her youth, the intoxicating triumphs of opera for
the sober rôle of a concert singer, singing not for herself, but for
charity.
Jenny Lind sat with her Lutheran Bible on her knee.
“Because,” she said, touching the Bible, “it left me so little time for
this, and” (looking at the sunset) “none for that.”
There is the secret of Jenny Lind's love for Wynd's Point, where the
cuckoo--his voice failing slightly in these hot June days--wakes you in
the rosy dawn and continues with unwearied iteration until the shadows
lengthen across the lawn, and the Black Mountains stand out darkly
against the sunset, and the lights of Gloucester shine dimly in the
deepening gloom of the vast plain.
Jenny Lind was a child of Nature to the end, and Wynd's Point is Nature
unadorned. It stands on a woody rock that drops almost sheer to the
road, with mossy ways that wind through the larches the furze and the
broom to the top, where the wind blows fresh from the sea, and you come
out on the path of spongy turf that invites you on and on over the
green summits that march in stately Indian file to the shapely peak of
Worcester beacon.
Whether you go north to Worcester beacon or south over Hereford beacon
to Gloucester beacon, there is no finer walk in England than along these
ten miles of breezy highlands, with fifteen English counties unrolled
at your feet, the swifts wheeling around your path and that sense of
exhilaration that comes from the spacious solitude of high places. It
is a cheerful solitude, too, for if you tire of your own thoughts and of
the twin shout of the cuckoo you may fling yourself down on the turf and
look out over half of busy England from where, beyond 'the Lickey Hills,
Birmingham stains the horizon with its fuliginous activities to where
southward the shining pathway of the Bristol Channel carries the
imagination away with Sebastian Cabot to the Spanish main. Here you
may see our rough island story traced in characters of city, hill, and
plain. These grass-grown trenches, where to-day the young lambs are
grazing, take us back to the dawn of things and the beginnings of that
ancient tragedy of the Celtic race. Yonder, enveloped in a thin veil of
smoke, is Tewkesbury, and to see Tewkesbury is to think of the Wars of
the Roses, of “false, fleeting, perjured Clarence that stabbed me on the
field at Tewkesbury,” and of Ancient Pistol, whose “wits were thick as
Tewkesbury mustard.” There is the battlefield of Mortimer's Cross, and
far away Edgehill carries the mind forward to the beginning of that
great struggle for a free England which finished yonder at Worcester,
where the clash of arms was heard for the last time in our land and
where Cromwell sheathed his terrible sword for ever.
The sun has left the eastern slopes and night is already beginning to
cast its shadows over Little Malvern and the golf links beyond, and the
wide plain where trails of white smoke show the pathway of trains racing
here through the tunnel to Hereford, there to Gloucester, and yonder to
Oxford and London. The labourer is leaving the fields and the cattle are
coming up from the pastures. The landscape fades into mystery and gloom.
Now is the moment to turn westward, where
Vanquished eve, as night prevails,
Bleeds upon the road to Wales.
All the landscape is bathed with the splendour of the setting sun,
and in the mellow radiance the Welsh mountains stand out like the
far battlements of fairyland. Eastnor Castle gleams like a palace of
alabaster, and in the woods of the castle that clothe these western
slopes a pheasant rends the golden silence with the startled noise and
flurry of its flight.
The magic passes. The cloud palaces of the west turn from gold to grey;
the fairy battlements are captured by the invading night, the wind turns
suddenly chill, the moon is up over the Cotswolds. It is time to go....
Down in the garden at Wynd's Point a rabbit scurries across the lawn and
a late cuckoo returning from the hills sends a last shout through
the twilight. The songs of the day are done. I stand under the great
sycamore by the porch where through the hot hours the chorus of myriads
of insects has sounded like the ceaseless note of a cello drawn by an
unfaltering bow. The chorus has ceased. The birds have vanished, all
save a pied wagtail, loveliest of a lovely tribe, that flirts its
graceful tail by the rowan tree. From the midst of the foliage come
those intimate murmurs of the birds, half chatter, half song, that close
the day. Even these grow few and faint until the silence is unbroken.
And the birds and the beasts and the insects are drowned,
In an ocean of dreams without a sound.
Overhead the sky is strewn with stars. Night and silence have triumphed.
[Illustration: 0115]
[Illustration: 0116]