Hannah, Jane, Fanny and Mary, these were the four sisters of the
Throgmorton family in the order of their respective ages. A brother they
had, but he comes into no part of this history. The world had taken him
when he was twenty-three. He left Bridnorth, the mere speck upon the
map it was and, with the wide affairs of life at his touch, the mere
speck it became in his memory. Stray letters reached Mary, his favorite
sister. Read aloud at the breakfast table, they came, bringing strange
odors of the world to those four girls. Vague emotions they experienced
as they heard these infrequent accounts of where he was and what he did.
Silently Fanny's imagination would carry her to the far places he wrote
of. Into the big eyes she had would rise a haze of distance across
which an untrained vision had power vaguely to transport her. Hannah
listened in a childish wonder. Jane made her sharp comments. It was
Mary who said--
"Why do men have the real best of it? He'll never come back to
Bridnorth again."
He never did come back. From the time their father and mother died they
lived in Bridnorth alone.
Theirs was the square, white early Victorian house in the middle of the
village through which the coach road runs from Abbotscombe to King's
Tracey.
That early Victorian house, the furniture it contained, the narrow strip
of garden in front protected from the road by low iron palings so that
all who passed could see in the front windows, the unusually large
garden at the back surrounded by a high brick wall, all these composed
the immediate atmosphere in which Mary and her three sisters had been
brought up from childhood.
It must be supposed that that condition of being overlooked through the
front windows was not without its effect upon their lives. If it takes
all sorts to make a world, it is all the variety of conditions that go
to make such sorts as there are. For it was not only the passers-by who
looked in at the Throgmorton windows and could have told to a fraction
of time when they had their meals, when Hannah was giving lessons to the
children she taught, those hours that Fanny was sitting alone in her
bedroom writing her verses of poetry. Also it was the Throgmorton girls
themselves who preferred the occupation of the rooms fronting the road
to those whose windows overlooked the shady and secluded garden at the
back.
This was the attraction of the stream for those who walk in quiet
meadows. There on the banks you will find the footpath of the many who
have passed that way. They sat at those front windows, sewing, reading,
often writing their letters on blotting pads upon their laps, scarcely
conscious that the little filtering stream of life in Bridnorth drew
them there. For had they been questioned on these matters, one and all,
severally or together they would have laughed, saying that for the
greater half of the year there was no life in Bridnorth to pass by, and
certainly none that concerned them.
Nevertheless it was the stream, however lightly they may have turned the
suggestion away. The passing of the postman, of the Vicar or the
Vicar's wife, these were the movements of life, such as you see in a
meadow stream and follow, dreaming in your mind, as they catch in the
eddies and are whirled and twisted out of sight. So they had dreamt in
their minds, in Bridnorth, these Throgmorton girls. So Mary had dreamed
the twenty years and more that dreams had come to her.
For the greater half of the year, they might have said there was no life
in Bridnorth. But from late Spring through Summer to the Autumn months
they must have claimed with pride that their Devon village had a life of
its own. The old coach with its four horses, beating out the journey
from Abbotscombe to King's Tracey, brought visitors from all parts;
generally the same every year. For a few months they leased whatever
furnished houses there were to be had, coming regularly every season for
the joy of that quiet place by the sea where there was a sandy beach to
bathe on, and lonely cliffs on which to wander their holidays away.
So the Throgmorton girls made friends with some whose lives lay far
outside the meadows through which the Bridnorth stream flowed peacefully
between its banks. To these friends sometimes they paid visits when the
Summer was passed. They went out of Bridnorth themselves by the old
coach, later returning, like pigeons homing, with the wind of the
outside world still in their wing feathers, restless for days until the
dreams came back again. Then once more it seemed a part of life to sit
at the window sewing and watch the postman go by.
There were regular visitors who came every summer, renewing their claim
from year to year upon the few houses that were to be let, so that there
was little available accommodation of that nature for any outsiders.
They called Bridnorth theirs, and kept it to themselves. But every
year, they had their different friends to stay with them and always
there was the White Hart, where strangers could secure rooms by the day
or the week all through the season.
The Bridnorth stream was in flood those days of the late Spring where
every afternoon the coach came rumbling up the hill past the
Throgmortons' house to set down its passengers at the hotel only a
little farther up the road.
Like the Severn bore it was, for coming from Abbotscombe down the
winding road that had risen with the eminence of the cliffs, the coach
could be seen descending by twists and turns and serpentine progressions
to the bottom of Bridnorth village, crossing the bridge that spans the
little river Watchett and climbing again with the contour of the cliffs
once more on its way to King's Tracey.
Leaning far out of one of the upper windows of the square, white house
or standing even at the gate in the iron paling, the little cloud of
dust or, in rainy weather, the black speck moving slowly like a fly
crawling down a suspended thread of cotton, could easily be seen two
miles away heralding the coming of the coach.
She who leant out of the window might certainly retire, closing it
slowly as the coach drew near. She who stood at the gate in the iron
palings might return casually into the house. But once they were out of
sight of those on the other bank of the Bridnorth stream, there would be
voices crying through the rooms that the coach was coming.
Thus, as it passed, there might four figures be seen at different
windows, who, however engrossing their occupations, would look out with
confessions of mild interest at the sound of the horses' hoofs on the
stony road, at the rattle of harness, the rumbling of wheels and,
casually, at the passengers come to Bridnorth.
Any visitor catching sight of these temperate glances from his box seat
on the coach might have supposed the eyes that offered them were so
well-used to that daily arrival as to find but little entertainment in
the event. From their apparent indifference, he would never have
believed that even their hearts had added a pulse in the beating, or
that to one at least that coach was the vehicle of Fate which any day
might bring the burden of her destiny.