SHOXFORD
Are there people who have never, in the course of anxious life, felt
desire to be away, to fly away, from every thing, however good and dear
to them, and rest a little, and think new thought, or let new thought
flow into them, from the gentle air of some new place, where nobody has
heard of them--a place whose cares, being felt by proxy, almost seem
romantic, and where the eyes spare brain and heart with a critic's
self-complacence? If any such place yet remains, the happy soul may seek
it in an inland English village.
A village where no billows are to stun or to confound it, no crag or
precipice to trouble it with giddiness, and where no hurry of restless
tide makes time, its own father, uneasy. But in the quiet, at the bottom
of the valley, a beautiful rivulet, belonging to the place, hastens or
lingers, according to its mood; hankering here and there, not to be away
yet; and then, by the doing of its own work, led to a swift perplexity
of ripples. Here along its side, and there softly leaning over it, fresh
green meadows lie reposing in the settled meaning of the summer day. For
this is a safer time of year than the flourish of the spring-tide, when
the impulse of young warmth awaking was suddenly smitten by the bleak
east wind, and cowslip and cuckoo-flower and speedwell got their bright
lips browned with cold. Then, moreover, must the meads have felt the
worry of scarcely knowing yet what would be demanded of them; whether to
carry an exacting load of hay, or only to feed a few sauntering cows.
But now every trouble has been settled for the best; the long grass
is mown, and the short grass browsed, and capers of the fairies and
caprices of the cows have dappled worn texture with a deeper green.
Therefore let eyes that are satisfied here--as any but a very bad eye
must be, with so many changes of softness--follow the sweet lead of the
valley; and there, in a bend of the gently brawling river, stands the
never-brawling church.
A church less troubled with the gift of tongues is not to be found in
England: a church of gray stone that crumbles just enough to entice
frail mortal sympathy, and confesses to the storms it has undergone in
a tone that conciliates the human sigh. The tower is large, and high
enough to tell what the way of the wind is without any potato-bury on
the top, and the simple roof is not cruciated with tiles of misguided
fancy. But gray rest, and peace of ages, and content of lying calmly
six feet deeper than the bustle of the quick; memory also, and oblivion,
following each other slowly, like the shadows of the church-yard
trees--for all of these no better place can be, nor softer comfort.
For the village of Shoxford runs up on the rise, and straggles away from
its burial-place, as a child from his school goes mitching. There are
some few little ups and downs in the manner of its building, as well as
in other particulars about it; but still it keeps as parallel with the
crooked river as the far more crooked ways of men permit. But the whole
of the little road of houses runs down the valley from the church-yard
gate; and above the church, looking up the pretty valley, stands nothing
but the mill and the plank bridge below it; and a furlong above that
again the stone bridge, where the main road crosses the stream, and is
consoled by leading to a big house--the Moonstock Inn.
The house in which my father lived so long--or rather, I should say, my
mother, while he was away with his regiment--and where we unfortunate
seven saw the light, stands about half-way down the little village,
being on the right-hand side of the road as you come down the valley
from the Moonstock bridge. Therefore it is on the further and upper side
of the street--if it can be called a street--from the valley and the
river and the meads below the mill, inasmuch as every bit of Shoxford,
and every particle of the parish also, has existence--of no mean sort,
as compared with other parishes, in its own esteem--on the right side of
the river Moon.
My father's house, in this good village, standing endwise to the street,
was higher at one end than at the other. That is to say, the ground came
sloping, or even falling, as fairly might be said, from one end to the
other of it, so that it looked like a Noah's ark tilted by Behemoth
under the stern-post. And a little lane, from a finely wooded hill, here
fell steeply into the “High Street” (as the grocer and the butcher loved
to call it), and made my father's house most distinct, by obeying a
good deal of its outline, and discharging in heavy rain a free supply of
water under the weather-board of our front-door. This front-door opened
on the little steep triangle formed by the meeting of lane and road,
while the back-door led into a long but narrow garden running along the
road, but raised some feet above it; the bank was kept up by a rough
stone wall crested with stuck-up snap-dragon and valerian, and
faced with rosettes and disks and dills of houseleek, pennywort, and
hart's-tongue.
Betsy and I were only just in time to see the old house as it used to
be; for the owner had died about half a year ago, and his grandson,
having proved his will, was resolved to make short work with it. The
poor house was blamed for the sorrows it had sheltered, and had the
repute of two spectres, as well as the pale shadow of misfortune. For my
dear father was now believed by the superstitious villagers to haunt the
old home of his happiness and love, and roam from room to room in search
of his wife and all his children. But his phantom was most careful not
to face that of his father, which stalked along haughtily, as behooved
a lord, and pointed forever to a red wound in its breast. No wonder,
therefore, that the house would never let; and it would have been
pulled down long ago if the owner had not felt a liking for it, through
memories tender and peculiar to himself. His grandson, having none of
these to contend with, resolved to make a mere stable of it, and build
a public-house at the bottom of the garden, and turn the space between
them into skittle-ground, and so forth.
To me this seemed such a very low idea, and such a desecration of a
sacred spot, that if I had owned any money to be sure of, I would have
offered hundreds to prevent it. But I found myself now in a delicate
state of mind concerning money, having little of my own, and doubting
how much other people might intend for me. So that I durst not offer to
buy land and a house without any means to pay.
And it was not for that reason only that Betsy and I kept ourselves
quiet. We knew that any stir in this little place about us--such as my
name might at once set going--would once for all destroy all hope
of doing good by coming. Betsy knew more of such matters than I did,
besides all her knowledge of the place itself, and her great superiority
of age; therefore I left to her all little management, as was in every
way fair and wise. For Mrs. Strouss had forsaken a large and good
company of lodgers, with only Herr Strouss to look after them--and
who was he among them? If she trod on one side of her foot, or felt a
tingling in her hand, or a buzzing in her ear, she knew in a moment what
it was--of pounds and pounds was she being cheated, a hundred miles off,
by foreigners!
For this reason it had cost much persuasion and many appeals to her
faithfulness, as well as considerable weekly payment, ere ever my good
nurse could be brought away from London; and perhaps even so she never
would have come if I had not written myself to Mrs. Price, then visiting
Betsy in European Square, that if the landlady was too busy to be
spared by her lodgers, I must try to get Lord Castlewood to spare me
his housekeeper. Upon this Mrs. Strouss at once declared that Mrs.
Price would ruin every thing; and rather than that--no matter what she
lost--she herself would go with me. And so she did, and she managed very
well, keeping my name out of sight (for, happen what might, I would have
no false one); and she got quiet lodgings in her present name, which
sounded nicely foreign; and the village being more agitated now about my
father's material house, and the work they were promised in pulling it
down, than about his shattered household, we had a very favorable time
for coming in, and were pronounced to be foreigners who must not be
allowed to run up bills.
This rustic conclusion suited us quite well, and we soon confirmed it
unwittingly, Betsy offering a German thaler and I an American dollar at
the shop of the village chandler and baker, so that we were looked upon
with some pity, and yet a kind desire for our custom. Thus, without any
attempt of ours at either delusion or mystery, Mrs. Strouss was hailed
throughout the place as “Madam Straw,” while I, through the sagacity
of a deeply read shoe-maker, obtained a foreign name, as will by-and-by
appear.
We lodged at the post-office, not through any wisdom or even any thought
on our part, but simply because we happened there to find the cleanest
and prettiest rooms in the place. For the sun being now in the height
of August, and having much harvest to ripen, at middle day came ramping
down the little street of Shoxford like the chairman of the guild of
bakers. Every house having lately brightened up its whitewash--which
they always do there when the frosts are over, soon after the feast of
St. Barnabas--and the weeds of the way having fared amiss in the absence
of any water-cart, it was not in the strong, sharp character of the sun
to miss such an opportunity. After the red Californian glare, I had no
fear of any English sun; but Betsy was frightened, and both of us were
glad to get into a little place sheltered by green blinds. This chanced
to be the post-office, and there we found nice lodgings.
By an equal chance this proved to be the wisest thing we could possibly
have done, if we had set about it carefully. For why, that nobody ever
would impute any desire of secrecy to people who straightway unpacked
their boxes at the very head-quarters of all the village news. And the
mistress of the post was a sharp-tongued woman, pleased to speak freely
of her neighbors' doings, and prompt with good advice that they should
heed their own business, if any of them durst say a word about her own.
She kept a tidy little shop, showing something of almost every thing;
but we had a side door, quite of our own, where Betsy met the baker's
wife and the veritable milkman; and neither of them knew her, which was
just what she had hoped; and yet it made her speak amiss of them.
But if all things must be brought to the harsh test of dry reason, I
myself might be hard pushed to say what good I hoped to do by coming
thus to Shoxford. I knew of a great many things, for certain, that never
had been thoroughly examined here; also I naturally wished to see, being
a native, what the natives were; and, much more than that, it was always
on my mind that here lay my mother and the other six of us.
Therefore it was an impatient thing for me to hear Betsy working out the
afternoon with perpetual chatter and challenge of prices, combating now
as a lodger all those points which as a landlady she never would allow
even to be moot questions. If any applicant in European Square had dared
so much as hint at any of all the requirements which she now expected
gratis, she would simply have whisked her duster, and said that the
lodgings for such people must be looked for down the alley. However,
Mrs. Busk, our new landlady, although she had a temper of her own (as
any one keeping a post-office must have) was forced by the rarity
of lodgers here to yield many points, which Mrs. Strouss, on her own
boards, would not even have allowed to be debated. All this was entirely
against my wish; for when I have money, I spend it, finding really no
other good in it; but Betsy told me that the purest principle of all
was--not to be cheated.
So I left her to have these little matters out, and took that occasion
for stealing away (as the hours grew on toward evening) to a place where
I wished to be quite alone. And the shadow of the western hills shed
peace upon the valley, when I crossed a little stile leading into
Shoxford church-yard.
For a minute or two I was quite afraid, seeing nobody any where about,
nor even hearing any sound in the distance to keep me company. For the
church lay apart from the village, and was thickly planted out from it,
the living folk being full of superstition, and deeply believing in the
dead people's ghosts. And even if this were a wife to a husband, or even
a husband reappearing to his wife, there was not a man or a woman in the
village that would not run away from it.
This I did not know at present, not having been there long enough;
neither had I any terror of that sort, not being quite such a coward, I
should hope. But still, as the mantles of the cold trees darkened, and
the stony remembrance of the dead grew pale, and of the living there was
not even the whistle of a grave-digger--my heart got the better of
my mind for a moment, and made me long to be across that stile again.
Because (as I said to myself) if there had been a hill to go up, that
would be so different and so easy; but going down into a place like
this, whence the only escape must be by steps, and where any flight must
be along channels that run in and out of graves and tombstones, I tried
not to be afraid, yet could not altogether help it.
But lo! when I came to the north side of the tower, scarcely thinking
what to look for, I found myself in the middle of a place which made me
stop and wonder. Here were six little grassy tuffets, according to the
length of children, all laid east and west, without any stint of room,
harmoniously.
From the eldest to the youngest, one could almost tell the age at which
their lowly stature stopped, and took its final measurement.
And in the middle was a larger grave, to comfort and encourage them, as
a hen lies down among her chicks and waits for them to shelter. Without
a name to any of them, all these seven graves lay together, as in a
fairy ring of rest, and kind compassion had prevented any stranger from
coming to be buried there.
I would not sit on my mother's grave for fear of crushing the pretty
grass, which some one tended carefully; but I stood at its foot, and
bent my head, and counted all the little ones. Then I thought of my
father in the grove of peaches, more than six thousand miles away, on
the banks of the soft Blue River. And a sense of desolate sorrow and of
the blessing of death overwhelmed me.