The aged lady who lives in a lovely old moated house a few miles out of
Thurswell is one of the youngest people I ever met. She is the mother
of two distinguished sons and the grandmother of a peeress. She takes an
interest in everything that is going on in various parts of the world,
and even points out the mistakes made by the leader-writers in the
London papers--some of the mistakes. But she does so quite cheerfully
and without any animus. She still sketches _en plein air_, and in her
drawings there is no suggestion of the drawing-master of the early
Victorians. Any elderly person who could hold a pencil and whose moral
character could bear a strict investigation was accounted competent to
teach drawing in those days; for drawing in those days meant nothing
beyond making a fair copy of a lithograph of a cottage in a wood with
a ladder leaning against a gable and a child sitting on a fence--a
possible successful statesman in the future--with a dog below him. She
never was so taught, she told me: she had always held out against the
restrictions of the schoolroom of her young days, and had never played
either the “Maiden's Prayer” or the “Battle of Prague.” Thalberg's
variations on “Home Sweet Home” she had been compelled to learn. No
young lady in that era of young ladies could avoid acquiring at least
the skeleton of Thalberg's masterpiece: and I was glad that this
particular old lady, who had once been a young lady, had mastered it;
for it enabled her to give me the most delightful parody upon it that
could be imagined.
Only once did I hear her speak with bitterness in referring to any one;
but when she began upon this occasion, she spoke not only bitterly, but
wrathfully--contemptuously as well. She was referring to the Emperor
Napoleon III. in his relations with the unhappy Maximilian of Mexico.
She had known the latter intimately. My own impression is that she had
been in love with him--and tears were in her eyes when she talked of how
he had been betrayed by the man whom she called a contemptible little
cad. Sedan represented, in her way of thinking, the cordial agreement
with her views by the Powers above. To hear her talk of those tragedies
of more than forty years ago, as if they were the incidents of the day
before yesterday, was inspiriting. I never inquired what was her age,
but one afternoon when I called upon her I found that a birthday party
was going on--a double party; for it was her birthday as well as
her youngest grandchild's. Two fully iced cakes, with pink and white
complexions, were being illuminated in the customary way, and each had
been made a candelabrum of eight tapers. When I ventured to suggest
that there must be an error in computation in some direction, it was
the younger of the beneficiaries who explained to me that about seventy
years or so ago Granny had become too old to allow of her birthday cake
holding the full amount of the candles to which she was entitled, so it
had been agreed that she should have only one candle for every ten years
of her life. The little girl confided in me that she thought it was
rather a shame to cheat poor Granny out of her rights, but of course
there was no help for it: any one could see that no cake could be made
large enough to accommodate, without undue crowding, eighty-one candles.
I looked at the sweet old Granny, and thought, for some reason or
other, of the night of the first January of the century when I had stood
listening to the tolling of the eighty-one strokes of the church bell in
Devonshire, when every belfry in the kingdom announced the age of the
good Queen who had gone to her rest. I wondered...
This dear lady of the eight-candle birthday cake--of which, by the bye,
she partook heartily and apparently without the least misgiving--had
been married at the age of seventeen, and this, she thought, was exactly
the right age for a girl to marry, not, as might be supposed, because
it admitted of her period of repentance being so much the longer, but
simply because she considered grandchildren so interesting. She was not
inclined to be tolerant over the prudent marriages of the present day,
when no girl is unreasonable enough to expect a proposal before she
is twenty-five, or from a man who is less than thirty-five. It almost
brought me back to Shakespeare's England to hear her express such
opinions. That stately old lady, Juliet's mother, as she appears in
every modern production of the play, was made by the author to be
something between twenty-six and twenty-seven, her daughter being some
months under fourteen, but certainly forward for her age. We used to be
informed by sage critics of this drama “of utter love defeated utterly”
that Shakespeare made Juliet so young because it was the custom in
Italy, where girls developed into womanhood at a much earlier age than
in England, for a girl to marry at Juliet's time of life. It so happens,
however, that early marriage was the custom in England and not in Italy
in the sixteenth century. When a girl was twelve her parents looked
about for a promising husband for her, and usually found one when she
was thirteen.
Only a few months ago I came upon an unpublished letter, written in the
beautiful Gothic hand of Queen Elizabeth, in response to the inquiry of
an ambassador respecting a wife for an amiable young prince. The Queen
suggested two names of highly eligible young women, and mentioned that
one of them was twelve and the other thirteen!
The most flagrant example of unbridled centenarianism which I have yet
come across in the course of my investigations in the neighbourhood of
Thurswell was that of a lady who had won quite a literary aureole for
her silver hair owing to the accident of her being actually the original
“Cousin Amy” of Tennyson's “Locksley Hall.” For years she had worn this
honourable distinction, and, so far as I could gather, her title to it
had never been disputed. Even in the Cathedral Close of Broadminster the
tradition had been accepted, and she had been pointed out to strangers,
who doubtless looked at her with interest, saying, “Not really!” or “How
perfectly sweet!”
I ventured to ask the prebendary who had told me that the poet had been
in love with her and consequently “greatly cut up” when she married some
one else--as might be inferred from some passages in the poem--what
was the present age of the lady, and he assured me that she was
seventy-four. She did not look it, but she really was seventy-four. I
had not the heart to point out that twenty-three years had elapsed since
Tennyson published his sequel--“Sixty Years After”--to his “Locksley
Hall,” so that this “Cousin Amy” must be at least a centenarian if she
had not died, as described in the sequel, between eighty and ninety
years ago. She was, however, a nice old lady and her name was really
Amy, and she had known Alfred Tennyson when she had been very young and
he a middle-aged gentleman whom it was a great privilege to know.