seven-and-twenty then, and was keeping my father’s house. Lord Lyndhurst
came to breakfast with my father, and I gave them their coffee and
whatever they wanted, and then sat there reading my _Galignani_, and not
thinking a bit about them. Suddenly Lord Lyndhurst asked me if I knew of
any very sunny apartment to let. “Oh, yes,” I said; “there is a friend
of mine who wants to let just what you wish for, and, if you will wait a
minute, I will run and get the keys, and can show it you.” So I got the
keys, and he went with me, and the apartment was a capital one and
suited him very well; and then, to my surprise, he asked me if I should
be at home in the afternoon, and I thought, “What on earth can the old
man want to come again for?”--and I answered him that I did not know.
And, in fact, I forgot all about it, and went out driving to the Bois;
and when I came in, the servant said Lord Lyndhurst had been. It gave me
a sort of shock, and I went to my room, and said to myself, “What on
earth can this mean?” But the next day before I was up--_before I was
up_, if you please--I had a note from Lord Lyndhurst asking when I
should be at home; and he came at that hour, and he came twice a day for
three months, and it became quite awkward, every one talked of it--Paris
is so small a world. However, at the end of that time he proposed.
Afterwards I said, “Now do tell me what the dickens made you want to
marry me--a woman without family, without fortune, and most decidedly
without beauty?” and he said he did not know. After he had engaged me to
marry him, he had to go back to England to his law-courts, and my father
told me that I had better begin to get my things ready and buy my
trousseau; but I said, “No, I should most certainly do nothing of the
kind, for I did not believe for an instant that my Lord would ever come
back again.”
“‘But he did come back, and we were married, and I had twenty-six years
of the most perfect happiness ever allotted to woman. My Lord had the
most perfect temper in the world, and in all the years we were together,
we never had even a difference of opinion. He never came in to
breakfast, and he never took luncheon, so he never appeared in our rooms
till dinner-time, but I trotted in and out of his library, and the
oftener I went in, the better he was pleased.
“‘I had seen nothing of the world before I was married, but I saw plenty
of it afterwards: indeed, a few years after, he was made Lord
Chancellor, and that was the top of everything. The world was the one
drawback to my happiness, for through almost the whole time of my
married life I had to go out. My Lord’s eldest daughter was married
three years after I married my Lord, and four years after, Soph, his
second girl, was married; and then very soon there was my own girl to
take out. Oh, how I hated it, but I never let my Lord know what I felt.
We dined with him, and afterwards there was his whist, or people came to
see him, and at ten o’clock he went to bed; then I went to my daily task
of dressing to take the girls out, and sometimes I fairly cried as I was
dressing.
“‘I was always up so late at night that I breakfasted in my own room,
but there was always breakfast downstairs for the girls and Auntie--for
my Lord’s elder sister, Miss Copley, always lived with us. Auntie was no
trouble in the house, and I was very fond of her, for she perfectly
adored my Lord. When I married, people wondered at my wishing to have my
sister-in-law to live with me, but I said, “Bless you, have I not been
brought up in France, where whole families live together, and have to
accommodate themselves to each other? and it would be hard indeed if I
could not get on with poor old Auntie, when she is so fond of my Lord.”
“‘It was at the marriage of my daughter to Sir Charles Du Cane that my
Lord said he had nothing left to live for, his work was done. He
comforted me by telling me that he was so very old--and so he was,--and
that if he lived he must become helpless, and so perhaps would be
unhappy, and then perhaps even his mind might go. He said, “You will
take care of Auntie?” and I said, “Of course I will,” and Auntie was
always with me afterwards, and I loved her dearly, and she died in this
very room at ninety-three. She was always well and cheerful, but one day
she asked for her cup of tea as usual, and afterwards she--fell
asleep,--she was so very old.
“‘My dear Lord was very old too when he died, but to me he was always
like a young man, he was so bright and cheerful and so kind--always the
pleasantest of companions. However, I could believe it was time that he
should go, because _he_ told me so.
“‘That is the story of my life, Mr. Hare, and now I am only waiting,
hoping that some day,--perhaps some day not very far off,--I may see my
dear Lord again.’”
* * * * *
“_Athenæum Club, Dec. 13._--Sir G. Dasent, sitting at the next table at
breakfast this morning, said, ‘I see you always sit in the historical
corner.’--‘Do I? how?’--“Why, it is the place where Sam Wilberforce
always sat (behind the door leading to the kitchen), and so did Theodore
Hook. It was from that corner that, when he had finished two bottles of
port, he used to be heard calling out “Waiter, lemonade: bring more
_lemonade_.” And they all knew what it meant: he hadn’t the face to ask
for another bottle of port.’”
* * * * *
“_Heckfield Place, Dec. 30._--I have had a pleasant visit here, meeting
Sir Erskine May, a most winning and agreeable person. He revived for me
the old story of Mrs. Blomfield, who forgot her Royal Academy ticket for
the ‘private view,’ and, when they tried to prevent her coming in, said,
‘Oh, but you must let me pass: I am the Bishop of London’s lady.’--‘No,
Ma’am, I could not let you in,’ said the doorkeeper, ‘if you were the
Bishop of London’s _wife_.’
“We went with Lord Eversley to see Bramshill, one of the places intended
for Prince Henry, a most noble and beautiful old house.”
* * * * *
“_Jan. 13, 1882._--With Ronald Gower and Hugh Pearson over the three
great houses of London in the same morning. Grosvenor House is the
pleasantest to live in, but Stafford House the most magnificent. When
the Queen was being received there by the late Duchess, she said, with
her happy power of expression, ‘I come, my dear, from my house to your
palace.’
“Hugh Pearson talked of Archbishop Longley’s singular tact in saying the
right thing. Some one asked him what tact was. He said, ‘It will be
difficult for me to describe what it is, but I will give you an instance
of what it is _not_. This morning I received a letter from a clergyman
beginning--“In consideration of your Grace’s many infirmities and
failing powers.” Now the beginning of that letter was not tact.’”
* * * * *
“_Jan. 14._--To Lady Lyndhurst, whom I found in her room ill, and in
great grief for the death of General Macdonald, her oldest friend, ‘who
was the pleasantest, frankest, and handsomest of young men when I first
came to England, and whom everybody has liked ever since. He was so well
known, that when Mrs. Norton directed a letter to him “Jem at his Club,”
the postman made no difficulties at all, but took it straight to him at
White’s. There have been several pleasant notices of him in the papers
since his death, but they have all committed the fatal blunder of
calling him “Jim,” the thing of all others he would have disliked--he
was always Jem with an _e_.’”
* * * * *
“_Athenæum, Feb. 3._--Sir G. Dasent sat by me at breakfast. He described
how he had almost bought the famous Vercelli MS. for £150, when ‘a
stupid old canon interfered, and thought it ought not to be taken out of
the place. It was taken to Italy from England by a Cardinal S. Andrea,
who was tutor to Henry II., and who collected everything relating to St.
Andrew, because of his name, and the MS. begins with the legend of St.
Andrew. It ought some day to be restored to England by an interchange,
England sending over some Italian MSS.; and now that it has been
removed to the National Collection, this has been facilitated.’
“Sir G. Dasent talked of St. Olaf again. ‘He is what I call a good
wearing saint, for he has lasted nine hundred years. It was just when
St. Olaf was “coming up” that Earl Godwin and his sons were banished for
a time. Two of them, Harold and Tosti, became Vikings, and in a great
battle they vowed that, if they were victorious, they would give half
their spoil to the shrine of St. Olaf, and a huge silver statue which
they actually gave existed at Throndjem till 1500, and, if it existed
still, would be one of the most important relics in archaeology. The old
kings of Norway used to dig up the saint from time to time and to cut
his nails. When Harold Hardrager was going to England, he declared he
must see St. Olaf again--“I must see my brother,” he said: and he also
cut the saint’s nails. But then he thought that from that time it would
be better that no one should see his brother any more--it would not be
for the good of the Church; so he took the keys of the shrine and threw
them into the fiord; but at the same time he said that it would be a
good thing for men who came after to know what a king was like, and he
caused St. Olaf’s measure to be engraved upon the wall of the church at
Throndjem--his measure of six feet.’”
* * * * *
“_Feb. 21._--I sat at dinner by Mrs. Duncan Stewart, who talked with her
usual power. ‘When I was young, I lived with my guardian and his wife at
Havre de Grâce, and thence I married Mr. Duncan Stewart, who was a
Baltic merchant, a prosperous and well-to-do man then, though he was
ruined afterwards. We lived in Liverpool; but my husband loved hunting
and fishing, and at certain times of the year he was “away after the
grouse,” as every Scotchman is. I stayed with my children then, but I
too had my time of the year for going away, and I always went to London,
where I became very intimate with Lady Blessington and all that set--a
very bad set, it must be allowed.
“‘One day when I was sitting alone in my house in Liverpool, and my
husband was away with the grouse, a note of introduction was brought in
for me from Mrs. Milner Gibson, whom I had known in London, with the
cards of Mr. and Mrs. Disraeli. He was a young man then, all curly and
smart, and his wife, though so much older than himself, was a very
handsome, imperial-looking woman. I told them that I should be delighted
to show them everything in Liverpool, as Mrs. Milner Gibson asked me.
“‘When I went to see them next day at the hotel, I asked Mrs. Disraeli
how she had slept, and she said, “Not at all, for the noise was so
great.” Then I said, “Why not move to my house, for my house is very
quiet, and I am alone, and there is plenty of room?” And they came, and
a most delightful ten days I had. We shut out Liverpool and its people,
and we talked, and we became great friends, and when we parted it was
with very affectionate regard on both sides; and afterwards they wrote
to me every week, and when I went to London, my place was always laid at
their table, and if I did not appear at their dinner, they always asked
me why I had not come to them.
“‘After she died, we drifted apart, he and I, and though I saw him
sometimes, it was never in the old intimate way. The last time I saw him
though, we had a really good talk together. It was not till we were
parting that I said to him, “I hope you are quite well,” and I shall
never forget the hollow voice in which he said to me, “_Nobody_ is quite
well.” After that I never saw him again, but I had a message from him
through William Spottiswoode. “Tell Mrs. Stewart always to come to talk
to me when she can: it always does me good to see her.”’
“Mrs. Duncan Stewart described Lady Beaconsfield as originally a
factory-girl. Mr. Lewis first saw her going to her factory, beautiful,
and with bare feet. He educated her and married her, died, and left her
very rich, and then she married Disraeli. When asked _why_ she married
her second husband, she would say, as if it was a feather in her cap,
‘My dear, he made love to me whilst my first husband was alive, and
therefore I know that he really loved me.’
“It was at ‘Greenmeadow,’ a house four miles from Llandaff, that
Disraeli served his apprenticeship as secretary to Mr. Lewis, living in
the house with him and Mrs. Lewis in the position of a dependant. When
the house overflowed with visitors from London, as was often the case,
he was sent out to sleep at ‘The Holly Bush,’ a little public-house in
the village. Both Greenmeadow and the Holly Bush exist still.”
* * * * *
On the 11th of March I again left England for Italy. I could not endure
leaving Holmhurst and my dear old nurse, but it seemed necessary to go
to finish collecting materials for my book on Southern Italy, as there
were still so many places which I had not seen. At Rome I paid an
interesting visit to the blind Duke of Sermoneta, still full of mental
vigour, and of indignation at “la stupidézza del Vaticano e l’infámia
del Quirinale.” Miss Garden had been to see him, and defended the policy
of the Quirinal, saying Italy was a young country, would come round, &c.
He retorted, “If you say that from politeness, as I think you do, you
are wrong; but if you really think so, you must be an idiot.” This was
my last visit to the kind old Duke, for he died in the following autumn.
[Illustration: LAKE OF AVERNUS, NEAR NAPLES.][367]
[Illustration: CAPRI.][368]
At Naples, returning at night from the hotels in the lower town to those
on the ridge of the hill, a gentleman engaged me in conversation and
strolled along by my side. Suddenly, in the most desolate part of the
road, he blew a whistle, and another man leapt out of the bushes, and
both rushing upon me demanded “L’orológio e la bórsa.” I declared that I
had neither watch nor purse. They insisted on my turning out all my
pockets, which contained only three francs in paper and sixteen soldi in
copper. Then they demanded my ring. I refused, and said it was no use
for them to try to get it; it had not been off my finger for more than
thirty years: it would not come off. They struggled to get it off, but
could not. Then they whispered together. I said, “I see what you mean to
do: you mean to cut off my finger and then drop me into the sea (which
there--opposite the Boschetto--is deep water); but remember, I shall be
missed and looked for.”--“No, we took good care to ascertain that
first,” said my first acquaintance; “you said you had only been two days
in Naples (and so I had): people who have been only two days in Naples
are never missed.”--“But I do know Naples well--bisogna esaminarmi sopra
Napoli,” I protested. “Dunque chi fu la Principessa Altamonti?”--“Fu
figlia del Conte Cini di Roma, sorella della Duchessa Cirella.”--“E chi
è il Principe S. Teodoro.”--“Fu Duca di S. Arpino, se maritava con una
signora Inglese, Lady Burghersh, chi sta adesso Lady Walsingham.” After
this they decided to let me go! But the strangest part of all was that
the first brigand said, “After this scene you will not be able to walk
home, and a carriage from the _guardia_ costs sixty centesimi; therefore
that sum I shall give you back,” and they counted twelve soldi from the
sum they had taken. It is this fact which makes me speak of the men who
attacked me at Naples as brigands, not as robbers.
I spent a few days delightfully in beautiful Capri, but most miserable
were my after travels in the desolate wind-stricken plains or
malaria-teeming swamps of wretched Calabria, of which I had formed a
lofty estimate from Lear’s almost wholly imaginary drawings. Each place
I had to visit seemed uglier and more poverty-stricken than the last,
but perhaps came to a climax at Cotrone, where the windowless prison-van
(being the only vehicle in the town) was sent to meet us, arriving by
the night-train at the distant desolate station, and where the stairs of
the hotel were crowded with beggars, who had nowhere else to sleep,
lying in heaps, and swarming with vermin.
I see that I wrote to Miss Leycester--“Calabria was indescribably
horrible, its poisonous swamps and arid plains too hideous for words:
nothing whatever but dry bread to eat: the so-called inns the filthiest
of hovels: the people ruffians: the remains of the Greek cities a few
stones apiece.” I pushed on to Reggio and Scilla. But soon I became so
ill that I fled to Venice, where I was fit for nothing but to float in
a gondola on the breast of ocean till I grew better.
* * * * *
JOURNAL.
[Illustration: SCILLA.][369]
“_Venice, April 25, 1882._--It was by a happy accident that I found
myself here on St. Mark’s Day. Madame von Usedom[370] called for me in
her gondola, and we went together to S. Marco at 10 A.M. Most glorious
it looked, glints of sunlight falling here and there on the golden
walls and waving peacock-hued pavement, and violet shadows resting on
all the inner recesses of arcades and cupolas, through which the grand
mosaic forms of the saints were dimly visible. Crowds of people were
present, yet in that vast space many thousands can move with ease. It is
only a few days since the Patriarch, newly elected and a cardinal,
entered Venice in triumph, followed by three hundred gondolas, standing
at the prow of his barge, in his new scarlet robes, blessing the people.
He is a young man, but is greatly beloved,[371] and every eye followed
him as the grand procession swept chaunting round the church, and he was
almost borne along by his huge golden robes, held up by the white-mitred
attendant bishops of Chioggia and Torcello.
“I returned afterwards with the Usedoms to luncheon, and Madame von
Usedom talked, as usual, of the great change which is sweeping over
religious belief, but of how, in most thinking minds, the great
essentials remained untouched. She had told Tholuck that she was
troubled about her belief in the Trinity. He replied that in being so
she confounded Religion with Theology: that the doctrine of the Trinity
was a purely theological question, and not the least necessary to
religion.
“In the afternoon the Comtesse de Lützow took me to see Besarel, a very
remarkable self-taught genius, and a very good simple man and sculptor
in wood and marble: and then we floated peacefully for hours through the
labyrinthine streets of this wonderful water-city. In the evening, as I
was sitting with the Lützows and Lady Augusta Cadogan at one of the
tables in the piazza in front of Florian’s caffè, a table near was
occupied by a party in which the conspicuous figures were a lady, not
old, but with snow-white hair, and a very beautiful young woman, sipping
_graniti_ and listening to the music: they were Queen Mary and Princess
Mary of Hanover.
[Illustration: FROM THE CAMPO DELLA CARITÀ.][372]
“And all this late evening, as I am sitting up writing, a monotonous
song is wafted through the windows from the boats on the canal--
‘One sombre sweet Venetian slumbrous tune,’
as J. A. Symonds calls it.”
* * * * *
I returned to England by way of Nüremberg, which seemed to me strangely
smaller and less interesting than when I saw it as a boy, and was more
thankful than ever before to find myself again, on the 10th of May, at
Holmhurst, where my dear old Lea’s most sweet and beautiful old face
welcomed me with a brighter smile than ever, and where I spent a happy
month alone with her, going back into our “wealthy past,” and living
again in memory many happy scenes in our long-ago.
At Venice a great sorrow had come to me--another blank in the narrowing
circle of my beloved ones. It was the sort of sorrow from which “all at
once one awakes and finds a whole wing of one’s palace has fallen,” as
Emerson says. Dearest Hugh Pearson was dead. He was altogether the most
perfectly good man I have ever known, and, strange to say, at the same
time the most perfectly charming. He was, from his earliest youth, as
free from self-consciousness as he was from selfishness, but rippled
over with geniality, cordiality, warmth of interest, affection to all
around him. He was really, not nominally, the father of his parish, and
I believe there was scarcely one of his parishioners who was not fonder
of him than of most of their own nearest relations. To the children of
his village he was simply adorable, and his manner to them, his fun, his
sympathy, his solicitude, the prettiest and most enchanting thing
imaginable. “He was like James amongst the Apostles, who wrote nothing
at all, and said nothing we know, and yet was one of the chosen three
who were with the Master that day when His glory was revealed, and that
night when His soul was exceeding sorrowful, even unto death. Trust came
to him; he never sought it. He was at home in the human heart, but he
never seemed to probe it.”[373]
I suppose dear Hugh Pearson was very ugly, but one loved him so much,
one thought there was no face like his. Though he was so very much older
than I was, there was no one with whom I was more intimate, and nothing
I would not have confided to him. His goodness, his religion, were
equally attractive and charming to all. One never felt with him as if
God had been rather unfortunate in His good intentions. His christian
spirit christianised everything it came in contact with. His memory is a
possession, and I may exclaim like the Duke of Ormonde, “I would not
exchange my dead friend for any living friend in Christendom.” In the
later years of his life, he had yielded to urgent request in accepting a
canonry at Windsor, where I had delighted to visit him; but his heart
was always in his country vicarage of Sonning on the Thames, and with
his dear people there. He had refused the Queen’s persistent offer that
he should succeed Arthur Stanley at Westminster, saying that he wished
to die as he had lived--“a private person.”
The end came suddenly. On Easter Sunday (April 9) he told his people
that it was his fortieth Easter Sunday amongst them, but he was taken
ill whilst he was preaching, and two days after mortification came on.
On Wednesday, the last evening of his life, when it was known that there
was no hope of saving it, he desired that all his people--his true
children--might be admitted to see him once more, and for three hours
multitudes of his parishioners, men, women, and children, passed weeping
through his room. He was able to speak separately to many of them, to
give them all his blessing, and with a message of peace--the last
effort of his great loving heart--upon his lips, he passed into the
perfect life.
[Illustration: Rev. Hugh Pearson.
From a Photograph.]
He has left the most undimmed memory it is possible for man to leave. To
none of those who knew him is it possible that there can be even a
breath upon the mirror of his perfectly beautiful and lovable life. To
no one could the words of Dante be applied with greater truth:--
“E se’l mondo sapesse il cor ch’ egli ebbe,
Assai lo loda e più lo loderebbe.”
“O ye holy and humble men of heart, praise Him and magnify Him for
ever.”
* * * * *
JOURNAL.
“_London, June 4, 1882._--In the last week I have spent three pleasant
days with the Husseys at Scotney, a lovely place, where an old tower of
Richard the Second’s time and a ruined house by Inigo Jones stand in a
wooded hollow, surrounded by a moat so clear that its reflections are
even brighter than the reality. On the hill above is a handsome modern
house with a glorious garden of azaleas and herbaceous flowers formed
out of an old quarry. Here at this season ‘tout fourmille de vie,’ as
Buffon would say. In the Roman Catholic persecution a priest was long
imprisoned in the dungeon of the old tower, but escaped by persuading
his gaolers that robbers had broken into the stables and were carrying
off the horses, and by swimming across the moat whilst they were gone to
the rescue.
“The whole country-side is full of traditions of smuggling days.
Goudhurst church, which crowns a steep hill-set village on the horizon
of hills opposite Scotney, was fortified by smugglers, who held out
there for three days against the military sent against them in George
the Third’s time. They were forced to capitulate at last and a number of
them were executed, one of them, no one knows why, being afterwards
buried under the hearthstone in one of Mr. Hussey’s cottages. This siege
of Goudhurst church is described in James’s novel. One of the best
remembered instances of successful smuggling was when a great funeral
was announced as arriving from the Continent. A gentleman, who had died
in France, and who had lived far on the other side of London, was being
taken home to be buried with his ancestors. A hearse with four horses
met the coffin at Dover. Relays of horses were ordered, and they were
changed at Ashford, at Lamberhurst, and several other places. But the
funeral never went beyond London, for the coffin was full of lace, which
was soon dispersed over the city.
“To the same wild times belongs the story of the outlawed Darrell, a
former owner of Scotney. News came that he had died abroad, and his body
was brought home to be buried at his native place. Great was the
concourse of neighbours and acquaintance at his funeral, but amongst the
mourners was a tall figure wrapped in a cloak, who, as the body was
lowered, said, ‘That is not me!’ to the mourner who stood nearest to the
grave, and immediately disappeared.
“A few years ago, Mr. Hussey mentioned the tradition that Darrell had
attended his own funeral to the old sexton, and asked if he could throw
any light upon it. He said, ‘Yes, forty years ago, when your uncle was
buried, the coffin next to which he was placed was that of Mr. Darrell,
which was falling to pieces, and so I looked into it, and was surprised
to see no remains whatever of a body, but only fragments of stone.’