However, taking one thing with another, those Sundays of the past were not so very dreadful. It is, indeed, open to question whether in essential matters we have greatly improved upon them. Certainly, the inconsistencies of Sabbatarian practice, as I remember them, were no greater than they are now. There was a lady of our acquaintance who had a gift for amateur millinery and a passion for smart bonnets and she once made one under my eye on a Sunday morning. It was understood that she would have imperilled her immortal soul by using needle and cotton, and she did not dream of doing that; she put it together entirely with pins. It took her twice as long, and disturbed the serenity of her mind twice as much, but by getting up early she managed to have it finished by church time, and then to wear it to church with an easy mind. But the same thing would be done – exactly parallel things are done – under my eye to-day, any Sunday of the year.
With regard to the moral practices of week-days, which are but those of Sunday carried over, either there were fewer subtle insincerities amongst the good people of the last generation or I have a keener eye for those which I see around me now. I remember that my elders of the fifties were much addicted to whist, and that a small money stake was necessary to the dignity of their game. They remained sober, friendly, gentlemanly, uncorrupted, allowing for the exceptions to every rule. Nowadays I play a round game with a family party, and one person will not touch a prize in the shape of a coin, but change the coin into "goods" and conscience is immediately satisfied. A clergyman once intimately associated with my household loved whist, but never played cards on principle; he got over the difficulty by sitting behind someone who did, and directing the latter's play with zeal. These are little instances.
At any rate the religious faith of the fifties as to which we were all children, young and old alike, it had one precious quality that it seems never likely to have again – it sufficed. Such as it was, we were satisfied with it. It made for peace and a contented mind. To be sure, we had heard of the "Tracts," and of a terrible bishop called Colenso; we ourselves learned Keble's hymns, with Mrs Alexander's, on Sundays; but we were happily undiscerning of the significance of these portents. They were no concern of ours. We no more expected them to have practical developments than he had expected an Indian Mutiny to result from a little fuss over greased cartridges. The Church of the Fifties, as an educational agent, is more despised to-day than any other institution of that date, but the old-fashioned parson had no spiritual worries to keep him awake o' nights and wear him out before his time; no more had we. Is it not possible that the despisers would give almost anything to be able to say the same?
CHAPTER IX
MY GRANDFATHER'S DAYS
The last time that I saw my old good grandfather, to whose old-time home M.G. and Mr B. drove me that July afternoon, was on a Sunday. It was just before we left T – for D – , where we were living when he died. By the same token I remember the night of the event, when we sat in the music-room with servants (taking care of us in the absence of our parents at his bedside), and how the girls made our flesh creep by telling how Rover had howled and death-watches had ticked in the walls, and winding-sheets had formed on the candles – "sure signs," every one; and how, being so wrought up, we shrieked at a sudden explosion in the fire, which ejected some little glowing shard that they declared to be a coffin – on the top of all the other gruesome portents. It was a blowy October night and we talked in firelight, as befitted the ghostly circumstances. I huddled up to my elder brother on the sofa by the hearth, in mortal dread of the dark drawing-room outside, the darker stairs, the awful attics, that must sooner or later be faced. But I do not recall any governess present, and I think we shared the fear of solitude amongst us and kept well together until morning.
As I said, the last time I saw the old man was on a Sunday – probably our last Sunday at T – .
Our district boasted its peculiarity in having
"A parish without a church,
A church without a steeple,
A steeple without a church,
A parish without people" —
all under the jurisdiction of our rector, Canon W., and the church without a steeple, that took turns with the church of H – in providing our Sunday services, stood at the gate of the park-like home field surrounding the grandfather's house. I think it was mostly in the afternoons that we attended it, and it was our custom to go and come through that little park instead of by the road, and to call on him by the way. These visits were our Sunday treat. There was a warm, luxurious atmosphere inside that house – which I was on the way to be entertained in for the first time since then; there was also a motherly housekeeper and an unfailing supply of cakes and sweets. We were regaled on these, inspected and catechised by the patriarch, and sent rejoicing on our way. Other families of grandchildren passed the same saluting point at about the same time, often melting into and mingling with ours before the armchair was reached (and these were the last times that M.G., my present hostess, and I had had cousinly intercourse together). His sons, farmers like himself, but none of them inheriting his force of character, lived within a walk of him, and each household looked to his for dower of various kinds. Every week he had a sheep killed to be distributed amongst them. Mutton was a sacred thing with him. Killed at a certain age – four years, I think – at the climax of condition; hung a stated number of days, according to the season, it was always a dish, if of his providing, "fit to set before a gentleman." The meat-safe of his own establishment was hung, to my eyes, quite in the clouds. It was sent up with running ropes, as a flag to a masthead, to the top of a tall tree, where the contents ripened in pure air above the range of flies (and I stood under that tree again and told his great-grandson's wife about it, his great-great-grandson holding my hand and looking up at it with me). He left a comfortable fortune to his five children, of whom my father was the youngest; and the sons quarrelled over their shares and flung the property into Chancery – where it is still if it is anywhere. Certainly it never came out again.
Well, I stood by his winged chair on a Sunday afternoon, and he looked at me with his watery and red-rimmed old eyes, set in a still fine old face that is as distinct to me as ever; then he drew me between his knees, laid his hands on my head, and formally and solemnly blessed me. The oddness of the incident impressed it indelibly on my mind. We had always been great friends, and it was our last parting. I suppose he knew it, although I did not.
I was fortunate in picking up, amongst the family relics, a little memoir of him. It told me more of his life and character than I knew before, and I think it is interesting enough to quote from briefly.
His uncommon name has aristocratic associations, as his descendants have not forgotten, and armorial bearings have been claimed on the strength of it, but as a matter of fact there is no sign of an authentic pedigree behind him. And I think, if there had been, it would be a cheapening of the dignity of his own simple excellence to obtrude it. His whole history presupposes the qualities of manhood essential to the ideal gentleman. As Landor says: "The plain vulgar are not the most vulgar," and it is only stating the proposition another way to say that the plain gentleman is more genuinely a gentleman than the fine gentleman. I know well how, when he rose in the world, he would have treated a suggestion to rake up a coat-of-arms! My father inherited that good taste which abhorred pretentiousness, as he showed in making us say "father" and "mother" at a time when every child above the labouring class said "pa" and "ma," and in refusing to let any one of the ten of us have more than one short Christian name.
He was born – the grandfather – on the 2nd of January 1770, at T – , but in which of the three farmhouses that, with their five labourers' cottages, composed the "parish without a church" (it had one once – in the fourteenth century) I do not know; not, I think, the one that was afterwards my home, as that property belonged to a different estate. All three houses were of a character to preclude the supposition that he sprang from what is figuratively termed the gutter, but the records clearly imply that it was not from a bed of ease. He used to get up early and milk the cows, and then walk to D – , about four miles off, to school. When he was seventeen the chronicle states he "did not leave his home as a runaway" but seeing no chance of advancing himself there, he, with only a small bundle of clothes, made his way to a farm at O – , where "he hired himself as a team-lad to a widow for four pounds a year and his living in the house." It is recorded that he "always spoke of her afterwards as his first friend and helper in the battle of life." From there he went to another Norfolk village, engaging himself again as a farm hand (waggoner); but soon he was a farm steward elsewhere, and soon after that manager of the estate of his father's landlord, one of the beautiful seats of the neighbourhood – which looked more beautiful than ever when I saw it again.
W – Woods (meeting overhead on the highroad and glorious with rhododendrons in the spring), and W – Hall, must have a word or two in passing. The splendid old house has been, since the reign of Elizabeth, the only one in W – which represents the "parish without people" and the "steeple without a church" of the local rhyme; but before that period, when it was the seat of the Coningsbys, there was a village, also a church, where the lonely tower now stands in the park, a hoary head with no body to it. From the Coningsbys the place passed to a certain Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, and he profaned the church (which then "ceased to be used for sacred purposes") by turning it into a hay-house and dog-kennel, and "depopulated the town to make the extensive park which still exists." For his sins this wicked squire's "dead corps" (I am quoting Blomefield, writing in 1810) "could for many days find no place of burial, but growing very offensive he was at last conveyed to the church of R – ," which was the church at the grandfather's gate already alluded to, "and buried there without any ceremony, and lyeth yet uncovered (if the visitors have not reformed it) with so small a matter as a few paving stones; and indeed no stone memorial was there ever for him, and if it was not for this account it would not have been known that he was buried there."
Certainly there was no visible trace of the unhallowed grave in that burial-ground of my family when I revisited it. The little "church without a steeple" I had always supposed a creation of our day, but it has a fine dog-toothed Norman doorway, and M. told me she could remember when it stood there amid ruins, and remember seeing the chapel built to enclose it. This Norman doorway, like the lovely ivied steeple, is all that speaks of the wicked judge to-day. It belonged to the church of his time. His beautiful home survived his occupation. It passed at his death to the Earls of Warwick through the marriage of his granddaughter; from them, by purchase, to the families of our times. I visited it in childhood, and I wish I could have visited it again.
Here my grandfather, while still in his twenties, administered the estate for the owner, who appears to have held him in high esteem. His first official act, we are told, was to "make the park around the mansion, and to beautify the hedges." He was not only a conspicuously practical agriculturist, but a great lover of natural beauty of the orderly kind; his care of hedges, in particular, would have been his "fad," if the word had been invented. For several years he held his post, "having at the same time a farm of his own at South R – ," which was his later and last home. When he was thirty he married a lady from Surrey. My grandmother predeceased him, but I dimly remember her as a gentle and dainty old lady, fastidious in dress, manners and the ordering of her house; or it may be only this tradition of her that I remember – I cannot be sure. Richard Brinsley Sheridan was at their wedding. He is said to have been closely connected, by blood or friendship, with her people.
"Coke of Norfolk" was his friend; I knew that always. The memoir speaks of "great gatherings of agriculturists at Holkham," which he attended as his squire's representative while at W – ; but after he was his own man the kindred spirits must have met and mingled, for it was Lord Leicester, I have been told, who gave to my grandfather's place at R – the flattering nickname of "Little Holkham," which clung to it for many years. They used to compare their respective experiments and the results, and my grandfather would come from these investigations to say (according to the memoir): "We beat him in some things, and he beat us in others."
I read that he (my grandfather) "was the first to make underdraining tiles in the county. The cost to buy them was four guineas per thousand, each tile weighing eighteen pounds, with holes perforated in them, and put down without soles to rest upon; he had as few joints as possible, and did not approve of the herring-bone shape on that account" – whatever that may mean.
"When he came to South R – they had ague in almost every house from poverty and undrained land. The poor rates were ten shillings in the pound, with a large common and unlimited rights thereon… He estimated the claying of this common at six pounds per acre. He was seven years at it, winter and summer, not always stopping at harvest time, for in this district a pit fills with water as soon as (and often before) it is finished, not again to be reworked, constant pumping being required. Large quantities of faggots had often to be placed to bear the horses and carts in getting out of the pits. Three hundred and four hundred loads per acre were put on the land. The extent of clay pits was estimated by Mr P. of N – , when apportioning the tithe rent charge, at ten acres… He made two ears of corn grow where only one had grown before."
Then, in 1822, there was "great depression in agriculture, and he took another farm, almost on his own terms, as tenant, and again clayed and underdrained … it was said that no tenant-farmer at that time employed so many hands or spent so much on the same quantity of land as he did … grass was as much cared for as arable." And on a certain field where he "harrowed in oats as a boy, he planted the land twice with fir-trees, twice cut them down and measured them up, and twice sold them." He wrote an essay for the Royal Agricultural Society "On the Rearing and Maintaining of Fences," which was printed in their journal. All his own fences (hedges) were "clipped twice in the year, at a cost of ten shillings per mile." I have seen the men doing it – they seemed always doing it – and those hedges were as smoothly rounded and trim as those of the neatest garden.
"The stitch in time was his motto," says the chronicler. The loss of a rail was replaced directly, or a tile from a building. It was so natural to him that he did not hesitate to point it out on his neighbour's premises, as when he saw a pig without a ring in its nose. A road-scraper was always on the road leading to the house and farmyard, and everyone was expected to use it, or would be reminded to do so, removing dirt on to the grass. All were trained to put farm implements under cover and to fix waggon and cart shafts up by a chain. I can answer for two of his descendants – the remnant of his youngest son's family – that they have inherited this instinct for neatness and order, although in one case circumstances rather hamper its free play. My father himself, like most of the males of my intimate acquaintance, was an untidy man and a bad domestic economist.
Two other marked traits of the grandfather's character are noted by his biographer – a great love of music and a great love of animals. It is mentioned that the guard of the mail-coach always began to play on his bugle when approaching the house, and the tune was "The Old English Gentleman" when passing it. "His kindness to animals was such that he had them often given to him when aged, from its being known that he never sold an old horse, and so they were sure to end their days with him." And "Shortly before his death, he asked for the curtains to be drawn aside that he might have a last look at the scene of his old labours, and he said, 'There are my sheep, pretty creatures!'"
It is evident that in his later life he was a distinguished county man. He was for many years agent for the trustees of large fen properties, and the agencies of some of the most important estates in Norfolk were offered him after he had retired from such duties. When the W – property, which had been his first charge, was sold again, "The measuring up, the valuation of the timber, and the price to be fixed on the whole estate, was left to his judgment." I have read some of his business letters, and they seemed to me models of what such should be. At Agricultural Society dinners, and other public functions, honour was paid him in complimentary speeches. "You must not consider what Mr C.'s farming is now, with all the improvements that have taken place of late, but as I remember him and his farm years ago, when no one but him clayed land, underdrained, or clipped hedges." And so on. In his eighty-second year he was presented by his friends with his portrait in oils, accompanied by the following address: —
"Dear Sir, – As a testimony of our esteem for the valuable services you have rendered to Agriculture during a residence of upwards of eighty years in the same locality, in converting an unproductive waste into a fertile country, and especially as the originator of the beneficial system of deep underdraining, claying and the management of fences, now generally followed – as a benefactor of the labourer, a kind neighbour and a sincere friend – we respectfully beg to present the accompanying Portrait, painted by Ambrosini Jerome, Esqr., portrait painter to her Royal Highness the Duchess of Kent, as an Heirloom to your family, with an assurance that they will ever regard it as a noble example of a parent who has raised himself by his science, diligence and integrity from a humble position to affluence and respectability and honour, and with our sincere wishes that you may long live to enjoy the merited reward of an active, useful and well-spent life. We are," etc.
And the names of leading Norfolk are appended.
I saw that portrait, still hanging in its old place, in the dining-room where M. and I had tea with the great-grandson and his family (our coachman, quite at home in the house that had sheltered generations of his family also, had put up his carriage and was enjoying himself in the kitchen), and I noted the same fault that had struck us when it was new – the common fault of painted portraits – a lack of the virile force that gave character to his face even in extreme old age. Otherwise it was a good likeness. He holds the appropriate swath of ripe wheat in one wrinkled hand, the heavy ears supported on the other – a nobler emblem than any Heralds' College could have given him.
The great-grandson did not know, until I (who had just found it out) told him, that the picture was an heirloom and no property of his, he being but the son of a younger granddaughter. He could not tell me how it came to be still in its old place, but I could tell him. It really belongs to America. Years ago – about ten or thereabouts – I had a letter from a cousin who had emigrated to the States in his youth, recalling himself to my memory for the first time since we were children together, meeting at the grandfather's armchair at R – on Sunday afternoons. I could not quite identify him, but my public position as a writer had supplied him with a clue to me. In this letter, which contained photographs of his home and children and details of his American life, he mentioned that he was now the head of the family and legal owner of the grandfather's portrait. It had come to him since he had emigrated, and he had never gone back, and never expected to go back; but he had an idea that I was going back, and he formally made over the picture to me. He asked me to find it, and take it, and keep it. He seemed to have lost touch and knowledge of his English connections in the course of so many years, but to feel that he had found a tangible, or, at any rate, authentic representative of them in me. If I would accept the treasure, he would be sure that it was in safe keeping – or something to that effect. In writing back to him, I, of course, refused it. I told him I was far less likely to return to England than he was, and that in any case I was not in the "line of succession"; and I heard no more about it. A year or two later I received a newspaper from his family announcing his death; then I had a letter from his son. Did I know where the portrait was? Did I know this and that and the other about the family? I could see that this young American had been nursed on legends of country seats and ancestors of the romantic pattern, that his father in his new country had idealised the old, as I had, and, unlike me, had impressed his unconscious exaggerations upon the imaginations of his children. "I am now the head of the family," wrote the young man, as if we were in the Peerage. I had to reply to him that I did not know where the portrait was, that I did not know anything about the family in England, and that nothing seemed more unlikely than that I ever should.
Now here I was, at the fountain-head of knowledge, and there was the portrait, benignly – too benignly – looking down upon me from the wall.
There, too, was the spot where the old armchair had stood. I, like my American cousin, had remembered the room surrounding it as a spacious apartment, with accommodation for a great deal of massive mahogany furniture; it had dwindled surprisingly. I thought there was a big hall, a wide staircase – and the hall was but the ordinary passage-way, and the stairs steep and cramped and twisty. I could have sworn there was a stone-pillared portico to the front door; it was a brick porch under the creepers. Well, well! It was a sweet old house, even in its reduced condition, and I had a charming time in it. They gave us a delicious tea, strawberries and raspberries (what a strawberry summer that was! I had never had quite as many as I could eat before), with unlimited cream, and thin bread-and-butter, and cakes of melting richness; and I was in the pink of health, when nothing could hurt me. After tea we strolled about the garden, grandfather's own old garden, and the dear little great-great-grandson, who as a memory can hold his own with all the ghosts behind him, ran hither and thither to gather flowers for me until I was loaded up with more than I could carry. Fain would I have had him temper zeal with discretion, but it was useless effort, and his mother would not back me.
Then, in the afterglow of the summer evening, the children were sent to the nursery, our hostess got the keys of the church, and we went across the park-like fields to the road, on the other side of which is the burial-place of the wicked squire who was so "very offensive" in various ways, and of the good old farmer, whose memory is as green as the land he tilled so righteously, his example as fruitful, his honoured name as sweet.
He died on the 9th October 1856, in his eighty-seventh year. "Around him in R – churchyard," says the memoir, "and near him, lie his old servants, on whose gravestones are recorded their faithfulness and length of service." I saw them all; D., who died before I was born, "after thirty-five years' service"; old C.B., who died the year after his master, after "upwards of fifty years' service"; M.B., the housekeeper who gave us cakes on Sundays, four generations of whose family, daughter following mother, filled the office of nurse in successive households of ours. The many graves of aunts and uncles and cousins (my own parents lie elsewhere) were not half so touching. Old B.'s death was said to have occurred as a direct consequence of his master's; it was the fall of one that broke down the other. B. was rather an arbitrary person, as we children knew him. He ordered us about as if the place was his – practically it was; no one but my grandfather could successfully dispute his authority. But he was wrapped up in us all; the family was his family, as it had been for "upwards of fifty years"; and his master was his king who could do no wrong. My father and grey-headed uncles were summoned to his dying bed – they had not quarrelled then – and he formally blessed them as grandfather had blessed me. "My boys," he murmured, "my boys!" His mumbled last words were, "I brought 'em all up."
It was hard to tear myself from these eloquent memorials, which I was looking upon for the first time, as doubtless it was the last. All around the little graveyard was green country – that lovely English green of velvet grass and noble trees which, after a month of it, was still an ever-fresh rapture to my Australian eyes. "An unproductive waste," it was said to have been, prior to the famous underdraining and claying; could my grandfather have seen it with me, he would have felt satisfied with his work, although not a town, or a railroad, or even a telegraph wire, was in sight.
But there was the little church to revisit yet – another shrine of memory. As I walked up the aisle and looked about me, I saw that in half-a-century the hand of change had scarcely touched it. It was a new church, with the exception of the Norman doorway, when I made its acquaintance as a child taken there by its nurse, and it started with the open benches and stencilled walls that were novelties of fashion then. There they were, the same, to the very pattern and hues of the mural decoration, which showed no sign either of renewal or decay. The armorial shields (to the memory of pious benefactors, doubtless), painted in their proper colours, that made a cornice to the little apse that formed the chancel, were each in its old place, tilted forward at the same angle; I recognised them all. Many a tedious hour had they relieved, as pictures to be studied and puzzled over – the breed of the various heraldic animals, the reasons of their parti-coloured coats and antic attitudes, and so on.
And what a procession of quaint figures passed before me as I stood at the upper end, where we had our family pew, and looked down at the open door through which the dead and gone flocked in! The aged labourers, soaped and oiled, in their clean smock-frocks with the wonderful stitchery on back and front; the neat old women, who unwrapped their church books from their clean pocket-handkerchiefs when service began, and wrapped them up again as soon as it was over; the village dressmaker, who sat just behind us, and whose stylish costumes I used to study through the back of our seat while kneeling on my hassock the reverse way to her – memorable chiefly for puffy white muslin undersleeves that were kept up with elastic which showed when she covered her face with her hands, and had wristbands with black velvet run through the holes in them; the organist at his little instrument near the entrance (it is in another place now, and is not played by turning a handle, as in his time); the inevitable schoolmaster with his indispensable long cane; the servant girls and their swains, the numerous child cousins, etc., etc. – a throng of ghosts. But there was one great and sensational event connected with my early attendances at this church, matching that of the raven in the other, only in this case tragedy instead of comedy; and I was looking at it the whole time, as at a cinematograph reproduction of the living scene.
A young curate (as usual at the unimportant afternoon services) was preaching – how plainly I see him, with his pallid, tawny face and soft black eyes – and suddenly stopped dead and stood still, simply staring at the congregation. "Oh," I thought, staring back at him from my commanding position below, "what news to take home to father and mother, that Mr H. has done this funny thing!" He was recently from India, recruiting delicate health, which was already the anxious care of the ladies of the parish, who sent broths and jellies to his lodgings and coddled him at their homes as often as he would come to them. My mother and M.'s mother were his chief friends, and we children, with whom he had played, were very fond of him. Still it was pure enjoyment to me to see him stop in the middle of his sermon, and to realise that he was not going to finish it. Poor fellow! It was the end of his preaching and of his work. He said, after that long, exciting pause – the words are as unforgettable as Canon W.'s "Bong on to him!" – "I must crave your indulgence, for I can get no further." With that he fell and disappeared. Some men rushed from their seats, dragged him out of the pulpit, and carried him, insensible, from the church; and the congregation broke up and scattered, we hurrying home at a run to tell the news. My mother at once put on her bonnet and went away to nurse him. All the village ladies became his mothers from that day until his death, when the whole parish wept and wailed for him and refused to be comforted. His memory was canonised amongst us. A memoir of him was published by his unknown kindred, containing a steel-engraved portrait (not a bit like him, for it made him fair and fat), and, scattered through the latter pages, allusions to "Mrs H.C." and "Mrs F.C." rendered the book peculiarly precious to two of the bereaved families. The only way that succeeding curates could make themselves tolerable was by confessing freely that they knew themselves unworthy to fill his place. I remember Mr R., his immediate successor, standing in our dining-room (it was his first visit as our pastor) and avowing, with dramatic earnestness, that the latchet of Mr H.'s shoes he was not worthy to unloose. He became a very dear friend, however, Mr R. He was a jolly, hearty, healthy fellow, splendid to play with, with no sadness and no conspicuous saintliness about him.