Original DROVE in at the gates of Hallington House as one might drive into the scene of a dear old dream--a dream that one has half-believed and half-doubted, and wholly loved, and dreamed again all one's life long. There it stood, as I had always wondered if I might not see it standing in that far day when I should go to England, behind its high brick wall, in the midst of its ivies and laburnums and elms and laurel-bushes, looking across where its lawns dipped into its river at soft green meadows sloping to the west--a plain old solid grey stone English country-house so long occupied with the birthdays of other people that it had quite forgotten its own. Very big and very solid, without any pretentiousness of Mansard roof, or bow window, or balcony, or verandah its simple story of strength and shelter and home and hospitality was plain to me between its wide-open gates and its wide-open doors, and I loved it from that moment.
It was the same all through--the Stacys realised the England of my
imagination to me most sweetly and completely; I found that there had
been no mistake. Mrs. Stacy realised it, pretty and fresh and fair
at fifty, plump and motherly in her black cashmere and lace, full of
pleasant greetings and responsible inquiries. So did the Squire, coming
out of his study to ask, with courteous old-fashioned solicitude, how I
had borne the fatigue of the journey--such a delightful old Squire, left
over by accident from the last century, with his high-bred phraseology
and simple dignity and great friendliness. So did the rest of the
Stacy daughters, clustering round their parents and their guest and the
teapot, talking gaily with their rounded English accent of all manner
of things--the South Kensington Museum, the Pinbury commissions, the
prospects for tennis. Presently I found myself taken through just such
narrow corridors and down just such unexpected steps as I would have
hoped for, to my room, and left there. I remember how a soft wind
came puffing in at the little low, tiny-paned window flung back on
its hinges, swelling out the muslin curtains and bringing with it the
sweetest sound I heard in England--a cry that was quite new and strange,
and yet came into me from the quiet hedges of the nestling
world outside, as I sat there bewitched by it, with a plaintive
familiarity--'Cuckoo!'... 'Cuckoo!' I must have heard it and loved
it years ago, when the Wicks lived in England, through the ears of my
ancestors. Then I discovered that the room was full of a dainty scent
that I had not known before, and traced it to multitudinous little round
flower-bunches, palest yellow and palest green, that stood about in
everything that would hold them--fresh and pure and delicious, all the
tender soul of the spring in them, all the fairness of the meadows and
the love of the shy English sun. Ah, the charm of it! It is almost worth
while being brought up in Chicago to come fresh to cuckoos and cowslips,
and learn their sweet meaning when you are grown up and can understand
it. I mean, of course, entirely apart from the inestimable advantages of
a Republican form of Government, female emancipation, and the climate of
Illinois. We have no cowslips in Chicago, and no cuckoos; and the
cable cars do not seem altogether to make up for them. I couldn't help
wishing, as I leaned through my low little window into the fragrant
peace outside, that Nature had taken a little more time with America.
'Cuckoo!' from the hedge again! I could not go till the answer came from
the toppling elm-boughs in the field corner, 'Cuckoo!' And in another
minute, if I listened, I should hear it again.
Down below, in the meantime, out came two tidy little maids in cap
and apron, and began to weed and to potter about two tidy little
plots--their own little gardens anybody might know by the solicitude
and the comparisons they indulged in--the freedom, too, with which they
pulled what pleased themselves. It was pretty to see the little maids,
and I fell to conjecturing such a scene in connection with the domestic
duchess of Chicago, but without success. Her local interest could never
be sufficiently depended upon, for one thing. Marguerite might plant,
and Irene might water, but Arabella Maud would certainly gather the
fruits of their labour, if she kept her place long enough. And I doubt
if the social duties of any of these ladies would leave them time for
such idylls.
'Cuckoo!' The bird caught it from the piping of the very first lover's
very first love-dream. How well he must have listened!... 'Cuckoo!'
I bade Miss Dorothy Stacy come in when I heard her knock and voice; and
she seemed to bring with her, in her innocent strength and youth and
pinkness, a very fair and harmonious counterpart of the cowslips and the
cuckoos. She came to know if I wasn't coming down to tea. 'Listen!' I
said, as the sweet cry came again. 'I was waiting till he had finished.'
It was better than no excuse at all.
'I think I can show you from here where I suspect they have stolen a
nest, lazy things!' answered Miss Dorothy, sympathetically, and she
slipped her arm round my waist as we looked out of the window together
in the suspected direction. 'Then you don't find them tiresome? Some
people do, you know.' 'No,' I said, 'I don't,' And then Miss Dorothy
confided to me that she was very glad; 'for, you know,' she said, I one
can't like people who find cuckoos tiresome,' and we concluded that we
really must go down to tea. At that point, however, I was obliged to
ask Miss Dorothy to wait until I did a little towards improving my
appearance. I had quite forgotten, between the cuckoos and the cowslips,
that I had come up principally to wash my face.
'You met our cousin on the ship crossing the Atlantic, didn't you?'
the third Miss Stacy remarked, enthusiastically, over the teapot. 'How
delightfully romantic to make a--a friend--a friend like that, I mean,
on a ship in the middle of the ocean! Didn't you always feel perfectly
comfortable afterwards, as if, no matter what happened, he would be sure
to save you?'
'Kitty!' said Mrs. Stacy from the sofa, in a tone of helpless rebuke.
'Mother, darling!' said Kitty, 'I do beg your pardon! Your daughter
always speaks first and thinks afterwards, doesn't she, sweetest mother!
But you must have had that feeling,' Miss Stacy continued to me; 'I know
you had!'
'Oh, no!' I returned. It was rather an awkward situation
--I had no wish to disparage Miss Stacy's cousin's heroism, which,
nevertheless, I had not relied upon in the least. 'I don't think I
thought about being drowned,' I said.
'That proves it!' she cried in triumph. 'Your confidence was so perfect
that it was unconscious! Sweetest mother--there, I won't say another
word; not another syllable, mother mine, shall pass your daughter's
lips! But one does like to show one's self in the right, doesn't one,
Miss Wick?'--and Mrs. Stacy surrendered to an impulsive volume of
embraces which descended from behind the sofa, chiefly upon the back of
her neck.
How pleasant it was, that five o'clock tea-drinking in the old-fashioned
drawing-room, with the jessamine nodding in at the window and all
the family cats gathered upon the hearthrug--five in number, with one
kitten. The Stacy's compromise in the perpetually-recurring problem of
new kittens was to keep only the representative of a single generation
for family affection and drawing-room privileges. The rest were
obscurely brought up in the stables and located as early as was entirely
humane with respectable cottagers, or darkly spoken of as 'kitchen
cats.' There had been only one break in the line of posterity that
gravely licked itself on the rug, or besought small favours rubbingly
with purrs--made by a certain Satanella, who ate her kittens! and
suffered banishment in consequence. But this was confided to me in
undertones by the second Miss Stacy, who begged me not to mention the
matter to Dorothy. 'We don't talk about it often, for Satanella was her
cat, you know, and she can't get over her behaving so dreadfully.' Each
cat had its individual history, and to the great-great-grandmother of
them attached the thrilling tale, if I remember rightly, of having once
only escaped hanging by her own muscular endurance and activity; but
none bore so dark a blot as covered the memory of Satanella. Perhaps it
is partly owing to my own fondness for pussies, but ever since I made
the acquaintance of the Stacys I must confess to disparaging a family
with no cats in it.
It was naturally Dorothy who took me out to see the garden--sweet, shy
Dorothy, who seemed so completely to have grown in a garden that Lady
Torquilin, when she brought her pink cheeks afterwards to gladden the
flat in Cadogan Mansions, dubbed her 'the Wild Rose' at once. At any
rate, Dorothy had always lived just here beside her garden, and never
anywhere else, for she told me so in explaining her affection for it. I
thought of the number of times we had moved in Chicago, and sighed.
It was not a very methodical garden, Dorothy remarked in apology--the
dear sweet things mostly came up of their own accord year after year,
and the only ambition Peter entertained towards it was to keep it
reasonably weeded. A turn in the walk disclosed Peter at the moment with
a wheelbarrow--the factotum of garden and stable, a solemn bumpkin of
twenty, with a large red face and a demeanour of extreme lethargy. His
countenance broke into something like a deferential grin as he passed
us. 'Can you make him understand?' I asked Miss Dorothy. 'Oh, I should
think so!' she replied. 'He is very intelligent!' From his appearance
I should not have said so. There was nothing 'sharp,' as we say in
America, about Peter, though afterwards I beard him whistling 'Two
lovely black eyes' with a volume of vigorous expression that made one
charge him with private paradoxical sweethearting. But I was new to the
human product after many generations of the fields and hedges.
It was a square garden, shut in from the road and the neighbours by that
high old red-brick wall. A tennis-court lay in the middle in the sun;
the house broke into a warmly-tinted gable, red-roofed and plastered and
quaint, that nestled over the little maids in the larder, I think,
at one end; a tall elm and a spreading horse-chestnut helped the
laurestinus bushes to shut it in from the lawns and the drive and
any eyes that might not fall upon it tenderly. We sat down upon the
garden-seat that somebody had built round the elm, Dorothy and I, and I
looked at the garden as one turns the pages of an old storybook. There
were the daisies in the grass, to begin with, all over, by hundreds and
thousands, turning their bright little white-and-yellow faces up at
me and saying something--I don't know quite what. I should have had to
listen a long time to be sure it was anything but 'Don't step on me!'
but I had a vague feeling that every now and then one said, 'Can't you
remember?' Dorothy remarked it was really disgraceful, so many of them,
and Peter should certainly mow them all down in the morning--by which
her pretty lips gave me a keen pang. 'Oh!' I said, I what a pity!'
'Yes,' she said, relentingly, 'they are dear things, but they're very
untidy. The worst of Peter is,' she went on, with a shade of reflection,
'that we are obliged to keep at him.'
I dare say you don't think much of daisies in the grass--you have always
had so many. You should have been brought up on dandelions instead--in
Chicago!
Then there were all the sweet spring English flowers growing in little
companies under the warm brick wall--violets and pansies and yellow
daffodils, and in one corner a tall, brave array of anemones, red
and purple and white. And against the wall rose-bushes and an ancient
fig-tree; and farther on, all massed and tangled in its own dark-green
shadows, the ivy, pouring out its abundant heart to drape and soften the
other angle, and catch the golden rain of the laburnum that hung over.
And this English Dorothy, with her yellow hair and young-eyed innocence,
the essence and the flower of it all.
Near the stables, in our roundabout ramble to the kitchen-garden,
Dorothy showed me, with seriousness, a secluded corner, holding two
small mounds and two small wooden tablets. On one the head of a spaniel
was carved painstakingly and painted, with the inscription, 'Here Lies a
Friend.' The second tablet had no bas-relief and a briefer legend: 'Here
Lies Another.' 'Jack,' said she, with a shade of retrospection, and
Jingo. Jack died in--let me see--eighteen eighty-five. Jingo two years
later, in eighteen eighty-seven. I didn't do Jingo's picture,' Miss
Dorothy went on, pensively. 'It wasn't really necessary, they were so
very much alike.'
About the kitchen-garden I remember only how rampant the
gooseberry-bushes were, how portentous the cabbages, and how the whole
Vegetable Kingdom combined failed to keep out a trailing company of
early pink roses that had wandered in from politer regions to watch the
last of the sunset across the river and beyond the fields.
'I have a letter to send,' said Miss Dorothy, 'and as we go to the
post-office you shall see Hallington.' So we went through the gates that
closed upon this dear inner world into the winding road. It led us past
'The Green Lion,' amiably couchant upon a creaking sign that swung from
a yellow cottage, past a cluster of little houses with great brooding
roofs of straw, past the village school, in a somewhat bigger cottage,
in one end whereof the schoolmistress dwelt and looked out upon her
lavender and rue, to the post-office at the top of the hill, where the
little woman inside, in a round frilled cap and spectacles, and her
shawl pinned tidily across her breast, sold buttons and thread, and
'sweeties' and ginger ale, and other things. My eye lighted with
surprise upon a row of very familiar wedgeshaped tins, all blue and
red. They contained corned beef, and they came from Chicago. 'I know the
gentleman who puts those up very well,' I said to Miss Dorothy Stacy;
'Mr. W. P. Hitt, of Chicago. He is a great friend of poppa's. 'Really!'
said she, with slight embarrassment. 'Does he--does he do it himself?
How clever of him!'
On the way back through the village of Hallington we met several stolid
little girls by ones and twos and threes, and every little girl, as we
approached, suddenly lowered her person and her petticoats by about six
inches and brought it up again in a perfectly straight line, and without
any change of expression whatever. It seemed to me a singular and
most amusing demonstration, and Miss Dorothy explained that it was a
curtsey--a very proper mark of respect. 'But surely,' she said, 'your
little cottager girls in America curtsey to the ladies and gentlemen
they meet!' And Miss Dorothy found it difficult to understand just why
the curtsey was not a popular genuflection in America, even if we had
any little cottager girls to practise it, which I did not think we had,
exactly.
Later on we gathered round a fire, with the cats, under the quaint old
portraits of very straight-backed dead-and-gone ladies Stacy in the
drawing-room, and I told all I knew about the Apache Indians and Niagara
Falls. I think I also set the minds of the Stacy family at rest about
the curious idea that we want to annex Canada--they had some
distant relations there, I believe, whom they did not want to see
annexed--although it appeared that the relations had been heterodox on
the subject, and had said they wouldn't particularly mind! I suggested
that they were probably stock-raising in the Northwest out there, and
found our tariff inconvenient; and the Stacys said Yes, they were.
I continued that the union they would like to see was doubtless
commercial, and not political; and the Stacys, when they thought of
this, became more cheerful. Further on, the Squire handed me a silver
candlestick at the foot of the stairs with the courtliness of three
generations past; and as I went to bed by candle-light for the first
time in my life, I wondered whether I would not suddenly arrive, like
this, at the end of a chapter, and find that I had just been reading one
of Rhoda Broughton's novels. But in the morning it came in at the
window with the scent of the lilacs, and I undoubtedly heard it
again--'Cuckoo!'...'Cuckoo!'