STANDARD
NOVELS.
No CXVII.
"No kind of literature is so generally attractive as Fiction. Pictures of
life and manners, and Stories of adventure, are more eagerly received by
the many than graver productions, however important these latter may be.
Apuleius is better remembered by his fable of Cupid and Psyche than by
his abstruser Platonic writings; and the Decameron of Boccaccio has
outlived the Latin Treatises and other learned works of that author."
TALES
OF
THE PEERAGE AND THE PEASANTRY.
COMPLETE IN ONE VOLUME.
LONDON:
RICHARD BENTLEY, NEW BURLINGTON STREET;
AND BELL & BRADFUTE, EDINBURGH.
1849.
LONDON:
Spottiswoodes and Shaw,
New-street-Square.
[Illustration:
_Clara Cause, del._ _C. Cook, sc._
TALES OF THE PEERAGE AND THE PEASANTRY.
"_The Chevalier received the Countess of Nithsdale with what he meant
to be marked attention, but his manner was subdued, his bearing
dejected_" Winifred
_London. Published by Richard Bentley. 1849._]
TALES
OF THE
PEERAGE AND THE PEASANTRY.
EDITED BY LADY DACRE.
LONDON:
RICHARD BENTLEY, NEW BURLINGTON STREET;
AND BELL & BRADFUTE, EDINBURGH.
1849.
NOTICE.
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are compelled by the new Copyright Act to discontinue purchasing and
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A PENALTY OF TEN POUNDS.
* * * * *
By the new Copyright Act and the new Customs Act, even single copies of
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and the Colonies. Copies so attempted to be passed are seized.
These measures will be rigidly enforced.
PREFACE.
The authoress feels much diffidence in sending forth to the world a
tale which by its title gives promise of treating not only of history,
but of Scottish history; an act of presumption from which she is
anxious to clear herself;--and at the same time she wishes to re-assure
those readers who may not like historical novels from a woman's pen,
that she has entered no farther into public affairs, than as they may
have influenced the fortunes and feelings of the one admirable woman
who forms the subject of the following memoir.
Since in the human heart the same passions and the same emotions are
found in all ages, she hopes she has not trespassed beyond the limits
assigned to one who is conscious that all she writes bears the stamp
of feminine authorship, in attempting the development of a female
character, the firmness and tenderness of which may be gathered from
Lady Nithsdale's own beautiful letter to her sister.
The foundation of the story of the Hampshire Cottage is strictly true.
The appearance, the characters, the sentiments, and the death of the
old couple, are entirely from nature. Their very Christian names have
been preserved; and the circumstance of the blind old man feeling too
low for the head of the little girl, who had outgrown his recollection,
actually occurred to the authoress, when visiting the cottage after a
long absence.
For reasons which perhaps may be understood by her friends, she adds,
that the tale of Blanche was written in the year 1832.
London.
June 26, 1835.
CONTENTS.
Page
Winifred, Countess of Nithsdale 1
The Hampshire Cottage 194
Blanche 273
TALES
OF
THE PEERAGE AND THE PEASANTRY.
WINIFRED, COUNTESS OF NITHSDALE.
CHAPTER I.
My father stood for his true king,
Till standing it could do nae mair;
The day is lost, and so are we,--
Nae wonder mony a heart is sair.
_Jacobite Song._
The sound of the organ pealed through the chapel of the English
Augustine convent at Bruges: a bright gleam of sunshine, streaming
through the painted window to the south of the altar, shone upon the
clouds of incense which arose in silvery folds from the censers; it
shone upon the white-robed assistants, upon the priests, and upon the
calm brow of the young nun who had that moment taken the irrevocable
vows which separated her from the world--a world of which she knew
but little; but which, from the circumstances in which her family was
placed, offered not to her the temptations it usually holds out to
youth, beauty, and rank such as hers.
The Lady Lucy Herbert was the fourth daughter of William Marquis of
Powis, who, having devoted himself to the cause of James the Second,
and accompanied his queen in her flight to France, received from the
exiled monarch, as a reward for his uncompromising loyalty, the empty
titles of Marquis of Montgomery and Duke of Powis.
James afterwards appointed him steward and chamberlain to his
household--offices which, although of small advantage, may have been
gratifying to his feelings, as proofs of the estimation in which he
was held by the master to whom he had sacrificed everything.
Upon the Duke of Powis's death, which took place in 1696, his widow
placed her two youngest daughters in the English Augustine convent
at Bruges; while the three elder remained with her at the melancholy
shadow of a court still kept up at St. Germain's.
It was no grief to the widowed mother when she found that the bent
of the young Lucy's mind was sincerely and enthusiastically directed
towards a religious life. Although the attainder had been reversed,
and her son had been restored to the Marquisate of Powis, it was not
till some years afterwards that she had ventured to return to England;
even then she lived in retirement and privacy. The widow of so zealous
an adherent to King James could not be regarded without suspicion;
her means were scanty; her elder daughters had not then made the
advantageous alliances which they afterwards formed; and joyfully did
she hail the vocation which she hoped would secure, to one of her
children at least, a peaceful and tranquil existence, secure from any
farther vicissitudes of fortune.
But to one person the decision of the Lady Lucy Herbert was a matter of
deep and unmixed sorrow. Her younger sister, the Lady Winifred, loved
her with all the devotion of a fresh and unpractised heart. They had
been early separated from the rest of their family. At the period of
their father's death, when their childish hearts had for the first time
been made acquainted with grief, they had been thrown entirely on each
other for support and consolation.
Though many years had now elapsed, the moment was still fresh in their
memories, when their mother, in her mourning habit, with pale cheek
and streaming eyes, delivered them over to the care of the friend who
was to convey them to Bruges. The sad countenances and black garments
of their sisters, and of the few domestics who still remained of their
former establishment, coupled with the vague, ill-defined feeling,
half resembling fear, half shame, which children experience when they
witness grief more intense than their young minds can comprehend, had
left a deep impression upon both the youthful pensioners. When first
they found themselves in the convent, with none but strangers around
them, the timid Winifred clung instinctively to her sister; while Lady
Lucy, forced, as it were, to become the prop and stay of one younger
and weaker than herself, acquired at an early age the habit of seeking
strength and support from above.
Loving and admiring her sister as did the Lady Winifred, it may excite
wonder that she did not imbibe her strict religious notions; that she
also should not have looked forward with joy to the idea of devoting
herself to pious seclusion, and thus, at the same time, preserving the
society of the being she most loved on earth. But it was not so. On the
contrary, she felt her sister's vows as a barrier of separation between
them.
Although she had no wish to wander beyond the walls of the little
convent garden, though she seldom even went to the parlour grate, and
never wished to avail herself of the occasional opportunities which
occurred to the pensioners of mixing in society, still she felt an
instinctive horror of irrevocable vows, to renounce--they knew not
what. It was with a feeling amounting to despair that she witnessed
the funeral rites, that she heard the service for the dead, that she
saw the black veil dropped between her sister and the world, of whose
pains and pleasures they could form no idea. Moreover, these vows for
ever precluded the possibility of her seeing their native country in
company with that beloved sister; and in the heart of the Lady Winifred
there existed the strong instinctive affection for the land of her
forefathers, which the coldest and the most hardened are not wholly
without, but which in minds of a more ardent temperament amounts almost
to a ruling passion. She had never beheld the British shores, she had
never breathed British air, and yet she felt as if England was her
home--her natural resting-place.
When first the young girls had been sent to Bruges, an old and faithful
servant of the name of Evans had accompanied them. She was a native of
Wales, and had been born in the neighbourhood of the ancient seat of
the Herbert family, Poole Castle, in Montgomeryshire.
Loyalty to the family of Herbert had grown with her growth and
strengthened with her strength, and was only balanced by the attachment
to her country, which is generally more enthusiastic in the inhabitants
of mountainous districts than of any other.
The young girl had listened for hours together to old Evans's glowing
descriptions of the cloud-capped Snowdon, the green mountains, the
smiling valleys, the rapid streams, the wreaths of mist,--all the
varied beauties of her own Wales. From the windows of their convent
they could descry nothing but the flat and uninteresting country
which surrounds Bruges: but when the clouds formed themselves into a
thousand fantastic shapes, old Evans would point out to them how one
mass resembled such a mountain near their ancestral castle--how another
was the very picture of Snowdon when he wore his white cap of clouds,
as she familiarly expressed herself. She would describe to them the
peculiar customs of Wales--the snowy caps, the small black hats, of
the women,--would expatiate on the light form and airy step with which
they trod the mountain paths--would picture to them how beautiful were
the white sheep dotting the soft green of the steep and swelling hills,
till the youthful Lady Winifred's heart would burn within her to flee
to the home of her ancestors.
Nor, though Evans afterwards returned to her mistress, the duchess,
when she established herself in England, did these impressions fade
away.
The nunnery was all composed of English, most of whom had been driven
into exile by the adherence of their families to that of Stuart; thence
it naturally arose that all their ideas of prosperity, happiness,
splendour and gaiety, were blended with the memory of England. These
recollections also partook of the colouring thrown around them by the
joyousness of youth; so that perhaps in no spot of earth had patriotism
a firmer hold on the human heart than in the English Augustine convent
at Bruges. There also did King James the Third, as he was ever styled,
reign without a rival. To every inhabitant of the convent was his
cause endeared by the sacrifice of friends, of property, of rank, or
of situation; and all those whose age or disposition inclined them
to hope, rather than to despond, looked forward with superstitious
confidence to the time when "the king should enjoy his own again."
It was an additional grief to the Lady Winifred that her sister's vows
would prevent her ever witnessing the glorious restoration which was
to take place at some future and unknown period; and it was with a
feeling of desolation keener than any emotion she had experienced since
the grief of childhood at her father's death, that she retired for the
first time to her solitary apartment as one of the pensioners; while
her sister--her friend, her companion by day and by night--was now a
professed nun, immured within her narrow cell, and henceforward subject
to all the rules and regulations of the order.
The Lady Lucy's vocation had been so decided, and her only surviving
parent's consent so unhesitating, that her noviciate had been
shortened; and it seemed to Lady Winifred a sudden and violent
separation.
During the next year, her thoughts, which could no longer be
communicated as they arose in the hourly companionship of sisterhood,
turned more frequently than ever towards her native land; her studies
were all of the glorious deeds of England; she read none but English
poets; she carolled none but English ballads; and she hailed with joy
the intelligence that her eldest sister, the Lady Mary, was united to
the eldest son of Carril Viscount Molineux, and that an alliance was in
treaty between the Lady Frances and the Earl of Seaforth, for she hoped
her mother might wish for her society when her sisters were honourably
disposed of in marriage.
Since she had taken the vows, the Lady Lucy had unavoidably been
not only less her companion, but moreover the constant practice of
religious forms and exercises occupied her mind as well as her time.
She was unable to sympathise with Lady Winifred: her lot was cast
within her convent walls; and she would have considered it a vain
and sinful indulgence to let her thoughts wander towards scenes or
pleasures, which she had renounced. At the age of fifteen, therefore,
the Lady Winifred's mind had been thrown back upon itself; and it
gradually acquired a gentle reserve, a mild thoughtfulness, which
suited well the cast of her features. The placid brow, and the full
white eyelids,--the rounded cheek, which, except when some sudden
emotion called up an evanescent bloom, was pale as the white rose
consecrated to the Jacobite party,--were not calculated to strike at
first sight; but any one who had once looked upon her, could not choose
but look again. The dove-like eyes, the lips so full of expression, the
whole form so aristocratic in its mould, so feminine in its movements,
so delicate, so fragile,--all were rather like a poet's dream, than
a being formed to encounter the chances and changes of this rough
work-day world. Her slender throat gleamed white from the close,
narrow mantilla of black silk edged with lace, which, according to the
fashion of the time and country, was closely fastened down the front;
her soft brown hair was smoothly parted off her brow, and tucked under
the little white cap, enclosing the back of the head, which is still
worn in the Low Countries, and which formed part of the dress of the
young pensioners.
The character, the countenance, the features, and the habit, all seemed
in unison with each other.