HALCYON DAYS
There is always one outstanding association to fly in your face ahead of
every other when you encounter a thing or person once connected with
your life, that has been severed from it for a long time. And when I
looked at the front door like a church door, simultaneously apprehending
its interesting character as a door, the first thing I thought of
was--valentines.
The word says nothing to my youthful reader. But, oh, dear contemporary
for whom especially I write, you who took part with me in those revels
that are no more, what it says to us! Certainly our diversions of that
time--when we were hardly into our teens, and when we were as innocent
as we were young--were so few and simple compared with those of our
children at the same age that we got more out of one of them than they
do out of a miscellaneous dozen; but I am allowing for that when I say
that for this particular diversion, and one or two more of a like kind,
no corresponding diversion of the present day offers anything like
adequate compensation. There are bloodless creatures, that forget they
were ever young, who point to the Christmas card as the improved
substitute for our valentine. Christmas card, indeed! So common, so
obvious, so lacking in individual human interest! What nonsense!
We know why they do it. But where is the sense of frowning upon the
innocent manifestations of nature in girls and boys, such as were called
forth by the valentine, the sprig of mistletoe, and certain other of our
games of olden times which were as gates ajar into the Promised Land,
with their stolen and yet not unauthorised kisses and anonymous
love-tokens? They gave honest outlet to the exuberance of healthy youth,
sweet and wholesome in its free play, but corrupting in secrecy like
everything deprived of air. At least such is my opinion, looking back
upon the pranks of my early days. The valentines that came to me in such
abundance on the 14th of February were simply symbols of so many lovers
and of how they severally regarded me. Who sent this? Who sent that? Who
lauds my beauty in such ardent verse? Who asks me to be his? The boy I
like (though I may never have exchanged a word with him)? Or the boy I
can't bear? The best of the valentine was that, as a rule, it did not
tell. The pleasures of imagination and tickled curiosity were not
impaired by any gross attempt on the part of the sender to trespass
beyond the privilege of the day. Where, then, was the harm?
I became old enough to take my part in this delicate dalliance while we
lived in D----, and it was in this house of the church door that my most
interesting Valentine's Days were spent. They were indeed momentous
occasions. The morning postman was not the chief purveyor of the
wonderfully devised tokens; it was the personal delivery after dark that
was most fruitful, as it was most exciting. On Valentine's eve or
Valentine's night we sat around the fire in the music-room, eyes
shining, ears cocked, muscles tense for the spring. Rat-tat-tat! We
flew down the steps through the drawing-room, through the hall to the
front door, to catch the visitor whose business and whose point of
honour was not to let us catch him. A banged gate, a vanishing shadow in
the fog or snow, mocked the strained sight and hearing; but plain upon
the doorstep--that very doorstep--gleamed a large white envelope
enclosing a "song without words" for somebody. It might be from
anybody--a boy who had only seen you at church, a greybeard friend of
your father's (I was the pet of old gentlemen from babyhood), the
man-servant of the house or that innocent young sweetheart of your
innocent first love, who had this great chance to declare (without
declaring) himself to be such. A sheaf of trophies--if you were a
favourite of Fortune, as I must have been--when the day was over, and
the long-continuing pleasure of conjecture, possibly of knowledge,
afterwards. I do not care what anybody says, it was a great and glorious
institution.
And the mistletoe, of which I spoke just now--oh, the mistletoe! What
was not enshrined for us in that insignificant bit of weed! Two leaf
blades and one berry were enough to work the charm--to turn a humdrum
house into a world of romance, filled with the interest of that passion
which is the most interesting thing in life, without its carking cares
and its deadly responsibilities. Like a trap in the run of a wild
animal, a pale sprig would be hidden for special purposes by a more
ardent player of the game, but that was considered to be a breach of
rules; in full view above the most frequented doorway, or at any rate in
some place known to all, one of the strangest of our small symbols for
big things honestly revealed itself, to be sought or shunned, dawdled or
darted past, remembered or forgotten, as the case might be. It must
have been a source of intensest interest to the youths and maidens
making Christmas fun together, knowing what they knew, feeling what they
felt, interchanging their sentimental diplomacies according to the
instincts and desires of their time of life; for I know what in a lesser
degree it meant to the younger children. I am sure that I was a very
modest little girl (there was my treatment of my first love-letter to
prove it), and that I did not walk--at any rate, that I did not
run--after the little boys to whom I inclined; nevertheless, the
mistletoe concerned me as much as anybody. The exquisite excitement of
circumventing the boys to whom I did not incline was fun and interest
enough.
It was forty years and more since I had seen mistletoe when that July I
walked in the grounds of the fine old rectory in Priory Lane--the garden
into which our balls and arrows used to overshoot themselves--and the
rector's wife, with whom I had been lunching, gathered and offered me a
little sprig of green stuff.
"You don't know what that is," said she.
I did not, because it was summer and the pearly berries had not formed.
"Mistletoe," said she.
Talismanic word! I folded it in paper and brought it home. It is in
Australia with me now.
Valentine's Day is hardly a name to be remembered now when the 14th of
February comes round. The date was far behind us when we arrived in
England, but I am sure the festival must be dead in its native land, and
it has never lived during my time in this. And as for Christmas--we
could not stay long enough to see an English Christmas again, but I
think, if I had seen it, I should have found it no more like the old
Christmas than the one I spent at sea. They belonged to their age, those
old Christmases of ours, to children not so critical and sophisticated
as the children of to-day.
Fragrant memories of Christmas hung about that old house at D----. Happy
Christmases with no governesses around! And such tremendous affairs they
were! Long, long before the day its heralds were all about us: the
choice fowls set apart for fattening; the ox selected that was to make
himself famous with a prize, if possible, before the butcher turned him
into Christmas beef; the solemn mixing of the Christmas pudding, at
which the youngest baby had to assist (the pudding divided into dozens
of puddings boiled in the big copper and hung up in their cloths, to be
used in instalments until Christmas came again); the making of the
mincemeat in the same wholesale manner (big brown jarfuls, also to last
through the year), and of the Christmas cakes, which were so rich that
keeping improved them, and the production of which therefore was only
limited by the number of canisters available in which to store them;
these were matters of vital interest ere autumn had fairly gone. For the
Feast of the Nativity was above all things a feast in the popular sense
of the word. Loaded shelves in the pantry and an overflowing table,
plenty for everybody and everything of the best, was the order not of
the day, or of the week but for the month or two that stood for the
"season" with these old-time provincial revellers. When we lived in the
country before coming to D---- two dishes in particular were conspicuous
on our bill of fare--Christmas dishes only, so far as I can recollect.
One was a game pie, in size and shape resembling a milliner's bonnet
box. Its walls were self-supporting and covered with pastry
ornamentation in relief; its inside was jelly close-packed with
miscellaneous game birds and bits of ham and veal and forcemeat and
things; the usual game pie, I suppose (I don't know, it is so many years
since I tasted one), but extra big and fine in honour of Christmas. The
other dish was a round of "Hunters' Beef"--very well named since it used
to be in great request for hunting sandwiches. It was beef rubbed all
over every day for three weeks with a certain dry mixture of sugar,
salts and spices, and then baked for six hours in an earthern crock
under a pile of shred suet, a meal crust and a sheet of brown paper. It
seems to me that I have never tasted real spiced beef since. It was used
in thin slices with bread and butter, not eaten like ordinary meat at
the substantial meals, and lasted a great while. When Christmas was
nearly upon us--governess gone, and all the carking cares of the past
year thrown overboard--the bakings and roastings were tremendous, the
excitement of preparation turned all heads.
At our farmhouse a cartload of evergreens used to come from our
grandfather's woods, sometimes through the snow. Here in the town we
still managed to get enough; always the Christmas tree in its largest
size. Every room had to be adorned as lavishly as they now adorn the
churches, whereas the churches were put off with a bough of holly stuck
into each seat end. The Christmas tree was planted in a tub on the
drawing-room floor--stripped of carpet and furniture for the nightly
games and dances (this floor was not of stone)--and usually the top had
to be cut off to get it under the ceiling. Its graduated layers of arms
bore dozens upon dozens of coloured wax tapers (the little tin sconces
for them were stored from year to year), and about the same number of
pendent glass balls, apples of gold and silver on the dark green boughs.
The substantial fruit, the presents, were in numbers sufficient to stock
a small bazaar. Mother and aunts and family friends had been working on
them for months. If the drawing-room could not be shut to children the
tree was jealously screened, for a day or two before the great night,
which was a party night. It was the young men and maidens who enjoyed
themselves in this interval, while the little ones hung about passages
and peepholes in burning curiosity and suspense. The enchanting moment
came when the party tea was over and a succeeding half-hour of thrilling
anticipation; the drawing-room door was flung wide and we rushed through
in a crowd towards the splendid blazing wonder in the middle of the
room, sighing forth our "Oh! oh!" of ecstasy.
The stage-managers ranged us in a circle around it, all goggle-eyed,
half stunned with the suddenness of our joy, and someone came round with
a bag of tickets--round and round, until each had half-a-dozen or more.
Oh, who would get No.1, the great doll at the top of the tree?--or No.2,
the work-box on the tub beneath (the tub hidden in green stuff, mingled
with pink glazed calico)? There were great prizes amongst the many
little ones, and some that I remember were quite remarkable. One was a
board--very difficult to fix to the tree safely--on which a party of
dolls were celebrating a wedding, the bride in her veil, with her
bewreathed bridesmaids, the little men in coats and trousers, the
surpliced parson, all complete. Such time and trouble were to spare for
children in those days! The steps were brought in and a man mounted them
to detach the articles from the upper boughs. A woman might set herself
on fire--once she did, and there was a gallant rescue, and frequently a
taper ignited a flimsy toy or set a green branch smoking. Doubtless
there were heart-burnings also over the caprices of Fortune in the
distribution of the gifts, but I cannot see blurs of that sort on the
shining picture now.
Santa Claus is still much alive, so I need not describe his doings. I
only hope the children of to-day enjoy shivering awake for half the
night and making themselves ill with the edible contents of their
stockings before daylight as much as we did. As for the delicious lurid
function, snapdragon, is it obsolete in England yet? It does not come,
like Santa Claus, into the scheme of child entertainment in Australia.
There would be a difficulty in finding the requisite depth of darkness
on Christmas evenings here. Besides, a supper of raw raisins cannot be
good for the infant stomachs. I would not give it to my own children,
but still I am glad that the mothers of old were in some things less
faddy than we are. One of the treasures of my collection is the weird
scene of the magic bowl and the spectral faces around it--the delightful
terror of the little girls, the heroic courage of the little boys who
seized for them the blazing morsels they dared not touch themselves. A
tender memory of that boy to whom I inclined, who shot himself (by
cocking a stiff-jointed gun with foot instead of finger), pictures him
gallantly fighting the flames on my behalf.
The Waits, I believe, are heard in the streets of England still. But
not, I fancy, on country road and garden paths, guests of the domestic
hearth at midnight, a nondescript rabble under no ecclesiastical
control, making their own fun, as they then did. Blue-nosed, beery,
hilarious, in woollen mitts and comforters, drinking good luck to a
dozen hosts in turn and thinking of nothing but how they were enjoying
themselves, they are not quite adequately represented to us older folk
by the better-drilled but unspontaneous choir-boy. He is like the
Christmas card for which we have exchanged the valentine--a shadow
replacing the substance, to our thinking.
The choir of the old times was the congregation, led by the clerk in the
three-decker. We went to service on Christmas morning, as in duty bound,
and sang "Praise God, from Whom all blessings flow," whether we had
singing voices or not, and were likewise audible and hearty with the
responses, as believing them our own; and when we came out--good,
unsophisticated Christians, exchanging our "Happy Christmas" with
everybody we met--the church was content to let us go for the remainder
of the day. We went home to our immense dinner (with dessert that
lasted through the afternoon), our festive tea, crowned with the
Christmas cake, our blindman's buff and turn-the-trencher and
drop-the-handkerchief in the cleared drawing-room, our snapdragons, our
punch-bowl, our adventures under the mistletoe.
The drawing-room, when not cleared, could not be closed to family use,
like the majority of the middle-class parlours of the past (I might
almost say of the present also), being the highway to the front door,
to the garden-playground, and to the music-room, which was the
sitting-room. Its four doors were constantly opening and shutting, and
it must have been a cave of the winds in winter, although I do not
remember it. Strips of crumb-cloth marked the crossing footpaths,
warning us to keep off the grass--_i.e._ the geometrical-patterned green
and crimson carpet; they were taken up whenever it was surmised that
"people might be coming," according to that curiously petty but intense
concern for a genteel (however false) appearance, which was one of the
things I had, mistakenly but naturally, taken for granted that England
had grown out of long ago. The room was still the reception-room for
callers and company, and all my mother's artistic skill, which only
distinguished itself the more for having so little money at the back of
it, had been expended upon its adornment.
When I think how that artistic skill was exercised, I have a foolish
impulse to shudder and to smile. When I think again, I have to ask
myself, "Why should I?" Further reflection convinces me that its
manifestations were admirable. To say the least, they were not
necessarily in bad taste then, although they would and ought to be so
now. But there is far more than that to say. The handicraft of the women
of the mid-Victorian era had the precious quality of finish and
thoroughness, than which there is none more worthy. Careful, delicate,
faithful work, no matter on what article expended, was the note of
excellence, and the longer I live the more I respect and love it. Such
fancy-work proper as adorned this old parlour of ours I do not wish to
see reproduced, but it was appropriate to its day and a credit to her
who was responsible for it.
She had a sort of settee-sofa under the window on the garden side. It
was covered with many squares of finest "wool-work," joined together.
There was a different design--vase of flowers, basket of flowers,
wreath, bouquet--in each square, although material and ground colour
were the same; and the number of them represented so many girl friends
who had combined to work them and present her with the sofa on her
marriage. It certainly was a graceful idea, cleverly carried out. And
wool-work was really very fascinating. With a piece of canvas, a bundle
of neatly-sorted Berlin wools, and a coloured pattern of flowers of
every hue--the more intricate the better--I was quite happy. I also
liked working out peacocks and other weird devices into antimacassars,
with crochet needle and white cotton, although not so well. I must have
made miles of "open-work" (the modern _broderie Anglaise_, only better)
for underclothes, first and last. Once I made a bead basket to hang by
glittering bead chains between draped netted-and-darned window-curtains.
I knitted rag rugs and silk purses, and sections of a great quilt for a
spare bed. I did elaborate geometrical patchwork for other quilts, and
fine marking of names (learned from my baby sampler) on linen with
engrained red cotton; and watchguards in black silk and gorgeous
slippers and winter mitts and comforters for father; and mats for lamps
and vases, and so on and so on.
But mother was really an artist, because she did not follow patterns,
but designed things herself. When she needed curtain cornices for the
tops of those windows, and could not afford the gilded, fender-like
affairs that were correct and desirable, she nailed deal boards
together, covered them with leather, and then with a design of leather
flowers or grapes with vine-leaves, which, when varnished, imposed upon
the spectator as a carving in wood. Now we would prefer the honest deal,
no doubt--I would, at any rate--but then there was not a person of taste
who would have done so. She made open wood-carving of leather-work
applied to stout cardboard, cutting away the latter from the interstices
of the pattern embossed. In the treatment of a pair of flower-holders
that used to stand on a table under the mirror between the garden window
and the garden door, she substituted a scarlet coating made of
sealing-wax for the dark wood-stain; her leather-work then called itself
coral. As for her wax flowers, they were truly beautiful. She was not
content to make up the boxfuls of petals prepared by the trade, but must
needs copy flowers out of the field and garden. I do not know how she
found time for all she did, but she seemed to do everything, and always
to do it right. My faith in her ingenuity and resourcefulness was as my
faith in the omnipotence of God.
It was in that drawing-room of her adornment that we held festival on
the afternoon of our famous wedding-day. It rained, and the amusement
for the guests--after the great breakfast in the music-room and the
departure of bride and bridegroom--was to practise archery upon a target
in the wet garden from the shelter of the house. The arrows from door
and window went wide over the garden walls, and the scared face of the
rector popped up in alarm at intervals as they hurtled into his domain.
It was the son of our old neighbours at T---- (the House of the Doll),
who, unknown to any of us at the time, pointed a moral for the
incautious parent who deposits with his (or her) infant offspring
evidence upon which they will some day rise up to judge him. H. was a
very smart young fellow, according to the notions of the time, and he
forgathered with a pretty cousin of ours, daughter of my father's eldest
brother, with whom my father was at feud over a lawsuit and not on
speaking terms. Her parents forbade the match, and she came to mine--the
hostile camp--for succour. Enthusiastically we took up her cause, and,
having given her all facilities for courtship, gave her the finest
wedding that could be compassed from our house. Not only that, but drove
her many miles behind white-favoured postilions to the church of her own
parish, possibly to "cheek" her family, who naturally held aloof,
although it was rumoured that they watched the passing of the bridal
carriages from some secret ambush. Of course, we young ones never
doubted for a moment that they were wholly malignant and in the wrong;
we were as sure as we were of night and day that our father and mother
could not possibly make mistakes.
While the happy pair were honeymooning, we assisted Mrs H., the
bridegroom's mother, to prepare for them what we thought an ideal home
in L----, a house so towny and stylish, compared with the farm
homesteads in which we had been reared, that we were lost in our sense
of the occupants' luck and bliss. I had been their little bridesmaid,
and I now became their frequent visitor; I suppose their attentions to
me were a return for our ill-omened hospitality to them. I used to sit
on a stool in the firelit dusk, totally disregarded, while, on the other
side of the hearth, H. nursed Cousin E. upon his knee and they whispered
together. Later on, I sat on the same stool to nurse the baby, E.
hanging over me to gloat upon him and assure herself that he was safe in
my arms.
The other day I saw that house again, and, looking up at the windows,
looked through them upon those past scenes with, oh! such different
eyes. According to precedent, H. proved himself, very early in the day,
to be the bad lot his wife's people had suspected. The first baby was
the last, because there was not time for more. The young father lived
beyond his means for a year or two, neglected his business, took to
drink, went under, and left the young mother and child to the charity of
the relatives who had probably foreseen how it would be. And now that I
am older than they were I think of my parents' part in the matter, once
so unquestioningly endorsed, and I shake my head. So will my children
shake their heads over remembered acts of mine which, at the doing, were
even as the decrees of Providence. Doubtless they have done so many a
time.
In my flying visits to D---- I was drawn again and again to the
neighbourhood of that old house. Any walk that I took for the sake of a
walk led past it, and I stopped at the two gates every time, because I
could not help it. The second gate, opening into the field that was part
of the premises, had its separate associations. Here roamed Taffy, when
he chose to keep in bounds, a white pony given to my eldest brother by
his grandfather, but for his long lifetime the useful servant and
beloved friend of the whole family; a dear, sweet-natured humorous
creature, human in his affections and intelligence. Taffy walked about
the domestic domain like a dog; he undid every fastening of every gate
that attempted to confine his rambles. He used to come to the schoolroom
window when we were at lessons and watch his chance to grab a mouthful
of hair. When mother and I made our journeys together to see her
parents, some fifteen miles off, we used to stop at a halfway inn to get
a basinful of porter for Taffy, who loved it and drank it down like a
Christian; he would not pass that inn without it. When thirsty at home
he sought the pump in the stableyard, took the handle in his teeth and
rattled it up and down, and as soon as water trickled from the spout
applied his mouth thereto. When I have told this story to my present
family, who never knew Taffy, tolerant and superior smiles have accused
me of drawing the long bow; so I was pleased when a sister of mine,
lately arrived from England after a thirty years' separation from me,
was happily inspired to say at table before them all (we were speaking
of old times), "Oh, do you remember Taffy and the pump?" proceeding to
tell the tale again exactly as I had told it. Thus Taffy and I got tardy
justice done us.
Here, too, in a memorable year, Wombwell's Menagerie established itself.
It was the half of the business which the original Wombwell had left
divided between a son and daughter, and the latter was the proprietress
and travelling with it. My father let his field to her for the few days
that must have been Winnold Fair days (St Wynewall originally--a fair
held here annually at the beginning of March, literally from time
immemorial, as, according to a deed of the reign of Edward the
Confessor, it was flourishing in his day, and there are no records to
tell how long before that); for I recall the state of the temperature.
Which reminds me of an old Norfolk rhyme much in use amongst us, to
indicate what might be expected in the way of weather at the season of
the Fair:
"First come David, then come Chad,
Then come 'Winnle' as if he was mad."
So Mrs Edwards (I think that was her name) brought her Wombwell's
Menagerie to our field. The numerous Black Marias of the caravan filed
into the gate before our popping eyes, the elephant walking as one has
heard of the lady doing in the sedan chair that had the bottom out; we
could only see his monstrous feet and ankles underneath the house that
he carried around him, and those massive members were partly swathed in
bandages, because, we were told, the poor thing suffered from
chilblains. The vehicles were formed into a hollow square, the arena
roofed over (it was deliciously warm to go into out of the cold open
air), and the grass floor thickly bedded in clean straw, from which we
sifted treasure-trove of nuts and lost articles when the show was gone.
The shutters were taken from the cages on the inner side, the entrance
steps put down, and all was ready for business. There was a band, of
course.
The contract gave our household the privilege of free access. I need not
say that it was utilised to the utmost. We had special holidays on
purpose. But the cream of those exciting days was Sunday, when there
was no show and no public, and we were admitted to the bosom of the
family, to see how it lived behind the scenes. In the afternoon of that
day my mother went into the field to show a little neighbourly attention
to the proprietress, taking me with her. It was one of the most
interesting calls I ever made. We found Mrs Edwards a very superior
lady, who did not travel with the show except now and then, to amuse
herself while her children were away at school (her daughter, I think
she said, was "finishing abroad"); she had her good house somewhere,
like other ladies. She was in silk attire, very stylish, and her private
van was a thing of luxury indeed; also she entertained us delightfully.
We strolled about the empty arena, and fraternised with the animals.
Many of them were let out for exercise; others we were allowed to fondle
and converse with. The little gazelle on its slim legs raced round and
round in front of the cages, mocking the futile leer and pounce of the
great cats that would have intercepted it had circumstances allowed; the
monkeys tweaked our ears and pulled the trimming off our hats; the great
elephant swayed about like a moving mountain, and condescended to take
our buns when we mustered courage to present them. Unforgettable Sunday
afternoon! Almost worthy to be ranked with the splendid day at Port
Said. The memory of it was in my mind when, on my second Sunday
afternoon in England, I was behind the scenes in the "Zoo" at Regent's
Park, dear little birds and beasties climbing over me and showing off
their pretty tricks to me for love and not for money.
But, ah, the nights! The dark nights up in that attic bedroom, when the
wintry wind bore the heart-thrilling plaints of homesick lions and
tigers--so awfully close to one! Oh, suppose they should get out! I have
never been conspicuously strong-minded when alone in the dark--I have
too much imagination--and I used to burrow deep down in the bedclothes
to shut out those appallingly suggestive sounds.
Time seems to deal tenderly with everything in England, and the two old
gates were the very same old gates, apparently. Approaching them through
the town, I passed the same old shops, with the same old names on some
of them. Next door, across Priory Lane, the same family of doctors still
lived, father and son in contiguous establishments; only the son of old
was now the father, and there was a new son. The daughters of the parent
house, young ladies of the old days, I found living still, to remember
and to entertain me; one of them, a widow approaching her ninetieth
year, was the most charmingly nimble-minded and witty person of her age
that I ever met. Her intellectual audacity impressed me as one of the
most striking incidents of my return to her little town. She had lived
there always, and was yet unsubdued by the stodgy atmosphere--as awake
to the humour of the ways of a little English town (in which, as she
expressed it, "twopence-ha'penny would not speak to twopence") as I was.
She was handsome too--altogether a dear.
Just opposite her old home, at the beginning (or end) of the street,
swung an inn signboard the sight of which was more delightful to me than
all the priceless canvases that I had been privileged to make
acquaintance with at Grosvenor House a few days previously. This was
the Rampant Horse of olden times--the very same red horse pawing space,
his colour faded out, but his familiar lineaments intact; and it was a
part of my phenomenal luck at that time to see it just when I did, for
the next time I passed that way the sign had been taken down, doubtless
to be "restored." I am convinced that it had not been touched in the
half-century that I had been away, but just waiting there to greet me.
On the other side of my old home, along the London Road, I walked in the
Past every step of the way. There was the same old workhouse, which we
used to visit after church on Christmas mornings to see the paupers
wolfing their roast beef and plum pudding, beside it the Court House,
full of memories of concert nights and entertainments--particularly of a
demonstration by a girl clairvoyant, who, while "under the influence,"
informed a member of our party that her son was lying dangerously ill at
his tutor's house in Heidelberg; which was afterwards proved to be the
case, although this was the first she heard of it. D---- has a Town Hall
now, a Jubilee Town Hall, but in my day the Court House seems to have
been the place for public functions; and I have an acute remembrance of
sitting through an evening on a ledge but a few inches wide, being
crowded off the benches and too proud to ask for a lap. My back aches
and the calves of my legs curl up now when it comes across me.
Further on, C---- Hall by the roadside--unchanged, except that I found
it temporarily tenantless. My little girl-contemporaries who used to
live there wore white pants to the feet, frilled around the ankles,
under their short skirts, like Miss Kenwigs. Where, I wondered, as I
looked at the blank windows, where were they now? Across the road, in
front of the hall, lay the park-like lands belonging to it, the
beautiful turf only matched by the beautiful trees--all as it used to
be. There I saw myself, a little thing in a new pink frock, dancing
about with my mother and a crowd of busy ladies amongst long plank
tables, at which the poor folk of the town and for miles around were
being feasted on roast beef and plum pudding, while brass bands brayed
and flags fluttered in the sun. The occasion was the Celebration of
Peace after the Crimean War.
Then the village of D----, object of so many walks in the governess
days--I tramped thither one fresh and sunny morning when I wanted a good
constitutional, and, as usual when I found the door open, I entered the
church. The clergyman, in a rapid gabble, was reciting the daily
service; he had one daily--in the very middle of the working morning, in
a parish containing only those who were bound to be hard at it earning
their living and attending to the needs of families. When, oh! when will
parsons learn common-sense? It was a relief to see that these
parishioners were not seduced from the path of duty by his
well-intentioned invitation. The whole congregation was embodied in one
extremely old man, whose infirmities had long disqualified him for the
work of life. For him, I thought, it would have been enough at this hour
to leave the place open, to comfort him, when he liked to wander in,
with its divine suggestions. He could not have followed the breathless
patter of words with his deaf ears.
However, perhaps this is not my business.