THE COTTAGE AT THREE MILE CROSS
It was during March of the year 1820 that the removal to the cottage
at Three Mile Cross took place. Although it was attended with
the inevitable bustle and discomposure, it could not have been,
according to all accounts, a job of very great difficulty, for
most of the furniture and pictures had been sold—sold at odd times
to meet pressing needs—and there was, therefore, little to convey
but the three members of the family, such books as were left to
them, together with Mossy—the dear old nurse who had shared their
misfortunes right through from the Alresford days—and Lucy the maid.
[Illustration: “Our Village” in 1913.
The Village of Three Mile Cross—A general view looking towards
Reading.]
We can almost picture the scene with the heavy farm-wagon,
broad-wheeled and lumbering, crunching its ponderous way along the
carriage-drive and out through the gates, with some of the dogs
prancing and bounding, now before and now behind, barking at the
unusual sight. Having cleared the gates there would be a turn to the
left, along a short stretch of narrow lane emerging into the road
from the village, where a sharp turn again to the left would take
them on beneath over-arching elms—leafless and gaunt—over a tiny
bridge spanning a tributary of the Loddon, past an occasional cottage
where twitching parlour-blinds would betray the stealthy interest of
the inmates in the passing of the folk from the big house; on until
the road branched, where the right-hand fork would be taken, and so,
by a gentle curve, the wagon would emerge by the side of the _George
and Dragon_ into the Basingstoke Road. And now, with a crack of the
whip—for the last few steps must be performed in good style—the wagon
would sweep once more to the left, where the finger-post, by the pond
opposite, pointed to Reading, and in a moment or two draw up in the
fore-court of the _Swan_, there to unload into the cottage next door.
Mossy and Lucy would be waiting to receive the goods, and the cobbler
opposite would watch the proceedings with more than usual interest,
for to him, that night, the village gossips would surely repair for
news, he being so favourably placed for the garnering of it.
While the wagon is being unloaded we will transfer ourselves again to
Bertram House.
The dogs are scampering and scurrying in the undergrowth of the now
neglected shrubbery, chasing leaves which the March winds scatter
crisply. The house is gaunt and cheerless as houses always are on
such occasions. Fitful gleams of watery sunshine streak through the
trees across to the steps down which two sad women take their slow
way. The dogs bound towards them and are greeted and stroked, the
while they curve their sleek and graceful bodies in an ecstasy of
delight.
Along the carriage-drive they walk, with its surface all overgrown
with weeds and marked with the heavy wheels of the wagon, the
tracks of which, deeply cut in the yielding road, they now follow.
Once through the gates they turn for a backward glance of “My own
cotemporary trees” and then a “long farewell to all.” At the end
of the lane they cast one sad look back—there is pain in the eyes
of both—then turning they follow the wheel-marks until the cottage
is reached, the door flies open—for Mossy has been watching for
them—and all that the cobbler sees of their arrival will force him to
draw on his imagination if his inquisitive neighbours are not to be
disappointed.
* * * * *
“Your delightful letter, my dear Sir William,” wrote Miss Mitford
shortly afterwards, “arrived at the very moment when kindness was
most needed and most welcome—just as we were leaving our dear old
home to come to this new one. Without being in general very violently
addicted to sentimentality, I was, as you may imagine, a little
grieved to leave the spot where I had passed so many happy years. The
trees, and fields, and sunny hedgerows, however little distinguished
by picturesque beauty, were to me as old friends. Women have more
of this natural feeling than the stronger sex; they are creatures
of home and habit, and ill brook transplanting. We, however, are
not quite transplanted yet—rather, as the gardeners say, ‘laid by
the heels.’ We have only moved to a little village street, situate
on the turnpike road, between Basingstoke and the illustrious and
quarrelsome borough [Reading]. Our residence is a cottage—no, not a
cottage—it does not deserve the name—a messuage or tenement, such as
a little farmer who had made twelve or fourteen hundred pounds might
retire to when he left off business to live on his means. It consists
of a series of closets, the largest of which may be about eight feet
square, which they call parlours and kitchens and pantries; some
of them minus a corner, which has been unnaturally filched for a
chimney; others deficient in half a side, which has been truncated
by the shelving roof. Behind is a garden about the size of a good
drawing-room, with an arbour which is a complete sentry-box of
privet. On one side a public-house, on the other a village shop, and
right opposite a cobbler’s stall.
“Notwithstanding all this, ‘the cabin,’ as Bobadil says, ‘is
convenient.’ It is within reach of my dear old walks; the banks
where I find my violets; the meadows full of cowslips; and the woods
where the wood-sorrel blows. We are all beginning to get settled and
comfortable, and resuming our usual habits. Papa has already had the
satisfaction of setting the neighbourhood to rights by committing a
disorderly person, who was the pest of the Cross, to Bridewell. Mamma
has furbished up an old dairy, and made it into a not incommodious
store room. I have lost my only key, and stuffed the garden with
flowers. It is an excellent lesson of condensation—one which we all
wanted. Great as our merits might be in some points, we none of us
excelled in compression. Mamma’s tidiness was almost as diffuse as
her daughter’s litter. I expect we shall be much benefited by this
squeeze; though at present it sits upon us as uneasily as tight
stays, and is just as awkward looking. Indeed, my great objection
to a small room always was its extreme unbecomingness to one of my
enormity. I really seem to fill it—like a blackbird in a goldfinch’s
cage. The parlour looks all me.”
Any doubts which the cobbler opposite may have entertained as to the
status of the new arrivals—if, indeed, particulars had not already
filtered through from Grazeley—must have been dispersed by the
Doctor’s action in at once removing the terror of the Cross. More
than this, he had actually suspended the village constable—who was
also the blacksmith—for appearing before him with a blood-stained
head—an unwarrantable offence against the person of the Chairman of
the Reading bench. Three Mile Cross was to be purged; henceforth, it
must behave itself, for a real live magistrate had come to live in
the midst and, until the villagers found that the Doctor’s bark was
worse than his bite they might shake with apprehension—and “they”
included the cobbler who stuck closer to his last and was not to be
tempted to anything more than a knowing wink when the magistrate and
his family came under discussion.
“Borrow a little of the only gift in which I can vie with you—the
elastic spirit of Hope”—wrote Miss Mitford to Mrs. Hofland at this
time, and in that sentence we catch a glimpse of this wonderful woman
who point blank refused to acknowledge a shadow so long as but one
streak of light were vouchsafed to her.
“This place is a mere _pied à terre_,” she wrote, “till we can suit
ourselves better,” and her one dread was that her father would elect
to live in Reading, to which town she had now taken a sudden and
violent dislike. “Not that I have any quarrel with the town, which,
as Gray said of Cambridge, ‘would be well enough if it were not for
the people’; but those people—their gossiping—their mistiness! Oh!
you can imagine nothing so bad. They are as rusty as old iron, and
as jagged as flints.” By which we may quite properly infer that the
affairs and dwindled fortunes of the Mitfords were being openly
discussed.
As a matter of fact, they must at this time have been almost
penniless, with nothing between them and actual want but what they
could obtain by the exertions of the daughter with her pen.
Whatever the original intention of the Doctor may have been as to
the tenure of the cottage, it has to be recorded that it lasted
for thirty years, witnessing the best and most successful of
Miss Mitford’s literary efforts and her short-lived triumph as a
dramatist; marking the gradual decay and death of Mrs. Mitford, and
the increasing selfishness of the Doctor, the results of which, when
he died, were his daughter’s only inheritance.
But, lest we should be accused of painting too gloomy a picture, let
us also joyfully record that it was in this humble cottage and among
the flowers of its garden that there gathered, from time to time,
those truest friends who came from far and near to pay homage to the
brave little woman who found comfort in the simple things of life,
and was happy only when she was permitted to share her happiness with
others.
Despite the pigs which came through the hedge from the _Swan_ next
door and “made sad havoc among my pinks and sweet-peas”; despite,
also, the pump which went dry “from force of habit,” soon after
they were installed, Miss Mitford was not long before she had
“taken root,” as she called it, and begun again her work and her
correspondence.
Haydon, the artist, sent her a picture—his study for the head of St.
Peter—a delicate compliment and, seeing that their walls were so
bare, a seasonable gift. “I am almost ashamed to take a thing of so
much consequence” wrote the pleased recipient; “but you are a very
proud man and are determined to pay me in this magnificent manner for
pleasing myself with the fancy of being in a slight degree useful to
you. Well, I am quite content to be the obliged person.”
Anxious to keep down all needless expenditure we now read of the
“discontinuance of my beloved _Morning Chronicle_” and of inability
to accept invitations away because of “mamma’s old complaint in
her head” and “papa’s sore throat, which he manages in the worst
possible manner, alternately overdoing it and letting it quite alone;
blistering it by gargling brandy one day, and going out in the rain
and wind all the next; so that, to talk of going out, even to you,
seems out of the question. They really can’t do without me.” On
the other hand, and remembering the mistiness, the rustiness and
flinty nature of the Reading folk, there was the pathetic plea to
Sir William Elford that he should turn aside on his journeys to or
from town, to pay the cottage and its inhabitants a visit. “We shall
have both house-room and heart-room for you, and I depend on seeing
you. Do pray come—you must come and help laugh at our strange shifts
and the curious pieces of finery which our landlord has left for the
adornment of his mansion. Did you ever see a corner cupboard? Pray
come and see us or you will break my heart—and let me know when you
are coming.”
Three months later she wrote:—“I have grown exceedingly fond
of this little place. I love it of all things—have taken root
completely—could be content to live and die here.... My method of
doing nothing seldom varies. _Imprimis_, I take long walks and get
wet through. _Item_, I nurse my flowers—sometimes pull up a few,
taking them for weeds, and _vice versâ_ leave the weeds, taking them
for flowers. _Item_, I do a short job of needlework. _Item_, I write
long letters. _Item_, I read all sorts of books, long and short, new
and old. Have you a mind for a list of the most recent? Buckhardt’s
_Travels in Nubia_, Bowdich’s _Mission to Ashantee_, Dubois’ _Account
of India_, Morier’s _Second Journey in Persia_. All these are quartos
of various degrees of heaviness. There is another of the same
class, La Touche’s[19] _Life of Sir Philip Sidney_ (you set me to
reading that by your anecdote of Queen Elizabeth’s hair). Southey’s
_Life of Wesley_—very good. Hogg’s _Winter Evening Tales_—very good
indeed (I have a great affection for the Ettrick Shepherd, have not
you?). _Diary of an Invalid_—the best account of Italy which I have
met with since Forsythe—much in his manner—I think you would like
it. Odeleben’s _Campaign in Saxony_—interesting, inasmuch as it
concerns Napoleon, otherwise so-so. _The Sketch Book_, by Geoffrey
Crayon—quite a curiosity—an American book which is worth reading. Mr.
Milman’s _Fall of Jerusalem_—a fine poem, though not exactly so fine
as the _Quarterly_ makes out. I thought it much finer when I first
read it than I do now, for it set me to reading _Josephus_, which
I had never had the grace to open before; and the historian is, in
the striking passages, much grander than the poet, particularly in
the account of the portents and prophecies before the Fall. These
books, together with a few Italian things—especially the _Lettere di
Ortes_—will pretty well account for my time since I wrote last, and
convince you of the perfect solitude, which gives me time to indulge
so much in the delightful idleness of reading.”
The anecdote of Queen Elizabeth’s hair to which Miss Mitford alludes
in the preceding letter, was one of which Sir William wrote in
the previous April. It was to the effect that two ladies of his
acquaintance had just paid a visit to Lord Pembroke’s family at
Wilton, and whilst there one of them desired to see the _Countess of
Pembroke’s Arcadie_ when, in perusing it, she discovered, between two
of the leaves, a long lock of yellow hair, folded in an envelope in
which was written, in Sir Philip Sidney’s handwriting, a declaration
that the lock was “The faire Queen Elizabeth’s hair,” given him by
her Majesty. In recounting this anecdote to Mrs. Hofland, Miss
Mitford remarked that “the miraculous part of the story is, that
at Wilton, amongst her own descendants, the _Arcadia_ should be so
completely a dead letter. I suppose it was snugly ensconced between
some of Sir Philip’s Sapphics or Dactylics, which are, to be sure,
most unreadable things.”
But, apart from this “idleness of reading,” Miss Mitford was busily
gathering material for her articles in the _Lady’s Magazine_, roaming
the countryside for colour. “I have already been cowslipping” she
wrote. “Are you fond of field flowers? They are my passion—even more,
I think, than greyhounds or books. This country is eminently flowery.
Besides all the variously-tinted primroses and violets in singular
profusion, we have all sorts of orchises and arums; the delicate wood
anemone; the still more delicate wood-sorrel, with its lovely purple
veins meandering over the white drooping flower; the field-tulip,
with its rich chequer-work of lilac and crimson, and the sun shining
through the leaves as through old painted glass; the ghostly field
star of Bethlehem—that rare and ghost-like flower; wild lilies of the
valley; and the other day I found a field completely surrounded by
wild periwinkles. They ran along the hedge for nearly a quarter of a
mile; to say nothing of the sculptural beauty of the white water-lily
and the golden clusters of the golden ranunculus. Yes, this is really
a country of flowers, and so beautiful just now that there is no
making up one’s mind to leave it.”
FOOTNOTES:
[19] Probably Miss Mitford meant T. Zouch’s _Memoirs of Sir Philip
Sidney_, published in 1809.