place--my cousin Marcus Hare’s home. We have been several excursions--to
Berry Pomeroy, an old castle too much overgrown by woods, named from the
Cotentin family of Pommeraye: to Sharpham, a pretty place on the Dart
with lovely grounds: and to Darlington, a fine old place of the
Champerownes. Two more days at Powderham have given another most happy
sight of Charlie and Lady Agnes. Quite a large party were there--the
Dowager Lady Fortescue and her pleasant Irish sister Miss Gale; Lord
Fortescue with his three daughters and a pleasant and very good-looking
midshipman son, Seymour; Sir Edward, Lady, and Miss Hulse, and Miss A.
Grosvenor, &c.
“Lord Fortescue[131] talked much of Mr. Beresford Hope, his oddities and
his wisdom--how at Oxford he puzzled all the Dons and frightened them
very considerably by his questions from the Fathers and obscure
Churchmen: how some friend of his, seeing in one of Mr. Hope’s books the
family motto, ‘At Spes non fracta,’ wrote beneath, ‘So Hope is not
cracked.’
“‘In these days of Homeopathy and Romanism,’ said Lord Fortescue, ‘one
never knows where one is. I never knew what peace or comfort was till I
took to leaving out the prefix to the word “vert.” Neither party can be
offended by your speaking of “a vert to Homeopathy” or “a vert to
Romanism.”’
“He talked much of different public men--of the accuracy of Disraeli’s
name for Mr. Cardwell--an inferior imitation of Peel--‘Peel and water:’
of Lord Russell, the ‘abruptness and deadness’ of most of his remarks,
and yet how some of them had passed into a proverb; for instance, his
definition of a proverb, ‘One man’s wit and every man’s wisdom:’ of
Peel’s personal shyness and his awkward way of walking up the House, on
which occasions O’Connor used to say, ‘Oh, there goes Peel with his two
left legs.’”
* * * * *
“_Ford Castle, Oct. 29._--I came here yesterday after a weary journey
from Devonshire to Northumberland. Only Lady Sarah Lindsay, her two
daughters, and Alick Yorke are here. This morning we had most
interesting visitors. Two women were seen coming in under the gateway,
one in a red cloak, the other carrying a bundle. It was Her Majesty
Queen Esther Faa and the Princess Ellin of the Gipsies!
“When she had had her breakfast, the Queen came up into the library. She
has a grand and beautiful old face, and she was full of natural
refinement and eloquence. She said how she would not change places with
any one, ‘not even with the Queen upon the throne,’ for ‘God was so good
to her;’ that she ‘loved to wander,’ and that she wanted nothing since
she ‘always drove her own pair,’ meaning her legs.
“She spoke very simply of her accession--that she was the last of the
Faas; that she succeeded her uncle King William; that before him came
her great-uncle, of whom we ‘must have read in history, Jocky Faa;’ that
as for her subjects, she ‘couldna allude to them,’ for they were such a
set that she kept herself clear of them; that she had had fourteen
children, but they were none of them Faas. She spoke of her daughter as
‘the Princess that I have left downstairs,’ but all she said was quite
simple and without any assumption. She sang to us a sort of paraphrase
of Old Testament history. Lady Waterford asked her if there was anything
she would like to have. She said she cared for nothing but rings--all
her family liked them; that her daughter, Princess Ellin, had wished to
have the ring Lady Waterford gave her when she last came to Ford, but
that she had told her she ‘never meant to take off her petticoats till
she went to bed;’ that next to rings, she liked ‘a good nate pair of
shoes,’ for she ‘didna like to gang confused about the feet.’
“When she went away she blessed us. She said to Alick, ‘You _are_ a
bonnie lad, and one can see that you belong to the Board of Health.’ She
said to me that she loved Lady Waterford, so that, ‘if it wouldna be too
bould,’ she should ‘like to take her in her arms and kiss her and cuddle
her to her old bosom.’”[132]
* * * * *
“_Oct. 30._--It has been very pleasant having Alick Yorke here. He is
most amusing. His impersonations are wonderful, and his singing very
good. Owing to his being here, Lady Waterford has talked much of her
childhood at Wimpole,[133] the delights of visits to the dairy, and
receiving great hunches of brown bread and little cups of cream there,
and how, with her ‘mind’s nose,’ she still smelt the smell of a
particular little cupboard near her nursery, &c.
“Yesterday we walked to Crookham, as Lady Waterford wished to visit a
man dying there of consumption. Lady Sarah Lindsay went in the
donkey-chair. She talked of Stichill, the old Pringle place on the other
side of the Tweed. It is now inhabited by a coal-master named Baird, who
has amassed an immense fortune, but retains all the old simplicity of
his character. He bought a quantity of books, from the idea of their
being proper furniture for the house, but when there was a discussion as
to whether they should be bound in Russia or Morocco, said, ‘Na, but I
will just ha’ them bound i’ Glasgow, my ain native place.’ In the
evening Lady Waterford sang to us--her voice like a silver clarion and
most touching--‘Far away, far away,’ till with the melting words dying
into such indescribable sweetness, one’s whole soul seemed borne
upwards.”
* * * * *
“_Oct. 31._--Lady Waterford said, ‘Now I must tell you a story.
Somers[134] came to Highcliffe this year. I like having Somers for a
cousin, he is always so kind and pleasant, and tells me so many things
that are interesting. I felt it particularly this year, for he was
suffering so much from a piece of the railroad that had got into his eye
and he was in great pain, but he was just as pleasant as ever. “Oh, love
has sore eyes,” he said, but he _would_ talk. The next day he insisted
on going off to Lymington to see Lord Warwick,[135] who was there, and
who had been ill; and it was an immense drive, and when he came back, he
did not come down, and Pattinson said, “Lord Somers is come back, but he
is suffering so much pain from his eye that he will not be able to have
any dinner.” So I went up to sit with him. He was suffering great pain,
and I wanted him not to talk, but he said, “Oh, no; I have got a story
quite on my mind, and I really must tell it you.” And he said that when
he got to Lymington, he found Lord Warwick ill in bed, and he said, “I
am so glad to see you, for I want to tell you such an odd thing that has
happened to me. Last night I was in bed and the room was quite dark
(this old-fashioned room of the inn at Lymington which you now see).
Suddenly at the foot of the bed there appeared a great light, and in
the midst of the light the figure of Death just as it is seen in the
Dance of Death and other old pictures--a ghastly skeleton with a scythe
and a dart: and Death balanced the dart, and it flew past me, just above
my shoulder, close to my head, and it seemed to go into the wall; and
then the light went out and the figure vanished. I was as wide awake
then as I am now, for I pinched myself hard to see, and I lay awake for
a long time, but at last I fell asleep. When my servant came to call me
in the morning, he had a very scared expression of face, and he said, ‘A
dreadful thing has happened in the night, and the whole household of the
inn is in the greatest confusion and grief, for the landlady’s daughter,
who slept in the next room, and the head of whose bed is against the
wall against which your head now rests, has been found dead in her
bed.’”[136]
* * * * *
“_Nov. 1, Sunday._--Lady Waterford has talked much of how few people in
the world each person has to whom their deaths would make a real void;
that she had scarcely any one--General Stuart perhaps, and Lady Jane;
that others would be sorry at the time, but that it would to them make
no blank; that somehow it would be pleasant to leave more of a void, but
that even with brothers and sisters it was seldom so. I spoke of her own
sister and of the great grief her death had been. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘a
great grief, but still it is wonderful how little we had been
together--scarcely three years, putting all the weeks together, out of
the fourteen years we had been married. Of all my relations, Mama is
certainly the greatest loss to me, we had been so much together
latterly, and were so much to each other.’
“Lady Waterford talked much of her mother’s life in Paris as
ambassadress, and of her own birth there at the Embassy. ‘I went many
years after with Mama to Spa, and there was a very agreeable old
gentleman there, to whom we talked at the _table-d’hôte_. He found out
that we knew Paris and the people there, and then he talked, not knowing
who we were, of the different ambassadresses. “Celle que j’ai preféré de
toutes les ambassadrices,” he said, “c’était Lady Granville.” He saw
somehow that he had not said quite the right thing, and next day he
wanted to make the _amende_, and he talked of the Embassy again before
all the people, of this room and that room, and then he said, “Est ce
que c’était dans cette chambre, Miladi, que vous êtes accouchée de
Miladi Waterford!” He was a M. de Langy, and was a very interesting
person. His family belonged to the _petite noblesse_, and at the time of
the flight to Varennes, after the royal family was captured, theirs was
one of the houses to which they were brought to rest and refresh on the
way,--for it was the custom then, when there were so few inns. M. de
Langy’s mother was a staunch royalist, and when she knew that the King
and Queen were coming, she prepared a beautiful little supper,
everything as nice as she could, and waited upon them herself. When they
were going away, the Queen, who had found it all most comfortable, said,
“Où est donc la maîtresse de la maison? j’ai ête si bien ici, je
voudrais la remercier avant de partir.” Madame de Langy, who was
waiting, said simply, “J’étais la maîtresse de la maison avant que votre
majesté y est entrée.”’
“We went to church at Etal in the afternoon. Both there and at Ford, it
being All Saints’ Day, the sermons were wholly in exaltation of the
saints, church services, and salvation by works. Lady Waterford was
pained by it: coming back she spoke of a simple rule of doctrine:--
‘Just before God by faith,
Just before men by works:
Just by the works of faith,
Just by the faith which works.’
In the evening she talked much of her first visit to Italy, her only
visit to Rome. ‘Char. was just married then, and I was just come out: we
went _pour un passe-temps_. We travelled in our own carriage, and the
floods had carried away the bridges, and it was very difficult to get
on. It was the year of the cholera, and we had to pass quarantine. My
father knew a great many of the people in authority, and we hoped to get
leave to pass it in one of the larger towns. Mantua was decided upon,
but was eventually given up because of the unhealthiness, and we had to
pass ten days at Rovigo. We arrived at last at Bologna. The people were
greatly astonished at the inn when we asked if the Cardinal Legate was
at home: it was as if we had asked for the Pope: and they were more
astonished still the next day when he came to call upon us. We went to a
party at his palace. He was Cardinal Macchi. I shall never forget
that party or the very odd people we met--I see them now. The Cardinal
was in despair because the theatres were closed--“Je vous aurais preté
ma loge, et je vous aurais donné _des glaces_!” The next day Rossini
came to see us--“Je suis un volcan éteint,” he said. Afterwards we went
to Rome and stayed four months there. I liked the society part best--the
balls at the Borgheses’ and those at the Austrian Embassy: they were
great fun.’
[Illustration: THE SECRET STAIR, FORD.][137]
[Illustration: _Louisa, Marchioness of Waterford_]
“On Saturday we went to Norham--the Lindsays and I. Even coming from
Devonshire, the interest of this country strikes one excessively. It is
bare, it is even ugly, but it is strangely interesting. There is such
breadth and space in the long lines and sweeping distances, amidst which
an occasional peel-tower stands like a milestone of history, and there
is such a character in the strange, jagged, wind-tossed, storm-stricken
trees. But it became really beautiful when we descended into the lovely
valley of the Tweed with all its radiant autumnal tints, and sat under
the grand mass of ruin, with great flights of birds ever circling round
it and crying in the still air.”
* * * * *
“_Nov. 4._--Yesterday we went quite a round of visits, seeing different
phases of Border family life. We lunched at the Hirsel (Lord Home’s)--a
great Scotchy-looking house in a rather featureless park. There were two
tables and an immense party at luncheon--Mr. and Lady Gertrude Rolle,
Lord Romney, and others. I did not think it an interesting place, though
it contains a fine portrait of Sir Walter Scott by Raeburn; but Lady
Waterford delighted in the happy family life, and says whenever she sees
Lord Home she is reminded of the Frenchman who said, ‘Oh, mon Dieu!
pourquoi est ce qu’il n’est pas mon père?’
“We went next to Sir John Marjoribanks of Lees. He was just come in from
hunting, and his wife was fishing in the Tweed. We went to her there:
she was standing up at the end of a boat which a man was rowing, and
the whole picture was reflected in a river so smooth that it looked as
if they were floating on a mirror.
[Illustration: NORHAM-ON-TWEED.][138]
“Then we went to the Baillie Hamiltons at Lenels, another and prettier
place on the Tweed near Coldstream Bridge. The house contained much that
was interesting, especially two enormous Chelsea vases representing
‘Air’ and ‘Water.’ Mrs. Baillie Hamilton was a daughter of Lord
Polwarth--very pleasing, and her sister came in with the most perfect
manners of good-breeding, &c. Then we went to the Askews.
“Lady Waterford stopped to take our luncheon--prepared but not eaten--to
a poor man in a consumption. She beguiled the way by describing her
visit to Windsor, and the Queen showing her the Mausoleum.
“She talked also of the passion for jewels: that she could understand it
in the case of such persons as Madame Mère, who, when remonstrated with
on buying so many diamonds, said, ‘J’accumule, j’accumule,’ for it had
been very useful to her. Apropos of not despising dress, she gave me the
quotation from Pope’s Homer’s Odyssey[139]--
‘A dignity of dress adorns the great,
And kings draw lustre from the robe of state.’
“Last Monday, having a great deal of natural talent for singing,
reciting, &c., in the castle, Lady Waterford would not keep it to
herself, and asked all the village people to the school, and took her
guests there to sing, &c., to them. At the end, just before ‘God save
the Queen,’ she was surprised by Miss Lindsay’s ode:--
‘All hail to thee, sweet lady, all hail to thee this night,
Of all things bright and beautiful, most beautiful, most bright;
Thou art a welcome guest alike in cottage and in hall,
With a kindly word and look and smile for each one and for all.
May every blessing life can give be thine from day to day,
May health, and peace, and happiness for ever strew thy way;
May the light thou shedd’st on others be reflected on thy brow,
May a grateful people’s love and pride like a stream around thee flow,
And all our prayers unite in one upon this festive e’en,
That long thou may’st be spared to Ford, to reign its Border queen.’”
* * * * *
“_Nov. 7._--Lord and Lady Warwick have been here for some days. She is
so simple and genial, that the Italian word _simpatica_ is the only one
to describe her.[140]
“Yesterday, Lady Waterford, Miss Lindsay, and I had a delightful long
walk across the moor and through charming relics of forest. It was a
succession of pictures--long extents of moss backed by ferny hills,
downy uplands breaking into red rocks, lighted here and there by the
white stem of an old birch-tree, and overlooking the softest expanses of
faint blue distance. We found several curious fungi. Lady Waterford said
that at Balmoral the Duchess of Edinburgh shocked the royal household by
eating almost all she found. They thought she would be poisoned; but in
Russia they are accustomed to eat fungi, and they make little patties of
them which they eat in Lent when meat is forbidden--‘and they taste so
like meat that there is almost the pleasure of doing something which is
not quite right.’
“The objects of the walk were two. One was the fall of the Rowling Lynn
in a chaos of red and grey rocks overhung by old birch-trees, a spot
which seems photographed in Coleridge’s lines--
‘Beneath yon birch with silver bark
And boughs so pendulous and fair,
The brook falls scattered down the rock,
And all is mossy there.’
The other was the sacrificial stone covered with the mysterious rings
which have given rise to boundless discussion among Northumbrian
archæologists. When we reached home, we found the Bloomfields
arrived.[141] In the evening Lady Bloomfield told a curious story.
“‘I was very intimate at Vienna with the Princess Reuss, whose first
husband was Prince of Anhalt. She was a niece of Queen Teresa of
Bavaria. She told me that her aunt was at Aschaffenberg with the
intention of going next day to Munich. In the evening the
lady-in-waiting came in and asked the Queen if she was intending to give
an audience. The Queen said, “Certainly not,” and that “she could not
see any one.” The lady then said that there was a lady sitting in the
ante-chamber who would not go away. Queen Teresa then desired her
brother to go out and find out who it was. He came back much agitated,
and said it was _sehr unheimlich_ (very uncanny), for it was the Black
Lady, and that when he came up to her she disappeared; for the Bavarian
royal family have a Black Lady who appears to them before a death, just
as the White Lady appears to the Prussian royal family. The next day the
Queen left Aschaffenberg, but being a very kind-hearted woman, she sent
back her secretary to fetch some petitions which had been presented, but
which she had not attended to, and when the secretary came into her
room, he found the Black Lady standing by the table where the papers
were, but she vanished on his approach. That night, when the old
castellan of Aschaffenberg and his wife were in bed, the great bell of
the castle began to toll, and they remembered that it could toll by no
human agency, as they had the key of the bell-tower.
“At that moment Queen Teresa died at Munich. She arrived at three: at
five she was seized with cholera: at eleven she was dead.’”
[Illustration: THE KING’S ROOM, FORD.][142]
“_Nov. 8._--The two Miss Lindsays and I have been for a most wild
excursion into the Cheviot valleys to the Heathpool Lynn--a ravine full
of ancient alders and birch, and a mountain torrent tossing through grey
rocks. The carriage met us at a farmhouse--a most desolate place, cut
off by snow all through the winter months, and almost always cold and
bleak.”
* * * * *
“_Nov. 9._--Lady Waterford, Miss Lindsay, and I walked to distant
plantations to see some strange grass, which, from being surrounded by
water at times, had been matted together so that it formed a thick
trunk, and branched out at the top like a palm-tree, with the oddest
effect. Lady Waterford talked of an old woman she knew, whose husband
was very ill, dying in fact. One day when she went to see him, she found
his wife busy baking cakes, and she--the old woman--said that as he was
dying she was getting them ready for his funeral. Going again some days
later, Lady Waterford found the man still alive, and she could not
resist saying to the woman that she thought her cakes must be getting
rather stale. ‘Yes, that they are,’ said the wife; ‘some folks are _so_
inconsiderate.’
“When we returned to the castle, we found that old Mr. Fyler, the Vicar
of Cornhill, had arrived, and he was very amusing all evening. He talked
much of Sir Horace St. Paul (a neighbour here), who had become a
teetotaler, and had thrown away all the wine in his cellar. His mother
was a daughter of Lord Ward, who had challenged and run through with his
sword a brother officer, who, when he was engaged to his wife, had
snatched away a brooch he had given her and exhibited it at mess as her
present. It was the Lord Ward who was brother of Lady St. Paul, who was
made the prominent figure in the picture by Copley of the death of the
Earl of Chatham. It is a grand portrait in a fine picture, and Copley
gave the life-size sketch which he made for it to the Ward family.
“When Sir Horace St. Paul was at college, he found a man lying drunk in
the quadrangle and tried to make him get up. ‘You’re drunk,’ he said;
‘you don’t even know who I am.’--‘Yes, I know very well who you are,’
said the man; ‘you’re the fellow that wrote an epistle to Timothy and
never got an answer.’ I have heard this quoted as one of the naturally
clever retorts of drunken men.
“Lady Waterford told Lord Grey’s story of the death--in a court in
Edinburgh--of a naval captain who had been noted for his cruelties at
sea, but especially in the slave trade. Mental terror made his death-bed
most appalling. According to Scottish custom, the family opened the door
for the spirit to pass more easily, when, to their horror, the bloody
head of a black man suddenly rolled into the room.
“The dying man gave the most fearful scream, and his relations rushed to
his bedside. When they looked round, the head was gone, but there was
fresh blood upon the floor. To them it seemed inexplicable, but the fact
was that Professor Owen had been attending an anatomical séance at which
the body of a black man had been dissected, and there was something so
curious in the way in which the head had been attached to the body, that
he had obtained leave to carry it home in a cloth, that he might examine
it more carefully. It was a very slippery, wet day, and as he was
passing the open door of the dying man, the Professor had stumbled, and
the head, slipping out of the cloth, had rolled into the house; then, in
the moment when they were all occupied with the dying man, he had
pursued it and whipped it up into the cloth again, and hoped it had not
been observed.”[143]
* * * * *
“_Nov. 10._--Last night Mr. Fyler told his famous story of ‘the nun.’ It
is briefly this:--
“A son of Sir J. Stuart of Allanbank, on the Blackadder, where Lady
Boswell lives now, was in Rome, where he fell in love with a novice in
one of the convents. When his father heard of it, he was furious, and
summoned him home. Young Stuart told the nun he must leave Rome, and she
implored him to marry her first; but he would do nothing of the kind,
and, as he left, she flung herself under his carriage; the wheels went
over her, and she was killed. The first thing the faithless lover saw on
his return to Scotland was the nun, who met him in the bridal attire she
was to have worn, and she has often appeared since, and has become known
in the neighbourhood as ‘Pearlin Jean.’ On one occasion seven ministers
were called in to lay her, but with no effect.
“Mr. Fyler says that when people on the Border are not quite right in
their heads, they are said to ‘want twopence in the shilling.’ A poor
cooper at Cornhill was one of these, and one day he disappeared. The
greatest search was made for the missing man, for he was a Johnson, and
almost all the village at Cornhill are Johnsons--fishermen. So every one
went out to look, and though nothing was found, they came to the
conclusion that he had been drowned in the Tweed.
“That evening Mr. Fyler observed that his church windows had not been
opened as he desired, and going up to them and looking in, he saw a
white figure wrapped in a sheet walking up and down the aisle and
flapping its arms. He went back and said, ‘I’ve found the lost man. He
is in the church, and two of the strongest men in the place must go with
me and get him out.’ But if any one else had looked into the church,
they would have thought it was a ghost. As it was, one of the men who
came to get him out fainted dead away.”
* * * * *
“_Winton Castle, Nov. 14._--Dear Lady Ruthven is stone deaf, almost
blind, and her voice like waggon-wheels, but--in her eighty-sixth
year--she is as kind and good and as truly witty as ever.