Читать книгу Loitering in Pleasant Paths - Marion Harland - Страница 7

Table of Contents

IF the English autumn be sad, and the English spring be sour, the smiling beauty of the English summer should expel the memory of gloom and acerbity from the mind of the tourist who is not afflicted with bronchitis. In England they make the ch very hard, and pronounce the i in the second syllable as in kite. They ought to know all about bronchitis, for it lurks in every whiff of east wind, and most of the vanes have rusted upon their pivots in their steadfast pointing to that quarter.

The east wind is not necessarily raw. It was bracing, and the sky blue as that of Italy, when we took a Fourth of July drive of nine hours through the fairest portion of the Isle of Wight. The Tally-Ho was a gorgeous pleasure-coach, all red and yellow. The coachman and guard were in blue coats and brass buttons, red waistcoats, and snowy leather breeches, fitting like the skin; high top-boots and cockaded hats. We had four good horses, the best seats upon the top of the coach, a hamper of luncheon, and as many rugs and shawls as we would have taken on a winter voyage across the Atlantic. There were opaline belts of light upon the sea, such as we had seen from Naples and Sorrento, passing into pearl and faintest blue where the sky met and mingled with the water. Hundreds of sails skimmed the waves like so many white gulls. Here and there a steamer left a dusky trail upon the air. Three were stationary about a dark object near the shore. It looked like a projecting pile the rising tide might cover. The Eurydice, a school-ship of the Royal Navy, had foundered there in a gale six weeks and more agone, carrying upwards of three hundred souls down with her. Day by day these government transports were toiling to raise her and recover the bodies of the boys. A week after we left the island they succeeded in dragging up the water-logged hulk. Only eighteen corpses were found. The sea had washed off and hidden the rest.

England is a garden in June, July, and August. The Isle of Wight is a fairy parterre, set with such wealth of verdure and bloom as never disappoints nor palls upon the sight. The roads are perfect in stability and smoothness, and whether they lie along the edge of the cliffs, or among fertile plains besprinkled with villages and farm-buildings, with an occasional manor-house or venerable ruin, are everywhere fringed by such hedges as flourish nowhere else so bravely as in the British Isles. The hawthorn was out of flower, but blackberries whose blossoms were pink instead of white, trailing briony, sweet-brier, and, daintiest and most luxuriant of all, wild convolvulus, hung with tiny cups of pale rose-color—healed our regrets that we were too late to see and smell the “May” in its best-loved home.

We lunched at Blackgang Chine, spreading our cloth upon the heather a short distance from the brow of the cliff, the sea rolling so far below us that the surf was a whisper and the strollers upon the beach were pigmies. The breadth—the apparent boundlessness of the view were enhanced by the crystalline purity of the atmosphere. In standing upon the precipice, our backs to the shore, looking seaward beyond the purple “Needles” marking the extremest point of the sunken reef, we had an eerie sense of being suspended between sky and ocean;—a lightness of body and freedom of spirit, a contempt for the laws of gravitation, and for the Tally-Ho as a means of locomotion, that were, we decided after comparing notes among ourselves, the next best thing to being sea-fowl.

The principal objects of interest for the day were Carisbrooke Castle and Arreton. Next to the Heidelberg Schloss, Carisbrooke takes rank, in our recollection of ruins many and castles uncountable, for beauty of situation and for careful preservation of original character without injury to picturesqueness. The moat is cushioned with daisied turf, but we crossed it by a stone bridge of a single span. Over the gateway is carved the Woodville coat-of-arms, supported on each side by the “White Rose” of York. The arch is recessed between two fine, round towers. The massive doors, cross-barred with iron, still hang upon their hinges. Passing these, we were in a grassy court-yard of considerable extent. On our left was the shell of the suite of rooms occupied by Charles I. during his imprisonment here, from November 13, 1647, until the latter part of the next year. Ivy clings and creeps through the empty window-frames, and tapestries walls denuded of the “thick hangings and wainscoting” ordered for the royal captive. The floors of the upper story have fallen and the lower is carpeted with grass. Tufts of a pretty pink flower were springing in all the crevices. Ferns grew rank and tall along the inside of the enclosed space. High up in the wall is the outline of a small window, “blocked up in after alterations,” according to the record. Through this the king endeavored to escape on the night of March 20, 1648. Horses were ready in the neighborhood of the Castle, and a vessel awaited the king upon the shore. A brave royalist came close beneath the window and gave the signal.

“Then”—in the words of this man, the only eye-witness of the scene—“His Majesty put himself forward, but, too late, found himself mistaken.”

Charles had declared, when the size of the aperture was under discussion, “Where my head can pass, my body can follow.”

“He, sticking fast between his breast and shoulders and not able to get backward or forward. Whilst he stuck I heard him groan, but could not come to help him, which, you may imagine, was no small affliction to me. So soon as he was in again—to let me see (as I had to my grief heard) the design was broken—he set a candle in the window. If this unfortunate impediment had not happened, his Majesty had certainly then made a good escape.”

The Stuarts were a burden to the land, as a family; but we wished the window had been a few inches broader, and exile, not the block, the end of fight ’twixt king and parliament, as we walked up and down the tilt-yard converted into a promenade and bowling-green for the prisoner while Colonel Hammond was governor of the Castle. Here Charles paced two hours each day, the wide sea and the free ships below him; in plain sight the cove where the little shallop had lain, at anchor, the night of the attempted rescue.

“He was not at all dejected in his spirits,” we read; “but carried himself with the same majesty he had used to do. His hair was all gray, which, making all others very sad, made it thought that he had sorrow in his countenance which appeared only by that shadow.”

In further evidence of his unbroken spirit in this earliest imprisonment, we have the motto “Dum spiro, spero,” written by himself in a book he was fond of reading. Without divining it, he was getting his breath between two tempests. That in these months all that was truly kingly and good within him was nourished into healthy growth we gather, furthermore, in reading that “The Sacred Scriptures he most delighted in; read often in Sand’s Paraphrase of King David’s Psalms and Herbert’s Divine Poems.” Also, that “Spenser’s Faerie Queen was the alleviation of his spirits after serious studies.”

The Bowling Green is little changed in grade and verdure since the semi-daily promenade of the captive monarch streaked it with narrow paths, and since his orphaned son and daughter played bowls together upon the turf two summers afterward. The sward is velvet of thickest pile. There is an English saying that “it takes a century to make a lawn.” This has had more than two in which to grow and green.

We were glad that another party who were with us in the grounds were anxious to see an ancient donkey tread the wheel which draws up a bucket from the well, “144 feet deep, with 37 feet of water” in a building at the side of the Castle. While they tarried to applaud “Jacob’s” feat, we had a quiet quarter of an hour in the upper chamber, where, as a roughly-painted board tells us, “The Princess Elizabeth died.”

Who (in America) has not read the narrative, penned by the thirteen-year-old child, “What the King said to me 29th of January last, being the last time I had the happiness to see him”? The heart breaks with the mere reading of the title and the fancy of the trembling fingers that wrote it out.

Her father had said to her, “But, sweetheart, thou wilt forget what I tell thee!” “Then, shedding abundance of tears, I told him that I would write down all he said to me.”

We knew, almost to a word, the naïve recital which was the fulfilment of the pledge. We could not have forgotten at Carisbrooke that her father had given her a Bible, saying: “It had been his great comfort and constant companion through all his sorrows, and he hoped it would be hers.” She had been a prisoner in the Castle less than a week when she was caught in a sudden shower while playing with her little brother, the Duke of Gloucester, on the Bowling Green. The wetting “caused her to take cold, and the next day she complained of headache and feverish distemper.” It was a poor bed-chamber for a king’s daughter (with one window, a mere slit in the wall, and one door), in the which she lay for a fortnight, “her disease growing upon her,” until “after many rare ejaculatory expressions, abundantly demonstrating her unparalleled piety, to the eternal honor of her own memory and the astonishment of those who waited upon her, she took leave of the world on Sunday, the 8th of September, 1650.”

That was the way the chaplain and the physician told the story—such a sorrowful little tale when one strips away the sounding polysyllables and cuts short the windings of the sentences!

The warden’s wife was, we know, one of “those who waited upon her.” Hireling hands ministered to her through her “distemper.” In the scanty retinue that attended her to Carisbrooke was one “Judith Briott, her gentlewoman.” We liked to think she must have loved her gentle little mistress. It is possible her tending was as affectionate as the care she might have had, had the mother, to whom the father had sent his love by the daughter’s hand, been with her instead of in France, toying (some say) with a new lover. Yet the child-heart must have yearned for parents, brothers and sisters. On that Sunday morning, an attendant entering with a bowl of bread-and-milk, discovered that the princess had died alone, her cheek pillowed upon the Bible—her father’s legacy.

That small chamber was a sacred spot where we could not but speak low and step softly. It is utterly dismantled. When draped and furnished it may not have been comfortless. It could never have been luxurious. A branch of ivy had thrust itself in at the window through which her dying eyes looked their last upon the sky. Caput reached up silently and broke off a spray. As I write, it climbs up my window-frame, a thrifty vine, that has taken kindly to voyaging and transplanting. To me it is a more valuable memento than the beautiful photograph of the monument erected to Princess Elizabeth’s memory in the Church of St. Thomas, whither “her body was brought (in a borrowed coach) attended with her few late servants.”

Yet the monument is a noble tribute from royalty to the daughter of a royal line. The young girl lies asleep, one hand fallen to her side, the other laid lightly upon her breast, her check turned to rest upon the open Bible. The face is sweet and womanly; the expression peacefully happy. “A token of respect for her virtues, and sympathy for her misfortunes. By Victoria R., 1856.” So reads the inscription.

Imagination leaped a wide chasm of time and station in passing from the state prison-chamber of Carisbrooke to the thatched cottage of The Dairyman’s Daughter; from the marble sculptured by a queen’s command, to the head-stone reared by one charitable admirer of the humble piety of Elizabeth Walbridge. To reach the grave we had to pass through the parish church of Arreton. It is like a hundred other parish churches scattered among the byways of England. The draught from the interior met us when the door grated upon the hinges, cold, damp, and ill-smelling, a smell that left an earthy taste in the mouth. Beneath the stone flooring the noble dead are packed economically as to room. The sexton, who may have been a trifle younger than the building, spoke a dialect we could hardly translate. The church was his pride, and he was sorely grieved when we would have pushed right onward to the burying-ground.

“Ye mun look at ’e brawsses!” he pleaded so tremulously that we halted to note one, on which was the figure of a man in armor, his feet upon a lion couchant.

“Here is ye buried under this Grave

Harry Haweis. His soul God save.

Long tyme steward of the Yle of Wyght.

Have m’cy on hym, God ful of myght.”

The date is 1430.

Another “brass” upon a stone pillar bears six verses setting forth the worthy deeds of one William Serle:

“Thus did this man, a Batchelor,

Of years full fifty-nyne.

And doing good to many a one,

Soe did he spend his tyme.”

“An’ ye woant see ’e rest?” quavered the old sexton at our next movement. “ ’E be foine brawsses! Quawlity all of um—‘e be!”

Seeing our obduracy, he hobbled to the side-door and unlocked it, amid many groans from himself and the rusty wards. The July light and air were welcome after the damp twilight within. In death at least, it would seem to be better with the poor than the “quality,” if sun and breeze are boons. The churchyard is small and ridged closely with graves. The old man led the way between and over these to the last home of the Dairyman’s Daughter. We gathered about it, looked reverently upon the low swell of turf. There is a metrical epitaph, sixteen lines in length, presumably the composition of the lady at whose expense the stone was raised. It begins:

“Stranger! if e’er by chance or feeling led,

Upon this hallowed turf thy footsteps tread,

Turn from the contemplation of the sod,

And think on her whose spirit rests with God.”

The rest is after the same order, a mechanical jingle in pious measure. It offends one who has not been educated to appreciate the value of post-mortem patronage bestowed by the lofty upon the lowly. It was enough for us to know that the worn body of Legh Richmond’s “Elizabeth” lay there peacefully sleeping away the ages.

We had picked up in a Ventnor bookshop a shabby little copy of Richmond’s “Annals of the Poor,” printed in 1828. It contained a sketch of Mr. Richmond’s life by his son-in-law, The Dairyman’s Daughter, The Negro Servant, and The Young Cottager, the scene of all these narratives being in the Isle of Wight. We reread them with the pensive pleasure one feels in unbinding a pacquet of letters, spotted and yellowed by time, but which hands beloved once pressed, and yielding still the faint fragrance of the rose-leaves we laid away with them when the pages were white and fresh. We, who drew delight with instruction from Sunday-School libraries more than thirty years back, knew Elizabeth, the “Betsey” of father and mother, better than we did our next-door neighbors. Prima and Secunda, allured by my enthusiasm to read the book, declared that her letters to her spiritual adviser “were prosy and priggish,” but that the hold of the story upon my heart was not all the effect of early association was abundantly proved by their respectful mention of her humble piety and triumphant death.

By her side lies the sister at whose funeral Legh Richmond first met his modest heroine. In the same family group sleep the Dairyman and his wife. “The mother died not long after the daughter,” says Mr. Richmond, “and I have good reason to believe that God was merciful to her and took her to Himself. The good old Dairyman died in 1816, aged 84. His end was eminently Christian.”

Elizabeth died May 30, 1801, at the age of thirty-one.

“Pardon!” said a foreign gentleman, one of the party, who, seeing Caput uncover his head at the grave, had done the same. “But will you have the goodness to tell me what it is we have come here to see?”

“The grave of a very good woman,” was the reply.

Legh Richmond tells us little more. Her love for her Saviour, like the broken alabaster-box of ointment in the hand of another woman of far different life, is the sweet savor that has floated down to us through all these years.

I stooped to picked some bearded grasses from the mound. The sexton bent creakingly to aid me, chattering and grinning. He wore a blue frock over his corduroy trousers: his hands and clothes were stained with clay; his sunken cheeks looked like old parchment.

“ ’A wisht ’a ’ad flowers to gi’ ’e, leddy!” he said. “ ’A dit troy for one wheele to keep um ’ere. But ’a moight plant um ivery day, and ’ee ud be all goane ’afore tummorrer. He! he! he! ’A—manny leddies cooms ’ere for summat fro’ e’ grave. ’A burried ’er brother over yander!” chucking a pebble to show where—“ ’a dit! ’E larst of ’e fomily. ’Ees all goane! And ’a’m still aloive and loike to burry a manny more! He! he!”

Our homeward route lay by the Dairyman’s cottage, a long mile from the church. When the coffin of Elizabeth, borne by neighbors’ hands, was followed by the mourners, also on foot, funeral hymns were sung, “at occasional intervals of about five minutes.” As we bowled along the smooth road, Prima, sitting behind me, read aloud from the shabby little volume a description of the surrounding scene, that might, for accuracy of detail, have been written that day:

“A rich and fruitful valley lay immediately beneath. It was adorned with corn-fields and pastures, through which a small river winded in a variety of directions, and many herds grazed upon its banks. A fine range of opposite hills, covered with grazing flocks, terminated with a bold sweep into the ocean, whose blue waves appeared at a distance beyond. Several villages, churches and hamlets were scattered in the valley. The noble mansions of the rich and the lowly cottages of the poor added their respective features to the landscape. The air was mild, and the declining sun occasioned a beautiful interchange of light and shade upon the sides of the hills.”

The annalist adds—“In the midst of this scene the chief sound that arrested attention was the bell tolling for the funeral of the ‘Dairyman’s Daughter.’ ”

“A picture by Claude!” commented Caput as the reader paused.

“A draught of old wine that has made the voyage to India and back!” said Dux, our blue-eyed college-boy.

These were the hills that had echoed the funeral psalm; these the cottages in whose doors stood those “whose countenances proclaimed their regard for the departed young woman.” Red brick “cottages,” the little gardens between them and the road crowded with larkspurs, pinks, roses, lavender, and southernwood. They were generally built in solid rows under one roof, the yards separated by palings. There were no basements, the paved floors being laid directly upon the ground. Two rooms upon this floor, and one above in a steep-roofed attic, was the prevailing plan of the tenements. The doors were open, and we could observe, at a passing glance, that some were clean and bright, others squalid, within. All, mean and neat, had flowers in the windows. The Dairyman’s cottage stands detached from other houses with what the neighbors would term “a goodish bit of ground” about it. To the original dwelling that Legh Richmond saw has been joined a two-story wing, also of brick. Beside it the cottage with its thatched roof is a very humble affair. The lane, “quite overshaded with trees and high hedges,” and “the suitable gloom of such an approach to the house of mourning,” are gone, with “the great elm-trees which stood near the house.” The rustling of these—as he rode by them to see Elizabeth die—the imagination of the unconscious poet and true child of Nature “indulged itself in thinking were plaintive sighs of sorrow.”

But we saw the upper room with its sloping ceiling, and the window-seat in which “her sister-in-law sat weeping with a child in her lap,” while Elizabeth lay dying upon the bed drawn into the middle of the floor to give her air.

The glory of the sunsetting was over sea and land, painting the sails rose-pink; purpling the lofty downs and mellowing into delicious vagueness the skyey distances—the pathways into the world beyond this island-gem—when we drove into Ventnor. The grounds of the Royal Hotel are high and spacious, with turfy banks rolling from the cliff-brow down to the road, divided by walks laid in snowy shells gathered from the shore. From a tall flag-staff set on the crown of the hill streamed out, proud and straight in the strong sea-breeze—the Stars and Stripes!

We did not cheer it, except in spirit, but the gentlemen waved their hats and the ladies kissed their hands to the grand old standard, and all responded “Amen!” to the deep voice that said, “God bless it, forever!” And with the quick heart-bound that sent smiles to the lips and moisture to the eyes, with longings for the Land always and everywhere dearest to us, came kindlier thoughts than we were wont to indulge of the “Old Home,” which, in the clearer light of a broadening Christian civilization, can, with us, rejoice in the anniversary of a Nation’s Birthday.