THE NEW HOME AT TRURO
One morning a most exciting bomb-shell exploded in the Chancery and blew
Lincoln into fragments. It came in the shape of two letters, one from
the Prime Minister, Lord Beaconsfield, offering my father the Bishopric
of the newly created see of Truro in Cornwall, the other from Queen
Victoria, saying that she personally hoped that he would accept it.
These letters must have arrived a few days before we knew of them, for
that day my father told us that he had thought it over and had settled
to go. I felt nothing whatever except wild delight and excitement,
unmingled as far as I am aware, with any regret for leaving Lincoln, and
all the time that we were out for our walk that morning Maggie and I,
instead of telling each other stories, whispered with secret smiles,
“The Lord Bishop of Truro! The Lord Bishop of Truro!” We were vastly
proud of my father, and thought it most sensible of Lord Beaconsfield
and the Queen to have selected him.[A]
[A] Lord Beaconsfield seems to have been as pleased as we were at my
father’s accepting the bishopric, for he wrote exultantly to a friend,
saying, “Well, we _have_ got a Bishop.”
The fresh move came in the spring of 1877, and in that loveliest of all
seasons the train slid one evening across the tall wooden viaducts with
the lights of Truro pricking the dusk, where the town lay below, and the
enchantment of Cornwall instantly began to weave its spell. The new
home was the Vicarage of Kenwyn, a small village high on the western
hills and perhaps a mile from the centre of the town. As a house it was
not comparable for amenities and mysteries with the Chancery of Lincoln,
but what was the garden at Lincoln, for all its towers and rolling
banks, in comparison to the garden here and the fields and water-haunted
valleys which encompassed it? The garden at Lincoln, confined within its
brick walls and planted down in the middle of a town, was like some
caged animal that here roamed wild and untamed.
Oh, unforgettable morning when for the first time I awoke in the new
house, and saw on the ceiling the light of the early sun that shone in
through the copse outside, making a green and yellow dapple on the
whitewash! The house was still silent; opposite me was Hugh’s bed with
his head half-hidden in the sheet, and I dressed stealthily and went
downstairs and out. From the lawn I could see the viaduct over which we
had come, and below it the misty roofs of the town, with one steeple
piercing the vapour into sunlight. Then the mist faded like a frosty
breath and beyond the town there stretched broad and shining the estuary
of the Fal. Instead of the sorry serge of ivy, the house was clad with
tree-fuchsias, and magnolia, and climbing roses and japonica: never was
there such a bower of a habitation. On that April morning no doubt the
fuchsia and the roses were not in flower, but looking back now, that
moment seems to have sucked into itself the decorations of all the
months, making in my mind a composite picture, from which I cannot now
disentangle the true component parts. But surely there was a gorse bush
at the corner of the house, on the edge of the copse through which the
sun had shone, and surely it was on that morning that I found a mossy
feathery little football of a tit’s nest, woven inextricably among the
spines of the gorse, and a virago of an infinitesimal bird peeped out of
the circular door, when I drew too near, and scolded me well for my
intrusion. I passed up the winding path that led through the shrubbery,
and found a circular pleasance with a summer-house. I went cautiously
past a row of beehives; I came through a door into a lane below the
churchyard, where ferns (the sort of things not known before to exist in
other localities than greenhouses and tables laid for dinner-parties)
grew quite carelessly in the crevices, and so back, now breathlessly
scampering and surfeited with impressions past woodshed and haystack and
stable, and upstairs again with heart and shoes alike drenched with the
spring-dew.
All that ensuing summer, lessons I fancy were considerably relaxed, and
the lovely months passed like some fugue built on the subjects of that
early walk, coloured, amplified and decorated. My father gave us a prize
for botany (all specimens to be personally gathered, personally pressed,
and mounted on sheets of cartridge paper with the English, and, if
possible, the Latin name written below), and we scoured the hedges and
liquid water-sides and the edges of the growing hay meadows, with a
definite object in view. Study was necessitated by the addition of those
names (Latin if possible), but this, like some homœopathic dose conveyed
in honey, was drowned in the delight of rambling explorations. The
appetite of the collector was whetted; there was a certain craving
created for exact knowledge, but far above that was the interest in the
loveliness that we should not otherwise have noticed, and the admiration
which the interest engendered. Definitely also I think I trace a love of
words in themselves which this studied collecting gave us, for what
child could write “centaury” or “meadow-sweet,” “bee-orchis,” “comfrey,”
“loosestrife,” or in more exalted spheres, “Osmunda regalis” on the
virgin sheet of cartridge paper without tasting something of the flavour
of these blossom-like syllables? Or what child could fail to whoop with
gladness when one of us brought an unknown bloom to a certain botanist
friend of my father’s, and was apologetically told that its name was
“Stinking Archangel”? For in the lives of all of us, words and due
discrimination in their use came to play a considerable part, and
somewhere we hoarded these rich additions to our vocabulary. My sister
Nellie won the prize, and I remember that she afterwards confessed to me
that she had stolen some of my pressed specimens and added them to her
own. I never was more astonished, and class this lapse of hers with
instances already given of my own demoniacal possession in the matter of
the Easter egg and the sheepskin hearthrug. We both agreed that she
could not possibly resign the prize, for that would lead to
investigation, and she gave me a shilling by way of compensation.
Birds’ eggs as a collection had hitherto been represented in the Museum
by one addled swan’s egg, but now they took rank among the objects of
existence. Here my father dictated the conditions under which they might
be acquired, namely, that no egg was to be taken from any nest unless
that nest contained four, and under no circumstances was more than one
to be taken. There was of course no questioning his decision, but it
seemed a pity to leave the great tit in the gorse bush to bring up a
family of fifteen after our levy had been made, and never to be able to
get a wood-pigeon’s egg at all, since those prudent birds refused to
lay more than two. But here Charles the groom shone forth gilded with
the glory of celestial charity, for he came to me one morning with his
entire collection of eggs and “would I accept of them?” Was there ever
such a groom? And among these was a pair of wood-pigeon’s eggs, so those
parsimonious parents were thwarted.
For a while games were quite in abeyance, romantic natural history held
the field. For consider: my sister Maggie and I had heard that otters
were found in Cornwall, and on that simple fact we built up the
following fairy-like adventure. There was a round copse, rather lonely,
on the edge of our fields; from it the ground declined in a steep down
to the bottom of a valley, through which ran a stream so small that by
wetting only one foot you could get across it at its widest part. But it
ran below bushes and under steep banks, and it seemed highly probable
that some of these Cornish otters lived there. Well, otters went about
on land as well as in the water, and the lure of imagination pictured
them taking a nice walk up this down and coming to the lonely copse.
This grew very thick in brushwood, through which the otters (now
indigenous in the copse) would certainly walk. So we hung nooses of
string here and there a foot or so from the ground so that the otter
might, in his walks, insert his head in the noose which would then be
pulled tight, and we should come and capture him. This gave rise to
further considerations; he might struggle, and get hurt if not strangled
in the noose, so we must clearly be on the spot to loosen the noose, and
substitute for it a chain and collar of one of the dogs. But if the
otter saw us, he would probably gallop back over the down to his stream,
so we built a hut woven of withies between two trees in which we could
lie _perdus_, and watch for the otter. Then we should lead him chained
to the stables, and gradually tame him till he could come out walking
with us in company with Watch and the nanny-goat which already formed
part of the family procession. (A second goat, called Capricorn, was
presently added, but he had an odious habit of standing upright on his
hind legs and hurling himself like a battering-ram against the
hinder-parts of the unobservant, and when harnessed to a small truck
which was used for gardening purposes, galloped with it at such speed
that sparks flew from its wheels as they spurned the gravel.)
A much larger bowl was now granted us for the aquarium, and the spa and
madrepores carefully brought from Lincoln (though the preserved hornet
seemed to have been forgotten) did not more than cover the bottom of the
new and sumptuous receptacle. Caddis-worms were culled from the streams
that flowed Fal-wards, and whelk-like water-snails were comforted for
their expatriation by having the chance of eating bread crumbs if so
they wished. But the aquarium was still but a crawling democracy, and
needed some denizen of livelier locomotive power to fill the post of
king in this water-world. And then one day, as I have told before, in a
book now mercifully forgotten, we caught the unique and famous
stickleback, by accident you may say (if you believe in accidents), for
certainly at the moment of his capture we had not even seen him, though
it is true that we were dredging in the stream in which the otter still
failed to make his appearance.
My sister Maggie and I then were just emptying out the dredging
(butterfly) net thinking we had found no great treasure on that cast,
when something stirred in the residuary mud, after we had extracted no
more than a caddis worm or two, and it was he. With tremulous rapture we
popped him in a jar for transport to the aquarium, and overcome with the
greatness of the moment (like Paolo and Francesco) we fished no more
that day. For perhaps a week he swam gorgeously about this new kingdom,
never getting over his delusion that if he swam swiftly enough against
the side of it, he would find himself at liberty again, and then the
tragedy happened.
It was our custom every morning to empty out the contents of the
aquarium, down the drain in the stable yard, and replace them with fresh
water. During this operation one of us held a piece of gauze over the
lip of the aquarium so that none of its inhabitants should be poured
away. And on one of these occasions, when the water was nearly drained
out, and the stickleback swimming in short indignant circles in the
residue, Maggie’s hand which was holding the gauze slipped suddenly and
in a flood the remaining pint or two rushed out, the stickleback in the
midst of it. With one flick of his tail, he disappeared down the drain
in the stable yard, leaving us looking at each other in incredulous
dismay....
It was certainly during this summer that another idol came to fill that
shrine of worship in my heart once occupied by the chorister, and once
again music was the hot coal that fired my incense, and the music in
question was the mellow thunder of the organ in Kenwyn Church. I still
believe that it was very skilfully and sympathetically played by the
unconscious object of my adoration. I must have fallen in love not
really with what she was, but with what she did, for my passion was all
ablaze before ever I had seen her face, or had the slightest idea
[Illustration: ELIZABETH COOPER; “BETH.” ÆT. 78
[Page 69]
what she was like. All I knew of her was that she produced these
enchanting noises, since from our pew I could see nothing of her except
her back, and a hand which reached out to shut a stop or open another
bleating fount of melody. She played the pedals, those great wooden
keys, and swayed slightly from side to side as her feet reached out for
them. Once or twice, entering or leaving the church I had a glimpse of
her in less than profile, and that served my adoration well enough. Her
name was Mrs. Carter, and I daresay she was thirty years old or
thereabouts, for she had a son of about my own age who used sometimes to
turn over leaves for her, sitting by her on the organ bench, and though
I don’t think I would quite have exchanged mothers with him, I would
have given most other things to take his place there.
This seemed likely to be a barren affair, for Sunday after Sunday passed
and I never saw more than the swaying back of Mrs. Carter. But by way of
killing one bird and possibly two with one stone, I got leave somehow
(with the gardener’s boy to blow the bellows for an occasional quarter
of an hour) to find my way about the organ. That exploration was a good
bird in itself, but a better lurked in my mind, for I thought that Mrs.
Carter might so easily come up to Kenwyn Church during the week to
arrange her music or what not, and she would find Me sitting in her
place and making tentative experiments with the stops, and straining
after the nearer pedals with my short legs. Surely some day I should
look up and see her standing by, and she would say, “Who taught you to
play so nicely?” (I perceive that vanity was mingled with passion) and
I, in a happy tumult of emotion, would reply, “Oh, Mrs. Carter!”
But this trap for Mrs. Carter never brought the hunter his quarry, and
quite independent circumstances led me closer. It was decreed that my
sisters should have music lessons and who but Mrs. Carter was engaged to
be the teacher? Twice a week she would come to the house, so now no
human agency, it would appear, could prevent us from meeting. But for
some time a human agency did do so, that human agency being myself, for
on observing Mrs. Carter’s approach up the drive, an agony of shyness
seized me, and I sat distracted in the day nursery until she had gone
upstairs, and the noise of the piano from the schoolroom showed that she
was engaged. Once, summoning up all my courage, I went in while the
lesson was in progress, but she did not take her eyes off the copy of
Schubert’s Impromptu in A flat, which Maggie was fumbling at, and I went
out and listened in the garden for the cessation of the piano, on which,
I determined, I would walk quite calmly towards the front door and thus
meet Mrs. Carter there or thereabouts. But, alas for this faint-hearted
lover, as soon as the piano ceased I walked in precisely the other
direction, and it was not likely that Mrs. Carter instead of going down
the drive would force her way through the laurel shrubbery in order to
find me.
I blush to record the next step of my wooing. An invincible shyness
(though I was not otherwise shy) forbade my walking down the drive as
Mrs. Carter was coming up, or taking any direct initiative, so I laid a
lure for her. Observing her approach to the house, I regret to say that
it was my custom to lean out of the schoolroom window, singing loudly.
This would certainly attract her attention (indeed I think that once it
did, and I rushed, panic-stricken, away) and she would say to one of my
sisters, “Was that your brother who was singing? What a charming
voice!” And one of my sisters would say, “Oh yes, he is very fond of
music.” Then surely, surely Mrs. Carter would say, “I don’t think we
have met,” or perhaps even, “I should like to see him,” and then my
sister would come and find me (for after these bursts of melody out of
the window I always fled like a frightened dove to the nursery) and say
that Mrs. Carter would like to see me. I had looked on her face by now,
and I pictured to myself how her kind mouth would smile as she shook
hands, and she would say, “We must be friends, mustn’t we, for we are
both so fond of music.”
This bleating piece of Platonism came to an end somehow, and I grew to
be able to contemplate Mrs. Carter’s back swaying to her pedal-playing
without emotion. But I think that this warm soft Cornish climate must
have brought out a sort of measles of sentimentality in me, for without
pause I transferred my sloppy heart to the curate at Kenwyn, the Rev. J.
A. Reeve, who subsequently was appointed Rector of Lambeth by my father,
and was an intimate friend of all of us. He was a man who was habitually
surrounded by an atmosphere of ecstasy, an adorer of children, and next
door to a fanatic in matters of religion, beloved and blissful, living
in a light that never was on sea or land. To the outward view he
presented a long lean figure, walking at a tremendous pace, and
perspiring profusely, with his umbrella tucked under his arm, and his
hands clasped in perpetual admiration of this inimitable world, and the
saints that he constantly discovered in it under the most deceptive of
disguises. There were no “miserable sinners” in his sight; the most
impenitent were but rather wilful children of the Father. He had a mane
of yellow hair which he tossed back as he laughed peals of uproarious
appreciation of any joke at all. But whereas with the chorister and
Mrs. Carter there certainly was some personal, physical attraction
(though no doubt the main source of the inspiration was music), with Mr.
Reeve there was no personal attraction of any kind, and the experience
was of the stained-glass window order, in which I was cast for the
stained-glass window, and Mr. Reeve for the worshipper. At the bottom of
it all perhaps there was some grain of genuine religious sentiment, but
this was so largely diluted by mawkishness and vanity, that examination
fails to find more than that minute presence described in the analysis
of medicinal waters as “some traces.” He used to breakfast with us after
a short service in Kenwyn Church at a quarter to eight every morning, to
which we children were encouraged though not obliged to go, and he was a
kind of unofficial chaplain to my father, writing his letters for him
half the morning with a puckered brow, but ready to burst into peals of
laughter on the smallest opportunity for mirth. Every Sunday also, he
came to tea before service, and afterwards to supper, and every Sunday
evening after tea I went with him into a spare bedroom where, with his
arm round my neck, he read me the sermon he was about to preach. I
suppose my comments were very edifying and satisfactory, for he
certainly told my mother that “that boy was not far from the kingdom of
God.” She must very wisely have begged him not to tell me that, for I
had no idea of it at the time. Once, indeed, he sadly failed me, for
meeting me as I was being taken to the dentist by Beth, there to have
two teeth out under gas, he said that to have gas was the same as
getting drunk, and I went on my weary way feeling not only terrified but
wicked as well. It is true, though scarcely credible, that the gas was
administered by Mrs. Tuck the dentist’s wife, and that there was no
anæsthetist or doctor present. But I daresay Mrs. Tuck performed her
office very well, for I had a delightful dream about being in a balloon
in the middle of a rainbow.
That autumn lessons began again, and until I went to a private school
next Easter I suffered under the awful rule of a German governess, not
our kind Miss Braun of Lincoln, but a dark-eyed and formidable woman
who, I was firmly convinced, must truly have been the terrible Madame de
la Rougierre in the tale of Uncle Silas which I was reading then in
small instalments, being too frightened to read much at a time. She
cannot have been with us long, for before I went to school the beloved
Miss Bramston came back, not originally as governess but for another and
a tragic reason.
The Christmas holidays of 1877 were the last when the whole of the
family of six, with my father and mother and Beth, who was absolutely of
the family also, were together. My eldest brother Martin was then
seventeen, and so great a gulf is fixed between that age and ten, that
never, till the day I saw him last, did I form any clear idea of him.
Here, then, I must abandon the standpoint I have hitherto maintained,
namely, that of speaking of the events of these early years through my
own personal recollection of what impression they made on me as the
jolly days slipped by, and mingle recollection with subsequent
knowledge.
At the age of fourteen Martin had won the first open scholarship at
Winchester, and had now mentally developed into an extraordinary
maturity and wisdom. He took an amazing interest in the political
affairs of the day, in classics he was considered to be perhaps the most
remarkable scholar that Winchester ever had, and as witness to his
innate love of learning there was a library which he had himself
acquired, and which must have been unique for a boy of his age. Already
at Lincoln he had “spotted” an Albert Dürer woodcut pasted on to the
fly-leaf of some trumpery book at a penny bookstall, and had
breathlessly conveyed the treasure home, and he and my father used to
exchange original Latin versions of hymns. But this precocity of
scholarship did not in the least check his boyishness, which verged on
the fantastic, for once he appeared in school with four little Japanese
dolls attached to the four strings of his shoelaces, and gravely
proceeded with his construing. There are notebooks full of his exquisite
ridiculous drawings with appropriate text in his minute handwriting:
there are poems as ridiculous, and behind it all was this serious limpid
spirit....
He went back that January to Winchester, and Arthur to Eton, and one
day, early in February he had a sudden attack of giddiness, and then
followed an attack of meningitis. My father and mother were sent for; he
was then unconscious. Arthur went there from Eton, but my mother decided
that we younger children should not go and instead Miss Bramston came
down to us in Cornwall. The rest I will tell by means of two letters
which my mother wrote to Beth. I found them, after my mother’s death,
forty years after, in a little packet of papers which had belonged to
Beth, and consisted of letters from all of us which she had always kept.
“WINCHESTER,
_Friday_ (Feb. 8, 1878).
DEAREST BETH,
I must write you a few lines to-day. Our dear one is no better at
all. Nothing can be done for him but to watch him and to give
nourishment and to pray and trust in God. Everything possible is
done for him; he has two nurses, day and night. We go in and out of
his room from time to time. He lies quite peacefully, mostly
sleeping, and evidently quite unconscious of any pain. There is no
sign of pain about his face. He knows us now and then, we think,
but he does not speak. He takes a little nourishment from time to
time, but with difficulty. Sir William Jenner has been sent for,
though there does not seem anything he can do.
Dearest Beth, it is such a comfort to think that you are with those
dear ones at home. I don’t know what they would do without you, or
how we could bear to think of leaving them unless they had you. We
are both quite sure that it is better they should not come. They
could not be with him, and it is no use their hearing details. We
ought to and must keep before their young minds just the Love of
God, whether He shews it in giving our darling back to our prayers,
or in taking to Himself so beautiful and holy a life.
But we must not, and do not give up hope. Though as far as man
knows or sees there is nothing to be done, and the doctors dare not
give us hope of recovery, yet just where man is most powerless, God
_does_ work, often, and we continue to pray to Him in hope for our
darling’s restoration. While there is life, we will not despair.
Dearest Beth, God keep you all: the thought of you is such a
comfort to us. Pray yourself continually,--encourage them all to
pray. One of the Psalms to-day begins, ‘I waited patiently for the
Lord, and He inclined unto me, and heard my calling.’
All our heart’s love is with you all always.
Your most loving
MARY BENSON.”
This is the second letter:
“DEAREST FRIEND AND MOTHER BETH,
Be comforted for Martin. He is in perfect peace, in wonderful joy,
far happier than we could ever have made him. And what did we
desire in our hearts but to make him happy? And now he will help
us out of his perfect happiness. He died without a struggle--his
pure and gentle spirit passed straight to God his Father, and now
he is ours and with us more than ever. Ours now, in a way that
nothing can take away.
Dearest Beth, we are all going to be more loving than ever, living
in love we shall live in God, and we shall live close to our dear
one.
One is so sure now, that sin is the only separation, and that sting
is taken out of death by Jesus Christ. My heart aches for the dear
ones at home, but I know you are a mother to them, and will support
and comfort their hearts, and keep before them that God is love,
and that He is loving us in this thing also. And I want them to
think of Martin, our darling, in perfect peace for ever, free from
fear, free from pain, from anxiety for evermore, and to think how
he will rejoice to see us walking more and more in Love for his
dear sake.
We cannot grudge him his happiness.
Dearest Beth, our boy is with God: he knows everything now, and
will help us. The peace of God Almighty be with you.
Your own child, your fellow-mother,
M. B.”
There is nothing that could tell so simply and completely, not only what
my mother was, but what Beth was, as this letter which my mother wrote
on the morning after the death of her eldest son. It gives the soul of
them both, of my mother that she could write it, and of Beth the
“fellow-mother,” to whom it was written.
When I was old enough to understand my mother told me about the day on
which that second letter was written. She had, so she said to me, a
couple of hours of the most wonderful happiness she had ever experienced
on that day, when she realized that though God had taken, yet she could
give. Her inmost being knew that, and when she came back to us a few
days later, there was no shadow on her, for all that she said to Beth
was the simple untouched copy of the writing on her heart. But even now
I can remember my father’s face, as he stepped from the carriage into
the lamplight, for it was the face of a most loving man stricken with
the death of the boy he loved best, who had been nearest his heart, and
was knit into his very soul. Often has my mother told me that though he
accepted Martin’s death as God’s will, he could not, out of the very
strength of his human love, adapt himself to it. His faith was unshaken,
but the deep waters had gone over him, and years afterwards, when he saw
the martins skimming about the eaves of the house at Addington, he wrote
about them and his own Martin a little poem infinitely touching; and
never, so I believe, did some part of him cease to wonder why his Martin
had been taken from him.