LYME REGIS AND TRAGEDY’S SHADOW
The picture, given us by Miss Mitford herself, of those early days
in the Hampshire home, is one from the contemplation of which we are
loth to drag ourselves.
Again and again in her _Recollections_ we note how the memory was
drawn upon to conjure up some pleasant scene from the past. Of
the town itself her vision is of “a picturesque country church
with yews and lindens on one side, and beyond, a down as smooth
as velvet, dotted with rich islands of coppice, hazel, woodbine,
hawthorn and holly reaching up into the young oaks, and overhanging
flowery patches of primroses, wood-sorrel, wild hyacinths, and wild
strawberries. On the side opposite the church in a hollow fringed
with alders and bulrushes, gleamed the bright clear lakelet, radiant
with swans and water-lilies, which the simple townsfolk were content
to call the Great Pond.”
Fortunately for us the hand of Time has touched this old town gently.
It is true the picturesque country church has, by sheer force of
decay begotten of a hoary antiquity, given place to one not less
picturesque on the old site; but the peaceful aspect of the streets
and inns remains, together with that commodious house in the Broad
Street which, excepting one slight internal alteration, differs in
nothing from the house which Miss Mitford knew in her childhood, the
place of her birth.
With steep-pitched roof and painted front, its old dormer-windows
look out with a certain grave dignity befitting the windows of a
house which enshrines such a tender memory, on the town “through
whose streets streamed Cavaliers and Roundheads after the battle
of Cheriton,” on the downs where, a full hundred and twenty years
ago, the little mistress was wont fearlessly to ride on her father’s
favourite blood-mare, seated on a specially-contrived pad and
enclosed so fondly by that same father’s strong and loving arm.
Specially privileged and greatly esteeming the privilege, we have
wandered through the rooms of this house; seen the breakfast room
round which were ranged the books of Grandpa Russell’s library; seen
the curiously contrived sash-window—the like of which we have never
seen in any house before or since—fashioned so cunningly that its
entire height slides upward into a recess quite out of sight; stepped
through the opening thus made on to the flagged pathway leading by
quaint outbuildings and stable to the garden and orchard beyond,
where, as we have already noted, took place those dashing rides on a
human mount, with a powdered, beribboned pig-tail in lieu of reins.
Small wonder is it that we looked on these things with something akin
to reverence, and certainly with pity in our heart as we recalled how
shamefully those idyllic days were to end.
With a strong preference for country sports and occupations, with
a gay and careless temper which all the professional etiquette
of the world could never tame into the staid gravity proper to a
doctor of medicine, and with that insidious canker, the love of
gambling, slowly devouring any manliness he may have possessed, Dr.
Mitford gradually frittered away the whole of his wife’s fortune,
save a matter of £3,500 in the funds, which, being in the hands of
trustees, was beyond his reach. Generous to a degree, and with a
blind confidence and belief in her husband’s affection, Mrs. Mitford
would not permit any part of her property to be settled on herself,
and was therefore, to some extent, to blame for the catastrophe which
followed.
Thus, in a few short years of married life—at the most nine—we
find this professional man forced to sell furniture and portions
of his library in order to meet current expenses and ease the
clamours of his creditors; forced, indeed, from very shame, to
quit the self-contained and therefore intolerant town where bitter
tongues were wagging and scornful fingers pointing, and to take
up a residence in a distant seaside town, where, if he ever hoped
to retrench and reform, and had he but given the matter a moment’s
consideration, he was scarcely likely to achieve his object.
It was to Lyme Regis they went—this unduly optimistic, noisy,
sportsman-practitioner, with his uncomplaining still trustful wife
and their six-year-old daughter, wide-eyed and wondering why this
sudden flight. The true import of this removal was not to be hidden
from this remarkably intuitive child. “In that old, historical town,”
she writes in one of her reminiscent moods, “that old town so finely
placed on the very line where Dorsetshire and Devonshire meet, I
spent the eventful year when the careless happiness of childhood
vanished, and the troubles of the world first dimly dawned upon my
heart—felt in its effects rather than known—felt in its chilling
gloom, as we feel the shadow of a cloud that passes over the sun on
an April day.” Strangely-sad words these, expressing the thoughts of
a child at an age when, not strong enough to help and too young to
be confided in, it can do nothing but mark the change, questioning
the mother’s furtive tear while, rendered more sensitive by reason of
its own impotence, it shudders in the cold atmosphere of vague yet
ill-concealed suspicion and mistrust.
Yet, mark the improvidence of this unstable man; the house he took
in Lyme Regis was, “as commonly happens to people whose fortunes are
declining, far more splendid than that we had inhabited, indeed the
very best in the town.”
The house still stands with its “great extent of frontage,
terminating by large gates surmounted by spread eagles.” It is now
known as “The Retreat,” and is in the Broad Street of Lyme, proudly
pointed to by the inhabitants as the house once rented by the great
Lord Chatham for the benefit of his son’s—William Pitt’s—health, and,
twenty years later, by the Mitford family.
Lyme Regis is the embodiment of much that is interesting,
historically and politically, but particularly to us by reason of
its literary associations. Of “The Retreat” we have, fortunately, a
description written by Miss Mitford herself.
“An old stone porch, with benches on either side, projected from
the centre, covered as was the whole front of the house, with tall,
spreading, wide-leaved myrtle, abounding in blossom, with moss-roses,
jessamine, and passion-flowers. Behind the building, extended round a
paved quadrangle, was the drawing-room, a splendid apartment, looking
upon a little lawn surrounded by choice evergreens, the bay, the
cedar and the arbutus, and terminated by an old-fashioned greenhouse
and a filbert-tree walk. In the steep declivity of the central garden
was a grotto, over-arching a cool, sparkling spring, whilst the
slopes on either side were carpeted with strawberries and dotted with
fruit trees. One drooping medlar, beneath whose branches I have often
hidden, I remember well.”
This great house, with its large and lofty rooms, its noble
oaken staircases, its marble hall, long galleries and corridors,
was scarcely the house which a man anxious to mark time in an
unpretentious fashion was likely to choose. Nor, had he stopped
for one moment to consider, would he have chosen Lyme Regis as a
retreat, for it was then practically at the height of its fashionable
prosperity, with its gay Assembly Rooms, the resort of those on
whom Bath and Brighthelmstone were beginning to pall, and who were
henceforth to divide their patronage between this Dorsetshire
rendezvous and that other, just awakened, resort still further
westward round the coast and destined, in the slow course of a
century, to become the imperiously aristocratic Torquay.
No, indeed! this was no move the wisdom of which was calculated
to inspire in the breast of Harness, the trustee, any restoration
of confidence, for those long galleries and corridors were, quite
naturally, “echoing from morning to night with gay visitors, cousins
from the North, and the ever-shifting company of the watering-place.”
It was a strange place wherein a laughter-loving child should be sad.
“Yet sad I was,” she says. “Nobody told me, but I felt, I knew, I
had an interior conviction, for which I could not have accounted,
that, in the midst of all this natural beauty and apparent happiness,
in spite of the company, in spite of the gaiety, something was wrong.
It was such a foreshowing as makes the quicksilver in the barometer
sink whilst the weather is still bright and clear.”
How pitiful it all seems! how strangely pathetic when, side by side
with that description of the insistent shadow, we set the written
indictment of him who was the cause of all the trouble—pathetic
because, though an indictment, it is done so gently and breathes the
very spirit of forgiveness.
“Then ... he attempted to increase his resources by the aid of cards,
(he was, unluckily, one of the finest whist-players in England), or
by that other terrible gambling, which assumes so many forms, and
bears so many names, but which even when called by its milder term
of _Speculation_, is that terrible thing gambling still; whatever
might be the manner of the loss—or whether, as afterwards happened,
his own large-hearted hospitality and too-confiding temper were alone
to blame—for the detail was never known to me, nor do I think it was
known to my mother; he did not tell and we could not ask. How often,
in after-life, has that sanguine spirit, which clung to him to his
last hour, made me tremble and shiver.”
Herein, perhaps, we may divine the reason for the otherwise
incomprehensible move from Alresford, where the cost of living would
be cheap[4] as compared with the high prices obtaining at fashionable
Lyme! Nevertheless, although the influence of the brooding shadow was
insistent, these days at Lyme Regis were not without their excitement
and pleasures.
“One incident that occurred there—a frightful danger—a providential
escape—I shall never forget,” says Miss Mitford in her _Recollections_.
A ball at the Rooms was about to take place, and a party of
sixteen or more persons dressed for it had assembled in the
Mitford dining-room for dessert, when suddenly the heavy plaster
ornamentation of the ceiling crashed down in large masses upon the
folk seated beneath. Fortunately the only damage was to the flowers
and feathers of the ladies, the crystal and china, and the fruits and
wines of the dessert, together with a few scratches on the bald head
of a venerable clergyman.
“I, myself,” she continues, “caught instantly in my father’s arms, by
whose side I was standing, had scarcely even time to be frightened,
although after the danger was over, our fair visitors of course
began to scream.”
But it was in the planning and carrying out of excursions in the
neighbourhood that Dr. Mitford showed to greater advantage, giving
full play to those characteristics which, as opposed to his general
selfishness, endeared him then and always to children. Hand in hand
with his little daughter, vivacious and inquiring, the two would
sally forth in quest of glittering spars and ores, of curious shells
and seaweeds and of the fossils which abounded in the Bay, the
collection to be finally carried home and laid out in a certain dark
panelled chamber which, after the book-room, was the most favoured
spot in all the house to the little girl.
Sometimes these excursions would take them towards Charmouth, at
others to the Pinny cliffs, where, “about a mile and a half from
the town, an old landslip had deposited a farm-house, with its
outbuildings, its garden, and its orchard, tossed half-way down
amongst the rocks, contrasting so strangely its rich and blossoming
vegetation, its look of home and comfort, with the dark rugged masses
above, below and around.”
At other times they would pace together that quaint old pier, the
Cob, or ascend the hill to Up-Lyme, whence they might watch the waves
swirling in sheets of green and spumey white in the Bay below.
Very happy, on such occasions, was the child, although the
indefinable shadow dogged her, now vague, now portentous.
At last, and little more than a twelvemonth after their removal
to Lyme, there was a hurried flitting, following short and stormy
interviews with landlords, lawyers and others.
One fateful night “two or three large chests were carried away
through the garden by George and another old servant.” Everything
was to be sold so that everybody might be paid. Save a few special
favourites among the books, the library was left for disposal by
auction, and a day or two after, Mrs. Mitford and the child, with
Mrs. Mosse, the housekeeper and a maid-servant, left Lyme and its
shadow for London and a shadow of more sinister bearing.
Dr. Mitford had gone before, leaving the little party to travel
post in a hack chaise. The journey was full of discomfort to the
distressed women. At Dorchester, where they had hoped to stay the
night, they found the town so full of soldiers, breaking camp, that
there was no accommodation for them, nor was there chaise or horses
wherewith to pursue the journey. Finally, after searching all over
the place, they were able to obtain a lift in a rough tilted cart
without springs which bumped and jolted them over eight rough miles
to a small place whence they might hope to proceed in the morning.
“It was my mother’s first touch of poverty; it seemed like a final
parting from all the elegances and all the accommodations to which
she had been used. I never shall forget her heart-broken look when
she took her little girl upon her lap in that jolting caravan, nor
how the tears stood in her eyes when we were turned altogether into
our miserable bed-room when we reached the roadside ale-house where
we were to pass the night, and found ourselves, instead of the tea we
so much needed, condemned to sup on stale bread and cheese.”
The next day they resumed their journey, and at length reached a
dingy comfortless lodging on the Surrey side of Blackfriars Bridge,
where, with the cause of all the trouble, they found a refuge from
pressing creditors within the rules of the King’s Bench. Here, like a
certain historic figure whose exploits were to be inimitably recorded
later, Dr. Mitford waited for something to turn up, beguiling the
time by visits to Guy’s Hospital, where his friend and fellow-pupil,
Dr. Babington, was one of the physicians, and by performing odd jobs
for, and being generally useful to the notorious “Dr. Graham”—a
famous quack who throve amazingly at the expense of a gullible and
doubtless sensually-minded public.[5]
With her fortune gone and with only the tattered but eloquent
remnants of respectability left to her, can we wonder that the
educated and refined daughter of an eminent divine should wear a
heart-broken look and weep bitter tears? Her spirit was broken, and
even Hope seemed to have deserted her!
FOOTNOTES:
[4] The only two entries in the rate-books of Alresford, relating to
payments made by “George Mitford—Surgeon,” are, under an assessment
at 9_d._ in the pound, made in 1787—7_s._; and, under an assessment
at 4½_d._ in the pound, made in 1790—5_s._
[5] Dr. Graham’s “Celestial Bed” for sterile couples is numbered
among the astounding frauds of the early nineteenth century. To
his “Temple”—first in the Adelphi and later, as he grew wealthy
and more daring, to Schomberg House in Pall Mall—there thronged
a heterogeneous mass of people, some taking him and his nostrums
seriously, while others—the bulk, it is suggested—paid large sums for
admission to view Emma Lyon, afterwards Lady Hamilton, pose, in scant
drapery, as the Goddess of Hygiene. Not the least of this charlatan’s
astounding achievements are his obscene and blasphemous pamphlets on
the most delicate subjects, which he circulated broadcast among the
class to which he knew they would appeal.