THE SIXTH HOME
The charms of solitude at "The Old Parsonage" were outweighed by its
disadvantages when I became that miserable creature, the confirmed
invalid. The fire danger which made me nervous in summer was bad for
health; the silence and loneliness of the winters, when nobody came,
were worse. My husband, of course, was much away from home; the
servants lived in their detached house; and so good and capable were
they that for a time--after the elder babies began to go with Miss C.
to school--I saved the expense of my dear little lady-help, who,
however, came back to me later on. It was only with the greatest
difficulty that I could get hold of my own children. Their devoted
nurse and mine, already mentioned, watched us like a cat to keep us
apart, lest their exuberance should fatigue me. The hour before tea
(not afternoon tea, but the solid evening meal) was grudgingly
conceded to us. Maria--she, like Dik, is dead, and I may give her the
name now held in so much love and honour--would then bring them,
beautifully brushed and garbed (she used to put clean socks and
pinafores on them twice a day, although there was nobody but ourselves
to see them), to my sofa side, and permit us to play together,
provided we behaved ourselves. All the while she hovered in the
doorway to see that I was not clambered over or roughly handled in any
way, and long before time was up would advance to sweep them out, with
her "Come now, I can see that mother is getting tired." She saw it
before I did. They were as good as gold, thanks to her splendid
training. Never were such model children--until the day that, as a
broken-hearted bride, she parted from them, when they "played up" in a
manner to drive the house distracted. When they had their little aches
and pains, and I used to beg Maria to let them sleep in my room, she
would not allow it. Many a time have I surreptitiously carried a
fretful child to my bed, and settled down with it comfortably, as I
thought, and then had it gently but firmly taken from me, despite my
expostulations. I had, at anyrate, the comfort of knowing that no
mother could tend them better than she did, and the theory of the
household that I was not strong enough to stand anything had some
foundation in fact. But my inactive life--although I still got through
a large amount of sewing and novel-writing--and my many hours of
brooding solitude, had their own bad effect upon my broken health.
There came a day when I declared, with tears, that if I had to spend
another winter in that place I should go melancholy mad.
So I did not spend another. G. also had had enough of it. And
particularly he wanted to get back to the Melbourne diocese, from
which he had been automatically expelled. But although he had been
automatically expelled, his old diocese held him to be a legal
stranger when he applied for re-admittance. It had a regulation, since
abrogated, that no clergyman from outside could take a living until he
had served unbeneficed for a year; and no exception was made in his
peculiar case. However, we freely paid the price to get our
way--exchanged our substantial parish, secure for life, had we so
willed it, for a humble curacy, which might lead to anything or
nothing--and on the 16th of November 1883 left the old parsonage for a
home that was the greatest possible contrast to it--a grubby little
terrace house in a low part of one of our premier cities--a house we
had to take as the only one in our new parish that was then available.
Our principal occupation and amusement during the short time that we
lived there was hunting for another, which fortunately we had not
found when the summons came to us again to move on.
But there was an interval between the uprooting in the Western
District and the re-planting in this cramped spot--for the children
and me. The elder ones were placed with some friends who kept a
kindergarten at the seaside, and the baby and Maria accompanied me on
a round of visits which lasted into January of the following year.
This was perhaps the gayest period of my life, in spite of increasing
invalidism. Socially it was the most brilliant era that Victoria has
known in my time, and I was so placed that the best of everything came
my way. The house that was my town head-quarters for many years then
possessed its magnet of a daughter--now on the roll of the grandees of
England, by her marriage an aunt to Royalty--and wherever she was,
there was good company and plenty of it, for she had her pick and
choice. And there for the time being was I also, for we were close
friends, as we remain to this day, none of the usual arguments of the
world against it having had any effect upon that faithful heart.
And this reminds me to make--as in these intimate disclosures I have
an opportunity to do--a little explanation. When I wrote a novel
called _The Devastators_, I knew that I was laying down a rule
contradicted in my own circle by two glaring exceptions. This bright
and beautiful woman is one of them; the other is a person still nearer
to me. I had to apologise to both of them when that book came out.
From their childhood they have been exposed to flatteries that should
have spoiled them utterly; both have proved unspoilable. In the case
of one of the pretty faces, it does not even care to look at itself in
the glass; the mere ordinary vanity of the ordinary female is lacking.
So that to this large extent my theory of the effect of physical charm
upon its possessor is discredited. While I am glad to state the fact,
I am sorry to remain of the opinion that such exceptions are
exceptions, and that the rule is still the rule.
With the elder of the incorruptible pair--the younger was then a small
child--I had great times in Melbourne, varying my social revels with a
visit to the doctor twice or thrice a week. The distinguished
globe-trotter was plentiful at that time. Lord and Lady Rosebery,
amongst others, were touring the colonies and the houses of some of my
friends. At one I spent three days with them. At another I had a still
more interesting week-end with Archibald Forbes. He came nearest to
the popular newspaper presentment of him, but I have little faith left
in printed history when it deals with the inner lives of my
illustrious contemporaries; from which it logically follows that I am
a hopeless sceptic in respect of the printed history of the past. "It
may have been thus," think I, when I con the so-called authentic
records of my race in this or that particular, "but I wish I could
have been there to see for myself."
It is not for me, a fellow-guest, to play reporter, but some incidents
of those occasions when I could study England and Australia in
conjunction upon the domestic stage may be mentioned without offence
to taste or hospitality. For instance:--One fine afternoon the
house-party, which included the Roseberys, went out to the tennis
ground of the establishment. When we arrived there we found the
beautiful grass court, kept like a bowling green, in the possession of
a crowd of strangers, holiday trippers of the 'Arry and 'Arriet type;
they had invaded the grounds from the railway near by, had found
racquets and balls, and were in the middle of an exciting game. Did
they scurry away, scared, on the appearance of the smart folks from
the house? Did anybody order them off, or even request them to desist?
Not a bit of it. They calmly continued their game, which took a long
time, while we sat down meekly and waited. When they had quite done
they trooped away without a word, and then Lord Rosebery wearily took
up his racquet and started in. Typically Australian as this incident
was, I cannot imagine it happening to those older great houses spoken
of in a former chapter--houses of no particular size, as far as their
material fabric is concerned, and with no liveried servants attached
to them, but of a dignity secure of public respect, even in this
disrespectful country.
Male house-servants, by the way, and men's valets, seem to me quite
out of harmony with the domestic traditions of this land. With us they
mark no caste, save that of wealth, and belong mainly to those who do
not know what to do with them. I have sat at breakfast with a regiment
of men in full-dress livery in waiting round the table--a degree of
state that, to the best of my belief, an English duke dispenses
with--and this in a house with no morning-room to go to when breakfast
was over, but only the same gilded and satiny drawing-room used
over-night; and where guests who had never done such a thing in their
lives might find themselves put to sleep in the same room with
strangers. A young titled Englishman, to whom this happened, cut his
acquaintance with the place in consequence, although his entertainers
never knew it. My "old families" are very chary of these exotic
innovations, and, whatever one's aristocratic leanings, it does hurt
one to think of an Australian man--synonym for simple and hardy
manliness--submitting to be dressed and coddled by a trousered
lady's-maid, and to think of another Australian man condescending to
that sort of servitude. But no Australian man does condescend to it, I
am sure; the Australian valet, as well as his liveried house-mates, is
an imported article.
Against the lady's-maid in petticoats, who outnumbers him a hundred to
one, I have nothing to say--quite the contrary. She is a "grateful and
comforting" institution in this country, so far as I have known her,
and three representatives of her class are on my list of friends. I
like a lady's-maid myself at times, and my own Maria took up the
_role_ as one to the manner born when she and I were visiting "the
quality" together. She packed and unpacked, and sewed tuckers, and
laid out my evening clothes, and was as jealous of my dignity and her
own, amongst strange servants, as if we had been grandees all our
lives. I was envied the possession of her. "How do you come to have a
woman like that?" said a person of wealth and consequence to me one
day. "Why doesn't she go to the good houses? She would be snapped up
anywhere. She could command any wages she liked to ask." "Well," said
I, with a serene smile, "you offer her a better place. I will not
stand in her way if she likes to take it." Maria's father was overseer
of a great station, and she had never been in service until she came
to me. I knew no bribe short of a husband and home of her own would
entice her to leave me.
Charming associations surround the spot where I foregathered with the
great war correspondent. There is a Mount--for it is not quite a
mountain, while it is much more than a hill--situated forty-four miles
from Melbourne and about seventeen hundred feet above it. In its
natural state every inch was covered with forest trees and scrub, so
that our mutual friend and host, who was one of the first to make a
residential suburb of it, had to chop out a hole in the dense growth
upon the steep hill-side to see where he was, when prospecting for a
site on which to make a home. That home, when I began to frequent it,
had become the show-place of the district. The pretty house made no
pretensions to be more than a cottage, but the garden was notoriously
one of the loveliest in the land. Its owner was a gardener born; he
came up twice a week to his family from his business in town and his
bachelor quarters at the Melbourne Club, and revelled in his darling
pursuit through all his leisure hours. His head gardener was an
importation from famous gardens at home; he had a salary of L200 a
year, a house in the grounds, and two men under him; and all their
work was exquisite. The garden dropped down and down, from the terrace
that had been cut for the house to stand on, to an artificial lake at
the bottom--velvet lawns and precious trees and shrubs, with a "fern
gully" on one side of it, where you stepped down a glade dark with
arching fronds, protecting thickets of innumerable rare varieties,
from New Zealand and elsewhere, kept moist and cooled by a perennial
cascade of crystal-clear mountain water, punctuated at intervals by
pools with goldfish or water-flowers in them. In the spring that fairy
tunnel was carpeted with lilies of the valley in myriads--the only
place where I have seen them growing in this country, except in
flower-pots. Up under the verandah roofs red bells of lapageria used
to hang like a drapery, and the treasures of the unpretentious glass
houses into which the sitting-rooms opened were beyond count. It was a
fitting environment for one of the finest flower-painters of her
day--known far beyond the limits of these realms, as, indeed, so is
the place which reared her. Many a globe-trotter would recall it if he
chanced to read these words. The Prince of Wales and his brother, when
they were boys, stayed here; their noble chief took the opportunity to
choose a wife for himself out of the house, a sister of the gifted
lady who painted flowers so marvellously, and with whom Archibald
Forbes fell--in a strictly platonic fashion, of course, for she was
already married and he about to become so for the second time--so
deeply in love. He raved about her in an English magazine article
after he got home. He said she was ... but there is the article (in a
bound volume) to speak for itself.
It was winter when I went to this house to meet him. Beautiful as the
place was in warmer seasons, abloom with flowers, when one sat under
trees to read, and, looking up from one's book, looked down again upon
the glimmering city and the sea fifty miles away, I think it was in
winter that I liked it best. Oh, it was cold! Wrapped about with
mountain mists or with whirling snow, it was like an Alpine _chalet_;
but one came in out of this weather to great wood-fires with cushioned
basket-chairs beside them--a fire to each room--and that was an effect
that could not have been surpassed. It poured with rain on the night I
speak of. I was staying at a neighbouring country-house, and joined
the Saturday party coming up from town at a wayside station. A son of
my host, who had been through the Russo-Turkish war with Archibald
Forbes--one on one side, one on the other--was with them; and fine
company they made, with their deadly reminiscences. They had met on
the bloody field of Plevna, the most vivid incident of which, it
appeared, was a banquet upon a looted German sausage (I think it was)
when both were starving.
We passed, in dripping mackintoshes, across the little platform lonely
in the scrub--there is a considerable station there now, and the Mount
is populous with country-houses--to the covered waggonette awaiting
us. Up the steep and miry Bush track, then like any other Bush track,
the poor horses strained and struggled, slipped and fell. The men had
to get out and do the climb on foot. It was pitchy dark, and the trees
closed us round. But presently we turned in at a gate and passed
through the perfect garden to the lighted house--the blazing bedroom
fire to dress by, the glowing drawing-room hearth to gather around
afterwards, the exhilarating dinner and evening talk. Mr Forbes had
just come from New Zealand, and that country had enchanted him. He had
roamed the earth--Switzerland, Norway, the Rockies, the Yosemite, all
the famous beauty spots--but never, he declared, had he seen anything
to match New Zealand scenery. A coach drive through the Otira Gorge
had simply turned his head. The husband of the flower-painter had
captained British troops in the Maori wars, and the house happened to
possess a fine collection of New Zealand photographs, bound in several
volumes. These I spent a long Sunday morning over, while Mr Forbes
descanted upon the pages as I turned them. I made a promise to myself
and him that not many years should pass before I saw the originals of
those pictures, but--as a matter of course--I have not seen them yet.
In my sadder moments I am convinced that I never shall. There was no
church upon the mountain then--only a little school-house where, on
alternate Sunday afternoons, an Anglican clergyman took a turn with
his Presbyterian brother; on such occasions we ladies of the house
brushed through the bracken-fern and woodland scrub to the humble
tabernacle. My hostess played the harmonium; the potential Personage
of the family led the singing. But on this wet and wintry Sunday we
stayed at home. I had much friendly intercourse with our chief guest,
and we corresponded afterwards. This was about four months before the
gay time which included the Rosebery episode.
The diversions of that gay time soon palled upon me. I was glad to
exchange my camp in town--lap of love as well as luxury though it
was--for a home of my own, however 'umble. We collected ourselves in
the little terrace house, which managed to hold us, a governess for
the children included; and as soon as she had made us as comfortable
as she could, Maria's ill-used young man came for her, and we lost a
friend who could never be replaced. The 20th of February 1884 was her
wedding-day, and no obsequies were ever celebrated with more pangs and
tears.
Miss P., the new governess, was a treasure notwithstanding. A curate
brother (he is a portly canon now), who wanted her for his
housekeeper, reft her from me three months afterwards; and she is
married, I hear, this long time, and I hope the man who has got her
appreciates his luck. She had a handful with those children after
Maria's influence was removed, but the way she managed them (in that
confined space) made me envious of her moral vigour and the texture of
her nerves.
When they were all disposed of for the night she and I used to take
walks together. In my state of health, especially in the hot
weather--and that was a particularly hot place--dressing and calling
were too much for me; I waited until after dark, and then went out in
about three garments, the most delightful costume that I ever wore in
my life, and one to which I look back now with regret and longing
unspeakable. Oh, why can we not relieve the inescapable fatigue of
life in that way always, and not only for a few brief hours in thirty
years! It was the heavenly fashion then to wear a long, light, loose
paletot of China silk--the early dust-coat, before it had been
spoiled. It buttoned at the throat and all down the front to the hem,
which cleared the ground by about three inches. It had roomy pockets
outside; the sleeves were roomy also; there was no need to wear a
dress under it, nor anything whatever round the waist. I did not, and
so walked with the sensations (as I should imagine them) of a
disembodied spirit.
Night after night, in this delicious liberty, we roamed that city
everywhere. It is a big city--the third in the state--with its due
proportion of dens and slums, of drunks and larrikins, but there was
not a hole or corner that we feared or had cause to fear. She, calm,
strong, protective, was the man of the pair; I, with my hand on her
arm, could wish no better. It was our joy to wander in the most
out-of-the-way places, and to find a new one if possible every night.
We watched trains from black railway embankments; we sat in the public
gardens away from lamps and out of call of people; we poked into blind
alleys and prowled over deserted mines--and we were never molested or
annoyed by anybody or anything. One day we read, with high
indignation, a letter in the newspaper which represented the town as
so rowdy at night-time that it was not safe for decent people to be
abroad. I became a newspaper controversialist myself, for once, in
order to confute that gratuitous liar, who, I am quite sure, was not a
decent person. The manners of our people may not be superfine, and in
fact they are not--there was no justification for the fastidiousness
of some persons who could not see any good in Archibald Forbes because
he drank his tea out of the saucer instead of the cup--but in the
conduct at the back of manners I have always found them decent to the
decent, in whatever walk of life.
The pokiness of the poky house did not trouble me, but its situation
was detestable. Never will I live in a terrace house again, if I can
help it. I used to hunt in vain for a quiet corner to write in, for I
am not like my friend, "Rolf Boldrewood," who can calmly pursue his
literary labours in a roomful of noisy family. If I settled myself at
the rear of the premises, the maid next door would take the
opportunity to sing in her back-yard at the top of her voice, and, in
view of the performances of the children in mine, I was not in a
position to expostulate. If I fled to the front, I was distracted with
the rattle of the street and the horrible jingle of a public-house
piano out of tune. In the stilly night one had sometimes to bury one's
head in the bed-clothes to avoid hearing the conversations of the
husband and wife in the next house. Their window was close alongside
ours, and we had to open them in summer to enable us to breathe. Twice
a week or so G. used to go out with his broom and pail of
disinfectant, and, starting at the top of the terrace, flush and sweep
the main gutter of all the houses down to the bottom--and then was
summoned for creating a nuisance, because the overflow of a
neighbour's nastiness, from an unreachable source, was detected in our
ground. We had good reason to believe that this deadly insult (to
persons who made domestic sanitation a fad, if not a passion) was
contrived as a punishment for his impertinence in meddling with other
people's drains. One or two of them used to stand at their yard doors
and look at him sourly while he was doing it, but it was the only way
of cleansing our own.
In spite of these drawbacks, our sojourn here was pleasant. There was
no hardship in being curate to such an incumbent as Archdeacon M'C.,
beloved by all who knew him. The taste of town life was sweet, after
so many years of rural isolation. My friends were near, dropping in
continually, between one train and another, as they passed up and down
on the railway; and, best of all, there were the most "filling"
library and reading-rooms, conveniently near to me, that I had ever
had the run of. My pleasantest memories of this particular year are of
that institution and the grave, grey, bookish old librarian, who did
all he knew to make it delightful to me. Though I never saw him after
'84, he has his place in the little company of true friends made for
life; "gone, but not forgotten," as the obituary column says of a baby
buried yesterday--I have not forgotten him in seventeen years, nor
ever shall. We used to talk books by the hour when he was disengaged.
He hoarded volumes for me in the secret recesses of his desk, and of
the new publications coming in I always had my choice before they were
put upon the shelves. It mattered not that I was entitled to but one
or two at a time, the more I would accept in excess of my allowance,
the better he was pleased. Sometimes he left them at my door on his
way home to bed, although my door was out of his road. And I never was
at a loss for recreation with those reading-rooms to browse in--green
pastures and still waters for the fattening and refreshing of mind and
soul. They alone would have made any place good to live in.
Just before Christmas, 1884, Bishop Moorhouse offered G. the parish
which was our favourite of the whole series--for six months. A
clergyman in England, belonging to one of our old families, already
mentioned, had a wish to return to his own people. He offered himself
unconditionally to the Bishop of Melbourne, who responded by
appointing him to this parish, up in the northeastern mountain
country, in the neighbourhood of our early homes; and G. was to take
charge of it until its incumbent-elect was ready. The latter, finding
it beneath his expectations, and being simultaneously offered a London
living, decided, after long deliberations, to remain where he was; and
we, who went there for six months, stayed nine years. It was so
congenial a place, that when (June 12, 1885) news came up to us that
the Board of Nominators in Melbourne had elected G. to the incumbency,
we said to each other that we had nothing left to wish for. To be safe
and settled once more had been our anxious desire for some months; we
now felt that if we had had our choice of all the districts and
dwellings in the diocese, we could not have suited ourselves better.
But first we had to pay toll--heavy toll. My health continued to fail,
so that I could not enjoy my pretty home, and the end of years of
stop-gap doctoring was the announcement that it was useless, and that
radical measures must be resorted to. On March 9, 1886, I was
deposited in a private hospital in Melbourne, fully aware of the fact
that my case was considered serious enough to make it as likely as not
that I should die there. Of all the black hours of my life, I think
that was the worst--when my husband had said good-bye to me and gone
back to the children whom I dared not hope to see again, and I was
left to my hard fate (on a very hard bed) amongst cold-eyed strangers
to whom I was of no account whatever, except in the way of business.
Once, when I was a child under governesses, I took a violent fancy to
go to boarding-school; I pestered doting parents until they
reluctantly acceded to my wish; but no sooner was it realised than I
began to weep and pine away with a home-sickness that could only be
cured by fetching me back again--I think at the end of the first
quarter. That brief experience of exile from the Place of Love faintly
foreshadowed my mental sufferings--worse than the physical ones, which
were indeed no joke--under this bitterer separation; yet both school
and hospital did their best for me, and were governed with all the
kindness and good-will that discipline and the general conditions
admitted of.
For months, that seemed years, I was imprisoned in the latter
place--even now I cannot pass it without a shudder, a thrill of
thankfulness to be outside instead of in--and I was then sent forth
with a reprieve only, and not a full discharge. The nurse, strange to
say, gave me the hint that I should probably "die of it" shortly; the
doctor, appealed to for the honest truth, first abused the nurse for
her indiscretion, and then endorsed her view. But nurses and doctors
have their human limitations; even they don't know everything. The
kindly reader may like to hear that I not only did not die of it, but
am in no danger of ever doing so.