For there, across the road, were the coastguard quarters, as surely their old selves as I was. And no feature of the place could have appealed to me more eloquently, if only because in one of them the antiseptic surgery I have spoken of was practised on my foot. That was in a summer when all of the few regular lodging-places had been bespoken ahead of us, and we could only get in by the desperate expedient of subsidising the coastguard. Three of the little dwellings divided the family amongst them, the largest available parlour being the rendezvous for meals. I slept with two sisters in a four-post bed with blue-and-white-checked curtains, and the dispossessed rightful occupiers used to cross a corner of the room to get to their makeshift couch elsewhere, after we had retired and were supposed to be asleep. We did not like to miss the event of the stealthy pa.s.sage of our coastguardsman from door to door, creeping in his stockinged feet, shading his candle with his hand, on such nights as he was off duty.
One of his brother officials was a clever worker in jet, amber and cornelian, found on the coast; his jewel-trays, prepared for summer visitors, held ornaments that were an ever-recurring joy to inspect and finger, especially if we could buy something--a cross or heart or string of beads for the neck, or a "faith-hope-and-charity" to add to one"s bunch of charms. Another and particularly dear coastguardsman employed his genius and leisure for years upon a large model of a battleship of the period. It was the glory of his spotless parlour, which it quite monopolised. He said he was going to present it to the boy Prince of Wales--afterwards Edward our King. Crowns and palaces would be as naught to him, we were sure, when he found himself in possession of this wonder of the world. And did he ever?
Wandering on, I came to the cobbled courtyard, closed with a wide door at night, in the recesses of which we kept house through another summer.
The very cobbles were there still! And farther on, the terrace of larger houses--_the_ houses, snapped up by the early birds--where we sojourned for the summer of several years, and where the little brother died. Dear little golden-head! Dolls were nowhere in the season when he reigned. It was the end of the summer, through which his sunny beauty had been the admiration of the beach and the adoration of his family, that he was s.n.a.t.c.hed from us. The terrace reminded me of one forgotten shadow upon the shining picture of the Past--the black day when father and mother drove away with the little coffin in a closed carriage, to lay him with his baby forerunners in the churchyard at H----, leaving us behind with our governess in a paradise despoiled. Miss W. it was, father"s favourite, she of the Rowland"s Kalydor-and-ink affair. And, by the way, I remember that, soon after our return home that year, I went to L---- with her, and accompanied her when she paid a call on the lady princ.i.p.al of the school where she had been educated, who had recommended her to us. This lady had an imposing presence--I can see her now--in dark blue poplin or black moire antique, adorned with a collar of choice lace. She and Miss W. were brightly chatting together, when I interposed with the great and solemn news that I had been bursting to impart: "Our baby is dead." I think I expected her to collapse under the shock, but the shock was mine. She glanced at me casually, then turned to Miss W. with a laugh. "Well," said she, "it"s one less for you to be bothered with."
And Miss W. laughed back as she replied that, yes, it was. Oh, no doubt she was a cat, the pretty and amiable Miss W. And the lady princ.i.p.al, a wife and mother, was just the sort to have had the training of her.
I did not get as far as the old church on these occasions, when I rambled alone between tea and dinner. The pony carriage took me there, when we drove about for two hours between breakfast and luncheon, and through the beautiful old park, that even now was so proudly exclusive that the public might pa.s.s through the gates on but one day of the week.
But I had not forgotten the tombs of the old family--fourteenth and fifteenth and sixteenth century monuments--and its great home, where it had dwelt since William the Conqueror, when the Norman founder took a Saxon lady to wife. Never, from that day to this, has the line of descent been broken, or the lord of that line been dispossessed of these lands. The charters that gave them are still in the muniment-room of the Hall, and Mrs B. showed me an enclosed copse, a dark piece of wild woodland, which she said was Saxon land that had never been touched since a Saxon kingdom owned it. The key was a sacred heirloom of the family, and one of the articles of the family creed was that no feet should enter there except its own. The whole history of England had pa.s.sed it by--this one bit, probably the only bit in all England, of virgin Saxon territory!
O England! England! How wonderful she is!
CHAPTER XII
EXCURSIONS TO SANDRINGHAM
I had a day of days before I left H----.
It was the 17th August, and the weather the very best that England could do. Roses were still plentiful in the beautifully kept English gardens--Dorothy Perkins painted herself on the landscape far and near--and mauve and purple clematis foamed over tawny house walls in delicious contrast of colour, with as little reserve as in our more ardently wooing air. A favourite ribbon-work of the little dark blue campanula was noticeable everywhere, bordering flower-beds and window-boxes; it was as positive as the blue pencil-marks of the Customs on my travelling baggage, and these oddly remind me of it. Withal a hint of autumn, gentle and gracious, mellowed the summer scene--a _red_ rowan-tree in one fine country garden; that splendid burning-bush, the Virginian sumach, in another; above all--the sweetest "note" to me--the little wild, incomparable harebell, the English harebell, thick in the gra.s.s of the roadsides. And the corn was ripe and ready, the hand-cut lane cleared for the reaping-machine around nearly all the fields.
Well, on this perfect morning Mrs B. escorted me to the livery stables where her pony was boarded out. A more notable fact in connection with them was that the elderly proprietor was once the young son of an elderly proprietor of stables in old H----, whence we derived the donkeys and the donkey chaises of bygone times. She took me to see him on the very day of my arrival, that we might indulge in mutual reminiscences of the Golden Age. Now he had a great establishment, many horses and fine carriages glittering in their modern elegance, and his sons in their turn were the acting directors of the business--smart men in well-cut riding breeches, to whom a donkey would be as amusing a little animal as it is to me.
Amongst the many excellent vehicles of the firm, to which satin-skinned teams were being harnessed, a large brake was out for an excursion to a famous show place of the county. I was going with it, and going "on my own," Mrs B."s back not being strong enough for the expedition. Usually I do not enjoy what we call pleasures all alone by myself, but for once I was able to make a happy day without the aid of a companion.
The seat of honour beside the coachman was reserved for me. He sat high in the air on his folded overcoat, and, becushioned and berugged, with a stool for my feet, I snuggled under his elbow, comfort personified. A fine man he was, with a fine old weather-toughened English face, and he was a fine whip; I knew it as soon as I saw him gather his four-in-hand together, and an Australian bushwoman of my experience is a fair judge.
He was not a garrulous person, but ready with his information when I wanted it, and I could not have wished for a more congenial Jehu. He confided to me his opinion of the motor that was "bouncing us off the road," his mournful view of a future when the horse should be no more.
It occurred to me that the next generation will find C."s livery stables dealing only with motors and chauffeurs, and Mr H. had the air of a man who would hope to be in his grave before he could see it. Certainly there was much need of the horn that brayed a notice of our coming at the approach of every turning. English roads and village streets are so narrow that at times our great drag seemed to fill them from side to side; only an experience of London traffic enabled me to believe it possible that another vehicle could pa.s.s us; and the corners were so masked by the hedges that one could not see around them. Mrs B. and I, trundling about in her pony-carriage of a morning, had many sudden encounters with goggle-eyed drivers who did not trouble to toot a warning that they were near. Fortunately, her high-born pony treated the mushroom automobile with contempt.
But, oh, those English roads! And the joy of that twelve-mile drive behind that spanking team! We pa.s.sed over the route by which our stage-coach of old brought us to and from old H---- before the railroad from L---- was made, and I could lean back in my comfortable seat and dream of the dear Past to my heart"s content. Mr H., while keeping me conscious that I was in his good care, only spoke when he was spoken to; on the other side of me were a lady and her daughter, who confined their low-voiced conversation to themselves. There may have been, in the seats behind, a dozen persons more, who did not in the least disturb me.
We threaded five lovely villages, with much horn-blowing and twisting and turning, before we came to royal Sandringham, which I had already seen, but not on this side of it; every house and church and garden and green and pond and tree was a picture, to raise in my mind the unceasing question: "Why did I never know that England was like this?" I had not forgotten, I had simply never known it. No English person can ever know it so long as he stays at home. The callousness of the native, who was used to it, to the beauty of his dwelling-place, the value of his privileges, was a continual surprise to me, although I knew the reason for it. To be as the King at Sandringham, without the suggestion of an unfinished or imperfect detail in the whole scheme of one"s domestic life, would be to have too oppressively much of a good thing, but I felt as if I would give my ears to live in one of his tenants" cottages.
By the way, even royal Sandringham had its message from the Past for me.
I had known the place in childhood, and had my memories of the family from whom it was acquired; but I had always understood that Edward VII.
had "rebuilt" the old mansion, which implied that he had first pulled it down. Instead of that, I found it had been built on to, which is quite a different thing. There it was, at the end of the immensely long facade, and, to my thinking, the most beautiful although the least ornate part of it. The photographers are not of the same opinion, for, having so much to get into a picture, they cut off what they consider can be spared at that end, never at the other; so it was a complete surprise to me to find the old house standing, and I had great difficulty in getting a photograph of the royal residence which took it in. But I did not cease from the search until I found one.
Lest I should seem to be sailing under false colours as a royal guest or otherwise privileged person, let me explain that I paid my visit to Sandringham as a cheap tripper on the occasion of the Cottage Flower Show of the estate. This was the day of the year--and in that favoured summer it was a day of unsurpa.s.sable weather, the 22nd of July--when the most generous of kings permitted any number of his humble subjects to overrun his domain right up to the house walls. The blinds were down--that was all, and the very least that could be done, in the way of decent reserve--but there was nothing save one"s own sense of propriety to prevent one from flattening ones nose against the window-gla.s.s and trying to see around the edges. Policemen were there, of course, quant.i.ties of them, I daresay; but they drifted about as if they had no interest in the proceedings except to render themselves as inconspicuous as possible. Never once did I find one exercising his profession, and it was evident that they had their orders not to do so, except in the last extremity. Surely if anybody knew how to do the graceful thing gracefully, it was that consummate gentleman, Edward VII. And the miscellaneous crowd to whose honour he trusted justified his courtesy and confidence in them; they strolled about, free and easy, as if the place belonged to them, but not the smallest unauthorised liberty was taken with it, that I could see.
It was very striking, the sort of tribal, patriarchal sentiment, the almost family feeling, prevailing all over this estate and as far as the royal landlord"s influence as such extended. Here the man behind the monarch was known as probably he could not be elsewhere in his own dominions or in the world--here, where he was in the special sense at home, and where he could be himself in freedom. Behind his back it was easy to gather the facts of the situation. There was no servile, old-world awe in the enormous and adoring respect paid to their great squire by those who "lived under" him; in their evidently boundless affection there was not a sc.r.a.p of fear. When the milk gave out in the refreshment tents, because the fine day had brought more tea-drinkers than were expected, messengers ran to the Queen"s dairy, as naturally as they would have run home if home had been as near, for more; and the little incident was typical. As a cheap tripper I gained an interesting experience and some valuable knowledge which as a privileged guest I must have missed. Also--in the retrospect--a delightful memory.
At the time, there was a disadvantage attached to the position which almost spoiled my day. The excursion train started early in the morning and returned late in the evening, giving us the whole day "out," and I was not strong enough to stand all that. I knew just how it would be, but I had not seen the time-table when I committed myself to the expedition by inviting a niece-in-law to accompany me. Otherwise I should not have come. And so now I am very thankful that I did invite her. As I said to her, when I tumbled, half dead, out of the train at D---- (cutting off what I could of the return journey, half of which she had still to make), "I"m glad I"ve done it--now that it is over."
It was all right, the getting there. The drive from Wolferton Station was full of joy, the beautiful modern woodland road not withholding glimpses of the wild heath of my young days, that was wild heath still, splashed with pinky-purple heather delightfully blending with dark fir wood and tawny sand. The tented meadows, and the sweet gardens beyond them, the views of the great house from this side and that, the glorious trees, the glorious gra.s.s, the glorious sunshine which Australia could not beat--as long as I escaped with my life to tell the tale--or, rather, to remember the feast of loveliness that it was--it is absurd to talk of what it cost me.
I do not grudge anything. I did not then; at any rate I knew I was not going to. But the fact remains that by one o"clock (with no train till after seven) I was dead beat.
For the sake of my young companion I "stuck it out" as long as possible.
We went to a restaurant tent and had a good lunch. That put into me a certain amount of spurious vitality, sufficient to carry me along for half-an-hour more. Then I sat on a bench in front of the house, while she flitted up and down terrace steps and explored nooks and corners, my eye of the chaperon keeping her in sight. Then I made a great effort and we went to the Flower Show proper. I dragged myself up and down the fragrant alley-ways and looked at everything, and made appreciative remarks to the exhibitors, who, I am able to testify, did themselves and the estate credit. Then the heat and crush in the tents overpowered me and I had to get outside in haste.
Sinking upon a bench in the grateful air I said to my niece: "My dear, do you happen to see amongst all these people anyone you know?" She did.
Almost as I spoke she spied a friend. It was a man alone, but fortunately an elderly man, yet not too old to be agreeable to her; married, the father of a family, a connection of her own by marriage; quite safe. So I turned her over to him that she might continue to enjoy herself, and they seemed both obliged to me. "Meet me at the church at four," said I (there was to be an organ recital at that hour).
"Meanwhile I will just sit and rest."
And here--if I may be forgiven by my gracious host for mentioning it--I seemed to find out one little weak spot in his scheme of perfection.
There were seats in plenty scattered over the broad acres of lawn. They were built around the trunks of many of the splendid trees, and they were excellently made of gnarled and twisted wood, and they were sylvanly picturesque; but I cannot allow that they were quite "right"--what one may term legitimately artistic. Because the essential principle of true art is that a thing shall be frankly what it professes to be, and these pretty rustic benches professed to be resting-places, and there was no rest in them. I tried one after another, until I must have gone the round of them all, in search of a niche for my tired back where a hard elbow would not poke into it, and there simply wasn"t one.
I could not afford to be thought too intoxicated to sit or stand, or I must have slipped down and laid my manifold aches upon the soft gra.s.s; so in despair I crawled to the church, where the seats, however hard, would not be k.n.o.bby; and there for an hour or two, before it was crowded to suffocation for the organ recital, I sat by the open door to endure my fatigue. As I was never so long without the relief of a rec.u.mbent or reclining att.i.tude since a carriage accident in 1877, when I was young and comparatively strong, gave me a permanent weak back, I was never so painfully tired in all my life. When the organ recital was over I made for the road where the vehicles were a.s.sembling for train time--still a long way off--and chartered a comfortable old landau, not only to take us to the station, but for use as a sofa in the meantime. I climbed in, leaned back luxuriously, put up my feet, and was in terrestrial heaven.
It was hard to make my coachman believe that, far from being in a hurry to start, I wanted to stay where I was to the last moment, and he was too zealous in spite of me; but for an hour I reposed happily, and could have done so for two or three more, watching the break-up of the festival--the exhibitors stacking their country carts, carrying off their loaded baskets, exchanging their felicitations before they scattered for their homes. Physically I enjoyed myself more than I had done all day.
But now I take no count of cost. I congratulate myself that I was forced to pay it. May I be a cheap tripper and go through it all again, if I can make the same profit in material for the imagination. As I write, my mind is suffused with the golden beauty of that day. It basks again in such English sunshine as an old Australian could not credit without seeing it; it revels in those summer woods, with their peeps of purple heathland, their pheasants tranquilly meandering in and out amongst the rhododendrons. In those miles of shaven lawn, like a continuous carpet, with their ornamentation of single trees and clumps, their dells and rockeries and lake and pretty nooks, all so flawless; in the delightful garden beds and bowers, that are still so simply English, flowering hardily in the open air; in the various aspects of the richly featured house, which is yet no more than an English country house, as comfort-breathing, cheerful and homely as one"s own. The little headstone (to a dog) under the windows; the pergola in the kitchen garden; York Cottage on its sunny slope; the charming rectory, its French windows open to the view of its ideal surroundings; the baby"s grave in mother earth under the wall of the family church, the pathetic family memorials within--above all, that plate let into one end of the family pew, which I could not bear to see anyone look at who was not a "mother dear," bereaved of her grown son, like me--each and all are the picture gallery of Memory, that blessed haunt of the soul in the aging years. And not so much as a sketch-book scrawl of a weary woman seeking rest on k.n.o.bbly rustic seats in vain.
However, in this chapter I set out to tell the tale of another adventure. And now it was August, and I was several-weeks-of-England stronger than I had been that day at Sandringham. And all I saw of the royal seat I saw from the public road--and I think we went over a part of the new road that a month earlier had been a-making--the road necessitated by the destruction of the famous avenue in a gale, the removal of the screen of trees leaving the house too much exposed to the pa.s.ser-by along the original highway. The King had been obliged to set his boundaries further out to preserve his privacy, and he had taken in the old road; at that time he was building miles of wall outside of it, and the Norwich gates were in pieces on the ground; by this time they will be set in the new wall, and another landmark of the old times be gone. It was the best that he could do, since even a king cannot set a fallen avenue up again. Workmen were very busy round about, and it was odd to see the King"s name, like that of any other Norfolk farmer, on the drays and carts that carried material to and fro. He was "running down" frequently, we learned, to inspect the works, as well as some improvements going on in the off-season at the house itself, like any other domestic person whose heart is in his home.
As we pa.s.sed the raw opening which displayed the royal residence in its temporary nakedness, Mr H. checked his horses to give his excursionists a view; it was one of the advertised features of the trip. Then we swept on through the remainder of the lovely villages--Dersingham, Wolferton (it is no use pretending to maintain anonymity here, since the mention of Sandringham, for which a mere "S----" would not serve, gives me away)--to the Black Horse Inn at Castle Rising, which was the goal of our journey so far as he was concerned.
I remembered the Black Horse, as I remembered the great castle--eagerly looked for on each of those stage-coach drives of the fifties--and I felt glad that I had no companion when I set out to explore the latter for absolutely the first time. "Oh, if we could only go _close_ to it!
Oh, if we could only go _into_ it!" we children used to sigh, as we were hurried through the most romantic piece of our known world, our eyes upon the mighty keep that held such store of history; and never had that wish been gratified till now.
I went first into the inn ("hotel" is not to be thought of as applying to these English villages), to brush up a little after my drive and inquire about luncheon arrangements. I found it was not the old Black Horse but a descendant of the same name; however, it was a pleasant little hostelry, blending not too crudely with its venerable surroundings. A maid informed me that the rural table d"hote would not be ready for half-an-hour, so I set off to get a preliminary peep at the great "lion" of those parts.
A short walk brought me to the wicket entrance, where an old man admitted me to the once sternly guarded fortress. And once more I found myself overwhelmed with a reality beyond all antic.i.p.ations. The great castle was far, far greater than I had supposed.
The antiquaries seem agreed that the earthworks are of Roman origin; their plan is still quite plain to trace--nearly circular, with jutting squares to east and west; and to think of that, as one stands on the very embankments, looking down into the very ditch, so wide and deep that one looks on the tops of trees that have grown huge and h.o.a.ry in the bottom of it, is to think of something that rather takes away one"s breath. The British who appropriated the ready-made entrenchments, and the Normans who ousted them, seem, for once, but mushroom peoples.
But the castle within the ancient ramparts----! I am afraid to begin to tell how it affected me, seeing it at last, after all these years.
Its human interest to me in childhood was almost exclusively connected with a royal prisoner once immured there. In my earliest reading days Miss Strickland"s "Queens of England" was my favourite history book--romance all through, made alive and convincing by the fascinating steel-engraved portraits of the ladies in their habits as they lived; and Miss Strickland said--so did everybody at that time--that Queen Isabella, widow of Edward the Second, was for her sins shut up in Rising Castle by Edward the Third, there to linger in captivity for twenty-seven years, until merciful death released her. I never pa.s.sed under the great keep without gazing up at the few holes in the wall to wonder which was the window through which her wild eyes of despair looked in vain for rescue to the road we travelled. Now that story has gone the way of so many old stories. Isabella, it seems, had not much to complain of beyond banishment from Court to a residence in a dull neighbourhood. She paid visits to her friends from time to time, to relieve the monotony, and she died quite comfortably in another part of the country, in a castle of her own. But no single figure is needed to create human interest for a dwelling-place of the age of this one.
In the reign of William Rufus it was that the castle was built by one William d"Albini--just about the time when a brother knight of Normandy "took up his selection" at old H----, on which his descendants have sat continuously to this present day. Doubtless William and his neighbour had the equivalent of a pipe and gla.s.s together many a time, and inspected the works in company--these works which were to stand for a thousand years! Whether both gentlemen married ladies of the land I know not, but a Cecily (which sounds Saxonish) of William"s line and name in the thirteenth century took the castle and manor of Rising into the family of Lord Montalt, her husband, where they remained for a good while. Then it appears to have become royal property, as witness Queen Isabella consigned thereto by her son.
The Black Prince and Richard the Second are mentioned as owners, if not occupiers, and it is said that King Richard exchanged it with the Duke of Brittany for the castle of Brest. In the s.p.a.cious days of great Elizabeth it was the Dukes of Norfolk who were in possession, off and on. Since then it has seemed to belong to Howards--sometimes one branch, sometimes another--and it belongs to Howards now. What volumes of history are written between the lines of this brief pedigree!
I went over the bridge and through the Norman gatehouse. I looked about at the magnificence within, crossed the greensward and turned the corner to the entrance door. I walked in and up the great staircase of stone to the splendid archway under which the dead people pa.s.sed to their great hall, now roofless and ruined. I surveyed the vaulted stone room with the Norman windows that was once its vestibule (and at the last a caretaker"s lodging); opened a little door in a corner which disclosed a stony shaft round which a stony newel stairway corkscrewed up and up to narrow stony pa.s.sages and chambers and long arcaded galleries tunnelled in the thickness of the walls--the steps so worn away by the many centuries of use that one could not keep foothold on them without the hand-rope on the wall, the dimensions so circ.u.mscribed that one thought of the burrows in the Egyptian Pyramids. Then I considered that further exploration would impair the pleasure of an extended rummage at leisure in the afternoon; also that luncheon would now be ready. And I returned through the village to the Black Horse.
Looking about I found the _salle-a-manger_, chill, and empty of life. A long table was set for a meal, but was still without food and without company. Further investigation brought me to a garden beside the house where stood a few small tables, at one of which two ladies--mother and daughter who had shared the box seat of the drag with me--were taking a light luncheon in peace and privacy. They were having eggs and salad and bread-and-b.u.t.ter and tea, with green gra.s.s under their feet and the sweet air and sunshine round them; and at once I perceived that this was the sort of thing, and not the table d"hote, for me. I took a table at a distance from them, but, no waitress forthcoming, I went across to ask them how they had obtained their provisions, which resulted in our joining forces and having a pleasant meal together. No one else came to the garden, except the maid who served us, and we chatted together as do callers at the same house on an At Home day, finding themselves isolated for the moment on contiguous chairs. One thing leading to another, it transpired that the young lady, who wore fine diamonds on her engagement finger, was going to be married in five weeks. A chance allusion to my own circ.u.mstances evoked the further information that her intended husband was a Melbourne man! That is to say, Melbourne was his birthplace and the place of business of his firm for which he acted as London manager. They mentioned his name and I knew it well. I see it in large letters on a factory wall every time I pa.s.s over the railway between the city and my home, and now I never see it without thinking of her. By this time if all went right she will have been married a long time. I hope she is well and happy.
I resumed my explorations of the castle, where I had several chance encounters with my friends of the inn garden on break-neck stairs and in stony corridors where there was scarce s.p.a.ce for us to pa.s.s each other, while still wandering in the solitude I desired, companioned only by my thoughts. It was a memorable afternoon. I had never before been in such close touch with the people of the past, makers of the History of England which is the lay bible of the British race. The very chambers they slept in and where they were born and died; the same floors and walls and stone-ribbed ceilings, the same outlook from the same windows and loopholes over heath and marsh to distant sea and the dim line of the coast of Lincolnshire; the Chapel of their penances and dispensations, where they dedicated the swords of slaughter; the Hall where they brawled and feasted, the dark holes at blind ends of the stony labyrinth, which silently witnessed to unthinkable dark deeds. If I had been better acquainted with old castles than I was, I might have been less impressed by these things and the reflections they evoked. As it was, the whole place seemed so thronged with ghosts that I felt as if I had not room to move amongst them.
And yet I learned from a little talk with those who knew, that a caretaker--a lady "custodian," moreover--had kept house and home in the very middle of it all, up to a quite recent date. How _could_ she? Her bedroom was the "Queen"s Room" where Isabella herself had slept (next door to her "Confession Room"); another that she used was the "Priest"s Chamber," up at the top of that slant-stepped newel stairway. The room at the top of the great main staircase, with the three Norman windows and the great dog-toothed Norman archway that once gave entrance to the hall, was her sitting-room. The evidences were there--archway bricked up, and a little iron stove (how little it did look, to be sure, in more ways than one) set against the bricks; windows glazed, boards (I think) laid down over the flagged floor. I tried to fancy how the lady custodian had furnished it--to picture her sitting at her book or needlework under that mighty overmantel above the hearth! I had not then seen the quarters of the chaplain of Malling Abbey, and how charmingly ancient and modern can be made to blend in the composition of a home by a person of intelligence, means and taste. Yet the gatehouse at Malling, apart from the chaplain"s "treatment" of it, is snug and cosy indeed compared with this. I could live there delightfully myself. But here----! From kitchen to parlour, from parlour to bedroom the lady custodian had to make pilgrimages through ruins open to the sky and up stairways and along tunnel-pa.s.sages such as one shuddered to think of in connection with dark nights. Imagine the wind rising after you have gone to bed, sighing and sobbing like ghosts of tortured captives come back to the scene of their Mediaeval woes, whistling through the loopholes like the arrows of a besieging army. Think of hearing an owl hoot in the desolate great hall--the creepings and scratchings of things alive that you cannot account for--the deadly silence in between, that feels like the silence of a tiger watching you and crouched to spring!
I was not surprised to learn that the last woman to defy the a.s.sociations of the place had found them too much for her, and that since her time the caretaker had lodged outside the castle instead of in. Her husband had died in that room of the bricked-up arch and the little iron stove, and what she went through in the nights of his last illness, when she had to sit up to watch him, and on the night when she was left with his coffined corpse for company, nearly drove her out of her mind. So I was told, and I quite believed it.
I came down at last from the wonderful place, having still time before me in which to explore the village. Mrs B. had warned me not to neglect this duty.
It is a beautiful village. As one saw "The King" written all over West Newton, Dersingham, Wolferton, every acre within a radius of miles from the royal seat, so here the impress of "The Howards" was plain upon Rising from end to end. The home of the family is in it; of course, withdrawn from the gaze of trippers. I pa.s.sed its guardian walls and spoke to a gardener who came through a high gate, wheeling his barrowful of stuff from the grounds within. I think he said that his lady was in residence. I strolled on to the village green to look at an ancient cross which Mrs B. had mentioned as an important feature. So it is--a very interesting example of the wayside shrine. I could find no special story attached to it, but one felt sure that it commemorated "The Howards" in some way. The rectory near by--a home of dignified leisure, also withdrawn from the gaze of trippers--is in their gift. The church is full of memorials of them. If I know little of castles I know much of the churches of my native country, and how remarkable they are. This one must be ranked with the ecclesiastical gems of Norfolk, which is so rich in them--although I found that it had been very thoroughly "restored,"
which generally means in some points altered from the original plan, within late years. By the way, Mrs B. has a valuable collection of the etchings of John Sells Cotman, whose work is, for architects and antiquaries, an authority on Norfolk churches and cathedrals, abbeys and castles, as they were a century ago; and I am not sure, but I think that one of them shows the square tower of Rising church without the singular roof which now covers it. However, it is a beautiful building, plainly Norman throughout; with all its richness of ornamentation, ma.s.sively simple and sincere, worthy to stand beside its great neighbour, which has defied the chances and changes of a thousand years. The hand of the Howards may be seen all over it, inside and out, but they have written only their love and taste, and said as little as possible about their own importance.