We looked out the topography of Middleshire in a county-guide, which
spoke highly, as the phrase is, of Lackley Park, and took up our abode,
our journey ended, at a wayside inn where, in the days of leisure, the
coach must have stopped for luncheon and burnished pewters of rustic
ale been handed up as straight as possible to outsiders athirst with
the sense of speed. We stopped here for mere gaping joy of its
steep-thatched roof, its latticed windows, its hospitable porch, and
allowed a couple of days to elapse in vague undirected strolls and sweet
sentimental observance of the land before approaching the particular
business that had drawn us on. The region I allude to is a compendium
of the general physiognomy of England. The noble friendliness of the
scenery, its latent old-friendliness, the way we scarcely knew whether
we were looking at it for the first or the last time, made it arrest us
at every step. The countryside, in the full warm rains of the last
of April, had burst into sudden perfect spring. The dark walls of the
hedgerows had turned into blooming screens, the sodden verdure of lawn
and meadow been washed over with a lighter brush. We went forth without
loss of time for a long walk on the great grassy hills, smooth arrested
central billows of some primitive upheaval, from the summits of which
you find half England unrolled at your feet. A dozen broad counties,
within the scope of your vision, commingle their green exhalations.
Closely beneath us lay the dark rich hedgy flats and the copse-chequered
slopes, white with the blossom of apples. At widely opposite points of
the expanse two great towers of cathedrals rose sharply out of a reddish
blur of habitation, taking the mild English light.
We gave an irrepressible attention to this same solar reserve, and found
in it only a refinement of art. The sky never was empty and never idle;
the clouds were continually at play for our benefit. Over against
us, from our station on the hills, we saw them piled and dissolved,
condensed and shifted, blotting the blue with sullen rain-spots,
stretching, breeze-fretted, into dappled fields of grey, bursting into
an explosion of light or melting into a drizzle of silver. We made our
way along the rounded ridge of the downs and reached, by a descent,
through slanting angular fields, green to cottage-doors, a russet
village that beckoned us from the heart of the maze in which the hedges
wrapped it up. Close beside it, I admit, the roaring train bounces out
of a hole in the hills; yet there broods upon this charming hamlet an
old-time quietude that makes a violation of confidence of naming it so
far away. We struck through a narrow lane, a green lane, dim with its
barriers of hawthorn; it led us to a superb old farmhouse, now rather
rudely jostled by the multiplied roads and by-ways that have reduced its
ancient appanage. It stands there in stubborn picturesqueness, doggedly
submitting to be pointed out and sketched. It is a wonderful image of
the domiciliary conditions of the past--cruelly complete; with bended
beams and joists, beneath the burden of gables, that seem to ache and
groan with memories and regrets. The short low windows, where lead and
glass combine equally to create an inward gloom, retain their opacity as
a part of the primitive idea of defence. Such an old house provokes on
the part of an American a luxury of respect. So propped and patched, so
tinkered with clumsy tenderness, clustered so richly about its central
English sturdiness, its oaken vertebrations, so humanised with ages
of use and touches of beneficent affection, it seemed to offer to our
grateful eyes a small rude symbol of the great English social order.
Passing out upon the highroad, we came to the common browsing-patch,
the “village-green” of the tales of our youth. Nothing was absent: the
shaggy mouse-coloured donkey, nosing the turf with his mild and huge
proboscis, the geese, the old woman--_the_ old woman, in person, with
her red cloak and her black bonnet, frilled about the face and
double-frilled beside her decent placid cheeks--the towering ploughman
with his white smock-frock puckered on chest and back, his short
corduroys, his mighty calves, his big red rural face. We greeted these
things as children greet the loved pictures in a storybook lost and
mourned and found again. We recognised them as one recognises the
handwriting on letter-backs. Beside the road we saw a ploughboy straddle
whistling on a stile, and he had the merit of being not only a ploughboy
but a Gainsborough. Beyond the stile, across the level velvet of a
meadow, a footpath wandered like a streak drawn by a finger over a
surface of fine plush. We followed it from field to field and from
stile to stile; it was all adorably the way to church. At the church we
finally arrived, lost in its rook-haunted churchyard, hidden from the
workday world by the broad stillness of pastures--a grey, grey tower, a
huge black yew, a cluster of village-graves with crooked headstones and
protrusions that had settled and sunk. The place seemed so to ache with
consecration that my sensitive companion gave way to the force of it.
“You must bury me here, you know”--he caught at my arm. “It’s the first
place of worship I’ve seen in my life. How it makes a Sunday where it
stands!”
It took the Church, we agreed, to make churches, but we had the sense
the next day of seeing still better why. We walked over some seven
miles, to the nearer of the two neighbouring seats of that lesson; and
all through such a mist of local colour that we felt ourselves a pair
of Smollett’s pedestrian heroes faring tavernward for a night of
adventures. As we neared the provincial city we saw the steepled mass of
the cathedral, long and high, rise far into the cloud-freckled blue; and
as we got closer stopped on a bridge and looked down at the reflexion of
the solid minster in a yellow stream. Going further yet we entered
the russet town--where surely Miss Austen’s heroines, in chariots
and curricles, must often have come a-shopping for their sandals and
mittens; we lounged in the grassed and gravelled precinct and gazed
insatiably at that most soul-soothing sight, the waning wasting
afternoon light, the visible ether that feels the voices of the chimes
cling far aloft to the quiet sides of the cathedral-tower; saw it linger
and nestle and abide, as it loves to do on all perpendicular spaces,
converting them irresistibly into registers and dials; tasted too, as
deeply, of the peculiar stillness of this place of priests; saw a rosy
English lad come forth and lock the door of the old foundation-school
that dovetailed with cloister and choir, and carry his big responsible
key into one of the quiet canonical houses: and then stood musing
together on the effect on one’s mind of having in one’s boyhood gone and
come through cathedral-shades as a King’s scholar, and yet kept ruddy
with much cricket in misty river meadows. On the third morning we betook
ourselves to Lackley, having learned that parts of the “grounds” were
open to visitors, and that indeed on application the house was sometimes
shown.
Within the range of these numerous acres the declining spurs of the
hills continued to undulate and subside. A long avenue wound and circled
from the outermost gate through an untrimmed woodland, whence you
glanced at further slopes and glades and copses and bosky recesses--at
everything except the limits of the place. It was as free and untended
as I had found a few of the large loose villas of old Italy, and I was
still never to see the angular fact of English landlordism muffle itself
in so many concessions. The weather had just become perfect; it was one
of the dozen exquisite days of the English year--days stamped with a
purity unknown in climates where fine weather is cheap. It was as if the
mellow brightness, as tender as that of the primroses which starred the
dark waysides like petals wind-scattered over beds of moss, had been
meted out to us by the cubic foot--distilled from an alchemist’s
crucible. From this pastoral abundance we moved upon the more composed
scene, the park proper--passed through a second lodge-gate, with
weather-worn gilding on its twisted bars, to the smooth slopes where the
great trees stood singly and the tame deer browsed along the bed of
a woodland stream. Here before us rose the gabled grey front of the
Tudor-time, developed and terraced and gardened to some later loss, as
we were afterwards to know, of type.
“Here you can wander all day,” I said to Searle, “like an exiled
prince who has come back on tiptoe and hovers about the dominion of the
usurper.”
“To think of ‘others’ having hugged this all these years!” he answered.
“I know what I am, but what might I have been? What do such places make
of a man?”
“I dare say he gets stupidly used to them,” I said. “But I dare say too,
even then, that when you scratch the mere owner you find the perfect
lover.”
“What a perfect scene and background it forms!” my friend, however,
had meanwhile gone on. “What legends, what histories it knows! My heart
really breaks with all I seem to guess. There’s Tennyson’s Talking Oak!
What summer days one could spend here! How I could lounge the rest of my
life away on this turf of the middle ages! Haven’t I some maiden-cousin
in that old hall, or grange, or court--what in the name of enchantment
do you call the thing?--who would give me kind leave?” And then he
turned almost fiercely upon me. “Why did you bring me here? Why did you
drag me into this distraction of vain regrets?”
At this moment there passed within call a decent lad who had emerged
from the gardens and who might have been an underling in the stables. I
hailed him and put the question of our possible admittance to the house.
He answered that the master was away from home, but that he thought it
probable the housekeeper would consent to do the honours. I passed my
arm into Searle’s. “Come,” I said; “drain the cup, bitter-sweet though
it be. We must go in.” We hastened slowly and approached the fine front.
The house was one of the happiest fruits of its freshly-feeling era,
a multitudinous cluster of fair gables and intricate chimneys, brave
projections and quiet recesses, brown old surfaces weathered to silver
and mottled roofs that testified not to seasons but to centuries. Two
broad terraces commanded the wooded horizon. Our appeal was answered by
a butler who condescended to our weakness. He renewed the assertion that
Mr. Searle was away from home, but he would himself lay our case before
the housekeeper. We would be so good, however, as to give him our cards.
This request, following so directly on the assertion that Mr. Searle
was absent, was rather resented by my companion. “Surely not for the
housekeeper.”
The butler gave a diplomatic cough. “Miss Searle is at home, sir.”
“Yours alone will have to serve,” said my friend. I took out a card and
pencil and wrote beneath my name _New York_. As I stood with the pencil
poised a temptation entered into it. Without in the least considering
proprieties or results I let my implement yield--I added above my name
that of Mr. Clement Searle. What would come of it?
Before many minutes the housekeeper waited upon us--a fresh rosy little
old woman in a clean dowdy cap and a scanty sprigged gown; a quaint
careful person, but accessible to the tribute of our pleasure, to say
nothing of any other. She had the accent of the country, but the manners
of the house. Under her guidance we passed through a dozen apartments,
duly stocked with old pictures, old tapestry, old carvings, old armour,
with a hundred ornaments and treasures. The pictures were especially
valuable. The two Vandykes, the trio of rosy Rubenses, the sole and
sombre Rembrandt, glowed with conscious authenticity. A Claude, a
Murillo, a Greuze, a couple of Gainsboroughs, hung there with high
complacency. Searle strolled about, scarcely speaking, pale and grave,
with bloodshot eyes and lips compressed. He uttered no comment on what
we saw--he asked but a question or two. Missing him at last from my side
I retraced my steps and found him in a room we had just left, on a faded
old ottoman and with his elbows on his knees and his face buried in
his hands. Before him, ranged on a great _crédence_, was a magnificent
collection of old Italian majolica; plates of every shape, with their
glaze of happy colour, jugs and vases nobly bellied and embossed. There
seemed to rise before me, as I looked, a sudden vision of the young
English gentleman who, eighty years ago, had travelled by slow stages to
Italy and been waited on at his inn by persuasive toymen. “What is it,
my dear man?” I asked. “Are you unwell?”
He uncovered his haggard face and showed me the flush of a consciousness
sharper, I think, to myself than to him. “A memory of the past!
There comes back to me a china vase that used to stand on the parlour
mantel-shelf when I was a boy, with a portrait of General Jackson
painted on one side and a bunch of flowers on the other. How long do you
suppose that majolica has been in the family?”
“A long time probably. It was brought hither in the last century, into
old, old England, out of old, old Italy, by some contemporary dandy with
a taste for foreign gimcracks. Here it has stood for a hundred years,
keeping its clear firm hues in this quiet light that has never sought to
advertise it.”
Searle sprang to his feet. “I say, for mercy’s sake, take me away! I
can’t stand this sort of thing. Before I know it I shall do something
scandalous. I shall steal some of their infernal crockery. I shall
proclaim my identity and assert my rights. I shall go blubbering to Miss
Searle and ask her in pity’s name to ‘put me up.’”
If he could ever have been said to threaten complications he rather
visibly did so now. I began to regret my officious presentation of
his name and prepared without delay to lead him out of the house. We
overtook the housekeeper in the last room of the series, a small unused
boudoir over whose chimney-piece hung a portrait of a young man in a
powdered wig and a brocaded waistcoat. I was struck with his resemblance
to my companion while our guide introduced him. “This is Mr. Clement
Searle, Mr. Searle’s great-uncle, by Sir Joshua Reynolds. He died young,
poor gentleman; he perished at sea, going to America.”
“He was the young buck who brought the majolica out of Italy,” I
supplemented.
“Indeed, sir, I believe he did,” said the housekeeper without wonder.
“He’s the image of you, my dear Searle,” I further observed.
“He’s remarkably like the gentleman, saving his presence,” said the
housekeeper.
My friend stood staring. “Clement Searle--at sea--going to America--?”
he broke out. Then with some sharpness to our old woman: “Why the devil
did he go to America?”
“Why indeed, sir? You may well ask. I believe he had kinsfolk there. It
was for them to come to him.”
Searle broke into a laugh. “It was for them to come to him! Well, well,”
he said, fixing his eyes on our guide, “they’ve come to him at last!”
She blushed like a wrinkled rose-leaf. “Indeed, sir, I verily believe
you’re one of _us!_”
“My name’s the name of that beautiful youth,” Searle went on. “Dear
kinsman I’m happy to meet you! And what do you think of this?” he
pursued as he grasped me by the arm. “I have an idea. He perished at
sea. His spirit came ashore and wandered about in misery till it got
another incarnation--in this poor trunk!” And he tapped his hollow
chest. “Here it has rattled about these forty years, beating its wings
against its rickety cage, begging to be taken home again. And I never
knew what was the matter with me! Now at last the bruised spirit can
escape!”
Our old lady gaped at a breadth of appreciation--if not at the
disclosure of a connexion--beyond her. The scene was really
embarrassing, and my confusion increased as we became aware of another
presence. A lady had appeared in the doorway and the housekeeper dropped
just audibly: “Miss Searle!” My first impression of Miss Searle was that
she was neither young nor beautiful. She stood without confidence on the
threshold, pale, trying to smile and twirling my card in her fingers.
I immediately bowed. Searle stared at her as if one of the pictures had
stepped out of its frame.
“If I’m not mistaken one of you gentlemen is Mr. Clement Searle,” the
lady adventured.
“My friend’s Mr. Clement Searle,” I took upon myself to reply. “Allow me
to add that I alone am responsible for your having received his name.”
“I should have been sorry not to--not to see him,” said Miss Searle,
beginning to blush. “Your being from America has led me--perhaps to
intrude!”
“The intrusion, madam, has been on our part. And with just that
excuse--that we come from so far away.”
Miss Searle, while I spoke, had fixed her eyes on my friend as he stood
silent beneath Sir Joshua’s portrait. The housekeeper, agitated and
mystified, fairly let herself go. “Heaven preserve us, Miss! It’s your
great-uncle’s picture come to life.”
“I’m not mistaken then,” said Miss Searle--“we must be distantly
related.” She had the air of the shyest of women, for whom it was almost
anguish to make an advance without help. Searle eyed her with gentle
wonder from head to foot, and I could easily read his thoughts. This
then was his maiden-cousin, prospective mistress of these hereditary
treasures. She was of some thirty-five years of age, taller than was
then common and perhaps stouter than is now enjoined. She had small
kind grey eyes, a considerable quantity of very light-brown hair and a
smiling well-formed mouth. She was dressed in a lustreless black
satin gown with a short train. Disposed about her neck was a blue
handkerchief, and over this handkerchief, in many convolutions, a string
of amber beads. Her appearance was singular; she was large yet somehow
vague, mature yet undeveloped. Her manner of addressing us spoke of all
sorts of deep diffidences. Searle, I think, had prefigured to himself
some proud cold beauty of five-and-twenty; he was relieved at finding
the lady timid and not obtrusively fair. He at once had an excellent
tone.
“We’re distant cousins, I believe. I’m happy to claim a relationship
which you’re so good as to remember. I hadn’t counted on your knowing
anything about me.”
“Perhaps I’ve done wrong.” And Miss Searle blushed and smiled anew. “But
I’ve always known of there being people of our blood in America, and
have often wondered and asked about them--without ever learning much.
To-day, when this card was brought me and I understood a Clement Searle
to be under our roof as a stranger, I felt I ought to do something. But,
you know, I hardly knew what. My brother’s in London. I’ve done what I
think he would have done. Welcome as a cousin.” And with a resolution
that ceased to be awkward she put out her hand.
“I’m welcome indeed if he would have done it half so graciously!” Again
Searle, taking her hand, acquitted himself beautifully.
“You’ve seen what there is, I think,” Miss Searle went on. “Perhaps now
you’ll have luncheon.” We followed her into a small breakfast-room where
a deep bay window opened on the mossy flags of a terrace. Here, for some
moments, she remained dumb and abashed, as if resting from a measurable
effort. Searle too had ceased to overflow, so that I had to relieve the
silence. It was of course easy to descant on the beauties of park and
mansion, and as I did so I observed our hostess. She had no arts, no
impulses nor graces--scarce even any manners; she was queerly, almost
frowsily dressed; yet she pleased me well. She had an antique sweetness,
a homely fragrance of old traditions. To be so simple, among those
complicated treasures, so pampered and yet so fresh, so modest and yet
so placid, told of just the spacious leisure in which Searle and I had
imagined human life to be steeped in such places as that. This figure
was to the Sleeping Beauty in the Wood what a fact is to a fairy-tale,
an interpretation to a myth. We, on our side, were to our hostess
subjects of a curiosity not cunningly veiled.
“I should like so to go abroad!” she exclaimed suddenly, as if she meant
us to take the speech for an expression of interest in ourselves.
“Have you never been?” one of us asked.
“Only once. Three years ago my brother took me to Switzerland. We
thought it extremely beautiful. Except for that journey I’ve always
lived here. I was born in this house. It’s a dear old place indeed, and
I know it well. Sometimes one wants a change.” And on my asking her
how she spent her time and what society she saw, “Of course it’s very
quiet,” she went on, proceeding by short steps and simple statements, in
the manner of a person called upon for the first time to analyse to that
extent her situation. “We see very few people. I don’t think there are
many nice ones hereabouts. At least we don’t know them. Our own family’s
very small. My brother cares for nothing but riding and books. He had
a great sorrow ten years ago. He lost his wife and his only son, a dear
little boy, who of course would have had everything. Do you know that
that makes me the heir, as they’ve done something--I don’t quite
know what--to the entail? Poor old me! Since his loss my brother has
preferred to be quite alone. I’m sorry he’s away. But you must wait till
he comes back. I expect him in a day or two.” She talked more and more,
as if our very strangeness led her on, about her circumstances, her
solitude, her bad eyes, so that she couldn’t read, her flowers, her
ferns, her dogs, and the vicar, recently presented to the living by
her brother and warranted quite safe, who had lately begun to light his
altar candles; pausing every now and then to gasp in self-surprise, yet,
in the quaintest way in the world, keeping up her story as if it were
a slow rather awkward old-time dance, a difficult _pas seul_ in which
she would have been better with more practice, but of which she must
complete the figure. Of all the old things I had seen in England this
exhibited mind of Miss Searle’s seemed to me the oldest, the most handed
down and taken for granted; fenced and protected as it was by convention
and precedent and usage, thoroughly acquainted with its subordinate
place. I felt as if I were talking with the heroine of a last-century
novel. As she talked she rested her dull eyes on her kinsman with
wondering kindness. At last she put it to him: “Did you mean to go away
without asking for us?”
“I had thought it over, Miss Searle, and had determined not to trouble
you. You’ve shown me how unfriendly I should have been.”
“But you knew of the place being ours, and of our relationship?”
“Just so. It was because of these things that I came down here--because
of them almost that I came to England. I’ve always liked to think of
them,” said my companion.
“You merely wished to look then? We don’t pretend to be much to look
at.”
He waited; her words were too strange. “You don’t know what you are,
Miss Searle.”
“You like the old place then?”
Searle looked at her again in silence. “If I could only tell you!” he
said at last.
“Do tell me. You must come and stay with us.”
It moved him to an oddity of mirth. “Take care, take care--I should
surprise you! I’m afraid I should bore you. I should never leave you.”
“Oh you’d get homesick--for your real home!”
At this he was still more amused. “By the way, tell Miss Searle about
our real home,” he said to me. And he stepped, through the window, out
upon the terrace, followed by two beautiful dogs, a setter and a young
stag-hound who from the moment we came in had established the fondest
relation with him. Miss Searle looked at him, while he went, as if she
vaguely yearned over him; it began to be plain that she was interested
in her exotic cousin. I suddenly recalled the last words I had heard
spoken by my friend’s adviser in London and which, in a very crude form,
had reference to his making a match with this lady. If only Miss Searle
could be induced to think of that, and if one had but the tact to put it
in a light to her! Something assured me that her heart was virgin-soil,
that the flower of romantic affection had never bloomed there. If I
might just sow the seed! There seemed to shape itself within her the
perfect image of one of the patient wives of old.
“He has lost his heart to England,” I said. “He ought to have been born
here.”
“And yet he doesn’t look in the least an Englishman,” she still rather
guardedly prosed.
“Oh it isn’t his looks, poor fellow.”
“Of course looks aren’t everything. I never talked with a foreigner
before; but he talks as I have fancied foreigners.”
“Yes, he’s foreign enough.”
“Is he married?”
“His wife’s dead and he’s all alone in the world.”
“Has he much property?”
“None to speak of.”
“But he has means to travel.”
I meditated. “He has not expected to travel far,” I said at last. “You
know, he’s in very poor health.”
“Poor gentleman! So I supposed.”
“But there’s more of him to go on with than he thinks. He came here
because he wanted to see your place before he dies.”
“Dear me--kind man!” And I imagined in the quiet eyes the hint of a
possible tear. “And he was going away without my seeing him?”
“He’s very modest, you see.”
“He’s very much the gentleman.”