the ever-haunted Warbleton Priory, and the recollection of its utter
weirdness and of the skulls kept there had always so remained with me
that I had quite longed to see it again. The many stories about it are
such as ought never to be told, only whispered. The very approaches have
a mystery. No one will stay there now, even by broadest daylight; so we
went to an old manor near Rushlake Green for the keys, but found even
that so bolted and barred that we were long in obtaining them. ‘Oh no,
there is never any one there,’ said the servant, ‘but you must go on
till you come to a black gate, then drive in.’ To reach this, we
followed a lane with well-built cottages, but they were deserted, their
windows broken and their gardens overgrown; no one could live so near
the accursed spot. Through the black gate we enter dark woods. A
cart-track exists, winding through thickets with fine oaks interspersed,
and by reedy ponds dense with waving cotton-plants. Then we cross open
fields entirely covered with thistles--enough to seed all Sussex--for no
one will work there. Then, through another black gate, we enter a
turf-grown space, with lovely distant view between old trees, and
there, with high red-tiled roofs, golden here and there with lichen, is
a forlorn and mossy but handsome old stone house, built from and rising
amidst other remains of an Augustinian priory. In its little garden are
roses, and box bushes which have once been clipped into shapes. Inside,
the mildewed rooms have some scanty remnants of their old furniture. In
one of them, where a most terrible murder was committed, the blood then
shed still comes up through the floor--a dark awful pool which no
carpenter’s work can efface. The most frightful sounds, cries, and
shrieks of anguish, rumblings and clankings, even apparently explosions,
are always heard by night, and sometimes by day. In the principal room
of the ground floor, in the recess of a window, are two skulls. They
are believed to be those of two brothers who fought here and both fell
dead. From one, the lower jaw has fallen down, increasing its ghastly
effect. Successive generations of farmers have buried them, and
instantly everything has gone wrong on the farm and all the cattle have
died: now they have altogether abandoned a hopeless struggle with the
unseen world. Besides this there is a tradition--often verified--that if
any one touches the skulls, within twelve hours they pass through the
valley of the shadow of Death. So naturally Warbleton Priory is left to
the undisputed possession of its demon-ghosts.”
* * * * *
JOURNAL _and_ LETTER _to_ W. H. MILLIGAN.
“_Thoresby, Oct. 22, 1897._--I began my little tour of visits at Maiden
Bradley.... You know how it is almost the only remnant the title
possesses from the once vast Somerset estates. The 12th Duke left
everything he possibly could away, and when the present Duke and Duchess
succeeded, they were pictureless, bookless, almost spoonless. Still they
were determined to make the best of it. ‘He could not take away our
future: we will not lament over all that is lost, but enjoy to the very
utmost what we have;’ this has been the rule of their existence, and so
‘Algie and Susie,’ as they, always speak of each other, have had a most
delightful life, enjoying and giving enjoyment. No one ever looked more
ducal than this genial, hearty, handsome Duke: no one brighter or
pleasanter than his Duchess: ‘all who have to do with her find nothing
but courtesy, gentleness, and goodness,’ as Brantôme wrote of Claude of
France. I liked my visit extremely. My fellow-guests were Sir E. Poynter
of the Royal Academy, Lady Heytesbury, and Mrs. Kelly, an authoress.
With the last I saw stately Longleat, which I had not visited since I
was fourteen, and--as horses are the one indulgence the Duke gives
himself--he drove us luxuriously about the country on his
coach-and-four.
“The following week was delightful--with the Boynes in their beautiful
hill-set home. They took me glorious excursions, and we picnicked out in
beautiful places five days running. One day we went to Kinlet--a really
great house, as well kept by Swedish maids (its mistress is a Swede) as
if there were a dozen men-servants. And the last day we went to a real
still-standing Norman farmhouse (Millichope), with its original round
arched doors and windows.
“From Burwarton I went on to my pleasant cousin’s, the Francis
Bridgemans, close to that beautiful church at Tong, and we spent a day
with Francis’s kind old father, Lord Bradford, at Weston, and he showed
us all the pictures and treasures in the house, and drove us about in
his sociable to the ‘Temple of Diana’ and other points of interest in
the park of a very comfortable well-to-do place.
“Next, I visited Lady Margaret Herbert (daughter of my dear Lady
Carnarvon) as châtelaine at Teversal manor in Notts, a smoky
wind-stricken country, but with Hardwicke and other fine houses to see.
The charming aunt of my hostess, Lady Guendolen, was living with her as
chaperon, none the worse in body for being a strict vegetarian, and in
mind the sunniest of the sunny, delightful to be with.
‘And scarcely is she altered, for the hours
Have led her lightly down the vale of life,
Dancing and scattering roses, and her face
Seems a perpetual daybreak.’[582]
I was glad to be taken to spend the day at Bestwood, the Duke of St.
Alban’s modern place, its woods an oasis in the wilderness, and its
honours were charmingly done by Lady Sybil Beauclerk and her
good-looking brother Burford. In the Duchess’s room were a series of
albums with all the original drawings for Dickens’s works. All the best
pictures were burnt in a fire.
“The Ladies Herbert sometimes, but in a far-away sense, remind me of
their mother, who was quite the most perfectly brilliant person I have
ever known. I have always heard that she was this even as a girl, and
that it was a perpetual surprise to her parents, who were very inferior
people. Lady Dufferin used to say that they were like savages who had
found a watch.
“Taking stern dismal Bolsover--its delicate carvings utterly ruined by
‘trippers’--on the way, I came on to meet a large party here at
Thoresby, which is in more than usual autumnal forest glory. We have
just been spending the afternoon at Welbeck, shown all the improvements
by Mrs. Dallas Yorke, in the absence of the tall handsome Duchess, who,
however, returned before we left. One did not wonder that she is such a
special joy to the old people of the place, because they had ‘been so
long without a duchess, and when there was one long ago, it was only
such a little one.’ She has built a delightful
gallery--Florence-fashion--between the old house and the new, and hung
it with a galaxy of old prints, and has made fascinating little
terrace-gardens, and edged their beds with dwarf lavender, so that ‘when
the ladies’ dresses brush against it, its scent may be wafted into the
house.’
“And meantime my thoughts have been much at Llandaff, with the
cousin[583] who was the dearest friend of my boyhood, seeming to pass
with her through the closing scenes of the good Dean’s life, and to see
him as she did, lying in his cathedral, dressed in his surplice, in the
majesty of eternal repose.”
* * * * *
_To_ MRS. C. VAUGHAN.
“_Holmhurst, Nov. 16, 1897._--Here I am again in quietude, thinking of
you very much in your last days at Llandaff; busy over the building of
which I am architect, overseer, a hundred things at once, and planting a
great deal, with a reminiscence of Dumbiedykes in Walter Scott--‘Be aye
sticking in a tree; it will be growing, Jock, while you’re sleeping.’ My
only companions now are the pleasant Hospitallers in the little Hospice,
whom I constantly meet in the garden and wood walks. I wish you could
see their little house, and the late roses lingering on their porch.
“I have been away for a week. Lady Stanhope took me from Chevening to
see Lullingstone Castle in Kent, the old house of the Dykes, with a
good brick gateway, a richly ceilinged upper gallery, and a chapel with
interesting tombs. Two days afterwards, Lady Chetwynd took me to a finer
place--Chawton in Hants, where the Knights, of Godmersham, live now,
representing several old extinct families, especially the Lewknors, with
whom I am very familiar through their tombs scattered all over Sussex,
and who are commemorated at Chawton by many portraits and fine
tapestried needlework. A little bookcase with a globe outside and a
series of Elzevir Histories of the World within, was very attractive.
[Illustration: PORCH OF HOSPICE, HOLMHURST.]
“Then I went to stay with ‘the richest man in the world,’ genial
unassuming Mr. Astor, in his beautiful Cliveden, much improved since he
bought it from its ducal owners, and enriched within by glorious
portraits of Reynolds and Romney, and without by the noble terrace
parapet of the Villa Borghese and its fountains, already looking here a
natural part of the Buckinghamshire landscape, and replaced on its old
site by a copy, which is just the same to nineteenth-century Italians!
All the splendid sarcophagi and even the marble benches of the
world-famous villa are now also at Cliveden, where they are more valued
than at Rome. We had a charming party--Jane, Lady Churchill, retaining
in advancing years ‘sa marche de déesse sur les nues,’[584] for which
she was famous in her youth; the Lord Chancellor, Lady Halsbury, and a
daughter; pretty gentle Princess Löwenstein; the Duchess of Roxburghe,
ever wreathed in smiles of geniality and kindness, with two very tall
agreeable daughters; Lord Sandwich, as bubbling with fun as when he was
a young man; Lord and Lady Stanhope--always salt of the earth; with Mr.
Marshall Hall and Sir Arthur Sullivan as geniuses; so, as you will see,
‘une élite très intelligente.’ Every one of these delightful people,
too, was simplicity itself, rare as that virtue is to find. I see that
Queen Adelaide, as Duchess of Clarence, wrote to Gabrielle von
Bülow--‘How rarely you meet a really simple man or woman in our great
world; they would be hard to find even with Diogenes’ lantern.’
Certainly ‘learned’ people are scarcely ever agreeable. There is a very
good sentence in Hamerton about that--‘A good mental condition includes
just as much culture as is necessary to the development of the
faculties, but not any burden of erudition heavy enough to diminish, as
erudition so often does, the promptitude or elasticity of the mind.’
“On Sunday morning we all went to the beautifully situated little church
at Hedsor, arriving early and seeing the congregation wind up the steep
grassy hill as to a church in Dalecarlia. In the afternoon we were
driven about the grounds of Cliveden to the principal points--Waldo
Story’s grand fountain in the avenue and his noble landing-place on the
river. Exquisitely beautiful were the peace of the still autumn evening,
the amber and golden tints of the woods, and the wide river with its
reflections. Mr. Astor has attended to all the historic associations of
the spot; placing a fine statue of Marlborough in the temple built by
Lord Orkney, who was one of his generals, and portraits of Lady
Shrewsbury and her Duke of Buckingham, and of Frederick and Augusta of
Wales, in the successor of the house where they lived. Another portrait
of Frederick, with his three sisters, Anne, Emily, and Caroline, all
playing on musical instruments, has the old house in the background. Our
host seemed to me quite absolutely frank and delightful; indeed,
Surrey’s lines on Sir T. Wyatt might be applied to him--
‘An eye whose judgment no effect could blind,
Friends to allure and foes to reconcile,
Whose piercing look did represent a mind
With virtue fraught, reposèd, void of guile.’
“Now, I am enjoying the time alone at home, with its much-reading
opportunity, and I often think that my natural bent would have been to
enjoy it quite as much as a boy, when all the family except you treated
me not only as a consummate dunce, but a _hopeless_ dunce; and when
almost every book was thought wicked, or at best quite unsuited for a
boy’s digestion. Now, eyes ache often, but I may say with Lady M.
Wortley Montagu, ‘If relays of eyes were to be ordered like post-horses,
I would admit none but silent companions.’
“Les années d’ennui et de solitude lui firent lire bien des
livres’--part of Catherine II.’s epitaph on herself--is certainly true
in my case. Just now I have been labouring through the two long thick
volumes which are called ‘Memoirs of Tennyson,’ though, when you close
them, you have less idea of what the man was like than when you
began--of the rude, rugged old egotist, who was yet almost sublimely
picturesque; of the aged sage, who in dress, language, manners was
always posing for the adoration of strangers, and furious if he did not
get it, or--if he did. The book is most provoking, for it would by no
means have destroyed the hero to have truthfully described the man.
“There have been no end of hard-worked boy-friends here for Sundays, and
it is no trouble, but very much the contrary. We always get on together
capitally--
‘That which we like, likes us:
No need of any fuss,’
is a capital Feejee proverb.[585]
[Illustration: THE AVE-VALE STEPS, HOLMHURST.]
“I think it is Frederick Locker who says that one gradually finds out
how much of the affection one inspires is ‘_reflected_.’ ‘Though thou
lose all that thou deemest happiness, if thou canst but make the
happiness of others, thou shall find it again in thine own heart,’ is a
sentence of George Ebers, of which I mentally leave out as irrelevant
the conclusion--‘Is not this playing at being God Almighty?’”
* * * * *
_To_ MISS GARDEN _at_ LUCCA, _and_ JOURNAL.
“_Holmhurst, August 1, 1898._--I have been much in London since I wrote
last, enjoying the garden-parties at Sion, Osterley, Holland House,
Hatfield, Lady Penrhyn’s, Lady Portman’s, &c., and seeing many pleasant
people, mostly ‘grandes dames de par le monde.’ Yet, in the season, it
is all too great a hurry; one seldom has time to become really
acquainted with any one; there are few who have even sufficient
personality to leave an individual impression on the mind; if any one
does, he or she is ‘like a tree in the steppe’ in the monotony of London
life. I dined out daily for two months, but how difficult it is to
remember any dinner-party! ‘Who cares for the whipped cream of London
society?’ was a saying of Walter Scott. I do recollect one dinner,
however, at Mr. Knowles’s, from the fine effect of light on Leighton’s
‘Clytie,’ the principal ornament of his dining-room, all the
illumination being given to one fold of the dress, and the rest
effectively left in shadow. One charming person whom I remember was Lady
Blake, lately returned to England with her husband, who had been
governor of Jamaica. She was fond of tame animals. ‘In Jamaica,’ she
said, ‘I often had a large snake coiled round my waist; my tiger-cat I
generally led by a string, for I never knew what he might do, but my
tame crocodile always quietly followed me.’ She was Irish--a Bernal
Osborne. ‘Oh, I assure you the Irish are very good to us, quite
charming, in fact.’ ‘But if you do anything they don’t like, they kill
you.’--‘Naturally.’
“On July 11 I was at Miss Fleetwood Wilson’s wedding to Prince
Dolgorouki, and also at Lady Mary Savile’s in the Church of the
Assumption, which was a most picturesque ceremony, performed by Cardinal
Vaughan--such a fine cardinal!--in a jewelled mitre, with all
accompaniments of cross-bearers, incense-swingers, &c.
“The nobly Christian death of Mr. Gladstone and the almost ludicrous
apotheosis of one who, in his political life, did nothing and undid so
much, were events of the spring. I have personally more individual
recollection of his kindness to those who needed it than of his witty
sayings; but they were constant. ‘What do you think of Purcell’s Life of
Manning?’ some one said to him shortly before the end. ‘I think that
Manning need have nothing to fear at the day of judgment.’ He was
formidable to strangers, chiefly on account of ‘those demoniac eyes of
his,’ as Cardinal Alcander said of Luther; and though in his private
capacity he was all goodness, it seemed inconsistent with his public
one. Yet what admirers he had! I remember his saying once to Lord
Houghton, ‘I lead the life of a dog,’ and the answer, ‘Yes, of a St.
Bernard--the saviour of men.’ Joseph Parker used to describe him as ‘the
greatest Englishman of the century, he was so massive, sincere, and
majestic. If he had had humour he would have been too good to live, but
eagles don’t laugh.’
“How much and long people have talked of him, and now what a silence
will fall upon it all. An amusing breakfast at Mr. Leveson’s has just
been recalled to me, where Lady Marian Alford said, ‘Gladstone really
puts his foot in it so often, he is a perfect centipede.’ Directly
after, a wasp lighted on the breakfast-table and there was some question
of killing it. ‘Oh, don’t; I can’t bear killing anything,’ cried Lady
Marian. ‘What! not even a centipede?’ quietly said Lord Lyons, who was
present.
“I was with Mrs. John Dundas at Holt in Wiltshire, where the little
village once prospered exceedingly owing to its mineral spring. Ten
smart carriages used to wait round its fountain at once whilst their
owners drank the waters, and a house is pointed out where some Duchess
or other died. Then the fashion changed, and drainage was allowed to
filter into the spring, and Holt sank into obscurity.
“We went to see Mr. Moseley, the admirable old Rector, who is
half-paralysed. A farmer had been to him to ask whether he did not think
he might get his hay in on a Sunday afternoon, as the weather was likely
to change, and he answered, ‘Certainly; it is God’s hay; save it by all
means.’ How unlike most English priests, but how Christ-like--‘personne
moins prêtre que Jesus Christ.’ ‘From the fetters of spiritual
narrowness, Good Lord deliver us,’ is a petition which I feel more and
more ought to be added to the Litany.[586] Yet in many houses I visit I
still find much of the old Sabbath-bondage remaining, though certainly
it is true that ‘we almost sigh with relief when we discover that even
saints can find monotony monotonous.’
“There is a perfect cordon of drawable old manor-houses round Holt, and
it is only two miles from Bradford-on-Avon, from which the great town in
Yorkshire was colonised, and which owes much of its foreign look to
French refugees. Its houses rise high, tier above tier, on the hillside,
blue-grey against the sky. Over the Avon is a beautiful bridge with a
fine old bracketed mass-chapel, long used as a lock-up. A tiny Saxon
church--the only real one probably in England--has been discovered
walled up into cottages; and there is a noble old ‘palace’ of the Dukes
of Kingston standing in high-terraced gardens. Great Chalfield is a most
lovely Tudor house, with an old chapel and moat. At South Wraxhall how I
recalled many visits from my miserable so-called tutors at Lyncombe, in
days of penury and starvation. How indefinite the misty future seemed in
the thinking-time which those long solitary rambles afforded, and how I
longed to penetrate it. At fifteen ‘j’ai trop voulu, des choses
infinies,’ but I was at a parting of the ways of life then, and I think
I decided in those early days to try to do the best I could here, and
leave the eternities and infinities--of which I heard so much more than
of realities--to take care of themselves, for:--
‘Though reason may at her own quarry fly,
Yet how can finite grasp infinity?’
“But I am moralising too much and must return to my old houses, which
were full of smugglers formerly--‘moonrakers’ they called them in
Wiltshire, because many of the smuggled goods were concealed in the
ponds, and when the excisemen caught the smugglers extracting them at
night, and demanded what they were doing, they answered, ‘Oh, we are
raking out the moon.’ I was working in Shropshire for some time after
my Wiltshire visit, inspecting almost every church and old house for my
book, and hospitably entertained by genial Fred Swete at Oswestry and
the Misses Windsor Clive at beautiful Oakly Park near Ludlow.
“While in London I went for two days to Bulstrode, which the late Duke
of Somerset left to his youngest daughter, Lady Guendolen Ramsden, who
is the most charming of hostesses, but the place is disappointing--a
very large modern villa, only one room remaining of the old house where
Mrs. Delany lived so much with Margaret, Duchess of Portland, and
nothing of that of Judge Jeffreys, which preceded it. It contains an
early portrait of Shakspeare, and a most grand Sir Joshua of a Mrs.
Weddell. We dawdled most of the day in the verandah. Oh, the waste of
time in country-house visits; but Lady Guendolen had much that was
pleasant to tell of her mother, the witty (Sheridan) Duchess of
Somerset. ‘She was once at a bazaar selling things, and a fat, burly,
plethoric farmer asked her the price of something and she mentioned it.
The price seemed to him absurd. ‘Do you take me for the Prodigal,’ he
said. ‘Oh, no,’ she replied; ‘I take you for the fatted calf.’ This made
Graham Vivian, who was one of the party, recollect. ‘I was walking by
the Duchess’s donkey-chair, and suddenly the donkey brayed horribly.
“Will he do it again?” said the Duchess. “Not unless he hears another,”
answered the donkey-boy. “Then mind _you_ don’t sneeze,” said the
Duchess, turning to me.’
“About Mr. L., who always speaks his mind, Lady Guendolen was very
amusing:--‘Mr. L. took me in to dinner, and I thought I was making
myself very agreeable to him, when he suddenly said--“Talk to your
neighbour on the other side.” I felt humiliated, but I thought he
fancied I couldn’t, so I did, and went on, and never spoke another word
to Mr. L. I told him of it afterwards, that he had hurt me so much that
I dreamt of it, and I told him my dream--that I said to him that I was
considered to become very amusing after I had had two glasses of wine,
and he answered, ‘_Then_, my dear lady, you must have been most
uncommonly sober this evening.’”
* * * * *
_To_ VISCOUNT HALIFAX.
“_Holmhurst, August 21, 1898._--I have been for three days at
Hurstmonceaux, doubly picturesque in the burnt turf of this hot summer,
upon which the massy foliage of the trees is embossed as in Titian’s
landscapes. I always feel there, as nowhere else except in the views of
the Roman Campagna from the Alban Hills, the supreme beauty of looking
down upon vast stretches of flat pasture-land, reaching for ten miles or
more, and iridescent in its pink and blue cloud-shadows, with here and
there a ripple of delicate green in softest glamour of quivering light.
Every hour one sees it change--luminous with long lines of natural
shadow, purple from drifting storm-clouds--
‘Then at some angel evening after rain
Glowing like early Paradise again.’
It is a pleasure now to be there, though life there is living amongst
the sepulchres. ‘La morte, l’estrema visitatrice,’[587] has come to all
I knew, and the gravestones of most of them are _moss-grown_--not only
of all the family of my childhood, but of all the neighbours, and all
that generation of poor people. How often there comes into one’s mind
something like the lines often repeated in the cemetery of Port-Royal--
‘Tous ces morts ont véçu, toi qui vis, tu mourras:
Ce jour terrible approche, et tu n’y penses pas.’
[Illustration: IN THE CHURCHYARD, HURSTMONCEAUX.]