Читать книгу The Story of My Life, volumes 4-6 - Augustus J. C. Hare - Страница 14

‘Just before God by faith,

Just before men by works:

Just by the works of faith,

Just by the faith which works.’

In the evening she talked much of her first visit to Italy, her only visit to Rome. ‘Char. was just married then, and I was just come out: we went pour un passe-temps. We travelled in our own carriage, and the floods had carried away the bridges, and it was very difficult to get on. It was the year of the cholera, and we had to pass quarantine. My father knew a great many of the people in authority, and we hoped to get leave to pass it in one of the larger towns. Mantua was decided upon, but was eventually given up because of the unhealthiness, and we had to pass ten days at Rovigo. We arrived at last at Bologna. The people were greatly astonished at the inn when we asked if the Cardinal Legate was at home: it was as if we had asked for the Pope: and they were more astonished still the next day when he came to call upon us. We went to a party at his palace. He was Cardinal Macchi. I shall never forget that party or the very odd people we met—I see them now. The Cardinal was in despair because the theatres were closed—“Je vous aurais preté ma loge, et je vous aurais donné des glaces!” The next day Rossini came to see us—“Je suis un volcan éteint,” he said. Afterwards we went to Rome and stayed four months there. I liked the society part best—the balls at the Borgheses’ and those at the Austrian Embassy: they were great fun.’

Louisa, Marchioness of Waterford

THE SECRET STAIR, FORD. [137]

“On Saturday we went to Norham—the Lindsays and I. Even coming from Devonshire, the interest of this country strikes one excessively. It is bare, it is even ugly, but it is strangely interesting. There is such breadth and space in the long lines and sweeping distances, amidst which an occasional peel-tower stands like a milestone of history, and there is such a character in the strange, jagged, wind-tossed, storm-stricken trees. But it became really beautiful when we descended into the lovely valley of the Tweed with all its radiant autumnal tints, and sat under the grand mass of ruin, with great flights of birds ever circling round it and crying in the still air.”

“Nov. 4.—Yesterday we went quite a round of visits, seeing different phases of Border family life. We lunched at the Hirsel (Lord Home’s)—a great Scotchy-looking house in a rather featureless park. There were two tables and an immense party at luncheon—Mr. and Lady Gertrude Rolle, Lord Romney, and others. I did not think it an interesting place, though it contains a fine portrait of Sir Walter Scott by Raeburn; but Lady Waterford delighted in the happy family life, and says whenever she sees Lord Home she is reminded of the Frenchman who said, ‘Oh, mon Dieu! pourquoi est ce qu’il n’est pas mon père?’

“We went next to Sir John Marjoribanks of Lees. He was just come in from hunting, and his wife was fishing in the Tweed. We went to her there: she was standing up at the end of a boat which a man was rowing, and the whole picture was reflected in a river so smooth that it looked as if they were floating on a mirror.

NORHAM-ON-TWEED. [138]

“Then we went to the Baillie Hamiltons at Lenels, another and prettier place on the Tweed near Coldstream Bridge. The house contained much that was interesting, especially two enormous Chelsea vases representing ‘Air’ and ‘Water.’ Mrs. Baillie Hamilton was a daughter of Lord Polwarth—very pleasing, and her sister came in with the most perfect manners of good-breeding, &c. Then we went to the Askews.

“Lady Waterford stopped to take our luncheon—prepared but not eaten—to a poor man in a consumption. She beguiled the way by describing her visit to Windsor, and the Queen showing her the Mausoleum.

“She talked also of the passion for jewels: that she could understand it in the case of such persons as Madame Mère, who, when remonstrated with on buying so many diamonds, said, ‘J’accumule, j’accumule,’ for it had been very useful to her. Apropos of not despising dress, she gave me the quotation from Pope’s Homer’s Odyssey[139]—

‘A dignity of dress adorns the great,

And kings draw lustre from the robe of state.’

“Last Monday, having a great deal of natural talent for singing, reciting, &c., in the castle, Lady Waterford would not keep it to herself, and asked all the village people to the school, and took her guests there to sing, &c., to them. At the end, just before ‘God save the Queen,’ she was surprised by Miss Lindsay’s ode:—

‘All hail to thee, sweet lady, all hail to thee this night,

Of all things bright and beautiful, most beautiful, most bright;

Thou art a welcome guest alike in cottage and in hall,

With a kindly word and look and smile for each one and for all.

May every blessing life can give be thine from day to day,

May health, and peace, and happiness for ever strew thy way;

May the light thou shedd’st on others be reflected on thy brow,

May a grateful people’s love and pride like a stream around thee flow,

And all our prayers unite in one upon this festive e’en,

That long thou may’st be spared to Ford, to reign its Border queen.’ ”

“Nov. 7.—Lord and Lady Warwick have been here for some days. She is so simple and genial, that the Italian word simpatica is the only one to describe her.[140]

“Yesterday, Lady Waterford, Miss Lindsay, and I had a delightful long walk across the moor and through charming relics of forest. It was a succession of pictures—long extents of moss backed by ferny hills, downy uplands breaking into red rocks, lighted here and there by the white stem of an old birch-tree, and overlooking the softest expanses of faint blue distance. We found several curious fungi. Lady Waterford said that at Balmoral the Duchess of Edinburgh shocked the royal household by eating almost all she found. They thought she would be poisoned; but in Russia they are accustomed to eat fungi, and they make little patties of them which they eat in Lent when meat is forbidden—‘and they taste so like meat that there is almost the pleasure of doing something which is not quite right.’

“The objects of the walk were two. One was the fall of the Rowling Lynn in a chaos of red and grey rocks overhung by old birch-trees, a spot which seems photographed in Coleridge’s lines—

‘Beneath yon birch with silver bark

And boughs so pendulous and fair,

The brook falls scattered down the rock,

And all is mossy there.’

The other was the sacrificial stone covered with the mysterious rings which have given rise to boundless discussion among Northumbrian archæologists. When we reached home, we found the Bloomfields arrived.[141] In the evening Lady Bloomfield told a curious story.

“ ‘I was very intimate at Vienna with the Princess Reuss, whose first husband was Prince of Anhalt. She was a niece of Queen Teresa of Bavaria. She told me that her aunt was at Aschaffenberg with the intention of going next day to Munich. In the evening the lady-in-waiting came in and asked the Queen if she was intending to give an audience. The Queen said, “Certainly not,” and that “she could not see any one.” The lady then said that there was a lady sitting in the ante-chamber who would not go away. Queen Teresa then desired her brother to go out and find out who it was. He came back much agitated, and said it was sehr unheimlich (very uncanny), for it was the Black Lady, and that when he came up to her she disappeared; for the Bavarian royal family have a Black Lady who appears to them before a death, just as the White Lady appears to the Prussian royal family. The next day the Queen left Aschaffenberg, but being a very kind-hearted woman, she sent back her secretary to fetch some petitions which had been presented, but which she had not attended to, and when the secretary came into her room, he found the Black Lady standing by the table where the papers were, but she vanished on his approach. That night, when the old castellan of Aschaffenberg and his wife were in bed, the great bell of the castle began to toll, and they remembered that it could toll by no human agency, as they had the key of the bell-tower.

“At that moment Queen Teresa died at Munich. She arrived at three: at five she was seized with cholera: at eleven she was dead.’ ”

THE KING’S ROOM, FORD. [142]

“Nov. 8.—The two Miss Lindsays and I have been for a most wild excursion into the Cheviot valleys to the Heathpool Lynn—a ravine full of ancient alders and birch, and a mountain torrent tossing through grey rocks. The carriage met us at a farmhouse—a most desolate place, cut off by snow all through the winter months, and almost always cold and bleak.”

“Nov. 9.—Lady Waterford, Miss Lindsay, and I walked to distant plantations to see some strange grass, which, from being surrounded by water at times, had been matted together so that it formed a thick trunk, and branched out at the top like a palm-tree, with the oddest effect. Lady Waterford talked of an old woman she knew, whose husband was very ill, dying in fact. One day when she went to see him, she found his wife busy baking cakes, and she—the old woman—said that as he was dying she was getting them ready for his funeral. Going again some days later, Lady Waterford found the man still alive, and she could not resist saying to the woman that she thought her cakes must be getting rather stale. ‘Yes, that they are,’ said the wife; ‘some folks are so inconsiderate.’

“When we returned to the castle, we found that old Mr. Fyler, the Vicar of Cornhill, had arrived, and he was very amusing all evening. He talked much of Sir Horace St. Paul (a neighbour here), who had become a teetotaler, and had thrown away all the wine in his cellar. His mother was a daughter of Lord Ward, who had challenged and run through with his sword a brother officer, who, when he was engaged to his wife, had snatched away a brooch he had given her and exhibited it at mess as her present. It was the Lord Ward who was brother of Lady St. Paul, who was made the prominent figure in the picture by Copley of the death of the Earl of Chatham. It is a grand portrait in a fine picture, and Copley gave the life-size sketch which he made for it to the Ward family.

“When Sir Horace St. Paul was at college, he found a man lying drunk in the quadrangle and tried to make him get up. ‘You’re drunk,’ he said; ‘you don’t even know who I am.’—‘Yes, I know very well who you are,’ said the man; ‘you’re the fellow that wrote an epistle to Timothy and never got an answer.’ I have heard this quoted as one of the naturally clever retorts of drunken men.

“Lady Waterford told Lord Grey’s story of the death—in a court in Edinburgh—of a naval captain who had been noted for his cruelties at sea, but especially in the slave trade. Mental terror made his death-bed most appalling. According to Scottish custom, the family opened the door for the spirit to pass more easily, when, to their horror, the bloody head of a black man suddenly rolled into the room.

“The dying man gave the most fearful scream, and his relations rushed to his bedside. When they looked round, the head was gone, but there was fresh blood upon the floor. To them it seemed inexplicable, but the fact was that Professor Owen had been attending an anatomical séance at which the body of a black man had been dissected, and there was something so curious in the way in which the head had been attached to the body, that he had obtained leave to carry it home in a cloth, that he might examine it more carefully. It was a very slippery, wet day, and as he was passing the open door of the dying man, the Professor had stumbled, and the head, slipping out of the cloth, had rolled into the house; then, in the moment when they were all occupied with the dying man, he had pursued it and whipped it up into the cloth again, and hoped it had not been observed.”[143]

“Nov. 10.—Last night Mr. Fyler told his famous story of ‘the nun.’ It is briefly this:—

“A son of Sir J. Stuart of Allanbank, on the Blackadder, where Lady Boswell lives now, was in Rome, where he fell in love with a novice in one of the convents. When his father heard of it, he was furious, and summoned him home. Young Stuart told the nun he must leave Rome, and she implored him to marry her first; but he would do nothing of the kind, and, as he left, she flung herself under his carriage; the wheels went over her, and she was killed. The first thing the faithless lover saw on his return to Scotland was the nun, who met him in the bridal attire she was to have worn, and she has often appeared since, and has become known in the neighbourhood as ‘Pearlin Jean.’ On one occasion seven ministers were called in to lay her, but with no effect.

“Mr. Fyler says that when people on the Border are not quite right in their heads, they are said to ‘want twopence in the shilling.’ A poor cooper at Cornhill was one of these, and one day he disappeared. The greatest search was made for the missing man, for he was a Johnson, and almost all the village at Cornhill are Johnsons—fishermen. So every one went out to look, and though nothing was found, they came to the conclusion that he had been drowned in the Tweed.

“That evening Mr. Fyler observed that his church windows had not been opened as he desired, and going up to them and looking in, he saw a white figure wrapped in a sheet walking up and down the aisle and flapping its arms. He went back and said, ‘I’ve found the lost man. He is in the church, and two of the strongest men in the place must go with me and get him out.’ But if any one else had looked into the church, they would have thought it was a ghost. As it was, one of the men who came to get him out fainted dead away.”

“Winton Castle, Nov. 14.—Dear Lady Ruthven is stone deaf, almost blind, and her voice like waggon-wheels, but—in her eighty-sixth year—she is as kind and good and as truly witty as ever.

“On Friday we went to Gosford—five in the carriage. It is a dull flat park, redeemed by being so near the sea, and contains two great houses close to each other, of which one—the modern one—has never been inhabited, as sea-sand was mixed with its mortar. We found old Lady Wemyss[144] sitting behind a screen, much like a lady-abbess in appearance. I was most warmly received by two child-friends—little Lady Eva Greville and her brother Sidney—a charming boy with dark eyes and light flowing hair. Then Lady Warwick came in with Lady Jane Dundas, and, with one hand-candle, showed us the pictures, just as Lady Elcho did many years ago.

“Yesterday we went to Ormistoun, an attractive place, to see the Dempsters, the uncle and aunt who brought up the authoress of ‘Vera’—charming old people. He talked much of former times in Scotland, and said that much the most agreeable women in the country were considered to be Lady Ruthven and Mrs. Stewart Mackenzie. He described the attachment of one of Mrs. Stewart Mackenzie’s sisters—a certain very untidy Frances Mackenzie—to Thorwaldsen, but they were not allowed to marry. The last word Thorwaldsen spoke was ‘Francesca.’

“In the garden of Ormistoun is a yew six hundred years old, but with every appearance of being still quite in its prime, growing hard, and likely to do so for another six hundred years. John Knox is said to have preached under it.

“I sat by Lady Ruthven at dinner. She talked of the quaintnesses of her village people. The schoolmaster was very particular about pronunciation. When his wife died, some one came in and said, ‘What a very lamēntable,’ &c.—‘Oh, do say lamentable,’ interrupted the schoolmaster. When the minister was marrying a couple he said, ‘Art thou willing to take this woman,’ &c.?—‘Yes, I am willing,’ replied the bridegroom, ‘but I had rather it had been her sister.’

“To-day Lady Ruthven walked with me to the kirk. She had neither her ‘speaking tubes’ nor her slate, so I could not answer her, but she told me the whole story of Lady Belhaven’s death, how it was ‘all arranged as was best for her, just a gentle passing away, almost unconscious, but perfectly happy;’ yet how, though one glibly said, ‘God’s will be done,’ it was so hard to feel it. In returning, she talked of the trees, how the forester wished her to cut one down where there were two close together, but how she was ‘unwilling to separate friends who had lived together so long.’

“One day Lady Ruthven had a letter asking for the character of her footman, John Smith, who was leaving her—if he was ‘clever, honest, sober, a Christian, a recipient of the Holy Communion,’ &c. She answered, ‘If John Smith could answer to half your demands, I should have married him long ago.’ ”

“Raby Castle, Nov. 20.—A week here with a large party, which I began to think delightful as soon as I could cure myself of the uncomfortable sensation of being so much behind my kind, all the other people knowing each other better, and being more in possession of their tongues and faculties than myself. ‘Be insignificant, and you will make no enemies,’ is, however, a very good piece of advice I once received. Interesting members of the circle have been the Fitzwilliams from Wentworth, and the Quaker family of Pease, of whom the mother is one of the sweetest, most charming people I ever saw, like a lovely picture by Gainsborough, and with the expression of one of Perugino’s angels. But the great feature of the visit has been the Butes, and I have been absorbed by them. I never expected to make much acquaintance, but from the first Lord Bute[145] annexed himself to me, perhaps because he thought I was shy, and because of other people he felt very shy himself. He has great sweetness and gentleness of manner, and a good-looking, refined face.

“Lady Bute[146] says the happiest time in her life was the winter they spent in Majorca, because then she got away, not only from all the fine people, but from all the people who wanted to know what they thought must be the fine people; but that it was such a bore even there bearing a name for which the natives would raise their prices. Next winter they mean to spend at Nazareth, where they will hire the Bishop’s house; ‘no one can get at us there.’ They are supposed to long very anxiously for the birth of a son, for now—

‘That little something unpossess’d

Corrodes and poisons all the rest.’[147]

“I walked with Lord Bute each day. It was like reading ‘Lothair’ in the original, and most interesting at first, but became somewhat monotonous, as he talks incessantly—winding into his subject like a serpent, as Johnson said of Burke—of altars, ritual, liturgical differences; and he often almost loses himself, and certainly quite lost me, in sentences about ‘the Unity of the Kosmos,’ &c.

“He spoke much of Antichrist—the mark 666, the question if it had been Nero, or if Nero was only a type, and the real Antichrist still to come; and of the other theory, that the reason why no ten thousand were sealed of Dan was that Antichrist was to come from that tribe, the dying words of Jacob tending to this belief.

“He talked much of fasting; that he had often fasted for twenty-four hours, and that he preferred fasting as the practice existed ‘before the folly of collations.’ I asked if it did not make him ill. He said ‘no,’ for if the hunger became too great he took a cigar, which allayed it, and that he went out and ‘ate the air’ while taking plenty of exercise; that poor people seldom became thin in Lent, because what they did eat was bread and potatoes. I said I thought it must make him dreadfully ill-tempered to be so hungry, and thus conduce rather to vice than virtue. He said he did not think it made him vicious; but he agreed with me that persons naturally inclined to be ill-tempered had better fast alone.

“From what he said it was evident that he would like to give up all his goods to the poor, and that the Island of Bute stands a chance of becoming a vast monastery. He talked much of the Troitska in Russia, where he had been; that the monks there were too lax, and that the really desirable monastic life was that of those who lived in the cells established some miles off by Philaret, which were subterranean, with a stove, and no other furniture. When mass was celebrated in their chapel, these anchorite monks could faintly discern, down a channel hollowed in the rock, the glitter of the candles on the altar, and occasionally, mingled with this, appeared a ray or two of bluish light, and this was daylight. It was the only time they ever saw it.

“Amongst the young men here is a young Ashburnham, third son of Lord Ashburnham, who reads Greek in his room for his amusement, and is a lawyer, but says he has not yet been able to realise the hymn, ‘Brief life is here our portion.’ He told me that the expression of minding your p’s and q’s came from toupets and queues.”

“Whitburn Hall, Nov. 24.—I returned here from Raby with my Williamson cousins,[148] who are always so kind that they make one feel at Whitburn ‘où peut’on être mieux qu’au sein de sa famille?’ The place has much interest of its own kind. There is something even fine in the vast black cloud of Sunderland smoke, obliterating the horizon and giving such an idea of limitless and mysterious space with the long lines of white breakers foaming up through the gloom; while at night the ghastly shriek of the fog-horn and the tolling of the bell, and the occasional boom of a cannon through the storm, give such dramatic effect that one forgets the waste inland landscape, the blackened hedges and wind-stricken coalfields.”

“Ravensworth, Nov. 29.—I was one night with poor Cousin Susan (Davidson), much aged and altered. She lay chiefly on a sofa in her own sitting-room, with her two favourite white dogs—the ‘boy and girl’—Fritz and Lulu, by her side, and half the birds in the neighbourhood pecking bread and potatoes outside the windows. It seemed a dreary life to leave her to, but she does not feel it so; hers is one of the cases in which only the body, and not the mind, seems to require nourishment. Thursday, when I came away, was her rent-day, and she wished me to go and see her tenants and speak to them at dinner, and said to the agent, ‘I wish that all my tenants should see my cousin;’ but fortunately the train came at the right moment to save me from this alarming encounter, which would have given a (probably) wrong impression—at least to the tenants.

“Lord Ravensworth[149] welcomed me with such cordial kindness, and has been so genial and good to me ever since, that I quite feel as if in him I had found the ideal uncle I have always longed for, but never before enjoyed. He is certainly the essence of an agreeable and accomplished scholar, with a faultless memory and apt classical quotations for every possible variety of subject. He told me, and made me write down, the following curious story:—

“It is going back a long time ago—to the time of Marie Antoinette. It will be remembered that the most faithful, the most entirely devoted of all the gallant adherents of Marie Antoinette was the Comte de Fersen. The Comte de Fersen was ready to lay down his life for the Queen, to go through fire and water for her sake; and, on her side, if Marie Antoinette had a corner in her heart for any one except the King, it was for the Comte de Fersen.[150] When the royal family escaped to Varennes, it was the Comte de Fersen who dressed up as coachman and drove the carriage; and when the flight to Varennes failed, and when, one after another, he had seen all his dearest friends perish upon the scaffold, the Comte de Fersen felt as if the whole world was cut away from under his feet, as if life had nothing whatever left to offer, and he sunk into a state of apathy, mental and physical, from which nothing whatever seemed to rouse him; there was nothing whatever left which could be of any interest to him.

“The physicians who were called in said that the Comte de Fersen must have absolute change; that he must travel for an unlimited time; that he must leave France; at any rate, that he must never see again that Paris which was so terrible to him, which was stained for ever with the blood of the Queen and Madame Elizabeth. And he was quite willing; all places were the same to him now that his life was left desolate: he did not care where he went.

“He went to Italy, and one afternoon in November he drove up to what was then, as it is still, the most desolate, weird, ghastly inn in Italy—the wind-stricken, storm-beaten, lava-seated inn of Radicofani. And he came there not to stay; he only wanted post-horses to go on as fast as he could, for he was always restless to be moving—to go farther on. But the landlord said, ‘No, it was too late at night; there was going to be a storm; he could not let his horses cross the pass of Radicofani till the next morning.’—‘But you are not aware,’ said the traveller, ‘that I am the Comte de Fersen.’—‘I do not care in the least who you are,’ said the landlord; ‘I make my rules, and my rules hold good for one as well as for another.’—‘But you do not understand probably that money is no object to me, and that time is a very great object indeed. I am quite willing to pay whatever you demand, but I must have the horses at once, for I must arrive at Rome on a particular day.’—‘Well, you will not have the horses,’ said the landlord; ‘at least to-morrow you may have them, but to-night you will not; and if you are too fine a gentleman to come into my poor hotel, you may sleep in the carriage, but to-night you will certainly not have the horses.’

“Then the Comte de Fersen made the best of what he saw was the inevitable. He had the carriage put into the coach-house, and he himself came into the hotel, and he found it, as many hundreds of travellers have done since, not half so bad as he expected. It is a bare, dismal, whitewashed barracky place, but the rooms are large and tolerably clean. So he got some eggs or something that there was for supper, and he had a fire made up in the best of the rooms, and he went to bed. But he took two precautions; he drew a little round table that was there to the head of the bed and he put two loaded pistols upon it; and, according to the custom of that time, he made the courier sleep across the door on the outside.

“He went to bed, and he fell asleep, and in the middle of the night he awoke with the indescribable sensation that people have, that he was not alone in the room, and he raised himself against the pillow and looked out. From a small latticed window high in the opposite whitewashed wall the moonlight was pouring into the room, and making a white silvery pool in the middle of the rough boarded oak floor. In the middle of this pool of light, dressed in a white cap and jacket and trousers, such as masons wear, stood the figure of a man looking at him. The Comte de Fersen stretched out his hand over the side of the bed to take one of his pistols, and the man said, ‘Don’t fire: you could do no harm to me, you could do a great deal of harm to yourself: I am come to tell you something.’ And the Comte de Fersen looked at him: he did not come any nearer; he remained just where he was, standing in the pool of white moonlight, half way between the bed and the wall; and he said, ‘Say on: tell me what you have come for.’ And the figure said, ‘I am dead, and my body is underneath your bed. I was a mason of Radicofani, and, as a mason, I wore the white dress in which you now see me. My wife wished to marry somebody else; she wished to marry the landlord of this hotel, and they beguiled me into the inn, and they made me drunk, and they murdered me, and my body is buried beneath where your bed now stands. Now I died with the word vendetta upon my lips, and the longing, the thirst that I have for revenge will not let me rest, and I never shall rest, I never can have any rest, till I have had my revenge. Now I know that you are going to Rome; when you get to Rome, go to the Cardinal Commissary of Police, and tell him what you have seen, and he will send men down here to examine the place, and my body will be found, and I shall have my revenge.’ And the Comte de Fersen said, ‘I will.’ But the spirit laughed and said, ‘You don’t suppose that I’m going to believe that? You don’t imagine that you are the only person I’ve come to like this? I have come to dozens, and they have all said, “I will,” and afterwards what they have seen has seemed like a hallucination, a dream, a chimæra, and before they have reached Rome the impression has vanished altogether, and nothing has been done. Give me your hand.’ The Comte de Fersen was a little staggered at this; however, he was a brave man, and he stretched out his hand over the foot of the bed, and he felt something or other happen to one of his fingers; and he looked, and there was no figure, only the moonlight streaming in through the little latticed window, and the old cracked looking-glass on the wall and the old rickety furniture just distinguishable in the half light; there was no mason there, but the loud regular sound of the snoring of the courier was heard outside the bedroom door. And the Comte de Fersen could not sleep; he watched the white moonlight fade into dawn, and the pale dawn brighten into day, and it seemed to him as if the objects in that room would be branded into his brain, so familiar did they become—the old cracked looking-glass, and the shabby washing-stand, and the rush-bottomed chairs, and he also began to think that what had passed in the earlier part of the night was a hallucination—a mere dream. Then he got up, and he began to wash his hands; and on one of his fingers he found a very curious old iron ring, which was certainly not there before—and then he knew.

“And the Comte de Fersen went to Rome, and when he arrived at Rome he went to the Swedish Minister that then was, a certain Count Löwenjelm,[151] and the Count Löwenjelm was very much impressed with the story, but a person who was much more impressed was the Minister’s younger brother, the Count Carl Löwenjelm, for he had a very curious and valuable collection of peasants’ jewelry, and when he saw the ring he said, ‘That is a very remarkable ring, for it is a kind of ring which is only made and worn in one place, and that place is in the mountains near Radicofani.’

“And the two Counts Löwenjelm went with the Comte de Fersen to the Cardinal Commissary of Police, and the Cardinal also was very much struck, and he said, ‘It is a very extraordinary story, a very extraordinary story indeed, and I am quite inclined to believe that it means something. But, as you know, I am in a great position of trust under Government, and I could not send a body of military down to Radicofani upon the faith of what may prove to have been a dream. At any rate (he said) I could not do it unless the Comte de Fersen proved his sense of the importance of such an action by being willing to return to Radicofani himself.’ And not only was the Comte de Fersen willing to return, but the Count Carl Löwenjelm went with him. The landlord and landlady were excessively agitated when they saw them return with the soldiers who came from Rome. They moved the bed, and found that the flags beneath had been recently upturned. They took up the flags, and there—not sufficiently corrupted to be irrecognisable—was the body of the mason, dressed in the white cap and jacket and trousers, as he had appeared to the Comte de Fersen. Then the landlord and landlady, in true Italian fashion, felt that Providence was against them, and they confessed everything. They were taken to Rome, where they were tried and condemned to death, and they were beheaded at the Bocca della Verità.

“The Count Carl Löwenjelm was present at the execution of that man and woman, and he was the person who told the Marquis de Lavalette, who told Lord Ravensworth, who told me. The by-play of the story is also curious. Those two Counts Löwenjelm were the natural sons of the Duke of Sudomania, who was one of the aspirants for the crown of Sweden in the political crisis which preceded the election of Bernadotte. He was, in fact, elected, but he had many enemies, and on the night on which he arrived to take possession of the throne he was poisoned. The Comte de Fersen himself came to a tragical end in those days. He was very unpopular in Stockholm, and during the public procession in which he took part at the funeral of Charles Augustus (1810) he was murdered, being (though it is terrible to say so of the gallant adherent of Marie Antoinette) beaten to death with umbrellas. And that it was with no view to robbery and from purely political feeling is proved by the fact that though he was en grande tenue, nothing was taken away.”

“Hutton, Yorkshire, Nov. 30.—I came here yesterday, arriving in the dark. It was a great surprise, as I expected to find the place amid the Middlesborough smoke, to see from the window on awaking a beautiful view of high moorland fells beyond the terraced gardens. I laugh when I think how the Duchess of Cleveland rejoiced in giving Mrs. Pease such a pleasant change to Raby, to see this intensely luxurious house by Waterhouse, filled with delightful collections of books, pictures, and carved furniture, and its almost Arabian-Night-like conservatories.

“We have been through bitter wind to Guisborough Abbey—only a grand church front standing lonely near a fine avenue of trees in the grounds of Colonel Challoner.

“Mr. and Mrs. Pease are excellent. He is member for Darlington, son and nephew of the famous Pease Brothers. She, formerly a Fox of Falmouth, is one of the most charming people I ever saw, full of the sweetest and simplest natural dignity. She lives in and for her children, and though the mother of six girls and two boys, looks about six-and-twenty herself.[152]

“There is a Mr. Stover here who is amusing. An uncle of his lives in the haunted house at Biddick. One day when he came in from shooting, he hung his hat on a pole-screen, and sat down by the fire to read his newspaper. Presently, looking over his paper, he saw, to his amazement, his hat on the top of the screen nodding at him. He thought he must be dreaming, but watched, and it certainly nodded again. He got up and walked round it, when it seemed still. Then he sat down again and watched it, and it nodded again, and not only that, but the screen itself seemed to be moving bodily towards him. He watched it, and it certainly crossed part of the pattern of the carpet: of this there could be no doubt. Then he could bear it no longer, and he rushed at the screen and knocked it over. Underneath was his tame tortoise.”

“Wentworth Wodehouse, Dec. 3.—This house has a very stately effect as you approach it, with a truly majestic portico. On the first floor is an immense hall like those in the great Roman houses, and on either side diverge the reception rooms, hung with pictures. Amongst the portraits are several of the great Lord Strafford, with his parents, his son, and his two daughters—Anne and Arabella. Of these, the elder married the Marquis of Rockingham, from whom the present owners are descended. The picture by Vandyke of Lord Strafford and his secretary is glorious. The rooms themselves want colour and effect. Sixty guests can stay in the house, and a hundred and twenty can dine without any crowd, but the place needs great parties of this kind, for smaller ones are lost in these vast suites of too lofty rooms. Lord Fitzwilliam[153] is the very type of a high-bred nobleman, and Lady Fitzwilliam[154] has a sweet and gentle manner; but Lady F. is calm and placid, her two daughters calmer and placider, and Lord F. calmest and placidest.

“To-day we were taken by Lord Fitzwilliam to the two churches. One by Pearson is new and most magnificent; the other is old and very ugly, but has interesting monuments. That of Lord Strafford is mural, with his figure kneeling near the altar. The epitaph does not allude to the manner of his death, but, after setting forth his virtues, simply says ‘he died May 8th, 1641.’ The ghost of Lord Strafford is still said to walk down the oak staircase at Wentworth every Friday night, carrying his head. An old gateway with several fragments of the house of his time remain, and many of his books are preserved in the library. My bedroom is hung with white worked with red by his daughter Lady Rockingham.”

“Dec. 4.—Lady Fitzwilliam has been showing us the house. It contains much of interest, especially in the pictures, and they are repeated so often that one learns to know the family faces—Lord Strafford and his three wives, his son and his two daughters by his second wife, and the second Lord Strafford with his wife, who was the daughter of James, Earl of Derby, and Charlotte de la Tremouille. His inscriptions in the Bibles of her father and mother, which are here, and the many memorials he raised to her, are so touching that it is quite a shock to find he married again after her death; but in his will he always speaks of the second as only his “wife,” the first as his “deare wife.” He restored the old church in her memory, and enjoined upon his descendants always to keep it up for her sake.

“Lady Albreda drove us about the park and to the ‘Mausoleum,’ a commemorative monument raised to the Minister Lord Rockingham by his son. It is copied from the Roman monument at S. Remy near Aries, and contains, in a kind of Pantheon, a statue by Nollekens of Lord Rockingham surrounded by his friends. The face is from a mask taken after death, and the figure is full of power and expression, with a deprecatory ‘Oh, pray don’t say such a thing as that.’ ”

“Temple Newsam, Dec. 6.—This great house is four miles from Leeds, by a road passing through a squalid suburb of grimy houses and muddy lanes, with rotten palings and broken paving-stones, making blackened pools of stagnant water; then black fields succeed, with withered hedges, stag-headed trees, and here and there a mountain of coal refuse breaking the dismal distances. It was almost dark as I drove up the steep park to the house.

“In an immense gallery, hung with red and covered with pictures, like the gallery at Chesney Wold in Bleak House, I found Mrs. Meynell Ingram and Freddie Wood[155] sitting. It was like arriving at a bivouac in the desert; the light from the fire and the lamps gleamed on a little tea-table and a few chairs round it, all beyond was lost in the dark immensity. … Soon other guests arrived—Judge Denman, come for the assizes at Leeds, and his marshal, young Ottaway, the cricketer; Admiral Duncombe, the High Sheriff; Mr. Glyn, Vicar of Beverley, the chaplain; and Sir Frederick Grey and his wife ‘Barberina.’ Some of the pictures are very fine—a portrait by Titian, several Vandykes, Reynolds’ ‘Shepherd Boy,” and some fine Reynolds portraits of Lord and Lady Irvine, the former possessors of this place—the Templar’s Stow of ‘Ivanhoe.’ They left it to their five daughters in turn. The eldest was Lady Hertford, and, if she had two sons, it was to go to the second, but she had only one; the second daughter was Lady Alexander Gordon, who was childless; the third was Mrs. Meynell, mother-in-law of the present possessor.”

“Dec, 7.—Deep snow all to-day and a furious wind. But yesterday we reached Leeds for the assize sermon from the Sheriff’s chaplain, Mr. Glyn,[156] a really magnificent sermon on ‘What is thy life?’ The music also was very fine, and the great church filled with people.

“This house, where Lord Darnley was born, and whence Lord Strafford issued his summons to the Cavaliers to meet in defence of the King, is very curious. In point of amusement, the Judge is the principal feature of the present party, and how he does trample on his High Sheriff! He coolly said to him yesterday that he considered a High Sheriff as ‘dust under his feet;’ and he narrated before him a story of one of his brother judges, who, when his High Sheriff had left his hat in court, not only would not let him go to fetch it, but would not wait while his servants fetched it, and ordered him instantly to take him back to his lodgings without his hat! In court, Judge Denman was annoyed by some stone-breakers outside the window, and was told it would cost a matter of £40 to have them stopped. ‘Stop the noise instantly,’ he said; and the Mayor had to pay for it out of his own pocket. Yesterday, when the snow was so deep, the High Sheriff timidly suggested that they might be snowed up. ‘That is impossible,’ said the Judge; ‘whatever the difficulties, Mr. High Sheriff, you are bound to see me conveyed to Leeds by the opening of the court, if the whole of Leeds is summoned out to cut a way for me.’

“Lord Strafford was here because he borrowed the house of Sir Arthur Ingram as the largest to which to summon the Cavaliers. Sir Arthur was rewarded by Charles II. for his devotion to the Stuarts by being made Viscount Irvine.”

“Ripley Castle, Dec. 12.—In this pleasant hospitable house I greatly miss the gentle presence of the beloved Lady Ingilby, who was so long a kind and warm-hearted friend; but it is pleasant to find her cordial welcome still living in that of her son, Sir Henry, and her pretty graceful daughter-in-law, who is a daughter of Lord Marjoribanks of Ladykirk.

“I found here Count and Countess Bathyany, people I was very glad to see. They retain their old castle in Hungary, where they are magnates of the first rank, but for some years they have lived chiefly in England, at Eaglehurst on the Solent, and receive there during the yachting season. The Countess has remains of great beauty and is wonderfully agreeable. As I sat by her at dinner, she talked much of Lady William Russell,[157] and told me the story of Lord Moira’s appearance, which she had heard from her own lips. “Lady William was at Brighton, where her friend Lady Betty—— was also staying. One day when Lady Betty went to her, she found her excessively upset and discomposed, and she said it was on account of a dream that she had had of her uncle, who, as Lord Moira, had brought her up, and who was then Governor of Malta. She said that she had seen a very long hall, and at the end of the hall a couch with a number of female figures in different attitudes of grief and despair bending over it, as if they were holding up or attending to some sick person. On the couch she saw no one, but immediately afterwards she seemed to meet her Uncle Moira and embraced him, but said, with a start, ‘Uncle, how terribly cold you are!’ He replied, ‘Bessie, did you not know that I am dead?’ She recollected herself instantly and said, ‘Oh, Uncle, how does it look on the other side?’—‘Quite different from what we have imagined, and far, far more beautiful,’ he replied with a radiant smile, and she awoke. Her dream occurred just when Lord Hastings[158] (formerly Lord Moira) died on a couch in a hall at Malta; but she told the circumstances to Lady Betty long before the news came.[159]

“Another story which Countess Bathyany told from personal knowledge was that of Sir Samuel Romilly.

“Lord Grey[160] and his son-in-law, Sir Charles Wood, were walking on the ramparts of Carlisle. The rampart is there still. It is very narrow, and there is only one exit; so if you walk there, you must return as you came. While they were walking, a man passed them, returned, passed them again, and then disappeared in front of them over the parapet, where there was really no means of exit. There was a red scarf round his throat. ‘How very extraordinary! and how exactly like Sir Samuel Romilly!’ they both exclaimed. At that moment Sir Samuel Romilly had cut his throat in a distant part of England.

“We have tea in the evening in the oak room in the tower, where Miss Ingilby has often had much to say that is interesting, especially this story.[161]

“A regiment was lately passing through Derbyshire on its way to fresh quarters in the North. The Colonel, as they stayed for the night in one of the country towns, was invited to dine at a country-house in the neighbourhood, and to bring any one he liked with him. Consequently he took with him a young ensign for whom he had taken a great fancy. They arrived, and it was a large party, but the lady of the house did not appear till just as they were going in to dinner, and, when she appeared, was so strangely distraite and preoccupied that she scarcely attended to anything that was said to her. At dinner, the Colonel observed that his young companion scarcely ever took his eyes off the lady of the house, staring at her in a way which seemed at once rude and unaccountable. It made him observe the lady herself, and he saw that she scarcely seemed to attend to anything said by her neighbours on either side of her, but rather seemed, in a manner quite unaccountable, to be listening to some one or something behind her. As soon as dinner was over, the young ensign came to the Colonel and said, ‘Oh, do take me away: I entreat you to take me away from this place.’ The Colonel said, ‘Indeed your conduct is so very extraordinary and unpleasant, that I quite agree with you that the best thing we can do is to go away;’ and he made the excuse of his young friend being ill, and ordered their carriage. When they had driven some distance the Colonel asked the ensign for an explanation of his conduct. He said that he could not help it: during the whole of dinner he had seen a terrible black shadowy figure standing behind the chair of the lady of the house, and it had seemed to whisper to her, and she to listen to it. He had scarcely told this, when a man on horseback rode rapidly past the carriage, and the Colonel, recognising one of the servants of the house they had just left, called out to know if anything was the matter. ‘Oh, don’t stop me, sir,’ he shouted; ‘I am going for the doctor: my lady has just cut her throat.’

“I may mention here a very odd adventure which the other day befell my cousin Eliot Yorke. He had been dining with the Duke of Edinburgh at Buckingham Palace, in company with Captain Fane, commander of H.M.S. Bellerophon on the Australian Station, who had been well known to the Duke and Eliot when the former was in the South Pacific in command of the Galatea. At a late hour Eliot and Captain Fane left the Palace to go to their club. The night was cold and wet, and, at a crossing in Pall-Mall, their attention was attracted by a miserable-looking little boy, ragged and shoeless, who, even in the middle of the night, was still plying his broom and imploring a trifle from the passers-by. Eliot, according to his usual custom, stopped to talk to the boy before relieving him. The child told him he was a stranger in London, that he had walked there to seek his fortune from some place on the south-west coast, that he was friendless, homeless, and penniless. The proprietor of the crossing had lent it to him, with his broom, for that day only: he had earned very little, but Eliot’s gift would secure him a lodging for that night, and then—he supposed there was nothing for him but starvation or the workhouse. ‘And have you really no friends or relations in the world?’ said Eliot. ‘Well, sir, it’s the same as if I had none; I’ve one brother, but I shall never see him again: I don’t even know if he is alive.’—‘What is your brother’s name?’—‘He is—— a signalman on board the Bellerophon, and he’s been away so long, he must have forgotten me.’—‘It’s perfectly true,’ said Captain Fane; ‘that is the name of my signalman, and a very smart fellow he is, and I see a strong likeness between him and the boy.’ The end of the story was, that the two gentlemen secured a lodging for the boy, bought him some clothes, and, through Captain Fane’s influence, he has been placed on board one of the training vessels, the Dreadnought, for the merchant service, to become a good sailor like his brother. But the combination of coincidences is most striking and providential. The boy only had the crossing for that one night. Captain Fane, almost the only person in the world who could testify to the truth of the story, was only in London for two nights; and he chanced to be walking with Eliot, probably the only person who would have thought of stopping to talk to a crossing-sweeper.”

“Hickledon, Dec. 12.—I came here yesterday, cordially welcomed by Lord and Lady Halifax, and was glad to find the John Greys here. In the evening my dear Charlie and Lady Agnes came, but our meeting was sadly clouded by the terrible news of poor George Grey’s[162] death at Sandringham. Charlie had brought back many stories from Bedgebury. Mr. Beresford Hope told him that:—

“His uncle Lord Decies, who had lived very much in Paris, met, somewhere abroad, young Lionel Ashley, a brother of Lord Shaftesbury, then about twenty-two, and living abroad, as he was, very much out at elbows. Lord Decies remarked upon a very curious iron ring which he wore, with a death’s-head and cross-bones upon it. ‘Oh,” said young Ashley, ‘about that ring there is a very curious story. It was given to me by a famous conjuring woman, Madame le Norman, to whom I went with two friends of mine. She prophesied that we should all three die before we were twenty-three. My two friends are already dead, and next year I shall be twenty-three: but if you like I will give you the ring;’ and he gave it to Lord Decies. When Lord Decies returned to Paris, Lionel Ashley came there too, and he frequently dined with him. A short time before the expiration of the year, at the end of which Ashley was again engaged to dine with him, Lord Decies was sitting in his room, when the door opened, and Lionel Ashley came in. As to what was said, Mr. Hope was not quite clear, but the circumstances were so singular, that when he was gone, Lord Decies rang the bell, and asked the servant who had let Mr. Ashley into the house. ‘Mais, Milord, M. Ashley est mort hier,’ said the servant.’[163]

“Another curious story was that—

“Lord Waterford (the third Marquis) was one day standing talking to the landlord of the little inn in the village close to his place of Curraghmore, when some one rushed up looking very much agitated, and said that there had been a most dreadful murder in the neighbouring hills. ‘Then it must be the little one,’ exclaimed the landlord. ‘What can you possibly mean?’ said Lord Waterford, feeling that the landlord’s knowing anything about it was at the least very suspicious. ‘Well, my lord,’ he said, ‘I am afraid you will never believe me, but I must tell you that last night I dreamt that two men came to my inn, a tall man and a little, and in my dream I saw the tall man murder the little man with a very curious knife, the like of which I never saw before. I told my wife when I woke, but she only laughed at me. To my horror, in the course of the morning, those very two men came to my inn, and I was so possessed by my dream, that I refused them admittance; but coming back some time after, I found that my wife had let them in when my back was turned. I could not turn them out of my house when they were once in it, but going in, some time after, with some refreshments, my horror was increased by seeing on the table between them the very knife I had seen in my dream. Then they paid for their refreshments and went away.’

“The dream of the landlord and the coincidences were considered so extraordinary, that as the bridge at Carrick-on-Suir was the only bridge in that part, and so in a sort of sense divided the country, a watch was put there, and in course of time a man exactly answering to the landlord’s description crossed the bridge and was arrested. In prison, he confessed that he had been in the cod-fishery trade with his companion, who had boasted to him of his great earnings. He forthwith attached himself to him, travelled with him, and watched for the opportunity of murdering him. His weapon was a knife used in the cod-fishery, quite unknown in those parts.”[164]

“Hickledon, Dec. 15.—I have been indescribably happy here with Charlie Wood, and every hour spent with him makes one more entirely feel that there is no one like him—no one.